James Fadiman

James Fadiman is an American psychologist who participated in Myron Stolaroff’s Menlo Park creativity studies in the 1960s and went on to help found transpersonal psychology, co-establishing the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.

After the long research freeze, he became one of the most influential figures of the psychedelic renaissance through The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide (2011), which laid out structured protocols for high-dose, museum-dose, and especially microdose use.

His informal data-gathering on microdosing helped turn a fringe practice into a global phenomenon. Fadiman’s role in the mind-power lineage is that of the protocol-builder and bridge between eras. He carried the 1960s creativity-and-consciousness research forward into the present and reframed psychedelics around deliberate, dose-specific outcomes—cognitive enhancement, problem-solving, and well-being.

Microdosing in particular fits squarely within the broader human-potential and self-optimization ethos: the premise that inner states can be precisely engineered for better performance and experience. While rigorous evidence for microdosing’s specific benefits remains contested, Fadiman’s frameworks shaped how a generation approaches consciousness as a tunable, optimizable system.