A provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took Drugs to explore the hidden regions of the Mind A New Yorker Best of the Week Pick Jay is a leading expert on the history of Western drug use, and Psychonauts is the latest in a series of excellent studies in which he has investigated the roots of a kind of psychoactive exploration that we tend to associate with the nineteen-fifties and sixties.--Clare Bucknell, New Yorker Captivating.
Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering Drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture..
From Sigmund Freud\'s experiments with cocaine to William James\'s epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism.
But after 1900 Drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear.
Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals.
Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the Mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy.
A welcome reconsideration of the role Drugs play in life, medicine, and science.-- Publishers Weekly Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of Drugs on the Mind did so by experimenting on themselves. . . .
A provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took Drugs to explore the hidden regions of the Mind A New Yorker Best of the Week Pick Jay is a leading expert on the history of Western drug use, and Psychonauts is the latest in a series of excellent studies in which he has investigated the roots of a kind of psychoactive exploration that we tend to associate with the nineteen-fifties and sixties.--Clare Bucknell, New Yorker Captivating
