Tim leary biography

One of the stranger claims to fame of the Department of Psychology at Harvard is that it was once home to two of the leading figures in the 1960s counterculture and culture of psychedelic drugs.

In 1960, two promising young psychologists at Harvard, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, began to explore the effects of psychotropic substances on the human mind.

They reasoned that psychology is the study of the mind, including its relationship to the brain, body, and environment.

Psychology, they  argued, has a legitimate interest in how cognition, perception, and emotion are affected by mind-altering substances. At the time, the possible dangers of researching such substances were not as well known as they were in subsequent decades.

Tim leary books

With a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University, Richard Alpert came to Harvard in 1953 as an assistant professor. In the early part of his career Alpert conducted personality and social psychology