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Giants Shoulder

Evan McGloughlin

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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  • 49 episodes
  • a few times a week
  • Avg 1 hr 30 min
  • English

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  • Thursday · 1 hr 51 min

    #172 - Meet The Author Rewriting NDE's, DMT Entities & Consciousness

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Anthony Peake is a consciousness author and independent researcher whose book Is There Life After Death? has sold more than 60,000 copies worldwide. For 25 years he has studied near-death experiences, déjà vu and precognition, and he co-edited a clinicians' handbook on near-death experiences highly commended by the British Medical Association. His theory, Cheating the Ferryman, proposes that the dying brain stretches subjective time so far that death never arrives, and that we relive our lives guided by a hidden second self he calls the daemon. Expect to learn: - The Real Death Experience: why Peake thinks the dying brain replays your whole life - Déjà Vu as Memory: and why 30% of people say they've never had it - The Daemon: the hidden second self he says has lived your life before - Isn't It Just the Subconscious?: the hardest objection, put to him directly - DMT Entities: the mantis being that told the same man off twice SPONSORS Get Unlimited Research Agent Usage with SciSpace (CGIANT for 35% off Advanced or Max plans) - https://scispace.com/?via=crgiant GS EPISODES MENTIONED David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o Stuart Hameroff - Meet The Anesthesiologist Who Started The Quantum Consciousness Revolution: https://youtu.be/FG3C5nQXvZs Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA Donald Hoffman - Donald Hoffman: "Consciousness Within Space-Time Is Doomed": https://youtu.be/dOAo04b6jCQ David Spiegel - World's Greatest Hypnosis Scientist Makes My Arm Levitate Live On Camera!: https://youtu.be/eCtRBZHIsgQ Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc David Nichols - Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/6umTgXsW1lQ GUEST LINKS Website: https://www.anthonypeake.com/ Substack: https://anthonypeake.substack.com/ Cheating the Ferryman (book): https://www.simonandschuster.ca/books/Cheating-the-Ferryman/Anthony-Peake/9781398814868 LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/6mAOT2PGHBM 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 0:02:34 Asking the Biggest Questions About Consciousness 0:03:52 The Migraine That Started It All 0:05:13 Cheating the Ferryman: Why the Dying Brain Stops Time 0:07:13 Near-Death vs Real Death: The Bohmian IMAX 0:08:23 The Daemon: Your Hidden Game Player 0:15:23 Is Déjà Vu a Memory of a Previous Life? 0:21:04 Seeing Half a Second Into the Future 0:25:59 Why 30% of People Never Get Déjà Vu 0:26:53 Split Brains: Two Selves in One Skull 0:33:09 Why the Being of Light Can Look Like Elvis 0:39:40 We Never Die: Time Dilation at the Point of Death 0:48:34 Bohm, Holograms and an Information Universe 0:53:50 Groundhog Day: Living Your Life Again and Again 0:59:48 Could Evolution Ever Produce a Daemon? 1:03:17 The Alzheimer's Patient Who Knew Too Much 1:07:20 Can We Prove the Daemon Exists? 1:18:26 Quantum Immortality and the Voice That Saves Lives 1:22:13 Isn't the Daemon Just Your Subconscious? 1:30:15 The Brain That Lit Up as a Man Died 1:34:44 DMT Entities and the Mantis That Came Back 1:38:34 Creating a Ghost: Thought-Forms and Tulpas 1:41:30 The UFOs Only the Camera Could See .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • Monday · 2 hr 2 min

    #171 - Meet The Greatest Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Dalibor Sames is a Columbia University chemist who has spent more than twenty years on a single molecule: ibogaine. His lab built the fluorescent tools that let you watch neurotransmitters move through living brain tissue — and used them to show that ibogaine works nowhere a drug is supposed to work. When they screened it against the 40 to 50 receptors every psychoactive drug hits, the result came back empty. Then he flew to Mexico, took it himself for thirty-six hours, and came back with a new theory of pharmacology. Expect to learn: - The Screen That Came Back Empty: cannabis hits CB1, LSD hits serotonin receptors, ibogaine binds nothing they tested - The Stimulant That Lowers Dopamine: every other stimulant raises it, and ibogaine still doesn't cause parkinsonism - Molecular Wizardry: how one molecule refolds proteins your own genes got wrong - Thirty-Six Hours: his account of the molecule drawing its own atomic structure and teaching him chemistry - Matrix Pharmacology: the theory that ibogaine reads a living system from the inside 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 Dalibor Sames - Meet The Greatest Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/K9whp_wtCoc Deborah Mash - Meet The Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist Who First Unravelled Its Big Mystery: https://youtu.be/z7eRtXV6ptA GUEST LINKS Columbia Chemistry faculty page: https://www.chem.columbia.edu/content/dalibor-sames Sames Lab: https://www.samesgroup.org/professor-dalibor-sames Matrix pharmacology / transporter paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.04.641351 Oxa-Iboga paper (Nature Communications, 2024): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51856-y Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals: https://www.gilgameshpharmaceutical.com/ Beond Ibogaine Clinic (where he took ibogaine): https://beondibogaine.com LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/R8zZ3x4FIas 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 Twenty Years Chasing One Molecule 0:05:36 Why He Finally Took Ibogaine Himself 0:07:17 Thirty-Six Hours Of "Chapters" 0:09:42 The Molecule Drew Its Own Structure 0:17:20 Day Two: The Download Kept Coming 0:24:55 Lucid And Tripping At The Same Time 0:29:17 300 Trip Reports: The Common Themes 0:33:03 It Finds The One Thing You're Hiding 0:35:39 Telephone Booths To Your Future Self 0:40:25 Noribogaine, The Metabolite Nobody Tracks 0:46:30 The Heart Risk That Kills People 0:49:21 Now We Break Everyone's Brain 0:53:03 The Receptor Screen Came Back Empty 0:56:28 The Opioid Paradox 1:05:24 Matrix Pharmacology, Explained 1:07:28 Ion Channels And The Nicotinic Pore 1:17:14 The Transporters: SERT And VMAT2 1:25:06 The Result That Drove His Students Crazy 1:31:04 Molecular Wizardry: Refolding Broken Proteins 1:35:53 Don't Call It A Dirty Molecule 1:41:21 A Stimulant That Lowers Dopamine 1:48:29 A Molecule That Reads The Living Matrix 1:49:55 The Ibogaine Genome Project: Billions Needed 2:00:34 The Man In Aspen Who Walked Again .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • November 5 · 1 hr 30 min

    #170 - Meet The Man Who Was Declared Dead For 47 Minutes

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Vinney Tolman is a near-death experiencer, the co-author of The Light After Death and co-founder of the nonprofit Living God's Light. In 2003, aged 25, a supplement twenty times stronger than he realised left him collapsed in a restaurant bathroom. By his account, paramedics declared him dead and zipped him into a body bag, and a rookie medic got his heart beating again 47 minutes later. He says he watched all of it from the ceiling. Expect to learn: - The Body Bag: why a rookie medic broke protocol and unzipped it - Three Heartbeats: what dying felt like, from the loud pop to weightlessness - Hearing Their Thoughts: the medics' minds, and the moment he realised the body was his - The Guide On The Big Screen: the spirit guide he says he recognised in a town-history slideshow six months later - Endogenous DMT: whether the brain's own psychedelic could explain any of it SPONSORS Get Unlimited AI Research Agent Usage with SciSpace (CGIANT for 35% off Advanced or Max plans) - https://scispace.com/?via=crgiant GS EPISODES MENTIONED Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc David Nichols - Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/6umTgXsW1lQ Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA GUEST LINKS Living God's Light: https://livinggodslight.org/ The Light After Death (2022): https://thelightafterdeath.com/ Living God's Light on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LivingGodsLight Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vinneytolman/ International Association for Near-Death Studies: https://iands.org/ LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/kmH6LxEZle4 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 0:02:38 Who Is Vinney Tolman? 0:03:34 The Supplement That Was 20 Times Too Strong 0:04:55 Pronounced Dead And Put In A Body Bag 0:06:53 The Rookie Who Broke Protocol 0:08:14 Watching His Whole Life Up To Age 25 0:09:35 "No Son, I'm Not God" 0:13:14 Earth Is A Grad School 0:17:30 What Leaving The Body Actually Felt Like 0:20:55 Three Heartbeats, Then Nothing 0:24:16 Feeling Sorry For "Whoever The Dead Guy Was" 0:25:29 Hearing Every Medic's Thoughts 0:26:55 Tracking Down The Rookie Medic 0:33:28 The Moment He Realised The Body Was His 0:37:36 "We Are Not Our Bodies" 0:43:48 Did He Look For A Scientific Explanation? 0:52:09 Do All Near-Death Experiences Look The Same? 0:54:38 The Being That Asks If You Want To Live 0:58:37 His Guide's Name, And A Photo Six Months Later 1:04:34 Is It Just DMT? 1:10:08 A 12-Hour Meditation And Three Letters: DMT 1:12:06 Evan Pushes Back On Endogenous DMT 1:19:26 Watching Them Find His Slot In Time 1:20:50 Ripping Out His Own Breathing Tube 1:27:19 "Don't Believe What You See In This World" .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • November 2 · 2 hr 5 min

    #169 - Top Cognitive Scientist: Salvia, DMT Entities, Ibogaine & Lucid Dreaming

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Anderson Todd is a cognitive scientist who studies consciousness from the inside. He teaches cognitive science at the University of Toronto, is Assistant Director of its Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Lab, works as a registered psychotherapist, and sits somewhere between Carl Jung and artificial intelligence. Salvia once destroyed his universe. An hour later, he went back in. Expect to learn: - The Salvia Trip: why the beings he met tore the universe apart to teach him respect - Bad Trips Are Good Trips: how salvia's kappa opioid effect may reorganise the mind, and its surprising antidepressant effect - The Dream Herb: the African plant that does nothing awake but supercharges your dreams - The Spider God: the LSD trip at 17 that ended in a lifelong pact - You Are Not One Person: why the entities people meet may be split-off parts of their own minds SPONSORS Check out Scispace (JNGIANT20: 20% off the monthly plan or JNGIANT40: 40% off the annual plan) - https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulder GS EPISODES MENTIONED David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o David Spiegel - World's Greatest Hypnosis Scientist Makes My Arm Levitate Live On Camera!: https://youtu.be/eCtRBZHIsgQ Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM John Vervaeke - No.1 Biopsychist: Michael Levin's Platonic Minds & Cognition All The Way Down: https://youtu.be/jcMtjjeUV98 GUEST LINKS University of Toronto Profile: https://www.uc.utoronto.ca/staff-faculty-profile/anderson-todd YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AndersonTodd LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/rvPqc7isZ0E 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 0:02:05 Somewhere Between Carl Jung and AI 0:04:15 Why Cognitive Science Is the Heir to Alchemy 0:13:36 The Salvia Trip That Destroyed the Universe 0:19:50 "We Destroyed the Universe to Teach You a Lesson" 0:22:10 An Hour Later, He Went Back In 0:23:26 "You Have Attended Your Own Funeral" 0:28:37 Why Bad Trips Can Be Good Trips 0:32:26 Salvia's Surprising Antidepressant Effect 0:45:48 Turning Into a Japanese Rose Garden 0:48:23 Silene Capensis, the Lucid Dream Herb 0:53:58 Why Dreams Aren't Random Noise 0:59:59 90% of DMT Users Meet Entities 1:07:33 "I Have an Arrangement With a Spider" 1:13:31 Split Brains and Multiple Selves 1:18:55 Hypnotised Into Forgetting How to Read 1:19:39 Evan's Arm Rises Under Hypnosis 1:24:53 One Session, 30 Years of Smoking Gone 1:31:48 Are the Entities Out There, or Inside You? 1:38:57 Why Do So Many People Meet Mantises? 1:42:35 Why Scientists Hide Their Weirdest Experiences 1:49:55 The Third Man: Explorers' Invisible Companion 1:52:54 The Giraffe Liver Dream Drug 2:00:03 How Michael Levin Broke His Materialism 2:02:40 Taking On Dennett: "The Most Primary Data I Have" .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • October 29 · 1 hr 11 min

    #168 - Meet The Scientist Growing Mini Brains In A Lab

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Thomas Hartung is the toxicologist who helped pioneer organoid intelligence: growing human brain tissue in a dish and wiring it up to see whether it can learn. He directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, and before that ran the European Commission's centre for validating alternatives to animal tests. His lab grows half-millimetre brain organoids by the tens of thousands. They can get better at a simple game. By the next day, they've forgotten all of it. Expect to learn: - The Pee Question: yes, you can grow a mini brain from the few cells in your urine - The Missing Cell: why organoids lacked the brain's immune cells, and why memory depends on them - The Overnight Wipe: they improve within a training session, then forget everything by the next day - The Bored Brain: why neurons in a dish are "longing for input" - The Ethics Line: could a cluster of brain tissue ever suffer, and who gets to decide? 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 Brett Kagan - Meet The Neuroscientist Creating New Forms of Sentient Biological Intelligence: https://youtu.be/TXlJc4tu1F8 Karl Friston - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://youtu.be/R-IZOFs4qmY Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM GUEST LINKS Johns Hopkins Faculty Profile: https://hub.jhu.edu/experts/profiles/thomas-hartung/ Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT): https://caat.jhsph.edu/ Organoid Intelligence (OI): The New Frontier in Biocomputing (Frontiers in Science, 2023): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235/full Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (Field Chief Editor): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/4xNxOXNCG-E 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 0:02:11 Why Animal Testing Is Outdated Technology 0:04:13 What A Brain Organoid Actually Is 0:06:51 Can You Grow A Brain From Your Urine? 0:10:48 Tens Of Thousands Of Snowflake-Sized Mini Brains 0:11:54 The Brain's Missing Immune Cells 0:16:23 How Organoid Intelligence Began 0:18:21 The Neurons That Learned To Play Pong 0:21:50 Punished With White Noise 0:24:38 They Learn, Then Forget Everything Overnight 0:26:05 The Holy Grail: Long-Term Memory 0:29:22 Why Trained Behaviour Isn't Intelligence (Yet) 0:32:23 "Yeah, They're Thinking" 0:35:08 Testing Drugs On Mini Brains 0:37:00 A $15 Million Bet On Alzheimer's 0:40:56 A House Fly's Worth Of Human Neurons 0:43:43 The Frankenstein Problem 0:46:20 "We Could Probably Make A Dragon" 0:51:07 "Can I Talk To Them?" No. 0:54:24 Animal Testing Is Losing The Public 0:57:37 Could A Mini Brain Ever Suffer? 0:58:53 "These Organoids Will Never Be Cuddled" 1:02:20 Your Brain vs A $600M Supercomputer 1:03:58 Ask ChatGPT, Get Eaten By The Tiger 1:10:00 What Comes Next For Organoid Intelligence .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • October 26 · 1 hr 18 min

    #167 - No.1 Plant Neurobiologist: Plant Conciousness, Root Brains & The Sentient Cell

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join František Baluška is the cell biologist who helped turn plant intelligence from a fringe idea into a field. At the University of Bonn he co-organised the first Symposium on Plant Neurobiology, and his lab showed that the same anaesthetics that knock humans out stop a Venus flytrap from snapping shut. With Arthur Reber and William Miller he co-wrote The Sentient Cell, which argues that cognition didn't begin with brains, but with the very first cell. Expect to learn: - The Anaesthetised Flytrap: why plants go under with the same drugs that knock us out - The Addicted Ants: how acacia trees hook their bodyguards so they refuse any other food - The Root Brain: Darwin's idea that every root tip acts like a mini brain - The Self-Assembling Animal: separate every cell of a hydra and it rebuilds itself - The Lost Cancer Cell: why tumours may be cells that have lost their map of the body SPONSORS Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe GS EPISODES MENTIONED Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM William B. Miller Jr. - Meet The Scientist Proving Your Cells Are Conscious and Intelligent: https://youtu.be/xrV5oGyyKSI Denis Noble - Denis Noble: Evolution Has Purpose, Cell Consciousness & Why The Last 70 Years of Genetics Is Wrong: https://youtu.be/xqw-DaWVK24 Philip Ball - Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://youtu.be/9SseGx0R0fY GUEST LINKS University of Bonn (IZMB) Group Page: https://www.izmb.uni-bonn.de/en/plant-cell-biology-1/ag-baluska The Sentient Cell (2023): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-sentient-cell-9780198873211 Anaesthetics Stop Plant Organ Movements (Annals of Botany, 2018): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6215046/ Senomic View of the Cell: Senome versus Genome (2018): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6132427/ The Third Way of Evolution: https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/people/view/frantisek-baluska LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/QbBnYnm4OTg 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 0:02:26 From Plant Roots To The Very First Cell 0:05:37 Plants vs Humans: Different In Scale, Not Kind 0:08:59 How Plants Turn Caterpillars Into Cannibals 0:10:08 The Tree That Gets Ants Addicted 0:13:26 Blind Biochemistry Or Real Cognition? 0:15:22 Do Cells Choose Their Own Mutations? 0:19:37 The Senome: The Cell's Missing Layer 0:23:55 "What Is Living Can Be Anaesthetised. The Rest Is Dead." 0:27:39 Wounded Plants Anaesthetise Themselves 0:29:02 How Do You Know A Daffodil Is Knocked Out? 0:36:03 The Field Science Tried To Shut Down 0:37:25 Darwin's Root-Brain Hypothesis 0:38:55 Roots That Swarm Like Birds 0:40:51 Underground Plant Wars 0:41:31 The Fungal Internet 0:47:10 Could AI Let Us Talk To Plants? 0:50:00 Cell Sentience vs Human Consciousness 0:53:10 Why Your Sense Of Self Is An Illusion 0:57:03 The Animal That Rebuilds Itself From Loose Cells 1:01:46 Your Membrane Traces Back To The First Cell 1:05:52 Heart Transplants And Personality Changes 1:10:31 Cancer Cells Have Lost The Map 1:15:15 "The Gene Outside The Cell Is Nothing" 1:16:47 Will Michael Levin Win A Nobel? .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • October 22 · 1 hr 9 min

    #166 - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Some People Have No Inner Speech

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Johanne Nedergaard is the cognitive scientist who, with Gary Lupyan, named anendophasia: the absence of an inner voice. An assistant professor at Aarhus University and a 2024 Aarhus University PhD prize winner, she ran the first experiments testing what changes when the voice in your head goes quiet. The answer was far less than anyone expected. Expect to learn: - The Missing Voice: why some people report no inner speech at all, and why nobody noticed - The Rhyme Test: they struggled with word lists and rhymes, until they said the words out loud - Mind Over Muscle: jam someone's inner voice and they push less hard on the bike - Heart Talk: raising your heart rate while lying perfectly still, using only words - The Control Question: why mental health tracks whether you can switch your inner voice off, not whether it's kind SPONSORS Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe GS EPISODES MENTIONED Russell Hurlburt - No. 1 Inner Experience Expert: Inner Monologue, Aphantasia and How Your Mind Lies to You: https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg Adam Zeman - The Blind Mind’s Eye: How Aphantasia Is Rewriting Consciousness ! Dr Adam Zeman: https://youtu.be/SgA2up6-Bok Alex Hutchinson - Alex Hutchinson: The Lie That Unlocked Human Limits, Tricking Perception & Aphantasia!: https://youtu.be/YqqU4ckq8s8 GUEST LINKS Aarhus University Profile: https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/au651723@cc.au.dk Personal Site: https://johannenedergaard.github.io Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/johanneskned.bsky.social Nedergaard & Lupyan (2024), Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice: https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241243004 Nedergaard et al. (2023), Mind Over Body: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2023.102472 Wallentin et al. (2025), Heart Talk: https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.70138 LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/a81yY0k4x78 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 0:02:02 What Is Anendophasia? 0:04:19 The Viral Threads That Started It All 0:05:57 Four Experiments on People With No Inner Voice 0:07:12 Saying the Words Out Loud Closed the Gap 0:14:10 Can You Trust Your Own Introspection? 0:17:27 Detecting Inner Speech From the Outside 0:19:56 How Many People Have No Inner Voice? 0:20:54 Where Your Inner Voice Comes From 0:23:24 Is It Genetic? 0:26:06 Unconscious Inner Speech and the Aphantasia Parallel 0:30:58 Deaf People Sign to Themselves Silently 0:33:25 What Your Self-Talk Reveals About Your Sport 0:35:46 Jam Your Inner Voice and You Push Less Hard 0:43:45 Raising Your Heart Rate With Words Alone 0:47:12 Positive vs Negative Self-Talk in Sport 0:52:55 What Silent Minds Reveal About Thinking 0:56:13 Mental Health Is About Control, Not Content 1:02:23 Psychedelics and the Inner Voice 1:03:51 Can You Train an Inner Voice? 1:07:25 They Never Rehearse Conversations .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • October 19 · 2 hr 14 min

    #165 - Donald Hoffman: "Consciousness Within Space-Time Is Doomed"

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Donald Hoffman is the cognitive scientist whose own maths told him reality isn't what it seems. Around 1986, after seven years modelling perception, the equations said we render the world on the fly, and he has been recovering ever since. Now Professor Emeritus at UC Irvine, he has founded the Trace Institute to rebuild physics from conscious observers, starting outside spacetime. Its first collaboration, with Andrew Gallimore, asks whether DMT entities are glimpses beyond the headset. Expect to learn: - The Trace: the 121-year-old maths behind every observer window - Zero For Trillions: why no theory of consciousness explains a single experience - The Nose Test: why seeing your own nose shows how restricted your headset is - The DMT Experiment: passing information through an entity under controlled conditions - Mach 40: what UFOs might look like to someone with the headset's source code SPONSORS Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Join the Outskill AI Mastery Sprint (Free This Weekend) - https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2 GS EPISODES MENTIONED Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA Michael Graziano - Is This Greatest Consciousness Theory You’ve Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/ZnasmLpY5_8 David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o Karl Friston - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://youtu.be/R-IZOFs4qmY GUEST LINKS Trace Institute Profile: https://traceinstitute.org/people/donald-hoffman/ Trace Institute Website: https://www.traceinstitute.org/ Trace Institute YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TraceInstitute X: https://x.com/donalddhoffman UC Irvine: https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ The Case Against Reality (2019): https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393254693 Trace × Andrew Gallimore (DMT research): https://traceinstitute.org/collaborations/gallimore/ LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/dOAo04b6jCQ 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 0:02:45 The Biggest Unsolved Problem In Science 0:05:38 Physicists Say Spacetime Is Doomed 0:11:03 Dennett, Graziano And The Illusion Of Consciousness 0:14:35 What Is A Trace? Markov Chains Made Simple 0:22:23 The Discovery That Founded The Trace Institute 0:26:10 Recursive Trace Logic: How Observers Become Agents 0:31:27 The CCTV Metaphor For Reality 0:37:01 Why There's Always A Nose In Your Vision 0:41:08 How Big Is Reality Beyond The Interface? 0:43:10 What "Consciousness Is Fundamental" Actually Means 0:52:43 Consciousness Science Has Explained Zero Experiences 0:58:03 Does Your Consciousness Belong To You? 1:01:57 If Consciousness Is One, Why Isn't Telepathy Common? 1:08:16 "I Have No Neurons" 1:11:13 The Maths That Slapped Him In 1986 1:20:04 Andrew Gallimore And The DMT Entity Experiment 1:26:34 The Swami Who Showed Zero Powers 1:32:08 The DMT Mantis And Why Reports Are So Consistent 1:37:28 Are DMT Entities Real, Or Just Icons? 1:46:35 Nine Conjectures To Rebuild All Of Physics 1:49:29 UFOs At Mach 40 1:50:19 Neuroscience As Headset Engineering 1:57:13 Hacking The Source Code Of Reality 2:04:28 AI Is "Dumber Than Cucumbers" .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • October 15 · 1 hr 37 min

    #164 - Meet The Scientist Who Thinks Aliens Are Actually Humans From The Future

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Michael Masters is the biological anthropologist who thinks the grey aliens might be us. A professor at Montana Technological University, he studies how the human skull, face and eyes evolved over six million years, and has excavated at a 3.5-million-year-old hominin site in South Africa. His extratempestrial hypothesis argues that the beings described in UFO encounters are our own descendants, travelling back in time to study their evolutionary past. He says it's falsifiable, just not in his lifetime. Expect to learn: - The Brazilian Farmer: the 1950s abduction that ended in sex with a near-human woman - The Earlier Cases: the abduction reports that predate Betty and Barney Hill - Brain Up, Face Back: why six million years of skull evolution point towards the greys - The Gamete Problem: why our descendants might come back for our sperm and eggs - Falsifiable By Time: why he'll be "long dead" before anyone knows if he's right 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 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 GUEST LINKS Montana Tech Faculty Profile: https://mtech.edu/arts-sciences/faculty/michael-masters/index.html X: https://x.com/MorphoTime Website: https://idflyobj.com/ Identified Flying Objects (2019): https://www.leighbureau.com/books/identified-flying-objects The Extratempestrial Model (2022): https://www.leighbureau.com/books/the-extratempestrial-model Lomas, Case & Masters (2024), The Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis: https://doi.org/10.29202/phil-cosm/33/3 LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/FRFT3PeiWwk 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 0:02:26 The Skull Scientist Who Studies UFOs 0:03:46 "They Could Be Us From The Future" 0:07:21 The Book On The Shelf That Started It All 0:09:10 Whitley Strieber And Communion 0:10:49 Abductees Who Never Told Their Own Families 0:17:13 The Archetypal Abduction Story 0:19:38 The Nimitz: 80,000ft In Under Two Seconds 0:20:37 The Farmer Who Had Sex With An Alien 0:22:22 "I Just Floated Right Through The Ceiling" 0:24:06 Did Sci-Fi Invent Alien Abductions? 0:29:15 DMT Entities, Machine Elves And UFOs 0:37:32 The 2017 Story That Broke UFOs Open 0:42:08 "The Disc-Shaped Craft Are The Time Machine" 0:44:39 Why The Greys Are Built Like Hominins 0:47:26 Can You Really Fast-Forward Evolution? 0:49:30 Brain Up, Face Back: 6 Million Years Of Skulls 0:56:04 Are We Just Projecting Human Faces? 1:00:13 How Far In The Future Are They From? 1:03:23 Why Would We Evolve To Look Like That? 1:06:51 Falling Sperm Counts And The Gamete Mystery 1:15:01 How Do You Falsify Time-Travelling Aliens? 1:22:27 Teaching A University Class On UFOs 1:30:13 Is The US Government Hiding Something Huge? 1:32:40 Keeping UFOs Quiet Through Grad School .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • October 12 · 1 hr 23 min

    #163 - Meet The Greatest Near-Death-Experience Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Janice Holden is a near-death-experience researcher who designed the first hospital experiment to catch consciousness outside the body, edits the Journal of Near-Death Studies and spent 31 years on the University of North Texas faculty. For nearly 40 years she has tested one claim: that patients whose hearts have stopped can see the room from above. Surgeons have corroborated some of those details. No controlled study has caught one yet. Expect to learn: - The Leg In The Yellow Bag: an anaesthetised patient described an amputation in the next operating room - The Post-it Notes: a heart patient saw a detail only his surgeon would know - The Hidden-Target Experiment: pictures hidden near hospital ceilings, visible only from above - The Life Review: reliving every moment of your life as the people you affected - DMT Vs Near-Death: why the brain may interpret reality rather than create it SPONSORS Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe GS EPISODES MENTIONED Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o Karl Friston - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://youtu.be/R-IZOFs4qmY Marjorie Woollacott - Neuroscientist: "Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness" — NDEs, Telepathy and Terminal Lucidity: https://youtu.be/mDWtmfmIUHA GUEST LINKS Website: https://www.janholden.com The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0313358648 Journal of Near-Death Studies: https://www.janholden.com/jnds IANDS: https://iands.org Articles: https://www.janholden.com/copy-of-articles LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/RAXr5ZavLk4 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 0:02:15 From Doctoral Student To 40 Years Of Near-Death Research 0:03:38 How Resuscitation Created The Near-Death Experience 0:09:06 What Actually Happens During A Near-Death Experience 0:11:03 Moving At The Speed Of Thought 0:11:41 The Tunnel And The City Of Light 0:13:18 The Life Review: Feeling What Everyone Else Felt 0:14:55 "It's Not Your Time": Why People Come Back 0:19:27 Why Near-Death Experiences Aren't Just Dreams 0:21:09 The Woman Who Watched Her Own Surgery 0:27:11 The Post-it Notes A Dead Patient Saw 0:32:31 The Doctors Who Corroborated These Cases 0:33:39 The Harvard Neurosurgeon Who Changed His Mind 0:37:38 Why "False Memory" Doesn't Explain It 0:40:08 The Patient Who Floated Into The CPR Training Room 0:45:05 Hiding Pictures On Hospital Ceilings 0:49:35 Seven Studies, No Hits Yet 0:53:32 Is Humanity Ready For Proof? 0:58:08 DMT Vs Near-Death Experiences 1:06:35 Does The Brain Create Reality Or Interpret It? 1:10:27 Consciousness Before Birth And After Death 1:14:47 Why Don't We See This All The Time? 1:17:30 Karma And The Afterlife In Southeast Asia .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • October 8 · 1 hr 11 min

    #162 - Meet The Scientist Who Says We've Gotten Cancer Completely Wrong

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Carlos Sonnenschein is Professor of Integrative Physiology and Pathobiology at Tufts University School of Medicine. With Ana Soto, he developed the tissue organisation field theory of cancer: the idea that a tumour begins not in a rogue cell, but in the breakdown of the tissue around it. For fifty years he has argued that cancer research has been looking one level too low. Here he explains why the mutations we find in tumours may be the wreckage, not the cause. Expect to learn: - The default state: why every cell's natural tendency is to proliferate - Growth factors: why he argued they don't exist, and why people laughed - Mutations without cancer: why he says no gene has been shown to cause a cancer - Targeted therapy: why he believes the target was never really there - Cellular agency: how life, proliferation and motility fit together 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 GUEST LINKS Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VmTCfroAAAAJ IEA Nantes Fellow Profile: https://www.iea-nantes.fr/en/fellows/carlos-sonnenschein Biological Purpose Project: https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/people/carlos-sonnenschein ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos-Sonnenschein An Integrative Approach Toward Biology, Organisms, and Cancer (2018): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29119499 LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/AypMhvhWwjg 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 0:02:26 From Paediatrics to Cancer Research 0:05:23 The Oestrogen Paradox 0:08:43 Proliferation Is the Default State of Every Cell 0:12:27 Inhibitors of Inhibitors 0:14:06 "Growth Factors Don't Exist" 0:15:31 The Somatic Mutation Theory 0:17:41 The Society of Cells and the Tissue Theory of Cancer 0:21:44 Stars and Dogs: Funding a Minority View 0:23:49 Teaching Cancer Through Genetics 0:25:01 How Does Tissue Keep Cells in Check? 0:26:04 Metastasis 0:28:34 Prostate Cancer and Spontaneous Regression 0:30:38 The Cost of Cancer Treatment 0:31:49 Melanoma, UV and the Standard Model 0:32:24 Mutations Without Cancer 0:35:17 No Gene Causes Cancer: BRCA1, p53 and RAS 0:37:00 Why Targeted Therapy Isn't Targeted 0:38:03 When Treatment Causes Cancer 0:40:39 What Does Genome Sequencing Tell You? 0:42:24 Why Does Cancer Run in Families? 0:45:41 Trauma, Healing and Tissue Robustness 0:47:59 A Theory of Organisms 0:50:59 What Is Life? 0:52:18 Economics Is a Branch of Biology 0:53:36 Cellular Agency 0:58:36 Defining Life: Proliferation and Motility 1:01:36 When Did Cells Become Agents? 1:04:49 The Future of Cancer Research 1:09:52 Final Thoughts .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • October 5 · 1 hr

    #161 - Meet The Psychonaut Who Survived Extended-State DMT

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Alexander Beiner is the writer who volunteered as a guinea pig for the world's first extended-state DMT trial. At Imperial College London, he was one of eleven people kept on a continuous DMT drip for thirty minutes. He is a co-Executive Director of Breaking Convention, Europe's largest psychedelic conference, and the author of The Bigger Picture. Expect to learn - The Chinchillas: hyperdimensional beings he had never seen in real life, speaking a visible language - The Reply: he sent a symbol back, they went ballistic, then got bored and left - The Pharmacology Problem: why tolerance to LSD and psilocybin does nothing to DMT - The Synchronicity: the stranger across a London road, and what he learned that night - The Spider Queen: a planet-sized entity that wrapped him in a web 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 Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o GUEST LINKS X: https://x.com/AlexanderBeiner Kainos (Substack): https://beiner.substack.com/ Personal Site: https://www.alexanderbeiner.com/ Breaking Convention: https://breakingconvention.co.uk/performers/alexander-beiner The Bigger Picture - Author Page: https://www.penguin.com.au/authors/alexander-beiner LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/aZnvPt9X3Dc 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 0:01:59 Why Changing Minds Isn't Enough 0:02:54 A Magic Mushroom Homecoming In Holland 0:05:33 Joining Europe's Largest Psychedelic Conference 0:06:44 Why He Signed Up To Be A DMT Guinea Pig 0:08:03 Half Of DMT Users Meet Autonomous Entities 0:10:38 Meeting The Hyperdimensional Chinchillas 0:14:25 He'd Never Seen A Chinchilla In Real Life 0:15:14 "They Were Speaking A Visible Language" 0:17:47 Why Priming Can't Explain The Chinchillas 0:21:33 The Metaphysical Shift After 100 Episodes 0:26:21 DMT Immunity And The Cross-Tolerance Mystery 0:28:07 Why Psychedelics Make Avoiding Pain Harder 0:29:28 The Placebo Dose And The Prank Paranoia 0:32:24 Three Heartbeats To The Deepest Trip 0:35:06 Wired Up: The Hidden Rituals Of The Lab 0:39:29 Would He Ever Come Back? 0:40:22 Psychedelic PTSD And The Fear Of Madness 0:41:31 The Synchronicity He Still Can't Explain 0:46:37 If Everything's Conscious, Where's The Telepathy? 0:49:16 Why The East Talks Openly About Ghosts 0:53:45 The Planet-Sized Spider Queen 0:58:51 "This Is So Similar To What McKenna Described" .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • October 2 · 1 hr 25 min

    #160 - Meet The Physicist Proving The Universe Builds Itself Out Of Information

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join 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 GUEST LINKS Chalmers Profile: https://www.chalmers.se/en/persons/dodig/ X: https://x.com/DodigGordana Chalmers Research Publications: https://research.chalmers.se/en/person/dodig Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bvc5bBsAAAAJ ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9881-400X LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordana-dodig-crnkovic/ LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/D4jBgWV8BoY 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 0:02:44 Physicist, Computer Scientist, Cognitive Scientist 0:08:05 What Is Information, Really? 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

  • September 28 · 1 hr 25 min

    #159 - No. 1 Biopsychist: Michael Levin's Platonic Minds & Cognition All The Way Down

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join 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 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 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"

  • September 24 · 1 hr 44 min

    #158 - Meet The Scientist Redefining Intelligence With Michael Levin

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join 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 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 Publications: https://www.richardawatson.com/publications-1 ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Watson-10 LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/wAGFE2S6qXg 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 0:23:45 When Springs Start to Remember 0:26:18 Learning as "Second-Order Falling" 0:28:56 No Selection, No Neural Nets, No Design 0:31:03 What "Memory" Actually Means 0:35:59 Gene Networks That Learn 0:38:13 An Ecosystem Solving Sudoku 0:43:22 Natural Selection "Isn't Doing Anything Clever" 0:52:08 No Amount of Sequencing Will Answer This 0:57:23 Will We Ever Model a Cell? "Bottom Up, Never" 1:01:23 Rethinking Medicine: Persuadable Systems 1:08:01 Agency, or Just Complex Biochemistry? 1:20:47 "I Don't Do Consciousness" 1:23:30 Three Things That Changed His Mind 1:25:39 Analytic Idealism and the Dream Argument 1:33:31 Why Doesn't Your Consciousness Blur Into the Chair? 1:35:47 McGilchrist and Why We're Blind to It 1:38:47 It Was Never About Survival .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • September 21 · 1 hr 23 min

    #157 - Meet The Consciousness Philosopher With No Mind’s Eye

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join 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 Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE Alfredo Spagna - Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!: https://youtu.be/k8SBHefDnEk GUEST LINKS Personal Site: https://onemorebrown.com Consciousness Live!: https://onemorebrown.com/consciousness-live/ Consciousness as Representing One's Mind (OUP, 2025): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/consciousness-as-representing-ones-mind-9780197784006 X: https://x.com/onemorebrown Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/onemorebrown.bsky.social LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/RBP-w5Z9t1g 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

  • September 17 · 1 hr 25 min

    #156 - Meet The Greatest Time Neuroscientist You’ve Never Heard Of

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join 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 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 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 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 GUEST LINKS UCLA Neurobiology Profile: https://neurobio.ucla.edu/people/dean-buonomano-phd Buonomano Lab: http://www.buonomanolab.com/ X: https://x.com/DeanBuono 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

  • September 14 · 1 hr 26 min

    #155 - Meet The World’s Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join 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 David Nichols - Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/6umTgXsW1lQ GUEST LINKS ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Steven-A-Barker-2164230436 N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, an Endogenous Hallucinogen (2018 review): https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00536 A Critical Review of Endogenous DMT in Humans 1955-2010 (with Strassman): https://doi.org/10.1002/dta.422 LC/MS/MS Analysis of Rat Pineal Microdialysate (2013, the paper discussed on tape): https://doi.org/10.1002/bmc.2981 Administration of DMT in Psychedelic Therapeutics (2022 review): https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-022-06065-0 LISTEN ON Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M 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 0:02:15 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

  • S2 · E154
    September 11 · 1 hr 26 min

    #154 Meet The Greatest End-Of-Life Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of

    🧠 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

  • September 7 · 1 hr 14 min

    #153 - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Does Recreational Heroin

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join 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 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 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 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) FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl 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

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