States of Consciousness:
Psychedelic Discovery
and the Edge of Uncertainty
Oct 14-15, 2026
Clark Kerr Campus Conference Center
University of California, Berkeley
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Wednesday, October 14
Main Stage Sessions
Arrival & Breakfast
8 am – Main Stage Sessions in Krutch Theater
Opening Ceremony with Sandor Iron Rope
9 am – Krutch Theater
Befriending Uncertainty
9:20 am – Krutch Theater
Uncertainty is often seen as something to fear and move past quickly. But consciousness studies is all about it: one leading definition even describes consciousness itself as “felt uncertainty.” Cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva opens the conference with what changes once we treat uncertainty positively, and how that shift shapes research in the discipline.
Community & Context with Michael Silver, Kuranda Morgan, Maya Acharya, and Andrea Venezia
9:45 am – Krutch Theater
The Science of Imagination
10 am – Krutch Theater
Every map has an edge: a place where the known world ends, and as cartographers used to write, here there be dragons. For the past several centuries, Western ways of knowing have treated those edges as warnings rather than invitations. The analytic mind seeks answers and certainty, but the imagination loves uncertainty. Drawing on neuroscience, contemplative tradition, depth psychology, and the phenomenology of transformative experience, UCSD psychologist Cassi Vieten and fine artist Fabrice Guerrier examine what happens, in the brain, in the body, and in behavior, when knowing arrives through image, symbol, intuition, insight, dream, psychedelic dissolution, and the strange truth-telling that only fiction makes possible. They both weave research findings with guided exercises to explore our inner territories.
Break
10:45 am
Learning Across Difference
11 am – Krutch Theater
What does it take to learn from a way of knowing that isn’t your own? Sylvestre Quevedo suggests that no single discipline, culture, or method has a monopoly on how reality becomes known. He makes the case for intellectual humility. As Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki wrote: in the mind of the expert there are few possibilities; in the mind of the beginner, many.
Capturing the Ineffable
11:25 am – Krutch Theater
How do you bring first-person subjective experience into objective science? For thirty years, Fire and Earth Erowid, alongside the Erowid team, have built the largest public archive of experience reports of psychoactive drug use. Sylvestre Quevedo works as a clinician, developing microphenomenology, a method for capturing experience. Michael Silver studies the neuroscience of visual perception, and brings a question philosophers have asked for centuries: what would it take to measure “qualia,” like the redness of red? What counts as evidence, when it comes from the inside?
Lunch
12:20 pm
Encounters at the Edge of Explanation
1:40 pm – Krutch Theater
What do near-death experiences, end of life visions, and deathbed lucidity reveal about consciousness? At the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, which has researched these experiences for over fifty years, Kim Penberthy studies prolonged grief and after-death communication. UC Berkeley neuroscience professor David Presti works at the intersection of neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche comes from a tradition that has studied death for millennia. In this session, they look at how we might treat empirical evidence that science has so far found difficult to explain.
Breakout Sessions
Observing the Observer
2:55 pm – Sargent Johnson (Room 203)
Researchers and practitioners bring more to their work than their training. They also carry their own lived experience – loss, illness, altered states, and moments that never made it into a methods section. Most are taught to keep the two separate. Kim Penberthy, who studies grief and consciousness at the University of Virginia, leads a group through what happens when that wall comes down.
Consciousness Through an Indigenous Lens
2:55 pm – Warring Wilkinson (Room 204)
Through his work, Sandor Iron Rope advocates for Indigenous-led approaches to sacred medicines and contributes to broader discussions surrounding mental wellness, healing, conservation, and the evolving psychedelic landscape. Here, Sandor Iron Rope leads a session on consciousness through an Indigenous lens.
Conscious Worldbuilding: An Imagination Workshop
2:55 pm – Newell Perry (Room 104)
Bring your own inner world onto paper, then build outward with others. In this hands-on session you’ll sketch a personal “story bible” — a document that holds the logic of your inner world, and your life’s mythology — using the archetypes from Cassi Vieten and Fabrice Guerrier’s main stage session.
From Substrate to Soul
2:55 pm – Executive Dining Room
Oakland Hyphae runs potency testing on psilocybin mushrooms from a Black-owned, community-rooted lab in Oakland, bridging underground practice with empirical science. Join Bryan Howard and Tomás Garrett from Oakland Hyphae for a conversation on why community science matters for understanding both psychedelics and consciousness.
Far Out Fieldwork in the Psychedelic Humanities
2:55 pm – Patio Dining Area
Every field has a line between legitimate inquiry and what gets dismissed as “out there” — e.g. animism, astral projection, quantum theories of mind. J. Christian Greer, who teaches the global history of higher consciousness at Stanford, leads a conversation on how that line has shifted over time, and what’s lost by holding it too rigidly.
Lab Reports
2:55 pm – Garden Dining Room
What is it like to participate in a psychedelic clinical trial? Meet Alia Lilienstein, Jen Holmberg, Tyler Toueg, Michael Silver and other researchers and clinicians who are conducting psilocybin human studies at BCSP, and experience firsthand the complex processes involved in the scientific investigation of psychedelics and the mind. In small groups, attendees will rotate through stations meant to simulate the various steps of running or participating in the BCSP Lab psilocybin clinical trials, while learning about the science of psychedelics and their impact through two of its studies: visual perception and the aging brain.
Break
4:10 pm
Reset
4:25 pm
Set, Setting, and the Critical Period
4:30 pm – Krutch Theater
A guided meditation led by Gül Dölen from an ongoing research study that tests the role of set and setting on psychedelic treatment for stroke patients.
Poster Session & Interactive Live Music
5 pm – Ginkgo Courtyard
Join us outdoors for an interdisciplinary poster session, celebrating the diversity of scholarship, expression, and collaboration at the intersection of psychedelics and consciousness. Light refreshments will be provided by Wahpepah’s Kitchen.
Day 1 Ends
6:30 pm
Thursday, October 15
Main Stage Sessions
Arrival & Breakfast
8 am – Main Stage Sessions in Krutch Theater
Day 1 Recap
9 am
Morning Meditation with
9:15 am – Krutch Theater
Is Healing Believing?
9:45 am – Krutch Theater
Boris Heifets, a Stanford anesthesiologist, documented how a patient’s PTSD unexpectedly resolved after a dream during anesthesia. His work examines the therapeutic potential of anesthesia-induced dreams and how his research into psychedelics led him there. UC Davis anthropologist Manvir Singh studies shamanic traditions across cultures, uncovering a consistent pattern: physiological healing happens through ritual practice, regardless of the substance. Moderated by science journalist Shayla Love, this panel explores how much healing depends on the experience.
Break
10:45 am
Open Windows
11:00 am – Krutch Theater
Alison Gopnik studies why children’s minds work the way they do: wide open and exploring, operating on what she calls “lantern consciousness” rather than the narrower “spotlight consciousness” of adulthood. She compares this childlike learning mode to both the psychedelic state and a related mode she terms “the intelligence of care.” Meanwhile, Gül Dölen’s research shows that certain psychedelics can reopen “critical periods”—developmental windows when the brain is uniquely receptive to change—in adults. Her lab is now testing whether psychedelics can reopen these neural windows in stroke patients to help them relearn motor skills. This conversation is moderated by science journalist Jane C. Hu, who holds a PhD in psychology from UC Berkeley.
Lunch
12 pm
Awakening Relational Consciousness
1:25 pm – Krutch Theater
One of Belinda Eriacho’s many roles is that of a bridge builder. In this session, Belinda opens the space to connect with relational consciousness—a concept central to the worldview of Tribal peoples of the Southwest. Relational consciousness does not translate neatly into Western frameworks or scientific models. From a Tribal perspective, all things possess inner form and awareness, including our other-than-human relatives: the water, air, plants, and animals.
Breakout Sessions
Experience as Evidence
2:30 pm – Sargent Johnson (Room 203)
Every method for studying subjective experience carries its own bias. Sylvestre Quevedo works on this problem directly, developing microphenomenology as a way to capture first-person experience before language flattens it. His current clinical trial is moving away from standard questionnaires and toward this method. In this session, you’ll try it yourself: pairing up to describe a subjective experience to another person, then examining where your own words held up and where they failed.
Making Meditation for Grief & Gratitude
2:30 pm – Warring Wilkinson (Room 204)
Deep grief can be its own state of consciousness. You might know the feeling: lost at sea, untethered, somewhere far from ordinary life, where time bends and nothing sits quite where you left it. Making art is an altered state too. Grief takes us one place, creative flow takes us another. In this Artshop, designer Elysa Fenenbock guides participants between those states of consciousness together. With simple materials, you’ll make something in memory of what you’ve lost and what you love. All artistic levels are welcome.
The Psychedelic Beat
2:30 pm – Newell Perry (Room 104)
Psychedelics and consciousness research are moving fast, and the story of what’s happening is still being written. Shayla Love (The New Yorker, Psyche, The Microdose), Malia Wollan (UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism), and Jane C. Hu (head writer of The Microdose) open up how they approach this beat, and how journalism’s values — fairness, accuracy, getting at the truth — apply in a field so uncertain.
A Student-led Classroom on Consciousness
2:30 pm – Executive Dining Room
Introduction to Psychedelic Science (affectionately called “PsySci”) is a student-led course has run every semester at UC Berkeley since 2020. Join the student-facilitators of PsySci as they demonstrate a typical (atypical) session of their course, complete with meditation, discussion, and a break for tea. Facilitators will explain the intentions behind these practices and illustrate the core aims of PsySci: building competence across the breadth of psychedelic study and cultivating appreciation for open dialogue in learning.
Introduction to Dream Yoga
2:30 pm – Patio Dining Area
Sleep and dreams aren’t just time for rest and relaxation, they can be a space for learning greater awareness. Drawing on Tibetan Bön dream and sleep yoga, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche leads a practice on recognizing awareness in waking, dreaming, and sleep.
Mapping What We Cannot Know Alone
2:30 pm – Garden Dining Room
An interactive session from the Collective Continuance Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship. Participants will redraw the familiar map of expanding consciousness through Indigenous relational frameworks and build yarn maps of their own table conversations, moving from where each of us stands today toward the outer ring of responsibility and continuance. Collective continuance is a concept coined by Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte to explain what responsibility and continuance mean in a community’s ability to adapt, grow, and thrive together while respecting its duties and relationships across generations.
Break
3:45 pm
The Shape of Thought
4 pm – Krutch Theater
In an ongoing brain-scanning study, participants describe how they think rather than what they think—whether through mind-wandering, ruminating, or sudden insight. But what if understanding the nature of thought requires something beyond language? Psychology professor Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva leads this research as director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Thought Lab at the University of British Columbia, where they have spent over a decade mapping the dynamics of thought—including how psychedelics shape them.
Closing Ceremony with Sandor Iron Rope
5 pm
Conference Ends
5:30 pm
Evening Reception
7:30 pm – Berkeley Alembic
Join us for a mixer with our friends at the Berkeley Alembic (2820 Seventh St, Berkeley, CA), featuring music, sound bath, tea, and refreshments. This is a chance to relax, deepen the connections you’ve been building, and start new conversations. Please bring your conference badge for entry.