Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Folktales of Summer Forests,” with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-summer-forests ]

Unique folklore emerges from the summer months, when the sun burns hot and nature bursts with full, lush beauty. Some of this lore is strange, some of it tragic, and some as beautiful as sunlight through branches.

Wander deep into the folklore of summer with Brittany Warman of the Carterhaugh School, an extraordinary educational organization which has earned a large and loyal following among Profs and Pints fans with its captivating talks on folktales, fairy tales, legends, and myths.

We’ll look at why the forest stands as the perfect setting for enchantment and mystery. It’s by turns a place of shade and rest and a place of uncertainty and fear. It can be dangerous, bountiful, tame, or wild. It shelters witches, fairies, monsters, and more under its branches.

From the forest come the legends of the illusive Green Man, the king of the woods. Also told are stories of sacred trees, hidden dances, and fairies who engage in midsummer abductions. Fairy tales like “The Witch in the Woods” and “The White Deer” tell of hidden doorways, magic rings, and cursed princesses.

Let Dr. Warman guide you through magical forests and you’ll emerge seeing the wonder in every leaf, stream, and wildflower. ( Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: "Fairies in a Bird's Nest," an 1860 painting by John Anster Fitzgerald.

Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore presents: “Brain Stories,” a crash course on the basics of neuroscience interspersed with surprising tales from research in the field, with Stuart McCaughey, who teaches courses on neuroanatomy, neuropharmacology, and neurological disorders as an assistant professor at the University of Delaware.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/metro-baltimore-brain-stories .

Gain insights into how our brains work, and learn what research tells us about the causes of our behavior and the links between our brains and those of animals, with brain expert Stuart McCaughey of the University of Delaware.

Using an approach that wins him and his courses rave reviews from his university’s students, Dr. McCaughey will discuss the basic principles of his field and illustrate them by telling remarkable stories related to the history of neuroscience and the workings of the brains of human beings and animals.

He’ll start by taking you on a tour of the nervous system, explaining the functions of its different parts and how various drugs alter neurochemical events.

We’ll look at neurological syndromes with bizarre symptoms, at the results of fascinating science experiments, and at the unusual effects of psilocybic mushrooms on the brain.

We’ll consider some of the many strange questions that have arisen as scientists have pursued their quest to understand how the brain works. Among them: Was the French Revolution triggered by a fungus with psychedelic properties? Does Parkinson’s disease cause a unique body odor? Should you eat your experiments on neural development when you finish collecting data on them?

Your brain will thank you for bringing it to the Guinness Open Gate Brewery for this talk. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy,” on findings, debates and trends in the use of psychedelic substances to treat trauma and other conditions, with Whitney Marris, instructor at the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work, certified psychedelic-assisted therapy facilitator, and consultant to clinical trials.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-psychedelic-therapy ]

Psychedelics are rapidly moving from the margins into the mainstream, and questions abound as the sociocultural and legal landscapes surrounding them shift. President Trump’s recent executive order expanding access to psychedelic drugs for certain conditions and accelerating research on them has both heightened interest and added to confusion.

Learn more about the so-called “Psychedelic Renaissance,” and get help separating the hope from the hype surrounding it, with Whitney Marris, a leading trainer and facilitator of psychedelic therapy who has used it to treat trauma survivors, military veterans, and people with cancer.

She’ll present foundational information on what we know about how psychedelics work. You’ll learn how psychedelic-assisted therapy differs from “trip sitting” and about what we know about the effects of “microdosing” versus “macrodosing.” We’ll examine what has been demonstrated to be helpful versus harmful before, during, and after a dosing session intended to support significant, sustainable change.

Marris also will discuss the historical and cultural context of the use of psychedelic medicines for healing, and she’ll describe the ethical challenges that arise as such practices move from counterculture to clinic. We’ll look at emerging and evolving findings in the field, as well as at the roles being played by various financial interests and ideologies in determining the direction of psychedelic-assisted therapy and research on its outcomes.

Attendees will gain an awareness of the need for new professional standards and regulatory guardrails related to such work, and they’ll leave knowing key questions to ask potential providers of psychedelic-assisted therapy. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Neanderthals Among Us,” on the genetic legacy of our ancestors’ pairings with Homo neanderthalensis and what such genes tell us about prehistoric life, with Alexander Platt, evolutionary geneticist and senior research scientist at University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/neanderthals-among-us .]

“Extinction” is a slippery word. Neanderthals went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, yet in a sense they’re more genetically present on Earth than ever given all of the markers of Neanderthal ancestry found mixed in the genes of the eight billion Homo sapiens around today. Moreover, Neanderthals aren't the only type of humans whose extinctions weren’t the end of the line.

Come to Baltimore’s Section 771 bar to learn about fascinating research on the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans being done by the University of Pennsylvania’s Tishkoff Lab. That lab, broadly devoted to studying genetic variation in global populations, generated worldwide headlines in February with a study finding that most of our Neanderthal ancestry appears to come from the pairing of male Neanderthals with Homo sapiens females.

Dr. Alexander Platt, lead co-author of the recent study, will talk about what we know about human-Neanderthal interactions and the major questions that have yet to be answered.

You’ll learn how fossil evidence helps us know where and when individuals from various early human groups lived, while anatomical similarities between them let us speculate about their respective migration histories and their relationships. Genetic evidence, from both modern humans and samples of ancient DNA, offers us fresh insights into the connections between some of them.

Dr. Platt will talk about how modern humans and Neanderthals shared a common ancestor over 500,000 years ago. They then spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving on separate continents, only to encounter each other repeatedly over the last 250,000 years, during which their interactions and interbreeding left each carrying a complex set of genetic relics of the other.

Exactly how and why such pairings took place is one of the key mysteries that Dr. Platt and his colleagues are working to solve. To get a better sense of how sex differences shaped those interactions, the researchers contrast genetic diversity in non-sex chromosomes with genetic diversity in the X chromosome, more reflective of the history of women than men.
You’ll emerge from the talk with a much better understanding of how breakthroughs in genetics are contributing to our understanding of human evolution, as well as a recognition that our own genetic makeup tells us about our roots in prehistory. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: A reconstruction of a Neanderthal man on display at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettman, Germany (Neanderthal Museum / Wikimedia Commons).