For millennia, humans have cultivated deep relationships with psychoactive plants and fungi – relationships embedded within and guided by ritual frameworks honoring the powers of these plants and fungi as allies. As cultures have evolved, so also have these plant-fungal-human interactions, often in ways that are highly interdependent. Join us for this opening talk of the Lounge Lecture series at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. David E. Presti will speak alongside the exhibit Pleaseure, Poison, Prescription, Prayer: The Worlds of Mind-Altering Substances.

About the Speaker:

David E. Presti teaches neurobiology, psychology, and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, where he has been on the faculty in molecular and cell biology for 28 years. His classes on topics related to brain, mind, consciousness, neurochemistry, and psychopharmacology typically reach more than 1,400 Berkeley students every year. For more than a decade he worked in the treatment of addiction and of post-traumatic-stress disorder at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco. And for the past 15 years, he has been teaching neuroscience and conversing about science with Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India, Bhutan, and Nepal. He is author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (2016) and of Mind Beyond Brain (2018).