Author Michael Pollan has pretty much conquered food. “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” is the inescapable mantra of the slow-food movement his work helped spark and the first of Pollan’s “rules.” But thinking enough about anything to distill it to a punchy truism tends to lead the thinker to contemplation of further frontiers. And now with our bellies fed, it’s high time— Pollan’s new book says—to feed our heads.

How to Change Your Mind may mainstream psychedelic drugs the way Pollan mainstreamed farm-to-table. His third book, Botany of Desire (2001), dipped into the powerful role of cannabis in our species’ coexistence with plants, but he has found a lot more to say since then. “The desire to change consciousness, weirdly enough, is a universal human desire,” he observed in a recent Recode interview, adding that How to Change Your Mind partly grew out of a 2015 New Yorker article on the lost science of psychedelics’ use as a treatment for psychological disorders.