The Giants Shoulder
A neuroscience podcast hosted by Evan McGloughlin, who holds a degree in Neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin. Each week, he interviews experts on topics such as consciousness, neuroplasticity, and evolution, with a particular focus on understanding subjective conscious experience. The podcast also touches on Evan's background as a co-founder of edtech startups, a professional tennis coach, and a triathlete enthusiast.
Episodes
#166 - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Some People Have No Inner Speech
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinJohanne Nedergaard is the cognitive scientist who, with Gary Lupyan, named anendophasia: the absence of an inner voice. An assistant professor at Aarhus University and a 2024 Aarhus University PhD prize winner, she ran the first experi
#165 - Donald Hoffman: "Consciousness Within Space-Time Is Doomed"
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinDonald Hoffman is the cognitive scientist whose own maths told him reality isn't what it seems. Around 1986, after seven years modelling perception, the equations said we render the world on the fly, and he has been recovering ever since.
#164 - Meet The Scientist Who Thinks Aliens Are Actually Humans From The Future
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinMichael Masters is the biological anthropologist who thinks the grey aliens might be us. A professor at Montana Technological University, he studies how the human skull, face and eyes evolved over six million years, and has excavated at a
#163 - Meet The Greatest Near-Death-Experience Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinJanice Holden is a near-death-experience researcher who designed the first hospital experiment to catch consciousness outside the body, edits the Journal of Near-Death Studies and spent 31 years on the University of North Texas faculty
#162 - Meet The Scientist Who Says We've Gotten Cancer Completely Wrong
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinCarlos Sonnenschein is Professor of Integrative Physiology and Pathobiology at Tufts University School of Medicine. With Ana Soto, he developed the tissue organisation field theory of cancer: the idea that a tumour begins not in a rogu
#161 - Meet The Psychonaut Who Survived Extended-State DMT
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinAlexander Beiner is the writer who volunteered as a guinea pig for the world's first extended-state DMT trial. At Imperial College London, he was one of eleven people kept on a continuous DMT drip for thirty minutes. He is a co-Exe
#160 - Meet The Physicist Proving The Universe Builds Itself Out Of Information
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinGordana Dodig-Crnkovic is a physicist turned cognitive scientist and Professor Emeritus at Chalmers University of Technology, with doctorates in both physics and computer science. Across three careers she built info-computationalism:
#159 - No. 1 Biopsychist: Michael Levin's Platonic Minds & Cognition All The Way Down
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinJohn Vervaeke is an award-winning cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Cognitive Science programme and the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He helped pioneer relevance realisation — the claim
#158 - Meet The Scientist Redefining Intelligence With Michael Levin
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinRichard Watson is a professor of artificial intelligence and theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Southampton and the author of Compositional Evolution. He argues that adaptation does not require natural selection at all,
#157 - Meet The Consciousness Philosopher With No Mind’s Eye
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinRichard Brown is a philosopher of mind who built one of the leading cognitive theories of consciousness, co-authored the paper with Joseph LeDoux that moved the feeling of fear out of the amygdala, and has just published the full book
#156 - Meet The Greatest Time Neuroscientist You’ve Never Heard Of
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinDean Buonomano is a UCLA neuroscientist and one of the first researchers to ask how the brain encodes time. His work overturned a century-old assumption — that somewhere in your head sits a central clock — by showing that timing falls
#155 - Meet The World’s Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinSteven Barker is the chemist who has spent fifty years proving your brain makes its own psychedelic. He built the mass-spectrometry methods sensitive enough to find DMT in living tissue, and showed it sits in the brain at concentratio
#154 Meet The Greatest End-Of-Life Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinAlexander Batthyány is the philosopher and psychologist who turned a deathbed anecdote into a science. He ran the first modern study of paradoxical lucidity, co-authored the field's founding definition with Bruce Greyson, and has n
#153 - Meet The Neuroscientist Who Does Recreational Heroin
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinCarl Hart is a human drug scientist — the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia University and Chair of its Department of Psychology, who runs one of the very few laboratories on earth licensed to give p
#152 - Meet The Biophysicist Who Accidentally Discovered Telepathy
JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinLuca Turin is a biophysicist who has spent thirty years arguing that the nose reads a molecule's vibrations rather than its shape, published in Nature at twenty-three, and co-wrote the definitive critical guide to perfume with his wife Tania
#151 - Meet the Greatest Lucid Dreaming Scientist You've Never Heard Of
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinKaren Konkoly is a dream scientist who led the first study to hold a real-time, two-way conversation with a person inside a dream, putting maths problems to sleepers in REM and getting answers back through their eye movements. She is
#150 - World's Greatest Hypnosis Scientist Hijacks My Mind Live On Camera!
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinDavid Spiegel is the world's leading hypnosis scientist — fifty years at Stanford spent proving that trance is a measurable brain state rather than a stage trick, across thirteen books, four hundred papers and roughly seven thousan
#149 - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing: https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinRick Strassman is the psychiatrist who ran the first new American psychedelic research in a generation — five years of DMT studies at the University of New Mexico, the first rating scale ever built specifically to measure a psychedelic
#148 - Meet The Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist Who First Unravelled Its Big Mystery
🧠 JOIN THE GIANT’S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing: https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinDeborah Mash is a neuropharmacologist who holds the first FDA licence ever granted to give ibogaine to a human being, built one of America's largest brain banks, and discovered noribogaine — the metabolite now entering its first US cli
#147 - No. 1 Mitochondria Psychobiologist: "Mitochondria Create Consciousness and Near-Death Experiences"
Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulderJoin the Outskill AI Mastery Sprint (Free This Weekend): https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-
#146 - Meet The Greatest Bioelectricity Scientist You've Never Heard Of
Try Mind Lab Pro, The Universal Nootropic For A Sharper Brain: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3Join The Outskill Claude Mastery Sprint (2 Days, Free): https://links.outskill.com/GIASHOULAUG2Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutMin Zhao is the UC Da
#145 - Meet the Ibogaine Neuroscientist Revolutionising Addiction Treatment
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/aboutKirsten Cherian is the Stanford neuropsycholo
#144 - Consciousness Expert Ranks Every Drug By Intensity Of Subjective Experience
Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial: https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiantsTry Mind Lab Pro, The Universal Nootropic For A Sharper Brain: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3Andrés Gómez Emilsson is a consciousness mathematician at the Qualia Research Institute, and he's back for round two of r
#143 - Meet the World's Greatest Imagination Neuroscientist You’ve Never Heard Of
Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutDr. Reshanne Reeder is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Liverpool and creator of the Ganzflicker — a flickering screen that
#142 - Meet the Philosopher Behind Michael Levin's Strangest Idea The - Platonic Space Of Minds
Check out Scispace: (JNGIANT35: Get 35% off on the Max plan) https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulderWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutDavid Resnik is the NIH's Senior Advisor for Research Integrity and a philosopher of science who has spent his career defending careful,
#141 - Meet the Neuroscientist Investigating Language and the Platonic Space
Upgrade 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/aboutElliot Murphy is a neurolinguist at UTHealth Houston who records language directly from inside the human brain, placing electrodes deep in
#140 - Meet The DMT Explorer Who's Had 100+ Encounters With Non Human Entities
Try Mind Lab Pro, The Universal Nootropic For A Sharper Brain: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutAdam Butler is a DMT researcher and author who has taken the molecule over 100 times and completed the same Monroe I
#139 - Meet The Greatest Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of
Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial: https://onelink.to/giantsGet 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/aboutDalibor Sames is the chemist who reverse-en
#138 - Meet The Greatest Ayahuasca Psychedelic Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.
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 experien
#137 - Dennis McKenna: "I've Spent 50 Years Investigating The Entities That Exist Within Ayahuasca"
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 actua
#136 - Denis Noble: Neo-Darwinism, Michael Levin & Why The Last 70 Years of Genetics Is Wrong
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 li
#135 - Consciousness Expert Explains The 5 Levels Of The Psilocybin Experience
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 pe
#134 - Neuroscientist: "Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness" — NDEs, Telepathy and Terminal Lucidity
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 worl
#133 - Meet The Most Important Man Alive In The History of MDMA
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 t
#132 - Meet the Psychedelic Scientist Proving The Fields Largest Theory is WRONG!
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 w
#131 Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List Part 3
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,
#130 - The Two Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientists Discuss The Insane Future Of Drugs
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 psyched
#129 - Meet The Worlds Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist
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
#128 - Meet the Neuroscientist Proving Scientists Got Conscious Ai WRONG
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
#127 Meet the Neuroscientist Who Gave A Brain to Michael Levins Xenobot’s
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 bui
#126 - Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Bioelectricity, Platonic Spaces, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots
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
#125 Meet The World’s Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist
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-
#124 - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's
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 Exp
#123 - Meet The Most Persuasive Panpsychist Alive Today
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 al
#122 - Meet the Psychiatrist Training To Be An Ayahuasca Shaman
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 hum
#121 Meet The Neuroscientist Teaching Neuron's in a Dish to Play Video Games
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 fi
#120 No.1 Inner Speech Expert: NPCs, Hallucinations, Imaginary Friends, Prayer and Experiential Crossing
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 conver
#119 Meet The Inner Speech Expert Proving We Can Conjure Other Conscious Entities
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 anyo
#118 - Meet The MIT Philosopher Proving Aphantasics Have Unconscious Imagery
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 re
#117 Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!
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 n
#116 Meet The World’s Greatest Psychedelic Receptor Scientist
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 pharmac
#115 Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience
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
#114 No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness
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 consciou
#113 - Meet The Neuroscientist Decoding Your Bodies Cannabis System
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
#112 - No. 1 Music Neuroscientist: How Music Hijacks Our Collective Unconscious, Emotion and Imagination
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 "
#111 - Tim Maudlin: Consciousness, Turing Machines, Problems with Quantum Mechanics and Ai
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.Exp
#110 - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness
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 i
#109 Dr Wendy Suzuki: How The Hippocampus Weaves Your Memories Into Consciousness
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 memor
#108 - Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of
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 i
#107 Robin Carhart-Harris: Your Consciousness Exists Between Order and Chaos | Entropic Brain
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 ex
#106 The Story Of How CO₂ Created ALL Life, Intelligence and Consciousness
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 h
#105 Meet the AI Researcher Proving Machines Will NEVER Be Conscious!
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
#104 GIANT'S DEBATE - Whats The SECRET to Engineering Artificial Consciousness? Cognition Vs Feeling
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 qu
#103 Meet The Social Neuroscientist Proving We’re All Living In A Collective Consciousness
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 consci
#102 Meet The Scientist Proving Cells Are Conscious and Intelligent
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 comp
#101 Meet The Physicist Who Believes Time Doesn’t Exist
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 a
#100 Meet The Scientist Who Wrote the Blueprint for Conscious Machines
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 hi
#99 Matt Segall: Panexperientialism, God, Metaphysics and What Neuroscience Is Getting Wrong!
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 Fren
#98 Chris Fields: Whats Wrong With Quantum Mechanics, Cellular Intelligence and Consciousness
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 comple
#97 Matt Ridley: COVID Lab Leak, Jeffrey Epstein and Failures In Science
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 e
#96 Stuart Hameroff: Meet The Anaesthesiologist Who Started The Quantum Consciousness Revolution
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 wh
#95 Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought"
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 sel
#94 Meet The Scientist Who Created The First Living Robot
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 thi
#93 Dr Tommy Wood: "Cognitive Decline Is Not Inevitable. Here’s Why."
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 stimula
#92 Joscha Bach: “The Nature Of Reality is Even Weirder Than We Previously Thought”
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 t
#91 Meet the Philosopher Questioning Everything Neuroscience Assumes About Consciousness
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 rev
#90 Meet The World’s Leading Executive Function Neuroscientist
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 under
#89 The Real Reason We Should Revive Extinct Animals
Andrew Pask is Chief Biology Officer at Colossal Biosciences and a professor of genetics at the University of Melbourne. He’s spent over 30 years on the front lines of marsupial conservation and now leads one of the most ambitious projects in biology: the genetic resurrection and rewilding of the extinct Tasmanian tiger.Sponsors:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoul
#88 Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function
Karl Friston is one of the most influential neuroscientists alive and the creator of the Free Energy Principle, a unifying theory that aims to explain how brains perceive, act, learn, and remain alive in an uncertain world.SPONSORS:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9
#87 Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When Consciousness First Emerged
Dr. Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist, professor at Princeton University, and creator of Attention Schema Theory — one of the most provocative scientific explanations for consciousness to date.He argues that awareness isn’t magic or mystery — it’s the brain’s simplified internal model of its own attention. A trick of information. A self-portrait painted by neurons. And it just might explain why
