Brainforest Café

Anthropologist Michael Winkelman, PhD, joins Dr. Dennis McKenna on the Brainforest Café to compare shamanic and psychedelic healing practices across Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and North America. Winkelman spent forty years researching shamanism, psychedelics, and altered states, and his new edited volume gathers case studies of mushroom, peyote, San Pedro, morning glory, and ayahuasca traditions under a single framework. What emerges is a pattern too consistent to be coincidence: fasting, sexual abstinence, restricted diet, an overnight ceremony, family and community present, songs at the center, and a long integration period built around dreams and behavior change. His argument is that these are not cultural decorations around the chemistry. They are the vessel the chemistry requires, and modern clinical research has quietly discarded most of them.

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Michael Winkelman is an ASU anthropologist and leading scholar of shamanism and psychedelics, with 40 years of cross-cultural research and editor of the Handbook of Entheogenic Healing (2025).

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In this episode of the Brainforest Café, Dr. Dennis McKenna sits down with Kat Maier, a registered herbalist and physician's assistant who has practiced for more than forty years and wrote the award-winning book Energetic Herbalism. Together they explore what modern medicine loses when it separates the body from spirit: how energetic traditions read the body as a living landscape (hot or cold, damp or dry, tense or relaxed), why context can matter as much as chemistry, and where the psychedelic renaissance fits into a much older understanding of plants as medicine for the soul. It is a warm, rigorous conversation about healing, reciprocity, and our estrangement from nature.

In this conversation:

Why Kat calls herself a "recovering scientist," and why she refuses to choose between biomedicine and the sacred

What energetic herbalism actually means, and how to read your own internal landscape

Why Echinacea "failed" a famous clinical trial, and how it was being used wrong

The drop of Black Cohosh that felt like a DMT journey, and what it reveals about context and healing

Drop doses, regional herbalism, and healing at the pace of tissue, not the pace of a pill

The Herbal Mutual Aid Directory, bringing plant medicine to communities after floods, fires, and storms

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Kat Maier, RH (AHG).PA has been a practicing herbalist for over forty
years. She is the founder and director of Sacred Plant Traditions, LLC
in Charlottesville, VA. She served as President of the Board of United
Plant Savers and received their first Medicinal Plant Conservation
Award. As a clinical herbalist she has taught at medical schools,
Naturopathic symposiums and internationally at herbal conferences.
As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Chile, coupled with her training as
a Physician’s Assistant, she weaves the language of biomedicine with
traditional energetic systems and wisdom. Kat served on the Admissions
Committee for American Herbalist Guild (AHG) for professional membership
for over ten years She is the founder of Botanica Mobile Clinic, which
offers support to mental health and at-risk community members at no
cost. Kat is the co-author of Bush Medicine of San Salvador Island,
Bahamas, and the author of Energetic Herbalism: A Guide to Sacred Plant
Traditions, Integrating Elements of Vitalism, Ayurveda, and Chinese
Medicine. This book won the 2022 Gold Medal Nautilus Award.

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For nearly a century, reports of a mysterious psychoactive bolete have puzzled ethnomycologists and anthropologists alike. From the 1930s reports of "mushroom madness" in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, which drew the curiosity of R. Gordon Wasson, Roger Heim, and Albert Hofmann, to modern Yunnan, China, where accidental poisonings from undercooked culinary mushrooms cause people to reliably see visions of tiny, colorfully dressed "little people."

In this episode of The Brainforest Café, Dennis McKenna sits down with mycologist and PhD candidate Colin Domnauer (University of Utah) to discuss how modern genomics, natural product chemistry, and fieldwork cracked this long-standing mystery.

Colin shares his journey traveling to the markets and forests of Southwest China and the Philippines, using DNA sequencing to identify the primary species responsible (Lanmaoa asiatica), conducting groundbreaking rodent bioassays, and exploring what these non-psilocybin compounds could reveal about the neurobiology of perception and the cross-cultural phenomenon of Lilliputian hallucinations.

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Colin is a Bay Area California native whose research focuses on unravelling the ethnomycological mystery of psychoactive bolete mushrooms. With a lifelong interest and undergraduate degree in astronomy before changing his studies to the ethnobiology of psychoactive substances, Colin has always felt attracted to explore the mind-bending wonders of nature. In his free time, he enjoys engaging in just about any outdoor activity with friends, most of all foraging for mushrooms.
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Dennis McKenna sits down with scholar, lawyer, and philosopher Tam Hunt (UC Santa Barbara’s META Lab) to dive deep into the mysteries of consciousness, psychedelics, and the existential crossroads of artificial intelligence.

Tam shares his unconventional journey, from growing up in a 1970s counterculture commune to transformative, high-dose LSD journeys in Waimea Canyon, and how these experiences led him to co-develop the General Resonance Theory (GRT) with Jonathan Schooler. Together, Dennis and Tam explore panpsychism, Whiteheadian process philosophy, the limits of reductionist neuroscience, plant intelligence, and whether future AI built on electromagnetic "field computing" could become conscious. They conclude with a candid discussion on AI safety, existential risk, the approaching 2030 Singularity, and why the principle of stewardship as love is essential for humanity's survival.
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Jonathan Dickinson, CEO and co-founder of Ambio Life Sciences and author of Ibogaine and the Bicameral Mind, returns to the Brainforest Café for part two of his conversation with Dr. Dennis McKenna. Where part one followed the personal journey, this one goes into the machinery: what ibogaine is actually doing to the mind and to the cell.

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Jonathan Dickinson, co-founder and CEO of Ambio Life Sciences and
founder of Terragnosis, joins Dr. Dennis McKenna on the Brainforest Café
for a conversation about ibogaine, iboga, and the Bwiti tradition of
Gabon.

A Mexico-licensed psychologist and former executive director of
the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, Jonathan helped develop the
field's foundational safety guidelines and completed the first
Nagoya-compliant export of Tabernanthe iboga root. In part one of a
two-part conversation, he traces the path from harm reduction work in
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to initiation in Gabon, and explains why
ibogaine refuses to behave like a pharmaceutical. It does not reduce
symptoms. It opens a door, and the person has to walk through it.
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