Benny Shanon, born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1948. Ph.D. from Stanford University. Professor of Psychology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Golestan Fellow (1 September 1998 – 30 June 1999)
The work I conducted during my year at NIAS can be divided into six parts. First, I worked on the writing of a monograph entitled “The acts of consciousness”, which is a phenomenological study of human consciousness advocating a new, actional based conceptualisation of this phenomenon. Second, I completed a monograph entitled “The antipodes of the mind”, which is a cognitive psychological study of the phenomenology of the non ordinary states of consciousness induced by the psychotropic Amazonian brew Ayahuasca. Third, I worked on an statistical data analysis of interviews conducted in conjunction with my Ayahuasca research as well as comparative analyses of several other corpora of data (e.g., dreams and mystical experiences). Fourth, I wrote several invited articles based on conference presentations and interviews delivered and entertained in the past two years. Fifth, I worked on drafts for several new papers in the domains of consciousness and the philosophy of psychology. Noteworthy is a programmatic paper on hallucinations. Sixth, I conducted extensive and multi varied library research.