Drugs, Plants, Brain, Mind
with Prof. David Presti
Thursday October 10, 2019
Doors at 6:00 PM, Talk at 7:00 PM
Cafe Leila, 1724 San Pablo Ave. Berkeley, CA
Join us at Cafe Leila on San Pablo Avenue for an evening of science, conversation, and community.
We’re grateful to Cafe Leila for hosting our series. Please show your support by enjoying their delicious cuisine, artisanal teas, fine coffee drinks, and more! BYOB (wine and beer) is welcome with purchase of any menu item.
For millennia, humans have cultivated 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. Our current era is one of reduction of organisms to molecules, and the commodification of just about everything that is marketable. How might ritual and respect be maintained in the presence of reduction and commodification?
Psychoactive plants
Prof. David Presti
David E. Presti teaches neurobiology and psychology at UC Berkeley, where he has been on the faculty in molecular and cell biology for 28 years. 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).
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