Ever wondered if your mind can do more than ruin your life? Did you know at one time you could get a degree in ESP and psychokinesis? This week we're taking a broad overview of the real world of academic parapsychology. From the married-botanists-turned-married-parapsychologists J.B. and Louisa Rhine and the founding of the Duke University Parapsychology lab to the 21st-century psychic experiments at the Rhine Research Center, and testing our own psychic powers, we couldn't really decide what this episode is really about. Call it Parapsychology 101. Can we really create photons with our brains? Do our unmet psychological needs make reality suck more? We address these questions and much more. Keep us ad-free and away from starting our own psychic hotline by supporting us on Patreon. You'll get access to bonus episodes and our patron Discord server, and you'll feel better about yourself than you do now. Maybe. https://patreon.com/thenonsensebazaar

What do you get when you cross sleeping pills with the tail end of the LSD molecule? Ambien! The miracle cure for insomnia taken by millions of Americans every year that definitely doesn't make your entire frontal lobe completely vanish while the rest of you walks around doing weird stuff. Stuff like perhaps taking a drive down the wrong side of the highway, start frying eggs in the middle of the night in a full body cast, and many other activities both hilarious and terrifying that you'll never remember even if you live through them. Ambien is an incredibly strange chemical, not just because of the sensational side effects that get people in a lot of trouble, but also because it truly does seem to be a miracle cure, not for insomnia but for brain damage. Ambien seems to allow neurons that stopped firing because of some type of damage to start turning back on and firing again. It's an incredibly strange chemical. And it's even stranger that this stuff is just being given out as a sleep aid. Keep The Nonsense Bazaar ad-free and away from ever considering slinging research chemicals on behalf of big-pharma by joining our Patreon. You'll get access to bonus episodes and our patron Discord server starting at just $5 a month!

https://patreon.com/thenonsensebazaar

Who among us hasn't had apocalyptic visions with a head full of mushrooms? Terrence sure did. This week we're looking at one of the pillars of the legendary psychedelic evangelist's cosmology: Timewave Zero. After Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis had their noggins rocked by psilocybe cubensis mushrooms in Colombia, Terrence returned from the jungle with "some funny ideas," ideas around a self-similar fractal waveform, calculated through doing fancy wizard math on the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese divination system. According to McKenna the resulting waveform could be overlayed on top of human history and showed a steady, relentless march towards a point of infinite novelty, infinite newness, the eschaton. And this eschaton, according to Mckanna, was set to arrive "on time and under budget" on...December 21, 2012. Spoiler alert: it didn't. But that doesn't make the ideas within Timewave Zero any less relevant, worth talking about, or poetically true. And hey, maybe the apocalypse did happen in 2012 and this is all just our hallucinatory death dream. You really never know. Increase the density of novelty in our lives by joining our Patreon. You'll get access to bonus episodes, our patron Discord server, and you'll keep The Nonsense Bazaar ad-free. All for just $5 a month! https://patreon.com/thenonsensebazaar