I’m interested in minds and the technologies that alter, expand, and connect them. Much of my current research focuses on a particular class of such technologies, psychedelics, that reliably push our minds into strange regions of the state space of conscious experiences. I want to understand how these substances do what they do, what role they’ve played (and could continue to play) in the evolution of human culture, and above all else what they tell us about the nature of consciousness itself. I conduct fieldwork in southern Africa, where I recently documented the first rigorous evidence of indigenous psilocybin use outside the Americas.
My research is motivated by my view that the modern science of consciousness skipped the crucial first step in understanding any domain: the natural history. To understand complex systems, we first need to survey and document the full range of phenomena that it is capable of generating — only then can we derive fundamental laws and taxonomies to account for the data we’ve observed. A natural history of consciousness would involve carefully exploring and characterizing as much of the phenomenological state space as possible. Psychedelics are one tool, among many others, that we can use to chart those unknown regions. My ultimate ambition is to do as much as I can to carry out that natural history.
I also explore other related puzzles: for instance, why we so reliably develop origin stories for our societies and beliefs in supernatural entities. My explorations of puzzles I care about but don’t have time to research more rigorously often end up on my Substack, Unpublishable Papers. For a list of my published academic papers, see my Google Scholar page. You should also learn more about the work of my lab mates in the Integrative Anthropology Lab at UC Davis.