“Ayahuasca, Cognitive Psychology, and the Ontology of Hallucination”

There is no doubt that the sacred plant ayahuasca can produce hallucinations under just about any definition of the term — visual experiences that are solid, detailed, three-dimensional, animated, interactive, and embedded in ordinary perceptual space; auditory experiences that are immediate, external, directional, locatable in space, and often coordinated with visual experiences. These experiences are similar in striking ways to lucid dreams, DMT journeys, scopolamine overdose, out-of-body experiences, false awakenings, waking dreams, apparitions, eidetic visualization, and active imagination — what we can call “visionary experiences,” all characterized to a lesser or greater degree of presentness, detail, externality, and three-dimensional explorable spacefulness. We will discuss what contributions current cognitive psychology can make to our understanding of these experiences, and the ontological implications of the ability of ayahuasca to collapse the boundary between the real and unreal, the world and the imagination.

Biography: Stephan V. Beyer, Ph.D. — scholar, adventurer, and expert on both jungle survival and plant hallucinogens — is the author of Singing to the Plants, “the best book on ayahuasca yet” and “the most comprehensive examination of Amazonian shamanism ever written.” Steve studied wilderness survival among the indigenous peoples of North and South America, and sacred plant medicine with traditional herbalists in North America and curanderos in the Upper Amazon, where he studied the healing plants with doña María Tuesta Flores and received coronación by banco ayahuasquero don Roberto Acho Jurama. With doctoral degrees in both religious studies and psychology, Steve lived for a year and a half in a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas, and has undertaken numerous four-day and four-night solo vision fasts in the desert wildernesses of New Mexico. He has studied the use of ayahuasca and other sacred plants in the Amazon, peyote in ceremonies of the Native American Church, and huachuma in Peruvian mesa rituals. He can be reached at [email protected].

“New Frontiers In Psychedelic Research: Letting go of the medical model”

Looking beyond the current resurgence in psychedelic studies about healing specific conditions, we will explore the restoration of basic freedoms: to experience one’s connection to the Divine, to explore dimensions of oneself that can lead to healing and re-connection to the natural world, and the right to use the best tools available to solve scientific and technical problems. We will review some ”best practices”: current entheogenic trainings, as well as how to use psychedelics as tools for physicists, mathematicians, architects, etc. We will present preliminary research findings on micro-doses that may act as all chakra enhancers and ongoing research studies including those done at prior Horizon and other psychedelic conferences. Members at this conference will have the chance to participate in the current national user survey project.

Biography: James Fadiman, Ph.D., co-founder of and teacher at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology, has also taught at San Francisco State, Brandeis and Stanford. He is a management consultant, workshop leader, sits on corporate boards and has written textbooks, novels, poems and a play. He has been involved in psychedelic research – spiritual, psychotherapeutic and scientific – since the 1960’s.

“Legal Issues Regarding the Santo Daime Church”

I will discuss the evolution of the Santo Daime Church in Brazil which utilizes a tea called Ayahuasca including the studies done in Brazil that resulted in the Brazilian Government authorizing official use of the tea as the sacrament of the Church. We will trace the importation of the tea and establishment of Churches in the United States and the failed efforts to obtain agreement with the United States to permit the tea. We will discuss the legal and factual issues that arose in the federal court case highlighting the government’s intellectually bankrupt reasons for banning the tea, the importance of experts in such cases, and of understanding the the legal issues regarding “reliable science.” The second part of this talk, time permitting, will hone in on the issue of who has the burden of proof regarding the so-called risks associated with ingesting entheogens in various sets and settings. Are scientists required to establish through existing data that imbibing the tea has no risks, or is the burden on those who oppose the use of the tea or other entheogens to establish the level of known risks based on existing data, where “speculation” has become the common defense for banning the tea. Here, I am particularly speaking to the scientists in the audience who discuss “risk” as part of their work, because that work, in turn, is crucial to the evolution of the current paradigm which is to use these God-given plants for the spiritual evolution of the planet.

Biography: Roy S. Haber, LLB is a Eugene, Oregon-based attorney for the Santo Daime Church of Brazil. He is a practicing civil rights and environmental lawyer formerly with the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Jackson, Mississippi, the Native American Rights Fund and Deputy Chief in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice under President Carter.

“Recent Findings from the Johns Hopkins Hallucinogen Research Group”

This talk will provide an overview of research with psilocybin and other hallucinogens conducted at Johns Hopkins, including very recent findings regarding salvinorin A (Salvia divinorum), optimal psilocybin dosage, mystical experience resulting from non-research administration of psilocybin, psilocybin and its relationship to headache, and psilocybin-occasioned personality change.

Biography: Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Vermont, and completed a fellowship in behavioral pharmacology at Johns Hopkins. He has received multiple grants as Principal Investigator from NIH to conduct research on the psychology and treatment of addiction. Current projects in this regard include studies examining the relationship between myopic decision-making and the high rates of sexual HIV risk behavior in cocaine addicted individuals, and a clinical trial examining the efficacy of the learning enhancer d-cycloserine in improving response to behavioral treatment of cocaine addiction. Dr. Johnson is also an expert in the assessment of psychoactive drug effects in humans, and in that regard has conducted human studies on numerous drugs including cocaine, benzodiazepines, GHB, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, dextromethorphan, salvinorin A, and psilocybin. For eight years Dr. Johnson has conducted human research with psilocybin and other hallucinogenic/psychedelic drugs at Johns Hopkins. He was the lead author on a recent paper describing how to safely conduct human hallucinogen research, and recently published the first placebo controlled study showing psychoactive effects of salvinorin A (Salvia divinorum) in humans. Dr. Johnson’s expertise in the psychology of addiction and in the characterization of psychoactive drugs in humans is reflected in his service as a scientific reviewer for multiple NIH grant review panels and numerous scientific and medical journals. He has authored approximately 30 peer reviewed scientific publications. Dr. Johnson recently received the 2011 American Psychological Association Young Psychopharmcologist Award for recognition of excellence in research at the interface of pharmacology and psychology.

“Art Under the Influence: 1965 to Now”

Something unprecedented happened in America in the mid-1960s: LSD and other aggressively hallucinogenic drugs became available on a mass basis, and millions of people avidly consumed them in order to experience states of mind once reserved for small numbers of mystic seekers. This development spawned a terrifically energetic psychedelic culture, which quickly grew so popular as to become almost synonymous with mainstream entertainment. Meanwhile, the character of cutting edge visual art changed. No longer was art something just to appreciate for its aesthetic qualities. Traditional connoisseurship was out; consciousness-altering experience was in. Boundaries between conventional media dissolved. Hierarchical distinctions collapsed. Shamanism, Eastern religions, video and film entered the picture, and viewers entered into the space and time of art through illusionism, moving imagery and enveloping installations. My illustrated talk will consider how and why all this happened and what it means for today’s art and culture.

Biography: Ken Johnson is an independent writer and critic has been reviewing visual art for the New York Times since 1997. In 2006-7 he was chief art critic for the Boston Globe. His book “Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Culture Transformed Modern Art” (Prestel Books, 20011; artandpsychedelix.com) is the first attempt at a serious and in depth assessment of the influence of psychedelic experience and culture on American art of the past half century. e-mail: [email protected] website: artandpsychedlix.com

“Ayahuasca in a Global Context: Controversies, Public Debate, and Regulation”

This presentation will address the internationalization of ayahuasca, a psychoactive substance made generally from the plants Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis. Ayahuasca has traditionally been used in indigenous, mestizo shamanic, and religious rituals in South America. In the last 20 years, its use has spread beyond the Amazon to the world, and has been accompanied by great controversy. This presentation will analyze the public debate around the expansion of the use of this substance. It will contemplate the discussions in media and society around legalization, religious freedom, cultural diversity, and health risks. This analysis makes use of ethnographic fieldwork in the main new contexts of use of this substance, such as ayahuasca tourism in Peru, and the expansion of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions (Santo Daime and UDV) around the world.

Biography: Beatriz (Bia) Caiuby Labate has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), Campinas, Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of psychoactive substances, drug policies, shamanism, ritual, and religion. Currently she is a Research Associate at the Institute of Medical Psychology, Heidelberg University and a member of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 619) “Ritual Dynamics – Socio-Cultural Processes from a Historical and Culturally Comparative Perspective.” She is also researcher with the Nucleus for Interdisciplinary Studies of Psychoactives (NEIP) and editor of its website (www.neip.info). She is author, co-author and co-editor of seven books, two with English translations, and one journal special edition. Her book “A Reinvenção do Uso da Ayahuasca nos Centros Urbanos” (Mercado de Letras, 2004) received the prize for Best Master’s Thesis in Social Sciences from the National Association for Graduate Studies in Social Science (ANPOCS) in 2000. For more information, see: www.bialabate.net

“Lullaby for a Mouse: Anthropological Observations of an Animal Model of Psychosis”

For about three decades, anthropologists have worked towards exoticizing the West – for example, by studying scientific laboratories. At the center of the ethnographic research presented in this talk are modern Americans trying to understand schizophrenia by startling mice, rats, and guinea pigs on hallucinogenic drugs. Since the 1950s, these substances have been used in psychiatric research to model mental disorders such as schizophrenia in nonhuman animals. At the same time, however, anthropologists found that the effects of psychedelics were contingent on so-called “cultural determinants,” better known by Timothy Leary’s phrase “set and setting.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a contemporary neuropsychopharmacology laboratory, the presentation will show how these nonpharmacological factors also modulate hallucinogen action in animals. It discusses how an animal model of mental illness affected by such “cultural determinants” makes us rethink what it means to be human today.

Biography: Nicolas Langlitz, Ph.D., is assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology of the New School for Social Research in New York. His work focuses on psychopharmacology, especially the current revival of psychedelic research, and the epistemic culture of neurophilosophy. He studied medicine and philosophy and received doctoral degrees in medicine (Berlin) and anthropology (Berkeley). He published a book on the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s practice of variable-length sessions (Die Zeit der Psychoanalyse: Lacan und das Problem der Sitzungsdauer, 2005). The manuscript for a second book, tentatively titled Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain, has just been completed.

“Effects of Psilocybin and other Selective Serotonin Agonists on Hippocampal Neurogenesis”

Decline in thinking processes, in particular memory, occurs naturally with aging and is greatly accelerated in dementing illnesses like Alzheimer’s Disease(AD). Even young individuals with healthy intellects value enhancers of memory, attention and problem-solving ability. There are a host of “nootropic” or pro-cognitive agents (“smart drugs”, “brain enhancers”) touted for their ability to enhance various, but not all, cognitive processes. These include nutritional supplements (CoQ10, creatine, acetyl-L-carnitine), nicotine, caffeine, Ginkgo biloba, ergoloid mesylates (Hydergine), psychomotor stimulants (e.g. amphetamines), anti-depressants, psychedelics (psilocybin, mescaline and low doses of LSD) and many more. We are especially interested in studying potential nootropic agents that work by increasing the generation of new neurons in brain. An important breakthrough in brain sciences has been the discovery that new brain cells (neurons) continue to be born throughout life in a structure of the brain known as hippocampus (HP). The hippocampus plays a critical role in learning and memory by converting short-term memories into long-term memories and is pivotal for the encoding, consolidation and retrieval of episodic memory. Several groups of scientists have shown that hippocampal-mediated learning and memory is related to the generation of new neurons in the adult brain. In rat experiments, inhibition of neurogenesis (birth and development of new neurons) with a toxic drug (used to destroy tumors) resulted in deficits in specific forms of memory. So it was logical to predict that promotion of neurogenesis would improve some aspects of memory and cognition. The proposition that psilocybin impacts cognition and stimulates hippocampal neurogenesis is based on extensive evidence that serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT) acting on specific 5-HT receptor sub-types (most likely the 5-HT2A receptor) is involved in the regulation of neurogenesis in hippocampus. The in vitro and in vivo animal data is compelling enough to explore whether psilocybin will enhance neurogensis and result in measurable improvements in learning. In this presentation the effects of a schedule of psilocybin and serotonin agonist administration on hippocampal neurogenesis will be reviewed. The relevance of these findings to enhancement of some aspects of memory and learning will be discussed.

Biography: Dr. Juan (Zeno) R. Sanchez-Ramos, M.D., Ph.D. received a B.S. Degree in Biology from the University of Chicago. After 3 years experience as a free lance artist in France, Spain and Denmark, he returned to the scholar’s life, earning a Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Physiology from the University of Chicago in 1976 and a medical degree (M.D.) from the University of Illinois in 1981. He trained in Neurology at the University of Chicago and as a Fellow in Movement Disorders at the University of Miami. Currently, he is Professor of Neurology at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa where he holds the Helen Ellis Endowed Chair for Parkinson’s Disease Research. Dr. Sanchez-Ramos has been a staff Neurologist at the James Haley VA Medical Center since 1996. He is also the Director of the HDSA Center of Excellence at USF, a comprehensive clinic dedicated to patients with Huntington’s Disease. He is an Investigator in the NIH Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Bryd AD Institute at USF. In addition to teaching and attending patients with Movement Disorders, he directs a basic research laboratory at the Haley VA with active projects in neurodegeneration, neurotoxicology and adult stem cell biology. Dr. Sanchez-Ramos is a member of the Heffter Research Institute Scientific Advisory Panel. He has had a long-standing interest in the history of hallucinogenic drug use in different cultures as well as in their untapped potential in experimental therapeutics. Most recently he is investigating the relationship between neurogenesis in adult brain and the use of tryptaminergic drugs. He is married to Catherine O’Neill Sanchez and has three children, Zachary, Zoe and Sofia.

“MAPS’ International Psychedelic Clinical Research: The Past, Present, and Future”

MAPS is conducting clinical research both in the U.S. and internationally to develop MDMA-assisted psychotherapy into a prescription medicine in close partnership with the FDA. This presentation will briefly cover what we have learned from past clinical trials and how we are applying these observations to the design of current trials in preparation for an End of Phase 2 meeting with the FDA. This presentation will discuss what Phase 3 studies may look like in order to facilitate FDA approval of MDMA for marketing. A thorough understanding of the benefits and risks of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy are required in order to envision a future where MDMA can be administered as a prescription medicine.

Biography: Berra Yazar-Klosinski, Ph.D., earned her Ph.D. in Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology from University of California at Santa Cruz, where she served as treasurer and president of the Graduate Student Association. After attending Stanford University for a B.S. in Biology, she worked as a Research Associate with Geron Corporation on telomerase activation and with Millennium Pharmaceuticals on Phase I clinical trials for Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Berra enjoys working with researchers and the clinical operations team at MAPS to design and facilitate clinical research studies.