Posts Tagged ‘cognitive enhancement’

Jobs, Taxes and Crime: Keys to California’s Pot Vote

Getty Images Inside City Hall in Oakland, Calif., Jim Wilcox explained his plan for a commercial marijuana farm. “My idea was a Silicon Valley of cannabis,” he told the city council recently. “An office park for pot.” The council has approved the creation, licensing...

July 28th, 2010 | Drug Policy | Read More

A Brainwaving Computer

Tan Le’s astonishing new computer interface reads its user’s brainwaves, making it possible to control virtual objects, and even physical electronics, with mere thoughts (and a little concentration). She demos the headset, and talks about its far-reaching applications. Tan Le is the head...

July 28th, 2010 | Science of the Mind | Read More

Cooking, Fire and Human Evolution

Did Learning to Cook Push Our Ancestors Toward Modernity? // Intriguing evidence shows that cooking may have been the spark that set human evolution blazing toward higher intelligence and civilization. It has long been a fascinating puzzle to scientists: Why did our apelike ancestors come...

July 26th, 2010 | Evolution | Read More

Psychedelic Technologies

Imagine… you are strolling along the Esplanade at Burning Man, and something catches your eye. Bands of lights are rapidly moving up and down a 30 foot high pyramid, from Red at the bottom, through Orange, Green, Turquoise, Indigo, Violet, and finally White light at the top. Nothing too unusual,...

July 26th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

The Anti-Psychic’s Challenge

Legendary skeptic James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, kicking off a searing 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs. He throws out a challenge to the world’s psychics: Prove what you do is real, and I’ll give you a million dollars. (No takers yet.)

July 20th, 2010 | Extended Mind | Read More

Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year’s list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails,...

July 13th, 2010 | Big Ideas | Read More

(A Brief History and) Motivation of an Entheogenic Chemist

Abstract: Casey Hardison was arrested spring 2004 for the production of psychedelic-type drugs, i.e., LSD, 2C- B and DMT. In the three years since, not one person from ‘authority’ had bothered to ask him what motivated him to synthesise psychedelic drugs. It was as if the a priori assumption that...

July 5th, 2010 | Drug Policy | Read More

“WATSON: THE NEEDLE!”

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND COCAINE By Mike Jay – http://mikejay.net/ Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a few short years, it went from a minor item in specialist catalogues to a major seller in a huge range of preparations in high-street...

July 1st, 2010 | Arts | Read More

Vegetarian Brains

Vegetarians are more intelligent, says study Posted by Tino Verducci from The Future is Vegan Frequently dismissed as cranks, their fussy eating habits tend to make them unpopular with dinner party hosts and guests alike. But now it seems they may have the last laugh, with research showing vegetarians...

June 30th, 2010 | Health & Happiness | Read More

DMT and the Pineal: Fact or Fiction?

A well-known factoid bandied about by psychedelic drug geeks is the idea that DMT, or some other psychoactive tryptamine, is produced by the pineal gland. When did this idea originate? And is it actually true? By John Hanna for Erowid.org During his talk “Psychoactive Drugs Throughout Human History”...

June 8th, 2010 | Altered States | Read More