Category Archives: Events

Mushroom Day, Belgrave, VIC

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Above: The APS crew brandish their banner underneath the new mushroom art sculpture at Belgrave.
Mushroom Day with the APS

The APS held its annual Mushroom day event at Sooki Lounge in Belgrave on the 12th July.

Mycologist, Beau Meister, educated us about the psilocybin mushrooms of Victoria. Find his slides here.

Mycologist, Caine Barlow gave a workshop on how grow your own wood-loving mushrooms at home (legal ones of course!), using agar, cardboard and hessian teks. Follow him on #guerrillamycology.

Nick Wallis and Daniel Witham shared their knowledge and personal insights into the interaction of psilocybin with the law. Find a useful resource here.

Dr Martin Williams and Dr Dean Wright also provided  us with an overview of the current science, looking at the psychedelic state and therapeutic use of psilocybin. Find their slides here.

A special highlight of the day, was the beautiful atmosphere as attendees shared their personal stories in front of an empathetic crowd. We are so grateful for those who shared, and those who listened attentively.

Thank you to everyone who joined us! I’m sorry to everyone who wanted tickets, but missed out. We will be seeking to cater for larger crowds in upcoming events.

Keep an eye out for events on the APS FB page.
Above: Caine Barlow providing a workshop on how to grow (legal) wood-loving mushrooms from home. Find out more at #guerrillamycology.
Above: Dr Martin Williams (PRISM) and Dr Dean Wright discuss the science of psilocybin.
Above: Nick Wallis discussed the intersection of psilocybin with the law.
Above: Beau Meister discusses the various psilocybin mushrooms of Victoria to a packed venue at Sooki Lounge.
Above: Caine Barlow deep in the explanation of the hessian-tek. Find out more at #guerrillamycology

APS & SSDP at Rainbow Serpent Festival

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WHEN: 11am – 1pm Monday 29th January

WHERE: The Solar Cinema, Lifestyle Village – Rainbow Serpent Festival

The session will include some short talks from members of APS and SSDP, then will evolve into a psychedelic story telling session.

Bring your tales to share!

Pictured: Psychedelic stories at EGA 2017 Psychedelic Symposium

Sydney – Post EGA 2017 Talks and Discussion

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In support of last weekend’s Entheogenesis Australis 2017 Psychedelic Symposium, the APS are bringing speakers Neşe Devenot and Vince Polito to Sydney, to give a taste of EGA for those who missed out.
 
The talks will be followed by a Q&A session where members old and new are encouraged to share their stories, ask questions and open up discussions on psychedelic issues both global and local.
 
Cost: $10 on the door
Hibernian House

NEŞE DEVENOT
The Role of Poetic Language in Psychedelic Science

This presentation argues that poetry (i.e., experimental uses of language) represents crucial data about the content of psychedelic experiences within the context of scientific research. I call for the need to develop psychedelic studies in the humanities, since the discourse of science is essential but insufficient for exploring these liminal realms of consciousness. Although the majority of recent work in psychedelic studies relies on quantitative, objectively verifiable measures, my research demonstrates that psychedelic science is frequently characterized by a necessary reliance on both science and poetry. The process of exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness depends upon the communication of unprecedented subjective experiences—a process that necessarily relies on metaphor and other creative uses of language, since no ready-made vocabulary exists to describe these experiences. For this reason, I argue that literary theory and poetic interpretation are as crucial as chemical analysis for generating data in psychedelic science and the scientific study of consciousness more generally. Drawing on my recent scholarship as a Research Fellow with the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers, I demonstrate that psychedelic scientists have theorized about the experimental value of poetic language since the first wave of psychedelic research in the twentieth century. I connect this lineage to the psychedelic renaissance based on my experiences as a Research Fellow with the NYU School of Medicine, where I joined four other co-authors in collaboratively analyzing patient transcripts for underlying themes. My presentation ends by proposing future directions for clinical research based on Neiloufar Family’s call at Breaking Convention 2015 for renewed scholarship on the relationships between psychedelics, neurochemistry, and language, and I argue that “trip reports” deserve further study as an established genre of literature.

NESE DEVENOT is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Puget Sound, where she teaches classes on psychedelics and literature and is also working on her book project, “Chemical Poetics: The Literary History of Psychedelic Science.” In 2016 she was awarded “Best Humanities Publication in Psychedelic Studies” from Breaking Convention in the United Kingdom as part of their First Annual Psychedelic Research Awards. As a 2016 Cosmic Sister Women of the Psychedelic Renaissance grant recipient, she is working on a journalistic account of a fully-funded trip to ayahuasca retreat centers in the Peruvian Amazon. She was a 2015-16 Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers and also a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where she participated in the first qualitative study of patient experiences. She received her PhD in 2015 from the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied psychedelic philosophy and the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (“trip reports”). She taught the class “Drug Wars: The Influence of Psychoactive Rhetoric” as a 2014-15 Critical Speaking Fellow, and she was also a 2014-15 Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Research Fellow with the Penn Humanities Forum, where she worked on the project “‘Innumerable Fine Shades’: Psychedelics and Synesthesia in the Literary Self-Experiments of Aldous Huxley.” She is a founder of the Psychedemia interdisciplinary psychedelics conference, and the former editor of “This Week in Psychedelics,” a Reality Sandwich column that reported on psychedelic news in the media between 2011 and 2013. She was a founding member of the MAPS Graduate Student Association, which she moderated during 2011-13, and she has presented on psychedelics at numerous conferences in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, and the Netherlands. Her opinion articles about psychedelics and social justice have helped to inspire a psychedelic “coming out” movement in the United Kingdom.

VINCE POLITO
The Science of Microdosing

Psychedelics are making their way back into mainstream science. High profile research teams are publishing findings in top journals showing that psychedelics can be used to better understand cognition, perception, neurobiology, psychopathology and wellbeing. At the same time there is increasing interest and acceptance of these substances amongst the general public. One topic of growing interest is the phenomenon of “microdosing” – taking extremely low doses of a psychedelic substance, most typically LSD or psilocybin. A microdose can be 1/10th or less of a recreational dose and users will often microdose regularly every 3 or 4 days over an extended period of time. Due to the very low dose, microdosers do not usually report the dramatic cognitive and perceptual changes that typically characterise psychedelic experiences, rather immediate effects are reported to be very subtle and sometimes barely noticeable. Despite this microdosers make a wide variety of claims for the benefits of microdosing, including improved vitality, positive mood, increased attention and greater creativity. Although microdosing has exploded in popularity in recent years, there has been very little empirical research on this topic and the accuracy of these claims has not been tested.

Our team conducted a systematic observational study of the effects of microdosing in healthy participants over the course of 6 weeks. Sixty regular microdosers provided baseline, daily, weekly, and post-study ratings of mood, attention, wellbeing, mindfulness, mystical experiences, personality, creativity and sense of agency. I’ll report what did and did not change for this group, talk about the role of placebo in the use of psychedelics, and try to answer the question of what really happens when people microdose.

VINCE POLITO is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University. His research aims to understand how self-monitoring changes in altered states of consciousness. To do this he has investigated attentional changes in meditation, psychiatric symptoms of disturbed control, states of flow in expertise, hypnotic suggestions, body representation alterations in virtual reality, and the effects of psychedelic substances.