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“If the Psychedelic Renaissance has its Lorenzo de’ Medici, it is Amanda Feilding.”
Agnese Codignola, LSD, cit., p. 157, UTET, 2018

Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wmyss and March, an Habsburg heir and owner of a castle near Oxford, has promoted numerous initiatives that brought research on altered states of consciousness to its greatest achievements to date. Among her many eccentric endeavors, it is impossible not to mention her idea—borrowed from her friend Joe Mellen and practices from ancient Egypt, the Andes, Tibetan monks, and other cultures—of cranial trepanation to expand consciousness. Joey Mellen documented his experiments in Bore Hole, beginning with the declaration: “This is the story of how I made a hole in my head to be permanently high.”
In 1970, Amanda Feilding decided to perform trepanation on herself, as documented in the film Heartbeat in the Brain. Between 1979 and 1983, she ran twice for the UK Parliament with the sole proposal of legalizing and reimbursing cranial trepanation.
In 1996, her interest in altered states led her to establish the Foundation to Further Consciousness, which became the Beckley Foundation in 1998—one of the leading global centers for scientific research on psychoactive substances, with members including Albert Hofmann and David Nutt, a British neuropsychopharmacologist specializing in drugs that affect brain function and treat conditions like addiction and anxiety. The Foundation’s decades-long research and advocacy, combined with Feilding’s political activism, earned her a place among the most influential scientific figures, according to The Guardian in 2010, as the organization began collaborating with Imperial College London, becoming one of the world’s top centers for psychedelic research.
Following the research of David Nutt, the UK government introduced the Psychoactive Substances Act, a strict law banning “any substance for human use capable of producing psychoactive effects.” The measure marked a dark moment for the fledgling psychedelic renaissance—until a Beckley Foundation researcher under Feilding and Nutt’s guidance made a discovery that would change history. In 2012, doctoral student David Carhart-Harris approached the Foundation with the idea of mapping the brain under LSD using brain imaging technology (which tracks blood flow and oxygen consumption). Nutt suggested starting with psilocybin.
Carhart-Harris’s 2014 results were promising, leading to experiments with LSD. In 2016, images showing an LSD-affected brain seemingly “lighting up,” with unprecedented and intensely connected neural networks, were unveiled, marking a milestone for neuroscience and pharmacology.
“…now that psychedelics have a clear path, the next step is to open the doors to research on trepanation.”
— Amanda Feilding, interview with Brian Rose, London Real, 2015
Federico di Vita, “A Brief Universal History of Psychedelia,” in La scommessa psichedelica, pp. 67–69, 2020