With nearly 30 presenters, including four keynote speakers, and over 300 participants from across the globe, the symposium was structured into multiple sessions exploring different themes. Chaired by CF’s Memming Park, Principal Investigator of the Neural Dynamics Lab, together with Yale University’s Shreya Saxena and the University of Cambridge’s Guillaume Hennequin, the event focused on neurocybernetics – a field first defined in the 1940s that studies how brains use feedback and control to adapt, learn, and interact with their surroundings.
 

“I was a psychedelic teenager. Then, at 18, I had a bad trip with LSD, and became very paranoid”, explained Jules Evans to his audience at the event that took place at Champalimaud Foundation, at the beginning of the month, under the title “Psychedelic Therapy: From Evidence to Equity”. Today, Evans is the founder and Director of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, the leading resource for post-psychedelic difficulties and what helps people recover from them.

Fred Hollows was an extraordinary man, “one of the most interesting people to have come out of the area of ophthalmology for many years, because he was a real disruptor”, said Nicola Watkinson, chair of the Fred Hollows Foundation UK, during an interview she gave us when she was in Lisbon, in September, to receive the 2025 António Champalimaud Vision Award.