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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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  • 39 episodes
  • a few times a week
  • Avg 1 hr 28 min
  • English

Episodes 39

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  • Thursday · 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

  • Monday · 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

  • September 3 · 1 hr 38 min

    #152 - Meet The Biophysicist Who Accidentally Discovered Telepathy

    JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join 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 Marjorie Woollacott - Neuroscientist: "Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness" — NDEs, Telepathy and Terminal Lucidity: https://youtu.be/mDWtmfmIUHA GUEST LINKS 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 FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl 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

  • S2 · E151
    August 31 · 1 hr 19 min

    #151 - Meet the Greatest Lucid Dreaming 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 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/ Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=teYHEFIAAAAJ&hl=en Cambridge Consciousness & Cognition Lab: https://www.ccc-lab.org/ Dust Systems (Dream Engineering): https://www.dust.systems/people/karen-konkoly X: https://x.com/KarenKonkoly 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 0:03:18 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

  • August 27 · 1 hr 34 min

    #150 - World's Greatest Hypnosis Scientist Hijacks My Mind Live On Camera!

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join David Spiegel is the world's leading hypnosis scientist — fifty years at Stanford spent proving that trance is a measurable brain state rather than a stage trick, across thirteen books, four hundred papers and roughly seven thousand patients hypnotised personally. I told him to his face that I thought his entire field was a scam, so he ran the hypnotisability test on me live on camera, my left arm floated off the desk and stopped obeying me for the next forty minutes, and he scored me seven out of ten. Expect to learn what hypnosis actually is and the three components it breaks down into, how stage hypnotists secretly screen their audiences before the show even starts, what changes in three separate brain networks the moment you go under, why "suggestibility" is the wrong word and cognitive flexibility is the right one, how hypnotised subjects cut their brain's electrical response to pain by 50%, why one in four smokers quit after a single session, the two very different childhoods that both produce highly hypnotisable adults, why eight-year-olds are the most hypnotisable people alive, how Rory McIlroy used self-hypnosis to break a seven-year Masters curse, what it feels like to have your own arm stop belonging to you, and much more… SPONSORS Try Reveri, Dr David Spiegel's Self-Hypnosis App (use code SPIEGEL20 for your discount) - https://reverihealth.app.link/e/spiegel Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe GUEST LINKS Stanford Profile: https://profiles.stanford.edu/david-spiegel Reveri: https://www.reveri.com/ Reveri on X: https://x.com/reveri_health Stanford Center on Stress and Health: https://med.stanford.edu/stresshealthcenter.html Trance and Treatment (his clinical textbook): https://www.appi.org/Products/Hypnosis/Trance-and-Treatment-Second-Edition 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 0:02:27 Who Is David Spiegel? 0:03:39 What Hypnosis Actually Is 0:05:37 Why He Calls Stage Shows "Dumb Shows" 0:06:29 How Hypnotists Secretly Screen The Audience 0:09:08 The Student Who Relived Being A Newborn 0:10:46 What Hypnosis Does To Three Brain Networks 0:13:23 It's Not Suggestibility, It's Cognitive Flexibility 0:16:12 Cutting The Brain's Pain Signal By 50% 0:17:05 One In Four Quit Smoking In A Single Session 0:18:33 The Meditator Whose Migraines Vanished 0:22:36 Why Hypnotisability Is Partly Genetic 0:23:54 The Two Childhoods That Make You Hypnotisable 0:27:16 Hypnosis, Flow States And Peak Performance 0:32:54 How Rory McIlroy Broke His Masters Curse 0:38:05 Why You Can Forget Your Own Name 0:44:29 Filtering The Hurt Out Of Pain 0:55:00 The Hypnotisability Test, Live On Camera 1:00:15 "It's Actually Going Up" 1:08:52 Evan Scores 7 Out Of 10 1:18:42 Trying To Erase The Number Four 1:31:04 "Please Don't Do This On My Other Arm" .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • August 24 · 1 hr 21 min

    #149 - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing: https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Rick Strassman is the psychiatrist who ran the first new American psychedelic research in a generation — five years of DMT studies at the University of New Mexico, the first rating scale ever built specifically to measure a psychedelic experience, and the book that made DMT famous. DMT: The Spirit Molecule sold a quarter of a million copies and effectively created machine-elf culture. Thirty years on, he is the most sceptical man in the room about what those entities actually are. Expect to learn why your brain spends energy importing DMT across the blood-brain barrier, why the pineal gland story he made famous fell apart, how brain DMT sits at the same concentration as serotonin and dopamine, why DMT floods the visual cortex of a dying brain, why a molecule that shrinks strokes and protects kidneys should not be psychedelic at all, what the endomatrix is and why it raises the simulation question, why he now thinks psychedelics are super placebos, what a DMT entity actually is and why talking to one is like talking to an AI, how you would actually test whether the entities are real, why only one scientist on Earth is studying endogenous DMT, 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 Join the Outskill AI Mastery Sprint (Free This Weekend) - https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2 GS EPISODES MENTIONED Steven Barker - Meet The World's Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/gTc5QjyZuvY David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o Deborah Mash - Meet The Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist Who First Unravelled Its Big Mystery: https://youtu.be/z7eRtXV6ptA 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 GUEST LINKS Official Site: https://www.rickstrassman.com/ Books & Publications: https://www.rickstrassman.com/publications/ Substack: https://rickstrassman.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/RickStrassman Biosynthesis and Extracellular Concentrations of DMT in Mammalian Brain (Dean et al., Scientific Reports 2019): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45812-w TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:04:31 The First Legal DMT Studies in a Generation 0:07:41 The Bomb-Maker Who Became a Psychedelic Scientist 0:14:13 The Iron Curtain Reason We Know DMT Works 0:22:32 Why Your Brain Spends Energy Importing DMT 0:28:26 Your Brain Makes DMT at Serotonin Levels 0:29:26 DMT Floods the Dying Brain's Visual Cortex 0:30:28 Stroke, Kidneys and Heart — DMT as a Survival Molecule 0:32:39 The $64,000 Question Nobody Can Answer 0:36:33 Does DMT Regulate How Real Reality Feels? 0:39:32 Only One Person on Earth Studies This 0:43:52 The Endomatrix and the Simulation Question 0:49:48 "Psychedelics Are Super Placebos" 0:55:12 The Man Who Wrote Down "Bananas Are Really Yellow" 1:03:50 The Barking Patient — Entities as Dream Logic 1:05:42 Talking to Entities Is Like Talking to an AI 1:06:40 The Prime Number Test for Proving Entities Are Real 1:13:36 Half His Volunteers Met Beings — And a Conscious Apartment 1:18:08 "Your Brain On Drugs" vs Another Dimension 1:26:58 The Entities That Curse You 1:29:09 "Have You Started Yet?" — The Man Immune to DMT 1:33:30 Why DMT Is the Only Psychedelic Without Tolerance 1:36:12 Blocking 5-HT1A Tripled the Effect — Buried 30 Years 1:39:06 Aphantasia and Seeing For the First Time .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • August 20 · 1 hr 2 min

    #148 - Meet The Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist Who First Unravelled Its Big Mystery

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT’S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing: https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Deborah Mash is a neuropharmacologist who holds the first FDA licence ever granted to give ibogaine to a human being, built one of America's largest brain banks, and discovered noribogaine — the metabolite now entering its first US clinical trial. She has spent over thirty years on a drug that appears to interrupt addiction after a single dose. This April a US president named it specifically. This is the scientist who was right three decades early. Expect to learn what Trump's executive order actually changes for ibogaine, why Sasha Shulgin put ibogaine in a box of its own, how noribogaine blocks nicotine, alcohol, cocaine and opioid use in animal models, why ibogaine holds the brain's neuroplasticity window open for four weeks when ketamine manages days, why some patients get the full therapeutic benefit with no psychedelic experience at all, why the reported ibogaine deaths are almost impossible to interpret, why more than 80% of her patients said they never wanted to repeat it, 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 Join the Outskill AI Mastery Sprint (Free This Weekend) - https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2GS EPISODES MENTIONED David Nutt - Meet the Neuroscientist Fired For Exposing the Truth! Dr David Nutt: https://youtu.be/BLk6a5Vb2O0 David Nutt - Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List: https://youtu.be/G-OZ_UBGvvo GUEST LINKS University of Miami Faculty Profile: http://neurology.med.miami.edu/about-us/faculty-list/deborah-c-mash-ph-d X: https://x.com/drdeborahmash Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4383E7wAAAAJ&hl=en DemeRx: https://www.demerx.com/team/deborah-c-mash-phd/ 2018 Frontiers in Pharmacology paper (St. Kitts cohort): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.00529/full 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 0:02:00 Why Ibogaine Is Suddenly Everywhere 0:02:22 Trump's Executive Order and What It Actually Does 0:05:55 The Drug That Breaks the Cycle of Addiction 0:08:07 Why One Drug Treats Addiction, Depression and Trauma 0:11:30 Noribogaine: The Metabolite Nobody Talks About 0:14:20 The Real Risks Nobody Reports Properly 0:16:36 How Ibogaine Became a Vast Underground Experiment 0:17:44 Veterans, Brain Trauma and the Testimonials 0:22:55 The Master Molecule: Why Ibogaine Stands Alone 0:23:30 Sasha Shulgin Draws Four Boxes 0:26:48 Is a Psychedelic Just a Hard Reboot? 0:28:11 Four Weeks of Neuroplasticity, Longer Than Anything Else 0:28:44 Fast, Slow and Ultra-Rapid Metabolisers 0:31:39 The First Patient in St. Kitts, Decades Later 0:34:35 Do You Need the Trip to Reach the Destination? 0:35:05 One Molecule, Every Addiction 0:37:39 Miami Vice and the Bodies at the Morgue 0:41:18 The Man Who Slept Through His Own Trip 0:44:11 Why America Will Lead on Ibogaine 0:47:51 Dual Dosing: The Second Stage of the Rocket 0:54:52 Why More Than 80% Never Want to Repeat It 0:57:33 What Would Ibogaine Do to a Healthy Brain? 0:58:18 Why She's Never Taken Ibogaine 0:59:39 Psychedelics, Longevity and Ageing Brains ......Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  • August 17 · 1 hr 3 min

    #147 - No. 1 Mitochondria Psychobiologist: "Mitochondria Create Consciousness and Near-Death Experiences"

    Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder Join the Outskill AI Mastery Sprint (Free This Weekend): https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2 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 Martin Picard is a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia University who just won the inaugural $1.5 million Baszucki Prize for a new theory of life. His radical claim: consciousness doesn't just run on energy, it might actually be made of it, generated inside your mitochondria rather than your brain. Expect to learn why calling mitochondria "the powerhouse of the cell" does them a disservice, how mitochondria might generate consciousness rather than just power the brain that has it, why some of history's most rigorous physicists ended up believing consciousness is more fundamental than matter, how psychedelics might work by reshaping the way energy is patterned through your body, why grey hair can reverse itself within weeks of a stressful period lifting, how a simple blood test might one day predict whether you're about to have a good or bad trip, why "no drug actually heals you" and what does instead, and much more. Timestamps: 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:00 What Actually Keeps You Alive (Not What You Think) 0:04:40 Why There's No Experience Without Energy Flow 0:07:11 Are You Conscious Because of Matter, or Despite It? 0:10:13 Why History's Greatest Physicists Became Idealists 0:17:17 The Doctor Who Watched Patients Come Back From Death 0:22:09 Don Hoffman and the Day the Beach Disappeared 0:24:12 What Actually Triggers a Near-Death Experience 0:24:51 You Are an Eddy in a River of Consciousness 0:31:59 Bernardo Kastrup's Idealism, Tested Live 0:33:34 Could We Scan Your Energy and Predict Your Mind? 0:39:37 Stop Calling Mitochondria "The Powerhouse" 0:40:03 Your Cells Are Basically Tiny GPUs 0:41:04 How Psychedelics Might Rewrite Your Energy Pattern 0:49:10 The Study Testing Whether Psilocybin Changes Your Mitochondria 0:52:06 "It's Not the Drug That Heals You"0:52:38 A Blood Test That Predicts Your Best (and Worst) Trip 0:57:27 The Psychedelic Paradox: Less Brain, More Experience 0:58:57 Aldous Huxley's "Reducing Valve" Theory of the Brain 1:02:03 "The Brain Is Overrated" ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned: Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk Guest Links: Columbia Faculty Profile: https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/martin-picard-phd Personal Website: https://www.martinpicard.energy/ X (Twitter): https://x.com/MitoPsychoBio Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IG2t_uMAAAAJ&hl=en Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab: https://www.picardlab.org

  • August 13 · 1 hr 15 min

    #146 - Meet The Greatest Bioelectricity Scientist You've Never Heard Of

    Try Mind Lab Pro, The Universal Nootropic For A Sharper Brain: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3 Join The Outskill Claude Mastery Sprint (2 Days, Free): https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2 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 Min Zhao is the UC Davis professor whose lab discovered the first genes ever found in electrical signalling — proof that every cell in your body runs on a current, not just your brain. He can reverse the polarity of a field and watch a living cell physically turn around and walk the other way. Expect to learn why every wound in your body generates its own measurable electric current, how a single postdoc's "failed" experiment revealed a force that overrides genetics, how reversing an electric field can make a cell physically turn around mid-migration, how a damaged potato generates the same electrical signal that guides wound healing in humans, why Min stops short of fully agreeing with Michael Levin on whether cells count as agents, and where the fight between bioelectricity and genetics currently stands. Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:20 What Everyone Gets Wrong About Wound Healing 0:07:20 Your Skin Is Secretly Electric (And So Is Everything Alive) 0:11:09 The 200-Year-Old Discovery Hiding in Every Wound 0:15:19 The Postdoc Result That Changed the Whole Lab 0:19:19 How Do Cells Know Where to Grow? (Five Fingers, Not Six) 0:21:19 The Potato Experiment That Reveals How Infections Start 0:25:24 Reverse the Field, Watch a Cell Turn Around 0:38:10 The Bioelectricity Nobody Taught in Biology Class 0:44:17 Is Bioelectricity More Fundamental Than Genes? 0:45:33 "No Electricity, No Life" 0:49:14 When Electric Fields Override Genetics Entirely 1:03:40 Michael Levin's Xenobots, Debated 1:12:22 Do Cells Have Agency? The Fuzziest Question in Biology 1:15:16 To Be Continued... (Members Get the Rest) ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned Michael Levin — Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM Philip Ball — Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SseGx0R0fY Denis Noble — Denis Noble: Evolution Has Purpose, Cell Consciousness & Why The Last 70 Years of Genetics Is Wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqw-DaWVK24 Michael Levin & Earl Miller — Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mU5nN5nlLA Guest Links UC Davis Faculty Profile: https://health.ucdavis.edu/dermatology/faculty/zhao.html Zhao Lab (UC Davis Dermatology): https://health.ucdavis.edu/dermatology/research/lab/zhao.html Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=G7-zWBcAAAAJ&hl=en Neuroengineering at UC Davis: https://neuroengineering.ucdavis.edu/people/min-zhao-md-phd UC Davis Profiles (Publications): https://profiles.ucdavis.edu/min.zhao

  • August 10 · 1 hr 31 min

    #145 - Meet the Ibogaine Neuroscientist Revolutionising Addiction Treatment

    Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder 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 Kirsten Cherian is the Stanford neuropsychologist who gave Special Forces veterans with traumatic brain injuries a single dose of ibogaine — a psychedelic root used in African shamanic ritual for millennia — and watched their injury scores collapse from severe to normal in a month. It's a weak agonist for nearly every receptor in the body, yet it somehow delivers a tailor-made result to each person — a form of pharmacology science has never seen before. Expect to learn why veteran suicide outpaces combat deaths, how one dose collapsed PTSD, depression, and anxiety at once, why users describe their brains being "defragged," a researcher's 12-hour "conversation" with the ibogaine molecule itself, the bizarre phenomenon of "DMT blocking" by hostile entities, why ibogaine has no single receptor target — "matrix pharmacology," how brain age dropped by over a year in a single month, and why the results contradict science's leading theory of consciousness. Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:11 How This Ibogaine Study For Veterans Began 0:04:06 Veteran Suicide Now Outpaces Combat Deaths 0:07:31 The 30-Veteran Study With Staggering Effect Sizes 0:12:22 Ibogaine Isn't A Trip, It's A Waking Dream 0:13:14 Vivid Trip Imagery: Slideshows And "Defragged" Brains 0:15:02 Reconciling Trauma By Talking To The Dead 0:20:01 What A Bad Ibogaine Trip Actually Looks Like 0:24:50 Purging "Black Demons" In A Room Full Of Strangers 0:27:23 The Scientist Who Talked To The Ibogaine Molecule 0:33:36 Why Elite Special Forces Veterans Still Broke 0:34:30 DMT Blocking: When Entities Refuse To Let You In 0:41:22 The Psilocybin Researcher Who Believes In Telepathy 0:43:00 Why Ibogaine Has No Single Target In The Brain 0:46:25 The 1920s Thought Experiment That Proves We're Too Skeptical 0:49:38 Ibogaine As A Full-System Diagnostic, Not A Drug 1:03:36 Measurable Brain Change From An African Tree Fruit 1:05:19 Brain Age Dropped Over A Year After One Dose 1:17:21 The Finding That Contradicts The Leading Theory Of Consciousness 1:20:28 If Ibogaine Research Got A Blank Billion-Dollar Check 1:23:21 Could Ibogaine Help Parkinson's And ALS Patients? ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned Dalibor Sames — Meet The Greatest Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9whp_wtCoc Andrew Gallimore — No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA David Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5o Matthew Johnson — Consciousness Expert Explains The 5 Levels Of The Psilocybin Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHyy3aW09sk Robin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk Guest LinksStanford Profile: https://profiles.stanford.edu/kirsten-cherian Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab: https://bsl.stanford.edu/ MISTIC Study (Nature Medicine, 2024): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38182784/ ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kirsten-Cherian VETS — Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions: https://vetsolutions.org/

  • S2 · E144
    August 6 · 2 hr 6 min

    #144 - Consciousness Expert Ranks Every Drug By Intensity Of Subjective Experience

    Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial: https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants Try Mind Lab Pro, The Universal Nootropic For A Sharper Brain: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3 Andrés Gómez Emilsson is a consciousness mathematician at the Qualia Research Institute, and he's back for round two of ranking altered states of consciousness by sheer intensity. He and Evan spend two hours ranking every substance and practice they can think of — arguing that ibogaine may be the most ethically urgent drug on Earth, that a hardcore meditation retreat can rival 5-MeO-DMT, and that an obscure nootropic produces psychedelic visuals through a mechanism nobody understands. Expect to learn why ibogaine seems to "scan" your whole nervous system instead of hitting one receptor, how advanced jhana meditation can go toe-to-toe with 5-MeO-DMT in depth, why ordinary DMT produces far more alien entity encounters than its "stronger" cousin, the topology behind why feeling like God and feeling like there's no self are almost the same state, why cannabis's real danger isn't addiction but a specific schizophrenia risk in young men, how combining LSD and ketamine produces "freewheeling hallucinations" you can consciously direct, why mescaline might be the best nootropic for doing actual math yet never caught on, and where MDMA, salvia, and a little-known nootropic called coluracetam land on the scale, and much more… Timestamps 0:02:53 Ibogaine 0:17:28 5-MeO-DMT 0:36:05 Meditation 0:46:33 DMT 0:58:41 Cannabis 1:05:15 Psilocybin 1:11:41 Ayahuasca 1:18:42 Coluracetam 1:21:09 MDMA 1:29:26 Salvia 1:44:21 Ketamine 1:54:37 Mescaline 1:58:48 LSD...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com 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 GS Episodes Mentioned David Nutt — Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEgbv6IHYaYMichael Levin & Earl Miller — Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mU5nN5nlLA Guest Links Qualia Research Institute: https://qri.org Qualia Computing (blog): https://qualiacomputing.com Substack: https://andrsgmezemilsson.substack.com X (Twitter): https://x.com/algekalipso

  • S2 · E143
    August 3 · 1 hr 42 min

    #143 - Meet the World's Greatest Imagination Neuroscientist You’ve Never Heard Of

    Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder 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 Dr. Reshanne Reeder is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool and creator of the Ganzflicker — a flickering screen that makes most people hallucinate complex scenes within a minute, no drugs required. Her research suggests hallucinations themselves are just disordered mental imagery, and that the most vividly imaginative among us may be the closest normal-range group to a psychotic break. Expect to learn why a simple red-and-black flicker makes most people hallucinate faces and landscapes within a minute, the accidental lab discovery that led to the Ganzflicker experiment, why she believes hallucinations are simply "disordered mental imagery," why psychedelic and clinical hallucinations come from entirely different brain mechanisms, the 1960s art device built to replace the television, why almost nobody hallucinates their own phone, how aphantasia may carry a hidden cost to face recognition, how she's trying to predict psychosis risk years before it ever develops, and much more… Timestamps 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:29 How She Discovered Imagery Isn't One Thing 0:08:43 Can You Decode Images in an Aphantasic's Brain? 0:10:37 The Truth About "Unconscious" Mental Imagery 0:16:01 Imagery vs Imagination: Why They Aren't the Same Word 0:18:55 Imagery, Perception, Hallucination, Dreaming: Where's the Line? 0:20:36 The Hyperphantasics Who Project Images Into the Real World 0:22:23 Her Bold Claim: Hallucinations Are Disordered Imagery 0:23:37 Can Aphantasics Hallucinate on Psychedelics? 0:27:55 The DMT Study Where 90% Said It Felt More Real Than Reality 0:29:39 Why Mental Imagery Breaks the Predictive Brain Theory 0:32:21 The Irish Castle Test: Are Mental Images Just Priors? 0:38:58 She Made People See Faces in Pure Random Noise 0:42:04 The Illusion That Turns Faces Into Monsters 0:45:48 Why Aphantasia Might Come With a Face-Recognition Cost 0:47:35 His Sister Went 31 Years Without Knowing She Had Aphantasia 0:49:59 The Accidental Origin Story of Ganzflicker 0:51:26 The 1700s Origin of the "Whole Field" Hallucination Effect 0:57:41 "I See a Lighthouse": The Moment Ganzflicker Was Born 1:00:28 Why Aphantasics Barely Hallucinate on Ganzflicker 1:05:31 The Sharp Cliff Between Zero and Weak Mental Imagery 1:12:30 Why Nobody Hallucinates Their Phone 1:19:45 The Hypnosis Session That Left His Arm Frozen in the Air 1:22:13 The 1960s "Dream Machine" That Was Supposed to Replace TV 1:35:59 Can This Predict Psychosis Before It Happens? ... ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com GS Episodes Mentioned Adam Zeman — The Blind Mind's Eye: How Aphantasia Is Rewriting Consciousness ! Dr Adam Zeman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgA2up6-Bok Alfredo Spagna — Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8SBHefDnEk David Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5o Karl Friston — Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-IZOFs4qmY Anil Seth — No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o Guest Links University of Liverpool Faculty Page: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/reshanne-reeder Personal Website (Ganzflicker Demo): https://www.reshannereeder.com/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/kerblooee.bsky.social Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=DfdUB3UAAAAJ LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/reshanne-reeder-53182123b

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