International Foundation for Advanced Study

The International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) was a Menlo Park research organization that tested whether carefully guided psychedelic sessions could support personal development and creative work. Founded by Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman in 1961, it brought together clinical procedures, spiritual questions, and experiments in problem solving. Its work helped make the promise—and the methodological and institutional fragility—of first-wave psychedelic research unusually visible.

Formation and purpose

IFAS grew out of a small circle of Ampex colleagues who began meeting after Stolaroff’s first LSD experience convinced him that the drug might help people transcend personal limitations. Don Allen, an Ampex engineer, and Harman, a Stanford electrical-engineering professor, joined the group. Al Hubbard began visiting Menlo Park to guide their psychedelic journeys and train them to guide others; Stolaroff later regarded him as an exceptionally capable therapist. The circle’s interest was not confined to treating illness: its members wanted to explore whether psychedelics could help healthy people realize more of their potential.

Before leaving Ampex, Stolaroff tried, with Hubbard’s help, to recast the company as a psychedelic corporation. Hubbard held weekly workshops at headquarters and gave LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The initiative faltered when Ampex’s general manager objected to Hubbard’s use of Christian images, including Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper, in his office. Harman, meanwhile, brought questions of human potential into his Stanford teaching, including a unit on psychedelics. In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to pursue research full-time, and he and Harman established IFAS to study LSD’s possible effects on personality and creativity.

The foundation assembled a small staff with distinct roles. Stolaroff hired psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman, then a first-year graduate student, as staff psychologist. Allen left Ampex to work as a screener and guide. IFAS obtained an FDA drug-research permit and received LSD and mescaline from Hubbard. Over its six years of operation, the foundation processed about 350 people.

Guided sessions and reported outcomes

IFAS treated its clients as participants in a structured program, rather than simply administering a drug. Most were healthy people, or what Fadiman described as a healthy neurotic outpatient population. A five-hundred-dollar package included personality testing before and after the session, a guided LSD experience, and follow-up. Hubbard moved in and out of the work as an influential adviser: Allen remembered him as both an inspiration and the staff’s resident expert, while Fadiman described him as the hidden force behind the Menlo Park research.

Hubbard also took staff members to Death Valley for training, believing its ancient landscape especially conducive to revelatory experiences. This emphasis on preparation, guidance, and surroundings placed the foundation’s practice within the period’s effort to make psychedelic sessions more than pharmacological events. The approach depended on the organization’s guides and the conditions they established, not on the substance alone.

In papers published during the early 1960s, IFAS researchers reported striking outcomes. Seventy-eight percent of clients said their ability to love had increased, 71 percent reported greater self-esteem, and 83 percent said they had glimpsed a higher power or ultimate reality. Participants who reported such an experience also reported the most lasting benefits. Allen described changes in beliefs and behavior that included becoming less judgmental and rigid, more open, and less defended. The results were not uniformly positive: some clients ended marriages after concluding that they were mismatched or caught in destructive patterns. The reported gains and disruptions alike show how far the foundation’s ambitions extended beyond relief from a defined symptom.

Experiments in creativity and problem solving

IFAS also asked whether LSD could improve creative work. The proposition was uncertain even to its investigators: an intense experience might distract a participant from the problem at hand rather than help solve it. Fadiman and his colleagues first tried the procedure on themselves, taking a relatively light dose of 100 micrograms while attempting to design a credible creativity experiment. They concluded that the task was possible under those conditions.

The researchers then worked in groups of four, giving the same dose to artists, engineers, architects, and scientists who felt stuck on a particular project. Fadiman and Harman used deliberate framing and environmental choices to encourage participants to expect enhanced intellectual performance. Participants reported more fluid thinking and a greater ability to visualize a problem and place it in a new context. The researchers were impressed by the number of solutions they considered novel and effective. Among the participants were William English and Douglas Engelbart, figures associated with later changes in computing.

The experiment nevertheless had substantial limitations. It was not controlled, it relied on participants’ own assessments of their success, and it ended before completion. The foundation’s findings therefore pointed toward a possible research direction rather than establishing that LSD reliably improved creativity. The contrast between ambitious claims and incomplete methods is central to understanding IFAS: its researchers were testing a genuinely open question, but their work did not meet the standards needed to settle it.

A mobile research network

IFAS belonged to a broader North American network that Hubbard helped connect. By the late 1950s he was carrying LSD, clinical advice, and practical knowledge among researchers and treatment centers, including work in Weyburn and Los Angeles. His later visits to Menlo Park brought that mobile expertise into the foundation’s sessions and guide training. IFAS, in turn, joined a wider first wave of researchers exploring therapeutic and developmental uses of psychedelics, even as its focus on healthy clients and creativity distinguished part of its program from treatment directed at illness.

The network’s knowledge did not remain confined to formal institutions. The book describes later underground guides as tracing professional lineages to several earlier figures, including Hubbard, and presents the underground practice that developed after prohibition as partly informed by first-wave research and therapists’ accumulated experience. It also notes that the later revival of university research drew on both the earlier studies and anecdotal evidence from underground therapists. IFAS was one institutional strand in that history, not its sole source: the foundation’s importance lies in the questions it pursued and in the people and practices it helped bring together.

Closure and significance

IFAS closed in 1966, as federal action brought an end to most psychedelic research programs in the United States. Fadiman recalled that the FDA letter revoking the foundation’s approval arrived just as he had dosed four participants for a problem-solving session. Rather than halt the session at that instant, he suggested that the researchers agree they had received the letter the next day. The four men were already lying in the adjoining room as their minds expanded. By the following day, IFAS and virtually every other U.S. program then underway had shut down; the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at Spring Grove was the exception described in the account.

The foundation’s record holds together experimental ambition and interruption. It developed a repeatable package of preparation, guided session, testing, and follow-up; reported changes that included both durable personal shifts and disrupted marriages; and attempted to investigate creativity under conditions that its own account acknowledged were uncontrolled and unfinished. Its closure turned that unfinished work into part of a wider historical break. Later research revived questions IFAS had pursued, but its findings remained preliminary: suggestive reports and a promising avenue for study, not a definitive demonstration of psychedelic enhancement.