Professor of cognitive psychology and ex-chairman of the Department of Psychology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). After studying philosophy and linguistics in Israel, he completed his doctorate in experimental psychology at Stanford University in 1974. His areas of research include cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, the semantics and pragmatics of natural language and the philosophy of psychology. Nowadays, his work concerns primarily the phenomenology of human consciousness, dealing with both ordinary and non-ordinary states of mind. In particular, he has been investigating the special state of mind induced by psychoactive brew ayahuasca, conducting the most comprehensive investigation of its effects from a cognitive psychological perspective. This research is based both on extensive firsthand experiences with ayahuasca and on the interviewing of a large number of individuals from different locales and socio-cultural contexts. Monographs he has published are "The Representational and the Presentational" (Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1993), a critique of the representational-computational paradigm in contemporary cognitive science, and "The Antipodes of the Mind" (Oxford University Press, 2002), which summarizes his work with ayahuasca. The latter received the Polonsky prize for originality and creativity in 2006. Currently, he is working on book devoted to a new psychological theory of human consciousness. Shanon is fundamentally skeptic with respect to paranormality and does not believe in the parapsychological as such. Instead, he maintains that the phenomenology of mental is exceedingly rich and wondrous, and that it defies much of our common conceptualizations.
Mario BEAUREGARD
