23 Facts About Amanda Feilding

Amanda Feilding has co-authored over 50 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, according to the Foundation.

Amanda Feilding has experimented with trepanning, drilling a hole into the skull to expose the dura mater, a technique used in some cultures to treat mental illness, and considered by some to provide a calming effect or a higher state of consciousness.

Amanda Feilding is a proponent of the use of LSD to trigger long-term improvements in creativity.

Amanda Feilding received the Women's Entrepreneurship Day Organization's Science Pioneer Award at the United Nations in 2022.

Amanda Feilding grew up in Oxfordshire at Beckley Park, a Tudor hunting lodge with three towers and three moats, which was owned by her father and situated on the edge of a fen outside Oxford.

From an early age, Amanda Feilding was interested in states of consciousness and mysticism.

Amanda Feilding concentrated later on learning about altered states of consciousness, psychology, physiology and, later, neuroscience.

Amanda Feilding had her first psychedelic experience at 22 years of age, when an acquaintance spiked her coffee with a massive dose of then-legal LSD.

Amanda Feilding retreated to her family home for months to recover.

Amanda Feilding gained notoriety in 1970 when she performed trepanation on herself, with a dental drill.

Amanda Feilding made a short art film about the experience, entitled Heartbeat in the Brain.

Amanda Feilding began to microdose herself with LSD while she was in her 20s.

In 1998, Amanda Feilding founded the Foundation to Further Consciousness, later renamed Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust which claims to promote a rational, evidence-based approach to global drug policies and initiates, directs, and supports pioneering neuroscientific and clinical research into the effects of psychoactive substances on the brain and cognition.

Amanda Feilding is the Founder and executive director of the Foundation.

Amanda Feilding is a significant figure in modern psychedelic research, with the New Scientist calling her the "Queen of Consciousness".

Amanda Feilding has been active in drug policy reform and was among the first to compile evidence upon which new policies could be formed, arguing that benefits as well as harms should be considered.

In 2007, Amanda Feilding convened the Global Cannabis Commission, producing a report authored by a group of leading drug policy analysts, which lays out a plan for possible reforms of cannabis control policies at national and international levels.

In 2013, President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala asked Amanda Feilding to advise on the Guatemala government's policy on drugs, and in 2015, Mark Golding, the Jamaican Minister of Justice, invited Amanda Feilding to advise him and the government in developing plans for the country's new system of cannabis regulation.

In 1966, Amanda Feilding met and formed a relationship with Dutch scientist Bart Huges.

In 2014, Amanda Feilding sold a version of the Chardin painting Le Benedicite from the collection at Gosford House.

Trepanation, Amanda Feilding hypothesises, allows increased blood circulation, allowing people to achieve and sustain a slightly higher state of consciousness that she theorises children experience before their cranial bones fuse.

Amanda Feilding ran for British Parliament, in 1979 and then in 1983, on the platform 'Trepanation for the National Health' with the intention of advocating research into its potential benefits; she advocated the provision of the procedure by the National Health Service.

Amanda Feilding has co-authored a number of papers and reports with the Beckley Foundation.