Myron Stolaroff

Myron Stolaroff was an American engineer and early Ampex executive who, after a transformative LSD experience in 1956, left the tech industry to devote himself to psychedelic research.

In 1961 he founded the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, where he and colleagues—including James Fadiman—administered LSD and mescaline to hundreds of subjects, pioneering studies on psychedelics and creative problem-solving among scientists, engineers, and artists before the 1966 prohibition ended the work.

He later wrote candid memoirs such as Thanatos to Eros on the therapeutic and spiritual value of the substances. Stolaroff’s contribution to the mind-power lineage runs along two channels. First, his creativity studies advanced the practical claim that altered states can enhance insight and problem-solving—an idea that seeded the later microdosing movement and the enduring Silicon Valley association between psychedelics and innovation.

Second, his Menlo Park work placed the psychedelic project at the very birthplace of the personal-computing culture, prefiguring the “cyberdelic” fusion of consciousness expansion and technology. He represents the engineer’s wing of the movement: consciousness as a tunable instrument for enhanced performance and creative reach.