In issue one of the Idler, published in August 1993, we ran an interview with Terence McKenna, the so-called magic mushroom guru. At the time he was recording with the Shaman and was a fashionable figure in underground London. More recently we’ve run pieces on the return of psychedelics to respectability, and it was through the American journalist Michael Pollan, who I interviewed last year, that I came across the work of Dr Robin Carhart-Harris (pictured above).

Dr Carhart-Harris, head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College, London, occupies a unique position in British scientific research. He is the first person to have legally prescribed LSD since the early seventies, when the absurdly ill-advised “war on drugs” took off and waged a propaganda war against psychedelics. Now they are back and being trialed in treatments for depressive patients – and Robin is getting interest from all over the world. He has spoken at Davos, and even the investor overlords of Silicon Valley have taken notice of his work, as The Economist belatedly reported in a recent piece on the money flowing into psychedelic research. It seems that the spirit of Aldous Huxley is finally being revisited.

That’s why we’re thrilled that Dr Carhart-Harris has recorded a brilliant online course exclusively for the Idler Academy, “The Science of Psychedelics”. Across seven videos, comprising over three hours, he takes you through the basic pharmacology of psychedelics, the history of psychedelic research, what actually happens to the brain on a trip, what these compounds do to the brain and their potential for therapeutic use.

Find out more and take the course by clicking here.