David Jay Brown

For other people with the same name, see David Brown.
David Jay Brown

Brown, circa 2009
Born 1961
Residence Ben Lomond, California
Nationality American
Education B.A. University of Southern California
M.A. New York University
Occupation Writer, interviewer, researcher
Website http://mavericksofthemind.com/

David Jay Brown (born 1961) is an American writer, interviewer and consciousness researcher. Brown has studied parapsychology, and the effects of psychoactive drugs. With parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake, he studied pets and people who apparently anticipate events. Brown has served as a guest editor for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and he has published many interviews of prominent thinkers.

Education

Brown earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1983. At New York University in 1986, Brown earned a master's degree in psychobiology. At USC, he assisted with research in a doctoral program for behavioral neuroscience.[1]

Anticipatory behavior

For Rupert Sheldrake's book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Brown researched reports of animals anticipating earthquakes. Summarizing this research, Brown wrote "Etho-Geological Forecasting", which was published by Oxford University.[1][2] Brown subsequently appeared on television programs about unusual animals: "Extraordinary Cats" for PBS Nature, and the "Psychic Animals" episode of Animal X for the BBC and the Discovery Channel.[1]

Sheldrake and Brown co-authored a paper titled "The Anticipation of Telephone Calls: A Survey in California", published in the Journal of Parapsychology in 2001.[3]

Interviews

Brown has interviewed psychedelic artist Alex Grey,[4] Jacob Teitelbaum[5] and John C. Lilly;[6] a collection of interviews was published in 1993 as Mavericks of the Mind. A second collection was published two years later as Voices from the Edge.

Brown's Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse was published in 2005, containing interviews with political scientist Noam Chomsky, comedian George Carlin, alternative medicine expert Deepak Chopra and others.

In 2007, Brown published Mavericks of Medicine which presented 22 interviews with doctors and biomedical researchers holding an unconventional stance on medicine.[7] These interviews included viewpoints from Andrew Weil, Jack Kevorkian, Bernie Siegel and Ray Kurzweil.

In turn, Brown was interviewed in July 2012 for R. U. Sirius's counter-cultural technology website "Acceler8or". Brown said he met author Robert Anton Wilson in the 1980s and asked him to write a blurb for a science fiction book Brown was working on; this resulted in Wilson writing an 11-page foreword for Brown's first published fiction: Brainchild (1988).[8]

Psychoactive drugs

Brown has experimented on himself with psychoactive drugs, including the anesthetic ketamine. He appeared on The Montel Williams Show in the early 1990s to defend the use of nootropic substances popularly known as "smart drugs". Brown said Montel Williams did not want to hear about any notional "smart" use of drugs and instead warned his viewers against methamphetamines.[8]

Brown claims that MDMA, an illegal psychoactive drug popularly known as "ecstasy", may be a useful treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).[9] Brown wrote in Discover in 2009 and in Scientific American in 2010 that a study by Michael and Annie Mithoefer showed potential for mitigating the suffering of chronic PTSD.[10][11][12]

Personal life

Brown lives in Ben Lomond, California, in Santa Cruz County, where he was named the "Best Author" of 2012 by Santa Cruz Weekly.[13] With sex educator Annie Sprinkle, Brown has taught workshops about the effects of drugs on sex.[14]

According to Andrew Leonard, writing in Salon magazine, Brown's Wikipedia article was one of those targeted by Robert Clark Young, a novelist who used Wikipedia to attack people involved in the pagan community or pagan related events.[15]

Writing

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 "Psychedelics and Health". Psychedemia. 2011. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  2. ↑ Brown, David Jay. "Etho-Geological Forecasting: Unusual Animal Behavior & Earthquake Prediction". Levity.com. Archived from the original on June 12, 1997. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  3. ↑ Brown, David Jay; Sheldrake, Rupert (2001). "The Anticipation of Telephone Calls: A Survey in California" (PDF). Journal of Parapsychology. 65: 145–156.
  4. ↑ "BBC World News: David Jay Brown, Seattle 1993". Alex Grey. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  5. ↑ "Understanding and Treating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome". Jacob Teitelbaum. 2004. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  6. ↑ Check, Erika (October 12, 2006). "Depression: Comfortably Numb". Nature. 443: 629–631. doi:10.1038/443629a.
  7. ↑ Strasser, Bruno J. (2007). "Book Review: How alternative is alternative medicine?". Nature Medicine. 13: 775. doi:10.1038/nm0707-775. ISSN 1078-8956.
  8. 1 2 Orion, Damon (July 17, 2012). "Altered Statesman: An Interview With Psychedelic Explorer David Jay Brown". Acceler8or. R. U. Sirius. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  9. ↑ Grusauskas, Maria (January 25, 2012). "Critics Counter County's Claim of Ecstasy Epidemic". San Jose Weekly. SanJose.com. p. 2. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  10. ↑ Brown, David Jay (July 19, 2010). "Treating Agony with Ecstasy". CBS News. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  11. ↑ Brown, David Jay (November 2009). "Treating Agony With Ecstasy". Discover. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  12. ↑ Brown, David Jay (September 14, 2010). "Ecstasy Triumphs over Agony: MDMA Helps with Recovery from Trauma". Scientific American. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  13. ↑ "2012 Gold Awards – Arts & Culture". Santa Cruz Weekly. SantaCruz.com. April 5, 2012. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  14. ↑ "About Dave". David Jay Brown. Retrieved May 25, 2013.
  15. ↑ Andrew Leonard (2013-05-24). "Wikipedia's anti-Pagan crusade: A rogue editor targeted witches, warlocks and psychedelic scientists -- and cast doubt on the site's judgment". Salon magazine. Archived from the original on 2013-05-25. Retrieved 2014-03-04. “Qworty” — the Wikipedia editor unmasked as the writer Robert Clark Young in Salon one week ago — played a leading role in instigating Brown’s deletion. As Qworty, Young denounced Brown as a “self-appointed spiritual savior” who had styled himself “a modern-day messiah who combined all of the powers of Jesus and Freud and Einstein and Marx and, oh why the heck not, Timothy Leary, lol.”

External links

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