The Giants Shoulder

Evan McGloughlin
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A Neuroscience podcast. Each week I talk with experts on a range of topics from consciousness and neuroplasticity to evolution and everything in between. I have a particular interest in consciousness and understanding our inner subjective conscious experience. Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is the co-founder of 2 (failed) edtech startups. He is a professional tennis coach and Triathlete enthusiast.

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    #108 - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness

    Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder 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/

    2h 14m

  2. 4 DAYS AGO

    #107 Dr Wendy Suzuki: How The Hippocampus Weaves Your Memories Into Consciousness

    Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulder 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 ...

    1hr 26min

  3. 2 APR

    #106 - 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/we00d2cmjpqe 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/

    1hr 32min

  4. 31 MAR

    #105 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 exists on a spectrum from order to chaos — and that psychedelics work by dissolving the brain's confidence in its own model of reality. His landmark trial in the New England Journal of Medicine showed two doses of psilocybin matched six weeks of antidepressants for depression.Expect to learn why psychedelics don't activate the brain but scramble it, what the entropic brain hypothesis actually means and why entropy may be the best biomarker for consciousness, how the default mode network holds your ego together and what happens when psychedelics melt it, the difference between DMT entity encounters and 5-MeO-DMT ego obliteration, why Robin thinks we could still get psychedelic medicine catastrophically wrong, and much more…Timestamps:00:00 Introduction to Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris03:01 The Journey into Psychedelics06:10 First Brain Scans with Psychedelics12:06 Understanding Brain Activity and Psychedelics17:49 The Entropic Brain Theory24:02 Consciousness and Brain Entropy30:10 Decoding Conscious Experience40:49 Exploring the Entropic Brain Model45:24 The Limits of Consciousness and Ego50:11 Psychedelics and Evolutionary Perspectives53:31 Shared Psychedelic Experiences and Archetypes01:00:06 The Nature of Hallucinations and Collective Unconscious01:04:34 Entropy, Connectivity, and Brain Function01:17:02 The Role of Serotonin Receptors in Psychedelic Experiences01:20:46 The Mechanisms of Psychedelics01:30:18 Cultural Perspectives on Psychedelics01:39:13 Psychedelics and Self-Understanding01:48:36 Cross-Cultural Studies in Psychedelic Research01:53:25 The Future of Psychedelics in Mental Health...Email for sponsorship enquiries: 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/

    2h 6m

  5. 26 MAR

    #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 has repeatedly rebooted life on Earth. Understanding it means rethinking everything from the origin of life to the future of civilization.Expect to learn how CO₂ helped spark the first cells at the bottom of ancient oceans, why hydrothermal vents may hold the key to alien life, how volcanoes rewrote evolution, the truth about the most catastrophic extinction in Earth’s history, how CO₂ shaped your metabolism, brain and the rise of humans, why mass extinctions can reboot evolution, why today’s climate experiment is unlike anything in the fossil record, why the planet has a natural thermostat — and how we’re breaking it, why life might be a universal process of energy dissipation, how the story of Earth challenges our ideas of uniqueness, and much more … Support The Channel: Get 1 Month Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder Timestamps: 02:14 How CO₂ Became the Most Misunderstood Molecule on Earth 07:31 Life as a Carbon-Fueled Energy Dissipation Machine12:45 The Origins of Life and the Vents That May Have Sparked It 19:08 Why Mass Extinctions Keep Rewriting Life’s Blueprint 26:27 CO₂ as Climate Stabilizer — Until It Isn’t 35:40 What the Permian Extinction Tells Us About the Future 42:55 Deep Time and the Psychology of Geological Thinking 49:18 Why the Anthropocene Might Be a Cosmic Joke 55:36 How Life Changes the Planet — And Gets Changed in Return 01:04:02 The Story of CO₂ as the Story of Everything 01:10:15 Is Earth’s Climate Crisis a Rehearsal of Past Catastrophes? 01:15:49 Carbon, Consciousness, and Why We’re Here to Begin With 01:22:06 What Would a Geologist See If They Dug Up 2024?01:27:31 Hope, Humility, and What Deep Time Teaches Us ... Email for sponsorship enquiries: 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/

    1hr 25min

  6. 23 MAR

    #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 outperform standard deep learning. He recently published a paper arguing that AI will never be conscious, introducing a framework called Biological Idealism. Expect to learn why your brain lifts reality into a higher-dimensional space just to see a straight line, what autopoiesis is and why it might be the dividing line for consciousness, why psychedelics decreasing brain activity while increasing experience is a problem for materialism, why firing neurons are an appearance of experience not the cause of it, why AI leaders claiming machines might be conscious is dangerous, and much more ... Support The Channel: Get 1 Month Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder Timestamps: 00:00 Why Erik Wrote the Biological Idealism Paper 02:00 The Materialist Bias in Society 04:23 Does a Machine Have Consciousness? 06:29 Can You Be a Materialist and Value Experience? 08:24 The Map vs The Terrain: What is Matter Really? 11:03 Bernardo Kastrup and the Path to Idealism 14:11 Psychedelics: Less Brain Activity, More Experience? 15:57 The Idealist Explanation of Neural Correlates 19:54 What Primes Someone Towards Idealism or Materialism? 24:17 Autopoiesis: The Self-Creation of Life 27:32 How Autopoiesis Works in an Idealist Framework 33:30 Where Physicalism and Idealism Actually Agree 41:15 Finding Common Ground Across Metaphysics 47:17 Why Are Some Creatures More Conscious Than Others? 50:18 Donut-Shaped Geometry in Brain Activity 54:46 Can Mathematics Ever Model Consciousness? 59:33 The Geometry of Experiences Explained 01:04:31 Continuity of Brain Structures Across the Animal Kingdom 01:06:03 Can We Make a Machine Autopoietic? 01:09:37 The Robot That Plugs Itself In: Is That Consciousness? 01:14:00 What Would You Do With 100 Billion Dollars? 01:20:20 Will We Ever See a Conscious Machine? 01:24:11 AI Propaganda and Emotional Manipulation 01:27:56 Hinton and Amodei: Is It Dangerous to Call AI Conscious? 01:31:43 The Ethics of Machine Consciousness Research 01:35:39 Animal Suffering, AI Spending and Asking the Right Questions 01:38:10 Closing Thoughts and Anna Ciaunica's Influence ... 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/

    1hr 46min

  7. 19 MAR

    #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 question: what does it take for a system to become conscious — and can we engineer it? Expect to learn why consciousness might be raw feeling rather than complex cognition, why your cortex may not actually be conscious, what's architecturally missing from current AI that rules out consciousness, what a machine would need to genuinely feel something, where these two brilliant scientists agree and exactly where they clash, and much more… Timestamps: 00:01 Introduction to the Giant's Debate 00:46 Mark Solms: What Makes a System Conscious? 05:31 Ryan Smith: The Cognitive Case for Consciousness 13:02 Where Mark and Ryan Agree and Disagree 17:32 The Selection Problem: What Gets to Be Conscious? 27:07 Can We Scientifically Prove Something Is Conscious? 30:02 Blindsight: Behaviour Without Experience 34:20 The Fish on Cocaine Problem 41:25 Different Meanings of Consciousness 54:57 How the Free Energy Principle Explains Consciousness 01:03:02 Ryan Smith: Taking Consciousness Out of Biology 01:12:17 How Do You Give a Computer Survival Needs? 01:18:20 The Brain in a Vat: Does the Body Actually Matter? 01:19:59 What Would Prove AI Is Conscious? 01:22:32 Mark Solms: Why He Believes We Can Build Consciousness 01:27:25 Why Current LLMs Have Zero Consciousness 01:30:36 Mark's Final Word: Goals Must Be Real 01:31:15 Rapid Fire with Ryan Smith 01:37:52 The Neuron Replacement Thought Experiment 01:42:10 Computation vs Architecture: A Middle Ground 01:44:06 Final Thoughts ... 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/

    1hr 52min

  8. 16 MAR

    #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 consciousness evolved to help us coordinate with others, and why your sense of self might be an illusion shared to stay sane. Support The Channel: Get 1 Month Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe Get Professional High Quality Talk Therapy at BetterHelp. 10% off your first month of therapy with this link - https://betterhelp.com/giantsshoulder Timestamps: 02:12 What Is Consciousness? A Brain-Built Social Model 06:34 Predictive Processing and Why You Never Really See the World 11:29 Controlled Hallucinations: How the Brain Manufactures Reality 16:45 Optical Illusions, Schizophrenia, and Seeing Too Much 21:08 What Schizophrenia Teaches Us About the Nature of Belief 27:10 Social Models, Sanity, and the Idea of a Collective Mind 32:43 Consciousness as a Social Adaptation — Not a Solo Experience 38:50 Generative Models and the Brain’s Simulation Engine 45:02 Why Solitude Breaks the Mind and Social Sync Holds It Together 50:31 Can AI Be Conscious? What’s Missing From Machines 56:07 Free Will, Agency and the Brain’s Self-Narrative 01:00:45 The Myth of a Single Reality: Delusions, Politics and Group Models 01:06:58 Consciousness, Intelligence, and the AI Illusion 01:11:41 Why the Self Is Just a Useful Story 01:17:09 Do Octopuses Have Consciousness? 01:21:16 Where Does the Line Fall Between Conscious and Not?01:25:20 Frith’s Thoughts on the Future of Consciousness Research 01:30:03 AI, Prediction, and the Limits of Machine Minds 01:34:38 Final Reflections: Social Brains, Sanity, and Shared Reality ... 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/

    1hr 38min
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About

A Neuroscience podcast. Each week I talk with experts on a range of topics from consciousness and neuroplasticity to evolution and everything in between. I have a particular interest in consciousness and understanding our inner subjective conscious experience. Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is the co-founder of 2 (failed) edtech startups. He is a professional tennis coach and Triathlete enthusiast.

Information

  • Creator
    Evan McGloughlin
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    116
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Evan McGloughlin
  • Show Website
    The Giants Shoulder

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