Giants Shoulder Archiv
173 Episoden
1 Stunde 39 Minuten
Want to truly understand your own conscious inner experience? I built a tool and its free - https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
Dr 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 Trailer
03:20 What is Shipibo Curanderismo?
04:52 From disillusioned NHS psychiatrist to the Peruvian Amazon
10:14 First ayahuasca: shown two versions of myself
15:41 The demon attack and the three suckers
26:13 Bridging Western psychiatry and Amazonian shamanism
36:04 Are DMT entities real? Carhart-Harris vs Gallimore
49:50 Inside the multimodal veteran PTSD study
52:41 DMT vs ayahuasca — what's actually different
57:11 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 Western
1:16:51 80% no longer meet PTSD criteria — the real numbers
1:20:37 The shaman drinks, not the patient — traditional protocol
1:30:41 The spiritual mechanism of action
1:34:54 The dream experiment — plant personalities
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
FOLLOW SIMON:
Website: https://www.drsimonruffell.comInstagram: @sgdruffell
Onaya Science: https://www.onaya.io
Heroic Hearts UK: https://www.heroicheartsuk.org
PAST EPISODES MENTIONED:
Robin Carhart-Harris — Entropic Brain, How Psychedelics Really Work and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk
Andrew Gallimore — DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA
Grace Blest-Hopley — Psychedelics Expert: Who is Blocking Psychedelic Research?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBcLxMfUzxw
Dr 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 Trailer
03:20 What is Shipibo Curanderismo?
04:52 From disillusioned NHS psychiatrist to the Peruvian Amazon
10:14 First ayahuasca: shown two versions of myself
15:41 The demon attack and the three suckers
26:13 Bridging Western psychiatry and Amazonian shamanism
36:04 Are DMT entities real? Carhart-Harris vs Gallimore
49:50 Inside the multimodal veteran PTSD study
52:41 DMT vs ayahuasca — what's actually different
57:11 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 Western
1:16:51 80% no longer meet PTSD criteria — the real numbers
1:20:37 The shaman drinks, not the patient — traditional protocol
1:30:41 The spiritual mechanism of action
1:34:54 The dream experiment — plant personalities
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
FOLLOW SIMON:
Website: https://www.drsimonruffell.comInstagram: @sgdruffell
Onaya Science: https://www.onaya.io
Heroic Hearts UK: https://www.heroicheartsuk.org
PAST EPISODES MENTIONED:
Robin Carhart-Harris — Entropic Brain, How Psychedelics Really Work and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk
Andrew Gallimore — DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA
Grace Blest-Hopley — Psychedelics Expert: Who is Blocking Psychedelic Research?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBcLxMfUzxw
1 Stunde 17 Minuten
Join the #1 Community Dedicated to Rigorous & Radical Biology: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
Brett 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 Trailer
02:30 Brett Kagan — Neurons Playing Doom
03:04 The stepping stones from Pong to Doom
04:00 What is the CL1 and Cortical Cloud?
05:20 The moonshot goal of Cortical Labs
06:46 Giant buildings of neurons as computation hubs
07:13 The biocomputing data centre already running in Melbourne
07:38 Not building a brain in a dish
09:00 What does a biological computer actually look like?
09:29 Electricity as the shared language between biology and silicon
10:49 How neurons on a chip play Pong
11:10 Topographic mapping inspired by the whisker barrel system
13:10 Why the neurons hit the ball — and what happens when they miss
14:33 The Free Energy Principle explained simply
16:03 The trap door analogy for unpredictable stimulation
18:42 How the structure of neuron cultures shapes performance
19:19 Bees vs elephants: why bigger brains aren’t always better
21:37 Growing hippocampal place cells in a dish
24:12 Teaching neurons Morse code
28:27 The Free Energy Principle — cups, predictions and surprise
32:29 Where Brett disagrees with Friston
37:03 The dog treat problem — how do you reward a neuron?
39:40 Complexity as a hidden driver of intelligence
41:53 His baby daughter’s obsession with fractals
43:57 Defining agency — the three orders of information processing
50:33 Change how you change over time
53:27 Why scientists are incentivised to be vague instead of wrong
59:42 J.D. Bernal’s 1929 vision for brains beyond bodies
1:02:38 Standing on the shoulders of iPSC pioneers
1:03:14 Can neurons play chess? Moravec’s Paradox
1:04:12 No AI can walk into your kitchen and make tea
1:05:16 Augmenting what silicon is bad at
1:06:35 Is general intelligence even possible for silicon?
1:09:40 Why 200,000 neurons beat 800,000
1:11:16 Complexity and structure matter more than scale
1:11:58 Could biological neurons end up in your laptop?
1:13:36 Edge robotics and the future of biological computing
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
Brett 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 Trailer
02:30 Brett Kagan — Neurons Playing Doom
03:04 The stepping stones from Pong to Doom
04:00 What is the CL1 and Cortical Cloud?
05:20 The moonshot goal of Cortical Labs
06:46 Giant buildings of neurons as computation hubs
07:13 The biocomputing data centre already running in Melbourne
07:38 Not building a brain in a dish
09:00 What does a biological computer actually look like?
09:29 Electricity as the shared language between biology and silicon
10:49 How neurons on a chip play Pong
11:10 Topographic mapping inspired by the whisker barrel system
13:10 Why the neurons hit the ball — and what happens when they miss
14:33 The Free Energy Principle explained simply
16:03 The trap door analogy for unpredictable stimulation
18:42 How the structure of neuron cultures shapes performance
19:19 Bees vs elephants: why bigger brains aren’t always better
21:37 Growing hippocampal place cells in a dish
24:12 Teaching neurons Morse code
28:27 The Free Energy Principle — cups, predictions and surprise
32:29 Where Brett disagrees with Friston
37:03 The dog treat problem — how do you reward a neuron?
39:40 Complexity as a hidden driver of intelligence
41:53 His baby daughter’s obsession with fractals
43:57 Defining agency — the three orders of information processing
50:33 Change how you change over time
53:27 Why scientists are incentivised to be vague instead of wrong
59:42 J.D. Bernal’s 1929 vision for brains beyond bodies
1:02:38 Standing on the shoulders of iPSC pioneers
1:03:14 Can neurons play chess? Moravec’s Paradox
1:04:12 No AI can walk into your kitchen and make tea
1:05:16 Augmenting what silicon is bad at
1:06:35 Is general intelligence even possible for silicon?
1:09:40 Why 200,000 neurons beat 800,000
1:11:16 Complexity and structure matter more than scale
1:11:58 Could biological neurons end up in your laptop?
1:13:36 Edge robotics and the future of biological computing
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
1 Stunde 8 Minuten
Do you really inner speak? Join my Skool community and find out: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
Charles 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 Intro
02:30 Inner Speech as a Swiss Army Knife
05:39 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 Think
10:03 Evan's 10-Week DES Experiment with Hurlburt
12:19 Condensed Inner Speech vs Unsymbolized Thinking
17:11 What Brain Scans Actually Show About Inner Speech
20:58 Spontaneous vs Elicited Speech Light Up Different Areas
25:16 Does It Matter How Much Inner Speech You Have?
30:02 When Inner Speech Becomes a Weapon Against Yourself
32:41 Are People Without Inner Speech NPCs?
36:02 It's Not How Much You Speak — It's What You Say
38:44 Why People Refuse to Believe Others Think Differently
42:26 Neurodiversity and the Inner Speech Revolution
44:35 The Dialogical Inner Speech Model Explained
49:55 Multiple Identities Inside Your Inner Dialogue
52:00 Prayer as Inner Speech with a Spiritual Being
54:20 Hearing Voices Without Being Mentally Ill
57:17 1 in 7 Readers Hear Characters Like Real People
58:34 Experiential Crossing — Walking Into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway
59:48 Do Writers Actually Hear Their Characters?
1:01:57 Predictive Processing and Fictional Selves
1:04:20 Why Children Create Imaginary Companions
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
Charles 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 Intro
02:30 Inner Speech as a Swiss Army Knife
05:39 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 Think
10:03 Evan's 10-Week DES Experiment with Hurlburt
12:19 Condensed Inner Speech vs Unsymbolized Thinking
17:11 What Brain Scans Actually Show About Inner Speech
20:58 Spontaneous vs Elicited Speech Light Up Different Areas
25:16 Does It Matter How Much Inner Speech You Have?
30:02 When Inner Speech Becomes a Weapon Against Yourself
32:41 Are People Without Inner Speech NPCs?
36:02 It's Not How Much You Speak — It's What You Say
38:44 Why People Refuse to Believe Others Think Differently
42:26 Neurodiversity and the Inner Speech Revolution
44:35 The Dialogical Inner Speech Model Explained
49:55 Multiple Identities Inside Your Inner Dialogue
52:00 Prayer as Inner Speech with a Spiritual Being
54:20 Hearing Voices Without Being Mentally Ill
57:17 1 in 7 Readers Hear Characters Like Real People
58:34 Experiential Crossing — Walking Into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway
59:48 Do Writers Actually Hear Their Characters?
1:01:57 Predictive Processing and Fictional Selves
1:04:20 Why Children Create Imaginary Companions
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
1 Stunde 3 Minuten
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: evan@thegiantsshoulder.comEpisodes 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
1 Stunde 20 Minuten
Get A Full Breakdown Of Your Own Conscious Inner Experience (100% Free): https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about
Matthias 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 misfire
6:22 Blood vessel shadows and the stuff your brain erases
7:50 Motion-induced blindness: your brain deleting real objects
9:50 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 consciousness
18:15 What does it mean to see without conscious vision?
18:40 "Tell me what it's like to see behind your head" — blindsight patient GY
20:48 Do fish have conscious vision?
22:05 Why conscious vision is 350-400ms too slow for action
24:07 Two visual systems: one conscious, one not
25:30 The hollow face illusion fools your eyes but not your hand
26:21 Binocular rivalry: your eyes know things you don't
29:24 Sensory horizons: why water limits conscious vision
33:17 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 monitoring
46:00 Why conscious imagery might be a "bug"
48:06 Blank access: using imagery without experiencing it
50:17 What is an unconscious visual representation?
55:54 The strongest counterevidence to unconscious imagery
58:50 Pupil dilation and Joel Pearson's results
1:01:18 How do we falsify unconscious imagery?
1:04:30 The PRM explanation for aphantasia: threshold differences
1:07:50 The future of consciousness and aphantasia research
1:10:29 Vividness is multidimensional — lessons from Russell Hurlburt
1:13:35 Brain imaging limitations and the next breakthrough
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
GS Episodes Mentioned
Mark Solms — https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc
Adam Zeman — https://youtu.be/SgA2up6-Bok
Russell Hurlburt (R1) — https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg
Russell Hurlburt (R2) — https://youtu.be/TfSuvAJB3JU
Merlin Monzel — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g21AqnSV1X4
Joel Pearson — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I_7HrWYMQ0
Alfredo Spagna - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8SBHefDnEk
Matthias 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 misfire
6:22 Blood vessel shadows and the stuff your brain erases
7:50 Motion-induced blindness: your brain deleting real objects
9:50 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 consciousness
18:15 What does it mean to see without conscious vision?
18:40 "Tell me what it's like to see behind your head" — blindsight patient GY
20:48 Do fish have conscious vision?
22:05 Why conscious vision is 350-400ms too slow for action
24:07 Two visual systems: one conscious, one not
25:30 The hollow face illusion fools your eyes but not your hand
26:21 Binocular rivalry: your eyes know things you don't
29:24 Sensory horizons: why water limits conscious vision
33:17 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 monitoring
46:00 Why conscious imagery might be a "bug"
48:06 Blank access: using imagery without experiencing it
50:17 What is an unconscious visual representation?
55:54 The strongest counterevidence to unconscious imagery
58:50 Pupil dilation and Joel Pearson's results
1:01:18 How do we falsify unconscious imagery?
1:04:30 The PRM explanation for aphantasia: threshold differences
1:07:50 The future of consciousness and aphantasia research
1:10:29 Vividness is multidimensional — lessons from Russell Hurlburt
1:13:35 Brain imaging limitations and the next breakthrough
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
GS Episodes Mentioned
Mark Solms — https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc
Adam Zeman — https://youtu.be/SgA2up6-Bok
Russell Hurlburt (R1) — https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg
Russell Hurlburt (R2) — https://youtu.be/TfSuvAJB3JU
Merlin Monzel — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g21AqnSV1X4
Joel Pearson — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I_7HrWYMQ0
Alfredo Spagna - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8SBHefDnEk
1 Stunde 29 Minuten
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…
Timestamps
00:08 What Happens in the Brain When You Imagine
01:02 Where Imagination and Perception Diverge
03:44 Would Perfect Imagination Be Hallucination?
05:49 Voluntary vs Involuntary Imagination
06:50 Why Do People with Aphantasia Still Dream?
07:33 What Is Aphantasia — The Discovery That Changed Everything
09:30 The Dissociation That Frightened Scientists
11:06 The Visualizer Fallacy
12:01 How Aphantasics Solve Problems Without Images
14:31 Evan's Sister Discovers Aphantasia at 31
16:55 Could Imagery Be Unconscious in Aphantasia?
18:19 The Architect Who Lost His Imagination
21:11 Eric the Painter — Creating Art Without Seeing It
24:51 The Inner Speech Fallacy and Neurodiversity
29:02 "I Can't Visualize My Mom's Face"
29:57 Why Aphantasia Breaks Psychotherapy
33:06 Empathy, Conflict and How Inner Experience Shapes Society
36:42 The Chemistry Exam Problem
39:09 Is Hypervisualization Actually a Disadvantage?
41:21 Imagination as a Double-Edged Sword
43:37 What Is the Fusiform Imagery Node?
46:10 The Cafeteria Conversation That Started It All
50:07 Three Bombshells From One Meta-Analysis
52:23 Domain-General vs Domain-Specific Imagination
54:05 The Brain Still Imagines in Aphantasia — It Just Disconnects
56:36 Is Aphantasia a Disconnection Syndrome?
58:59 Step-By-Step: What Your Brain Does When You Imagine an Apple
1:05:05 Non-Visual Imagination — Taste, Touch, Sound
1:09:38 What Aphantasia Reveals About Consciousness
1:13:26 Does This Support IIT or Global Workspace Theory?
1:15:49 Can Aphantasia Be Trained Away?
1:18:53 The Olympic Skier Who Visualized Gold
1:22:25 $10 Billion to Solve Imagination — Where Would You Spend It?
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️ 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/
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…
Timestamps
00:08 What Happens in the Brain When You Imagine
01:02 Where Imagination and Perception Diverge
03:44 Would Perfect Imagination Be Hallucination?
05:49 Voluntary vs Involuntary Imagination
06:50 Why Do People with Aphantasia Still Dream?
07:33 What Is Aphantasia — The Discovery That Changed Everything
09:30 The Dissociation That Frightened Scientists
11:06 The Visualizer Fallacy
12:01 How Aphantasics Solve Problems Without Images
14:31 Evan's Sister Discovers Aphantasia at 31
16:55 Could Imagery Be Unconscious in Aphantasia?
18:19 The Architect Who Lost His Imagination
21:11 Eric the Painter — Creating Art Without Seeing It
24:51 The Inner Speech Fallacy and Neurodiversity
29:02 "I Can't Visualize My Mom's Face"
29:57 Why Aphantasia Breaks Psychotherapy
33:06 Empathy, Conflict and How Inner Experience Shapes Society
36:42 The Chemistry Exam Problem
39:09 Is Hypervisualization Actually a Disadvantage?
41:21 Imagination as a Double-Edged Sword
43:37 What Is the Fusiform Imagery Node?
46:10 The Cafeteria Conversation That Started It All
50:07 Three Bombshells From One Meta-Analysis
52:23 Domain-General vs Domain-Specific Imagination
54:05 The Brain Still Imagines in Aphantasia — It Just Disconnects
56:36 Is Aphantasia a Disconnection Syndrome?
58:59 Step-By-Step: What Your Brain Does When You Imagine an Apple
1:05:05 Non-Visual Imagination — Taste, Touch, Sound
1:09:38 What Aphantasia Reveals About Consciousness
1:13:26 Does This Support IIT or Global Workspace Theory?
1:15:49 Can Aphantasia Be Trained Away?
1:18:53 The Olympic Skier Who Visualized Gold
1:22:25 $10 Billion to Solve Imagination — Where Would You Spend It?
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️ 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/
1 Stunde 2 Minuten
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 Psychedelics
02:41 Falling Into Receptor Science by Accident
04:58 When Only 5 People on Earth Studied Psychedelic Receptors
06:07 Why "Psychedelic" Was Banned From Research Grants
07:28 The 2016 Papers That Changed Everything
08:26 The Scientist Friend Who Got "Cured" by Psilocybin
10:41 The Vietnam Vet With a Gun in His Mouth — Ibogaine's Power
12:50 What Is Ibogaine and Why Can It Kill You?
18:06 Why the Kappa Opioid System Breaks Reality
19:07 The Hidden History of Psychotomimetic Opioids
22:16 Why Opioid Researchers Deny Kappa Causes Hallucinations
23:18 The Claustrum: Where Serotonin and Opioid Receptors Meet
24:14 Multiple Entry Points Into Reality-Altering Brain Systems
28:35 Why Psychedelic Experiences Feel So Meaningful
29:58 DMT: "More Real Than Reality" — And Nobody Knows Why
31:28 Salvia: Becoming Plaid on a Wall
33:48 Trump's $50M Psychedelic Order Won't Buy One Clinical Trial
35:33 No Other Psychedelic Touches the Kappa Receptor
38:10 The Real Reason He Built a Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelic
41:33 DARPA: More Psychiatric Casualties Than Physical in the Military
44:48 Biased Agonism: Stripping the Trip From the Therapy
47:19 How GPCRs Work and Why Drug Design Is Still Trial and Error
49:50 People Who Will Never Touch a Psychedelic But Do Cocaine Weekly
52:27 "I Don't Discuss That" — Whether He's Taken Psychedelics
52:47 Screening a Trillion Drugs That Don't Exist
55:02 The Real Bottleneck: 26,000 Targets, Only 100 Drugged...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️ 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/
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 Psychedelics
02:41 Falling Into Receptor Science by Accident
04:58 When Only 5 People on Earth Studied Psychedelic Receptors
06:07 Why "Psychedelic" Was Banned From Research Grants
07:28 The 2016 Papers That Changed Everything
08:26 The Scientist Friend Who Got "Cured" by Psilocybin
10:41 The Vietnam Vet With a Gun in His Mouth — Ibogaine's Power
12:50 What Is Ibogaine and Why Can It Kill You?
18:06 Why the Kappa Opioid System Breaks Reality
19:07 The Hidden History of Psychotomimetic Opioids
22:16 Why Opioid Researchers Deny Kappa Causes Hallucinations
23:18 The Claustrum: Where Serotonin and Opioid Receptors Meet
24:14 Multiple Entry Points Into Reality-Altering Brain Systems
28:35 Why Psychedelic Experiences Feel So Meaningful
29:58 DMT: "More Real Than Reality" — And Nobody Knows Why
31:28 Salvia: Becoming Plaid on a Wall
33:48 Trump's $50M Psychedelic Order Won't Buy One Clinical Trial
35:33 No Other Psychedelic Touches the Kappa Receptor
38:10 The Real Reason He Built a Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelic
41:33 DARPA: More Psychiatric Casualties Than Physical in the Military
44:48 Biased Agonism: Stripping the Trip From the Therapy
47:19 How GPCRs Work and Why Drug Design Is Still Trial and Error
49:50 People Who Will Never Touch a Psychedelic But Do Cocaine Weekly
52:27 "I Don't Discuss That" — Whether He's Taken Psychedelics
52:47 Screening a Trillion Drugs That Don't Exist
55:02 The Real Bottleneck: 26,000 Targets, Only 100 Drugged...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️ 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/
1 Stunde 19 Minuten
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.
Timestamps
00:00 The 6 Geometric Levels of DMT
02:30 Can Subjective Experience Be Studied Like Physics?
03:58 Mapping Experience as a Hypergraph
09:33 Introducing the Symmetry Theory of Valence
12:19 What Symmetry Actually Is (And Why Physics Cares)
19:21 Why Energetic Blockages Feel Bad — Yoga, Jhanas and Wave Propagation
23:06 Is Pleasure Necessarily Symmetrical?
26:31 The Annealing Metaphor: Healing a Broken Cymbal
29:18 Symmetries in the World vs Symmetries in the Brain
32:54 The Bucket Brigade: Why Coupled Oscillators Have to Be in Phase
36:27 Where the Free Energy Principle Stops Being a Theory of Consciousness
39:33 Marr's Levels: Why Friston Describes But Doesn't Explain
42:12 What's Actually Symmetric in the Brain? (Thalamus and Biorhythms)
47:52 Anxiety as Hyperpressurisation
50:13 Connectome Harmonics and the Brain as a Musical Instrument
52:18 The Six Levels of DMT — Threshold, Symmetry Hotel, Magic Eye
55:06 The Magic Eye Level Explained
57:31 Crystal Worlds and the Waiting Room
59:48 The Breakthrough: When Topology Itself Changes
01:01:43 Why Bad Trips Are Competing Symmetries, Not Missing Ones
01:04:35 Square vs Hexagon Universes Fighting for Territory
01:05:54 The LSD Christianity Example
01:07:32 Andrew Gallimore's Alien Worlds — Pre-Configured Reality?
01:09:04 Beam Splitter Holography and the Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer
01:10:21 Why DMT Feels So Real — Cross-Modal Coherence and the Tactile Field
01:12:48 The Coupling Kernel and Opposite-Phase Oscillators
01:13:53 DMT Archetypes and the Specificity of Encounters
...
GS Episodes ReferencedAndrew Gallimore (DMT, alien worlds): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Gallimore
Elizabeth Margulis (music neuroscience): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Margulis
Mark Solms (homeostatic theory of valence): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Solms
Andrés Gómez Emilsson
Qualia Research Institute: https://qri.org
Qualia Computing (blog): https://qualiacomputing.com
Substack: https://andrsgmezemilsson.substack.comEmail for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
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.
Timestamps
00:00 The 6 Geometric Levels of DMT
02:30 Can Subjective Experience Be Studied Like Physics?
03:58 Mapping Experience as a Hypergraph
09:33 Introducing the Symmetry Theory of Valence
12:19 What Symmetry Actually Is (And Why Physics Cares)
19:21 Why Energetic Blockages Feel Bad — Yoga, Jhanas and Wave Propagation
23:06 Is Pleasure Necessarily Symmetrical?
26:31 The Annealing Metaphor: Healing a Broken Cymbal
29:18 Symmetries in the World vs Symmetries in the Brain
32:54 The Bucket Brigade: Why Coupled Oscillators Have to Be in Phase
36:27 Where the Free Energy Principle Stops Being a Theory of Consciousness
39:33 Marr's Levels: Why Friston Describes But Doesn't Explain
42:12 What's Actually Symmetric in the Brain? (Thalamus and Biorhythms)
47:52 Anxiety as Hyperpressurisation
50:13 Connectome Harmonics and the Brain as a Musical Instrument
52:18 The Six Levels of DMT — Threshold, Symmetry Hotel, Magic Eye
55:06 The Magic Eye Level Explained
57:31 Crystal Worlds and the Waiting Room
59:48 The Breakthrough: When Topology Itself Changes
01:01:43 Why Bad Trips Are Competing Symmetries, Not Missing Ones
01:04:35 Square vs Hexagon Universes Fighting for Territory
01:05:54 The LSD Christianity Example
01:07:32 Andrew Gallimore's Alien Worlds — Pre-Configured Reality?
01:09:04 Beam Splitter Holography and the Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer
01:10:21 Why DMT Feels So Real — Cross-Modal Coherence and the Tactile Field
01:12:48 The Coupling Kernel and Opposite-Phase Oscillators
01:13:53 DMT Archetypes and the Specificity of Encounters
...
GS Episodes ReferencedAndrew Gallimore (DMT, alien worlds): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Gallimore
Elizabeth Margulis (music neuroscience): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Margulis
Mark Solms (homeostatic theory of valence): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Solms
Andrés Gómez Emilsson
Qualia Research Institute: https://qri.org
Qualia Computing (blog): https://qualiacomputing.com
Substack: https://andrsgmezemilsson.substack.comEmail for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
1 Stunde 22 Minuten
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 Trailer
2:11 What Is the Building Alien Worlds Thesis?
4:06 What Makes DMT Unique Among Psychedelics?
6:57 World Space Landscape and Consensus Reality
8:11 DMT Entities — Prevalence and Types
11:04 Consistency of Entity Interactions
13:31 Is the DMT World Real or a Hallucination?
17:34 Thalamocortical Loops and World-Model Construction
20:34 Attractor States Explained
24:21 Why DMT’s Stability Suggests an Evolutionary Role
27:25 Parallel Lives — The DMT Sleep Cycle Hypothesis
28:36 What Was the Evolutionary Purpose of the DMT World?
33:35 Melatonin, Serotonin and DMT — Pharmacological Cousins
35:57 Is DMT Still Doing Something Important in the Brain?
36:36 Noonautics and Endogenous DMT Research
38:43 Debunking DMT Breathwork Courses and Pineal Myths
40:45 What Does a Stable Pattern of Brain Activity Actually Look Like?
43:53 Order Within Chaos — Chris Timmermann’s DMTx Findings
47:16 Robin Carhart-Harris and the Jungian Archetype Debate
48:37 What Jungian Archetypes Actually Are
53:36 Why Archetypes Can’t Explain Alien Entities
54:32 The Directed World Model — Do Entities Control Access?
56:55 DMT Lockout — When Entities Deny You Entry
58:30 Can You See Entities in Brain Scans?
1:00:06 Future Brain Scanning Technology
1:01:24 The Speed of the Switch as Evidence
1:04:40 Dimensionality and Topology of the DMT World
1:06:39 DMTx — What Is the Extended State Protocol?
1:09:03 Target-Controlled Intravenous Infusion Explained
1:11:23 Sending Specialists Into DMT Space
1:13:35 Time Perception on DMT
1:16:16 Surprises from DMTx Experiments
1:18:15 The Future of DMT Consciousness Research
1:19:12 Andrés Gómez Emilsson and the Mathematics of DMT Space
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️
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/id1752486249
Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/
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 Trailer
2:11 What Is the Building Alien Worlds Thesis?
4:06 What Makes DMT Unique Among Psychedelics?
6:57 World Space Landscape and Consensus Reality
8:11 DMT Entities — Prevalence and Types
11:04 Consistency of Entity Interactions
13:31 Is the DMT World Real or a Hallucination?
17:34 Thalamocortical Loops and World-Model Construction
20:34 Attractor States Explained
24:21 Why DMT’s Stability Suggests an Evolutionary Role
27:25 Parallel Lives — The DMT Sleep Cycle Hypothesis
28:36 What Was the Evolutionary Purpose of the DMT World?
33:35 Melatonin, Serotonin and DMT — Pharmacological Cousins
35:57 Is DMT Still Doing Something Important in the Brain?
36:36 Noonautics and Endogenous DMT Research
38:43 Debunking DMT Breathwork Courses and Pineal Myths
40:45 What Does a Stable Pattern of Brain Activity Actually Look Like?
43:53 Order Within Chaos — Chris Timmermann’s DMTx Findings
47:16 Robin Carhart-Harris and the Jungian Archetype Debate
48:37 What Jungian Archetypes Actually Are
53:36 Why Archetypes Can’t Explain Alien Entities
54:32 The Directed World Model — Do Entities Control Access?
56:55 DMT Lockout — When Entities Deny You Entry
58:30 Can You See Entities in Brain Scans?
1:00:06 Future Brain Scanning Technology
1:01:24 The Speed of the Switch as Evidence
1:04:40 Dimensionality and Topology of the DMT World
1:06:39 DMTx — What Is the Extended State Protocol?
1:09:03 Target-Controlled Intravenous Infusion Explained
1:11:23 Sending Specialists Into DMT Space
1:13:35 Time Perception on DMT
1:16:16 Surprises from DMTx Experiments
1:18:15 The Future of DMT Consciousness Research
1:19:12 Andrés Gómez Emilsson and the Mathematics of DMT Space
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️
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/id1752486249
Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/
1 Stunde 4 Minuten
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@thegiantsshoulder.com ️ 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/
1 Stunde 21 Minuten
Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder
Dr. 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 Intro
02:45 From Concert Pianist to Cognitive Scientist
06:27 What Does a Brain Look Like Listening to Music?
09:04 How Musical Processing Differs from Speech
10:53 The Irresistible Urge to Dance
16:18 Can Animals Keep a Beat? The Snowball Experiment
23:42 Why Repetition Changes How You Feel About Music
26:31 The Speech-to-Song Illusion
32:05 Is Music Evolutionary? The Case for Social Bonding
36:36 Psychedelics and Music: What's Really Driving the Healing?
42:28 The Mozart Effect Myth
47:42 How to Raise a Musical Prodigy
49:25 Musical Daydreams: Why Strangers Imagine the Same Stories
53:11 The China Experiment: Same Music, Different Stories
1:06:57 Psychedelic Hallucinations and Musical Archetypes
1:16:17 Can Music Teach Us About Consciousness?
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️ 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/id1752486249
Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/
Dr. 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 Intro
02:45 From Concert Pianist to Cognitive Scientist
06:27 What Does a Brain Look Like Listening to Music?
09:04 How Musical Processing Differs from Speech
10:53 The Irresistible Urge to Dance
16:18 Can Animals Keep a Beat? The Snowball Experiment
23:42 Why Repetition Changes How You Feel About Music
26:31 The Speech-to-Song Illusion
32:05 Is Music Evolutionary? The Case for Social Bonding
36:36 Psychedelics and Music: What's Really Driving the Healing?
42:28 The Mozart Effect Myth
47:42 How to Raise a Musical Prodigy
49:25 Musical Daydreams: Why Strangers Imagine the Same Stories
53:11 The China Experiment: Same Music, Different Stories
1:06:57 Psychedelic Hallucinations and Musical Archetypes
1:16:17 Can Music Teach Us About Consciousness?
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️ 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/id1752486249
Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/
1 Stunde 37 Minuten
Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder
Tim 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 Computable
02:35 Maudlin's 1989 Paper: Computation and Consciousness
06:01 The Thought Experiment: Beer Cans, Windmills and Conscious Machines
08:11 Why Running a Programme Can't Be Enough for Consciousness
10:36 Counterfactuals: What the Machine Would Have Done
13:56 The Cog and Wheel Machine: Stripping It Down
16:18 The Strange Anaesthesia: Jamming the Gears
19:10 Why Computational Structure Is the Wrong Level
20:08 Is This For or Against Computationalism?
23:01 The 2026 AI Consciousness Debate
25:06 Why the Turing Test Is Trivially Defeatable
27:00 Neural Nets Are Nothing Like Brains
29:12 Why the Brain Is Far More Than Neurons
31:01 HAL 9000 and How Children Actually Learn
33:27 The Car Wash Question That Breaks ChatGPT
35:18 Defining Intelligence and Consciousness
37:53 Twin Earth: Why Definitions Don't Work the Way You Think
43:06 Locked-In Syndrome and the Lobster Problem
47:08 Computation Can't Explain Pain Either
48:01 Intelligence vs Consciousness: Why You Must Separate Them
50:45 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 Theory
01:03:26 Why Formalising Consciousness Is a Fetishisation of Maths
01:09:00 Why There Is No Simple State Space for Vision
01:13:22 Does Quantum Mechanics Explain Consciousness?
01:18:25 The Problem with Penrose and Hameroff's Microtubule Theory
01:21:31 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 Unsolvable
01:29:47 Could Someone Invent a New Explanatory Framework?
01:31:13 Why Pain Hurts: The Evolutionary Story
01:33:12 What Newton Would Think of General Relativity
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: [evan@thegiantsshoulder.com](mailto:evan@thegiantsshoulder.com)️
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/
Tim 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 Computable
02:35 Maudlin's 1989 Paper: Computation and Consciousness
06:01 The Thought Experiment: Beer Cans, Windmills and Conscious Machines
08:11 Why Running a Programme Can't Be Enough for Consciousness
10:36 Counterfactuals: What the Machine Would Have Done
13:56 The Cog and Wheel Machine: Stripping It Down
16:18 The Strange Anaesthesia: Jamming the Gears
19:10 Why Computational Structure Is the Wrong Level
20:08 Is This For or Against Computationalism?
23:01 The 2026 AI Consciousness Debate
25:06 Why the Turing Test Is Trivially Defeatable
27:00 Neural Nets Are Nothing Like Brains
29:12 Why the Brain Is Far More Than Neurons
31:01 HAL 9000 and How Children Actually Learn
33:27 The Car Wash Question That Breaks ChatGPT
35:18 Defining Intelligence and Consciousness
37:53 Twin Earth: Why Definitions Don't Work the Way You Think
43:06 Locked-In Syndrome and the Lobster Problem
47:08 Computation Can't Explain Pain Either
48:01 Intelligence vs Consciousness: Why You Must Separate Them
50:45 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 Theory
01:03:26 Why Formalising Consciousness Is a Fetishisation of Maths
01:09:00 Why There Is No Simple State Space for Vision
01:13:22 Does Quantum Mechanics Explain Consciousness?
01:18:25 The Problem with Penrose and Hameroff's Microtubule Theory
01:21:31 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 Unsolvable
01:29:47 Could Someone Invent a New Explanatory Framework?
01:31:13 Why Pain Hurts: The Evolutionary Story
01:33:12 What Newton Would Think of General Relativity
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: [evan@thegiantsshoulder.com](mailto:evan@thegiantsshoulder.com)️
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#110 - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness
2 Stunden 13 Minuten
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Dr. 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 Intro
01:22 The Evolution of Neuroscience Techniques
05:13 Understanding Feedforward Inhibition
08:13 The Paradigm Shift in Brain Function
12:07 The Role of Rhythms in Prediction
14:28 Overcoming Technological Barriers in Research
16:45 Mapping the Hippocampus and Microcircuitry
25:30 The Complexity of Brain Connectivity
26:24 The Future of Connectomics
34:36 The Inside Out Brain: A New Framework
42:28 The Brain's Survival Mechanism
45:00 Local and Global Brain Interactions
48:47 Evolution of Brain Complexity
52:56 Inside-Out Thinking in Neuroscience
59:32 The Importance of Body Rhythms
01:17:42 The Interconnectedness of Mind and Body
01:26:43 Understanding Brain Dynamics in Psychiatric Disorders
01:29:04 The Future of Diagnosing Mental Health Conditions
01:32:56 The Role of Technology in Neuroscience
01:35:47 Exploring the Nature of Memory
02:06:25 Consciousness and Its Complexities
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️ 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/id1752486249
Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/
Dr. 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 Intro
01:22 The Evolution of Neuroscience Techniques
05:13 Understanding Feedforward Inhibition
08:13 The Paradigm Shift in Brain Function
12:07 The Role of Rhythms in Prediction
14:28 Overcoming Technological Barriers in Research
16:45 Mapping the Hippocampus and Microcircuitry
25:30 The Complexity of Brain Connectivity
26:24 The Future of Connectomics
34:36 The Inside Out Brain: A New Framework
42:28 The Brain's Survival Mechanism
45:00 Local and Global Brain Interactions
48:47 Evolution of Brain Complexity
52:56 Inside-Out Thinking in Neuroscience
59:32 The Importance of Body Rhythms
01:17:42 The Interconnectedness of Mind and Body
01:26:43 Understanding Brain Dynamics in Psychiatric Disorders
01:29:04 The Future of Diagnosing Mental Health Conditions
01:32:56 The Role of Technology in Neuroscience
01:35:47 Exploring the Nature of Memory
02:06:25 Consciousness and Its Complexities
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com ️ 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/id1752486249
Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/
1 Stunde 26 Minuten
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Dr 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 You
07:01 Patient H.M.: The Most Famous Brain Surgery in History
11:28 Place Cells, Grid Cells, and the Nobel Prize for Mapping Reality
17:18 The Patients Who Can't Imagine a Tropical Beach
20:41 Is Memory Just a Type of Imagination?
24:44 Aphantasia: The People With No Mind's Eye
28:55 The People Who Can't Forget Anything
36:39 Reconsolidation: Why Remembering Makes Memories Vulnerable
42:46 Marian Diamond and the Discovery of Brain Plasticity
46:53 Autocatalytic Closure: How Memories Become Ideas
51:44 Time Cells: How Your Brain Tracks "When"
55:42 What the Hippocampus Does While You Sleep
59:34 The All-Nighter Experiment: From A Grades to F Grades
01:03:47 Does the Brain Replay Emotions During Sleep?
01:07:01 The Amygdala, Fear Conditioning, and Joy Conditioning
01:13:13 What Is Consciousness and Does the Hippocampus Create It?
01:14:38 Clive Wearing: New Consciousness Every Seven Seconds
01:19:30 The Dream Experiment and Optimizing Your Brain for Life
...
Dr 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 You
07:01 Patient H.M.: The Most Famous Brain Surgery in History
11:28 Place Cells, Grid Cells, and the Nobel Prize for Mapping Reality
17:18 The Patients Who Can't Imagine a Tropical Beach
20:41 Is Memory Just a Type of Imagination?
24:44 Aphantasia: The People With No Mind's Eye
28:55 The People Who Can't Forget Anything
36:39 Reconsolidation: Why Remembering Makes Memories Vulnerable
42:46 Marian Diamond and the Discovery of Brain Plasticity
46:53 Autocatalytic Closure: How Memories Become Ideas
51:44 Time Cells: How Your Brain Tracks "When"
55:42 What the Hippocampus Does While You Sleep
59:34 The All-Nighter Experiment: From A Grades to F Grades
01:03:47 Does the Brain Replay Emotions During Sleep?
01:07:01 The Amygdala, Fear Conditioning, and Joy Conditioning
01:13:13 What Is Consciousness and Does the Hippocampus Create It?
01:14:38 Clive Wearing: New Consciousness Every Seven Seconds
01:19:30 The Dream Experiment and Optimizing Your Brain for Life
...
1 Stunde 32 Minuten
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Dr. 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 Chemist
05:09 Making MDMA for $4,000 and Changing Psychiatry
08:25 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 Universe
14:52 A Psychedelic Healed His Relationship With His Abusive Father
19:26 MDMA, PTSD, and a New Paradigm in Healing
21:17 Psilocybin for Alcohol Addiction: The Stories That Changed Everything
24:30 Why Is Psychedelic Research Still So Painfully Slow?
30:05 Big Alcohol, Big Pharma, and the Economics of Prohibition
33:24 The Paradigm Shift Happening in Real Time
39:35 What Psychedelics Actually Do to Your Perception of Life
42:06 Music and Psychedelics: Why Lyrics Can Ruin a Trip
44:56 Can You Separate Real Insight From Hallucination?
46:19 Is Consciousness in the Brain at All? The Transducer Theory
52:36 His Wife's Paranormal Prediction of Her Father's Death
55:56 Eating Disorders, OCD, and the Untapped Frontier
59:25 Why Psychedelics Work Like Rebooting Your Computer
01:00:08 The Bureaucratic Nightmare of Studying Schedule I Drugs
01:06:11 The MDMA Analogue Nobody Will Fund
01:08:16 A Plea to Billionaires: Fund Psychedelic Research
01:09:32 Structure Activity Relationships: Sculpting Molecules to Fit Receptors
01:12:07 AlphaFold, AI, and the Future of Drug Discovery
01:14:36 The Golden Question: What Happens After a Drug Binds?
01:17:39 DMT and the Pineal Gland: Debunking the Myth
01:21:21 Is There Any Evidence DMT Is Released at Death?
01:22:33 DMT Transfusions and Machine Elves
01:26:09 What Excites Him About the Future of Psychedelics
01:28:19 The Legacy of the Greatest Psychedelic Chemist Alive
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: [evan@thegiantsshoulder.com](mailto:evan@thegiantsshoulder.com)
️ 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. 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 Chemist
05:09 Making MDMA for $4,000 and Changing Psychiatry
08:25 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 Universe
14:52 A Psychedelic Healed His Relationship With His Abusive Father
19:26 MDMA, PTSD, and a New Paradigm in Healing
21:17 Psilocybin for Alcohol Addiction: The Stories That Changed Everything
24:30 Why Is Psychedelic Research Still So Painfully Slow?
30:05 Big Alcohol, Big Pharma, and the Economics of Prohibition
33:24 The Paradigm Shift Happening in Real Time
39:35 What Psychedelics Actually Do to Your Perception of Life
42:06 Music and Psychedelics: Why Lyrics Can Ruin a Trip
44:56 Can You Separate Real Insight From Hallucination?
46:19 Is Consciousness in the Brain at All? The Transducer Theory
52:36 His Wife's Paranormal Prediction of Her Father's Death
55:56 Eating Disorders, OCD, and the Untapped Frontier
59:25 Why Psychedelics Work Like Rebooting Your Computer
01:00:08 The Bureaucratic Nightmare of Studying Schedule I Drugs
01:06:11 The MDMA Analogue Nobody Will Fund
01:08:16 A Plea to Billionaires: Fund Psychedelic Research
01:09:32 Structure Activity Relationships: Sculpting Molecules to Fit Receptors
01:12:07 AlphaFold, AI, and the Future of Drug Discovery
01:14:36 The Golden Question: What Happens After a Drug Binds?
01:17:39 DMT and the Pineal Gland: Debunking the Myth
01:21:21 Is There Any Evidence DMT Is Released at Death?
01:22:33 DMT Transfusions and Machine Elves
01:26:09 What Excites Him About the Future of Psychedelics
01:28:19 The Legacy of the Greatest Psychedelic Chemist Alive
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: [evan@thegiantsshoulder.com](mailto:evan@thegiantsshoulder.com)
️ 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/
