David Nutt is a professor of neuropsychopharmacology specialising in the research of alcohol and drugs. He set up the Psychopharmacology Unit in Bristol University before moving to Imperial College London in December 2008 where he currently leads a unit with a particular focus on brain sciences. When he was sacked from being a government advisor, David knew that he had to keep researching and talking about evidence-based drugs policy. So he set up a charity, now called Drug Science, to act as an honest, impartial and evidence based expert group free from any political pressure. As chair of Drug Science, David continues to provide the public, media and politicians with analyses on drugs and drugs policy.

Cat Bohannon completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Science magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, and on The Story Collider. She lives in the U.S. with her partner and two offspring.

Gelong Thubten is one of the UK’s foremost meditation and mindfulness teachers. He works with the tech giants of Silicon Valley as well as many other global companies, also with Hollywood stars, schoolchildren, major universities, hospitals and prisons. He is a world pioneer, as he introduced these techniques in the corporate sector over 20 years ago, before the mindfulness trend had emerged. His approach includes the development of compassion, which greatly enhances the benefits of the training. He designs and delivers mindfulness courses for medical students at the National University of Ireland; he has lectured at Oxford University and is speaking for the United Nations in 2019. Thubten and the neuroscientist Ash Ranpura collaborated with Ruby Wax on her latest bestselling book – How to be Human, the Manual – and they are currently touring the UK with a live show based on it. Thubten’s book A Monk’s Guide to Happiness was published in June.

Caspar Henderson has been a journalist and an editor: a contributor to BBC Radio 4, Financial Times, The Guardian, Nature, New Scientist and openDemocracy. His debut, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings (Granta, 2012), won the Roger Deakin Award of the Society of Authors and the Jerwood Award of the Royal Society of Literature, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. A New Map of Wonders (Granta) was published in 2017. A Book of Noises will be published by Granta in October 2023. He lives in Oxford.