Somehow they managed to get past the first line of defence, being the intercom-controlled front door to our apartment block in south London. Once across the threshold, the only thing that could stop the rampaging band of Jehova’s Witnesses was a complete lockdown of the building. Only on this occasion they refused to take no for an answer, and insisted on an explanation as to why one was so reluctant to engage.

Such aggressive evangelisation from Jehovah’s Witnesses is new in my book, and the experience has creeped me out. Particularly disturbing was a reserved yet persistent young man who looked as if he had recently made a profound life choice between god and axe murdering. I sent the lad away with a polite “No thank you.”, but within minutes he had returned with his supervisor, who asked whether I knew that “God has a personal name”.

Next time I may well direct these religious proselytisers to the London residence of Alain de Botton, who will no doubt speak to them at great length about temples and stuff.

Further to yesterday’s comment on Alain de Botton’s Holy House of Atheism, I note that in the current issue of Private Eye is a spoof diary piece by the esteemed neo-philosophe. My typing fingers shall treat you to an extract…

"The error of modern bus travel is to overlook the most profound needs of its passengers. Correct in so many ways, Reginald Varney might nevertheless be criticised for neglecting his passengers’ deepest longings. He would ask them where they wanted to go, but never why.

"The ideal bus route would substitute the usual dull and dispiriting destinations for beautiful but forgotten places in the human heart. So when working people – butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers – hopped onto their bus, they would be transported not to Kings Cross, Islington and Stoke Newington, but to the wonder-filled new lands of Joy, Hope and Understanding.

"And our bus would not run on petrol. No – it would run on Happiness. And then we would find the answer to the question we are all asking: Who can take tomorrow, dip it in a dream, separate the sorrow and collect up all the cream?

"The Candy Man can, because he mixes it with love, and makes the world taste good."

The thing is, de Botton, who has a new book to flog, featured this morning on a BBC Radio 4 lifestyle programme, uttering a stream of words that closely resembled the above. Given that the Private Eye publication predated de Botton’s latest media flurry, my Lord Gnome may have cause to sue. Plagiarism is a cultural crime of great gravity.

My friend Anja was right to wonder whether the pop-philosopher Alain de Botton has taken leave of his senses, and is on the ball in her realisation that de Botton’s grandiose and grotesque plan for a “temple to atheism” in central London is an exercise in self-deification. I laughed out loud on reading Robert Booth’s Guardian article, and imagined the one true prophet Richard Dawkins (PBUH) turning a deep shade of puce on doing same.

Of all the criticisms of de Botton’s foolishness, the one that stands out for me comes from Anglican priest Katherine Rumens…

“You need a welcome, a sense of belonging and of wanting to return. It might make you feel so insignificant you wouldn’t know how to start. What would this say to somebody who is mentally frail or nearing the end of their life? How does that really speak to the human condition?”

This sums up what I miss in no longer being part of the church community. There is as yet no secular substitute for a religious community welcome born of selfless love.

Lofty humanist intellectuals such as Alain de Botton have their head in the heavens, and little understanding of the human condition. If it requires a priest or other believer in supernatural nonsense to have real feeling for their fellow human beings, then we are all screwed.

Give me Dawkins’ “destructive atheism” any day. In fact, put him in a room with the Reverend Rumens, and you could end up with a genuinely constructive dialogue.

That iThingy is, like, five years old. Why no upgrade? So uncool.

He is fast turning into a national treasure, is David Nutt, the UK government drugs advisor sacked for telling it like it is. Political controversy aside, Nutt is an active researcher into psychotropic drugs, and, television and press interviews aside, he occasionally does a spot of proper work. Which is just as well, in these publish or perish times.

Nutt and his colleagues have now published in peer-reviewed form the research which featured in the BBC documentary series, The Brain: A Secret History. Presenter Michael Mosley took part in Nutt’s trial of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic active ingredient of magic mushrooms. As indeed they are! From a short video clip posted on the BBC News website, you can see the effect that the drug had on Mosley. He wouldn’t stop rabbiting on about the experience.

This was a controlled scientific study, but we should not ignore the very real emotional and, dare I say it, spiritual effects that psychedelic drugs have on those who imbibe them. The effects of magic mushrooms, LSD, mescaline (peyote) and a whole number of other substances are similar, with the LSD trip being the most head-focused of all. With magic mushrooms one’s body is also affected by the drug, with the touch sensation, for example, being radically enhanced. We shall ignore the gurgling sensations in the lower regions.

Nutt’s research group has published two papers based on the psilocybin research. The first⁽¹⁾, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, details a study in which healthy volunteers with previous positive experience of psychedelic drugs took psilocybin while inside magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, which measure changes in brain activity. The scans of the volunteers showed decreased activity in so-called “hub” regions of the brain, which are especially well-connected with other areas. This may be counter-intuitive to those used to the idea that psychedelic drugs are mind-expanding, which might imply that they increase mental activity. What psilocybin does is suppress hub activity which constrains and orders our experience of the world as experienced through the physical senses.

The MRI study revealed a decrease in oxygen supply and blood flow to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) of the brain. The PCC is understood to play a role in consciousness and self-identity, while the mPFC is known to be overactive in those suffering from clinical depression. This could explain some of the antidepressant effects that have been reported for psychedelic drugs.

Nutt’s second study⁽²⁾, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, focused on memory and positive emotions experienced while under the influence of psilocybin. The researchers found a positive correlation between memory vividness under the drug and longer-term wellbeing, with the effect lasting for weeks if not months following its consumption. If psilocybin facilitates access to memories and emotions, this has clear implications for its use as a psychotherapeutic agent.

According to Robin Carhart-Harris, first author of both papers,…

“Previous studies have suggested that psilocybin can improve people’s sense of emotional wellbeing and even reduce depression in people with anxiety. This is consistent with our finding that psilocybin decreases mPFC activity, as many effective depression treatments do. The effects need to be investigated further, and ours was only a small study, but we are interested in exploring psilocybin’s potential as a therapeutic tool.”

This research is fascinating, and the results do indeed show the potential of psychedelic drugs in the treatment of depression and other disorders. But one should be very careful when it comes to public reporting of scientific research into psychedelics, owing to the dangers associated with self-medication. I say this as someone with extensive personal experience of psychedelic drugs. Positive experience, by and large.

What worries me particularly is any suggestion without caveat that hallucinogenic drugs may be beneficial to those suffering from anxiety. In the right conditions they could well be. That is, taken under controlled conditions, with the subject in the care of a qualified and sensitive therapist.

A depressed and anxious person taking such drugs outwith a controlled therapeutic environment runs the risk of inducing and exacerbating a serious panic attack, leading to a bad trip that could do significant emotional damage. Psychedelic drugs are useful tools for those engaged in a voyage of self-discovery, and they can be great fun. But they should not be played with lightly.

(1) Carhart-Harris et al., “Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin”, PNAS (2012)

(2) Carhart-Harris et al., “Implications for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study”, Brit. J. Psychiatry (2012)

With the IMF siren warning of a potential collapse in global civilisation, my attention is drawn to a press release issued by an obscure Austrian university. This announces the recent launch in Berlin of the splendidly-named “Bureau for Working on Intractable Problems and Measures of Higher Authorities” (Amt für Arbeit an unlösbaren Problemen und Massnahmen der hohen Hand).

“If future humans have anything in common, it will not be illusions of cultural identity — e.g., a common language, religions or table manners – but rather the shared experience of being confronted with intractable problems.”

Depressing stuff, but then there are three things certain about human beings: we have a short memory, a tendency to bullshit, and are riddled with cognitive biases. In which case the snappily titled bureau could have a positive role to play, its aim being to present the public with examples of once seemingly intractable problems that were at some point solved and promptly forgotten about. I’m sure you can think of a few.

As Arno Bammé says, all it takes is a little sociological imagination.

Celebrity scientist Alice Roberts – medic turned proper doctor turned researcher and anatomy teacher at Bristol University – is moving to Birmingham to assume the role of “Professor of Public Engagement with Science”. This is a well deserved appointment, and I wish Alice every success in her new job. She is an outstanding science communicator.

Plaudits aside, Alice Robert’s academic promotion is not what prompts me to write here. It is rather her comments about the need for a rounded secondary school education that takes in the arts, humanities and sciences. In making this statement, Alice raises to a new level the cultural scientist and scientifically literate artist’s attack on the “Two Cultures”: a term coined in 1959 by the scientist and novelist CP Snow to describe what he saw as the then sorry state of western intellectual life. The newly titled Professor Doctor Doctor Roberts focuses her attention on the English A-level system of high school graduation, contrasting this unfavourably with the broader and more culturally relevant curriculum of the baccalaureate, which is making achingly slow progress through the British educational system.

Alice’s criticism is well-aimed, and I expect that its effect will be amplified by her TV celebrity status. However, much as we need to broaden our children’s education in order to produce literate and cultured individuals capable of taking on and transforming the world for the better, focusing on the so-called “gold standard” of A levels risks missing an important point.

The Two Cultures is an ideological construct designed to reinforce a hegemonic political system. The UK’s top scientists may in some ways be part of the establishment, but they are kept at arms length by those who regard their right to manage and control society as somehow enshrined in the unwritten constitution, and will fight to protect their privileged position. Creative scientists and engineers are celebrated, but they are also expected to know their place.

Before anyone excoriates Apple Inc. for locking consumers into the company’s postpostmodern product line and pixel-perfect aesthetic, let us not forget that Microsoft before it had commanded a virtual monopoly in most sectors of the educational and corporate worlds. What we are seeing now is a protracted regime change, albeit in a more diverse market in which consumers have greater freedom of choice. That they may choose not to exercise that choice is another matter.

Still, the above picture is one that I find profoundly depressing, and not only due to the corporate monoculture displayed in this university lecture hall. On a pedagogical level it is potentially harmful. If I were a teacher, I would ban electronic devices such as laptops and tablets, and discourage the use of pen and paper for anything more than taking brief notes. Lecturers should distribute paper or electronic handouts listing the salient points of their presentations, to which the students should pay close attention, free from technological distractions.

Talking of tablets, I see that Apple has yet again upped the ante by launching an electronic textbook platform based on the iPad and a book authoring tool that runs on Mac computers only. Apple’s updated iBooks format is apparently a forked and extended version of the open EPUB 3 format for ebook readers. Another Microsoft trick that Apple has exploited to lock in the masses: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Apple can get away with this as the market is new, and Apple pretty much the only creative innovator operating within it. The publishing industry has for years been talking about moving to electronic textbooks, but talk is as far as it goes. Apple acts, and unsurprisingly reaps the rewards while others whinge. Apple’s iPad virtually owns the market for fondleslabs, and users are said to love it as a media consumption device. Again, this is something I find depressing, as Apple succeeds by appealing to our universal inner idiot and penchant for shallow shininess.

How Apple’s competitors will respond is anyone’s guess, and there is no shortage of market analysts with an opinion on the matter. Amazon’s reaction will be key to the development of the electronic textbook market. If Amazon can push its Kindle Fire tablet cheaply and in large volumes, Apple will face real competition, and could be forced to move to a more open business model. But do not count on the corporate world as a whole moving to open technology standards. Lock-in is a boon for technology providers, as it secures their revenue stream for significant periods of time, thereby allowing for forward planning backed up by vast cash reserves.

Ed Miliband has been quick to defend himself against charges from trade union leaders that he has set the Labour Party on a path towards “destruction” and “certain election defeat”. I have nothing to to say about the politics, save that Miliband Minor has no choice but to face down Len McCluskey and his colleagues, who cannot be allowed to dictate party policy.

What interests me is Miliband’s presentation of the counter argument. Take, for example, the interview broadcast today by the BBC. Filling most of the frame is your typical politician in a suit, making the right noises, and anxious to get through the interview without being forced to say anything of substance. In other words, a bog standard soundbite interview.

Now look at the photograph on the desk behind Miliband, which was no doubt strategically placed there by PR advisors armed with rulers and protractors. That is no typical family photo, designed to remind an overworked politician what his wife and children look like, and ward off any loss of the will to live. In the picture, Miliband is wearing a suit, and the shot is composed so as to portray a scene of respectable bourgeois domesticity. Now I’m sure that Justine Thornton is a lovely woman, and the Microbands delightful creatures. But the scene is manufactured, and the result tacky in comparison with the efforts of former PR turned prime minister David Cameron.

Miliband has form when it comes to manipulated television interviews, and I have my doubts about this latest effort. But I have no desire to damn the BBC journalists responsible. Politicians routinely pressure journalists into presenting them in their best, stage-managed light, and there has to be give and take between them. Non-cooperation from either side simply makes life difficult for all concerned: politicians, journalists and the media-consuming general public.

In this case, however, I would have refused to play ball with Miliband and his spindoctors, and instead framed the camera shot to focus in on Miliband alone. One cannot totally avoid this kind of PR bullshit, but there have to be limits.

Denmark gives us Forbrydelsen (The Killing), and Britain produces Sherlock, the final episode of which was inflicted upon viewers last night.

And to think that England once ruled the waves.

Good actors (Benedict Cumberbatch – Cabin Pressure; Martin Freeman – Micro Men), crap writing that would do a disservice even to Dr Who, appalling production, hyped to the heavens. The result? An instant hit, adored by critics throughout medialand.

British television audiences get what they deserve. I should have heeded Mick Hartley’s warnings.