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What is Consciousness?

Christof Koch, Bernardo Kastrup, and Rupert Spira, 12/11/2021

We all know what consciousness is: it’s our direct experience of the present moment, our window into the external world, the feeling of what it is like to see, smell, taste, touch, hear, think, emote, and more. Yet it also seems to be the case that we have no idea what consciousness is. Consciousness has baffled neuroscientists and philosophers alike for centuries; indeed, for many people, there seems to be a fundamental, perhaps even unbridgeable, gap between the subjective, felt sensation of, for example, pain and the electrochemical activity of our brains. How, then, could consciousness arise from the brain?
In this event, three extraordinary experts on consciousness will debate each other about their answers to this question. Christof Koch is a legendary neuroscientist who has collaborated with Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, to uncover the “neural correlates” of consciousness. Since Dr. Crick’s death, he has continued in this line of research and developed, along with another neuroscientist, Integrated Information Theory, which is arguably the leading scientific account of consciousness. Bernardo Kastrup is a philosopher who also boasts an impressive background in science; he worked at the high-energy particle collider in CERN before pursuing a career in analytical philosophy of mind, where he argued for the idea that reality itself is on extended form of consciousness. Finally, Rupert Spira is a spiritual teacher who belongs to the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, a “non-dual” school of Hindu philosophy that believes that an infinite, pure, divine consciousness underlies the apparent duality between the perceiving self and the perceived universe. Each of the speakers will give a brief “opening statement” about his view on consciousness, and then our president, Kenneth Shinozuka, will begin moderating the debate between them. The debate will last an hour, and then we will conclude the event with a 30-minute Q&A with the audience.
Why is the Oxford Psychedelic Society putting on an event about consciousness, you might ask? Each of the three speakers will comment on psychedelics and their implications for our understanding of consciousness; they have all written or spoken publicly about psychedelics, and Christof Koch has even incorporated psychedelics into his research program on consciousness. Furthermore, psychedelics and the study of consciousness are inextricably linked to each other; the essence of the psychedelic experience is a profound change in a person’s state of consciousness.

The Flowing Brain on Psychedelics

Morten Kringelbach, Andrea Luppi, Parker Singleton, 01/11/2021

The electrochemical ebb and flow of brain activity exhibits a multitude of extraordinarily complex patterns. A leading theory suggests that psychedelics make these patterns, or “dynamics,” more chaotic. Neuroscientists Morten Kringelbach, Andrea Luppi, and Parker Singleton will talk about the effect of psychedelics on the ebb and flow of brain activity. Morten will present a cutting-edge model that shows that psychedelics increase the turbulence of brain dynamics, Andrea will discuss a theory that compares brain dynamics on psychedelics to music, and finally, Parker will talk about how psychedelics alter the structure of the brain and thereby liberate the flow of activity.Morten is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at Oxford University. Morten built his career by performing groundbreaking studies on the neuroscience of pleasure, and now he is the only professor who researches the neuroscience of psychedelics at Oxford. Andrea is a PhD student in Clinical Neurosciences at the Cambridge University, where he studies how the capacity for cognition and consciousness arises from the complex interactions between brain systems, viewed as a dynamic network. Parker is a PhD student in Computational Biology at Cornelll University, where he researches the “connectome,” or the structure of connections in the brain.

Healing Addiction with Ibogaine

Patrick Kroupa, 21/10/2021

Patrick Kroupa has over 20 years of experience working with a wide spectrum of psychedelic compounds to address mental health and drug dependence disorders. During the 1990s Patrick was a high-functioning heroin addict, who was a founder of New York City's first internet access provider, MindVox. He regained his life through the reset that ibogaine provides, and was recruited by Dr. Deborah Mash to work at the University of Miami's Ibogaine Research Project, Dept. of Neurology, Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. He is co-author of the first ibogaine microdosing paper ever published (MAPS, 2005), and a founder of Clear Sky, the world's oldest medically-based psychedelic treatment clinic focused on utilizing ibogaine to interrupt polysubstance abuse disorders.

Accessing Other Dimensions on DMT

Andrew Gallimore, Chris Timmermann, Rick Strassman, 14/06/2021

Of all the psychedelics, DMT gives rise to the most extraordinary visions; those who have “broken through” on the drug have witnessed “machine elves,” super-intelligent aliens in “hyperspace,” a “never-ending fractal of infinite complexity,” God, and more. Because these visions are described as “realer than real,” some DMT users come to believe that the drug serves a tool for breaking out of “the simulation” - the artificial reality in which we spend our sober, waking lives - and entering a hidden dimension that contains ultimate reality. Is this hidden dimension real, or is it merely a hallucination? If the latter is true, then how is the brain capable of constructing an alternate universe that is so much richer and more vivid than the world as we know it? But if DMT is more than a hallucination, then what can DMT tell us about the nature of reality and our purpose within it?Our first guest, Andrew Gallimore, is the creator of Alien Information Theory, which claims that “DMT provides the secret to exiting our Universe permanently -- to complete the cosmic game and to become interdimensional citizens of hyperspace.” He will be discussing the theory as well “DMTx,” a method that he co-invented for significantly lengthening the DMT breakthrough experience and thereby enabling a much deeper understanding of its rich phenomenology and profound therapeutic effects.Chris Timmermann, our second speaker, has conducted pioneering research on the neurobiological effects of DMT, and he will be presenting both his findings and his trials of DMTx on human participants at Imperial College London.Last but certainly not least, Rick Strassman, our third guest, conducted the first scientific tests of DMT on humans after the US government had banned research on hallucinogens for nearly two decades, and he recorded his results in the groundbreaking book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Dr. Strassman will be introducing a novel philosophical framework for interpreting the effects of DMT on our imagination and on our ability to reason.

Varieties of Healing

Prof. Guy Goodwin, Hanneke Schots, Dr. Joe Tafur, 02/06/21

With growing scientific evidence for the efficacy of psychedelic drugs in treating mood disorders and shifts in regulatory attitudes, it feels as if we are on the cusp of seeing psychedelic therapies go mainstream. But how should psychedelic therapy be integrated into the Western medical practice? Who should be allowed to perform the therapies? And what can Western medicine learn from indigenous traditions which have used psychedelics for centuries to heal people?“The Varieties of Healing" brings together Prof. Guy Goodwin from the University of Oxford, an expert in neuropsychopharmacology and the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs; Hanneke Schots from Guided Tripping, a psychodynamic therapist who uses psilocybin in her practice; and Dr. Joe Tafur, a family physician and Curandero who has helped establish an ayahuasca retreat in Peru and written about the interface between Western and Shipibo medicine in his book The Fellowship of the River to discuss the role of psychedelics in modern healthcare.

Psychedelic Capitalism

Alexander Beiner, Lars Wilde, 27/05/21

This moderated Q&A brings together Lars Wilde, President of COMPASS Pathways, and Alexander Beiner, co-director of the Breaking Conventions conference and co-founder of Rebel Wisdom.The event focused on three main topics regarding psychedelic capitalism: 1) ethics: should psychedelic therapy be a for-profit enterprise? 2) feasibility: how will psychedelic therapy be distributed? 3) accessibility: how do ensure that people in need of psychedelic therapy receive it?COMPASS Pathways is one of the leading for-profit psychedelic companies in the world and is currently developing psilocybin therapy for treatment-resistant depression. Breaking Conventions is the largest psychedelics conference in Europe.

The Cutting Edge of Psychedelic Science

Andrés Gomez Emilsson, Carl Hayden Smith, Michael Schartner, 06/05/21

Andrés Gomez Emilsson
"Healing Trauma with Neural Annealing:
Is Annealing the Key Condition for Successful Psychedelic Psychotherapy?"Mystical-type experiences mediate the therapeutic benefit of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (Griffiths, 2016; Ross, 2016). In this talk we will explore why this may be the case and how we might improve this effect. On the one hand we can interpret the effect of mystical-type experiences through the lens of belief and attitude change (Carhart-Harris and K. J. Friston, 2019). But beliefs that are not deeply felt are unlikely to have much of an effect. Why would mystical-type experiences in particular cause deeply felt belief changes? On the other hand, one can interpret the effect of these experiences to be healing at a low-level: they allow the reconfiguration of the microstructure of our experience in beneficial ways. The first lense suggests that these experiences change what we believe and think about, whereas the second lense suggests that the experiences change how we feel. In this talk we will unify these two lenses and argue that neural annealing (Johnson, 2019) underlies high-level changes in beliefs and attitudes as well as low-level microstructural healing of internal representations. This paradigm ties together the puzzling effects of mystical-type experiences by interpreting them as uniquely strong versions of neural annealing. We suggest that traumatic memories are indeed implemented with low-level microstructural dissonance in the internal representations (Gomez Emilsson, 2017). Not only are they about something bad, they also feel bad. In turn, neural annealing targeted towards these internal representations can heal and transform them from dissonance-producing to consonance-producing. More so, neural annealing also enhances the information propagation fidelity of the nervous system, allowing the healed representations to update the state of the rest of the nervous system. This insight, along with careful study of annealing dynamics under psychedelics, can allow us to target the annealing process in order to heal these internal representations more effectively. We conclude with empirical predictions for what to look for in order to identify the signatures of successful neural annealing under psychedelics and suggest methods to piggyback on the natural well-trodden paths of beneficial annealing (e.g. meditation, yoga, music, creativity) to optimize such experiences.Carl Hayden Smith
"DMTX as a 21st Century Mystery School"'This talk will focus on the prospects of being one of the first participants in the world to try DMTX (X=Extended) at Imperial College London (ICL). After being part of the DMT phase 1 and phase 2 trials (over the last 5 years) this research now moves into a whole new level of immersion. During this experiment the peak of the DMT state will be extended thanks to a continuous intravenous drip feeding of the entheogen. This arguably turns this ancient medicine into a new form of technology. Early findings of the research from Chris Timmerman (ICL) suggests that nnDMT produces the same brain signature as the dreaming state. During the extended state we may be better able to explore the hypothesis from Andrew Gallimore that nnDMT actually opens up an entirely novel, orthogonal reality.The DMTX experiment potentially means that nnDMT could become the base layer of our subjective reality, being combined, exponentially, with everything in life. What are the implications of this? Is there a danger that the psychedelic state is being overly romanticised and that DMTX could be regarded as a new form of bio chemical VR? How will DMTX help with the integration problem? Maybe the problem of bringing our insight back from the liminal space isn't that these experiences defy verbalization, but that our languages are not yet sufficient enough to describe these experiences.Michael Schartner
"Global states of consciousness - such as general anaesthesia or REM sleep - can be characterised by metrics of signal diversity, showing that diverse cortical activity is a hallmark of consciousness. We found that signal diversity is elevated in classical psychedelic states, possibly explained by a larger repertoire of brain states - which would be in line with reports about openness, novel associations and levelled salience of all experiences during psychedelic states. This coarse description of the brain as a dynamical system with various degrees of diversity in activity is only one dimension to characterise such global states of consciousness. Neural network models of visual perception and its pharmacological perturbation may provide a more mechanistic model, showing how the balanced integration of prior and sensory information into conscious perception is regulated by serotonin."

The Curious Tale of The Fly Agaric Mushroom

Andy Letcher, 17/02/2021

There is now considerable interest both within academia and in mainstream culture about the therapeutic and transformative potential of the so-called classical psychedelics, most especially psilocybin and the mushrooms that produce it. Amidst all this excitement, a distant fungal cousin, the Fly Agaric Amanita muscaria, has gone almost unnoticed. Unmistakeable with its dramatic red and white-spotted cap, the Fly Agaric is if not exactly psychedelic then provocatively psychoactive. Its effects are capricious, ranging from visionary ecstasies through to increased stamina, optical distortions, muscle twitches and a coma like sleep. Largely shunned despite its legality in the UK, the very idea of it has nonetheless had a profound cultural impact, from its discovery by Western travellers to Siberia in the seventeenth century through to the present day. No other mushroom has generated so many myths.In this talk, Dr Andy Letcher discusses the chemistry, effects, history and cultural impact of this strange, eldritch mushroom. He introduces and questions many of the stories that swirl and circulate about it with giddy regularity. Did Siberian shamans drink mushroom-infused reindeer piss to get high? Was Jesus a Fly Agaric mushroom? Had Lewis Carroll been chomping them when he wrote Alice in Wonderland? And is the red and white figure of Santa Claus actually a mushroom shaman bringing gifts from the Upper World with his flying reindeer?Dr Andy Letcher has doctorates in Ecology (from the University of Oxford) and the Study of Religion (King Alfred’s College, Winchester). He is a Senior Lecturer at Schumacher College, Devon UK, where he is the Programme Lead for the MA Engaged Ecology. His research interests focus on the contemporary use of psychedelics with a particular interest in the discourses by which people frame their experiences and by which those experiences become meaningful. He is currently researching ritual and animistic usage of psychedelics by contemporary British Druids. He is the author of numerous papers on subjects as diverse as environmental protest, animism, fairies, the revival of the Heathen lyre, and the distribution of mammals across continents. He is the author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom. In a quest for homegrown acoustic dance music (ADM) he plays English bagpipes and Dark Age lyre.

Coming Out Psychedelic

Julian Vayne, 21/01/2021

Plato claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living, and to examine life surely we must explore awareness itself? Over two millennia later Timothy Leary compared psychedelic drugs to the telescope in terms of their capacity to reveal hidden aspects of our minds. As psychedelic experience struggles to break free of the Drug War paradigm how can we integrate psychedelic use within our existing institutions and culture? While suitably distanced research work on psychedelics is increasingly acceptable, personal engagement with these substances often isn't. From mainstream medicine to academia and to politics - everywhere psychedelic substances are the teacher that dare not speak its name.Join us for an evening with psychonaut, occultist and writer Julian Vayne to explore these issues. Julian was recently banned from addressing students at the University of Oxford because of his involvement with psychedelic drugs. He is the author of Getting Higher: The Manual of Psychedelic Ceremony and sits on the board of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies

Drugs at Dusk: DMT & the Near-Death Experience

Pascal Michael, 03/12/20

The breakthrough DMT experience, though brief in ‘real time’, is well-known to produce radical transformations in perception, including disembodiment, sense of translocation to otherworldly spaces and encounters with otherworldly beings. This core set of experiences is also shared with the ‘near-death’ experience (NDE), and the assumption that the soul hitches a ride on this Spirit Molecule at death thus triggering the NDE has been a lingering one since Strassman’s 2001 book.Since this time there have been psychological and neurobiological studies in support of this hypothesis – however, alongside other significant work suggesting the NDE is a highly complex psychobiological phenomenon that certainly cannot be reduced to the singular release of this simple psychedelic indole. Akin to cross-cultural work on the near-death experience, it appears that DMT is capable only of simulating the basic structure of the NDE.The central thrust of my qualitative analyses is to show that the specific content within the two states varies in its particular manifestation and is usually very idiosyncratic. Only infrequently are some core features ‘NDE-like’ in their presentation, and almost never is the broad NDE ‘syndrome’ evinced by DMT. There is most likely a constellation of differences, including psychological (such as context) and neurophysiological (such as neurotransmitter recruitment), to account for these phenomenological differences. As such, the facilitation of experiences with greater fidelity to the death process, for instance in the terminally ill, may make better use of other substances (such as psilocybin, as already being carried out).While the precise neurobiology of the human experience of the NDE may only be elucidated by studies with logistical and ethical challenges (e.g. PET-imaging at the moment of death) – the reflection on two profound and life-transformative mystical experiences can afford us (though sometimes potentially contradictory) lessons on our belief-systems and behaviours in life.Pascal received a BSc Hons (Aberdeen University) in Neuroscience and an MSc (University College London) in Clinical Mental Health Sciences. His current PhD at University of Greenwich with Dr. David Luke is ‘A comparative phenomenology of the psychedelic DMT and near-death experience’. His interests lie in the continuum of death – from the molecular to the humanistic, and from the anomalous to the transcendent – and its inevitable illumination of the nature of life.

Spinoza and Psychedelics: Eternity and Ecology

Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-H, 20/11/20

In this talk, philosopher of mind Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H will present a brief exposition of Spinoza’s metaphysics and its legacy, with an emphasis on its identification of ‘God’ with ‘Nature’, its view of the timeless eternal, and with its notion of the highest attainment of experience: ‘the intellectual love of God’ – a notion compared with certain psychedelic phenomenology.The overview of Spinozism’s troublesome legacy will seek to reveal factors that have led us to both the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ and the ecological crisis, showing how a psychedelic resurgence may help mitigate both.Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a philosopher of mind and ontologist with research pertaining to panpsychism and altered states of consciousness – with a predilection for Spinoza, Whitehead, and Nietzsche. Peter is a research fellow and associate lecturer at the University of Exeter, as well as being the TEDx Talker on 'Psychedelics and Consciousness', author of Noumenautics, and inspiration to the Marvel superhero Karnak.

How Psychedelics Alter the Way We Think About Consciousness

James Cooke, 22/10/20

Throughout human history, psychedelic substances have impacted how we think about consciousness and the nature of reality. This class of substances can produce profound visionary experiences but also mystical experiences, characterised by profound changes in perspective rather than visionary content. These experiences typically point to contradictory metaphysical conclusions, however, particularly with regards to how consciousness relates to the material world. I will argue that modern neuroscience offers a perspective that validates the common metaphysical conclusions following mystical experiences while suggesting that the content of visionary experiences should not be taken as literally true. By understanding visionary experience as reflecting the deep programming of our minds, however, such experiences are in no way stripped of their meaning but are instead seen as revealing archetypal truths that exist within us, as opposed to existing outside of us.Dr. James Cooke is a neuroscientist, writer, and speaker, whose work focuses on consciousness, with a particular interest in meditative and psychedelic states. He studied Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience at Oxford University and is passionate about exploring the relationship between science and spirituality, which he does via his writing, YouTube channel and podcast (Living Mirrors with Dr. James Cooke). He splits his time between London and the mountains of Portugal where he is building a retreat centre, The Surrender Homestead

Lockdown Psymposium #2

Jules Evans, Anna Ermakova, Tom Hatsis, 16/06/20

Jules Evans - “Spiritual Emergencies: When Trips Go Wrong and How to Deal With Them”
Author and broadcaster with books published on ecstatic and self-transcendent experiences, ayahuasca tourism, and spiritual emergencies.Anna Ermakova - “Entheogenic Conservation”
A psychedelic scientist and board member of the Cactus Conservation Institute, currently undertaking research in the ecology and conservation of peyote.Tom Hatsis - “A Trip Through Psychedelic History”
Psychedelic Historian and author of three books at the interface of psychedelia and magic.

DMT, Neuroscience & Beliefs

Chris Timmermann, 04/06/20

DMT is a psychedelic drug with powerful effects on human consciousness, with users reporting entering different dimensions and communicating with entities. This talk will explore the neuroscience of DMT and how psychedelics alter beliefs about the nature of reality.Chris Timmermann is a neuroscientist and researcher at Imperial College London, where he is completing his PhD in neuropsychopharmacology, focusing on the effects of DMT in the brain and human consciousness.

Kambô: Sacred Frog of the Amazon Rainforest

Benjamin Mudge, 26/05/2020

Indigenous traditions with Kambô are believed to support physical and spiritual purification, liberation from “Panema” energy, and connection with the benevolent consciousness of an amphibian that has no predators. Kambô is applied through small holes burned into the surface of the skin. Kambô induces a strong detoxifying purge and is, therefore, a challenging process that is best received in a safely-held and compassionate setting.This talk covers:
- Traditional uses of Kambô by indigenous tribes in Brazil and Peru
- What to expect in a Kambô ceremony, and how to get the best results
- Overview of the history of Westernization of the Kambô tradition, from the first gringo encounter in Cruzeiro do Sul in Brazil, to the international proliferation of Kambô practitioners
- A discussion of the ideological issues and practical problems arising when an indigenous Amazonian tradition gets transplanted into a Western city
- Personal observations of working with Kambô since 2010
...and more!Benjamin Mudge is an empathic Kambô Ceremony Facilitator who has been training with Brazilians since 2010, including pajés from the Huni Kuin, Yawanawá, Katukina and Puyanawa tribes. He is also doing a PhD about ayahuasca and curated the London Psychedelic Society’s Ayahuasca Symposium.

Ayahuasca Psymposium

Kerry Rowberry, Sam Gandy, Adam Knowles, 14/5/2020

Kerry Rowberry (Shamanism in the UK)
Kerry has been researching curandeirism (a traditional healing system from Latin America) in the UK, part-time since October 2011. Her research provides insight into various ayahuasca rituals, and accompanying treatments, and how they have found their way into the UK. She uses post-colonial principles, while exploring the phenomenon in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's principles of the rhizome. She founded the Psychedelic Society of Birmingham where she hosted Monthly talks and random events until the end of 2018.Sam Gandy (the psychedelic-ecophilic connection)
Sam has a PhD in ecological science from the University of Aberdeen and an MRes in entomology from Imperial College London. He is a writer, speaker, amateur mycologist and has a lifelong love of nature and wildlife. He also has experience of working in the psychedelic field, as a past scientific assistant to the director of the Beckley Foundation, and currently as a collaborator with the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. His research is focussed on the capacity of psychedelics to (re)connect our increasingly disconnected species to nature, for the potential betterment of humanity and the biosphere at large.Adam Knowles (Ayahuasca and Psychotherapy)
Adam is an existential psychotherapist researching the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca and its potential to help those in the UK with insight and well-being. Undertaking a PhD on the phenomenology of ayahuasca experience at Birkbeck, Adam works with biomedical experts at King’s College London (Institute of Psychiatry), and embedded indigenous experts from the Ayahuasca Foundation in Peru.

Cannabis Use by Yogis in India

Dr. Matthew Clark, 10/03/20

In this talk Dr Matthew Clark will survey what is known about the use of cannabis in India from the earliest records until modern times. In his recent book, The Tawny One: Soma, Haoma and Ayahuasca (London/New York: Muswell Hill Press, 2017), one of the chapters was devoted to this topic. Although there are a few occasional references in the Vedas (the oldest religious texts of South Asia) to what may be cannabis, the plant does not appear in medical texts until around 1,000 years ago. The use of cannabis for recreational purposes was mainly introduced into India by radical Sufis (known variously as Qalandar, Heydari or Malang) in the 13th century. Some South Asian yogis use cannabis heavily as a form of tapas. The use of cannabis was made illegal in India in 1986, since when recreational use has declined. However, in some areas cannabis is still legal, and bhāṅg (a form of the plant prepared for oral consumption) is still widely available in north India. This talk will also look briefly at different kinds of cannabis preparations in South Asia.Dr Matthew Clark is a Research Associate in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at SOAS (University of London). He specialises in yoga, sādhus, and the religious cultures of India. He is involved in the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies and is one of the editors of the Journal of Yoga Studies. His research in the last few years has focussed on soma/haoma, the ancient Asian ritual drink. His theory, presented in his recent book (The Tawny One: Soma, Haoma and Ayahuasca. London/New York: Muswell Hills Press, 2017) and several articles, is that it was originally made from plants that acted as analogues of ayahuasca, a powerful psychedelic concoction.

MDMA as a treatment for PTSD

Dr. Ben Sessa, 01/11/2019

In his talk, Dr Sessa describes the developmental roots of mental disorder and addictions through a description of child abuse and trauma. He illustrates the challenges clinicians face dealing with alcohol addiction, and presents MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as a potentially useful new tool. He describes the preliminary results of his ongoing MDMA study in Bristol and discusses the future for psychedelic-assisted psychiatry in the UK.Dr Ben Sessa (MBBS BSc MRCPsych) is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist. He trained at UCL medical school, graduating in 1997, and he is interested in the developmental trajectory from child maltreatment to adult mental health disorders. Dr Sessa is an approved MDMA and psilocybin psychotherapist. currently a senior research fellow at Bristol and Imperial College London Universities, where he is conducting the UK's first clinical study with MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD and alcohol dependence syndrome. He is also lead therapist on Bristol-based study investigating the role for psilocybin therapy for depression. He is currently working with industry figures to set-up a network of UK-based psychedelic therapy clinics.
In the last ten years he has worked on several UK-based human pharmacology trials as study doctor or as a healthy subject administering and receiving test doses of LSD, DMT, psilocybin, MDMA and ketamine. He is the author of several dozen peer-reviewed articles in the mainstream medical press and has written two books exploring psychedelic medicine; The Psychedelic Renaissance (2012 / 2017) and To Fathom Hell or Soar Angelic (2015). In speaking publicly at universities and medical conferences, Dr Sessa is outspoken on lobbying for change in the current system by which drugs are classified in the UK, believing a more progressive policy of regulation would reduce the harms of recreational drug use and provide increased opportunities for clinical psychedelic research.
He is a co-founder and director of the UK's Breaking Convention conference.

The New Psychedelic Revolution

Prof. David Nutt, 14/05/19

Oxford Psychedelic Society and Oxford Psychology Society hosted a special lecture by Prof. David Nutt followed by an extensive one-hour Q&A session on 14th May 2019.Prof. Nutt discusses how various hallucinogens work on the brain as well as legal barriers preventing research into hallucinogens and how researchers can overcome them.

A New Age for Psychedelic Drugs?

Prof. Guy Goodwin, 14/11/18

From 1970 it was illegal to use or research the actions of the so-called hallucinogens (notably LSD, psilocybin). Previously psychiatrists had been relatively free to explore their uses in a range of conditions like depression, anxiety and addiction and, of course, their traditional use in religious celebrations may date to the origins of human civilisation. Their pharmacology inspired advances in our understanding of chemical neurotransmission and the role of serotonin specifically. Efforts are now underway to re-medicalize the hallucinogens for the benefit of patients with difficult to treat conditions. There remain a lot of risks to this enterprise. Public discussion and understanding can only help.

Past Talks

What is Consciousness?

Christof Koch, Bernardo Kastrup, and Rupert Spira, 12/11/2021

The Flowing Brain on Psychedelics

Morten Kringelbach, Andrea Luppi, Parker Singleton, 01/11/2021

Healing Addiction with Ibogaine

Patrick Kroupa, 21/10/2021

Accessing Other Dimensions on DMT

Andrew Gallimore, Chris Timmermann, Rick Strassman, 14/06/2021

Varieties of Healing

Prof. Guy Goodwin, Hanneke Schots, Dr. Joe Tafur, 02/06/21

Psychedelic Capitalism

Alexander Beiner, Lars Wilde, 27/05/21

The Cutting Edge of Psychedelic Science

Andrés Gomez Emilsson, Carl Hayden Smith, Michael Schartner, 06/05/21

The Curious Tale of The Fly Agaric Mushroom

Andy Letcher, 17/2/2021

Coming Out Psychedelic

Julian Vayne, 21/01/2021

Drugs at Dusk: DMT & the Near-Death Experience

Julian Vayne, 03/12/2020

Spinoza and Psychedelics: Eternity and Ecology

Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-H, 20/11/20

How Psychedelics Alter the Way We Think About Consciousness

James Cooke, 22/10/20

Lockdown Psymposium #2

Jules Evans, Anna Ermakova, Tom Hatsis, 16/06/20

DMT, Neuroscience & Beliefs

Chris Timmermann, 04/06/20

Kambô: Sacred Frog of the Amazon Rainforest

Benjamin Mudge, 26/05/2020

Ayahuasca Psymposium

Kerry Rowberry, Sam Gandy, Adam Knowles, 14/5/2020

Cannabis Use by Yogis in India

Dr. Matthew Clark, 10/03/2020

MDMA as a treatment for PTSD

Dr. Ben Sessa, 01/11/2019

The New Psychedelic Revolution

Prof. David Nutt, 14/05/2019

A New Age for Psychedelic Drugs?

Prof. Guy Goodwin, 14/11/2018

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Start-of-Term Party

Ecstatic 5Rhythms Dance

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Kundalini Yoga: Archetypal Knowing

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Psychedelics and Tekhne: Modifying the Phenomenology of Altered States

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Nature Walk

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Shroomshop

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Indigenous Uses of Ayahuasca

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Midterm Chill

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Psychedelics, Sexuality, and Healing Trauma

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Psychedelics for Alzheimer's Disease

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Gong Bath

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Chanting for Inner Peace

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End-of-Term Party

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