Benny Shanon

Who is Benny Shanon?

Benny Shanon is a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and holds the Mandel Chair in cognitive psychology and education. Born in Tel Aviv, Shanon studied philosophy and linguistics at Tel Aviv University and received his doctorate in experimental psychology from Stanford University.

He is author of the 2002 book Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience published by Oxford University Press. In this work, Shanon provides a rough cartography of the visions and non-visual effects ayahuasca can induce. He writes that he had consumed ayahuasca himself several hundred times and gathered a corpus of empirical data from published literature, structured and unstructured interviews he conducted and his personal experience. In total the corpus comprises some 2,500 ayahuasca experiences.