Altered States
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2022
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From Aldous Huxley to cat pictures by Louis Wain: altered states of consciousness can be induced by taking drugs, but they also include dreams, tiredness, grief, and various states of mental illness. Matthew Sweet is joined by Turner Prize winning artist Tai Shani, whose recent work Neon Hieroglyphs explores the history and culture of the hallucinogenic fungus ergot; Sarah Shin, editor of an anthology Altered States; Gary Lachman, historian of the occult whose most recent book Dreaming Ahead of Time explores precognitive dreams; and David Luck, archivist at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, currently staging an exhibition of Louis Wain's cat pictures which are often described as being psychedelic.
Producer: Luke Mulhall
You can find Tai Shani's artwork online at the Serpentine Gallery https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/tai-shani-untitled-hieroglyphs/
Animal Therapy: The Cats of Louis Wain runs at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind until April 14th and there's also an online version https://museumofthemind.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/animal-therapy-the-cats-of-louis-wain
Altered States edited by Sarah Shin and Dreaming Ahead of Time by Gary Lachman are out now.
In the Free Thinking archives you can find Matthew Sweet discussing Drugs and Consciousness with guests including David Nutt https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000nll
And David Nutt shared his musical choices with Michael Berkley on Radio 3's Private Passions https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnv3
Image: Louis Wain's painting Kaleidoscope Cats. Image credit: By permission of Bethlem Museum of the Mind
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Can I just say? |
| 0:01.5 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | It's such a wonderful listen. |
| 0:05.6 | So nice. |
| 0:06.5 | There are loads more like it on BBC sounds. |
| 0:08.8 | Different paces, different heights. |
| 0:10.6 | The roof is buckling. |
| 0:11.9 | Where you can also listen to live sports commentary. |
| 0:14.2 | It's right foot goes for goal. |
| 0:16.7 | And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories. |
| 0:21.6 | The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession. |
| 0:25.2 | And she's had to live with that. |
| 0:26.8 | So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion. |
| 0:29.7 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.7 | Sort of expecting that every week now. |
| 0:34.6 | Would you like to push against the doors of perception? |
| 0:38.8 | My name's Matthew Sweet, |
| 0:43.3 | and in the Arts and Ideas podcast, we'll be pushing pretty hard after these messages. |
| 0:48.1 | Hello, my name's Ian McMillan, and before you slide into the podcast you were expecting, |
| 0:52.3 | let me tell you a little bit about my program, The Verbe, Radio 3's Literary Festival, |
| 0:55.5 | Language Coffee, and Journey to the centre of the sentence. |
| 1:00.4 | We'll hear new poems and stories, specially commissioned for the show, and we'll ask the kinds of questions that writers really like to be asked, like, do you use a pen or a pencil? No, I promise, |
... |
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