In the spring of 1966, Stewart Brand did 100 micrograms of LSD and sat on top of a roof in San Francisco.
Perched there, he looked toward a curved horizon and imagined the spherical Earth and just how limited resources on our planet are. Out of that psychedelic drug-induced vision, he developed the Whole Earth theory. He campaigned for NASA to release satellite images of the Earth, and created the influential and generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog.
Author Michael Pollan explored the mysterious effects that psychedelic drugs like LSD have on the human mind in his latest book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. In a recent interview with TIME, he explained how these drugs can “break” patterns of repetitive thought and essentially “reboot the brain.”
“The biggest misconception people have about psychedelics is that these are drugs that make you crazy,” Pollan said. “We now have evidence that that does happen sometimes — but in many more cases, these are drugs that can make you sane.”
To accompany Pollan’s book, virtual reality Director Elijah Allan Blitz reimagined Brand’s trip in a virtual reality experience exclusively for TIME. Take a look below to see it in 360 or visit LIFE VR’s Samsung VR channel to see it in virtual reality.
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