One Step Beyond, 1960s Magic Mushrooms Doc.

From ScienceBlogs.com

1960s documentary: Self-experimenting with magic mushrooms

Originally Posted on: July 17, 2008 10:11 AM, by Mo

In the January 4th, 1961 episode of One Step Beyond, director and presenter John Newland ingests psilocybin under laboratory conditions, to investigate whether or not the hallucinogenic mushroom can enhance his abilities of extra-sensory perception.

The programme was apparently inspired by a 1959 book called The Sacred Mushroom, by parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, who is known for taking the spoon-bending fraudster Uri Geller to the United States for investigation.

In the first part of the programme (embedded below), Newland, Puharich and others travel to Mexico to collect mushroom samples. They then return to Puharich's lab in Palo Alto, where Newland's ESP abilities are tested before and after ingestion of several mushroom stems.

The programme is of historical interest, as it was made some years before the widespread use of LSD led researchers to stop conducting psychedelic research. It therefore includes a brief mention of the potential therapeutic effects of psilocybin for psychiatric patients.

Parts 2 and 3 of the episode are also available on YouTube.

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"And then, oddly enough, the first sound we hear as the chemical in the mushroom takes effect is… laughter."
This video is a lot of fun and introduced me to Andrija Puharich, who wrote The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity (1959). UCLA research psychologist Barbara Brown (who invented biofeedback), also makes the trip down to Mexico. But it is most fascinating to see the show's host, John Newland in an on-camera lab setting, have his extrasensory perception skills tested under the influence of mushrooms. Really makes me wonder where we might be now if science had continued to have access to these substances.

And then down the rabbit hole! I'm a big fan of a book called 'Myself and I'(1962) by Constance Newland, which is the pen-name of Thelma Moss, who was a parapsychology researcher at UCLA. 'Myself and I' tells the story of her LSD-assisted psychotherapy. She had specific symptoms she was trying to address, and years of traditional psychotherapy had gotten her nowhere. Under LSD she makes profound connections to long-lost childhood experiences which open the way to her cure. I learned a lot about my own mind from reading about her insights. I would highly recommend this book.

But I wonder if Thelma Moss ever met John Newland through Barbara Brown who was also at UCLA. I found one clip on the net that connects Moss and Brown… "In Prague I was warmly and hospitably received by Dr. Rejdak, who is perhaps the most active parapsychologist in Czechoslovakia. In the company of two other Ameri ­cans, Dr. Thelma Moss and Dr. Barbara Brown, we were shown films of recent experiments in the telepathic trans ­mission of taste impression on a hypnotic subject. I'm not sure why I'm even curious but somehow it's interesting. Another connection to this whole cast of characters is Uri Geller. As mentioned above, Andrija Puharich was responsible for bringing Uri Geller to the US for experiments. You can easily find Uri connections to Thelma Moss and Barbara Brown.

A free biography of Andrija Puharich by his ex wife H.G.M. Herman, found on Uri Geller's site offers up such gems as… In 1955 he had heard from a Mr. Wasson that a ritualistic mushroom cult had existed in Mexico for hundreds of years, and was still practiced in some remote parts of the country. (Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Wasson wrote a book entitled Mushrooms, Russia and History. It was published in 1957).Anxious to find out for himself, Andrija set out for the village of Juquila in the state of Oaxaca, 200 miles south of Mexico City in June of 1960. The original expedition was made up of nine people, including Paul Jones. When Paul returned after about four weeks saying that all members of the team had become ill, and that Andrija had been crazy to go on alone with an even crazier missionary, I became not only greatly concerned, but furious as well. How the hell did Andrija dare risk his life, being the father of four children and a fifth on the way? I hadn't even known that he was off to a dangerous remote place in Mexico. Besides, he had left me with barely enough money to buy food, and with unpaid bills. We no longer lived in Carmel Valley, but had moved to the chic part of Carmel, called Carmel Meadows. How Andrija had been able to buy the beautiful, spacious patio house, had been "none of my business." This from Chapter 6.
While browsing Uri Geller's site I noticed this in his sidebar: are your eyes attracted to 11.11? But we'll save that for another day.
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Daniel Kahneman – A Bat and a Ball Cost $1.10

Daniel KahnemanRIP Danny. Thank you for your insights and stories. I'm glad of the opportunity to know your work. You made a difference.

[Update 9/8/2010 A paper Danny co-authored, "Income's Influence on Happiness" has just been released.]

… the bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Daniel Kahneman KNOWS that the first thought that entered your head was $.10–even if you're a Computer Science major at MIT. But that's the wrong answer.

Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling On Happiness" led me to Nicholas Taleb's "Fooled By Randomness". Both books cite the work of Danny Kahneman. I blogged a bit about him here. I have been rummaging around the internet looking for whatever I can find on Danny and his work and have come up with some excellent content. But let me give you a taste of the sort of fascinating facts you'll hear in Danny's lectures first.

In a study Danny (I don't know him personally but after listening to all these lectures, I feel as though I do. He could no doubt name the cognitive bias this suggests) mentions in one of his talks, people are asked how much pleasure they derive from their car. They are then asked enough questions about the car to determine its blue book (resale) value. It turns out that there IS a correlation between the amount of pleasure the subject reported and the dollar value of the car. i.e. Yes, that late model BMW in the garage DOES give you more pleasure than my 20 year old Honda would. BUT! They then go on to ask the subject if they find their commute to work pleasurable, and guess what?– nobody does!. It turns out that the ONLY time people derive pleasure from their car is when they are THINKING about it.

From Wikipedia:
With Amos Tversky (Kahneman's longtime research partner, with whom he would have shared the Nobel prize had Tversky not died in 1996) and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973, Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982), and developed Prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in Prospect theory.

Major Contributions:

  • anchoring and adjustment -describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
  • availability heuristic -where people base their prediction of the frequency of an event or the proportion within a population based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.
  • conjunction fallacy -when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a general condition that contains the specific condition. (i.e. You think you're MORE likely to die in an air disaster brought on by a terrorist event, than you are to die in ANY kind of air disaster).
  • framing (economics) -reversals of preference when the same problem is presented in different ways. (10% fat vs. 90% fat-free!)
  • loss aversion -the tendency for people strongly to prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains. (Why New Yorkers stay in New York for the culture, and Angelenos stay in LA for the weather!!).
  • peak-end rule – we judge our past experiences almost entirely on how they were at their peak (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended.
  • prospect theory -how people make choices in situations where they have to decide between alternatives that involve risk.
  • reference class forecasting -predicts the outcome of a planned action based on actual outcomes in a reference class of similar actions.
  • simulation heuristic – people determine the likelihood of an event based on how easy it is to picture mentally. (Why we buy lottery tickets.)
  • status quo bias -in other words, people like things to stay relatively the same.

Media – Most of these lectures have a fairly long-winded intro. Skip ahead if you don't need the background info.

Explorations of the Mind – Well-Being: Living and Thinking About It. (YouTube)

Conversation With History – Intuition and Rationality. (YouTube)

Conversation With History – Intuition and Rationality. (Audio)

Explorations of the Mind – Intuition: The Marvels and the Flaws. (YouTube)

Nobel Prize Lecture. (YouTube)

Update March 2009- Kahneman and Taleb on the same stage discus the crash. (YouTube)

Update March 2010. From the February 2010, Ted Talk Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory. (YouTube)

Found a few more DK links.
A Perspective on Judgment and Choice 24pg. PDF doc. on the subject of his Nobel Prize.
The Allais Paradox Wired magazine 10/10 (Archive)

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Horizon: Psychedelic science by Bill Eagles

mind-hacks.png

Mind Hacks is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment workings of our brain with a view to understanding ourselves a little better and learning a little more, in a very real sense, about what makes us tick. It's by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb, and published by O'Reilly.

psychedelic-splash

And from the Mind Hacks Blog: In 1997, BBC science programme Horizon broadcast a legendary edition on the use of psychedelic drugs in medicine. Luckily, it's been uploaded to Google Video and you can now watch the whole thing online. Read more…

Asylum Street Spankers – Ribbons On Your SUV

Viral political satire in a musical theater setting!

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/KmsOIjzQ1V8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Or here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/v/KmsOIjzQ1V8

time lapse film compresses 35 years of skyscraper construction in Shinjuku district of Tokyo

 http://blog.longnow.org/2007/09/10/35-year-time-lapse-of-tokyo-skyline/

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/laPU0bS8JOc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

'In the Shadow of the Moon' film opens; no stars in any film frames?

 How come no stars in the film/photos taken outside the atmosphere of the Earth? No views of the Star Fields on the 3 day trip to Moon. We went there 9 times?! No comments by any astronauts on the stars and how they do not twinkle in no air…and there would be plenty to see! Duh?! and what gives…I 've never seen a star in any photo by NASA taken by a film camera by a person outside the atmosphere since NASA started…

Astronauts Live 'In the Shadow of the Moon'

Film Records Deepest Thoughts of Men Who Went to the Moon

By NED POTTER

Sept. 7, 2007 –

In all of time, only 24 human beings have flown to or around the moon, looked back, and seen Earth as a small blue sphere in the blackness of space.

Their numbers are dwindling. Of the 12 who walked on the moon's surface, only nine are alive today, and the youngest is 71.

So British director David Sington and his crew set out to seize the moment — now, before the opportunity passes, to bring the Apollo astronauts together in one film, and ask them how the experience affected them.

"I think these guys are very sane individuals. They are very down to earth, because, in some sense, they really know what Earth is," says Sington. "There are 7 billion of us on the planet, and nine of those 7 billion have stood on another heavenly body."

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=3399586&page=1

Film web site

http://www.intheshadowofthemoon.com/

Clip on Apple

http://www.apple.com/trailers/thinkfilm/intheshadowofthemoon/trailer/

Media Ecology Association – 2007 Awards Announced

MEA recently announced the winners of the 2007 (for year 2006) MEA Awards.

The Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book
in the Field of Media Ecology

Peter K. Fallon for Printing, Literacy, and Education in Eighteenth Century Ireland: Why the Irish Speak English

The Walter Benjamin Award for Outstanding Article
in the Field of Media Ecology

Corey Anton for "Playing with Bateson: Denotation, Logical Types,
and Analog and Digital Communication"

The Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship
in the Ecology of Social Interaction

Richard A. Lanham for The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information

The Susanne K. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship
in the Ecology of Symbolic Form

Martin H. Levinson for Sensible Thinking for Turbulent Times

The Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship
in the Ecology of Culture

David MacDougall for The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses

The Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship
in the Ecology of Technics

Timothy C. Campbell for Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi
and to
Fred Turner for From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

The Harold A. Innis Award for Outstanding Thesis or Dissertation in the Field of Media Ecology

Adriana Braga for Feminilidade Mediada por Computador: Interação Social no Circuito-Blogue [Computer-Mediated Femininity: Social Interaction on the Blog Circuit]

The Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work

Janna Levin for A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

The John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis
in the Field of Media Ecology

Michael Wesch for The Machine is Us/ing Us (video on YouTube.com)

The Louis Forsdale Award for Outstanding Educator
in the Field of Media Ecology

Octavio Islas

The Jacques Ellul Award for
Outstanding Media Ecology Activism

Donna Flayhan

The James W. Carey Award for
Outstanding Media Ecology Journalism

Philip Marchand

The Walter J. Ong Award for
Career Achievement in Scholarship

Jay David Bolter

The Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement
in Public Intellectual Activity

Eric McLuhan

Barlow on Human Rights in Action; Lessig on our right to copyright!

Barlow:

[…]If you wanna share something – share it. If you wanna use something – use it. Try to do so ethically in the sense of don't take things without attribution.[…] Pay no attention to these people when it comes to being creative. Go ahead and do the stuff that Larry showed in the beginning of his talks and do lot of it. And every time they put a lock on – break it. And every time they pass a new law – break that.[…]

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/04/barlow_on_hackerinfr.html

embed Lessig talk here>

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7661663613180520595&q=23c3

Lessig video at googleVideo