![]() If you search online for the words John C. And again, you can listen to these recordings. Lilly is a physiologist, is a kind of early neuroscientist who's really deeply committed to this idea that using things like computers and emerging scientific techniques, it should be possible to communicate not just with dolphins, but with whales as well, with cetaceans.Īnd meanwhile, Lilly is injecting the dolphins with LSD and himself with LSD, and spending literally hours at a time trying to talk to them. Lilly invites Gregory Bateson to join him at this dolphin research lab he's set up with NASA funding and U.S. Lilly, who Bateson, in about 1961, ends up writing to and they become friends. The person at the center of this story is a guy named John C. On NASA-funded programs in the '60s to teach dolphins to speak using LSD So by the early Cold War, by about 1952, the Macy Circle is being co-opted by the CIA - and that's the beginning of what I see as this really important split in the history of psychedelics between the public branch and the secret branch. ![]() But also - and this is the really fascinating thing about the Macy Circle - it also got the attention of intelligence organizations and the military. Mead and Bateson are not conducting that research, but they're crucial for bringing together this group of people from different fields and framing it in a way that allowed psychedelic science to flourish as a potential pathway toward benevolent treatments, treatments that were healing for society. It led to an interest in what was called "truth drugs," and it led to the very early psychedelic research in the United States. What this really looked like in practice was what came to be known as "psychological warfare." Forms of propaganda, ways of understanding how altered states of consciousness could be used in the war. ![]() They tried to find ways that they could contribute. grows out of this belief that scientists needed to directly intervene in the effort, and specifically scientists who are studying consciousness, like anthropologists like Bateson and Mead, but also psychiatrists and psychologists. Her specific interest in psychedelics took hold in 1930 when, while doing fieldwork on the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska, she noticed that people of the reservation were using peyote.Īuthor Interviews The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief' He says Mead's research began as an effort to understand the science of expanded consciousness and hypnosis. "They saw science as something which was responsible for some of the bad things in the world," historian Benjamin Breen says, "but also something which could be a tool for fixing the world or healing a sick society."īreen is an associate professor of history at the University of California Santa Cruz. In the aftermath of World War I, as technologies like the radio and automobile began to take hold, Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson began to formulate a vision for utopia that relied upon plant-based psychedelics. ![]() Pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead came of age in a time of enormous change and uncertainty. American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead sits for an interview in 1952.
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