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. 2 DAYS AGO

    #110 - No. 1 Music Neuroscientist: How Music Hijacks Our Collective Unconscious, Emotion and Imagination

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

    1hr 22min

  2. 5 DAYS AGO

    #109 - Tim Maudlin: Consciousness, Turing Machines, Problems with Quantum Mechanics and Ai

    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/

    1hr 37min

  3. 9 APR

    #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

  4. 6 APR

    #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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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
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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
    118
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Evan McGloughlin
  • Show Website
    The Giants Shoulder

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