 Okay, we now have Zoe Cormier with Talk on Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll. Great. Can you hear me? Is it coming through? Chuck, I think you've switched the feed. Hello, can you hear me? Great. Thank you so much. So, as you said, my name is Zoe, and I'm going to be talking about sex, drugs and rock and roll. I've just written a book, which we've got here, and it's for sale in the shop, about these three favorite activities. Before I get going, anyone with children in the audience, I will be using graphic language, I will be talking about body parts, I will be talking about addiction and drugs. So, just full disclosure, if you don't want your child hearing anything dirty, just letting you know now. So, as I said, my book is about the science of hedonism and activities that we tend to think of as sinful and what science has taught us about these things. And ultimately, my book, it contains a lot of really, really amazing stories from the history of science, and I'm just going to give you a snapshot of a few things that are in there. But the ultimate goal isn't just to tell these amazing stories, it's really to get at this. You probably can't see the screen, but it's a figure of Rodin's The Thinker. And the ultimate question that I seek to answer is, what does it mean to be human? What do sex, drugs, and rock and roll teach us about what it means to be human? Because this is a question that has occupied the minds of scientists and philosophers since the moment we became self-aware. What is it that specializes the human species away from the animal kingdom? What is it that makes us unique? Is it the capacity to do mathematics? Is it the ability to write things down? Is it the fact that we can think about the past, present, and future? Is it self-consciousness? What is it that makes us special? And traditionally, scientists have focused on our higher cognitive capacities, our so-or quote-unquote frontal cortex activities, things that are thought to be elevated among the animal kingdom in terms of higher thinking. Meanwhile, other activities, getting high, getting laid, and rocking out, have been denigrated as primitive. They've been denigrated as animalistic. They've often been thought to be more basal parts of our species. What I would argue is that these three things are just as important defining characteristics of the human species. Now, you can't see it, but it's a photograph of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. And this photograph really says it all. So you've got Jimmy, sex on legs. You've got 400,000 people in front of him. And most people, you might not know this, but Jimmy used to wear tabs of acid underneath his bandanas so he could stay high the whole time. And he's playing to an audience of 400,000 people. And today, we think that we're hardcore with Glastonbury, you know, 175,000 people. Now, that has nothing on this festival. 400,000 dirty kids sat in the field in upstate New York without barely any amenities, toilets, restaurants, coffee bars, all for the power of music. And they had one stage, one stage, and most of them didn't have tents. This says a lot about how much we value sex, drugs, and rock and roll. If you haven't been paying attention, you might not think that these are important qualities of our species, but clearly they are. So what have scientists discovered about these supposedly base pursuits? What have modern empirical investigations taught us? But moreover, as I'm going through the contents of this lecture, I want you to think about what do these things teach us about the scientific method? It's a two-way street. So let's get to everyone's favorite subject, sex. How many people here know the name Visalius? Okay, Visalius was a Dutch anatomist in the Renaissance era, and he's known as the father of anatomy. He basically invented the art of drawing the human form in a scientific manner, and he was truly a genius, and he was capable of elucidating the valves of the heart. Sir, I'm about to talk about some very dirty content that you might not want her to listen. It's going to be up 50. Are you sure? Because I'm about to start talking about the clitoris for like 15 minutes. Okay, fine. Sure? Okay, it's your choice. So Visalius was capable of elucidating the valves of the heart, and he was capable of tracing the tubes that lead from the ovaries to the uterus, the fallopian tubes. And he did not believe in the existence of the clitoris. He believes that it didn't exist. When a colleague of his, Rialdo Columbo, an Italian, claimed to have discovered it, Rialdo Columbo claimed to discover the clitoris, and he was not the only anatomist at the time who claimed to be the very first person to ever find this thing. And Rialdo wrote to Visalius, and he described it as, quote, so pretty and useful a thing. And Visalius shot back, you can hardly ascribe this new and useless part as if it were an organ to healthy women. Key words, new and useless. However, modern studies have found that the clitoris contains 8,000 nerve endings, a higher density than found anywhere else in the human body outside the brain. It is the only body part that appears to be designed for pleasure and only pleasure. It is indeed a pretty and useful a thing. Moreover, you can't quite, oh, you can see this actually. So in five years ago, urologists in Australia mapped the shape of it, and they found that it's not just a little nub on the outside of the body, it extends inside the body into a wish-found structure that goes all the way around the vulva, and it grows in size as we get older. Now, Visalius was not capable of finding this either through dissection or recreational activities. So there's probably a lot more about him than it does about the clitoris. Now, the history of the clitoris inside the clitoris is colorful and quirky. Let's get to your friend and mine, Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud did not think the clitoris was imaginary. He knew it existed. However, he said it was childish. He said that only women who masturbated and climaxed from manual stimulation of the clitoris required it to achieve orgasm. And he believed that through marriage and sex and maturation and mating with a man, a woman would develop into a mature form who climaxed from only penetration, not requiring a man, a fumbling man, one might add, to use his fingers or his tongue. Now, Freud called this the clitoral vaginal transfer, and he said that this was a key cornerstone in a woman's life. Now, denigration of clitoral stimulation was not restricted to the male of our species. This is one of my favorite stories from scientific history and the scientific study of sex. This is Princess Marie Bonaparte. Princess Marie Bonaparte was the great-grandmice of Napoleon, and if you can see in the photograph she's wearing basically a crown and a lot of bridal gear. She clung to her regal heritage with every inch of her being. And there was another inch of her being that she scrutinized with great interest, and that was the distance between her clitoris and her vaginal opening. She did not climax from penetration alone, and this caused her great despair. This was the 1920s, and she felt like a lot of women today feel that she was inadequate, that she was improperly built because her clitoris was required for orgasm. So what did she do? She conducted a scientific study gathering data like any intrepid scientist would. She measured the distance between the clitoris and the vaginal opening in 243 women. And she split women into three categories, the paracredoradien, the mesocredoradien, and the telecridoradien, and she said that women who had their clitoris further than an inch and a half of her vaginal opening would not come from penetration alone. She measured herself and she decided that she was one of the unfortunate telecridoradien that her clitoris was too far removed from her vagina. So what did she do? She hired a surgeon, and the surgeon snipped the ligaments, connecting her clitoris to her body, and he repositioned it closer to her vaginal opening. And then she still didn't climax from penetration alone, so she had him do it again. And this was in the 1920s. Like I always say, truth is stranger than fiction. Napoleon's great grandkids had a surgeon reposition her clitoris twice. The history of the clitoris doesn't end there. Let's get to our lovely charmers, masters and Johnson. These were two of the most famous sex scientists who've ever lived. William Masters wanted to study people having sex in the lab, and he knew that this would look suspect. He thought that it would look weird if there was just a single scientist watching people have sex in the lab. Moreover, modern scientific studies look at couples who volunteer. He put random strangers together to have sex in front of him. And he knew that this would look odd, especially because he was using prostitutes, mostly, and grad students. Now, so what did he do to make this look less suspect? He decided to have a female co-author on his paper, so he hired his secretary, Virginia Johnson, sorry, Virginia Masters, and she, eventually, he left his wife for her. So these were rock star scientists. They were on the cover of Time Magazine. They were very famous. Through their studies, they decided that women who do not climax from penetration alone suffered from, quote, sexual dysfunction. And they even went so far as to use the word disease to describe such women. Now, the great game changer in the history of the clitoris is this woman, Sherry Hyde. Sherry Hyde was then and is now a vape. She's still a vape. And she was a student at Columbia University in the 1970s. And she couldn't pay her tuition, like a lot of American students. She wanted to be a psychologist. She wanted to be a scientist. And it was just too expensive. So what did she do? She posed her playboy to make it quite fun. Frankly, if I could do what I would. So she posed for a photo, and she didn't know what it was going to look like when it was printed. When the photograph was printed, it was her in front of a typewriter, and the strap line read, the typewriter is smart, so she doesn't have to be. So what did she do? She staged a protest in front of playboy headquarters against the very ad that she had appeared in. How cool can you get? So she went on to do some incredibly groundbreaking research. She interviewed a hundred thousand women, aged 14 to 78. And this is a lot about science. A lot of people think about Eureka moments. They think about running naked through the street. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. I wouldn't know if it was my niece. So she interviewed a hundred thousand women, and a lot of people think about Eureka moments. People think about that big wham bam moment of realization. Frankly, a lot of science just involves being incredibly patient and gathering lots of data and then seeing what it tells you. So she did this, and she found that 70% of women require direct patrol stimulation in order to orgasm. 70%. And that figure has held up ever since. In the past 40 years, every other study has found pretty much the same thing. When she published her findings, Playboy Magazine called it the hate report. The hate report. However, her research reveals that it is indeed, as Rael de Colombo said, a pretty and useful thing. Now, let's get on to the lads. The penis, your favorite body part and mine. Now, the penis also has some anatomical quirks up its sleeve. Most mammals have bones in their penises, and these bones are used for quicky insertion, for quicky mating. It allows a male to simply insert himself into a female very easily at any moment. And so this includes dogs, cats, whales. I'm not sure if you can see the photograph, but this is the penis bone of a walrus, and there's a pencil underneath it just for a size comparison. It's about this big. It's called an usik, and the Inuit use it as a weapon of warfare. They use it as a club. The fact that humans don't have a bone in their penis, and by the way chimpanzees do, so the fact that our closest relatives do and we don't, further indicates how special this is for our species. The fact that we don't have a penis bone means that other factors are required to get it up and keep it up. In other words, behavior and psychology and the mind are integral for things like arousal and sexuality, which means that what goes on when we have sex is unique in the animal kingdom. So the penis has other tricks up its sleeve. If you look at the brain, there's a strip inside everyone's brain called the somatosensory cortex. It's basically a map of feeling, and it's basically, when neuroscience is mapped, where body parts are positioned in this region, it basically illustrates the size of your brain that is devoted to sensation in that region. So for example, the lips are huge, the eyes are huge, the torso is very, very small. You actually have very few sensory nerve endings in your back. So you can turn this into a 3D model, and this is what scientists produced in the 1950s. It's a spectacularly ugly creature called the homunculus. So as I said, you can see the hands are massive, the eyes are massive. When this was published by Wilder Penfield and his colleagues in the 1950s, they lied. They lied. They made a very, very significant omission. What did they omit? The size of the penis. An updated version published five years ago looks like this. I'm not quite sure if you can see it, but the member is enormous. Weak in the knees. Now no discussion of science and sex would be complete without a discussion of homosexuality. Clearly, this is a very fitting subject as we are in Bletchley Park. As I'm sure all of you are very well aware, we thank this country's greatest scientists ever with chemical castration. Well done science, well done us. This was the mainstream view for a very long time. I'm sure a lot of you are very familiar with the history of how homosexuals have been treated, not just by religious pontificators and politicians, but by scientists. They have been denigrated as diseased, pathologized, subject to mental institutions, ice bath therapy. These charming people, Masters and Johnson, who paired people to have random sex in the lab in front of them, they made a fortune doing something called conversion therapy, subjecting gay men to psychological therapy to cure them of their disease. But this isn't the worst thing that was done to homosexuals. I think this is the worst. Ice pick lobotomy. I'm not sure if you can quite see, but there is a medical doctor at the front there. His name is Walter Freeman, and he's got an ice pick and a hammer, and he's sliding the ice pick underneath the eyelid into the frontal lobe and swirling it around to sever connections between the frontal lobe and other structures at the back of the brain. This was proffered as a treatment for homosexuality in America, and thousands of gay men had this done to them. One of the reasons for this is that mainstream science accepted the idea that being gay was a pathology. There were lots of scientists who thought that this was ridiculous and tried to overturn mainstream thinking. The most important one is this guy, and if there's anyone in the audience who's homosexual, you should know his name. In fact, everyone should know his name. His name is Dr. E. Friar. Dr. E. Friar was a psychiatrist in the 1960s and 70s, and he was gay, and he couldn't come out of the closet because mainstream scientific thinking had put homosexuality into the diagnostics and statistics manual. This is basically the Bible of psychiatry that decrees what is healthy and what is not, and it declared that homosexuality was a disease. So he couldn't come out of the closet because his entire life and his career would be ruined. So he gave a presentation at the American Psychiatric Association's AGM in a rubber mask, a wig, and a tuxedo, and he gave an impassioned speech under the name Dr. H. Anonymous. Now, I would think wearing a rubber mask and a tuxedo and a fluffy wig would make you look sane, but it worked, and homosexuality was removed from the DSM just one year later. And think about how much courage it took to do that. To sit on stage knowing that at any moment somebody could run up and take off your mask and reveal who you really were and your life would be ruined. So what would I conclude from the study of sex and the study of science? Scientists are people, people are flawed, and sometimes smart people still think stupid things, especially when it comes to something as sensitive as sex, which is a deeply personal subject that people get very shirty about. Moreover, it takes bravery and rebellion to overturn entrenched scientific stupidity. Sometimes being rebellious is important to really progress towards the truth. Moreover, science has revealed that anatomically, behaviorally, and psychologically we are unrivaled in the animal kingdom with respect to our sexuality. It is a very special thing and one of the defining characteristics of our species. Other animals might rut and reproduce, but we've taken it to the next level. Right, next step. I'm not quite sure how much you guys are into this subject. This is drugs. I normally talk about this at music festivals where most of the audience is already on drugs and they actually perform. But even if you're a complete T-Totaler, you can't deny that they're an important and interesting subject. Why would any species want to self-dose to the point of self-obliteration? It's a scientific puzzle, and therefore it's worthy of inspection. So what have scientists discovered about drugs and what science has done for drugs? I'm sure you all can think about tablets, potions, etc. But what I find more interesting is the way drugs have influenced science. Starting with Nobel Prizes, there are many rumors that Francis Crick, the co-winner of the Nobel Prize in 1962 for Physiology or Medicine for decoding the structure of DNA, there are many rumors that he achieved his insight on LSD. He was known to be a party animal. It's a bit of a rumor. It was published in the Daily Mail a few years ago. We're never really going to know the truth because it's dead now. We know for a fact that this man, Kerry Mullis, who devised and he had his insight on acid. The polymerase chain reaction won him the Nobel Prize in 1992. And this is a truly ingenious innovation. In the 1980s, scientists had an incredibly difficult time trying to read the language of DNA. It was an incredibly painfully slow, laborious process. A strand of human DNA can be four billion letters long, basically. And reading it one letter at a time took months and months and months. Today we can read the genome of a single species in a single day. Before, it took an absolutely painfully long time. Mullis' insight was to take the strand, split it into thousands of little bits, and then read those individually, and then put them back together. And it truly was a stroke of genius, and he did deserve the Nobel Prize because this is revolutionized medicine. And he got his insight into how to do this on LSD. And he wrote about this in his autobiography. What are the two most important words in this quote? Mountain road. He was on acid while he was driving. He was driving at night down a windy mountain road, and his wife was asleep next to him. This year is a photograph. You can't quite see it of the Mary Pranksters, who were Ken Keesey's band of hippies, but he was on acid while he was driving. He was driving at night down a windy mountain road, and his wife was asleep next to him. This year is a photograph. This year is a photograph of Mary Pranksters, who were Ken Keesey's band of hippies who drove around America taking acid and writing about it and taking more acid and driving and taking acid. Basically, a Nobel Prize winner did the exact same thing, routinely, apparently. Now, let's not label Carrie Mullis a scientific hero, because ever since then he's done basically nothing of importance, except he's gone on to deny the science of climate change and AIDS. Illustrating once again, and think asinine things. Now, let's get on to somebody who is not asinine, one of your country's greatest scientists, Sir Humphrey Davy, founder of the Royal Society. Sir Humphrey Davy is truly one of this country's greatest products. He produced this thing, the Davy Gas Lamp. Until he devised this, miners in this country and around the world were dying by the tens of thousands due to tunnel collapse. Seems of methane would open and explode, with people at a time. This incredibly simple invention is basically a wire mesh cage that encircles a flame, and the flame can just allow for the controlled burning of the gas. And there's no question that there are people in this room who are alive because of this invention. It saved the lives of untold tens of thousands of people. Before he did that, he was the world's very first balloon addict. He was in love with nitrous oxide. He was working at a research institution just outside of Bristol, studying a variety of gases and what potential applications they had for human health. And some of you might smile to yourselves, knowing that Bristol is then and still today a hotbed of chemical consumption. However, nitrous oxide is incredibly important for three reasons. Number one, this is the very first drug that was ever made in a lab that was put into the human brain. Until then, all the drugs that people consumed came from plants or from fungi, or from another wild source. This is the very first thing made in the lab. Nitrous does exist in the atmosphere naturally, but it had to be produced in the lab using the new tools of the science of chemistry for it to actually be concentrated and isolated into a singular form. Number two, Humphrey Daisy's studies were the very first methodical investigation of a drug and its effects. He took very detailed, very careful records of how much he took, how much his friends took, what the effects were and how they influenced people. And number three, and this is the most important thing, this eventually led to the gift of anesthesia, pain-free surgery. Until then, all we had to dull the pain of any kind of surgical intervention was booze and maybe a bullet to bite. This eventually led to the proliferation of things like chloroform nitrous as is used in dental surgery and all the other chemicals that are now today giving us the opportunity to have surgery without knowing what's happening. Again, there's no question that there are people in this room who are alive because of this. Now, Humphrey Daisy didn't quite realize that at the time. What he thought he was doing was probing the border between consciousness and subconsciousness, life and death. He thought he was exploring the hinterlands of the mind in a true investigation of what it meant to be self-aware. And he loved it. And like kids today, he made lots of cool gear. This is a silk balloon that he made that's entombed by a wire cage. My favorite thing that he made was basically a giant box that he was like a sedan chair and he would get inside the box and he would have his assistant's pump it full of gas. On one occasion he sat in there for about an hour and he inhaled about 80 quarts of nitrous oxide. This puts any balloon lover today to shame. Kids today in Brooklyn who think that they know what they're doing amateurs. This guy was a pro. He'd leave it to the scientists to do it right. And like drug enthusiasts today, he wrote down what he thought were salient things. Nothing exists but thoughts. The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains. One thing about Humphrey David that I like a lot is that he tested everything he ever experimented on, on himself first. Even before he gave it to an animal, before he'd even give it to his friends. He did everything to himself first. And then when he decided it was fun and safe, he would share it with his friends. And he had parties with the cool cats of the day. And they also had their thoughts written down. Robert South he poet laureate for four years. I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder working gas of delight. Samuel Colleridge an unmingled pleasure. Anonymous. I felt like the sound of a harp. This man Oscar Wilde said in fewer words what other people attempted to capture in hundreds of words as was his want. I felt that I knew everything. Now nitrous oxide escaped from the lab. You can't keep something fun secret forever. And this is a pattern repeated throughout scientific history. Scientists isolate something people enjoy it and then it gets out into the world. Next up, cocaine. The active ingredient in coca leaves, if you chew coca leaves, it just gives you a bit of pet. It's not like doing a Miami style line. The active ingredient was not isolated until 1860 by a German chemist. And after he isolated it, it sat basically in a vial on a laboratory shelf for about 20 years and no one really paid any attention to it. Until your friend and mine, Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud came along, picked it up and thought, what's this? And he became arguably one of the world's very first cocaids. And he would stay up all night for days and weeks taking cocaine and writing about how amazing cocaine is. You ever want to do cocaine, it's really good for creativity and I really like cocaine and I want more cocaine. And he did this for a couple of years and he published a book called Uppercocka. And before he decided that the clitoris was childish and that you want to have sex with your mother, he was the world's very first cocaid. Give it up for Sigmund Freud. Always the charmer. Now this book along with a few other scientists who were revelling in what he called the most gorgeous excitement of the chemical, led to its popularization in mainstream society. So the Victorians injected cocaine into everything they could get their hands on. It was sold in herons, it was sold in drinks, it was sold in candy for children which I find incredibly counter-intuitive. There were other potions for children that were sold that contained opium which I think makes more sense. This is my favorite cocaine containing product from the day. This is a wine that was 10% alcohol, 8% cocaine and it received the blessing of the pope. And Queen Victoria was a fan as well as two American presidents. Ver Mariani. Now scientifically this was very important because the proliferation of drugs and their ingestion by scientists and the public alike eventually led to the discovery of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals in the human mind that are basically the molecular messengers. They're what cells use to talk to each other. So you've heard the names of these before, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. It wasn't you could argue that we only discovered them because of the human tendency to take drugs and this is why. Most drugs work by mimicking the neurotransmitters in your body. So I'm not sure if you can quite see it, but on the left that's a molecule of psilocybin, what's in magic mushrooms. On the right, serotonin. They look shockingly similar and that's how magic mushrooms work, is they fit into the key holes in your mind that are designed for serotonin and in fact they fit into those key holes better than serotonin itself. LSD works the same way and so does mescaline. It's basically botanical burglary. They basically lockpick your genome. It's really quite impressive thievery. And scientists in the 19th century were puzzled as to how drugs could work. So this is how the train of thought went. How can something made by a plant or by a fungus work inside the human body? It doesn't really make sense. And so when they started to investigate how they worked this led them down a chemical detective trail to finding the receptor. So the very first time this happened nicotine was first isolated in 1843. It wasn't until the 1970s that scientists found the receptor for it and this receptor normally binds to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. When they found the receptor they named it after nicotine. It's called the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. The pattern continues the active ingredient in cannabis was first isolated in 1964. The endocannabinoids our own neurotransmitters were not found until the 1990s. Moreover morphine 1805 it took a hundred and seventy years for scientists to track down endorphins which is what morphine mimics. And this is my favorite example it might be possible that we never understood the role that serotonin has in the brain if it wasn't for LSD. And this is why. 80% of the serotonin in your body is contained in your guts. Not your brain. And so scientists didn't think that serotonin had a role in the mind. However a couple of scientists Maurice Rapar and Arda Green they had experimented with LSD they knew that LSD looked like serotonin so they carded 10,000 liters of cow blood to the laboratory in Baltimore to isolate the active ingredients and they eventually demonstrated that serotonin has a role in the brain. Now I'm sure all of you are familiar with SSRI antidepressants. These are the most popular form of treating depression in the human species which as we all know is one of our most intractable killers. And it's arguable that we would never have developed them if it wasn't for the resemblance between LSD and serotonin and again there's no question that there are people in this room who are alive because of these drugs. Now let's get to the invention of LSD because this is one of science's greatest stories. This is Albert Hoffman the man who made LSD. He was not a hippie. He was a Swiss nerd. He was the biggest nerd who ever nerded a nerd and he worked for one company his whole life. He worked for chemicals in Zurich, Switzerland and he never took drugs until he made LSD. After he took it he fell in love with it and he took it until he was 96 and he lived until he was 102. 102 that's him on his 100th birthday. That's not an advertisement for drug use I'm not quite sure what is. So what happened was he was working away in the lab he was studying the chitin molecules of crustaceans and he studied the perparae plants and he was trying to make a synthetic analog of something. What do you think he was really trying to do? He got some of this crystal on his fingers and then as he rode a bicycle home he started to trip and this was the world's very first acid trip but it was an accident. What do you think he was really trying to do? Does anyone here know? Okay, well this is Raul Levent at the back. He was trying to make treatments for pregnant women. He was trying to create drugs that would stop post-partum hemorrhaging and the death of women in childbirth. That was his main goal and he spent almost his entire life pursuing this goal and in fact he developed something called methargyne which is still today one of the most widely used drugs in Osteopteryx. And the reason he developed LSD is because there's this thing, it's called the ergot fungus. This is a black parasite it's a fungus that infests dry and if people consume large quantities of this, which has happened routinely throughout European history for the past thousand years, they can suffer from something called ergot poisoning and it's foul and it kills. The largest mass killing was about 50,000 people in aquitaine. The last reported mass outbreak of this fungus was in 1926 in Russia and the poisoning was very severe. You would experience hallucinations, delusions, fever, gangrene. There were reported incidents of peasants who had all four limbs drop off. That's why you've got hands and feet hanging above the saint. So victims of this form of poisoning have their own saint because it was considered to be so unpleasant. So Hoffman wanted to be able to create synthetic analogs of this fungus. Why? Because midwives knew that in small doses prepared in the right way you could use this fungus to prevent postpartum hemorrhaging and also to induce miscarriages or abortions if preferred. So he wanted to make something that would allow for the prevention of postpartum hemorrhaging but without the horrible side effects of hallucinations and fever. So if you remember anything acid comes from a parasite originally acid has its own saint and it was born in the quest to find remedies for women. Now after Hoffman experienced this drug he declared LSD could be for psychiatry but the microscope was for biology and the telescope for astronomy and this made sense at the time. I mean something so powerful that can bend the mind. Surely that has a lot to teach us as any of you may know from genetics for example when something works you break a bit of it and see what happens. Knock out mice for example engineering same principle. So he wanted LSD to be used in meaningful therapeutic ways to treat the human condition and to understand how the mind works. However like cocaine and like nitrous before LSD escaped from a lab into the world and became very very popular and the rest is history and authorities obviously were very worried about counterculture and the mass use of this drug in uncontrolled settings and whether or not you're a fan of LSD if you've ever seen anybody lose their minds to it if you've ever met an acid casualty somebody from the 60's or 70's who walked through a door in their mind and never came back you would worry too. There's a guy in San Francisco his name is the bird cage man and he wears a bird cage on his head and he's been homeless and lost in his mind for about 40 years. So there was a massive clamp down on therapeutic use of psychedelics so for a long time scientists really were restricted to research on animals the whole history of animal research and psychedelics is long and very colorful there's a lot of it in my book this is one of the most famous studies this is very interesting I'm not sure if you can quite see it clearly but these experiments were funded by NASA now you may have seen this image before it's spider webs produced under the influence of different drugs and you may have seen this and thought it was just an image created by some guy in the department of vice magazine or whatever no no no these were real studies in the 1970's and these were funded by NASA the space agency the very same agency that put the man on the moon gave drugs to spiders to try and get an idea of how toxic they were what's fascinating is that the caffeine web which is bottom right is the most messed up one it makes absolutely no sense the marijuana web you can't quite see it but it's in the top left basically the spider kind of knew what it was doing they gave up halfway through and then you can see bottom left the LSD web is essentially flawless but it's really broad make of that what you will now while some scientists were experimenting on animals here is a man who did not experiment on animals and no discussion of the history of science and drugs would be complete without this man Alexander Shulgen Alexander Shulgen is the man who gave the world MDMA Alexander Shulgen was a chemist chemist to be precise and he was working for Dow Chemical and he was making pesticides in fact and he made one of the world's very first biodegradable pesticides and his patents on these basically made him independently wealthy so eventually he was able to spend 40 years in a shed in his garden making drugs the reason he started doing this is because he was given a sample of a chemical by one of his grad students when he was at Berkeley and this chemical was MDMA this was first synthesized in 1914 by Merck in fact no one really knows what happened to it but they gave it to a few animals in the 1920s it didn't seem to do anything interesting and they kind of languished in obscurity somehow it got into the counterculture and we don't really know how it's presumed that the CIA was using it to investigate its potential as a truth serum on psychiatric patients in Canada in a program called MKUltra which some of you might know of probably knows for sure but it got into the counterculture and there are bits and pieces of it floating around the club scene in New York and what not and one of his students got her hands on some and she handed it to him and she said try this and he did and he was overwhelmed but what he did that was special was he figured out how to make it because until he came along no one knew what the molecular structure was or how you could produce it he fell in love with the act of making new chemicals and he spent the next 40 years making it new drugs he did it at Dow for a few years but then they got tired of his druggy pursuit so he set up a lab in his garden he can kind of make this out from the photograph but it's basically composed of milk bottles and jugs and homemade tubes and wires what I love about Alexander Shulgen is that he tried everything on himself first he did not give it to animals he was a gentleman and if he thought the drug was good he would then give it to his wife and if she thought it was good they would give it to their friends now he created more than 2,000 chemicals that he tried them all on himself of these about 200 were psychoactive including 2CB, 2CE, TCI a weird one called DOI that only affects the ears it's basically a hallucinogen for your auditory system but not your eyes, it's fascinating and when he was worried that the CIA would try and shut him down he composed everything in these two books one's called PECAL and one's called TECAL they're basically chemical cookbooks if you're online now you can get on arrowweb.com E-R-O-W-I-D and you can find the recipes for everything but what's interesting is that every single time he made a drug and took it it was 100% legal because it was brand new there was no regulation on anything he did so he basically made drugs for 40 years and he died at the right age of 86 not bad now as I said for a long time scientists could only really investigate the use of drugs on animals until today we are now experiencing something that some scientists are calling the psychedelic renaissance a lot of psychiatrists and neuroscientists lobbied the government and universities for years and years in some case 40 years to get permits and planning commission and funding to study the impacts of psychedelics on the human mind why? because all drugs all drugs whether you're talking about alcohol caffeine, nicotine, MDMA every single drug is a double-edged sword and it has good properties and it has bad properties it's about how you use it and when and why and so they're now conducting proper double-blind studies on people to investigate therapeutic effects okay one of the first ones LSD and cluster headaches cluster headaches are known to be incredibly painful it's one of the very few forms of pain that the papacy has said might merit the act of suicide people who suffer from these forms of headaches had found that LSD could treat their pain and they set up online forums about this like hey dude have you tried acid my headache went away blah blah blah they lobbied the American government to have that drug legally investigated for therapeutic potential and they won they won crowd sourced drug investigation due to recreational activity there are many other drugs that people are now exploring for their therapeutic effects using magic mushrooms to help people quit smoking this is in Baltimore using cell assignment to help treat obsessive-compulsive disorder people who scratch themselves to the point of wearing their skin down to the point that they bleed or worse no way really okay cool so ketamine and depression NDMA and PTSD LSD and alcoholism the list goes on and on so could psychedelics be for the mind what the telescope was for for the economy maybe most famous drug scientists in this country drugs are an important part of our evolutionary history and we cannot ignore them now I'm going to zip through my very favorite subject music music has never broken my heart or killed any of my friends and this is my absolute favorite of our three sins so if you're going to look at what scientists have found about music you have to ask what is music what is music it's incredibly difficult to define here's a definition organized sound well an alarm clock is organized sound and that's not really music some have called it beautiful math it is beautiful it is mathematical but many forms of mathematics are not musical the best definition is it is an exquisite illusion it's an illusion it exists in your mind and it exists only in your mind and the way that I can explain that is that there's a condition called amusia which means no music people who have amusia don't hear what other people hear where some people hear crescendos and beautiful symphonies and pleasing chords they hear disjointed noise it doesn't mean anything to them and there usually is nothing wrong with their hearing their brain just doesn't do the computational magic that it goes on in everybody else to create the perception of music and 4% of the human population has amusia and most people who have amusia don't know they have it because they don't know what music sounds like to other people you can go online the University of Montreal of McGill in Montreal they have online amusia tests and you can discover if you're one of the 4% you'd be in good company one of the most famous is this guy, Che Guevara probably had amusia he hated music and he couldn't tell the difference between any genre so what's going on in the rest of us as you are probably familiar with there are more possible connections between the neurons in your head and there are atoms in the universe the most complicated thing in the universe is inside your skull and when neuroscientists looked at what goes on inside the skull when people listen to music they found some amazing things they found it engages every single part of your brain more than any other human activity more than language, more than mathematics more than anything you can do music touches every corner of your head from top to bottom, front to back the major structures such as the cortex the hippocampus memory everything my favorite it also touches so called primitive structures such as your brainstem and your cerebellum parts of your brain that you share with reptiles respond to music but not to spoken language or random noise moreover when you listen to music it triggers the release of chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins the same chemicals that are released by cocaine and by other drugs you do not need no cocaine all you need is Marvin Gaye your iPod is an auditory sex toy it's doing the exact same thing moreover anthropologists have found that all human cultures make music not every human culture has the number zero not every human culture has our agriculture architecture, writing, stratified social structures every human culture makes music moreover it appears that the oldest recovered artifact ever was a flute this is the femur of a bear it was found in Slovenia and scientists have created a replica of it of what it would have looked like at large scale it makes the dolbré me fa scale and this is 40,000 years old so if we made flutes 40,000 years ago how much longer were we making drums bells or just singing so if music is something that we've evolved to do if it's ancient how might it have evolved could it have an adaptive benefit could it have been selected for what is the most obvious answer huh? that's the great answer and I will get to that but that is not the most obvious answer I'd say there you go sex Darwin thought so I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind to make charming the opposite sex there's one very quick story I'll tell from the history of rock and roll does anyone hear what the very first I'm sorry you might want to go like that do you file? does anyone here know what the very first thing Pamela Anderson said to Tommy Leeliz she saw him at a party she walked up she shook out her hand and she said I will fuck any drummer that says it all Canadian girls we are classy if nothing else however the less obvious answer is social bonding we are social creatures and we navigate our world with music to create social bonds with each other it's a form of sonic navigation and scientists have found that when people sing in choirs this triggers the release of oxytocin this is the same hormone released by orgasm and by breastfeeding and this is not released when you sing solo and it's thought that this facilitates social bonding moreover if we didn't have social bonding and if we didn't have music and if we didn't have the pyramids if we couldn't go he, po, he, po and do it together in time we never would have created the world's ancient monuments so just like for questions could we have formed large complex societies about music could music predate language as a form of communication could we have evolved language without music would we be human without music by our last point one minute left don't worry do animals make music if animal made music what kind of music would animal make? animal beat drum anyway so there was a neuroscientist who wanted to investigate this question for real so he took marmosets his name's josh mcdermot he was a club dj and then he became a neuroscientist so he took adorable little marmosets and if you're a lab animal and you've got like some marmosets next door who are having drugs experimented on them or you're like in the music marmoset lab i'd want to be in that lab i'm not sure if you can quite see it but he basically made them this maze and he put different speakers at the ends of different tunnels and he played them different genres of music it's basically like a multi room rave from marmosets so he could tell by where they went what they liked so he played them classical techno garage what kind of music do you think they liked? techno classical rock jungle now the answer is silence no matter what the marmosets always preferred silence they just found music irritating because their brains weren't doing the magic that our brains do so this led some scientists to say well humans therefore must be the only creature that makes music and then other scientists said well that's ridiculous whales and birds have very complex sonic communication it might not be what we do but that doesn't mean it's not music and this led to a back and forth and a very long very boring argument scientists tried to draw a line in the sand and he said ok other animals might make sounds but we are the only ones with a sense of rhythm when he said this this angered a lot of people in the public and he got a flurry of angry e-mails people saying no no no my dog pops its head it's a soup dog and he said fine fine fine if you have a pet and you live in the San Diego area come to my lab I will pay for your expenses and I will test it and this this is quite a tip but this is a talk or two and Bob gets his head in front of Mr. Freddie Mercury and Queen and he does this so accurately they wrote a son of a patron in 2009 and published it now in the New York Public Academy describing the ability of a non-human to keep time this video has been viewed 9 million times on YouTube you can also see a link to the Backstreet Boys and to Michael Jackson and I wish you could see it more clearly but it's just about the most awesome video ever so that brings us to the end so what have we found? we have found that other animals have the capacity to keep time but no animal really does what we do we are the musical monkey we are also the drugiest monkey other animals might self-dose but we have taken it to the next level and we are one incredibly sexy monkey so what has science taught us? science has taught us that what we perceive to be base or primitive pursuits are actually a deeply important and special part of the human condition moreover these primitive activities have led us to some of science's most astounding discoveries about what it means to be human and how the universe works hedonistic impulses have informed intellectual pursuits and most importantly and please don't forget this there is redemption in being rebellious you need to talk back to your superiors if we're ever going to progress thank you I've got books for sale here interestingly there was a review today in the Daily Mail that was blowing the last time the Daily Mail wrote about me they described me as Dr. Zoe Chromier they gave me a PhD which I don't have and then they quoted me a bunch of times saying things that I didn't say they didn't even call me so anyway, Dr. Zoe Chromier thank you and also thank you so much to the EMF Festival for having me it's a real real pleasure thank you