Deeper Learning with Psychedelics PDF Download

Author: David J. Blacker
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438498144
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
In both clinical and informal settings, psychedelics users often report they have undergone something profound and even life-altering. Yet there persists a confounding inability to articulate just what has been imparted. Informed by multidisciplinary emerging research, this book provides an account of the specifically educational aspects of psychedelics and how they can render us ready to learn. Drawing from indigenous peoples worldwide who typically revere these substances as "plant teachers" and from canonical thinkers in the western tradition such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Heidegger, the author proposes an original set of categories through which to understand the educational capabilities of "entheogens" (psychedelics with visionary qualities). It emerges that entheogens' real power lies not in destabilizing and decentering—"turning on and dropping out"—but as powerful aids in restoring and reenchanting our shared worlds.

Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224153
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Now on Netflix as a 4-part documentary series! “Pollan keeps you turning the pages . . . cleareyed and assured.” —New York Times A #1 New York Times Bestseller, New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018, and New York Times Notable Book A brilliant and brave investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs--and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the 1960s, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists inadvertently catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research. A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan's "mental travelogue" is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both suffering and joy, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.

Author: Brian C. Muraresku
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 125027091X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As seen on The Joe Rogan Experience! A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations. The most influential religious historian of the 20th century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. Did the Ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians inherit the same, secret tradition? A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age? There is zero archaeological evidence for the original Eucharist – the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus. The Holy Grail and its miraculous contents have never been found. In the absence of any hard data, whatever happened at the Last Supper remains an article of faith for today’s 2.5 billion Christians. In an unprecedented search for answers, The Immortality Key examines the archaic roots of the ritual that is performed every Sunday for nearly one third of the planet. Religion and science converge to paint a radical picture of Christianity’s founding event. And after centuries of debate, to solve history’s greatest puzzle. Before the birth of Jesus, the Ancient Greeks found salvation in their own sacraments. Sacred beverages were routinely consumed as part of the so-called Ancient Mysteries – elaborate rites that led initiates to the brink of death. The best and brightest from Athens and Rome flocked to the spiritual capital of Eleusis, where a holy beer unleashed heavenly visions for two thousand years. Others drank the holy wine of Dionysus to become one with the god. In the 1970s, renegade scholars claimed this beer and wine – the original sacraments of Western civilization – were spiked with mind-altering drugs. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany and archaeochemistry have hinted at the enduring use of hallucinogenic drinks in antiquity. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers. But the smoking gun remains elusive. If these sacraments survived for thousands of years in our remote prehistory, from the Stone Age to the Ancient Greeks, did they also survive into the age of Jesus? Was the Eucharist of the earliest Christians, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist? With an unquenchable thirst for evidence, Muraresku takes the reader on his twelve-year global hunt for proof. He tours the ruins of Greece with its government archaeologists. He gains access to the hidden collections of the Louvre to show the continuity from pagan to Christian wine. He unravels the Ancient Greek of the New Testament with the world’s most controversial priest. He spelunks into the catacombs under the streets of Rome to decipher the lost symbols of Christianity’s oldest monuments. He breaches the secret archives of the Vatican to unearth manuscripts never before translated into English. And with leads from the archaeological chemists at UPenn and MIT, he unveils the first scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelic drugs in classical antiquity. The Immortality Key reconstructs the suppressed history of women consecrating a forbidden, drugged Eucharist that was later banned by the Church Fathers. Women who were then targeted as witches during the Inquisition, when Europe’s sacred pharmacology largely disappeared. If the scientists of today have resurrected this technology, then Christianity is in crisis. Unless it returns to its roots. Featuring a Foreword by Graham Hancock, the NYT bestselling author of America Before.

Author: Andrew Glassner
Publisher: No Starch Press
ISBN: 1718500734
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 1239

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Book Description
A richly-illustrated, full-color introduction to deep learning that offers visual and conceptual explanations instead of equations. You'll learn how to use key deep learning algorithms without the need for complex math. Ever since computers began beating us at chess, they've been getting better at a wide range of human activities, from writing songs and generating news articles to helping doctors provide healthcare. Deep learning is the source of many of these breakthroughs, and its remarkable ability to find patterns hiding in data has made it the fastest growing field in artificial intelligence (AI). Digital assistants on our phones use deep learning to understand and respond intelligently to voice commands; automotive systems use it to safely navigate road hazards; online platforms use it to deliver personalized suggestions for movies and books - the possibilities are endless. Deep Learning: A Visual Approach is for anyone who wants to understand this fascinating field in depth, but without any of the advanced math and programming usually required to grasp its internals. If you want to know how these tools work, and use them yourself, the answers are all within these pages. And, if you're ready to write your own programs, there are also plenty of supplemental Python notebooks in the accompanying Github repository to get you going. The book's conversational style, extensive color illustrations, illuminating analogies, and real-world examples expertly explain the key concepts in deep learning, including: • How text generators create novel stories and articles • How deep learning systems learn to play and win at human games • How image classification systems identify objects or people in a photo • How to think about probabilities in a way that's useful to everyday life • How to use the machine learning techniques that form the core of modern AI Intellectual adventurers of all kinds can use the powerful ideas covered in Deep Learning: A Visual Approach to build intelligent systems that help us better understand the world and everyone who lives in it. It's the future of AI, and this book allows you to fully envision it. Full Color Illustrations

Author: Timothy Leary
Publisher: Ronin Publishing
ISBN: 1579511058
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
Written in the psychedelic era, Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out is Timothy Leary at his best, beckoning with humor and irreverence, a vision of individual empowerment, personal responsibility, and spiritual awakening. Includes: Start Your Own Religion Education as an Addictive Process Soul Session Buddha as Drop-Out Mad Virgin of Psychedelia God's Secret Agent o Homage to Huxley The Awe-Ful See-Er o The Molecular Revolution MIT is TIM Backwards Neurological Politics "Trickster is a major figure in American Indian folk Wisdom. Also in Sufi Tales … a certain type of "rascal"-with a grin and a wink (and wisdom beyond wisdom) … in the Zen tradition this is known as the School of Crazy Wisdom … Timothy Leary-in his own inimitable way-has become the twentieth century's grand master of crazy wisdom …" - Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

Author: Ido Hartogsohn
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262358948
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
How historical, social, and cultural forces shaped the psychedelic experience in midcentury America, from CIA experiments with LSD to Timothy Leary's Harvard Psilocybin Project. Are psychedelics invaluable therapeutic medicines, or dangerously unpredictable drugs that precipitate psychosis? Tools for spiritual communion or cognitive enhancers that spark innovation? Activators for one's private muse or part of a political movement? In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers studied psychedelics in all these incarnations, often arriving at contradictory results. In American Trip, Ido Hartogsohn examines how the psychedelic experience in midcentury America was shaped by historical, social, and cultural forces--by set (the mindset of the user) and setting (the environments in which the experience takes place).

Author: Jean-Pierre Briot
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319701630
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This book is a survey and analysis of how deep learning can be used to generate musical content. The authors offer a comprehensive presentation of the foundations of deep learning techniques for music generation. They also develop a conceptual framework used to classify and analyze various types of architecture, encoding models, generation strategies, and ways to control the generation. The five dimensions of this framework are: objective (the kind of musical content to be generated, e.g., melody, accompaniment); representation (the musical elements to be considered and how to encode them, e.g., chord, silence, piano roll, one-hot encoding); architecture (the structure organizing neurons, their connexions, and the flow of their activations, e.g., feedforward, recurrent, variational autoencoder); challenge (the desired properties and issues, e.g., variability, incrementality, adaptability); and strategy (the way to model and control the process of generation, e.g., single-step feedforward, iterative feedforward, decoder feedforward, sampling). To illustrate the possible design decisions and to allow comparison and correlation analysis they analyze and classify more than 40 systems, and they discuss important open challenges such as interactivity, originality, and structure. The authors have extensive knowledge and experience in all related research, technical, performance, and business aspects. The book is suitable for students, practitioners, and researchers in the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and music creation domains. The reader does not require any prior knowledge about artificial neural networks, deep learning, or computer music. The text is fully supported with a comprehensive table of acronyms, bibliography, glossary, and index, and supplementary material is available from the authors' website.

Author: Marc Lewis
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610394380
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Through the vivid, true stories of five people who journeyed into and out of addiction, a renowned neuroscientist explains why the "disease model" of addiction is wrong and illuminates the path to recovery. The psychiatric establishment and rehab industry in the Western world have branded addiction a brain disease. But in The Biology of Desire, cognitive neuroscientist and former addict Marc Lewis makes a convincing case that addiction is not a disease, and shows why the disease model has become an obstacle to healing. Lewis reveals addiction as an unintended consequence of the brain doing what it's supposed to do-seek pleasure and relief-in a world that's not cooperating. As a result, most treatment based on the disease model fails. Lewis shows how treatment can be retooled to achieve lasting recovery. This is enlightening and optimistic reading for anyone who has wrestled with addiction either personally or professionally.

Author: Tim Read
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1644113333
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
• Examines the therapeutic potential of expanded states, underground psychedelic psychotherapy, harm reduction, new approaches for healing individual and collective trauma, and training considerations • Addresses challenging psychedelic experiences, spiritual emergencies, and the central importance of the therapeutic relationship • Details the use of cannabis as a psychedelic tool, spiritual exploration with LSD, micro-dosing with Iboga, and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD Exploring the latest developments in the flourishing field of modern psychedelic psycho-therapy, this book shares practical experiences and insights from both elders and newer research voices in the psychedelic research and clinical communities. The contributors examine new findings on safe and skillful work with psychedelic and expanded states for therapeutic, personal, and spiritual growth. They explain the dual process of opening and healing. They explore new approaches for individual inner work as well as for the healing of ancestral and collective trauma. They examine the power of expanded states for reparative attachment work and offer insights on the integration process through the lens of Holotropic Breathwork. The contributors also examine the use of cannabis as a psychedelic tool, spiritual exploration with LSD, microdosing with Iboga, treating depression with psilocybin, and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. Revealing diverse ways of working with psychedelics in terms of set, setting, and type of substance, the book concludes with discussions of ethics and professional development for those working in the field as well as explores considerations for training the next generation of psychedelic therapists.

Author: Richard Louis Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1620556987
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Explores the potential of psychedelics as medicine and the intersections of politics, science, and psychedelics • Explores the tumultuous history of psychedelic research, the efforts to restore psychedelic therapies, and the links between psychiatric drugs and mental illness • Offers non-technical summaries of the most recent, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies with MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca • Includes the work of Rick Doblin, Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, Julie Holland, Dennis McKenna, David Nichols, Charles Grob, Phil Wolfson, Michael and Annie Mithoefer, Roland Griffiths, Katherine MacLean, and Robert Whitaker Embracing the revival of psychedelic research and the discovery of new therapeutic uses, clinical psychologist Dr. Richard Louis Miller discusses what is happening today in psychedelic medicine--and what will happen in the future--with top researchers and thinkers in this field, including Rick Doblin, Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, Julie Holland, Dennis McKenna, David Nichols, Charles Grob, Phil Wolfson, Michael and Annie Mithoefer, Roland Griffiths, Katherine MacLean, and Robert Whitaker. Dr. Miller and his contributors cover the tumultuous history of early psychedelic research brought to a halt 50 years ago by the U.S. government as well as offering non-technical summaries of the most recent studies with MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca. They explore the biochemistry of consciousness and the use of psychedelics for self-discovery and healing. They discuss the use of psilocybin for releasing fear in the terminally ill and the potential for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of PTSD. They examine Dr. Charles Grob’s research on the indigenous use and therapeutic properties of ayahuasca and Dr. Gabor Mate’s attempt to transport this plant medicine to a clinical setting with the help of Canada’s Department of National Health. Dr. Miller and his contributors explore the ongoing efforts to restore psychedelic therapies to the health field, the growing threat of overmedication by the pharmaceutical industry, and the links between psychiatric drugs and mental illness. They also discuss the newly shifting political climate and the push for new research, offering hope for an end to the War on Drugs and a potential renaissance of research into psychedelic medicines around the world.