i'm a professor of neuropsychopharmacology which is the study of drugs and the brain and i'm a psychiatrist, i treat patients but i've researched drugs and the brain and it's particularly nice to be here because the first time i ever understood that a drug might change brain function was when i was 15 and i read my father showed me this piece that hoffman had written about how time extended under lsd when he was cycling home after his accidental exposure and it struck me at that moment that this is a really fundamental insight into the way the brain works if you can change time that profoundly with a drug then i presume you could do anything with a drug and that's why i'm a psychopharmacologist so that was quite a sort of founding influence on my career i think however, i went off to a place called cambridge university where this man had won the nobel prize along with alan hodgekin a few years before i went there and, this is andrew huxley he defined the way which action potentials worked, he produced the first mathematical model of how a neuron did something immensely powerful intellect, phenomenal contribution he's the founder of mathematical neuroscience but as you all know it was his half-brother, aldous, who in some ways was the more interesting person and of course the reason most of you are here is because the way in which aldous promoted the concept of psychedelic research was so efficient and also so remarkable in terms of its linguistic qualities that he became very compelling to many people so there he is, aldous is the older half-brother of andrew