Giants Shoulder

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial: https://onelink.to/giantsWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutDráulio Barros de Araújo is a physicist who spent twenty years pointing MRI scanners at the ayahuasca experience, and ran the world's first controlled trial proving a single dose of a psychedelic could lift treatment-resistant depression in a week. He thinks DMT entity encounters are not hallucinations, and he wants to know if they could be real.Expect to learn why calling ayahuasca visions "hallucinations" is scientifically wrong, why you can't overdose or build tolerance to ayahuasca the way you can with alcohol or cocaine, why vomiting is considered part of the medicine rather than a side effect, how a physicist measured the entropy of a mystical experience and watched it rise, why your eyes physically won't stay open during a vision, the hippocampal memory glitch that may explain why DMT entities feel real, and why psychedelic science may be measuring altered states with the wrong tools entirely.Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:50 Who Is the Physicist Studying Ayahuasca Visions0:05:05 The 1930s Origin of Brazil's Ayahuasca Churches0:10:13 Why You Can't Buy Ayahuasca Like a Coca-Cola0:11:22 What a Typical Ayahuasca Trip Actually Feels Like0:16:53 Why LSD Visions Happen With Eyes Open, Ayahuasca Doesn't0:17:22 Your Brain on Ayahuasca Looks Like a Dream, Not a Hallucination0:21:08 Why Ayahuasca Visions Never Feel Like "Just a Dream"0:22:23 There's No Such Thing as an Ayahuasca Overdose0:24:18 Why Vomiting and Diarrhea Are Part of the Medicine0:28:34 The Hippocampus Theory of Why DMT Entities Feel Real0:33:22 Would Irish People See Snakes on Ayahuasca Too?0:35:40 We're Measuring Trips With the Wrong Scientific Tools0:40:44 Speech Analysis: A New Way to Study the Trip0:44:31 The Flawed Questionnaire Behind Every Psychedelic Study0:50:23 Why Dráulio Refuses to Ask a Single Direct Question0:55:19 The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Explained by a Physicist1:02:01 Why Psychedelics Dissolve Your Career Ambitions1:04:02 The Most Important Psychedelic Question Science Avoids: Death1:06:09 What the West Should Learn From Indigenous Ayahuasca Traditions... Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Episodes MentionedDavid Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5oRobin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-GkE4YtLRkDavid Nutt — Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEgbv6IHYaYGuest LinksUFRN Brain Institute — Faculty Profile: https://neuro.ufrn.br/institute/members/investigators/draulioGoogle

Get Manta Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL and Code GIANTSMANTA10Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutDennis McKenna is an ethnopharmacologist who spent fifty years decoding the chemistry of psychedelic plants, producing the first hard pharmacological proof of why ayahuasca actually works. He's also the younger brother of Terence McKenna, and in 1971 the two of them ran an experiment on their own minds in the Colombian Amazon that ended in a two-week psychotic break neither has ever fully explained.Expect to learn why the McKenna brothers thought DMT was a portal to another dimension rather than a drug trip, what happened during Dennis's two-week dissociation from reality in the Amazon, how ayahuasca's DMT and MAO-inhibitor plants actually work together in the body, why Dennis still calls the entire 1971 expedition "an act of science fiction, not science," how his PhD research became the first pharmacological proof of why ayahuasca works, why he thinks his own brother unintentionally seeded the "machine elf" into everyone else's DMT trips, why a career pharmacologist has never personally seen one himself, and why DMT entity encounters may be linked to real mental health outcomes, and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:03:07 How Dennis Got Into Psychedelics0:06:07 Terence The Philosopher vs Dennis The Scientist0:11:11 The 1971 Expedition To The Colombian Amazon0:16:05 Why DMT Was "The Holy Grail"0:17:50 The Ayahuasca Chemistry Nobody Understood Yet0:18:45 Hunting For The Legendary Oo-Koo-Hé0:22:00 Stumbling Into A Mushroom Paradise0:27:05 When The Mushrooms Started "Talking"0:28:38 The DNA Resonance Experiment0:36:01 The Two-Week Psychotic Break0:40:46 Psychotic Break, Shamanic Initiation, Or Alien Encounter?0:47:08 From Psychotic Break Back To The Lab0:53:16 Proving How Ayahuasca Actually Works0:58:47 The Book That Seeded Mushrooms Into Society1:05:39 Sasha Shulgin And The Chemistry Of Psychedelics1:11:02 "I've Never Seen A Machine Elf Myself"1:17:56 Pushing The DMT Experience To Five Hours1:20:02 What Makes DMT Different From Psilocybin1:26:18 DMT Entities And Mental Health Outcomes...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Episodes MentionedAndrew Gallimore — No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDADavid Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5oGuest LinksHeffter Research Institute Bio: https://www.heffter.org/dennis-j-mckenna-phd/McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy: https://mckenna.academy/mka-team/dennis-mckenna/X: https://x.com/DennisMcKenna4Book — The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: http://brotherhoodofthescreamingabyss.com/ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dennis-Mckenna

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulderGet Manta Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL and Code GIANTSMANTA10Denis Noble is the physiologist who built the first computer model of the heart in 1960 — and has spent the sixty years since using it to dismantle the gene-centric view of life that dominates modern biology. He took Richard Dawkins's Selfish Gene and rewrote its most famous passage word for word in reverse — and every single experiment still fits.Expect to learn why the central dogma of molecular biology is provably wrong, how your immune system rewrites its own DNA to fight off new viruses, why the peppered moth story in every biology textbook turns out to be false, what happened when Denis told Richard Dawkins "Lamarck is back" to his face, why a cell corrects roughly 800,000 DNA replication errors before it's allowed to divide, how epigenetic inheritance can persist indefinitely if the environment stays changed, whether plants might have a form of experience, and where exactly agency ends and pure chemistry begins.Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:27 Meet The Man Who Modeled The Heart By Hand0:04:43 Why The Central Dogma Of Biology Is Wrong0:06:39 The 1866 Split Between Darwin And Wallace0:09:02 The Infinite Monkey Theorem, Tested For Real0:17:30 The Peppered Moth Myth Textbooks Still Teach0:20:19 The Nobel Laureate Textbooks Forgot To Cite0:22:53 Telling Richard Dawkins "Lamarck Is Back"0:27:43 Was Lamarck's Giraffe Neck Story Actually Right?0:29:40 How Your Body Talks To Your DNA0:38:17 A New Species Evolved In Two Generations0:44:18 So What's Actually Controversial Here?0:48:09 Cellular Agency: When Cells Act Like Organisms0:53:04 Steelmanning The Case Against Cellular Agency0:55:05 The 17th-Century Prediction That Proved Purpose Works1:04:20 Your Cells Correct 800,000 DNA Errors Per Division1:13:14 Life Lives On The Edge Of Order And Chaos1:15:27 Do Plants Have Experience?1:27:31 How Does Consciousness Fit Into Systems Biology?...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Episodes MentionedMichael Levin — Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyMPhilip Ball — Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SseGx0R0fYGuest LinksOxford Faculty Page: https://www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/team/denis-noblePersonal Website: https://www.denisnoble.comGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=J6kLmsIAAAAJ&hl=enUnderstanding Living Systems (Book): https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Living-Systems-Life/dp/1009277367The Third Way of Evolution: https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/people/view/denis-noble

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeGet Manta Sleep Mask: https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL and Code GIANTSMANTA10Matthew Johnson is a psychedelic addiction scientist who spent over two decades at Johns Hopkins before becoming the senior researcher at Sheppard Pratt's Center of Excellence for Psilocybin Research. He's personally guided over 100 people through high-dose psilocybin sessions and says the "mystical experience" that shows up in the data predicts recovery even after you strip out how strong the drug felt.Expect to learn how the psilocybin experience changes as the dose climbs from one gram to a full "heroic dose," why a mystical-type experience predicts addiction recovery even after controlling for how intense the drug felt, what separates a mystical experience from personal insight and emotional catharsis as predictors of healing, why DMT users around the world keep reporting the same handful of entity archetypes, the peer-reviewed Rupert Sheldrake experiment testing whether people can sense who's about to call them before the phone rings, why he thinks rigorous telepathy research keeps getting ignored rather than debunked, why a hard-nosed behavioral pharmacologist ends up leaning toward an idealist view of reality, and much more…Timestamps:0:00:00 Trailer0:02:28 Who Matt Johnson Actually Is0:04:34 How He First Got Into Psychedelics0:09:07 Did He Sense Addiction Benefits Early On0:15:03 The First Mystical Experience Trial At Hopkins0:16:42 What Counts As A High Dose Session0:22:17 How The Trip Changes From 1 To 5 Grams0:30:41 Why Mystical Experiences Predict Better Outcomes0:33:34 Insight And Catharsis As Separate Predictors0:39:49 DMT Entities And Machine Elves Explained0:44:02 Why 20% Of DMT Users See The Same Beings0:52:58 The Peer-Reviewed Telepathy Experiment That Shocked Him0:59:32 Why No One Has Funded A Real Telepathy Study1:11:04 Attention Schema Theory And The Illusion Of Self1:16:00 Could A Single Cell Have Experience1:17:54 Why He Leans Toward Idealism Over Materialism...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... Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Episodes MentionedMichael Graziano — Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When Consciousness First Emerged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnasmLpY5_8Guest LinksSheppard Pratt Profile: https://www.sheppardpratt.org/news-views/story/sheppard-pratt-announces-dr-matthew-w-johnson-as-senior-researcher-for-the-center-of-excellence-for-psilocybin-research-and-treatment/X: https://x.com/drug_researcherGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fWhYUvwAAAAJ&hl=enResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutMarjorie Woollacott is a neuroscientist who spent three decades as a hard materialist and co-wrote the textbook used to train physiotherapists worldwide. After a meditation experience her own field said was impossible, she hid it from her colleagues for over 25 years before concluding the brain does not produce consciousness — it filters it.Expect to learn why a career materialist neuroscientist hid her own paranormal experience for 25 years, the prospective hospital studies that corroborate what patients report while clinically dead, how a comatose man with zero brain activity accurately described a nurse hiding his dentures, what terminal lucidity is and why dying Alzheimer's patients regain full clarity minutes before death, the ongoing lab research into non-speaking autistic children who appear to communicate telepathically, why Christof Koch said the data would turn his world upside down, how Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism compares to Woollacott's own theory of consciousness, and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:46 Where Her Story Really Begins0:05:05 The Materialist Neuroscientist She Used To Be0:06:15 The Meditation Retreat That Broke Her Skepticism0:14:24 What Actually Caused Her Awakening0:22:59 How Rigorous Is Near-Death Experience Research, Really0:24:19 The Prospective Studies Skeptics Ignore0:25:06 The Coma Patient Who Knew Where His Dentures Were0:35:48 Bernardo Kastrup's Analytic Idealism Explained0:43:19 Is Terminal Lucidity Just Wishful Interpretation?0:46:09 The Three-Year-Old's Last Request Before Dying0:53:07 Can Consciousness Move Physical Objects?0:58:20 Why Jung And A Nobel Physicist Believed In Idealism1:02:59 The Telepathy Tapes, Explained1:19:40 The Autism Vulnerability Problem With This Research1:21:21 The 5% Above Chance Telepathy Effect1:35:13 Designing an Experiment Skeptics Can't Dismiss...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Episodes MentionedChristof Koch — The Psychedelic Trip that Convinced Christof Koch Consciousness is Fundamental: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlV-b2bvaEGuest LinksWebsite: https://marjoriewoollacott.com/University of Oregon Faculty Page: https://ion.uoregon.edu/about/person-page/459Book – Infinite Awareness: https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Awareness-Awakening-Scientific-Mind/dp/144225033XAcademy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences Bio: https://www.aapsglobal.com/marjorie-woollacott/ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marjorie-Woollacott

Check out Scispace (JNGIANT20: 20% off the monthly plan or JNGIANT40: 40% off the annual plan): https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulderGet Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulderWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutRick Doblin is the founder of MAPS and the man who spent 50 years dragging the world's most demonized drug into the doctor's office. He taxed legal ecstasy dealers to fund the first MDMA toxicity studies, sued the DEA with the profits, and got a Harvard PhD in public policy to beat the system from inside — then ran the only completed Phase 3 trials in history showing that two-thirds of severe PTSD patients no longer had the diagnosis after MDMA-assisted therapy.Expect to learn how he taxed ecstasy dealers to sue the DEA, why MDMA was a couples-therapy drug before it was a party drug, the real reason Nixon criminalized psychedelics in 1970, why 88% of severe PTSD patients responded to MDMA therapy while half dropped out of standard VA treatment, why you can't get addicted to MDMA the way you can to cocaine, why you'll do more jail time for MDMA than for the same weight of cocaine, his plan for "net zero trauma by 2070," and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:03:03 Winning the Generational Lottery After the Holocaust0:05:27 Dropping Out of College to Study LSD0:08:15 The Forgotten Golden Era of Psychedelic Research0:09:33 When the CIA Weaponized LSD for Mind Control0:13:10 Half a Pound of Mescaline and Ten Years to Recover0:15:09 The Day a Stranger Said "There's This Drug Called Adam"0:15:56 MDMA Was a Therapy Drug Before It Was Ecstasy0:18:39 Sasha Shulgin, the Man Who Invented 200 Psychedelics0:24:12 How Dealers Tweaked Molecules to Stay Legal0:27:21 Why Nixon Really Criminalized the Hippies0:30:04 Going to War With the DEA — and Winning0:33:56 Founding MAPS and $200 Million Later0:39:09 Taxing the Ecstasy Dealers to Fund the Lawsuit0:41:33 The First MDMA Safety Study, Run on a Beach0:42:43 The 1992 Moment That Reopened Psychedelic Science0:44:31 The First PTSD Study, Shut Down for Politics0:48:08 Cannabis Is Palliative, Psychedelics Are Curative0:50:08 The Veteran Suicide Epidemic Nobody Will Fund0:53:33 Why MAPS Bet Everything on MDMA0:58:35 The Effect Sizes That Should Have Changed Everything1:01:01 Why Half of Veterans Quit Standard PTSD Therapy1:02:13 Why the Data Alone Was Never Going to Win1:04:54 The Absurd Reason the FDA Cited: "Euphoria"1:06:34 Why You Can't Get Hooked on MDMA1:07:26 More Jail for MDMA Than for Cocaine1:08:36 Net Zero Trauma by 20701:10:47 MDMA for Couples, and Bringing It to the World...... Email for sponsorship en

Check out Scispace (Use Code JNGIANT20: 20% OFF MONTHLY): https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulderGet Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulderWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutManoj Doss is a cognitive neuroscientist and one of the only people studying what psychedelics actually do to memory — trained inside the field's most prestigious lab at Johns Hopkins, he's now its most rigorous internal sceptic. His claim is heretical: the profound sense of revelation you get on a trip may be a memory glitch — a familiarity signal firing without the detail that would normally justify it, so the trip feels like downloading the truth while your brain quietly degrades what it's actually recording.Expect to learn why the profound insights you get on psychedelics might be a memory glitch, why the entire default mode network story "needs to go to hell", what a 250-subject mega-analysis revealed that small studies missed, why salvia melts you into the couch while DMT builds whole worlds, whether DMT entities and mantises are real contact or just a brain built to see faces, why blocking a single receptor proves psychedelics aren't "keys to reality", the flaw Doss says sinks the entropic brain and REBUS, how you'd ever tell a true revelation from a beautiful lie, and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:24 The One Thing Psychedelic Science Ignores: Memory0:05:38 Why Your Worst Beliefs Feel Like Hard Facts0:07:38 The "Sense of Knowing" That Fools Everyone0:09:00 How Psychedelics Rewire What You Remember0:16:11 Why Yoga Feels Better on Psilocybin0:20:27 "The Default Mode Network Story Needs to Go to Hell"0:27:26 How Neuroscience Invents Stories From Noise0:35:42 Why Psychedelic Studies Are Too Small to Trust0:40:31 Salvia: Becoming a Sentient Piece of Corn0:44:13 The Kappa-Opioid Door Into Another Reality0:48:00 Why Salvia Is Heaven and Ibogaine Is Hell0:53:03 Does the Brain Have Two Reality Generators?0:59:24 Has 20 Years of Psychedelics Taught Us Anything?1:05:18 Are DMT Entities Real? The Mantis Problem1:13:28 Why You See Machine Elves (But His Mum Wouldn't)1:24:29 Tearing REBUS and the Entropic Brain Apart1:36:21 "Do Stuff in the Scanner, Stuff Happens in the Brain"1:44:25 The Debate Robin Was Warned Not to Do...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Episodes MentionedKarl Friston — Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-IZOFs4qmYRobin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-GkE4YtLRkMichael Levin — Mi

Check out Scispace (JNGIANT20: 20% off the monthly plan or JNGIANT40: 40% off the annual plan): https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulderProfessor David Nutt is a neuro­psychopharmacologist, former UK chief drug adviser, and author of Drugs Without the Hot Air, Drink?, Cannabis, and Psychedelics. After two rounds that sparked an overwhelming response, round three goes fringe — ibogaine, salvia, mescaline, peyote, GHB, xylazine, the nitazines, and the Amanita muscaria "Santa Claus" mushroom — ranking each on Nutt's evidence-based harm scale.Timestamps:2:56 Ibogaine7:21 Salvia18:02 Mescaline & Peyote23:59 San Pedro Cactus28:55 GHB40:59 Kratom & 7-Hydroxy46:05 Xylazine ("Tranq")51:34 Nitazines54:53 Amanita Muscaria...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Nutt's BooksDrink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health: https://amzn.to/4dZTP9ZPsychedelics: The Revolutionary Drugs That Could Change Your Life―A Guide from the Expert: https://amzn.to/3SJXAX6Drugs without the hot air: Making sense of legal and illegal drugs: https://amzn.to/4kyu7eSCannabis (Seeing Through the Smoke): The New Science of Cannabis and Your Health: https://amzn.to/3FOiLo2Check out the amazing work of Drug Science (Dr David Nutt's Charity)Website - https://www.drugscience.org.uk/Prof Nutt Twitter (X) - @ProfDavidNuttDrug Science SocialsFacebook - @DrugScienceISCDTwitter (x) - @drug_scienceInstagram - @drugscienceinfoLinkedIn - @drugscience-ltdBlueSky - @drugscience.bsky.socialYouTube - @DrugScienceMore Resources on Drug SafetyMedical Cannabis: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-cannabis-working-groupMedical Psychedelics: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-psychedelics-working-groupHarm Reduction: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/enhanced-harm-reduction-working-groupAcademic Research: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/research

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeGet Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulderWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutDavid Nichols is the chemist who made the molecules behind the entire psychedelic renaissance; Bryan Roth is the pharmacologist who cracked how those drugs actually work inside the brain. Together they reveal how little we still understand about the compounds now entering mainstream medicine — and how the same technology could, in Roth's own words, build a literal zombie apocalypse.Expect to learn why the word "psychedelic" could once kill a research grant, how Nichols hand-made the MDMA, DMT and psilocybin behind the field's most famous trials, what profiling 41 psychedelics against 318 receptors actually revealed, why we still don't know what half of those receptors even do, whether the trip itself is the medicine or a side effect that can be engineered away, why a twitching mouse is the most reliable predictor of a human trip, how Roth's "remote control for neurons" could rewrite memory, pain and aggression, and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer3:22 Two Godfathers of Psychedelics, Together4:03 The Man Who Made the Molecules by Hand7:34 How Roth Fell Into Serotonin by Accident16:46 When "Psychedelic" Was a Forbidden Word20:18 318 Receptors, 41 Psychedelics: The Big Paper31:18 Nobody Knows What Half These Receptors Do35:46 How Nixon's Drug War Killed the Science46:06 The LSD in the Famous Structure Was Dave's55:52 1.4 Kilos of MDMA for $4,00057:29 The Psilocybin That Stunned Johns Hopkins1:00:19 The Real-Life Walter White1:01:20 Where Psychedelic Medicine Goes Next1:07:13 "It's Just GQ": How Psychedelics Actually Work1:11:35 The Hidden Proteins Behind Mental Illness1:20:03 Is the Trip Itself the Medicine?1:34:33 Why a Twitching Mouse Predicts a Trip1:38:14 Your Personalised Psychedelic, Designed by AI1:45:51 The Tech to Build a Zombie Apocalypse...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Episodes MentionedDavid Nichols — Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6umTgXsW1lQBryan Roth — Meet The World's Greatest Psychedelic Receptor Scientist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEmmmMma8QsGuest LinksBryan Roth — UNC Pharmacology: https://www.med.unc.edu/pharm/directory/bryan-roth-md-phd/Roth Lab & NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program: https://pdspdb.unc.edu/rothlab/David Nichols — Heffter Research Institute: https://www.heffter.orgThe 318-receptor psychedelics paper (Neuron, 2025): https://www.cell.com/neur

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant’s Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutJoseph LeDoux is, by almost any measure, the greatest emotion neuroscientist who has ever lived. His work has been cited more than 185,000 times, he wrote The Emotional Brain — the book that defined the field — and he put the amygdala on the map as the brain’s fear centre. Then he spent a decade arguing that everyone, including himself, got the lesson wrong.Expect to learn how a marketing student accidentally became the most-cited emotion researcher alive, what split-brain experiments reveal about why your brain invents fake explanations for your behaviour, why the amygdala is not a fear centre and what it actually does, how every act of remembering chemically rewrites the memory, why anxiety drugs have been targeting the wrong brain circuit for 50 years, what the Four Realms of Existence means for the concept of self, why emotions are culturally acquired schema rather than universal hardwired states, and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:43 From Marketing Student to Neuroscientist0:06:18 Moving to New York and Meeting Gazzaniga0:07:37 How Split-Brain Surgery Works0:09:58 The Chicken and Shovel Experiment0:12:13 We Are Confabulating 24/70:17:13 Why He Chose to Study Emotion in Rats0:19:26 His Grant Was Rejected for Studying Emotions0:22:30 Masquerading as a Learning Researcher0:25:22 Growing Discomfort With the Amygdala Fear Centre0:28:23 Rethinking the Emotional Brain0:30:47 Why Fear Isn’t Universal — Danger Is0:33:19 Emotions as Acquired Schema0:35:22 The Four Realms of Existence0:40:36 Cognition vs Consciousness in Animals0:41:29 Tulving’s Three Kinds of Consciousness0:47:57 The Brain Region Only Humans Have0:53:40 Your Model Is Still on the Slide — And You Disagree0:55:05 The George Martin Analogy0:56:37 Why Anxiety Drugs Don’t Actually Work0:58:21 The Three-Step Fix for Fear1:01:27 Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness1:05:36 Using AI to Decode Conscious vs Unconscious Speech...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] LinksNYU Faculty Page: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/joseph-e-ledoux.htmlPersonal Website: https://www.joseph-ledoux.com/Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iAqJssMAAAAJ&hl=enPsychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/joseph-e-ledoux-phdThe Four Realms of Existence (Harvard University Press): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291003

Get Jenni, Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off): http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulderGet the Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulderPaul Cisek is a control neuroscientist at the University of Montreal who records from single neurons in the brains of monkeys as they think, and who has spent decades reconstructing how the brain evolved across hundreds of millions of years. His verdict cuts against everything Silicon Valley believes: the brain was never a computer — it's a control system built to keep a body alive, and the most advanced AI on Earth understands nothing it says.Expect to learn why Richard Dawkins is wrong that Claude could be conscious, why every era wrongly compares the brain to its fanciest technology, how a baseball outfielder reveals what the brain is really doing, why large language models are "Eliza on steroids" and 100% illusion, where meaning actually comes from and why LLMs can never have it, why the real danger isn't ChatGPT but the agentic systems that come next, whether a paramecium could be conscious, what Michael Levin's neuron-growing biobots tell us about minds, and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:33 Why Paul Rescheduled to Watch a Monkey Learn0:06:13 Probing Electrodes Into a Living Brain0:13:42 What a Single Neuron Actually Sounds Like0:20:41 The Brain Is Not a Camera Plugged Into a Computer0:24:55 How an Outfielder Catches a Ball Without Doing Physics0:33:24 Why Federer "Lets the Cerebellum Run the Show"0:38:09 Richard Dawkins Says Claude Might Be Conscious0:39:11 Every Era Thinks the Brain Is Its Latest Gadget0:42:36 Why AI Is "Eliza on Steroids" and 100% Illusion0:45:38 The Mechanical Turk and the Stage Magician0:48:09 The Mimicry Irony at the Heart of Dawkins' Mistake0:52:32 The One Thing AlphaFold and ChatGPT Both Lack0:53:30 Where Meaning Actually Comes From0:57:55 Language Is Persuasion: The Crying Baby Problem1:03:14 The Paper With Friston and Clark on What AI Misses1:04:48 Could You Build a Machine That Wants Things?1:10:23 Build a Mind, Build a Rival: Do We Even Want To?1:13:32 Is a Paramecium Conscious?1:18:11 Why There's No Line Between a Lump of Cells and You1:23:18 Population Thinking: It's All Continuums1:30:36 The Mad Scientist Won't Be Sam Altman — It'll Be Michael Levin1:36:29 Does Synthetic Biology Deserve Its Own Doomsday?1:39:37 Why Real Intelligence Would Be a Competitor We Should Fear1:43:20 Why the Real World Humbles Every Robot...Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience?Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutEmail for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeUpgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutHaleh Fotowat is a neuroscientist who builds nervous systems from scratch — the scientist who gave neurons to Michael Levin's xenobots, the living robots made from frog cells. When those neurons self-organised into a working nervous system, they switched on genes for eyes, in a creature that has never had eyes and never existed in nature.Expect to learn how a clump of frog skin cells becomes a moving biological robot, why these cells secretly default to becoming neurons unless their neighbours stop them, what happened when the neurons grew axons and reached out for the body, why every neurobot develops its own movement personality, how a brainless blob forces you to redefine agency and goals, why the neurons switched on genes for eyes despite having none, what a seizure drug revealed about which biobots truly have nervous systems, what might happen if you gave the neurobots DMT, and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:05 What Is a Neurobot?0:02:39 Building a Living Robot From Frog Cells0:08:46 Why These Cells Secretly Want to Be Neurons0:10:48 What's the Point of This Research?0:16:26 Brain Cells in a Dish Playing Doom0:18:16 A Warehouse Full of Human Neurons0:19:16 What Happened When the Neurons Grew0:21:36 The Neurons Reached Out for the Body0:25:51 Why Each Neurobot Has Its Own Personality0:28:51 Can a Blob of Neurons Have Goals?0:39:42 Braitenberg's Vehicles: Complexity From Simplicity0:42:25 Biology Is Cognition All the Way Down0:49:12 The Eyes That Shouldn't Exist0:54:18 Xenobots Grew Genes for Hearing1:01:16 The Role of Bioelectricity1:04:02 One Question for Michael Levin1:06:53 What If You Gave the Neurobots DMT?1:07:27 The Seizure Drug That Surprised Everyone...... Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Episodes MentionedMichael Levin — Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyMBrett Kagan — Meet The Neuroscientist Creating New Forms of Sentient Biological Intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlJc4tu1F8Philip Ball — Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SseGx0R0fYJosh Bongard — Meet The Scientist Who Created The First Living Robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h908uoH6n4Guest LinksAllen Discovery Center (Tufts) Profile: https://allencenter.tufts.edu/our-team/haleh-fotowat-ph-d/Art Website: http://

Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulderUpgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutMichael Levin is a developmental biologist who builds living creatures that have never existed before, and Earl Miller is a neuroscientist who has spent thirty years arguing that your thoughts live in the brain's electric fields, not its wiring. In the same room together for the first time, they agree on something that sounds insane — that bioelectricity is the engine of mind at every scale of life, from a single cell deciding to grow an eye to a human deciding what to eat for lunch.Expect to learn how cells use a bioelectric code you can read and rewrite to grow an eye on a tadpole's tail, why no single cell knows what an eye is but the collective does, how a flatworm regrows a whole new brain and keeps its old memories, why the brain is an orchestra of electric waves and not a telegraph of wires, how three different anaesthetics switch off consciousness through one mechanism reductionism can't explain, why consciousness may just be the story your brain tells about what it already did, whether memories can be transplanted between bodies, what the Platonic space of minds is and why Levin thinks physicalism died with Pythagoras, and much more…Timestamps: 0:00:00 Trailer0:02:46 The Vacuum Tubes That Started It All0:08:36 How to Read and Rewrite the Bioelectric Code0:12:36 Why No Single Cell Knows What an Eye Is0:15:22 Your Brain Is Not a Telegraph System0:19:30 Why They Called It Magic and Bullshit0:24:56 Flatworm or Human Brain — Same Code?0:30:00 Where Is Memory Actually Stored?0:32:24 The Flatworm That Regrows Its Memories0:34:34 People Living Without Most of Their Brain0:40:32 Can Memories Live Outside the Brain?0:43:26 Will a Rat Pop Down to the 7-Eleven for Smokes?0:49:14 Consciousness Is Overrated (Says a Neuroscientist)0:53:17 Hey Liver, Why Do I Feel Like Crap?0:54:20 Nobody Knows Why Anaesthesia Works0:57:21 Three Drugs, One Mystery, One Mechanism0:58:50 Why Anaesthesia Is Dangerous When You're Old1:02:12 What Is a Neurobot?1:08:18 The Eyes That Shouldn't Exist1:13:28 What Is the Platonic Space of Minds?1:20:44 Devil's Advocate: Have We Just Not Figured It Out?1:24:03 The Free Lunch: More Out Than You Put In1:29:36 Why Physicalism Died With Pythagoras1:32:52 How Bioelectricity Touches the Platonic Space...GS Episodes MentionedAnil Seth — No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Real

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeUpgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutSteven Barker is the world's longest-running DMT researcher and the analytical chemist who helped prove the molecule exists in the mammalian brain. He argues your brain manufactures its own psychedelic at the same concentration as serotonin — and floods your cortex with it under stress and as you die.Expect to learn why Steven believes your brain produces DMT at serotonin-level concentrations, how 29 years of drug-testing racehorses gave him the tools to find it, why he says David Nichols is wrong about endogenous DMT, why stress can make brain DMT spike tenfold, how a hidden receptor inside your neurons may explain how psychedelics rewire the brain, why the DMT trip might be neuroplasticity you can actually feel, what DMT entities really are, and much more…Timestamps0:00:00 Trailer0:02:40 The Recurring Dream That Started a 50-Year Obsession0:06:53 Hunting For The Brain's Own Psychedelic In 19720:12:54 The Discovery That We ALL Make DMT0:19:07 Were Psychedelics Ever Meant To Be Medicine?0:22:17 How The War On Drugs Killed The Research0:24:02 Funding Psychedelic Science With Racehorse Drug Tests0:34:56 Why You Can't Patent A Psychedelic0:36:31 The Psychedelic Trip Is Just An "Overdose"0:41:58 Why David Nichols Is Wrong About DMT0:50:16 The "Pineal Is Too Small" Argument Is Ludicrous0:54:20 DMT Is In Your Brain At Serotonin Levels1:01:00 Stress Floods Your Brain With DMT1:02:32 Why Everyone Else Failed To Detect DMT1:12:05 The Hidden Receptor Inside Your Neurons1:19:54 Is The DMT Trip Just Neuroplasticity You Can Feel?1:26:09 What DMT Entities Actually Are1:32:15 Are We Building A New Psychedelic Religion?1:42:11 50 Years of DMT and The Nature of Consciousness1:44:26 Why He's Still A "Proud Reductionist"...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] Episodes MentionedDavid Nichols — Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6umTgXsW1lQBryan Roth — Meet The World's Greatest Psychedelic Receptor Scientist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEmmmMma8QsAndrew Gallimore — No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDAGuest LinksResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven-Barker-8Cottonwood Research Foundation: https://www.cottonwoodresearch.org

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeGet Muse EEG Headband (15% off): https://choosemuse.com/giantsshoulderWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community (100% free): https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutDavid Luke is the world's first and only Professor of Exceptional Experience — a parapsychologist and psychedelic researcher at the University of Greenwich who has spent two decades running experiments on the phenomena mainstream science refuses to touch. His naturalistic DMT field study found that 90% of participants encountered autonomous entities, 85% believed they were real — and some were blocked from returning by the entities themselves.Expect to learn why 90% of DMT users encounter entities and 85% say they're real, what happens when the entities refuse you entry, how your body responds to images before you've seen them, why someone with zero visual imagery can still meet elves on DMT, how entity encounters shift people's sense of purpose and meaning more than any other psychedelic effect, what the telepathy tapes are and why they show 100% success rates, why physics gets to be weird but consciousness doesn't, what a neo-pagan shamanically-informed lazy mystic actually believes about reality, and much more…0:00:00 Trailer0:04:03 Double Career Suicide0:07:32 The DMT Field Study0:13:45 Your Body Predicts the Future0:16:01 Huxley's Reducing Valve Theory0:20:23 Chris Timmermann's DMT Research0:23:20 90% Encounter Entities0:24:48 Punched in the Head by God0:27:17 The DMT Entity Taxonomy0:29:03 Experiencing Entities Without Vision0:48:28 The Aphantasia DMT Trip0:53:47 Entities Leaking Into Other People's Trips0:54:23 DMT Blocking0:56:30 The Entities Said Bugger Off0:59:57 Endogenous DMT and the Pineal Gland1:02:55 David Nichols Dismantles the Pineal Theory1:05:52 Giant Mantis Entities1:11:12 Purpose & Meaning: The #1 Wellbeing Shift1:12:06 The Telepathy Tapes1:19:54 The Ganzfeld Experiment1:24:16 Physics Gets To Be Weird But We Can't1:26:33 Why DMT Entities Are So Reliable1:29:33 Pablo Amaringo's Ayahuasca Art1:36:34 Do You Have a Stable Ontology?1:38:12 The Lazy Mystic1:39:34 In the Province of the Mind There Are No Limits...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Want to go deeper on consciousness? Join our community where we run live discussions, inner experience challenges and early ad free access to every episode: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutPhilip Goff is a professor of philosophy at Durham University and author of Galileo's Error and Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Stephen Fry called him the most persuasive panpsychist alive.Physics tells us everything about what matter does — but nothing about what it actually is. Goff argues this isn't a gap we'll close — it's a permanent hole. And the best candidate to fill it is consciousness itself.Expect to learn why physics can only describe what stuff does and not what it is, how Evan's sister discovered at 31 she has zero mental imagery, why Bertrand Russell may have already solved consciousness a hundred years ago, what 5-MeO-DMT revealed to a philosopher about the nature of reality, the difference between weak and strong emergence and why it matters for AI, and much more…Timestamps:00:00 Trailer02:21 What Makes Consciousness Radically Different05:24 Evan's Descriptive Experience Sampling Experiment06:42 Discovering Aphantasia at 3108:27 Change Blindness and the Invisible Gorilla10:40 Mary's Room: What Red Looks Like13:21 Why Consciousness Theories Ignore Subjective Experience16:48 The Resurgence of Panpsychism18:14 Bertrand Russell: The Darwin of Consciousness20:13 Evan's Psychedelic Journey Toward Biopsychism22:12 Taking 5-MeO-DMT as a Philosopher24:38 Michael Pollan, Plants and Psychedelic Openness28:45 Is Consciousness Computational or Biological?30:43 The Combination Problem: How Tiny Minds Become One37:17 Russell's Inversion: Start With Consciousness40:21 The Hole in Physics: What Stuff Does vs What It IS41:50 Why Bernardo Kastrup Gets Cross44:41 Galileo's Error: The Decision That Broke Science47:20 Aphantasia, Visual Decoding and the Consciousness Gap49:50 Front Brain vs Back Brain: Where Is Consciousness?52:40 Eric Schwitzgebel's Snail Problem55:40 Philosopher-Scientist Teams: A New Model1:03:01 Strong Emergence and New Causal Dynamics1:04:47 Will We Fall in Love With Robots?1:07:22 The Genome Didn't Solve Life1:10:54 The $10 Billion Consciousness Experiment...GS Episodes MentionedAnil Seth — Consciousness, Controlled Hallucination, Perception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1oPhilip Ball — Quantum Mechanics, Brain Organoids, How Life Works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNbG5lnp51EKevin Mitchell — Free Will, Neuroplasticity, Strong Emergence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VGWzGqA32EMatthias Michel — Consciousness Philosophy, Aphantasia, Fish Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtVWgpVPr1sRussell Hurlburt — Inner Experience, Descriptive Experience Sampling: https:/

Want to truly understand your own conscious inner experience? I built a tool and its free - https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutDr Simon Ruffell is a clinical psychiatrist and the CEO of Onaya Science, the research organisation that studies Amazonian ayahuasca healing alongside Shipibo curanderos in the Peruvian rainforest. His team ran the first-ever study on a psychedelic and human epigenetics — finding that ayahuasca methylates the trauma-memory gene SIGMAR1, mapping precisely onto what the Shipibo have called "cleaning ancestral lines" for thousands of years.Expect to learn why a Maudsley-trained psychiatrist walked away from the NHS to apprentice as a Shipibo shaman, what happens when a curandero performs an exorcism on you mid-ceremony, how 80% of veterans no longer met PTSD criteria six months after a two-week retreat, why the curandero traditionally drinks the ayahuasca and the patient doesn't, what happened when Simon gave a Shipibo curandero a hit of pure crystal DMT, why DMT entities might be real and where Robin Carhart-Harris and Andrew Gallimore disagree about it, and much more…Timestamps:00:00 Trailer03:20 What is Shipibo Curanderismo?04:52 From disillusioned NHS psychiatrist to the Peruvian Amazon10:14 First ayahuasca: shown two versions of myself15:41 The demon attack and the three suckers26:13 Bridging Western psychiatry and Amazonian shamanism36:04 Are DMT entities real? Carhart-Harris vs Gallimore49:50 Inside the multimodal veteran PTSD study52:41 DMT vs ayahuasca — what's actually different57:11 Should you try this? Preparation and "gringo wasca"1:04:52 The first-ever psychedelic epigenetics study (SIGMAR1)1:12:17 "Cleaning ancestral lines" — when Indigenous science met Western1:16:51 80% no longer meet PTSD criteria — the real numbers1:20:37 The shaman drinks, not the patient — traditional protocol1:30:41 The spiritual mechanism of action1:34:54 The dream experiment — plant personalitiesEmail for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] FOLLOW SIMON:Website: https://www.drsimonruffell.comInstagram: @sgdruffellOnaya Science: https://www.onaya.ioHeroic Hearts UK: https://www.heroicheartsuk.orgPAST EPISODES MENTIONED:Robin Carhart-Harris — Entropic Brain, How Psychedelics Really Work and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRkAndrew Gallimore — DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDAGrace Blest-Hopley — Psychedelics Expert: Who is Blocking Psychedelic Research?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBcLxMfUzxw

Join the #1 Community Dedicated to Rigorous & Radical Biology: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutBrett Kagan is the Chief Scientific Officer at Cortical Labs, the Australian startup that fuses living human neurons with silicon chips to create a fundamentally new kind of intelligence. His team's DishBrain paper showed that neurons in a dish learned to play Pong in under five minutes — without any reward signal — providing some of the strongest experimental evidence for Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle.Expect to learn how neurons on a chip actually play Pong and Doom, why unpredictable stimulation drives learning better than reward, what the Free Energy Principle really says and where Brett disagrees with Friston, why 200,000 neurons outperform 800,000 on certain tasks, how Brett's baby daughter staring at fractals led to a new theory of intelligence, why no AI system can walk into your kitchen and make a cup of tea, what biological data centres look like and why they already exist, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer02:30 Brett Kagan — Neurons Playing Doom03:04 The stepping stones from Pong to Doom04:00 What is the CL1 and Cortical Cloud?05:20 The moonshot goal of Cortical Labs06:46 Giant buildings of neurons as computation hubs07:13 The biocomputing data centre already running in Melbourne07:38 Not building a brain in a dish09:00 What does a biological computer actually look like?09:29 Electricity as the shared language between biology and silicon10:49 How neurons on a chip play Pong11:10 Topographic mapping inspired by the whisker barrel system13:10 Why the neurons hit the ball — and what happens when they miss14:33 The Free Energy Principle explained simply16:03 The trap door analogy for unpredictable stimulation18:42 How the structure of neuron cultures shapes performance19:19 Bees vs elephants: why bigger brains aren’t always better21:37 Growing hippocampal place cells in a dish24:12 Teaching neurons Morse code28:27 The Free Energy Principle — cups, predictions and surprise32:29 Where Brett disagrees with Friston37:03 The dog treat problem — how do you reward a neuron?39:40 Complexity as a hidden driver of intelligence41:53 His baby daughter’s obsession with fractals43:57 Defining agency — the three orders of information processing50:33 Change how you change over time53:27 Why scientists are incentivised to be vague instead of wrong59:42 J.D. Bernal’s 1929 vision for brains beyond bodies1:02:38 Standing on the shoulders of iPSC pioneers1:03:14 Can neurons play chess? Moravec’s Paradox1:04:12 No AI can walk into your kitchen and make tea1:05:16 Augmenting what silicon is bad at1:06:35 Is general intelligence even possible for silicon?1:09:40 Why 200,000 neurons

Do you really inner speak? Join my Skool community and find out: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutCharles Fernyhough is the world's leading Inner Speech Researcher, Cambridge-trained Psychologist, and author of *The Voices Within*. His three decades of research have uncovered something most people never suspect: the voice in your head isn't a monologue — it's a compressed conversation between internalised versions of everyone you've ever spoken to, and when that compression fails, you hear voices.Expect to learn why inner speech is a Swiss army knife you use against yourself as often as you use it to plan your day, what "thinking in pure meanings" actually feels like when language gets stripped away, why spontaneous inner speech lights up completely different brain regions than scientists expected, how the dialogic structure of your inner voice explains human creativity, why 1 in 7 fiction readers hear characters as vividly as a real person in the room, what experiential crossing is and why a reader walked into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway, why prayer might just be a specific kind of inner speech, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Intro02:30 Inner Speech as a Swiss Army Knife05:39 Is Inner Speech the Same as Thinking?06:58 Why We Should Abolish the Word "Thinking"08:42 Chess Experts Don't Use Language to Think10:03 Evan's 10-Week DES Experiment with Hurlburt12:19 Condensed Inner Speech vs Unsymbolized Thinking17:11 What Brain Scans Actually Show About Inner Speech20:58 Spontaneous vs Elicited Speech Light Up Different Areas25:16 Does It Matter How Much Inner Speech You Have?30:02 When Inner Speech Becomes a Weapon Against Yourself32:41 Are People Without Inner Speech NPCs?36:02 It's Not How Much You Speak — It's What You Say38:44 Why People Refuse to Believe Others Think Differently42:26 Neurodiversity and the Inner Speech Revolution44:35 The Dialogical Inner Speech Model Explained49:55 Multiple Identities Inside Your Inner Dialogue52:00 Prayer as Inner Speech with a Spiritual Being54:20 Hearing Voices Without Being Mentally Ill57:17 1 in 7 Readers Hear Characters Like Real People58:34 Experiential Crossing — Walking Into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway59:48 Do Writers Actually Hear Their Characters?1:01:57 Predictive Processing and Fictional Selves1:04:20 Why Children Create Imaginary Companions...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

Do you really inner speak? Join my Skool community and find out: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutBen Alderson-Day is a hallucination researcher, Professor of Psychology at Durham, and author of the award-winning book *Presence*. His work reveals that the line between your inner voice, hearing voices, and deliberately creating a mind inside your own head is far thinner than anyone assumed.Expect to learn why not as many people truly inner speak as you might think, how your parents' voices became the voice in your head, why writers hear their characters talk back, what tulpamancers are and how they build autonomous minds, what really separates inner speech from hallucination, what Evan's LSD experience revealed about the voice in his head, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Intro03:20 What everyone should know about their inner speech05:39 Is my inner speech really me?07:30 Why some people have no inner speech at all11:13 How your parents' voices became the voice in your head13:34 The age your brain learns to think in words15:25 What 10 weeks of sampling your own mind reveals18:13 Peep Show and why we think thinking means talking21:04 What Evan's inner experience was actually like23:00 The field was written by people who talk to themselves25:32 Why people refuse to believe other minds work differently28:39 Why you get furious when a character's voice is wrong in a film34:22 Reader Bank — find out what type of reader you are37:53 Can you train yourself to have richer inner speech?40:20 Writers who hear their characters speak42:27 What is a tulpamancer and how did this start?45:36 How to create a sentient being in your own mind50:20 "This sounds like you're channelling psychosis"52:45 "It's just like hearing a voice in the room"55:50 The time Evan didn't recognise his own voice on LSD58:31 Would a hallucination researcher ever try tulpamancy?...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] mentioned:Russell Hurlburt (Round 1): https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNgRussell Hurlburt (Round 2): https://youtu.be/N9tO1OLdJtoGualtiero Piccinini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkDIPLIuRg

Get A Full Breakdown Of Your Own Conscious Inner Experience (100% Free): https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutMatthias Michel is an MIT philosopher and co-founder of the MIT Consciousness Club who has developed one of the most provocative theories of consciousness in recent years: Perceptual Reality Monitoring. He argues your brain runs a constant reality check on every signal it receives — deciding what's real and what's noise — and that this mechanism IS consciousness.Expect to learn how your brain tells the difference between perception, memory, imagination and noise, why conscious vision lags 400 milliseconds behind reality, why every fast action you've ever taken was driven entirely unconsciously, why fish probably have no conscious visual experience at all, how aphantasics may have mental imagery they can't consciously access, why conscious mental imagery might actually be a bug in the system, what blindsight patient GY's experience reveals about unconscious vision, and much more…Timestamps: 0:00 Matthias Michel — What Is Perceptual Reality Monitoring?2:58 How does the brain tell reality from imagination?5:30 Snake fear in Malaysia: when prediction systems misfire6:22 Blood vessel shadows and the stuff your brain erases7:50 Motion-induced blindness: your brain deleting real objects9:50 Is schizophrenia a broken reality monitor?11:02 Where does reality monitoring happen in the brain?12:53 Can you be conscious without a frontal cortex?15:49 Mark Solms and brainstem consciousness18:15 What does it mean to see without conscious vision?18:40 "Tell me what it's like to see behind your head" — blindsight patient GY20:48 Do fish have conscious vision?22:05 Why conscious vision is 350-400ms too slow for action24:07 Two visual systems: one conscious, one not25:30 The hollow face illusion fools your eyes but not your hand26:21 Binocular rivalry: your eyes know things you don't29:24 Sensory horizons: why water limits conscious vision33:17 Could coral reef fish or octopuses be the exception?37:31 Are fish complete zombies? (60% confidence)39:18 Should we still protect fish even if they're unconscious?42:47 Aphantasia through the lens of reality monitoring46:00 Why conscious imagery might be a "bug"48:06 Blank access: using imagery without experiencing it50:17 What is an unconscious visual representation?55:54 The strongest counterevidence to unconscious imagery58:50 Pupil dilation and Joel Pearson's results1:01:18 How do we falsify unconscious imagery?1:04:30 The PRM explanation for aphantasia: threshold differences1:07:50 The future of consciousness and aphantasia research1:10:29 Vividness is multidimensional — lessons from Russell Hurlburt1:13:35 Brain imaging limitations and the ne

Dr. Alfredo Spagna is a Cognitive Neuroscientist at Columbia University who discovered the Fusiform Imagery Node — the brain region that activates every time you imagine anything. But when he scanned people with aphantasia using an ultra-high-field 7T brain scanner, the node was firing perfectly — it just wasn't connected to the frontal lobe, suggesting that consciousness itself might depend not on what your brain computes, but on what it connects.Expect to learn how imagination hijacks the brain's perceptual system, why aphantasia shattered 40 years of assumptions about mental imagery, what the "visualizer fallacy" is and why it affects everything from therapy to education, how a painter with aphantasia creates art without ever seeing it in his mind, why your brain imagining a lemon makes you salivate even though there's no lemon, what the 7T brain scanner revealed about the architecture of imagination, how aphantasia may support the Global Neuronal Workspace theory of consciousness, why Olympic athletes spend hours visualizing routines they never physically perform, and much more…Timestamps00:08 What Happens in the Brain When You Imagine01:02 Where Imagination and Perception Diverge03:44 Would Perfect Imagination Be Hallucination?05:49 Voluntary vs Involuntary Imagination06:50 Why Do People with Aphantasia Still Dream?07:33 What Is Aphantasia — The Discovery That Changed Everything09:30 The Dissociation That Frightened Scientists11:06 The Visualizer Fallacy12:01 How Aphantasics Solve Problems Without Images14:31 Evan's Sister Discovers Aphantasia at 3116:55 Could Imagery Be Unconscious in Aphantasia?18:19 The Architect Who Lost His Imagination21:11 Eric the Painter — Creating Art Without Seeing It24:51 The Inner Speech Fallacy and Neurodiversity29:02 "I Can't Visualize My Mom's Face"29:57 Why Aphantasia Breaks Psychotherapy33:06 Empathy, Conflict and How Inner Experience Shapes Society36:42 The Chemistry Exam Problem39:09 Is Hypervisualization Actually a Disadvantage?41:21 Imagination as a Double-Edged Sword43:37 What Is the Fusiform Imagery Node?46:10 The Cafeteria Conversation That Started It All50:07 Three Bombshells From One Meta-Analysis52:23 Domain-General vs Domain-Specific Imagination54:05 The Brain Still Imagines in Aphantasia — It Just Disconnects56:36 Is Aphantasia a Disconnection Syndrome?58:59 Step-By-Step: What Your Brain Does When You Imagine an Apple1:05:05 Non-Visual Imagination — Taste, Touch, Sound1:09:38 What Aphantasia Reveals About Consciousness1:13:26 Does This Support IIT or Global Workspace Theory?1:15:49 Can Aphantasia Be Trained Away?1:18:53 The Olympic Skier Who Visualized Gold1:22:25 $10 Billion to Solve Imagination — Where Would You Spend It?...Em

Bryan L. Roth is a drug receptor scientist who solved the crystal structure of LSD inside a serotonin receptor and took $26.9 million from DARPA to build a non-hallucinogenic psychedelic — a compound that hits the same receptor as psilocybin, produces antidepressant effects in mice, and doesn't cause a trip.Expect to learn how his mother's schizophrenia launched a 40-year career in pharmacology, why Salvia divinorum has zero serotonin activity and works entirely through the kappa opioid receptor, why serotonin and opioid receptors converge in the claustrum, why DARPA funded non-hallucinogenic alternatives for soldiers, how his lab screens a trillion compounds that don't physically exist, why only 100 of 26,000 protein targets have ever been drugged, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Bryan L. Roth — The Man Who Builds Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelics02:41 Falling Into Receptor Science by Accident04:58 When Only 5 People on Earth Studied Psychedelic Receptors06:07 Why "Psychedelic" Was Banned From Research Grants07:28 The 2016 Papers That Changed Everything08:26 The Scientist Friend Who Got "Cured" by Psilocybin10:41 The Vietnam Vet With a Gun in His Mouth — Ibogaine's Power12:50 What Is Ibogaine and Why Can It Kill You?18:06 Why the Kappa Opioid System Breaks Reality19:07 The Hidden History of Psychotomimetic Opioids22:16 Why Opioid Researchers Deny Kappa Causes Hallucinations23:18 The Claustrum: Where Serotonin and Opioid Receptors Meet24:14 Multiple Entry Points Into Reality-Altering Brain Systems28:35 Why Psychedelic Experiences Feel So Meaningful29:58 DMT: "More Real Than Reality" — And Nobody Knows Why31:28 Salvia: Becoming Plaid on a Wall33:48 Trump's $50M Psychedelic Order Won't Buy One Clinical Trial35:33 No Other Psychedelic Touches the Kappa Receptor38:10 The Real Reason He Built a Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelic41:33 DARPA: More Psychiatric Casualties Than Physical in the Military44:48 Biased Agonism: Stripping the Trip From the Therapy47:19 How GPCRs Work and Why Drug Design Is Still Trial and Error49:50 People Who Will Never Touch a Psychedelic But Do Cocaine Weekly52:27 "I Don't Discuss That" — Whether He's Taken Psychedelics52:47 Screening a Trillion Drugs That Don't Exist55:02 The Real Bottleneck: 26,000 Targets, Only 100 Drugged...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Andrés Gómez Emilsson runs research at the Qualia Research Institute and thinks consciousness has a literal mathematical shape. We walk through the six geometric levels of DMT, why phenomenal space goes hyperbolic at high doses, why bad trips are competing symmetries fighting for territory in your visual field, and why he thinks AI on silicon will never be conscious.Expect to learn why pleasure is symmetry, what makes DMT phenomenologically alien at the topological level, why your breath being out of phase with your heartbeat might be most of what anxiety is, where the free energy principle stops being a theory of consciousness, and why a swimming pool full of logic gates breaks every computational theory of the mind.Timestamps00:00 The 6 Geometric Levels of DMT 02:30 Can Subjective Experience Be Studied Like Physics?03:58 Mapping Experience as a Hypergraph09:33 Introducing the Symmetry Theory of Valence12:19 What Symmetry Actually Is (And Why Physics Cares)19:21 Why Energetic Blockages Feel Bad — Yoga, Jhanas and Wave Propagation23:06 Is Pleasure Necessarily Symmetrical?26:31 The Annealing Metaphor: Healing a Broken Cymbal29:18 Symmetries in the World vs Symmetries in the Brain32:54 The Bucket Brigade: Why Coupled Oscillators Have to Be in Phase36:27 Where the Free Energy Principle Stops Being a Theory of Consciousness39:33 Marr's Levels: Why Friston Describes But Doesn't Explain42:12 What's Actually Symmetric in the Brain? (Thalamus and Biorhythms)47:52 Anxiety as Hyperpressurisation50:13 Connectome Harmonics and the Brain as a Musical Instrument52:18 The Six Levels of DMT — Threshold, Symmetry Hotel, Magic Eye55:06 The Magic Eye Level Explained57:31 Crystal Worlds and the Waiting Room59:48 The Breakthrough: When Topology Itself Changes01:01:43 Why Bad Trips Are Competing Symmetries, Not Missing Ones01:04:35 Square vs Hexagon Universes Fighting for Territory01:05:54 The LSD Christianity Example01:07:32 Andrew Gallimore's Alien Worlds — Pre-Configured Reality?01:09:04 Beam Splitter Holography and the Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer01:10:21 Why DMT Feels So Real — Cross-Modal Coherence and the Tactile Field01:12:48 The Coupling Kernel and Opposite-Phase Oscillators01:13:53 DMT Archetypes and the Specificity of Encounters...🔗 GS Episodes ReferencedAndrew Gallimore (DMT, alien worlds): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=GallimoreElizabeth Margulis (music neuroscience): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=MargulisMark Solms (homeostatic theory of valence): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Solms 🔗 Andrés Gómez EmilssonQualia Research Institute: https://qri.orgQualia Computing (blog): https://qualiacomputing.comSubstack: htt

Andrew Gallimore is a neurobiologist, pharmacologist and chemist who developed the DMTx protocol — a technology that extends the most intense psychedelic experience known to science from minutes to hours. He is the author of Alien Information Theory, Reality Switch Technologies and Death by Astonishment, and is Director of Noonautics, a nonprofit dedicated to the scientific exploration of consciousness. He currently lives and works in Tokyo.Expect to learn why your brain builds alien worlds on DMT, what thalamocortical loops and attractor states actually are, why DMT may have once been an ancient neurotransmitter, why 94% of users encounter non-human entities, what Jungian archetypes can and can't explain about DMT, where Andrew disagrees with Robin Carhart-Harris on the reality of entities, what the DMTx extended state protocol is and how it works, why DMT is the only psychedelic that doesn't produce tolerance, what happens when entities deny you access to the DMT world, what darkness retreats and breathwork have to do with endogenous DMT, and much more...Timestamps:0:00 Trailer2:11 What Is the Building Alien Worlds Thesis?4:06 What Makes DMT Unique Among Psychedelics?6:57 World Space Landscape and Consensus Reality8:11 DMT Entities — Prevalence and Types11:04 Consistency of Entity Interactions13:31 Is the DMT World Real or a Hallucination?17:34 Thalamocortical Loops and World-Model Construction20:34 Attractor States Explained24:21 Why DMT’s Stability Suggests an Evolutionary Role27:25 Parallel Lives — The DMT Sleep Cycle Hypothesis28:36 What Was the Evolutionary Purpose of the DMT World?33:35 Melatonin, Serotonin and DMT — Pharmacological Cousins35:57 Is DMT Still Doing Something Important in the Brain?36:36 Noonautics and Endogenous DMT Research38:43 Debunking DMT Breathwork Courses and Pineal Myths40:45 What Does a Stable Pattern of Brain Activity Actually Look Like?43:53 Order Within Chaos — Chris Timmermann’s DMTx Findings47:16 Robin Carhart-Harris and the Jungian Archetype Debate48:37 What Jungian Archetypes Actually Are53:36 Why Archetypes Can’t Explain Alien Entities54:32 The Directed World Model — Do Entities Control Access?56:55 DMT Lockout — When Entities Deny You Entry58:30 Can You See Entities in Brain Scans?1:00:06 Future Brain Scanning Technology1:01:24 The Speed of the Switch as Evidence1:04:40 Dimensionality and Topology of the DMT World1:06:39 DMTx — What Is the Extended State Protocol?1:09:03 Target-Controlled Intravenous Infusion Explained1:11:23 Sending Specialists Into DMT Space1:13:35 Time Perception on DMT1:16:16 Surprises from DMTx Experiments1:18:15 The Future of DMT Consciousness Research1:19:12 Andrés Gómez Emilsson and the Mathematics of DMT Space...Ema

Dr. Matt Hill is one of the world’s leading cannabis neuroscientists, former president of the International Cannabinoid Research Society, and a researcher with over 21,000 citations studying how the endocannabinoid system regulates the brain and body.Cannabis affects different people in completely opposite ways — calming one person while causing crippling anxiety in another — and Hill explains why the biology makes this inevitable, why both sides of the cannabis debate are getting it wrong, and why legalisation in Canada accidentally destroyed the very research that could have answered our biggest questions.Expect to learn why CB1 is the most widely distributed receptor in the brain yet almost nobody has heard of it, how endocannabinoids work backwards across the synapse unlike any other signalling system, why low-dose THC calms the amygdala but high-dose THC causes paranoia and anxiety, why women get higher than men on the same dose of cannabis due to a liver enzyme difference, why only a third of people genuinely benefit from medical cannabis while a third get nothing, how cannabis triggers schizophrenia in genetically vulnerable people without actually causing the disease, why Canadian legalisation killed cannabis clinical trials through a bureaucratic GMP-versus-GPP standoff, what the real cardiovascular risks of chronic cannabis use are, why cannabis users paradoxically have lower obesity rates, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer02:00 Dr. Matt Hill — Cannabis Neuroscientist02:25 The Endocannabinoid System: Your Body’s Own Cannabis04:23 Every Biological Function It Controls06:30 The Most Distributed Receptor Nobody’s Heard Of07:20 Why Cannabis Science Is So Politically Toxic09:35 Both Sides Are Wrong: The Three Blind Men Problem10:23 The Frustrating Polarity of the Cannabis Debate12:37 Your Personal Experience Doesn’t Generalise16:25 Why Cannabis Feels Like a Different Drug for Different People17:52 Retrograde Signalling: How Cannabis Works Backwards20:08 Low Dose Calms, High Dose Causes Paranoia — Here’s Why22:24 Women Produce More 11-Hydroxy-THC Than Men25:52 Why Receptor Distribution Makes Cannabis Unpredictable27:11 The PET Scan Problem: Why We Can’t Map Your Receptors29:04 Why Cannabis Companies Don’t Fund Real Research31:25 How Legalisation Accidentally Killed Cannabis Science34:46 The GMP vs GPP Bureaucratic Disaster38:09 David Nutt: Drug Policy Driven by Politics Not Science43:01 Why You Can’t Standardise Cannabis Dosing Like Alcohol49:44 The Three Thirds Rule: Benefit, Side Effects, or Nothing53:05 The Best Evidence: Where Cannabis Actually Works53:36 Schizophrenia Risk — It’s a Trigger, Not a Cause55:52 Cardiovascular Risk: The Under-Discussed Real Danger57:02 Does Exercise Cancel Out Cannabis Heart Risk?58:14 The Obesity Paradox: Why Cannabis Users Are Thinner01:01:03 Chronic Pain, MS, Epilepsy and PTSD — The Medical Evidence01:03:18 Final Thoughts and a Plea for Billionaire Stoners...Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@t

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderDr. Elizabeth Margulis is a professor of music cognition at Princeton University and author of Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams.When strangers listen to the same unfamiliar music, they independently imagine the same vivid stories — down to specific words like "frolic" and "pirates." This may be one of the most surprising findings in modern cognitive science, and it challenges everything we assume about the privacy of our own thoughts.Expect to learn why strangers imagine the same stories when listening to identical music, how a cross-cultural experiment between the US and rural China revealed completely different imagined worlds to the same sounds, how repeated speech spontaneously transforms into song, the surprising link between psychedelic therapy and modern music therapy, why the Mozart Effect misled state legislatures, what makes certain songs irresistibly groovy, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Intro02:45 From Concert Pianist to Cognitive Scientist06:27 What Does a Brain Look Like Listening to Music?09:04 How Musical Processing Differs from Speech10:53 The Irresistible Urge to Dance16:18 Can Animals Keep a Beat? The Snowball Experiment23:42 Why Repetition Changes How You Feel About Music26:31 The Speech-to-Song Illusion32:05 Is Music Evolutionary? The Case for Social Bonding36:36 Psychedelics and Music: What's Really Driving the Healing?42:28 The Mozart Effect Myth47:42 How to Raise a Musical Prodigy49:25 Musical Daydreams: Why Strangers Imagine the Same Stories53:11 The China Experiment: Same Music, Different Stories1:06:57 Psychedelic Hallucinations and Musical Archetypes1:16:17 Can Music Teach Us About Consciousness?...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderTim Maudlin is a philosopher of physics at NYU and founder of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. In 1989 he published a paper proving that consciousness cannot arise from computation — thirty-five years before the world started panicking about whether ChatGPT can think.Expect to learn why no computer programme will ever be sufficient for consciousness, why large language models operate nothing like human brains, the critical difference between intelligence and consciousness that the AI industry keeps collapsing, why Penrose's arguments about consciousness are wrong, why quantum mechanics has nothing to do with the mind, why the mind-body problem may be the most intractable problem in all of science, and much more…Timestamps:00:00 Why Consciousness Is Not Computable02:35 Maudlin's 1989 Paper: Computation and Consciousness06:01 The Thought Experiment: Beer Cans, Windmills and Conscious Machines08:11 Why Running a Programme Can't Be Enough for Consciousness10:36 Counterfactuals: What the Machine Would Have Done13:56 The Cog and Wheel Machine: Stripping It Down16:18 The Strange Anaesthesia: Jamming the Gears19:10 Why Computational Structure Is the Wrong Level20:08 Is This For or Against Computationalism?23:01 The 2026 AI Consciousness Debate25:06 Why the Turing Test Is Trivially Defeatable27:00 Neural Nets Are Nothing Like Brains29:12 Why the Brain Is Far More Than Neurons31:01 HAL 9000 and How Children Actually Learn33:27 The Car Wash Question That Breaks ChatGPT35:18 Defining Intelligence and Consciousness37:53 Twin Earth: Why Definitions Don't Work the Way You Think43:06 Locked-In Syndrome and the Lobster Problem47:08 Computation Can't Explain Pain Either48:01 Intelligence vs Consciousness: Why You Must Separate Them50:45 Can Anything Be Intelligent Without Being Conscious?53:09 Is the Turing Machine Argument About Intelligence Too?54:04 What Does Memory Actually Mean?57:00 Can Mathematics Capture the Structure of Qualia?01:00:02 Scott Aaronson's Demolition of Integrated Information Theory01:03:26 Why Formalising Consciousness Is a Fetishisation of Maths01:09:00 Why There Is No Simple State Space for Vision01:13:22 Does Quantum Mechanics Explain Consciousness?01:18:25 The Problem with Penrose and Hameroff's Microtubule Theory01:21:31 How Do We Actually Make Progress on Consciousness?01:24:45 Does the Body Matter or Is It All in the Brain?01:27:00 The Mysterian View: Why the Mind-Body Problem May Be Unsolvable01:29:47 Could Someone Invent a New Explanatory Framework?01:31:13 Why Pain Hurts: The Evolutionary Story01:33:12 What Newton Would Think of General Relativity<

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderDr. György Buzsáki is one of the world’s most influential neuroscientists and the author of The Brain from Inside Out — a radical rethinking of how the brain generates perception, memory, and consciousness.We’ve been asking the wrong questions about the mind. Memory isn’t storage. Perception isn’t passive. Time and space aren’t sensed — they’re constructed. And the rhythms of our own bodies may be the hidden scaffolding behind everything we think, feel, and remember.Expect to learn why the brain doesn’t record the world but predicts it, how neural rhythms act like syntax to structure our thoughts, why time is not an input but a product of the brain’s internal cycles, how space and memory emerge from the same temporal code, why consciousness might just be a performance built from nested oscillations, what happens when brain–body rhythms fall out of sync, how we can think about memory as musical replay not archival storage, how rhythm breakdown may underlie mental disorders, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Intro01:22 The Evolution of Neuroscience Techniques05:13 Understanding Feedforward Inhibition08:13 The Paradigm Shift in Brain Function12:07 The Role of Rhythms in Prediction14:28 Overcoming Technological Barriers in Research16:45 Mapping the Hippocampus and Microcircuitry25:30 The Complexity of Brain Connectivity26:24 The Future of Connectomics34:36 The Inside Out Brain: A New Framework42:28 The Brain's Survival Mechanism45:00 Local and Global Brain Interactions48:47 Evolution of Brain Complexity52:56 Inside-Out Thinking in Neuroscience59:32 The Importance of Body Rhythms01:17:42 The Interconnectedness of Mind and Body01:26:43 Understanding Brain Dynamics in Psychiatric Disorders01:29:04 The Future of Diagnosing Mental Health Conditions01:32:56 The Role of Technology in Neuroscience01:35:47 Exploring the Nature of Memory02:06:25 Consciousness and Its Complexities...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderDr Wendy Suzuki is a Neuroscientist and Professor at New York University whose lab was the first to capture neurons firing as new memories are born. Her TED talk has over 65 million views, and she's the author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life.The hippocampus isn't just where memories are stored — it's the structure that builds your internal model of reality, imagines futures you've never lived, and may be the engine that constructs your sense of self.Expect to learn how place cells and grid cells map your world inside your skull, why people without a hippocampus can't imagine a tropical beach, how memories become models and models become selves, what the default mode network reveals about consciousness, how exercise physically grows new brain cells even into your 90s, why the boundary between memory and imagination is far blurrier than you think, and much more…Timestamps: 04:31 The Hippocampus: The Brain Structure That Makes You You07:01 Patient H.M.: The Most Famous Brain Surgery in History11:28 Place Cells, Grid Cells, and the Nobel Prize for Mapping Reality17:18 The Patients Who Can't Imagine a Tropical Beach20:41 Is Memory Just a Type of Imagination?24:44 Aphantasia: The People With No Mind's Eye28:55 The People Who Can't Forget Anything36:39 Reconsolidation: Why Remembering Makes Memories Vulnerable42:46 Marian Diamond and the Discovery of Brain Plasticity46:53 Autocatalytic Closure: How Memories Become Ideas51:44 Time Cells: How Your Brain Tracks "When"55:42 What the Hippocampus Does While You Sleep59:34 The All-Nighter Experiment: From A Grades to F Grades01:03:47 Does the Brain Replay Emotions During Sleep?01:07:01 The Amygdala, Fear Conditioning, and Joy Conditioning01:13:13 What Is Consciousness and Does the Hippocampus Create It?01:14:38 Clive Wearing: New Consciousness Every Seven Seconds01:19:30 The Dream Experiment and Optimizing Your Brain for Life...

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeDr. David E. Nichols is a pharmacologist, medicinal chemist, and widely regarded as the greatest living psychedelic scientist. He personally synthesized the psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT used in the most landmark psychedelic studies ever conducted — and founded the institute that funded most of them. He is 81 years old, has published nearly 300 scientific papers, and there is no one alive who can replace him.Expect to learn how he made a kilogram of MDMA for $4,000 and changed the course of psychiatry, what his first LSD trip revealed about the function of the universe, why psilocybin may be the most effective depression treatment we have, how his research was stolen and turned into street drugs that killed people, why the DMT pineal gland theory is scientifically impossible, whether consciousness lives in the brain at all, and much more…Timestamps:00:00 The Greatest Living Psychedelic Chemist05:09 Making MDMA for $4,000 and Changing Psychiatry08:25 How Do You Explain a Kilo of MDMA to Your University?10:50 What Was Known About MDMA in the 1980s?12:06 The LSD Trip That Showed Him the Function of the Universe14:52 A Psychedelic Healed His Relationship With His Abusive Father19:26 MDMA, PTSD, and a New Paradigm in Healing21:17 Psilocybin for Alcohol Addiction: The Stories That Changed Everything24:30 Why Is Psychedelic Research Still So Painfully Slow?30:05 Big Alcohol, Big Pharma, and the Economics of Prohibition33:24 The Paradigm Shift Happening in Real Time39:35 What Psychedelics Actually Do to Your Perception of Life42:06 Music and Psychedelics: Why Lyrics Can Ruin a Trip44:56 Can You Separate Real Insight From Hallucination?46:19 Is Consciousness in the Brain at All? The Transducer Theory52:36 His Wife's Paranormal Prediction of Her Father's Death55:56 Eating Disorders, OCD, and the Untapped Frontier59:25 Why Psychedelics Work Like Rebooting Your Computer01:00:08 The Bureaucratic Nightmare of Studying Schedule I Drugs01:06:11 The MDMA Analogue Nobody Will Fund01:08:16 A Plea to Billionaires: Fund Psychedelic Research01:09:32 Structure Activity Relationships: Sculpting Molecules to Fit Receptors01:12:07 AlphaFold, AI, and the Future of Drug Discovery01:14:36 The Golden Question: What Happens After a Drug Binds?01:17:39 DMT and the Pineal Gland: Debunking the Myth01:21:21 Is There Any Evidence DMT Is Released at Death?01:22:33 DMT Transfusions and Machine Elves01:26:09 What Excites Him About the Future of Psychedelics01:28:19 The Legacy of the Greatest Psychedelic Chemist Alive...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - h

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeDr Robin Carhart-Harris is the world's leading psychedelic researcher, founder of the first Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, and the scientist who put the first person on LSD inside a brain scanner in over 40 years.His Entropic Brain Hypothesis proposes that consciousness exists on a spectrum from order to chaos — and that psychedelics work by dissolving the brain's confidence in its own model of reality. His landmark trial in the New England Journal of Medicine showed two doses of psilocybin matched six weeks of antidepressants for depression.Expect to learn why psychedelics don't activate the brain but scramble it, what the entropic brain hypothesis actually means and why entropy may be the best biomarker for consciousness, how the default mode network holds your ego together and what happens when psychedelics melt it, the difference between DMT entity encounters and 5-MeO-DMT ego obliteration, why Robin thinks we could still get psychedelic medicine catastrophically wrong, and much more…Timestamps:00:00 Introduction to Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris03:01 The Journey into Psychedelics06:10 First Brain Scans with Psychedelics12:06 Understanding Brain Activity and Psychedelics17:49 The Entropic Brain Theory24:02 Consciousness and Brain Entropy30:10 Decoding Conscious Experience40:49 Exploring the Entropic Brain Model45:24 The Limits of Consciousness and Ego50:11 Psychedelics and Evolutionary Perspectives53:31 Shared Psychedelic Experiences and Archetypes01:00:06 The Nature of Hallucinations and Collective Unconscious01:04:34 Entropy, Connectivity, and Brain Function01:17:02 The Role of Serotonin Receptors in Psychedelic Experiences01:20:46 The Mechanisms of Psychedelics01:30:18 Cultural Perspectives on Psychedelics01:39:13 Psychedelics and Self-Understanding01:48:36 Cross-Cultural Studies in Psychedelic Research01:53:25 The Future of Psychedelics in Mental Health...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist and the author of The Story of CO₂ Is the Story of Everything — a mind-bending journey through deep time that reveals how a single molecule shaped life, climate, intelligence, and mass extinction.Carbon dioxide isn’t just a climate statistic. It’s the raw material of all biology, the original building block of your brain, and the molecule that has repeatedly rebooted life on Earth. Understanding it means rethinking everything from the origin of life to the future of civilization.Expect to learn how CO₂ helped spark the first cells at the bottom of ancient oceans, why hydrothermal vents may hold the key to alien life, how volcanoes rewrote evolution, the truth about the most catastrophic extinction in Earth’s history, how CO₂ shaped your metabolism, brain and the rise of humans, why mass extinctions can reboot evolution, why today’s climate experiment is unlike anything in the fossil record, why the planet has a natural thermostat — and how we’re breaking it, why life might be a universal process of energy dissipation, how the story of Earth challenges our ideas of uniqueness, and much moreTimestamps: 02:14 How CO₂ Became the Most Misunderstood Molecule on Earth07:31 Life as a Carbon-Fueled Energy Dissipation Machine12:45 The Origins of Life and the Vents That May Have Sparked It19:08 Why Mass Extinctions Keep Rewriting Life’s Blueprint26:27 CO₂ as Climate Stabilizer — Until It Isn’t35:40 What the Permian Extinction Tells Us About the Future42:55 Deep Time and the Psychology of Geological Thinking49:18 Why the Anthropocene Might Be a Cosmic Joke55:36 How Life Changes the Planet — And Gets Changed in Return01:04:02 The Story of CO₂ as the Story of Everything01:10:15 Is Earth’s Climate Crisis a Rehearsal of Past Catastrophes?01:15:49 Carbon, Consciousness, and Why We’re Here to Begin With01:22:06 What Would a Geologist See If They Dug Up 2024?01:27:31 Hope, Humility, and What Deep Time Teaches Us...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Dr. Erik Bekkers is an associate professor in Geometric Deep Learning at the University of Amsterdam, an ELLIS Program Director, and one of the most original thinkers working at the intersection of mathematics, AI and consciousness.He reverse-engineered how the human visual cortex processes reality using the geometry of curved spaces — then used those same principles to build AI architectures that outperform standard deep learning. He recently published a paper arguing that AI will never be conscious, introducing a framework called Biological Idealism.Expect to learn why your brain lifts reality into a higher-dimensional space just to see a straight line, what autopoiesis is and why it might be the dividing line for consciousness, why psychedelics decreasing brain activity while increasing experience is a problem for materialism, why firing neurons are an appearance of experience not the cause of it, why AI leaders claiming machines might be conscious is dangerous, and much more...Timestamps:00:00 Why Erik Wrote the Biological Idealism Paper02:00 The Materialist Bias in Society04:23 Does a Machine Have Consciousness?06:29 Can You Be a Materialist and Value Experience?08:24 The Map vs The Terrain: What is Matter Really?11:03 Bernardo Kastrup and the Path to Idealism14:11 Psychedelics: Less Brain Activity, More Experience?15:57 The Idealist Explanation of Neural Correlates19:54 What Primes Someone Towards Idealism or Materialism?24:17 Autopoiesis: The Self-Creation of Life27:32 How Autopoiesis Works in an Idealist Framework33:30 Where Physicalism and Idealism Actually Agree41:15 Finding Common Ground Across Metaphysics47:17 Why Are Some Creatures More Conscious Than Others?50:18 Donut-Shaped Geometry in Brain Activity54:46 Can Mathematics Ever Model Consciousness?59:33 The Geometry of Experiences Explained01:04:31 Continuity of Brain Structures Across the Animal Kingdom01:06:03 Can We Make a Machine Autopoietic?01:09:37 The Robot That Plugs Itself In: Is That Consciousness?01:14:00 What Would You Do With 100 Billion Dollars?01:20:20 Will We Ever See a Conscious Machine?01:24:11 AI Propaganda and Emotional Manipulation01:27:56 Hinton and Amodei: Is It Dangerous to Call AI Conscious?01:31:43 The Ethics of Machine Consciousness Research01:35:39 Animal Suffering, AI Spending and Asking the Right Questions01:38:10 Closing Thoughts and Anna Ciaunica's Influence...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Do

Welcome to Giant Conversations — a new format where top experts debate, discuss and unravel the biggest questions in science. Dr. Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst and author of The Hidden Spring. Dr. Ryan Smith is a computational neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research who builds mathematical models of how the brain predicts and feels.Together they tackle the question: what does it take for a system to become conscious — and can we engineer it?Expect to learn why consciousness might be raw feeling rather than complex cognition, why your cortex may not actually be conscious, what's architecturally missing from current AI that rules out consciousness, what a machine would need to genuinely feel something, where these two brilliant scientists agree and exactly where they clash, and much more…Timestamps:00:01 Introduction to the Giant's Debate00:46 Mark Solms: What Makes a System Conscious?05:31 Ryan Smith: The Cognitive Case for Consciousness13:02 Where Mark and Ryan Agree and Disagree17:32 The Selection Problem: What Gets to Be Conscious?27:07 Can We Scientifically Prove Something Is Conscious?30:02 Blindsight: Behaviour Without Experience34:20 The Fish on Cocaine Problem41:25 Different Meanings of Consciousness54:57 How the Free Energy Principle Explains Consciousness01:03:02 Ryan Smith: Taking Consciousness Out of Biology01:12:17 How Do You Give a Computer Survival Needs?01:18:20 The Brain in a Vat: Does the Body Actually Matter?01:19:59 What Would Prove AI Is Conscious?01:22:32 Mark Solms: Why He Believes We Can Build Consciousness01:27:25 Why Current LLMs Have Zero Consciousness01:30:36 Mark's Final Word: Goals Must Be Real01:31:15 Rapid Fire with Ryan Smith01:37:52 The Neuron Replacement Thought Experiment01:42:10 Computation vs Architecture: A Middle Ground01:44:06 Final Thoughts...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Chris Frith is a pioneering neuroscientist who helped launch the field of cognitive neuroscience — and his work has completely changed how we understand reality, consciousness, and mental illness.In this episode, you’ll learn why perception is just a controlled hallucination, how our brains build reality through social connection, why people with schizophrenia see the world differently, how consciousness evolved to help us coordinate with others, and why your sense of self might be an illusion shared to stay sane.Timestamps: 02:12 What Is Consciousness? A Brain-Built Social Model06:34 Predictive Processing and Why You Never Really See the World11:29 Controlled Hallucinations: How the Brain Manufactures Reality16:45 Optical Illusions, Schizophrenia, and Seeing Too Much21:08 What Schizophrenia Teaches Us About the Nature of Belief27:10 Social Models, Sanity, and the Idea of a Collective Mind32:43 Consciousness as a Social Adaptation — Not a Solo Experience38:50 Generative Models and the Brain’s Simulation Engine45:02 Why Solitude Breaks the Mind and Social Sync Holds It Together50:31 Can AI Be Conscious? What’s Missing From Machines56:07 Free Will, Agency and the Brain’s Self-Narrative01:00:45 The Myth of a Single Reality: Delusions, Politics and Group Models01:06:58 Consciousness, Intelligence, and the AI Illusion01:11:41 Why the Self Is Just a Useful Story01:17:09 Do Octopuses Have Consciousness?01:21:16 Where Does the Line Fall Between Conscious and Not?01:25:20 Frith’s Thoughts on the Future of Consciousness Research01:30:03 AI, Prediction, and the Limits of Machine Minds01:34:38 Final Reflections: Social Brains, Sanity, and Shared Reality...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

William B. Miller Jr. is a Medical Doctor, Evolutionary Biologist, and author of Bioverse and co-author of The Sentient Cell — one of the most radical rethinks of biology published in decades.Every cell in your body is conscious, intelligent, and making decisions right now. Evolution is not random. Cancer is not a genetic accident — it's a highly intelligent system we've been fighting completely wrong. And the central dogma of molecular biology, the foundation of modern medicine, is broken.Expect to learn why biology begins with intelligence not chemistry, why every cell has preferences goals and experiences, why natural selection is only half the story, how cancer cells are intelligent agents and why that changes everything about treatment, why genes are tools not bosses, why consciousness can never exist in silicon alone, and much moreTimestamps:00:00:00 Introduction & The Biology Revolution Nobody Is Talking About00:01:40 Biology Begins With the Intelligent Measuring Cell00:05:09 Cognition All the Way Down: Is Even mTOR a Smart Molecule?00:07:20 Are Viruses Intelligent? The Strange World of Social Virology00:09:39 Defining Intelligence, Cognition and Consciousness00:16:09 What Is True Biological Agency and Where Does It Begin?00:17:20 The Constructal Law and The Biogenic Principle00:21:09 What Separates a Biological Agent From a Machine00:24:51 Free Will, Doubt and Why Miller Would Refuse To Stop Believing In Agency00:28:20 The Stem Cell That Searches For Its Identity00:44:55 The Toxoplasmosis Moment: The Medical Observation That Changed Everything00:50:21 Slime Mould vs Water: How Do We Separate Agency From Gradient Descent?00:53:49 Why We Stopped Having Children: States of Preference Are Running Evolution00:56:06 Where Is Preference Encoded in a Cell?01:03:30 The Senome: The Sensory Organ That Replaces Gene-Centric Biology01:07:17 Why Crick's Central Dogma Was Wrong: Information Never Flows One Way01:10:23 The Six Cellular Principles That Should Govern Human Ethics01:14:47 How Single Cell Consciousness Becomes One Unified Experience01:18:16 Symbiogenesis, Mitochondria and The Birth of the Eukaryotic Cell01:20:36 Why It Took 1.4 Billion Years For Multicellular Life To Appear01:28:09 Cognitive Selection: The Real Driver of Evolution01:34:02 Michael Levin, Morphogenesis and Where the Body's Blueprint Actually Lives01:39:47 You Never Truly Die: Your Intelligence Flows Back Into the River of Life01:43:30 What Does All This Mean For Medicine, Biotech and Society?01:45:50 Why Cancer Is Intelligent and We Are Fighting It Wrong01:48:31 AI Cannot Be Conscious — And That Might Make It a Better Tool01:49:21 The Future: Marrying AI to Conscious Biological Cells...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our

Dr. Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who has spent over sixty years working from a 17th-century farmhouse in Oxfordshire on the deepest question in physics — what is time? His answer: it doesn't exist.He completed the project Newton declared impossible and Einstein never finished, built two bestselling books around it, and at 88 remains one of the most original thinkers alive.Expect to learn why the Wheeler-DeWitt equation implies the universe is frozen and nothing evolves, what Shape Dynamics is and why only ratios and relations are real, why your brain is a "time capsule" containing the complete illusion of a past, how consciousness might add all the colour and motion to a bare mathematical skeleton, why Newton's gravity might secretly be a theory of variety, and why Barbour believes quantum mechanics itself could be replaceable, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00:00 What Is Time? Julian Barbour's Life Question00:03:07 Weather Observer in the Canadian Arctic00:05:31 The Dirac Article That Changed Everything00:08:28 Phoning Paul Dirac at Cambridge00:12:23 Why Dirac Rejected Four-Dimensional Spacetime00:15:28 Hamilton, Quaternions and the Dublin Bridge00:19:36 The Straw Poll with Hawking That Made Spanish Headlines00:22:08 The Titanic Analogy for the Problem of Time00:27:26 What the Wheeler-DeWitt Equation Actually Says00:31:00 Time Capsules: Why Your Memories Don't Prove Time Passed00:35:03 Flow States and the Experience of Time00:37:08 The Kingfisher in Flight: Consciousness Plays the Movie00:40:47 Psychedelics, Pollan and Consciousness00:44:13 Materialism vs Idealism: Where Does Barbour Stand?00:48:33 Complex Wavefunctions and the Born Density00:53:16 The Three-Body Collision Problem00:55:33 Leibniz, Monads and the Living Mirror of the Universe00:58:10 "I Am the Universe Seen from My Point of View"01:04:01 The Punchline: Gravity Equals Variety01:08:43 Buzsáki and How the Brain Keeps Time01:13:46 Did Science Take a Wrong Turn in 150 BC?01:19:32 Barbour's Ontology: Points, Distances, Ratios — That's It01:25:34 "Invisible Time Is a Monumental Lie"01:28:08 What Was There Before the Universe?01:31:46 Newton's Gravity as a Theory of Recognisability...Buy Barbours Books The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics: https://amzn.to/4liP9zyThe Janus Point: A New Theory of Time: https://amzn.to/4bw3ZPIEmail for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience

Dr. Michael Timothy Bennett is an award-winning AI researcher at the Australian National University and author of "How to Build Conscious Machines" — a mathematical blueprint for why anything is conscious and what it would take to engineer a machine that truly experiences the world.Expect to learn why information processing feels like anything at all, how consciousness is built from a hierarchy of selves, why a fly has experience but a slime mold does not, why current AI is fundamentally incapable of consciousness, how cancer is an alignment problem between cells, what building a conscious machine actually requires, and much more…Timestamps:00:00 Why Does Information Processing Feel Like Anything?01:05 The Cosmic Ord: How the Universe Deletes What Doesn't Work03:59 Where is the Line Between Non-Conscious and Conscious?05:53 Multi-Scale Competency: Cells, Organs, Organisms, Ecosystems07:43 The First Order Self: Phenomenal Consciousness Explained08:27 Access Consciousness: Predicting Your Prediction of Me13:04 When Do Enough Abstraction Layers Produce Experience?18:40 Liquid Brains vs Solid Brains: Ant Colonies and Human Networks21:03 Bioelectricity: How Cells Signal and Cooperate24:03 Human-AI Hybrids: Prosthetic, Cooperative and Integrated30:30 Is There a Bottom to the Abstraction Stack?37:07 Why a Single Thread CPU Will Never Feel Anything40:56 Feeling Pain vs Knowing You Feel Pain42:52 Do Dogs Model Your Mind?46:58 The Paper He Wrote as a Joke That Won Best Student Prize48:11 Cancer as a Breakdown in Cellular Cooperation53:22 Why Elephants Don't Get Cancer and What That Means for AI56:47 How Do You Actually Build a Conscious Machine?01:01:36 Does a Tesla Robot Have Grounding?01:04:17 Should We Build Conscious Machines?01:06:46 If You Design a Robot to Love Cleaning Your Toilet01:08:25 His Biggest Fears About the Future of AI01:13:09 The Rise of Anti-Natalism and Losing Hope01:14:34 The Library of Babel: Why Modern Life Feels Overwhelming...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Matt Segall is a process philosopher, Associate Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and author of Physics of the World-Soul and Crossing the Threshold — two books arguing that consciousness isn't produced by the brain but is woven into the fabric of reality itself.Expect to learn why there is no scientific evidence that consciousness exists, how one French philosopher broke Western science in 1637 and we still haven't fixed it, why the brain is a condition for consciousness but not the producer of it, what panpsychism actually claims and why it's making a serious comeback, why the hard problem of consciousness and the origin of life might be the same problem, what it might feel like to be water or a photon, how psychedelics reveal something philosophy has been saying for centuries, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 The Nature of Consciousness02:52 Evidence and Experience06:09 Consciousness and the Brain09:09 Emergence vs. Production of Consciousness12:11 Panpsychism and Process Philosophy15:08 Information and Consciousness17:47 Biopsychism and Early Consciousness21:11 The Hard Problem of Consciousness24:08 Subjectivity and Objectivity27:06 The Role of Information in Reality29:47 Consciousness and the Universe48:25 The Relational Nature of Truth51:10 Beyond Space and Time54:55 The Self in a Panpsychist View56:30 The Evidence for Panpsychism01:00:01 Sociological Influences on Worldviews01:03:34 Psychedelics and Consciousness01:10:56 Navigating Reality and Hallucination01:15:13 Falsification and Progress in Panpsychism01:19:57 The Ethical Implications of Panpsychism...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Support The Channel:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder Dr. Chris Fields is an independent researcher with one of the most extraordinary careers in modern science — from nuclear physics to decoding the first complete genome to quantum information theory — now collaborating with Michael Levin and Karl Friston to rewrite how we understand life and consciousness.His central claim: nothing in the universe has a real boundary. Every object you see — including yourself — is a decision, not a discovery.Expect to learn how quantum theory became a theory of communication, why cells might be goal-directed agents, whether bacteria can experience space, and much more...Timestamps:00:00 The Evolution of a Scientific Career02:06 Understanding Boundaries in Science09:59 Quantum Information Theory Explained14:55 Neurons and Quantum Communication40:07 Collaboration and Implications in Biology40:17 Exploring Biological Systems as Information Processors43:44 Agentive Thinking in Biology48:40 Understanding 3D Space Representation in Cells56:14 Conscious Agent Theory and Information Exchange01:15:02 Future Directions in Biological Communication Research...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Matt Ridley is an evolutionary biologist, bestselling science writer and author of eleven books including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist and Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.He co-investigated the origin of SARS-CoV-2 with molecular biologist Alina Chan — and what they found may be the biggest cover-up in the history of science. A secret Pentagon proposal describing the exact genetic manipulation that may have created the pandemic. Private messages showing virologists publicly denying a lab leak while privately admitting they thought it was likely. And an establishment that chose silence while millions died.Expect to learn what a furin cleavage site is and why it stunned virologists worldwide, what the secret DEFUSE proposal reveals about the experiments happening in Wuhan, why the virus was suspiciously well-adapted to human lungs from day one, what the recently released Epstein files reveal about how a convicted sex offender directed research at Harvard and compromised elite science, why no major funding body has investigated the lab leak despite 25 million deaths, and much more…Timestamps:00:00 The Origins of COVID-19: A Lab Leak Theory03:11 Investigating the Wuhan Institute of Virology06:00 The Role of Genetic Engineering in Virus Research09:08 The Furin Cleavage Site: A Key to Infectivity11:58 The Defuse Proposal: A Shocking Revelation14:51 The Pangolin Narrative: A Red Herring?18:10 The Call for Transparency in Science33:16 Controversies in Virus Origins35:35 Evaluating Zoonotic Narratives37:30 The Role of Markets in Virus Transmission40:22 Lab Leaks vs. Natural Origins42:05 Genetic Manipulation and Furin Cleavage44:42 Passaging Theory and Virus Evolution49:10 Implications of High Infectivity51:22 Suspicion of Early Vaccine Development54:48 The Need for Transparency56:24 The Future of Gain of Function Research01:00:57 The Lab Leak Hypothesis: Recklessness in Research01:10:01 Trust in Science: The Impact of COVID-19 on Public PerceptionEpstein01:20:20 Epstein's Influence: Compromising Science and Ethics01:23:32 Reforming Science Funding: Addressing Systemic Issues...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Dr. Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist, consciousness researcher, and co-creator of the Orch-OR theory — a radical and controversial model proposing that consciousness arises from quantum processes inside the brain’s microtubules.For over 30 years, Dr. Hameroff has worked alongside Sir Roger Penrose to explore how the fundamental fabric of spacetime could give rise to awareness itself — and what that means for AI, life after death, and the mystery of subjective experience.Expect to learn why microtubules inside neurons might be the real seat of consciousness, how anesthetics switch off awareness by dampening quantum vibrations, what happens to consciousness when the brain flatlines, why current AI models may never be truly conscious, how quantum coherence can persist in the warm, wet brain, what a "quantum soul" might actually mean, why critics have called this theory absurd — and how new research may finally be proving them wrong, how ultrasound could treat depression by targeting the roots of awareness, and much more...Timestamps: 00:00 The Misconception of the Brain as a Computer03:00 The Journey to Understanding Consciousness05:51 Microtubules: The Key to Consciousness09:00 Anesthesia and Its Role in Consciousness11:51 The Historical Context of Anesthesia15:06 The Mechanism of Anesthesia18:01 The Quantum Nature of Anesthesia21:06 The Role of Microtubules in Anesthesia24:00 The Unitary Mechanism of Anesthesia26:56 The Evidence Supporting Microtubules30:02 The Future of Anesthesia Research36:35 The Quest for Consciousness Evidence37:42 Microtubules and Information Processing39:15 AI, Neural Networks, and Consciousness41:09 Roger Penrose and the Heart Problem42:36 Gödel's Theorem and Quantum Physics44:03 Superposition and Spacetime Curvature46:54 Objective Reduction and Consciousness49:16 Microtubules as Quantum Devices51:30 Fibonacci Geometry and Consciousness54:49 Integrating Biology and Physics57:48 Criticism and Defense of the Theory01:01:26 The Impact of the 1995 Paper01:05:02 Decoherence in Biological Systems01:07:11 Experimental Evidence for Quantum Effects01:09:46 Conductance and Quantum Effects in Microtubules01:11:41 Experiments and Anesthesia's Impact on Consciousness01:14:06 The ORCH-OR Theory and Its Explanatory Power01:18:41 Integrating ORCH-OR with Other Consciousness Theories01:27:30 The Mechanism of Consciousness and Quantum Collapse01:36:11 Free Will, Quantum Mechanics, and Consciousness...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts

Philip Ball is a former Nature editor of 20 years and the author of over 30 books spanning quantum physics, consciousness, and the strange frontiers of biology. In How Life Works, he argues that everything we’ve been taught about life — genes, blueprints, biological machines — is deeply incomplete.Get How Life Works: https://amzn.to/46dQRMlBiology isn’t built from instructions. It’s built from self-organising systems that sense, evaluate, predict and act. Cognition didn’t start with brains. Purpose isn’t mystical. And causation may not live where we think it does.Expect to learn why genes aren’t in control, how cells make decisions without neurons, what combinatorial explosion means for biology, why self-organisation shapes development, how agency emerges from physics, and what all of this means for consciousness — and much more…Timestamps00:00 The Evolution of Biological Understanding04:54 Rethinking Genes and Their Functions10:59 The Complexity of Biological Systems15:50 Metaphors in Biology: The Need for New Narratives25:12 Robustness in Biological Systems30:26 Hierarchies and Interactions in Biology35:36 The Impact of Genetic Mutations38:09 Redundancy and Compensation in Biological Systems39:26 Understanding Noisy Cellular Activity43:53 The Role of Noise in Cell Differentiation46:45 Navigating Developmental Landscapes49:48 Canalization and Robustness in Biology53:27 The Dynamics of Energy Landscapes in Biology57:01 Self-Organization and Developmental Goals01:00:52 The Interplay of Genes and Non-Equilibrium Systems01:10:54 The Limitations of Genetic Metaphors01:12:36 Understanding Causal Emergence01:15:19 Neural Networks and Causal Power01:17:29 The Complexity of Protein Functions01:21:05 Cognition Across Biological Systems01:23:32 The Future of Biology Education01:29:30 Rethinking Genetic Determinism01:33:17 Agency and Meaning in Biology01:44:40 Continuity of Agency in Biological Systems01:47:02 Defining Genuine Agency in Proteins01:50:55 Exploring Sentience and Awareness in Cells01:56:53 Ethical Considerations in Generative Biology01:59:51 The Future of Synthetic Biology and Regulation...Episodes MentionedMeet the MIT Neuroscientist Showing Brain Waves Are the Secret Engine Behind Consciousness: https://youtu.be/7OFb-NG3jIwMeet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyMSponsors:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.s

Dr. Josh Bongard is a computer scientist, roboticist, and co-creator of Xenobots — the world’s first living robots made from frog cells, capable of movement, healing, and even self-replication.Together with biologist Michael Levin, Bongard’s work is upending some of biology’s most sacred assumptions: that DNA is a blueprint, that the brain is the seat of intelligence, and that only neurons can think. In his lab at the University of Vermont, he’s building AI-designed organisms that challenge our understanding of life, agency, intelligence, and what it means to be a self.Expect to learn how a pile of skin cells assembled itself into a replicating robot, why biology may be cognitive all the way down, how AI is learning to design living systems from scratch, why memory and learning might emerge in systems without brains, why the illusion of consciousness could be evolution’s greatest trick, how Xenobots are influencing the future of robotics and synthetic life, what moral standing these beings might eventually require, and why your high school biology textbook may have gotten almost everything wrong…Timestamps: 00:00 The Birth of Xenobots03:08 Understanding Xenobots: Science and Implications05:57 Cognition and Intelligence: A New Perspective08:53 Defining Consciousness and Self-Awareness12:09 Memory and Learning in Xenobots14:46 The Nature of Experience and Reality18:00 Exploring Agency and Adaptation20:52 The Future of Xenobots and Robotics28:10 The Evolution of Robotics: Learning from Biology30:21 Human-Like Adaptability in Robots33:10 Xenobots: The Future of Self-Replication37:38 Understanding Agency in Xenobots40:47 The Challenge of Defining Agency43:35 Ethical Considerations of Xenobots45:07 AI and the Future of Biological Robotics47:43 The Role of AI in Understanding Biology52:05 The Potential of AI in Biological Discoveries55:15 The Moral Implications of Synthetic Life01:00:01 Future of Food and Ethical Eating...Episodes Mentioned: Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When Consciousness First Emerged: https://youtu.be/ZnasmLpY5_8Meet the Scientist Who Mathematically Proved Reality is an Illusion! Round 2: https://youtu.be/kTKE8eLo8CUPhilip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI & Life!: https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Dr. Tommy Wood is a neuroscientist and performance expert who trains the brains of elite Formula 1 drivers and studies how cognitive resilience can be built—and rebuilt—across a lifetime.From premature birth to world championship podiums, Tommy’s work spans the full arc of brain health, human performance, and cognitive decline. He’s also at the forefront of research into cutting-edge brain stimulation, virtual reality training, and the science of flow and resilience.Expect to learn what separates F1 drivers from the rest of us, why most brain training is a scam (and what actually works), the surprising role of virtual reality in cognitive development, why recovery and adaptation are more important than optimization, how elite performers manipulate arousal to access clutch states, why Sudoku doesn’t make you smarter, how executive function and decision-making can be trained like a muscle, the truth about brain stimulation (tDCS, TMS, vagus nerve) and what’s still pseudoscience, how dancing and martial arts might save your brain, and why cognitive decline is far from inevitable—and what to do to slow or even reverse it.Timestamps:00:00:00 Meet the Neuroscientist Training Formula 1 Drivers00:03:42 The Science Behind Split-Second Decision-Making at 200mph00:05:15 What Sets F1 Brains Apart From the Rest of Us?00:06:20 Is High Performance Born or Built?00:10:13 Why Obsession With Outcomes Can Hurt Your Brain00:11:26 Cognitive Optimization: What’s Real, What’s a Scam?00:13:12 Near vs Far Transfer: How Real Is Brain Training?00:17:01 The Best Activities for Boosting Brain Plasticity00:18:21 Why Complex Skill Learning Is the New Brain Hack00:19:20 How F1 Drivers Train Executive Function Without Driving00:22:09 Optimizing Recovery to Enhance Mental Performance00:23:21 Virtual Reality as the Future of Cognitive Training00:27:14 Why Real-World Complexity Trumps Gamified Drills00:30:00 Can VR Really Make You a Better Athlete?00:33:03 The Secret Behind Federer’s “Average” Reflexes00:34:11 Brain Stimulation in High Performance: Where Are We Now?00:39:41 Flow vs Clutch: What Actually Drives Performance?00:42:00 What Flow Feels Like in a Formula 1 Car00:45:03 Flow Is Overrated for Learning: Here’s Why00:46:34 The “Rule of Thirds” of Human Performance00:47:08 Understanding How and Why the Brain Declines With Age00:48:05 Allostasis: How the Brain Balances Change Over Time00:49:02 Does Routine Shrink the Brain?00:50:04 Can We Reverse Cognitive Aging?00:51:04 Tau, Amyloid and the Story of Dementia00:51:57 Resilience and Reserve: Your Brain’s Emergency Buffer00:53:16 What Triathlons Can Teach Us About Brain Longevity00:53:49 Aerobic vs Resistance Training for Brain Health00:54:54 White Matter and Why Lifting Weights Builds Intelligence00:55:22 The Surprising Brain Benefits of Dance, Martial Arts and Sport00:56:32 The Future of Brain Health: Stimulate or Decline00:57:13 Why Your Cognitive Destiny Is More Controllable Than You Think00:57:59 You Don’t Need Gadgets to

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher of mind whose work has shaped how we think about synthetic consciousness and the architecture of thought itself.He developed the MicroPsi cognitive architecture, has held research roles at MIT and Harvard, and just co-founded the California Institute of Machine Consciousness with Karl Friston — a lab dedicated to building minds that know they exist.Expect to learn how emotions are compressed value functions for simulated agents, how brains create recursive world models to predict and control experience, why the self might just be a stabilizing hallucination, how synthetic minds could surpass biological ones, why Joscha sees spirits as information processes, and how consciousness might emerge anywhere complex systems learn to model themselves.We also explore the implications of Michael Levin’s work, the ethics of synthetic selves, why nature is already computational, and what’s truly at the bedrock of reality. This conversation is strange, deep, and unforgettable.Timestamps:00:00 Journey into Consciousness and AI02:59 The Intersection of Neuroscience and AI05:52 Understanding Consciousness: A Second Order Perception08:53 Consciousness: An Evolved Property or Fundamental Reality?12:03 The Concept of Spirit in Consciousness14:56 Exploring Consciousness in Non-Brain Systems18:00 The Nature of Consciousness in Organisms21:12 The Role of Software in Consciousness23:52 The Potential of Xenobots and Consciousness37:06 Emergence of Artificial Life40:12 The Nature of Consciousness43:56 Comparing Consciousness Across Species46:58 The Role of Social Structures in Consciousness54:39 Biological Ingredients for Consciousness01:10:55 Building Conscious AI01:16:38 Exploring Ethical Constraints in AI Experiments01:18:11 The Nature of Consciousness in AI01:22:18 Comparing Consciousness: LLMs vs. Xenobots01:24:19 The Binary Nature of Consciousness01:27:01 Agency vs. Consciousness: A Complex Relationship01:32:34 The Horrors of Conscious Existence01:37:41 Concerns About AI and Society01:40:14 The Role of AI in Society's Future01:46:57 The Urgency of AI Development01:51:03 The Future of AI and Society......❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a philosopher of mind and leading voice on psychedelics, panpsychism, and the metaphysics of consciousness. He’s a research fellow at the University of Exeter and author of Noumenautics and Modes of Sentience — books exploring whether mind is fundamental to the universe.In this episode, we dive into why your brain might not produce consciousness, how psychedelics could reveal deeper truths about reality, the philosophical roots of mystical experience, and why matter itself might be sentient. Expect to rethink everything you thought was solid...Timestamps:00:00 Understanding Panpsychism02:49 The Nature of Consciousness05:56 Defining Mind and Its Ambiguities09:01 Historical Perspectives on Mind11:49 The Evolution of Consciousness14:57 Philosophical Positions on Consciousness17:41 The Intersection of Consciousness and Biology20:33 The Influence of Historical Context on Consciousness23:53 Exploring the Continuum of Consciousness26:41 The Debate on Consciousness Cutoff Points32:22 Exploring the Nature of Electrons and Consciousness34:26 The Interconnection of Consciousness and Physics36:24 Diverse Perspectives on Panpsychism40:13 Historical Context of Panpsychism and Its Reception43:40 Psychedelics: Insights into Consciousness51:52 The Challenge of Describing Psychedelic Experiences01:00:23 The Debate of Universalism vs Contextualism01:01:43 Psychedelics and Consciousness: Fact vs Fiction01:03:46 Hallucinations: Delusions or Deeper Reality?01:05:13 Mental Causation: The Connection Between Mind and Body01:08:55 The Therapeutic Mechanism of Psychedelics01:12:49 Exploring Panpsychism: Consciousness Beyond the Brain01:16:22 The Future of Consciousness Studies01:25:03 Metaphysical Possibilities in ScienceSponsors:Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder (Paid Partnership by BetterHelp)❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

Dr. Adele Diamond is one of the world’s most influential developmental cognitive neuroscientists and a pioneer in our understanding of executive functions — the brain’s core control processes that shape attention, self-regulation, problem-solving, and goal-directed behaviour.Her groundbreaking research was the first to show that the prefrontal cortex is active in infants, transforming how we understand child development and reshaping clinical treatment for ADHD and PKU worldwide. She’s also led the charge in redefining education, proving that joy, movement, play, and emotional connection aren’t luxuries — they’re neuroscience-backed necessities.Expect to learn what executive functions really are and why they matter for everything from school performance to lifelong happiness, the overlooked role of the prefrontal cortex in ADHD, how dopamine operates very differently in this brain region, the crucial (and often missed) distinction between types of ADHD, why some kids are misdiagnosed when they’re actually suffering from trauma, why psychostimulants can backfire and how we might be overprescribing the wrong doses, why martial arts might outperform cognitive training, how childhood stress reshapes brain wiring, the profound importance of early encouragement and self-concept, how AI and smartphones are degrading our cognitive systems, why social-emotional connection is a prerequisite for learning, and what Adele believes schools are still getting tragically wrong — even today.This is an episode about rewiring how we think about attention, emotion, learning, and what it means to help human beings thrive.Timestamps: 00:00 Understanding Executive Functions and Their Importance04:48 The Journey to Discovering the Prefrontal Cortex11:04 Behavioral Paradigms: Linking Cognition and Brain Function18:05 ADHD: Understanding the Disorder and Its Nuances25:56 Dopamine, Focus, and Executive Function32:58 The Role of Psychostimulants and Long-Term Effects35:21 Improving Executive Function Beyond Medication38:00 Brain Plasticity: Can We Train Executive Function at Any Age?41:26 Self-Identity and Its Impact on Learning and Growth42:52 The Future of Executive Function in the Age of AI44:03 AI in Education: Opportunities and Challenges45:58 Balancing AI Use in Learning48:04 The Role of Technology in Early Childhood Development51:57 Attention Span and Distraction in the Digital Age53:57 Social Interaction and Mental Health56:03 The Dangers of Over-Reliance on Technology59:12 The Importance of Social-Emotional Learning01:03:05 Integrating Emotional Intelligence in Education01:05:58 The Need for Teacher Training in Child Development01:09:48 Addressing Childhood Trauma and Mental Health01:14:03 The Role of Psychedelics in Healing01:17:08 Conclusion and Future Directions...Sponsors:Mind Lab