One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shining. "I wish I could talk in Technicolor," she said. And, at another point, "I can see the molecules. Were some families maybe--oh, I don't know--eating meat loaf on TV trays as they watched this nice lady undergo her mind-bending, molecule-revealing journey through inner space? Did they switch to "Father Knows Best" or "The Perry Como Show" afterward? One of the feats that the historian Benjamin Breen pulls off in his lively and engrossing new book, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (Grand Central), is to make a cultural moment like the anonymous woman's televised trip seem less incongruous, if no less ...

Artificial intelligence has been used to analyse thousands of written reports of personal experiences with psychoactive drugs to gain a better understanding of their subjective effects and how they work in the brain. Psychedelic drugs such as LSD, ketamine and psilocybin – the active compound in magic mushrooms – are being investigated as treatments for a range of conditions, including depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder. The experiences they induce, which may be important for their therapeutic effects, are highly variable, and can include visual and auditory hallucinations, an altered sense of self and a distorted perception of time. Danilo Bzdok at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues used a pattern-recognition algorithm to scour 6850 accounts of experiences submitted on the website Erowid, involving 27 different drugs. They linked words used in the accounts for each drug, such as "euphoria", "nausea" or "visuals", with any of 40 receptors in the brain that the drug is known to interact with, and mapped drug effects onto areas of the brain where these receptors are most active.