A Biology & Consciousness podcast chronicling the bio-singularity. 3x times per week I speak with leading scientists at the bleeding edge of Neuroscience, Consciousness and Biology.
No idea is too strange, tackled with genuine curiosity and technical rigour. Come follow the journey as I have my brain melted and ontology warped on a regular basis.
Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is founder of Giants Shoulder.
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Données mises à jour le 03/10/2026
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#160 - Meet The Physicist Proving The Universe Builds Itself Out Of Information
vendredi 2 octobre 2026 • Durée 01:25:15
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Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic is a physicist turned cognitive scientist and Professor Emeritus at Chalmers University of Technology, with doctorates in both physics and computer science. Across three careers she built info-computationalism: the idea that nature is information and computation at every level, from particles to minds. Her conclusion puts her at odds with much of her own field. Cognition arrives with life itself, which puts consciousness in a single bacterium and nowhere in today's AI.
Expect to learn:
- Info-computationalism: why nature is information and computation all the way down
- Cell consciousness: why a single cell is already sensing, deciding and minimally aware
- The Levin divide: where she draws the line Michael Levin won't
- Anaesthetised bacteria: why ether switches off organisms with no brain
- Machines that can't feel: why today's AI has intelligence but no goals of its own
SPONSORS
Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder
GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM
Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA
William B. Miller Jr. - Meet The Scientist Proving Your Cells Are Conscious and Intelligent: https://youtu.be/xrV5oGyyKSI
Mark Solms - Meet the Scientist Proving Dreams Hold the Key to Consciousness! Dr Mark Solms: https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249
SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
0:13:16 You Can't Observe Without Changing The System
0:16:14 Are Conscious Agents The Most Fundamental Thing?
0:20:06 A Single Cell Is Already Conscious
0:27:16 Where She Parts Ways With Michael Levin
0:28:41 Can We Build A Machine That Creates Itself?
0:33:38 Why A Book Is Just Food To An Insect
0:39:40 You Are Trillions Of Information Agents
0:44:09 Science's Obsession With Measurement
0:46:40 Xenobots And The Cells Nobody Programmed
0:51:02 Agency Or Just Complicated Chemistry?
0:55:58 Why No Experiment Can Settle This
0:57:22 Where Computation Ends And Cognition Begins
1:01:08 Would Levin Say Gene Networks Think?
1:03:37 Why Survival Might Be Essential For Consciousness
1:07:07 You Can Anaesthetise A Bacterium
1:11:08 Can Consciousness Be Written Down As Maths?
1:19:31 How AI Could Help Us Understand Minds
1:22:35 Should We Ever Build Conscious AI?
.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
#159 - No. 1 Biopsychist: Michael Levin's Platonic Minds & Cognition All The Way Down
lundi 28 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:25:18
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John Vervaeke is an award-winning cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Cognitive Science programme and the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He helped pioneer relevance realisation — the claim that underneath your intelligence, your attention and your consciousness sits a single process, and that every living thing is doing it. He has argued since 1997 that this process cannot be a computation, and his field is only now conceding the point: even predictive processing, its dominant framework, is increasingly admitted to presuppose the thing he named. A cell decides what matters to it. So does a bacterium. Possibly everything that has ever been alive, long before there was a brain to think with.
Expect to learn:
- Relevance realisation: how you ignore almost everything in front of you and still land on what matters
- Cognition all the way down: why a single cell is doing the same thing your mind is, only smaller
- The line at life: why a tornado self-organises but never cares, and what that rules out
- Why computation can't do it: the reason large language models collapse on open-ended problems and always will
- Mind as the between: the case that consciousness isn't inside your head but in the coupling with your world
SPONSORS
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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
#158 - Meet The Scientist Redefining Intelligence With Michael Levin
jeudi 24 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:44:59
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Richard Watson is a professor of artificial intelligence and theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Southampton and the author of Compositional Evolution. He argues that adaptation does not require natural selection at all, and that biology has spent a century mistaking one for the other. With Michael Levin he published Natural Induction, which shows that any network whose connections give way under stress will begin to learn on its own. Ecosystems. Gene networks. Possibly the chemistry of the early Earth, long before anything was alive to be selected.
Expect to learn:
- Cognition before selection: why learning came first and natural selection came second
- The spring mechanism: how falling masses solve hard puzzles with no brain, no genes and no designer
- Ecosystems that compute: the model where an ecosystem solves a Sudoku without reproducing or inheriting
- The limits of the genome: why no amount of sequencing will explain what a cell is actually doing
- Medicine as persuasion: treating tissues as cognitive systems to negotiate with, not machines to fix
SPONSORS
Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants
GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM
#157 - Meet The Consciousness Philosopher With No Mind’s Eye
lundi 21 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:23:56
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Richard Brown is a philosopher of mind who built one of the leading cognitive theories of consciousness, co-authored the paper with Joseph LeDoux that moved the feeling of fear out of the amygdala, and has just published the full book-length case for it with Oxford University Press. He also cannot picture a chicken. Brown has aphantasia — no voluntary mental imagery whatsoever — and he didn't find out until a graduate seminar, when he realised that everyone around him had been speaking literally all along about seeing things in their heads. This is a man building a theory of inner experience from inside a mind with no pictures in it.
Expect to learn:
- The blank mind's eye: what a philosopher with no mental imagery reveals about where experience actually happens
- Fear without the amygdala: how he and Joseph LeDoux moved the feeling of fear up into the cortex
- Fake phenomenology: the TMS study where vision gets more vivid without getting any more accurate
- Experience you can't reach: whether you can be having a conscious state and be locked out of it
- The state of the field: why the consciousness chapter in most neuroscience textbooks is a coin flip
SPONSORS
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe
GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0
#156 - Meet The Greatest Time Neuroscientist You’ve Never Heard Of
jeudi 17 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:25:27
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Dean Buonomano is a UCLA neuroscientist and one of the first researchers to ask how the brain encodes time. His work overturned a century-old assumption — that somewhere in your head sits a central clock — by showing that timing falls out of the dynamics of neural circuits themselves. He wrote the bestseller Your Brain Is a Time Machine, then took the argument to physics, co-authoring a paper with Carlo Rovelli on whether the past still exists. He is a presentist in a field that mostly isn't.
Expect to learn:
- The clockless brain: why there is no central timer anywhere in your head
- Timing in a dish: how isolated brain tissue can be taught intervals
- Death and religion: how foresight forced our ancestors to invent the afterlife
- The ten-second test: the one simple thing no language model can do
- Pause the computer: the thought experiment that breaks state-based theories of consciousness
SPONSORS
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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
György Buzsáki - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/95FFRTIiLDY
Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0
#155 - Meet The World’s Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of
lundi 14 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:26:18
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Steven Barker is the chemist who has spent fifty years proving your brain makes its own psychedelic. He built the mass-spectrometry methods sensitive enough to find DMT in living tissue, and showed it sits in the brain at concentrations rivalling serotonin and dopamine. In 1981 the war on drugs cut his funding and the work stopped for fifteen years. He also synthesised his own supply — and took it.
Expect to learn:
- The locked cabinet: what his mentor kept behind two locks, and why Barker raided it
- The missing neurotransmitter: why DMT meets every formal criterion and nobody noticed
- Machine elves: why he calls the term marketing rather than science
- DMT immunity: the lab technician who took a full dose and felt nothing
- Receptors inside the neuron: the 2023 finding that explains the neuroplasticity
SPONSORS
Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants
GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA
Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc
Dennis McKenna - Dennis McKenna: "I've Spent 50 Years Investigating The Entities That Exist Within Ayahuasca": https://youtu.be/gTSBhfZhuD8
#154 Meet The Greatest End-Of-Life Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of
Saison 2 · Épisode 154
vendredi 11 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:26:43
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinAlexander Batthyány is the philosopher and psychologist who turned a deathbed anecdote into a science. He ran the first modern study of paradoxical lucidity, co-authored the field's founding definition with Bruce Greyson, and has now collected around 450 cases of severely demented patients unexpectedly getting their memory, speech and personality back. Victorian doctors documented the phenomenon at length and called it "lightening up before death"; twentieth-century medicine stopped writing it down because there was no way to phrase it in a case study. He is now working with a group at the Mayo Clinic to put cameras in patients' rooms so the episodes stop being missed. In one case a woman came back for two hours, discussed her own diagnosis, died — and imaging taken immediately afterwards showed no change whatsoever.SPONSORSGet One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeGS EPISODES MENTIONEDRick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYscAndrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDAGUEST LINKSX: https://x.com/Alxdr_BatthyanyGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VRL8CPYAAAAJPersonal Site: https://sites.google.com/view/alexanderbatthyany/startViktor Frankl Institute Vienna: https://www.viktorfrankl.org/Threshold (2023): https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250782298/threshold/Psychology Today - Magic Mushrooms and Terminal Lucidity: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/consciousness-and-meaning-at-lifes-end/202607/magic-mushrooms-and-terminal-lucidityBatthyany & Greyson (2021), Spontaneous Remission of Dementia Before Death: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2021/04/terminal-lucidity-PC.pdfSKOOLWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutFOLLOW EVANhttps://x.com/evan_mcglTIMESTAMPS0:00:00 Trailer0:02:29 What Terminal Lucidity Actually Is0:05:33 Why He'd Rather Call It "Paradoxical Lucidity"0:06:01 "Call Your Grandma - She's Back Again"0:09:11 The Victorians Documented It, Then Medicine Stopped0:10:55 "We Saw It, But We Didn't Write It Down"0:12:58 Frankl's Rule: Treat Them As Fully Present0:17:35 What Brain Age Was She Speaking From?0:18:36 "It Was All As If In A Fog"0:21:11 The Wife Who Filmed It So People Would Believe Her0:25:40 The Art Historian Who Gave Back His Books0:30:27 Is It Comforting For Families, Or Crueller?0:32:02 The Three Shocks Every Family Goes Through0:38:05 450 Cases And Counting0:41:29 Does It Have Anything To Do With Death At All?0:45:12 Steven Pinker: "You're Seeing Figures In Clouds"0:47:10 "Everywhere And Nowhere"0:49:47 They Overdosed Her On Psilocybin. She Woke Up.0:51:37 She Got Her Sense Of Humour Back0:55:18 Dresden: The Brain Hadn't Changed At All0:56:37 "Some Of Our Personhood Is Platform Independent"1:02:40 Near-Death Experiences vs Paradoxical Lucidity1:05:52 Rick Strassman, DMT And Neuroprotection1:11:22 "How Can We Get Them Out?"1:20:20 When Vienna Gave Psychiatric Patients Malaria.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
#153 - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Does Recreational Heroin
lundi 7 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:14:11
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Carl Hart is a human drug scientist — the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia University and Chair of its Department of Psychology, who runs one of the very few laboratories on earth licensed to give people real doses of crack cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA. His volunteers live inside a sealed four-room lab for weeks at a time, originally built for NASA to study astronauts, with no contact with the outside world while he measures their sleep, their food intake and how much they speak. He started that work believing drugs were what had gone wrong in neighbourhoods like the one he grew up in. Thirty years of data refused to agree with him.
Expect to learn why there is no such thing as drug addiction in a rat, why "hard drugs" is a category the human body doesn't recognise, why he refuses to use the word "psychedelic", how one extra methyl group is the only difference between methamphetamine and the main ingredient in Adderall, why psychiatry still runs on a theory formalised in 1967 when only six neurotransmitters were known, what heroin actually feels like and why the real danger is constipation rather than overdose, why addiction tracks access rather than pharmacology, and much more…
SPONSORS
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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o
GUEST LINKS
Columbia Psychiatry Profile: https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/carl-hart-phd
#152 - Meet The Biophysicist Who Accidentally Discovered Telepathy
jeudi 3 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:38:04
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Luca Turin is a biophysicist who has spent thirty years arguing that the nose reads a molecule's vibrations rather than its shape, published in Nature at twenty-three, and co-wrote the definitive critical guide to perfume with his wife Tania Sanchez. The vibrational theory of olfaction was declared dead twice before he revived it, and he is still waiting for the one experiment that would settle it. His newest result has nothing to do with smell: fruit flies sealed in separate opaque wells, with no sight, sound or scent between them, coordinate their movement anyway — and the coordination vanishes the moment the plate is made of metal. This is a scientist who went looking for anaesthesia and found something that looks like insect telepathy.
Expect to learn why creating a smell stimulus is nothing like creating a colour, how a startup elicited smell sensations with ultrasound for the first time in history, why the only two chemical groups in the universe that share one vibration are also the only two that smell of rotten eggs, how a receptor could read vibrations with no lenses or prisms anywhere in your nose, why the famous "trillion smells" figure was a mathematical error, why nobody in pharmacology can predict what a drug will do once it binds, how Google Quantum AI's xenon question led to fruit flies, what happened when the plates were swapped for aluminium, why radio frequency would be the perfect brain-wide reward signal, and much more…
SPONSORS
Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants
GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Earl K Miller - Meet the MIT Neuroscientist Showing Brain Waves Are the Secret Engine Behind Consciousness: https://youtu.be/7OFb-NG3jIw
#151 - Meet the Greatest Lucid Dreaming Scientist You've Never Heard Of
Saison 2 · Épisode 151
lundi 31 août 2026 • Durée 01:19:08
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Karen Konkoly is a dream scientist who led the first study to hold a real-time, two-way conversation with a person inside a dream, putting maths problems to sleepers in REM and getting answers back through their eye movements. She is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cambridge Consciousness and Cognition Laboratory, completed her PhD in the Paller Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, and has spent her career building tools to engineer dreams — from targeted lucidity reactivation for narcolepsy nightmares to planting unsolved problems into REM sleep. She has also asked a dream character to swap bodies with her, and woken up inside it. This is the strangest conversation we have had on the channel.
Expect to learn how scientists prove someone is awake inside a dream, why you still cannot fly in your own dream even when you know it is a dream, what happened when Karen swapped bodies with a dream character, whether time really slows down while you sleep, why practising darts in a lucid dream works about as well as practising awake, what galantamine and acetylcholine actually do to REM sleep, the exact protocol for having your first lucid dream, why Karen no longer believes lucidity is the key to consciousness, and much more…
SPONSORS
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe
GS EPISODES MENTIONED
David Spiegel - World's Greatest Hypnosis Scientist Hijacks My Mind Live On Camera!: https://youtu.be/eCtRBZHIsgQ
GUEST LINKS
Personal Website: https://www.karenkonkoly.com/
Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM
Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA
Philip Ball - Philip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI & Life!: https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E
Philip Ball - Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://youtu.be/9SseGx0R0fY
Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE
Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o
GUEST LINKS
University of Toronto Faculty Profile: https://www.psych.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/john-vervaeke
Website: https://johnvervaeke.com/
X: https://x.com/vervaeke_john
YouTube (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis): https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaeke
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (book): https://johnvervaeke.com/books/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/
LISTEN ON
YouTube - https://youtu.be/jcMtjjeUV98
SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:54 The Meaning Crisis, Explained by a Cognitive Scientist
0:04:16 The Patterns in This Room Outnumber the Particles in the Universe
0:06:45 How Your Mind Ignores Almost Everything
0:09:09 "Dad, It's Relevance Realisation All The Way Down"
0:10:24 Noise Is Just Information Nobody Needs
0:15:33 Comparing a Human Mind to a Single Cell
0:18:01 Michael Levin's Cognitive Light Cone
0:19:49 The Cone of Caring
0:23:20 How Far Down Does Mind Actually Go?
0:24:15 Why a Tornado Isn't Alive
0:25:34 Pressing Michael Levin to Admit He's a Platonist
0:34:01 The Water Bottle Experiment
0:40:34 Where Levin Leaps From Patterns to Minds
0:48:12 The Problem With Symmetry Theories of Consciousness
0:55:03 Why LLMs Fall Apart on Open-Ended Problems
1:00:16 Obviousness Is Not a Physical Property
1:05:11 The Shark That Dies in the Sahara
1:10:49 What Consciousness Is Actually Doing
1:15:12 Are Neural Correlates a Dead End?
1:22:07 "We Should Stop Funding It"
GUEST LINKS
University of Southampton Profile: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5x27lw/professor-richard-watson
Personal Website: https://www.richardawatson.com
Natural Induction (Entropy, 2024, with Michael Levin): https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/9/765
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249
SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:43 The Assumptions Every Biologist Knows Are Wrong
0:03:53 "All of Life Is Cognitive"
0:06:58 Survival Is a Consequence, Not the Driver
0:09:32 How Cognition Could Come Before Natural Selection
0:14:03 Adaptation Isn't What Natural Selection Does
0:17:57 What a Sudoku Puzzle Teaches About Life
0:20:41 Masses, Springs and the Physics of Learning
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249
SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:10 Why You Can't Do Science Without Philosophy
0:04:54 "You're Doing Bad Philosophy and You Don't Know It"
0:06:26 The Band That Got Him Working With Joseph LeDoux
0:11:53 Why the Consciousness Chapter Is a Coin Flip
0:17:17 What a Higher-Order Theory Actually Says
0:20:43 The Two Kinds of Awareness
0:21:59 The Blurry Book That Taught Him About Experience
0:26:32 Consciousness as Awareness of Your Own Mind
0:27:08 LeDoux, the Amygdala and Where Fear Really Lives
0:33:06 "There Is No Unconscious Fear"
0:39:17 Two Famous Theories That Are Secretly the Same
0:40:15 Aphantasia as Evidence for Higher-Order Theory
0:42:57 The Speckled Hen That Broke the Seminar
0:44:48 Seven Spots, or Black on Black?
0:45:46 What Meditation Showed a Man With No Mind's Eye
0:49:38 You Might Be Having Experiences You Can't Reach
0:52:21 Ned Block's Overflow and the "Placeholder" Problem
0:55:36 India Solved This Before Descartes
1:02:26 Subjective Inflation, or "Fake Phenomenology"
1:03:38 Zapping the Prefrontal Cortex With TMS
1:06:13 The $3 Million Experiment Testing All of This
1:09:56 Quality Space Theory and Mental "Dabs of Paint"
1:22:08 Why You Can't Swap Your Red for My Green
.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM
Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/eNi-_2cOVtc
Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o
Bridging the Neuroscience and Physics of Time (with Carlo Rovelli): https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01976
LISTEN ON
YouTube - https://youtu.be/G2LaKtxUng0
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249
SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:01 The Brain Has No Central Clock
0:04:17 How Neural Population Clocks Work
0:05:40 Teaching Brain Tissue To Tell Time
0:06:57 Prediction Is Really About When
0:09:10 Even Bacteria Keep Time
0:10:27 Mental Time Travel Built Civilisation
0:11:39 Realising You'll Die Invented Religion
0:14:57 Squirrels Don't Actually Plan Ahead
0:18:19 Waking Up Before Your Alarm
0:23:29 Why Time Is Central To Consciousness
0:24:01 Block Universe vs Only Now
0:29:24 The Runner Who Lost Time
0:33:18 Why Marathons Destroy Time Perception
0:37:18 The Memories With No Timestamp
0:42:02 Your Brain Runs Many Clocks
0:43:31 AI Cannot Wait Ten Seconds
0:45:38 How Transformers Deleted Time
0:49:29 What If You Paused The Computer?
0:53:05 Could We Ever Build Conscious AI?
0:58:17 Arguing About Time With Carlo Rovelli
1:01:40 A Time Traveller Would Prove Me Wrong
1:07:05 You Can't Measure Time With Time
1:12:25 Which Theory Of Consciousness Is Right?
1:21:55 Why We Invented The Soul
.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
David Nichols - Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/6umTgXsW1lQ
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249
SKOOL
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:15 50 Years Chasing One Molecule
0:06:37 Huxley, Osmond and the Birth of "Psychedelic"
0:08:01 The Schizotoxin Hypothesis That Started It All
0:10:54 Finding DMT in Everyone, Not Just Patients
0:11:56 How the War on Drugs Killed the Research
0:16:39 The 40 Years of Research We Lost
0:18:36 "Have You Ever Taken It Yourself?"
0:19:20 Inside the Locked Psychedelic Cabinet
0:20:22 The Overabundance He Didn't Want to Waste
0:22:51 Why He Won't Describe What He Saw
0:23:38 Set, Setting and the Expectancy Problem
0:27:16 Dennis McKenna Has Never Seen a Machine Elf
0:28:31 "Machine Elf" Was a Marketing Term
0:30:40 The Tryptamine Family Tree Explained
0:34:21 Bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT and the Blood-Brain Barrier
0:38:36 DMT as a Working Neurotransmitter
0:41:34 "DMT Is the Missing Neurotransmitter"
0:44:56 You Have Two Brains - and the Gut Makes More
0:46:29 Pushing Back on Gallimore's Alien World
0:54:04 96% Say the Entity Was Conscious
0:57:52 Did the Caveman Experience an Alien?
0:59:07 "These Are Not Real Elves"
1:06:40 Are Some People Immune to DMT?
1:10:51 You Can't Build Tolerance to Your Own Neurotransmitter
1:15:46 The Receptors Hiding Inside Your Neurons
1:24:24 What a Psychedelic Overdose Actually Is
.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
Personal Website: https://drcarlhart.com/
X: https://x.com/drcarlhart
Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Use_for_Grown-Ups
High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Price_(book)
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:16 Why Human Rights Became His Whole Mission
0:03:45 "I Believed the Bullshit About Drugs"
0:07:42 The Brain-Imaging Studies That Prove Nothing
0:10:32 Why "Hard Drugs" Is a Made-Up Category
0:12:42 There Is No Such Thing as Addiction in a Rat
0:14:18 Put Cocaine on Your Gum and See What Happens
0:15:50 Rat Models for Autism, ADHD and Depression
0:18:03 How Many Hoops to Give a Human Crack Cocaine
0:20:38 "Psychedelic" Is a Political Word, Not a Real Thing
0:22:40 Why the One-Receptor Story Is Bullshit
0:23:56 Psychiatry Is Still Running on a 1967 Theory
0:31:17 One Methyl Group: Meth vs Adderall
0:34:41 The Lab NASA Built for Astronauts
0:37:45 The Phenomenology Gap Nobody Studies
0:39:01 "I Was a Virgin to These Drugs, And Not Even Curious"
0:44:14 What Heroin Actually Feels Like
0:47:04 The Real Danger Is Constipation
0:52:47 The Overdose Myth He's Trying to Destroy
0:55:39 Education, Not Harm Reduction
0:58:40 Addiction Isn't About Drugs, It's About Access
1:01:38 Not Whether to Legalise, But How
1:05:30 Dublin's Cocaine Problem, Evan Pushes Back
1:06:46 "That's Quite Arrogant of You"
1:09:05 The Same Argument That Delayed Emancipation
1:12:50 "We Put People on the Moon. This Is Not Complicated."
.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fgXXdQYAAAAJ
Wi-Fly Project: https://wi-fly.eu/
X: https://x.com/LucaTurin
Substack: https://lucaturin.substack.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lucaturin
SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:20 Biophysicists Are Dreamers, Biologists Are Doomed
0:07:07 The Startup That Triggered Smells With Ultrasound
0:12:22 The Rotten-Egg Coincidence That Convinced Him
0:18:34 What The Receptor Is Actually Reading
0:19:54 Electron Tunnelling, Explained Simply
0:23:33 The Trillion-Smells Figure Was A Maths Error
0:28:21 What Perfumers Perceive That You Don't
0:32:14 Why Every Drug Receptor Might Be Electrical
0:33:12 The Mystery Nobody Admits: Drug Efficacy
0:39:28 "Cascade" Is A Word That Masks Ignorance
0:44:04 The Receptor As A Transistor
0:48:40 Google Quantum AI And The Xenon Puzzle
0:52:24 Two Years Of Work, A Definite Maybe
0:53:55 30 Flies Freeze Like The Guards At Buckingham Palace
0:55:28 One Fly Per Well, No Way To Communicate
0:56:17 To My Total Astonishment, They Coordinate
0:58:45 Metal Plates Kill The Signal
0:59:36 The Wi-Fly: A Radio Network For Flies
1:11:26 Radical Pairs: How A Fly Could Listen
1:16:34 What Is The Brain's Reward Signal?
1:19:59 Standing Waves And The Binding Problem
1:23:58 Could Humans Ever Do This?
1:27:46 Ramanujan And Latent Abilities
1:36:16 Giving Fruit Flies DMT
.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=teYHEFIAAAAJ&hl=en
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249
SKOOL
Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl
TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:03:18 What Lucid Dreaming Actually Is
0:05:37 Wake Back To Bed: The 4am Method
0:06:40 Why You Still Can't Fly In Your Own Dream
0:09:20 How You Prove Someone Is Lucid In A Dream
0:11:53 Are The Sleep Stages Even Real?
0:15:28 When A Dream Dissolves But You Don't Wake Up
0:19:19 The Reality Check You Can Do Tonight
0:21:00 Does Time Run Slower Inside A Dream?
0:24:45 Trying And Failing To Become Her Dog
0:26:10 Swapping Bodies With A Dream Character
0:27:51 Is Lucidity A Glitch In Consciousness?
0:33:37 Hyperphantasia And Maladaptive Daydreaming
0:37:53 Practising Darts While You're Asleep
0:41:52 When Lucid Dreaming Is A Bad Idea
0:46:09 Why A Giraffe Can't Appear While You're Awake
0:49:54 Galantamine, Acetylcholine And Dream Drugs
0:52:17 The Squat Experiment
0:58:38 The Full Protocol, Step By Step
1:04:55 What This Teaches Us About Consciousness
1:09:15 Who Are Your Dream Characters?
1:12:55 "You're Not You"
1:14:41 Hypnosis, David Spiegel And Lucid Dreaming
1:18:20 What She's Working On Next
.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
