Artist Draws 9 Portraits on LSD During 1950s Research Experiment

in Art, Psychology | May 2nd, 2024

Dur­ing the 1950s, a researcher gave an artist two 50-micro­gram dos­es of LSD (each dose sep­a­rat­ed by about an hour), and then the artist was encour­aged to draw pic­tures of the doc­tor who admin­is­tered the drugs. Nine por­traits were drawn over the space of eight hours. We still don’t know the iden­ti­ty of the artist. But it’s sur­mised that the researcher was Oscar Janiger, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia-Irvine psy­chi­a­trist known for his work on LSD.

The web site Live Sci­ence has Andrew Sewell, a Yale Psy­chi­a­try pro­fes­sor (until his recent death), on record say­ing: “I believe the pic­tures are from an exper­i­ment con­duct­ed by the psy­chi­a­trist Oscar Janiger start­ing in 1954 and con­tin­u­ing for sev­en years, dur­ing which time he gave LSD to over 100 pro­fes­sion­al artists and mea­sured its effects on their artis­tic out­put and cre­ative abil­i­ty. Over 250 draw­ings and paint­ings were pro­duced.” The goal, of course, was to inves­ti­gate what hap­pens to sub­jects under the influ­ence of psy­che­del­ic drugs. Dur­ing the exper­i­ment, the artist explained how he felt as he worked on each sketch. You can watch how things unfold­ed below (or above):

20 Min­utes After First Dose. Artist Claims to Feel Nor­mal

85 Min­utes After First Dose: Artist Says “I can see you clear­ly. I’m hav­ing a lit­tle trou­ble con­trol­ling this pen­cil.”

2 hours 30 min­utes after first dose. “I feel as if my con­scious­ness is sit­u­at­ed in the part of my body that’s now active — my hand, my elbow… my tongue.”

2 hours 32 min­utes: ‘I’m try­ing anoth­er draw­ing… The out­line of my hand is going weird too. It’s not a very good draw­ing is it?”

2 hours 35 min­utes: Patient fol­lows quick­ly with anoth­er draw­ing. ‘I’ll do a draw­ing in one flour­ish… with­out stop­ping… one line, no break!”

2 hours 45 min­utes: Agi­tat­ed patient says “I am… every­thing is… changed… they’re call­ing… your face… inter­wo­ven… who is…” He changes medi­um to Tem­pera.

4 hours 25 min­utes: After tak­ing a break, the patient changes to pen and water col­or. “This will be the best draw­ing, like the first one, only bet­ter.”

5 hours 45 min­utes. “I think it’s start­ing to wear off. This pen­cil is mighty hard to hold.” (He is hold­ing a cray­on).

8 hours lat­er: The intox­i­ca­tion has worn off. Patient offers up a final draw­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

The Pol­ish Artist Stanisław Witkiewicz Made Por­traits While On Dif­fer­ent Psy­choac­tive Drugs, and Not­ed the Drugs on Each Paint­ing

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

Who’s Behind These Scammy Text Messages We’ve All Been Getting?: The Search Engine Podcast Demystifies the Global Scam

in Current Affairs, Technology | April 12th, 2024

You have received those odd text mes­sages from a stranger. (“Hi, This is Ani­ta. Have you received the Panam­era parts yet?”) You know the mes­sages are spam, but you don’t quite under­stand the angle of the scam. Above, the Search Engine pod­cast works with Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux to break down the con oper­a­tion. The sto­ry turns out to be more com­pli­cat­ed than it first appears. It involves cryp­to, but also human traf­fick­ing and forced labor com­pounds in Cam­bo­dia and Myan­mar. We’ll just leave it at that and sug­gest you lis­ten to this unnerv­ing pod­cast episode. You can hope­ful­ly stream it above or find it on your favorite pod­cast platform—e.g., Apple and Spo­ti­fy.

How Walking Fosters Creativity: Stanford Researchers Confirm What Philosophers & Writers Have Always Known

in Nature, Psychology | January 5th, 2024

Image via Diego Sevil­la Ruiz

A cer­tain Zen proverb goes some­thing like this: “A five year old can under­stand it, but an 80 year old can­not do it.” The sub­ject of this rid­dle-like say­ing has been described as “mindfulness”—or being absorbed in the moment, free from rou­tine men­tal habits. In many East­ern med­i­ta­tive tra­di­tions, one can achieve such a state by walk­ing just as well as by sit­ting still—and many a poet and teacher has pre­ferred the ambu­la­to­ry method.

This is equal­ly so in the West, where we have an entire school of ancient philosophy—the “peri­patet­ic”—that derives from Aris­to­tle and his con­tem­po­raries’ pen­chant for doing their best work while in leisure­ly motion. Friedrich Niet­zsche, an almost fanat­i­cal walk­er, once wrote, “all tru­ly great thoughts are con­ceived by walk­ing.” Niet­zsche’s moun­tain walks were ath­let­ic, but walk­ing—Frédéric Gros main­tains in his A Phi­los­o­phy of Walk­ing—is not a sport; it is “the best way to go more slow­ly than any oth­er method that has ever been found.”

Gros dis­cuss­es the cen­tral­i­ty of walk­ing in the lives of Niet­zsche, Rim­baud, Kant, Rousseau, and Thore­au. Like­wise, Rebec­ca Sol­nit has pro­filed the essen­tial walks of lit­er­ary fig­ures such as William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Gary Sny­der in her book Wan­der­lust, which argues for the neces­si­ty of walk­ing in our own age, when doing so is almost entire­ly unnec­es­sary most of the time. As great walk­ers of the past and present have made abun­dant­ly clear—anecdotally at least—we see a sig­nif­i­cant link between walk­ing and cre­ative think­ing.

More gen­er­al­ly, writes Fer­ris Jabr in The New York­er, “the way we move our bod­ies fur­ther changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice ver­sa.” Apply­ing mod­ern research meth­ods to ancient wis­dom has allowed psy­chol­o­gists to quan­ti­fy the ways in which this hap­pens, and to begin to explain why. Jabr sum­ma­rizes the exper­i­ments of two Stan­ford walk­ing researchers, Mar­i­ly Oppez­zo and her men­tor Daniel Schwartz, who found that almost two hun­dred stu­dents test­ed showed marked­ly height­ened cre­ative abil­i­ties while walk­ing. Walk­ing, Jabr writes in poet­ic terms, works by “set­ting the mind adrift on a froth­ing sea of thought.”

Oppez­zo and Schwartz spec­u­late, “future stud­ies would like­ly deter­mine a com­plex path­way that extends from the phys­i­cal act of walk­ing to phys­i­o­log­i­cal changes to the cog­ni­tive con­trol of imag­i­na­tion.” They rec­og­nize that this dis­cov­ery must also account for such vari­ables as when one walks, and—as so many notable walk­ers have stressed—where. Researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan have tack­led the where ques­tion in a paper titled “The Cog­ni­tive Ben­e­fits of Inter­act­ing with Nature.” Their study, writes Jabr, showed that “stu­dents who ambled through an arbore­tum improved their per­for­mance on a mem­o­ry test more than stu­dents who walked along city streets.”

One won­ders what James Joyce—whose Ulysses is built almost entire­ly on a scaf­fold­ing of walks around Dublin—would make of this. Or Wal­ter Ben­jamin, whose con­cept of the flâneur, an arche­typ­al urban wan­der­er, derives direct­ly from the insights of that most imag­i­na­tive deca­dent poet, Charles Baude­laire. Clas­si­cal walk­ers, Roman­tic walk­ers, Mod­ernist walkers—all rec­og­nized the cre­ative impor­tance of this sim­ple move­ment in time and space, one we work so hard to mas­ter in our first years, and some­times lose in lat­er life if we acquire it. Going for a walk, con­tem­po­rary research confirms—a mun­dane activ­i­ty far too eas­i­ly tak­en for granted—may be one of the most salu­tary means of achiev­ing states of enlight­en­ment, lit­er­ary, philo­soph­i­cal, or oth­er­wise, whether we roam through ancient forests, over the Alps, or to the cor­ner store.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

via The New York­er/Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

The 10 Para­dox­i­cal Traits of Cre­ative Peo­ple, Accord­ing to Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi (RIP)

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive a Century Later

in Science | November 15th, 2023

Image by The Well­come Trust

When research­ing a famous his­tor­i­cal fig­ure, access to their work and mate­ri­als usu­al­ly proves to be one of the biggest obsta­cles. But things are much more dif­fi­cult for those writ­ing about the life of Marie Curie, the sci­en­tist who, along her with hus­band Pierre, dis­cov­ered polo­ni­um and radi­um and birthed the idea of par­ti­cle physics. Her note­books, her cloth­ing, her fur­ni­ture (not to men­tion her lab), pret­ty much every­thing sur­viv­ing from her Parisian sub­ur­ban house, is radioac­tive, and will be for 1,500 years or more.

If you want to look at her man­u­scripts, you have to sign a lia­bil­i­ty waiv­er at France’s Bib­lio­theque Nationale, and then you can access the notes sealed in a lead-lined box. The Curies didn’t know about the dan­gers of radioac­tive mate­ri­als, though they did know about radioac­tiv­i­ty. Their research attempt­ed to find out which sub­stances were radioac­tive and why, and so many dan­ger­ous elements–thorium, ura­ni­um, plutonium–were just sit­ting there in their home lab­o­ra­to­ry, glow­ing at night, which Curie thought beau­ti­ful, “like faint, fairy lights,” she wrote in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy. Marie Curie car­ried these glow­ing objects around in her pock­ets. She and her hus­band wore stan­dard lab cloth­ing, noth­ing more.

Marie Curie died at age 66 in 1934, from aplas­tic ane­mia, attrib­uted to her radioac­tive research. The house, how­ev­er, con­tin­ued to be used up until 1978 by the Insti­tute of Nuclear Physics of the Paris Fac­ul­ty of Sci­ence and the Curie Foun­da­tion. After that it was kept under sur­veil­lance, author­i­ties final­ly now aware of the dan­gers inside. When many peo­ple in the neigh­bor­hood noticed high can­cer rates among them, as report­ed in Le Parisien, they blamed the Curie’s home.

The lab­o­ra­to­ry and the build­ing were decon­t­a­m­i­nat­ed in 1991, a year after the Curie estate began allow­ing access to Curie’s notes and mate­ri­als, which had been removed from the house. A flood of biogra­phies appeared soon after: Marie Curie: A Life by Susan Quinn in 1995, Pierre Curie by Anna Hur­wic in 1998, Curie: Le rêve sci­en­tifique by Loïc Bar­bo in 1999, Marie Curie et son lab­o­ra­toire by Soraya Boudia in 2001, Obses­sive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie by Bar­bara Gold­smith in 2005, and Radioac­tive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fall­out by Lau­ren Red­niss in 2011.

Still, pass­ing away at 66 is not too shab­by when one has changed the world in the name of sci­ence. Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (1903), the only woman to win it again (1911), the first woman to become a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris, and the first woman to be entombed (on her own mer­its) at the Pan­théon in Paris. And she man­aged many of her break­throughs after the pass­ing of her hus­band Pierre in 1906–who slipped and fell in the rain on a busy Paris street and was run over by the wheels of a horse-drawn cart.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Work of Marie Curie, the First Female Nobel Lau­re­ate

Marie Curie’s Ph.D. The­sis on Radioactivity–Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doc­tor­al Degree in Physics

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Work of Marie Curie, the First Female Nobel Lau­re­ate

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

A Researcher Identifies the Old Man on the Iconic Cover of Led Zeppelin IV, 52 Years After the Album’s Release

in Art, Music | November 10th, 2023

Who’s that beard­ed man on the cov­er of Led Zep­pelin IV, the one hunched over, car­ry­ing a large bun­dle of sticks? Bri­an Edwards, a researcher from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West of Eng­land, has solved the 52-year-old mys­tery. Look­ing through a pho­to album while con­duct­ing research, Edwards spot­ted a pho­to­graph and, being a Led Zep­pelin fan, “instant­ly recog­nised the man with the sticks.” “It was quite a rev­e­la­tion, he told the BBC.” From there, he fig­ured out who took the pho­to­graph in 1892 (Ernest Howard Farmer), and even­tu­al­ly iden­ti­fied the fig­ure in the pho­to itself: Lot Long, a thatch­er from Mere, a town in Wilt­shire, Eng­land. You can see him above.

Decades lat­er, Robert Plant appar­ent­ly found a col­orized ver­sion of the pho­to­graph in an antique shop. On the 1971 album cov­er, we see the pho­to turned into a framed paint­ing and lay­ered onto the wall of a drab home. The rest, as they say, is rock ’n’ roll his­to­ry…

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Decon­struct­ing Led Zeppelin’s Clas­sic Song ‘Ram­ble On’ Track by Track: Gui­tars, Bass, Drums & Vocals

William S. Bur­roughs Reviews a Led Zep­pelin Con­cert for Craw­dad­dy! Mag­a­zine (1975)

Hear Led Zeppelin’s First Record­ed Con­cert Ever (1968)

Researchers Use AI to Decode the First Word on an Ancient Scroll Burned by Vesuvius

in History, Technology | October 13th, 2023

In the year 79, AD Mount Vesu­vius erupt­ed, bury­ing both Pom­peii and Her­cu­la­neum. In 1750, an Ital­ian farm­work­er dis­cov­ered an entombed sea­side vil­la in Her­cu­la­neum while dig­ging a well. When exca­vat­ed, the res­i­dence yield­ed hun­dreds of scrolls, all of them turned into what looked and felt like lumps of ash, and prac­ti­cal­ly all of them unrol­lable, let alone read­able. Only in 2015 did humankind — or more specif­i­cal­ly, Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky com­put­er sci­en­tist Brent Seales and his team — devel­op the tech­nol­o­gy that could let us see what texts these ancient scrolls con­tain. Even­tu­al­ly, a par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor and machine learn­ing came into play. This time­line comes from the web site of the Vesu­vius Chal­lenge, “a machine learn­ing and com­put­er vision com­pe­ti­tion to read the Her­cu­la­neum Papyri.”

Fund­ed by tech­nol­o­gy entre­pre­neurs Nat Fried­man and Daniel Gross, the Vesu­vius Chal­lenge has giv­en out $260,000 of its $1 mil­lion of prizes so far, includ­ing $40,000 to under­grad­u­ate student/engineer Luke Far­ri­tor, who iden­ti­fied ten let­ters in a sec­tion of one scroll, and $10,000 to bioro­bot­ics grad­u­ate stu­dent Youssef Nad­er, who sub­se­quent­ly and inde­pen­dent­ly dis­cov­ered those same let­ters.

The word they form? Por­phyras, ancient Greek for “pur­ple”: a col­or, inci­den­tal­ly, that sig­ni­fied wealth and pow­er in the ancient world, not least because of the enor­mous amount of labor required to extract it from nature. That the Her­cu­la­neum Papyri have start­ed to become read­able also rep­re­sents the cul­mi­na­tion of a sim­i­lar­ly impres­sive effort, albeit one based on tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment rather than the extrac­tion of sea-snail glands.

As Nicholas Wade writes in the New York Times, the cur­rent method “uses com­put­er tomog­ra­phy, the same tech­nique as in CT scans” — exe­cut­ed with the afore­men­tioned par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor — “plus advance­ments in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence” used “to help dis­tin­guish ink from papyrus.” You can learn more about the Vesu­vius Chal­lenge in the video above. Its cre­ator Gar­rett Ryan, of ancient-his­to­ry Youtube chan­nel Told in Stone, has been pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his expla­na­tion of how 99 per­cent of ancient texts were lost — which means these charred scrolls could hold a great deal of knowl­edge about the ancient world. Do they con­tain, as Ryan fan­ta­sizes, the lost books of Livy, the dia­logues of Aris­to­tle, poems by Sap­pho? We’ll only know when some­one fig­ures out how best to use tech­nol­o­gy to decode them all. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may be the key to the future, as we’ve often heard in recent years, but in this par­tic­u­lar case, it offers a promis­ing key to the past.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Par­ti­cle Accel­er­a­tors, 3D Mod­el­ing & Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Hid­den Ancient Greek Med­ical Text Read for the First Time in a Thou­sand Years — with a Par­ti­cle Accel­er­a­tor

Pom­peii Rebuilt: A Tour of the Ancient City Before It Was Entombed by Mount Vesu­vius

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

How 99% of Ancient Lit­er­a­ture Was Lost

A New­ly-Dis­cov­ered Fres­co in Pom­peii Reveals a Pre­cur­sor to Piz­za

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How to Be Happier in 5 Research-Proven Steps, According to Popular Yale Professor Laurie Santos

in Education, Psychology, Science, Yale | October 13th, 2023

Nature doesn’t care if you’re hap­py, but Yale psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Lau­rie San­tos does.

As Dr. San­tos points out dur­ing the above appear­ance on The Well, the goals of nat­ur­al selec­tion have been achieved as long as humans sur­vive and repro­duce, but most of us crave some­thing more to con­sid­er life worth liv­ing.

With depres­sion ris­ing to near epi­dem­ic lev­els on col­lege cam­pus­es and else­where, it’s worth tak­ing a look at our ingrained behav­ior, and maybe mak­ing some mod­i­fi­ca­tions to boost our hap­pi­ness lev­els.

Psy­chol­o­gy and the Good Life, Dr. San­tos’ mas­sive twice week­ly lec­ture class that active­ly tack­les ways of edg­ing clos­er to hap­pi­ness, is the most pop­u­lar course in Yale’s more than 300-year his­to­ry.

Do we detect some resis­tance?

Pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy — or the sci­ence of hap­pi­ness — is a pret­ty crowd­ed field late­ly, and the over­whelm­ing demand cre­at­ed by great throngs of peo­ple long­ing to feel bet­ter has attract­ed a fair num­ber of grifters will­ing to impart their proven method­olo­gies to any­one enrolling in their paid online cours­es.

By con­trast, Dr. San­tos not only has that Yale pedi­gree, she also cites oth­er respect­ed aca­d­e­mics such as the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chicago’s Nicholas Epley, a social cog­ni­tion spe­cial­ist who believes under­so­cial­i­ty, or a lack of face-to-face engage­ment, is mak­ing peo­ple mis­er­able, and Harvard’s Dan Gilbert and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Virginia’s Tim­o­thy Wil­son, who co-authored a paper on “mis­want­i­ng”, or the ten­den­cy to inac­cu­rate­ly pre­dict what will tru­ly result in sat­is­fac­tion and hap­pi­ness.

Yale under­grad Mick­ey Rose, who took Psy­chol­o­gy and the Good Life in the spring of 2022 to ful­fill a social sci­ence cred­it, told the Yale Dai­ly News that her favorite part of the class was that “every­thing was cit­ed, every­thing had a cred­i­ble source and study to back it up:”

I’m a STEM major and it’s kind of my over­all per­son­al­i­ty type to ques­tion claims that I find not very believ­able. Obvi­ous­ly the class made a lot of claims about mon­ey, grades, hap­pi­ness, that are coun­ter­in­tu­itive to most peo­ple and to Yale stu­dents espe­cial­ly.

With Psy­chol­o­gy and the Good Life now avail­able to the pub­lic for free on Cours­era, even skep­tics might con­sid­er giv­ing Dr. San­tos’ rec­om­mend­ed “re-wire­ment prac­tices” a peek, though be fore­warned, you should be pre­pared to put them into prac­tice before mak­ing pro­nounce­ments as to their effi­ca­cy.

It’s all pret­ty straight­for­ward stuff, start­ing with “use your phone to actu­al­ly be a phone”, mean­ing call a friend or fam­i­ly mem­ber to set up an in per­son get togeth­er rather than scrolling through end­less social media feeds.

Oth­er com­mon sense adjust­ments include look­ing beyond your­self to help by vol­un­teer­ing, resolv­ing to adopt a glass-is-half-full type atti­tude, cul­ti­vat­ing mind­ful­ness, mak­ing dai­ly entries in a grat­i­tude jour­nal, and becom­ing less seden­tary.

(You might also give Dr. San­tos’ Hap­pi­ness Lab pod­cast a go…)

Things to guard against are mea­sur­ing your own hap­pi­ness against the per­ceived hap­pi­ness of oth­ers and “impact bias” — over­es­ti­mat­ing the dura­tion and inten­si­ty of hap­pi­ness that is the expect­ed result of some hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed event, acqui­si­tion or change in social stand­ing.

Below Dr. San­tos gives a tour of the Good Life Cen­ter, an on-cam­pus space that stressed out, social­ly anx­ious stu­dents can vis­it to get help putting some of those re-wire­ment prac­tices into play.

Sign up for Coursera’s 10-week Sci­ence of Well-Being course here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Sci­ence of Well-Being: Take a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale University’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness? Lessons from a 75-Year-Long Har­vard Study

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Everything You Wanted to Ask About Psychedelics: A Johns Hopkins Psychedelics Researcher Answers 24 Questions in 2 Hours

in Psychology | August 31st, 2023

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These days, psy­che­del­ic research is expe­ri­enc­ing a renais­sance of sorts. And Matt John­son, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chi­a­try at Johns Hop­kins, is lead­ing the way. One of “the world’s most pub­lished sci­en­tists on the human effects of psy­che­delics,” his research focus­es on “unrav­el­ing the sci­en­tif­ic under­pin­nings of psy­che­del­ic sub­stances, mov­ing beyond their his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al con­text to shed light on their role in mod­ern ther­a­peu­tic appli­ca­tions.” Like some oth­er researchers before him, he believes that psy­che­delics ulti­mate­ly have the “poten­tial to bring about a par­a­digm shift in psy­chi­a­try, neu­ro­science, and phar­ma­col­o­gy.” In the Big Think video above, the pro­fes­sor answers 24 big ques­tions about psy­che­delics, from “What are the main effects of psy­che­delics?,” to “How do psy­che­delics work in the brain?” and “What are the biggest risks of psy­che­delics?,” to “Will psy­che­delics answer the hard prob­lem of con­scious­ness?” John­son cov­ers a lot of ground here. Set­tle in. The video runs 2+ hours.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Michael Pol­lan, Sam Har­ris & Oth­ers Explain How Psy­che­delics Can Change Your Mind

How to Use Psy­che­del­ic Drugs to Improve Men­tal Health: Michael Pollan’s New Book, How to Change Your Mind, Makes the Case

Psilo­cy­bin Could Soon Be a Legal Treat­ment for Depres­sion: Johns Hop­kins Pro­fes­sor, Roland Grif­fiths, Explains How Psilo­cy­bin Can Relieve Suf­fer­ing

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

New LSD Research Pro­vides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Poten­tial to Pro­mote Cre­ativ­i­ty

Inside MK-Ultra, the CIA’s Secret Pro­gram That Used LSD to Achieve Mind Con­trol (1953–1973)

Aldous Hux­ley, Psy­che­delics Enthu­si­ast, Lec­tures About “the Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence” at MIT (1962)

Is Coffee Good for You?: A Coffee Connoisseur Reviews the Scientific Research

in Food & Drink, Health | June 23rd, 2023

Accord­ing to NPR, “Caf­feine is the most wide­ly con­sumed drug in the world. Here in the U.S., accord­ing to a 2022 sur­vey, more than 93% of adults con­sume caf­feine, and of those, 75% con­sume caf­feine at least once a day.” Giv­en the preva­lence of cof­fee world­wide, it pays to ask a sim­ple ques­tion: Is cof­fee good for you? Above, James Hoff­mann, the author of The World Atlas of Cof­fee, pro­vides an overview of research exam­in­ing the rela­tion­ship between cof­fee and var­i­ous dimen­sions of health, includ­ing the gut/microbiome, sleep, can­cer, cog­ni­tion, mor­tal­i­ty and more. If you want to explore this sub­ject more deeply, Hoff­mann has cre­at­ed a list of the research papers reviewed here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

How Cof­fee Affects Your Brain: A Very Quick Primer

Why Cof­fee Naps Will Perk You Up More Than Either Cof­fee, or Naps, Alone

Paul Gia­mat­ti Plays Hon­oré de Balzac, Hopped Up on 50 Cof­fees Per Day

In Search of the Best Croissant in Protest-Filled Paris

in Food & Drink | May 11th, 2023

An Ital­ian tourist went to Paris in search of the best crois­sant. A nat­ur­al thing to do. Except he did it amidst a city-wide strike, one pre­cip­i­tat­ed by Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to raise the min­i­mum retire­ment age in France. It all makes for a unique kind of food/travel video.

So what boulan­geries (bak­eries) made the list? Tout Autour du Pain on rue de Turenne; Car­ton Paris on Boule­vard de Denain; Stohrer (estab­lished in 1730) on Rue Mon­torgueil; Du Pain et des Idées on Rue Yves Toudic; and Cedric Gro­let OPÉRA on rue de l’Opéra.

And what bak­ery takes the prover­bial cake? Turns out, it’s Du Pain et des Idées. When we vis­it Paris in June, we’ll be sure to stop by…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent

French Café Adds Extra Charge for Rude Cus­tomers

See Rid­ley Scott’s 1973 Bread Commercial—Voted England’s Favorite Adver­tise­ment of All Time

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Harvard’s Free Course on Mak­ing Cakes, Pael­la & Oth­er Deli­cious Food