Mind States VI Presenters


	MIND STATES VI PRESENTERS


	MARKUS BERGER • PIERS BIZONY • SUSAN BLACKMORE VIBRATA CHROMODORIS • LINDA ROSA CORAZON • MIKE CROWLEY DELVIN • SIJAY • NAASKO • NOAH • ISIS INDRIYA • LYNZEE DAVA LYNX RICK DOBLIN • FRANK ECHENHOFER • ROBERT FORMAN • CHARLES S. GROB CHARLES HAYES • JULIE HOLLAND • CLARK HEINRICH • SANDRA KARPETAS RAMEZ NAAM • DURK PEARSON • MARK PESCE • TOM RIEDLINGER KATIE SALEN • SANDY SHAW • MICHAEL SHERMER ALLAN SNYDER • SYLVIA THYSSEN • DONNA TORRES DONNA TRACY • JIM WOODRING



	MARKUS BERGER is a freelance researcher, speaker, author, activist, and journalist from Germany. For the past seventeen years he has studied botany, pharmacology, ethnomedicine, and psychedelic culture. He is a staff member or has written for a variety of international drug-education publications, including Entheogene Blätter, Swiss Hemp Times, Cañamo, Hanfblatt, Grow!, Hanf Journal, Drugstore Magazine, Magister Botanicus, Junkfurter Ballergazette, Grass Times, Legalize It!, Soft Secrets, The Entheogen Review, Salvia divinorum Magazine, and GaiaMediaNews. He is a founder of the EntheoVision Congress in Berlin. As well, he has written the books Psychoaktive Kakteen (Werner Pieper 2003), Stechapfel und Engelstrompete (Nachtschatten 2003), Cactus Entéogenos (La Canameria Global 2004), and DrogenNotfall on the topic of harm reduction (Nachtschatten 2004). He currently lives in Knüllwald near Kassel, and is working on several forthcoming books on the topic of entheogens. "Minimizing Risks of Visionary Plants"


	PIERS BIZONY’S book Invisible Worlds (Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2004) is a stunning collection of images from the strange frontier where cutting-edge scientific exploration crosses the borderline with art. Bizony has written about space and cosmology for a wide variety of magazines in the United Kingdom and the United States, including Focus, Omni, WIRED, and The Independent national newspaper. His award-winning book on the making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has become a standard reference work for the movie’s many fans around the world. In 1997 The Rivers of Mars, his critically acclaimed analysis of the life on Mars debate, was nominated for the NASA/Eugene M. Emme Award for Astronautical Writing, while Island in the Sky investigated the politics of the space station. Starman, produced as a book and BBC/PBS film in partnership with TV producer Jamie Doran, told the story of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin for the first time; and Digital Domain resulted from nearly two years charting the work of some of Hollywood’s finest special effects artists. Bizony also worked on the successful £25 million Millennium Fund bid for the @Bristol multimedia complex, and was creative consultant for the Cosmic Voyage planetarium at the Futuroscope educational park in Poitiers, France. "Scientists are from Mars, Artists are from Venus; the Two Cultures Divide"


	SUSAN BLACKMORE is a former university psychology lecturer who now works as a freelance writer and broadcaster. She lives in Bristol, England. After getting a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University (1973) she decided to devote herself to parapsychology and obtained one of the first PhD degrees in parapsychology in Britain. But after twenty-five years of increasing skepticism, she finally gave up studying the paranormal. Her research interests now include memetics, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and the effects of meditation. She has been practising Zen for many years. Sue writes for several magazines and newspapers, and is a frequent contributor and presenter on radio and television. She is author of over sixty academic articles, forty book contributions, and many book reviews. Her books include Beyond the Body (1982), Dying to Live (on near-death experiences, 1993), In Search of the Light (an autobiography, 1996), Test Your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1997) the best-selling The Meme Machine (1999) which has been translated into ten other languages, and most recently the first-ever college textbook on consciousness, titled Consciousness: An Introduction. See www.susanblackmore.co.uk. "Mindstates and Memes"

VIBRATA CHROMODORIS was born in Canada and she graduated from Lakehead University’s Fine Arts program in Ontario in 1992. She has been living in San Francisco since 1999, exhibiting her art in various venues, participating in multimedia events, and working on commission. Her work was chosen for the 2002 Artspan Selections Exhibition, and she was a key exhibitor at Worldspirit in Oakland in 2003, an event featuring internationally celebrated artists. Her paintings and digital work are in private collections in America, Canada, and Japan. Her art includes elements of symmetry and rhythmic patterning, geometry, and the use of beguiling perceptual distortions. Vibrata is a member of YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology, and is a longtime member of the Rhythm Society, an intentional community focused on spiritual experience through dance. She is a four-time veteran of the Burning Man Festival, and produced her own art installation there in 2003 called the Wind Oracle. See www.vibrata.com.

"Psychedelic Psychosynthesis"


	LINDA ROSA CORAZON, MA, MS, worked closely for almost twenty years with Salvador Roquet, MD, a pioneer in the field of psychedelic psychotherapy. She has also apprenticed with shamanic healers throughout the Americas. A college counselor and instructor in the Bay Area, she is the adopted daughter of Cheyenne Medicine Man, Billy Turtle. Currently she is expanding her work of bringing groups to do ceremonies with native healers in Mexico and the Amazon. "Traditional Ethnographic and Contemporary Approaches to Psychedelic Psychotherapy"


	MIKE CROWLEY was born in Wales in 1948. At the age of 17, Mike met a young lama, a refugee from Tibet, who soon accepted him as his first student. Thus began a study of Tibetan Buddhism which has continued from that day to this. Mike has lectured on Buddhism and Tibetan history in America, Canada, Poland, and the United Kingdom. He has a particular interest in the use of sacred mushrooms in Asian cultures. He lives in California with his wife Melanie, where they collaborate on an etymology web site that she began in 1994. See www.takeourword.com. "Secret Drugs of Buddhism"

CRYSTAL AND SPORE (C&S) is a multimedia spoken word/art/music performance by DELVIN, SIJAY, NAASKO, and NOAH. They have presented talks on visionary culture and post-civilization at BOOM Festivals in Portugal, the Altered States and Spiritual Awakening conference in 2003, and at the 2004 Synergenesis art gathering in San Francisco. For Mind States VI, C&S will be joined onstage by a dance prayerformance from ISIS INDRIYA and LYNZEE DAVA.

"Ecstatic Evolution; Dance Music Culture and Transcendent Technology"



			C&S • DELVIN is a permaculture designer and plant path poet. His university work in future studies, emerging cultures, transformational education, and shamanic traditions led him to his current job as metapoetikal curator and plant-human liaise. His interests in west coast future-history, rave culture, phytoremediation, and sustainable development inspires his facilitation of workshops, presentations, rituals, councils, circles, and tribal gathering. Currently he is co-crafting the Galactik Trading Card Oracle Complex. See www.elvism.net.


			C&S • SIJAY is a graphic/multi-media artist permaculture designer. He holds a BA in poetics, linguistics, and cultural theory. He has been a magazine layout editor, a freelance illustrator, photographer, electronic musician, DJ, and currently runs ONBEYOND METAMEDIA, an infosystems design company. He co-facilitates workshops around the world on intuitive utopias, applied visionary experience and practical metaphysics. Having spent the last decade as a performer/producer and attendee of electronic dance music events, he has transformed his love of ecstatic dance experience into a world shaping activity. His active interests include cultural cartography, future design, digital art, anime, yoga, and transtemporal meme dispersal. See www.crystalandspore.com.


			C&S • NAASKO holds a degree in communication and cultural studies and is currently a freelance DJ working in close association with BC-based Interchill Records and Native State. As project coordinator for Invisible Productions—a collective multi-media enterprise—he produced the conference area at Portugal’s Boom Festival 2002, the Liminal Village in 2004, and has worked on many events along the west coast in between. The last several years have been devoted to traveling the circuits of electronic music culture and to the post-graduate study of visionary experience, the archaic revival, and the shifting faces of generation E. See www.nativestaterecords.com.


			C&S • NOAH is a sonic architect from the forests of Mount Elphinstone who has been creating digital music for the past eight years. He has performed live music and DJed at numerous gatherings, and produced tracks for over twenty international record labels. His audio explorations have garnered critical acclaim worldwide. Focusing on a deeply expansive sound, which reflects the implicitly interconnected nature of experience, has led him to develop interests in increasingly higher orders of holistic art and design. Exploring the connections between artistic disciplines and the intentional transmutation of group dynamics, Noah has curated, produced, and participated in a number of multimedia events throughout Canada. With an ear towards the future, Noah is constantly exploring integrated approaches to audio, communication, and consciousness itself.


			C&S • ISIS INDRIYA grew up on the tiny island of Guam in Micronesia. Her formal spiritual training began after she had moved to North America and includes work with channeling, reiki, shamanism, moon circles and rites, expressive dance, transpersonal counseling, and hermetic studies with the Rocky Mountain Mystery School. Isis co-founded the intentional dance community Oracle Gatherings which has helped shape, define, and synthesize the North West Coast tribal dance culture. These gatherings are a series of community-created Tarot archetypal multimedia events involving sacred dance, ritual prayerformance, visionary art, healing modalities and transformative education. Isis has done workshops and presentations on the chakras, alchemy, dance movement therapy, prayerformance, west coast tribal history, the Oracle, and visionary culture. Currently Isis is on retreat in Bali co-creating a SynchroMystic Jedi clothing line and a music prayerformance DVD documentary on Benben Stone Productions. As an inspired ritual designer and intentional community builder Isis is dedicated to the (r)evolutionary co-creation of a resacrilized world.


			C&S • LYNZEE DAVA LYNX is an artist, healer, and medicine woman. Working across disciplines and modalities, she has studied yoga, filmmaking, photography, energy medicine, and she holds a BA in Integral Studies. Lynx has cultivated a lifelong relationship to dance and movement, which serves as one of her most potent portals for channeling Spirit. Deeply committed to the threefold path of inneractivision / interactivism / galactivation, Lynx facilitates gatherings, prayerformances, and community-building events along the west coast and around the world. She also wombafests tribal unity through the design of one-of-a-kind clothing and jewelry. Within her continued studies of planetary healing, shamanic practice, creative expression, and neo-tribal community, Lynx is actively participating in the co-creation of a sustainable, (r)evolutionary, integrated world. She can be contacted at metacinema@yahoo.com.


	RICK DOBLIN is the founder (in 1986) and president of the Multidisiplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Doblin’s dissertation (Public Policy, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government) was on The Regulation of the Medical Use of Psychedelics and Marijuana. His master’s thesis (Harvard) focused on the attitudes and experiences of oncologists concerning the medical use of marijuana. His undergraduate thesis (New College of Florida) was a twenty-five year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences. Doblin has also studied with Dr. Stan Grof and was in the first group to become certified as Holotropic Breathwork practitioners. His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise “healthy” people, and to also become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He currently resides in Boston with his wife and three young children. "Psychedelic Psychotherapy Research and Psychedelic Culture"



	FRANK ECHENHOFER is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at CIIS, where he teaches Experiential and Transpersonal Psychotherapy and Lifespan Developmental Psychology. Since 2000 he has conducted EEG research in shamanic journey practices in the Brazilian Amazon. In his elective courses he teaches the comparative study of visionary experiences in spiritual systems and the iconography and symbolism of transformation in the sacred arts. "Implications of EEG Research for Future Exploration of Visionary Mystical Experiences"


	ROBERT FORMAN began making yarn paintings in 1969 while still in high school. In 1975 he received his BFA in painting from The Cooper Union School of Art, where thread painting was encouraged and accepted as a painting technique. In 1990 Forman purchased a Huichol yarn painting at a Greenwich Village Flea Market. Excited to find a community of artists working in the technique he’d been developing for the past twenty years, Forman traveled to Mexico as a Fulbright Fellow to talk shop with fellow yarn painters. Huichol artists also seemed fascinated by the coincidence of their parallel development of yarn painting. Forman has received Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museum, including the Renwick Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Newark Museum. Forman is represented by the Remy Toledo gallery in New York City. See www.glueyarn.com. "Yarn Crosses Cultures"


	CHARLES S. GROB is director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine. He did his undergraduate work at Oberlin College and Columbia University, and obtained a B.S. from Columbia in 1975. He received his M.D. from the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in 1979. Prior to his appointment at UCLA, Grob held teaching and clinical positions at the University of California at Irvine, College of Medicine, and The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, departments of psychiatry and pediatrics. He conducted the first government approved psycho-biological research study of MDMA, and was the principal investigator of an international research project in the Brazilian Amazon studying the visionary plant brew, ayahuasca. He is currently conducting an approved research investigation on the safety and efficacy of psilocybin treatment in terminally ill patients with anxiety. He is the editor of Hallucinogens: A Reader and he has published numerous articles on psychedelics in medical and psychiatric journals and collected volumes. Grob is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, which is devoted to fostering and funding research on psychedelics. Grob's compilation of interviews with psychedelic elders (co-edited with Roger Walsh), titled Higher Wisdom: Psychedelics, Society, Mind, and God—Eminent Thinkers Explore the Continuing Impact and Implications of Psychedelics, is forthcoming from SUNY Press in late 2005. "The Use of Psilocybin in Psychiatry; An Experimental Model in Advanced-Stage Cancer Patients with Anxiety"


	CHARLES HAYES is a freelance writer and editor who focuses on the topics of drugs, politics, and culture. His work has appeared in The Earth Times, E Magazine, Heads, High Times, Journal of Drug Education and Awareness, The Northern California Bohemian, The Oxford American, Shaman’s Drum, Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture & Society, and Trip: The Journal of Psychedelic Culture. In 2000 his book Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures was published; it is currently in its sixth printing. Charles has spoken on the topic of psychedelics to the audiences of countless radio shows, as well as at the Starwood Festival and the BOOM Festival. "Din Memoriam"


	JULIE HOLLAND majored in the Biological Basis of Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania. During her college years, she authored an extensive research paper on MDMA (ecstasy), resulting in three television appearances. She received her medical degree from Temple University School of Medicine in 1992. At Mount Sinai Medical Center, she completed a residency program in psychiatry, where she created a research project that treated schizophrenics with a new medication. In 1994, she received the Outstanding Resident Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. Currently, she is an attending physician and board-certified psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, where she works in the psychiatric emergency room. As a liaison to the hospital’s medical emergency room and toxicology department, she is considered an expert on street drugs. She published a paper in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, describing a resurgence of the drug phenomenon smoking marijuana soaked in embalming fluid. On the topic of MDMA, she has been quoted in or written articles for Harper’s magazine, Lancet, the MAPS Bulletin, and she has been interviewed on multiple television talk shows. She has edited the most detailed current book on MDMA titled Ecstasy: The Complete Guide—A Comprehensive Look at the Risks and Benefits of MDMA. She also has a private psychiatric practice in Greenwich Village. "Medical Ecstasy; A Harm Reduction Model for MDMA Use"


	CLARK HEINRICH is the author of Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, the new edition of his earlier work Strange Fruit: Alchemy, Religion and Magical Foods and co-author of the recent book The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist. He is one of the foremost living researchers on the Amanita muscaria mushroom, from both historical and psychonautical perspectives. His writing has appeared in periodicals such as the German Integration and the Italian Eleusis, and he is on the board of directors for the U.S. publication Entheos: The Journal of Psychedelic Spirituality. He is currently working on a new book titled God Without Religion: A Book Of Tools. "How to Find a Lost Mushroom"


	SANDRA KARPETAS is the project coordinator for the Iboga Therapy House, an ibogaine-based recovery program for chemical dependence. She has been working on harm reduction initiatives for the last eight years, has co-founded several drug user advocacy groups and education projects, has presented at, facilitated, and organized several related conferences and workshops, and has worked in the creation of safe settings for psychedelic experiences. Her interests and inspirations are drawn from harm reduction psychotherapy, transpersonal psychology, cognitive liberty, drug policy reform, therapeutic uses of psychoactive drugs, permaculture, ecstatic dance, holistic healing, rites of passage, and whole systems approaches. "The CosmiKiva Project: Providing Safe Spaces"



	RAMEZ NAAM is the author of the recently-published book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. More Than Human explores the growing power of humanity to alter our own minds and bodies through technology. In the book Naam argues that these technologies have the power to improve our world, if the choice of when and how to use them is placed in the hands of individuals and families. Prior to writing More Than Human, Ramez helped build two of the most widely used pieces of software in the world-Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer. He currently lives in Seattle, where he works on Internet search technology. "Designer Minds"



	DURK PEARSON has patents in the areas of oil shale recovery, lasers, holography, and functional food. He worked on all the manned aerospace programs from Gemini to the Shuttle and won numerous awards, including an award in 1980 from the International Society for Testing and Failure Analysis (a professional organization) for his penetrating quality control and safety analyses. He wrote much of the original safety manual for the Materials Processing Laboratory on the Shuttle. Durk took a triple major at MIT in physics, biology, and psychology, with a triple minor in electrical engineering, computer science, and chemistry, graduating in 1965 with a BS degree in physics. He is co-author, with Sandy Shaw, of Life Extension, a Practical Scientific Approach (Warner Books, 1982), which has sold over a million copies and was on the New York Times’ Best-sellers List for 10 months; The Life Extension Companion (Warner Books, 1984); The Life Extension Weight Loss Program (Doubleday, 1986); and Freedom of Informed Choice: FDA v. Nutrient Supplements (Common Sense Press, 1993). In 1994, Pearson and Shaw (later joined by others) filed suit against the FDA for violating the First Amendment protection of free speech by censoring truthful information on labels of dietary supplements. In 1999, they won in the landmark Pearson v. Shalala 164 F.3d 650 (D.C. Cir. 1999, rehearing denied). As a result, in 2001 (following additional litigation, as FDA refused to comply with the court’s 1999 decision that their information suppression was unconstitutional), FDA was forced to allow truthful health claims, such as the one for the cardioprotective effects of omega-3 fatty acids (found in fatty cold water fish), which had been prohibited prior to the litigation. SANDY SHAW received her BS degree in chemistry from UCLA in 1966 with a double major in chemistry and zoology and a minor in mathematics. She has a patent on a functional food product. Her work in the food industry has included supervision of quality control of all food production at a major canned food company. In the late 1960s, she designed and implemented the first computerized quality control system to be used at the company, doing all the computer programming herself. She is co-author, with Durk Pearson, of three best-selling books on aging processes, health maintenance, weight loss, and nutrition, as well as a book on FDA public policy. (See Pearson’s bio for more.) In 1985, Durk and Sandy received the Award for Excellence in Health & Education from the Association for Holistic Health. In 1990, Durk and Sandy received the American Aging Association’s Paul F. Glenn Award for “individuals who have made special contributions to biomedical aging research.” In 2004, Durk and Sandy each received the James Lind Scientific Achievement Award and Guardian of the Constitution Award at the Celebration of Freedom, Big Sky, Montana. The Durk Pearson & Sandy Shaw designer dietary supplements and functional foods are licensed to carefully selected manufacturers who use Durk & Sandy-approved ingredients. Shaw and Pearson also own and operate a cattle ranch (all natural beef) with a strain of cattle that they have developed to have a high efficiency mitochondrial genome. "Feed Your Head to Enhance Your Mind; Life Extension and Functional Optimization for Your Brain" "Dodging the Bullets with Protective Nutrients; How to Not Drop Dead or Burn Out"



	MARK PESCE is internationally renowned as a writer, educator, and as the man who brought virtual reality into the world wide web. He has been exploring the technological frontiers for over two decades. The author of five books, Pesce is widely respected as a futurist, philosopher, and thinker who possesses vision paired with a unique ability to translate abstract concepts into concrete explanations. Mainstream publications such as Forbes ASAP, TIME Digital, WIRED, and The New York Times have profiled him and his views on the future. A well-respected journalist, Pesce has written for WIRED, Feed, Salon, and PC Magazine, and he served on the editorial board of Trip magazine. See www.playfulworld.com. "hyperpeople"



	TOM RIEDLINGER, a mental health counselor and therapist, has written and lectured extensively on entheogenic plants and the psychology of religion with an emphasis on mystical experience. A Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and former Associate in Ethnomycology at Harvard Botanical Museum, Tom holds a degree in psychology from Northwestern University and in world religions from Harvard University. His published works include The Sacred Mushroom Seeker: Essays for R. Gordon Wasson and chapters in Hallucinogens: A Reader (edited by Charles S. Grob), Entheogens and the Future of Religion and Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In (both edited by Robert Forte), Psychoactive Sacramentals: Essays on Entheogens and Religion (edited by Thomas B. Roberts) Teonanacatl: Sacred Mushroom of Visions (edited by Ralph Metzner), and a forthcoming Festschrift for Stanislav Grof compiled and edited by Rick Tarnas. Tom also has published articles in The Entheogen Review, Gnosis, The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, the MAPS Bulletin (with Timothy Leary), Medical Hypotheses, Psychedelic Monographs & Essays, Shaman’s Drum, and other periodicals. He recently finished writing Sacred Mushroom Stems & Pieces: A Companion to the Sacred Mushroom Seeker (not yet published) and has two other books in progress: Edible Light and Finding God in a Godless Universe. Tom and his wife Beverly Jean, with whom he shares an interest in the psychology of religion and a branch of religious studies called theodicy, live with their cat Sam-I-Am in Olympia, Washington. "**La Noche Asombrado; Gordon Wasson's Night of Awe"**


	KATIE SALEN is a designer interested in the connections between game design, interactivity, and play. She wears many hats, including the directorship of the graduate Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design, and works as a designer and consultant on a range of game-related projects for clients such as MSN, SIGGRAPH, the Hewlett Foundation, XMediaLab, the Design Institute, the Director’s Guild of America, mememe Productions, and others. Co-author (with Eric Zimmerman) of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design (MIT Press), as well as the forthcoming Rules of Play Reader (MIT Press 2005), she is also member of Playground, a design team focused on large-scale, experimental, real-world games. Katie recently partnered with screenwriter and director Hampton Fancher (Minus Man; Bladerunner) on a project for the XEN division of Microsoft to develop an animated storytelling experience distributed through Xbox Live, and has helped curate programs at the Lincoln Center, Cinematexas, ZKM, Exploding Cinema, and the Walker Art Center on machinima, the practice of creating animated films using game engines. She is a contributing writer for RES magazine, and worked as an animator on Richard Linklater’s critically acclaimed animated feature Waking Life, as well as two music videos for the band Zero 7 (In the Waiting Line; Destiny). "Tripping the Game Fantastic"


	MICHAEL SHERMER is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the co-host and producer of the 13-hour Fox Family television series Exploring the Unknown. He is the author of The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin’s Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time. According to the late Stephen Jay Gould (from his Foreword to Why People Believe Weird Things): “Michael Shermer, as head of one of America’s leading skeptic organizations, and as a powerful activist and essayist in the service of this operational form of reason, is an important figure in American public life.” Dr. Shermer received his BA in psychology from Pepperdine University, MA in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his PhD in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. He has appeared on 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Larry King Live, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries, and other shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as interviews in countless documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel. See www.skeptic.com. "Science Friction; Where the Known Meets the Unknown"


	ALLAN SNYDER received the Marconi Prize—“the world’s foremost prize in communication and information technology”—in New York City, December 2001. Bulletin/Newsweek magazine describes him as “agile, playful, audacious, inventive, [he] leaps across boundaries, making unexpected connections, juggling a dozen trains of thought at once.” Snyder’s controversial hypothesis that the extraordinary skills of savants (like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rainman) can be turned on by turning off part of the brain with magnetic pulses is featured in The New York Times, the Times of London, the Discovery Channel documentary Savants, the BBC documentary Fragments of Genius, Barbara Walters 20/20, and Discovery magazine. Alan is the director of the Centre for the Mind, and holds distinguished professorships at two universities. He writes for the popular press and frequently appears on radio and television. Previously, he was a John Guggenheim Fellow at the Yale School of Medicine and a Royal Society Guest Research Fellow at Cambridge University. He has degrees from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University College, London. Dr. Snyder is a fellow of the Royal Society of London and the recipient of its 2001 Clifford Patterson Prize. See www.centreforthemind.com. "Turning on Savant-like Skills by Turning off Part of the Brain with Magnetic Pulses"


	SYLVIA THYSSEN is a freelance editor and “data wrangler” specializing in the area of drug information since 1993. She worked for many years with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and has consulted on numerous harm reduction and drug information documents for the Center for Educational Research + Development, DanceSafe, and The Entheogen Review. Sylvia is currently a contributing editor on the Erowid Project. She is also Art Director for the Mind States conference series. See www.righteye.org. "Rumor and Ethic; Verbal Hygiene as a Harm Reduction Measure"


	DONNA TORRES is an art instructor at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and at the Miami Dade College. She has travelled the world, extensively studying ancient and contemporary shamanic cultures, and she uses the history of shamanism as source material to allow her to examine the roles and relationships developed through the use of inebriating plants. Her art has appeared on the covers of Jonathan Ott’s books Pharmacophilia or The Natural Paradises, and The Age of Entheogens & The Angels’ Dictionary, as well as in the new edition of Schultes & Hofmann’s classic Plants of the Gods. Click here for more of her art. "A Garden of Visions"

DONNA TRACY is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who uses traditional and new media. Her work has been exhibited in galleries nationwide. She works independently as well as in collaboration with artists, scientists, and technology. Her artwork challenges the viewer with provocative imagery and content that both enchants and disturbs. She has been employed as a designer, art director, compositor, animator, and painter on such films as Star Wars, Altered States, Total Recall, Terminator 2, Independence Day, Harry Potter, and Spiderman. An article about Tracy's most recent work was published in the March 2005 issue of WIRED magazine, and an article on copyright issues related to this work in the May/June 2003 issue of Afterimage. Tracy has a B.A. in Fine Arts from UCLA and an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts. She lives in Los Angeles and recently joined the faculty at Chaffey College as an Assistant Professor of Art/Digital Media.

"Digitritus; Virtual Species and the Dream State"

JIM WOODRING’S surreal cartoons are drawn from subconscious realms, creating a graphic world of dreams. But while his work may speak in the language of dreams, Woodring’s life has often led him into nightmare territory. Born in Los Angeles in 1952, Woodring describes his early Californian childhood as one plagued by both schoolmates and “apparitions”—waking nightmares accompanied by “voices” that which haunted him even into his adult life. Woodring has worked as a garbage man, an animator for Disney and Hanna-Barbera, and a self-published comic book artist. Although mental and drug problems adversely affected him early on, his life and art later became influenced by Hinduism. He has produced the critically-acclaimed comic book series JIM, and the 120-page book collections, Frank Vols. 1 & 2. Woodring has also written several licensed comics, including Labyrinth, a four-issue Aliens series for Dark Horse, an adaptation of the cult film Freaks for Fantagraphics Books’ Monster Comics imprint, and several titles in Dark Horse’s Star Wars line. His work has appeared in The Whole Earth Review, Weirdo, American Splendor, Buzz, Zoetrope, and Duplex Planet Illustrated, among many others. Woodring also works in canvas painting, and 3-dimensional art. In recent years, Woodring has devoted a large portion of his artistic focus to the Internet, developing web pages for Microsoft. For more, see www.jimwoodring.com.

"Lazy Robinson"