Giants Shoulder

Evan McGloughlin
  • 5.0 (7)
  • Life Sciences
  • Updated Weekly

A Biology & Consciousness podcast chronicling the bio-singularity. 3x times per week I speak with leading scientists at the bleeding edge of Neuroscience, Consciousness and Biology. No idea is too strange, tackled with genuine curiosity and technical rigour. Come follow the journey as I have my brain melted and ontology warped on a regular basis. Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is founder of Giants Shoulder.

  1. 12h ago

    #162 - Meet The Scientist Who Says We've Gotten Cancer Completely Wrong

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Carlos Sonnenschein is Professor of Integrative Physiology and Pathobiology at Tufts University School of Medicine. With Ana Soto, he developed the tissue organisation field theory of cancer: the idea that a tumour begins not in a rogue cell, but in the breakdown of the tissue around it. For fifty years he has argued that cancer research has been looking one level too low. Here he explains why the mutations we find in tumours may be the wreckage, not the cause. Expect to learn: - The default state: why every cell's natural tendency is to proliferate - Growth factors: why he argued they don't exist, and why people laughed - Mutations without cancer: why he says no gene has been shown to cause a cancer - Targeted therapy: why he believes the target was never really there - Cellular agency: how life, proliferation and motility fit together SPONSORS Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder GS EPISODES MENTIONED Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM GUEST LINKS Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VmTCfroAAAAJ IEA Nantes Fellow Profile: https://www.iea-nantes.fr/en/fellows/carlos-sonnenschein Biological Purpose Project: https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/people/carlos-sonnenschein ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos-Sonnenschein An Integrative Approach Toward Biology, Organisms, and Cancer (2018): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29119499 LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/AypMhvhWwjg Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249 SKOOL Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:26 From Paediatrics to Cancer Research 0:05:23 The Oestrogen Paradox 0:08:43 Proliferation Is the Default State of Every Cell 0:12:27 Inhibitors of Inhibitors 0:14:06 "Growth Factors Don't Exist" 0:15:31 The Somatic Mutation Theory 0:17:41 The Society of Cells and the Tissue Theory of Cancer 0:21:44 Stars and Dogs: Funding a Minority View 0:23:49 Teaching Cancer Through Genetics 0:25:01 How Does Tissue Keep Cells in Check? 0:26:04 Metastasis 0:28:34 Prostate Cancer and Spontaneous Regression 0:30:38 The Cost of Cancer Treatment 0:31:49 Melanoma, UV and the Standard Model 0:32:24 Mutations Without Cancer 0:35:17 No Gene Causes Cancer: BRCA1, p53 and RAS 0:37:00 Why Targeted Therapy Isn't Targeted 0:38:03 When Treatment Causes Cancer 0:40:39 What Does Genome Sequencing Tell You? 0:42:24 Why Does Cancer Run in Families? 0:45:41 Trauma, Healing and Tissue Robustness 0:47:59 A Theory of Organisms 0:50:59 What Is Life? 0:52:18 Economics Is a Branch of Biology 0:53:36 Cellular Agency 0:58:36 Defining Life: Proliferation and Motility 1:01:36 When Did Cells Become Agents? 1:04:49 The Future of Cancer Research 1:09:52 Final Thoughts .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  2. 3d ago

    #161 - Meet The Psychonaut Who Survived Extended-State DMT

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Alexander Beiner is the writer who volunteered as a guinea pig for the world's first extended-state DMT trial. At Imperial College London, he was one of eleven people kept on a continuous DMT drip for thirty minutes. He is a co-Executive Director of Breaking Convention, Europe's largest psychedelic conference, and the author of The Bigger Picture. Expect to learn - The Chinchillas: hyperdimensional beings he had never seen in real life, speaking a visible language - The Reply: he sent a symbol back, they went ballistic, then got bored and left - The Pharmacology Problem: why tolerance to LSD and psilocybin does nothing to DMT - The Synchronicity: the stranger across a London road, and what he learned that night - The Spider Queen: a planet-sized entity that wrapped him in a web SPONSORS Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder GS EPISODES MENTIONED Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o GUEST LINKS X: https://x.com/AlexanderBeiner Kainos (Substack): https://beiner.substack.com/ Personal Site: https://www.alexanderbeiner.com/ Breaking Convention: https://breakingconvention.co.uk/performers/alexander-beiner The Bigger Picture - Author Page: https://www.penguin.com.au/authors/alexander-beiner LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/aZnvPt9X3Dc Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249 SKOOL Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:01:59 Why Changing Minds Isn't Enough 0:02:54 A Magic Mushroom Homecoming In Holland 0:05:33 Joining Europe's Largest Psychedelic Conference 0:06:44 Why He Signed Up To Be A DMT Guinea Pig 0:08:03 Half Of DMT Users Meet Autonomous Entities 0:10:38 Meeting The Hyperdimensional Chinchillas 0:14:25 He'd Never Seen A Chinchilla In Real Life 0:15:14 "They Were Speaking A Visible Language" 0:17:47 Why Priming Can't Explain The Chinchillas 0:21:33 The Metaphysical Shift After 100 Episodes 0:26:21 DMT Immunity And The Cross-Tolerance Mystery 0:28:07 Why Psychedelics Make Avoiding Pain Harder 0:29:28 The Placebo Dose And The Prank Paranoia 0:32:24 Three Heartbeats To The Deepest Trip 0:35:06 Wired Up: The Hidden Rituals Of The Lab 0:39:29 Would He Ever Come Back? 0:40:22 Psychedelic PTSD And The Fear Of Madness 0:41:31 The Synchronicity He Still Can't Explain 0:46:37 If Everything's Conscious, Where's The Telepathy? 0:49:16 Why The East Talks Openly About Ghosts 0:53:45 The Planet-Sized Spider Queen 0:58:51 "This Is So Similar To What McKenna Described" .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  3. 6d ago

    #160 - Meet The Physicist Proving The Universe Builds Itself Out Of Information

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic is a physicist turned cognitive scientist and Professor Emeritus at Chalmers University of Technology, with doctorates in both physics and computer science. Across three careers she built info-computationalism: the idea that nature is information and computation at every level, from particles to minds. Her conclusion puts her at odds with much of her own field. Cognition arrives with life itself, which puts consciousness in a single bacterium and nowhere in today's AI. Expect to learn: - Info-computationalism: why nature is information and computation all the way down - Cell consciousness: why a single cell is already sensing, deciding and minimally aware - The Levin divide: where she draws the line Michael Levin won't - Anaesthetised bacteria: why ether switches off organisms with no brain - Machines that can't feel: why today's AI has intelligence but no goals of its own SPONSORS Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder GS EPISODES MENTIONED Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Michael Levin & Earl Miller: Platonic Space of Minds, Bioelectricity, Cell Intelligence & Neurobots: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA William B. Miller Jr. - Meet The Scientist Proving Your Cells Are Conscious and Intelligent: https://youtu.be/xrV5oGyyKSI Mark Solms - Meet the Scientist Proving Dreams Hold the Key to Consciousness! Dr Mark Solms: https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc GUEST LINKS Chalmers Profile: https://www.chalmers.se/en/persons/dodig/ X: https://x.com/DodigGordana Chalmers Research Publications: https://research.chalmers.se/en/person/dodig Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bvc5bBsAAAAJ ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9881-400X LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordana-dodig-crnkovic/ LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/D4jBgWV8BoY Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249 SKOOL Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:44 Physicist, Computer Scientist, Cognitive Scientist 0:08:05 What Is Information, Really? 0:13:16 You Can't Observe Without Changing The System 0:16:14 Are Conscious Agents The Most Fundamental Thing? 0:20:06 A Single Cell Is Already Conscious 0:27:16 Where She Parts Ways With Michael Levin 0:28:41 Can We Build A Machine That Creates Itself? 0:33:38 Why A Book Is Just Food To An Insect 0:39:40 You Are Trillions Of Information Agents 0:44:09 Science's Obsession With Measurement 0:46:40 Xenobots And The Cells Nobody Programmed 0:51:02 Agency Or Just Complicated Chemistry? 0:55:58 Why No Experiment Can Settle This 0:57:22 Where Computation Ends And Cognition Begins 1:01:08 Would Levin Say Gene Networks Think? 1:03:37 Why Survival Might Be Essential For Consciousness 1:07:07 You Can Anaesthetise A Bacterium 1:11:08 Can Consciousness Be Written Down As Maths? 1:19:31 How AI Could Help Us Understand Minds 1:22:35 Should We Ever Build Conscious AI? .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  4. Sep 28

    #159 - No. 1 Biopsychist: Michael Levin's Platonic Minds & Cognition All The Way Down

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join John Vervaeke is an award-winning cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Cognitive Science programme and the Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He helped pioneer relevance realisation — the claim that underneath your intelligence, your attention and your consciousness sits a single process, and that every living thing is doing it. He has argued since 1997 that this process cannot be a computation, and his field is only now conceding the point: even predictive processing, its dominant framework, is increasingly admitted to presuppose the thing he named. A cell decides what matters to it. So does a bacterium. Possibly everything that has ever been alive, long before there was a brain to think with. Expect to learn: - Relevance realisation: how you ignore almost everything in front of you and still land on what matters - Cognition all the way down: why a single cell is doing the same thing your mind is, only smaller - The line at life: why a tornado self-organises but never cares, and what that rules out - Why computation can't do it: the reason large language models collapse on open-ended problems and always will - Mind as the between: the case that consciousness isn't inside your head but in the coupling with your world SPONSORS Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants GS EPISODES MENTIONED Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/6mU5nN5nlLA Philip Ball - Philip Ball: Why Quantum Mechanics is NOT What you think, Consciousness, Brain Organoids, AI & Life!: https://youtu.be/nNbG5lnp51E Philip Ball - Philip Ball: "Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought": https://youtu.be/9SseGx0R0fY Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o GUEST LINKS University of Toronto Faculty Profile: https://www.psych.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/john-vervaeke Website: https://johnvervaeke.com/ X: https://x.com/vervaeke_john YouTube (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis): https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaeke Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (book): https://johnvervaeke.com/books/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/ LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/jcMtjjeUV98 SKOOL Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:54 The Meaning Crisis, Explained by a Cognitive Scientist 0:04:16 The Patterns in This Room Outnumber the Particles in the Universe 0:06:45 How Your Mind Ignores Almost Everything 0:09:09 "Dad, It's Relevance Realisation All The Way Down" 0:10:24 Noise Is Just Information Nobody Needs 0:15:33 Comparing a Human Mind to a Single Cell 0:18:01 Michael Levin's Cognitive Light Cone 0:19:49 The Cone of Caring 0:23:20 How Far Down Does Mind Actually Go? 0:24:15 Why a Tornado Isn't Alive 0:25:34 Pressing Michael Levin to Admit He's a Platonist 0:34:01 The Water Bottle Experiment 0:40:34 Where Levin Leaps From Patterns to Minds 0:48:12 The Problem With Symmetry Theories of Consciousness 0:55:03 Why LLMs Fall Apart on Open-Ended Problems 1:00:16 Obviousness Is Not a Physical Property 1:05:11 The Shark That Dies in the Sahara 1:10:49 What Consciousness Is Actually Doing 1:15:12 Are Neural Correlates a Dead End? 1:22:07 "We Should Stop Funding It"

  5. Sep 24

    #158 - Meet The Scientist Redefining Intelligence With Michael Levin

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Richard Watson is a professor of artificial intelligence and theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Southampton and the author of Compositional Evolution. He argues that adaptation does not require natural selection at all, and that biology has spent a century mistaking one for the other. With Michael Levin he published Natural Induction, which shows that any network whose connections give way under stress will begin to learn on its own. Ecosystems. Gene networks. Possibly the chemistry of the early Earth, long before anything was alive to be selected. Expect to learn: - Cognition before selection: why learning came first and natural selection came second - The spring mechanism: how falling masses solve hard puzzles with no brain, no genes and no designer - Ecosystems that compute: the model where an ecosystem solves a Sudoku without reproducing or inheriting - The limits of the genome: why no amount of sequencing will explain what a cell is actually doing - Medicine as persuasion: treating tissues as cognitive systems to negotiate with, not machines to fix SPONSORS Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants GS EPISODES MENTIONED Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM GUEST LINKS University of Southampton Profile: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/5x27lw/professor-richard-watson Personal Website: https://www.richardawatson.com Natural Induction (Entropy, 2024, with Michael Levin): https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/9/765 Publications: https://www.richardawatson.com/publications-1 ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Watson-10 LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/wAGFE2S6qXg Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249 SKOOL Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:43 The Assumptions Every Biologist Knows Are Wrong 0:03:53 "All of Life Is Cognitive" 0:06:58 Survival Is a Consequence, Not the Driver 0:09:32 How Cognition Could Come Before Natural Selection 0:14:03 Adaptation Isn't What Natural Selection Does 0:17:57 What a Sudoku Puzzle Teaches About Life 0:20:41 Masses, Springs and the Physics of Learning 0:23:45 When Springs Start to Remember 0:26:18 Learning as "Second-Order Falling" 0:28:56 No Selection, No Neural Nets, No Design 0:31:03 What "Memory" Actually Means 0:35:59 Gene Networks That Learn 0:38:13 An Ecosystem Solving Sudoku 0:43:22 Natural Selection "Isn't Doing Anything Clever" 0:52:08 No Amount of Sequencing Will Answer This 0:57:23 Will We Ever Model a Cell? "Bottom Up, Never" 1:01:23 Rethinking Medicine: Persuadable Systems 1:08:01 Agency, or Just Complex Biochemistry? 1:20:47 "I Don't Do Consciousness" 1:23:30 Three Things That Changed His Mind 1:25:39 Analytic Idealism and the Dream Argument 1:33:31 Why Doesn't Your Consciousness Blur Into the Chair? 1:35:47 McGilchrist and Why We're Blind to It 1:38:47 It Was Never About Survival .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  6. Sep 21

    #157 - Meet The Consciousness Philosopher With No Mind’s Eye

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Richard Brown is a philosopher of mind who built one of the leading cognitive theories of consciousness, co-authored the paper with Joseph LeDoux that moved the feeling of fear out of the amygdala, and has just published the full book-length case for it with Oxford University Press. He also cannot picture a chicken. Brown has aphantasia — no voluntary mental imagery whatsoever — and he didn't find out until a graduate seminar, when he realised that everyone around him had been speaking literally all along about seeing things in their heads. This is a man building a theory of inner experience from inside a mind with no pictures in it. Expect to learn: - The blank mind's eye: what a philosopher with no mental imagery reveals about where experience actually happens - Fear without the amygdala: how he and Joseph LeDoux moved the feeling of fear up into the cortex - Fake phenomenology: the TMS study where vision gets more vivid without getting any more accurate - Experience you can't reach: whether you can be having a conscious state and be locked out of it - The state of the field: why the consciousness chapter in most neuroscience textbooks is a coin flip SPONSORS Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe GS EPISODES MENTIONED Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0 Andrés Gómez Emilsson - Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience: https://youtu.be/xMdl7zF2MWE Alfredo Spagna - Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!: https://youtu.be/k8SBHefDnEk GUEST LINKS Personal Site: https://onemorebrown.com Consciousness Live!: https://onemorebrown.com/consciousness-live/ Consciousness as Representing One's Mind (OUP, 2025): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/consciousness-as-representing-ones-mind-9780197784006 X: https://x.com/onemorebrown Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/onemorebrown.bsky.social LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/RBP-w5Z9t1g Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249 SKOOL Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:10 Why You Can't Do Science Without Philosophy 0:04:54 "You're Doing Bad Philosophy and You Don't Know It" 0:06:26 The Band That Got Him Working With Joseph LeDoux 0:11:53 Why the Consciousness Chapter Is a Coin Flip 0:17:17 What a Higher-Order Theory Actually Says 0:20:43 The Two Kinds of Awareness 0:21:59 The Blurry Book That Taught Him About Experience 0:26:32 Consciousness as Awareness of Your Own Mind 0:27:08 LeDoux, the Amygdala and Where Fear Really Lives 0:33:06 "There Is No Unconscious Fear" 0:39:17 Two Famous Theories That Are Secretly the Same 0:40:15 Aphantasia as Evidence for Higher-Order Theory 0:42:57 The Speckled Hen That Broke the Seminar 0:44:48 Seven Spots, or Black on Black? 0:45:46 What Meditation Showed a Man With No Mind's Eye 0:49:38 You Might Be Having Experiences You Can't Reach 0:52:21 Ned Block's Overflow and the "Placeholder" Problem 0:55:36 India Solved This Before Descartes 1:02:26 Subjective Inflation, or "Fake Phenomenology" 1:03:38 Zapping the Prefrontal Cortex With TMS 1:06:13 The $3 Million Experiment Testing All of This 1:09:56 Quality Space Theory and Mental "Dabs of Paint" 1:22:08 Why You Can't Swap Your Red for My Green .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  7. Sep 17

    #156 - Meet The Greatest Time Neuroscientist You’ve Never Heard Of

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Dean Buonomano is a UCLA neuroscientist and one of the first researchers to ask how the brain encodes time. His work overturned a century-old assumption — that somewhere in your head sits a central clock — by showing that timing falls out of the dynamics of neural circuits themselves. He wrote the bestseller Your Brain Is a Time Machine, then took the argument to physics, co-authoring a paper with Carlo Rovelli on whether the past still exists. He is a presentist in a field that mostly isn't. Expect to learn: - The clockless brain: why there is no central timer anywhere in your head - Timing in a dish: how isolated brain tissue can be taught intervals - Death and religion: how foresight forced our ancestors to invent the afterlife - The ten-second test: the one simple thing no language model can do - Pause the computer: the thought experiment that breaks state-based theories of consciousness SPONSORS Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder GS EPISODES MENTIONED György Buzsáki - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/95FFRTIiLDY Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0 Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/eNi-_2cOVtc Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o GUEST LINKS UCLA Neurobiology Profile: https://neurobio.ucla.edu/people/dean-buonomano-phd Buonomano Lab: http://www.buonomanolab.com/ X: https://x.com/DeanBuono Bridging the Neuroscience and Physics of Time (with Carlo Rovelli): https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01976 LISTEN ON YouTube - https://youtu.be/G2LaKtxUng0 Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249 SKOOL Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:01 The Brain Has No Central Clock 0:04:17 How Neural Population Clocks Work 0:05:40 Teaching Brain Tissue To Tell Time 0:06:57 Prediction Is Really About When 0:09:10 Even Bacteria Keep Time 0:10:27 Mental Time Travel Built Civilisation 0:11:39 Realising You'll Die Invented Religion 0:14:57 Squirrels Don't Actually Plan Ahead 0:18:19 Waking Up Before Your Alarm 0:23:29 Why Time Is Central To Consciousness 0:24:01 Block Universe vs Only Now 0:29:24 The Runner Who Lost Time 0:33:18 Why Marathons Destroy Time Perception 0:37:18 The Memories With No Timestamp 0:42:02 Your Brain Runs Many Clocks 0:43:31 AI Cannot Wait Ten Seconds 0:45:38 How Transformers Deleted Time 0:49:29 What If You Paused The Computer? 0:53:05 Could We Ever Build Conscious AI? 0:58:17 Arguing About Time With Carlo Rovelli 1:01:40 A Time Traveller Would Prove Me Wrong 1:07:05 You Can't Measure Time With Time 1:12:25 Which Theory Of Consciousness Is Right? 1:21:55 Why We Invented The Soul .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

  8. Sep 14

    #155 - Meet The World’s Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of

    🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY Become a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇 https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/join Steven Barker is the chemist who has spent fifty years proving your brain makes its own psychedelic. He built the mass-spectrometry methods sensitive enough to find DMT in living tissue, and showed it sits in the brain at concentrations rivalling serotonin and dopamine. In 1981 the war on drugs cut his funding and the work stopped for fifteen years. He also synthesised his own supply — and took it. Expect to learn: - The locked cabinet: what his mentor kept behind two locks, and why Barker raided it - The missing neurotransmitter: why DMT meets every formal criterion and nobody noticed - Machine elves: why he calls the term marketing rather than science - DMT immunity: the lab technician who took a full dose and felt nothing - Receptors inside the neuron: the 2023 finding that explains the neuroplasticity SPONSORS Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants GS EPISODES MENTIONED Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc Dennis McKenna - Dennis McKenna: "I've Spent 50 Years Investigating The Entities That Exist Within Ayahuasca": https://youtu.be/gTSBhfZhuD8 David Nichols - Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/6umTgXsW1lQ GUEST LINKS ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Steven-A-Barker-2164230436 N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, an Endogenous Hallucinogen (2018 review): https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00536 A Critical Review of Endogenous DMT in Humans 1955-2010 (with Strassman): https://doi.org/10.1002/dta.422 LC/MS/MS Analysis of Rat Pineal Microdialysate (2013, the paper discussed on tape): https://doi.org/10.1002/bmc.2981 Administration of DMT in Psychedelic Therapeutics (2022 review): https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-022-06065-0 LISTEN ON Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249 SKOOL Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about FOLLOW EVAN https://x.com/evan_mcgl TIMESTAMPS 0:00:00 Trailer 0:02:15 50 Years Chasing One Molecule 0:06:37 Huxley, Osmond and the Birth of "Psychedelic" 0:08:01 The Schizotoxin Hypothesis That Started It All 0:10:54 Finding DMT in Everyone, Not Just Patients 0:11:56 How the War on Drugs Killed the Research 0:16:39 The 40 Years of Research We Lost 0:18:36 "Have You Ever Taken It Yourself?" 0:19:20 Inside the Locked Psychedelic Cabinet 0:20:22 The Overabundance He Didn't Want to Waste 0:22:51 Why He Won't Describe What He Saw 0:23:38 Set, Setting and the Expectancy Problem 0:27:16 Dennis McKenna Has Never Seen a Machine Elf 0:28:31 "Machine Elf" Was a Marketing Term 0:30:40 The Tryptamine Family Tree Explained 0:34:21 Bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT and the Blood-Brain Barrier 0:38:36 DMT as a Working Neurotransmitter 0:41:34 "DMT Is the Missing Neurotransmitter" 0:44:56 You Have Two Brains - and the Gut Makes More 0:46:29 Pushing Back on Gallimore's Alien World 0:54:04 96% Say the Entity Was Conscious 0:57:52 Did the Caveman Experience an Alien? 0:59:07 "These Are Not Real Elves" 1:06:40 Are Some People Immune to DMT? 1:10:51 You Can't Build Tolerance to Your Own Neurotransmitter 1:15:46 The Receptors Hiding Inside Your Neurons 1:24:24 What a Psychedelic Overdose Actually Is .....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

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About

A Biology & Consciousness podcast chronicling the bio-singularity. 3x times per week I speak with leading scientists at the bleeding edge of Neuroscience, Consciousness and Biology. No idea is too strange, tackled with genuine curiosity and technical rigour. Come follow the journey as I have my brain melted and ontology warped on a regular basis. Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is founder of Giants Shoulder.

Information

  • Creator
    Evan McGloughlin
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    168
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Evan McGloughlin
  • Show Website
    Giants Shoulder

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