When I found the mushroom Amanita muscaria being sold in candy wrappers, I uncovered legal loopholes, dangerous dosages and more

Excerpted from Mike Jay’s Stranger Than Fiction, available in Kindle and paperback editions from Amazon. The young H.G. Wells seems, with hindsight, to have exploded onto the literary world with a pro...

What would you do if you could experience “ecstasy with no consequence”? It’s a possibility explored with great style in Michael Reeves’ 1967 film, The Sorcerers, as JENNIFER WALLIS explores.

The task force on Declassified Federal Secrets held its latest hearing on the history of CIA mind control research. Once again, it chose conspiracy over accountability.

Confined in Bedlam in 1797 as an incurable lunatic, James Tilly Matthews’ case is one of the most bizarre in the annals of psychiatry. He was the first...

In the company of historian of drugs, MIKE JAY, we journey back to the first psychedelic age - not the 1960s, but the 1790s, when Britain was at the forefront, at the frontier, of gonzo psychedelic sc...

Programmed as part of My Lady Nicotine, this panel brings together writer Mattha Busby, cultural historian Mike Jay and exhibiting artists.

A definitive history of mescaline that explores its mind-altering effects across cultures, from ancient America to Western modernity Mescaline became a popul...

What allowed occultism to blossom in the United States at the turn of the 20th century? Linotype machines, cheap pulp paper, and newly improved postal networks. Allan Johnson investigates the forgotte...

Events at Waterstones get you closer to the books and authors you admire most. Find information and tickets about Wireheads - An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain: an evening with Mike Jay ...

Just like vertebrates, cephalopods — such as octopuses and squid — have elaborate brains. Neuroscientists are flocking to them for insights into how intelligence evolved.

An early contribution to drug literature, in which a man came to be fashioned out of wood.

What really happened on the first acid trip?

America's cocaine use is quietly collapsing — even as the drug floods the market at record purity and historic low prices.

Compounds in psychedelic drugs like DMT, psilocybin, and psilocin are naturally produced in certain plants, fungi, and animals, and have a long history of use in spiritual and therapeutic contexts. No...

Ist der Drogenrausch ein neues Phänomen – entstanden in einer genusssüchtigen Gesellschaft, die keine Grenzen mehr kennt? Funde tausende Jahre alter Drogenartefakte wecken Zweifel. Der Rausch scheint ...

60 Minutes has aired four Havana Syndrome exposés—but two intelligence assessments say attacks are “highly unlikely.” Robert Bartholomew, a scholar of mass delusion, reveals the omissions, conflicts o...

The story of the mavericks and scientists, crackpots and artistic visionaries who imagined a future where machines fuse with our mindsAs humanity and technol...

YouTube video by Axess Television

Psilocybe Pickers tells the story of how these psychedelic fungi entered British consciousness in the twentieth century, the bemushroomed Britons who took them on as part of their culture, and how the...

It’s understandable that the dead should be angry or vengeful: after all, they have suffered a terrible calamity....

Scientists and philosophers have spent centuries studying sleep. Each descent only deepens the mystery.

In Soho, London, 100 years ago, John Logie Baird’s mechanical television system broadcast recognisable human faces for the first time.

Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.

Between traditional folklore and modern biology, the wild forest floor and the sterile scientific laboratory, lies the story of the lilliputian mushroom.

Mike Jay will discuss with Dr Matt Butler the fascinating stories and cast of characters involved in the discovery of laughing gas (nitrous oxide) which is the subject of his latest book Free Radicals...

Bonfire Night in Lewes: its riotous origins and survival against the odds

Was Victorian fairy art and lore inspired by actual experiences with mind-altering fungi?