The Social Life of Psychedelics | Can the Psychedelic Sciences and Humanities Talk to One Another?

Psychedelics in Society & Culture | Initiative-Supported Event

Speakers: David Yaden, Johns Hopkins and Nicolas Langlitz, The New School

About the Event

As psychedelics approach mainstream medicine, the question of what they mean for our culture has become impossible to ignore. The sciences can tell us how these substances work; the humanities ask what we should want from them. But what exactly are the humanities in this conversation? In early modernity, the studia humanitatis emerged as a secular alternative to divinity — humane studies as opposed to divine ones. Only later did the now-familiar opposition of humanities vs. sciences take center stage. Psychedelics, whose revival has been driven by biomedicine while their cultural significance keeps spilling into religious territory, sit at the intersection of all three. In this conversation, psychopharmacologist David Yaden (Johns Hopkins) and anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz (The New School) take on a challenge C. P. Snow identified nearly a century ago: can the "two cultures" actually talk to each other — and what might that conversation produce at a moment when psychedelic states of consciousness are becoming a matter of public concern?

About the Speaker

Nicolas Langlitz is Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. He is an anthropologist and historian of science who takes philosophical questions out of the armchair to the field. His fields are medicine, the life sciences, and the behavioral sciences where he look for interlocutors who share his curiosity about Homo sapiens as an animal that has changed beyond recognition and, for better and worse, shows no signs of settling down. He is especially interested in research approaches that cut across the disciplinary divide between social research, humanities scholarship, and the natural sciences.

David B. Yaden, PhD, is an Associate Professor and the Roland Griffiths Professor of Psychedelic Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Since his doctoral work in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, his research focus has been on the psychology and neuroscience of psychedelic and psychedelic-like mental states. Specifically, David seeks to understand how brief experiences can occasionally result in long-term changes to well-being.

This event is part of the Social Life of Psychedelics talk series.

What do psychedelics reveal about the people and culture who work with them? 

Psychedelics shape society, politics, religions, law, music, or medicine. They gain their power not just from their psychopharmacology, but from the many ways that people use them: to influence others, form relationships and identities, negotiate hierarchies, imagine futures, and create transformative social worlds. This talk series will use psychedelics as a probe to consider the assumptions, desires, and imaginations of cultural ecosystems.

Social Life of Psychedelics talks will take place every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the spring 2026 semester in the Thompson Room (Barker Center 110). Contact Amadeus Harte with any questions.