Date: Sunday, May 21
Time: 12 pm ET

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Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments—in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals.
 
But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear.
 
From Sigmund Freud’s experiments with cocaine to William James’s epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture.

In this illustrated talk, Mike Jay will relate the forgotten history of these often hair-raising and mind-blowing self-experiments, and show how they informed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious and the rise of modernism.  

Mike Jay is an author and curator who has written widely on the cultural history of medicine and the mind sciences. His previous books include Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic and High Society: Mind-altering Drugs in History and Culture. He writes regularly for London Review of Books and Wall Street Journal, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL, London. More at mikejay.net.