Nerdy About... NEUROSCIENCE OF DRUGS (Lecture and Discussion - 08)

Attend a lecture in a cafe!

Date: October 11, 2026

Time: 2 PM

Venue: Top Spin Club, ISKCON Cross Roads, Ahmedabad

Topic : The Neuroscience of Drugs : from neural circuits to cultural revolutions

High Science: what happens when molecules borrow your brain's keys? Cognitive Neuroscientist Harshil Vyas takes you on a trippy tour of legal and illegal drugs: opioids, alcohol, cannabis, psychadelics, and psychiatric meds. How they hack synapses, how they feel, their strange histories and politics, and the weirdest ways in which we've have experimented with them. Then the floor is yours - we will conclude by discussing/debating psychiatry's unanswered questions.

Speaker : Harshil Vyas, Senior Neuroscientist at Decrypt, Research Consultant at IIT Gandhinagar

Meet Harshil Vyas, Senior Neuroscientist at Decrypt, where he works in consumer neuroscience, in his words, as scanning people's brains while they watch ads and translating neural and behavioural data into actionable business insights. His work brings neuroscience into the world of consumer understanding, combining insights into the brain and human behaviour with business decision-making.

Previously, Harshil worked as a Neuroscience Research Consultant at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), contributing to research at the Brain and Informatics Lab and the Control and Learning of Action Lab. His research journey also includes the University of Antwerp in Belgium, where he pursued doctoral research in neuroeconomics to investigate how the brain navigates conflict and cooperation in decision making, and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in the Netherlands, where he worked on decision-making involving social and monetary rewards.