Giants Shoulder

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Matthew Johnson is a psychedelic addiction scientist who spent over two decades at Johns Hopkins before becoming the senior researcher at Sheppard Pratt's Center of Excellence for Psilocybin Research. He's personally guided over 100 people through high-dose psilocybin sessions and says the "mystical experience" that shows up in the data predicts recovery even after you strip out how strong the drug felt.Expect to learn how the psilocybin experience changes as the dose climbs from one gram to a full "heroic dose," why a mystical-type experience predicts addiction recovery even after controlling for how intense the drug felt, what separates a mystical experience from personal insight and emotional catharsis as predictors of healing, why DMT users around the world keep reporting the same handful of entity archetypes, the peer-reviewed Rupert Sheldrake experiment testing whether people can sense who's about to call them before the phone rings, why he thinks rigorous telepathy research keeps getting ignored rather than debunked, why a hard-nosed behavioral pharmacologist ends up leaning toward an idealist view of reality, and much more…

Timestamps:

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:28 Who Matt Johnson Actually Is

0:04:34 How He First Got Into Psychedelics

0:09:07 Did He Sense Addiction Benefits Early On

0:15:03 The First Mystical Experience Trial At Hopkins

0:16:42 What Counts As A High Dose Session

0:22:17 How The Trip Changes From 1 To 5 Grams

0:30:41 Why Mystical Experiences Predict Better Outcomes

0:33:34 Insight And Catharsis As Separate Predictors

0:39:49 DMT Entities And Machine Elves Explained

0:44:02 Why 20% Of DMT Users See The Same Beings

0:52:58 The Peer-Reviewed Telepathy Experiment That Shocked Him

0:59:32 Why No One Has Funded A Real Telepathy Study

1:11:04 Attention Schema Theory And The Illusion Of Self

1:16:00 Could A Single Cell Have Experience

1:17:54 Why He Leans Toward Idealism Over Materialism

...

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GS Episodes Mentioned

Michael Graziano — Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When Consciousness First Emerged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnasmLpY5_8

Guest Links

Sheppard Pratt Profile: https://www.sheppardpratt.org/news-views/story/sheppard-pratt-announces-dr-matthew-w-johnson-as-senior-researcher-for-the-center-of-excellence-for-psilocybin-research-and-treatment/X: https://x.com/drug_researcherGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fWhYUvwAAAAJ&hl=enResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew-Johnson-57JHU Faculty Bio: https://hub.jhu.edu/experts/profiles/matthew-johnson/

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Marjorie Woollacott is a neuroscientist who spent three decades as a hard materialist and co-wrote the textbook used to train physiotherapists worldwide. After a meditation experience her own field said was impossible, she hid it from her colleagues for over 25 years before concluding the brain does not produce consciousness — it filters it.

Expect to learn why a career materialist neuroscientist hid her own paranormal experience for 25 years, the prospective hospital studies that corroborate what patients report while clinically dead, how a comatose man with zero brain activity accurately described a nurse hiding his dentures, what terminal lucidity is and why dying Alzheimer's patients regain full clarity minutes before death, the ongoing lab research into non-speaking autistic children who appear to communicate telepathically, why Christof Koch said the data would turn his world upside down, how Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism compares to Woollacott's own theory of consciousness, and much more…

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:46 Where Her Story Really Begins

0:05:05 The Materialist Neuroscientist She Used To Be

0:06:15 The Meditation Retreat That Broke Her Skepticism

0:14:24 What Actually Caused Her Awakening

0:22:59 How Rigorous Is Near-Death Experience Research, Really

0:24:19 The Prospective Studies Skeptics Ignore

0:25:06 The Coma Patient Who Knew Where His Dentures Were

0:35:48 Bernardo Kastrup's Analytic Idealism Explained

0:43:19 Is Terminal Lucidity Just Wishful Interpretation?

0:46:09 The Three-Year-Old's Last Request Before Dying

0:53:07 Can Consciousness Move Physical Objects?

0:58:20 Why Jung And A Nobel Physicist Believed In Idealism

1:02:59 The Telepathy Tapes, Explained

1:19:40 The Autism Vulnerability Problem With This Research

1:21:21 The 5% Above Chance Telepathy Effect

1:35:13 Designing an Experiment Skeptics Can't Dismiss...

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

GS Episodes Mentioned

Christof Koch — The Psychedelic Trip that Convinced Christof Koch Consciousness is Fundamental: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlV-b2bvaE

Guest Links

Website: https://marjoriewoollacott.com/

University of Oregon Faculty Page: https://ion.uoregon.edu/about/person-page/459

Book – Infinite Awareness: https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Awareness-Awakening-Scientific-Mind/dp/144225033X

Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences Bio: https://www.aapsglobal.com/marjorie-woollacott/

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marjorie-Woollacott

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Rick Doblin is the founder of MAPS and the man who spent 50 years dragging the world's most demonized drug into the doctor's office. He taxed legal ecstasy dealers to fund the first MDMA toxicity studies, sued the DEA with the profits, and got a Harvard PhD in public policy to beat the system from inside — then ran the only completed Phase 3 trials in history showing that two-thirds of severe PTSD patients no longer had the diagnosis after MDMA-assisted therapy.

Expect to learn how he taxed ecstasy dealers to sue the DEA, why MDMA was a couples-therapy drug before it was a party drug, the real reason Nixon criminalized psychedelics in 1970, why 88% of severe PTSD patients responded to MDMA therapy while half dropped out of standard VA treatment, why you can't get addicted to MDMA the way you can to cocaine, why you'll do more jail time for MDMA than for the same weight of cocaine, his plan for "net zero trauma by 2070," and much more…

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:03:03 Winning the Generational Lottery After the Holocaust

0:05:27 Dropping Out of College to Study LSD

0:08:15 The Forgotten Golden Era of Psychedelic Research

0:09:33 When the CIA Weaponized LSD for Mind Control

0:13:10 Half a Pound of Mescaline and Ten Years to Recover

0:15:09 The Day a Stranger Said "There's This Drug Called Adam"

0:15:56 MDMA Was a Therapy Drug Before It Was Ecstasy

0:18:39 Sasha Shulgin, the Man Who Invented 200 Psychedelics

0:24:12 How Dealers Tweaked Molecules to Stay Legal

0:27:21 Why Nixon Really Criminalized the Hippies

0:30:04 Going to War With the DEA — and Winning

0:33:56 Founding MAPS and $200 Million Later

0:39:09 Taxing the Ecstasy Dealers to Fund the Lawsuit

0:41:33 The First MDMA Safety Study, Run on a Beach

0:42:43 The 1992 Moment That Reopened Psychedelic Science

0:44:31 The First PTSD Study, Shut Down for Politics

0:48:08 Cannabis Is Palliative, Psychedelics Are Curative

0:50:08 The Veteran Suicide Epidemic Nobody Will Fund

0:53:33 Why MAPS Bet Everything on MDMA

0:58:35 The Effect Sizes That Should Have Changed Everything

1:01:01 Why Half of Veterans Quit Standard PTSD Therapy

1:02:13 Why the Data Alone Was Never Going to Win

1:04:54 The Absurd Reason the FDA Cited: "Euphoria"

1:06:34 Why You Can't Get Hooked on MDMA

1:07:26 More Jail for MDMA Than for Cocaine

1:08:36 Net Zero Trauma by 2070

1:10:47 MDMA for Couples, and Bringing It to the World...

... Email for sponsorship enquiries:[email protected]

Guest Links

Rick Doblin — MAPS: https://maps.org/people/rick-doblin/

Rick Doblin on X: https://x.com/RickDoblin

MAPS: https://maps.org

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Manoj Doss is a cognitive neuroscientist and one of the only people studying what psychedelics actually do to memory — trained inside the field's most prestigious lab at Johns Hopkins, he's now its most rigorous internal sceptic. His claim is heretical: the profound sense of revelation you get on a trip may be a memory glitch — a familiarity signal firing without the detail that would normally justify it, so the trip feels like downloading the truth while your brain quietly degrades what it's actually recording.

Expect to learn why the profound insights you get on psychedelics might be a memory glitch, why the entire default mode network story "needs to go to hell", what a 250-subject mega-analysis revealed that small studies missed, why salvia melts you into the couch while DMT builds whole worlds, whether DMT entities and mantises are real contact or just a brain built to see faces, why blocking a single receptor proves psychedelics aren't "keys to reality", the flaw Doss says sinks the entropic brain and REBUS, how you'd ever tell a true revelation from a beautiful lie, and much more…

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:24 The One Thing Psychedelic Science Ignores: Memory

0:05:38 Why Your Worst Beliefs Feel Like Hard Facts

0:07:38 The "Sense of Knowing" That Fools Everyone

0:09:00 How Psychedelics Rewire What You Remember

0:16:11 Why Yoga Feels Better on Psilocybin

0:20:27 "The Default Mode Network Story Needs to Go to Hell"

0:27:26 How Neuroscience Invents Stories From Noise

0:35:42 Why Psychedelic Studies Are Too Small to Trust

0:40:31 Salvia: Becoming a Sentient Piece of Corn

0:44:13 The Kappa-Opioid Door Into Another Reality

0:48:00 Why Salvia Is Heaven and Ibogaine Is Hell

0:53:03 Does the Brain Have Two Reality Generators?

0:59:24 Has 20 Years of Psychedelics Taught Us Anything?1:05:18 Are DMT Entities Real? The Mantis Problem

1:13:28 Why You See Machine Elves (But His Mum Wouldn't)

1:24:29 Tearing REBUS and the Entropic Brain Apart

1:36:21 "Do Stuff in the Scanner, Stuff Happens in the Brain"

1:44:25 The Debate Robin Was Warned Not to Do...

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

GS Episodes Mentioned

Karl Friston — Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-IZOFs4qmY

Robin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-GkE4YtLRk

Michael Levin — Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM

Christof Koch — The Psychedelic Trip that Convinced Christof Koch Consciousness is Fundamental: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlV-b2bvaE

David Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5o

Guest Links

Manoj Doss — Dell Medical School: https://dellmed.utexas.edu/directory/manoj-dossX (Twitter): https://x.com/manojdossGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KFo44R0AAAAJORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2939-2522

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Professor David Nutt is a neuro­psychopharmacologist, former UK chief drug adviser, and author of Drugs Without the Hot Air, Drink?, Cannabis, and Psychedelics. After two rounds that sparked an overwhelming response, round three goes fringe — ibogaine, salvia, mescaline, peyote, GHB, xylazine, the nitazines, and the Amanita muscaria "Santa Claus" mushroom — ranking each on Nutt's evidence-based harm scale.

Timestamps:

2:56 Ibogaine

7:21 Salvia

18:02 Mescaline & Peyote

23:59 San Pedro Cactus

28:55 GHB40:59 Kratom & 7-Hydroxy

46:05 Xylazine ("Tranq")

51:34 Nitazines

54:53 Amanita Muscaria

...

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Buy Nutt's BooksDrink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health: https://amzn.to/4dZTP9Z

Psychedelics: The Revolutionary Drugs That Could Change Your Life―A Guide from the Expert: https://amzn.to/3SJXAX6

Drugs without the hot air: Making sense of legal and illegal drugs: https://amzn.to/4kyu7eS

Cannabis (Seeing Through the Smoke): The New Science of Cannabis and Your Health: https://amzn.to/3FOiLo2

Check out the amazing work of Drug Science

(Dr David Nutt's Charity)Website - https://www.drugscience.org.uk/Prof Nutt Twitter (X) - @ProfDavidNutt

Drug Science SocialsFacebook - @DrugScienceISCDTwitter (x) - @drug_scienceInstagram - @drugscienceinfoLinkedIn - @drugscience-ltdBlueSky - @drugscience.bsky.socialYouTube - @DrugScienceMore Resources on Drug Safety

Medical Cannabis: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-cannabis-working-group

Medical Psychedelics: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-psychedelics-working-group

Harm Reduction: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/enhanced-harm-reduction-working-groupAcademic Research: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/research

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David Nichols is the chemist who made the molecules behind the entire psychedelic renaissance; Bryan Roth is the pharmacologist who cracked how those drugs actually work inside the brain. Together they reveal how little we still understand about the compounds now entering mainstream medicine — and how the same technology could, in Roth's own words, build a literal zombie apocalypse.

Expect to learn why the word "psychedelic" could once kill a research grant, how Nichols hand-made the MDMA, DMT and psilocybin behind the field's most famous trials, what profiling 41 psychedelics against 318 receptors actually revealed, why we still don't know what half of those receptors even do, whether the trip itself is the medicine or a side effect that can be engineered away, why a twitching mouse is the most reliable predictor of a human trip, how Roth's "remote control for neurons" could rewrite memory, pain and aggression, and much more…

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

3:22 Two Godfathers of Psychedelics, Together

4:03 The Man Who Made the Molecules by Hand

7:34 How Roth Fell Into Serotonin by Accident

16:46 When "Psychedelic" Was a Forbidden Word

20:18 318 Receptors, 41 Psychedelics: The Big Paper

31:18 Nobody Knows What Half These Receptors Do

35:46 How Nixon's Drug War Killed the Science

46:06 The LSD in the Famous Structure Was Dave's

55:52 1.4 Kilos of MDMA for $4,000

57:29 The Psilocybin That Stunned Johns Hopkins

1:00:19 The Real-Life Walter White

1:01:20 Where Psychedelic Medicine Goes Next

1:07:13 "It's Just GQ": How Psychedelics Actually Work

1:11:35 The Hidden Proteins Behind Mental Illness

1:20:03 Is the Trip Itself the Medicine?

1:34:33 Why a Twitching Mouse Predicts a Trip

1:38:14 Your Personalised Psychedelic, Designed by AI

1:45:51 The Tech to Build a Zombie Apocalypse

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

GS Episodes Mentioned

David Nichols — Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6umTgXsW1lQ

Bryan Roth — Meet The World's Greatest Psychedelic Receptor Scientist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEmmmMma8QsGuest Links

Bryan Roth — UNC Pharmacology: https://www.med.unc.edu/pharm/directory/bryan-roth-md-phd/Roth Lab & NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program: https://pdspdb.unc.edu/rothlab/

David Nichols — Heffter Research Institute: https://www.heffter.org

The 318-receptor psychedelics paper (Neuron, 2025): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(25)00470-2

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Joseph LeDoux is, by almost any measure, the greatest emotion neuroscientist who has ever lived. His work has been cited more than 185,000 times, he wrote The Emotional Brain — the book that defined the field — and he put the amygdala on the map as the brain’s fear centre. Then he spent a decade arguing that everyone, including himself, got the lesson wrong.

Expect to learn how a marketing student accidentally became the most-cited emotion researcher alive, what split-brain experiments reveal about why your brain invents fake explanations for your behaviour, why the amygdala is not a fear centre and what it actually does, how every act of remembering chemically rewrites the memory, why anxiety drugs have been targeting the wrong brain circuit for 50 years, what the Four Realms of Existence means for the concept of self, why emotions are culturally acquired schema rather than universal hardwired states, and much more…

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:43 From Marketing Student to Neuroscientist

0:06:18 Moving to New York and Meeting Gazzaniga

0:07:37 How Split-Brain Surgery Works

0:09:58 The Chicken and Shovel Experiment

0:12:13 We Are Confabulating 24/7

0:17:13 Why He Chose to Study Emotion in Rats

0:19:26 His Grant Was Rejected for Studying Emotions

0:22:30 Masquerading as a Learning Researcher

0:25:22 Growing Discomfort With the Amygdala Fear Centre

0:28:23 Rethinking the Emotional Brain

0:30:47 Why Fear Isn’t Universal — Danger Is

0:33:19 Emotions as Acquired Schema

0:35:22 The Four Realms of Existence

0:40:36 Cognition vs Consciousness in Animals

0:41:29 Tulving’s Three Kinds of Consciousness

0:47:57 The Brain Region Only Humans Have

0:53:40 Your Model Is Still on the Slide — And You Disagree

0:55:05 The George Martin Analogy

0:56:37 Why Anxiety Drugs Don’t Actually Work

0:58:21 The Three-Step Fix for Fear

1:01:27 Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness

1:05:36 Using AI to Decode Conscious vs Unconscious Speech...

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

Guest Links

NYU Faculty Page: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/joseph-e-ledoux.html

Personal Website: https://www.joseph-ledoux.com/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iAqJssMAAAAJ&hl=en

Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/joseph-e-ledoux-phd

The Four Realms of Existence (Harvard University Press): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291003

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Paul Cisek is a control neuroscientist at the University of Montreal who records from single neurons in the brains of monkeys as they think, and who has spent decades reconstructing how the brain evolved across hundreds of millions of years. His verdict cuts against everything Silicon Valley believes: the brain was never a computer — it's a control system built to keep a body alive, and the most advanced AI on Earth understands nothing it says.

Expect to learn why Richard Dawkins is wrong that Claude could be conscious, why every era wrongly compares the brain to its fanciest technology, how a baseball outfielder reveals what the brain is really doing, why large language models are "Eliza on steroids" and 100% illusion, where meaning actually comes from and why LLMs can never have it, why the real danger isn't ChatGPT but the agentic systems that come next, whether a paramecium could be conscious, what Michael Levin's neuron-growing biobots tell us about minds, and much more…

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:33 Why Paul Rescheduled to Watch a Monkey Learn

0:06:13 Probing Electrodes Into a Living Brain

0:13:42 What a Single Neuron Actually Sounds Like

0:20:41 The Brain Is Not a Camera Plugged Into a Computer

0:24:55 How an Outfielder Catches a Ball Without Doing Physics

0:33:24 Why Federer "Lets the Cerebellum Run the Show"

0:38:09 Richard Dawkins Says Claude Might Be Conscious

0:39:11 Every Era Thinks the Brain Is Its Latest Gadget

0:42:36 Why AI Is "Eliza on Steroids" and 100% Illusion

0:45:38 The Mechanical Turk and the Stage Magician

0:48:09 The Mimicry Irony at the Heart of Dawkins' Mistake

0:52:32 The One Thing AlphaFold and ChatGPT Both Lack

0:53:30 Where Meaning Actually Comes From

0:57:55 Language Is Persuasion: The Crying Baby Problem

1:03:14 The Paper With Friston and Clark on What AI Misses

1:04:48 Could You Build a Machine That Wants Things?

1:10:23 Build a Mind, Build a Rival: Do We Even Want To?

1:13:32 Is a Paramecium Conscious?

1:18:11 Why There's No Line Between a Lump of Cells and You

1:23:18 Population Thinking: It's All Continuums

1:30:36 The Mad Scientist Won't Be Sam Altman — It'll Be Michael Levin

1:36:29 Does Synthetic Biology Deserve Its Own Doomsday?1:39:37 Why Real Intelligence Would Be a Competitor We Should Fear

1:43:20 Why the Real World Humbles Every Robot

...

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Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]...

GS Episodes Mentioned

Paul Cisek Round 1: https://youtu.be/C6frE6nj1tY

Michael Levin — Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM

Anil Seth — No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o

Karl Friston — Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-IZOFs4qmY

Mark Solms — Meet the Scientist Proving Dreams Hold the Key to Consciousness! Dr Mark Solms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMWaQ1U6dcc...

Guest Links

Paul Cisek — Faculty page, Université de Montréal: https://neurosciences.umontreal.ca/en/our-team/staff-directory/staff/cisek-paul/Cisek Lab: https://www.ciseklab.umontreal.ca/Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Bbk0DEcAAAAJX / Twitter: https://x.com/PaulCisek...

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Haleh Fotowat is a neuroscientist who builds nervous systems from scratch — the scientist who gave neurons to Michael Levin's xenobots, the living robots made from frog cells. When those neurons self-organised into a working nervous system, they switched on genes for eyes, in a creature that has never had eyes and never existed in nature.

Expect to learn how a clump of frog skin cells becomes a moving biological robot, why these cells secretly default to becoming neurons unless their neighbours stop them, what happened when the neurons grew axons and reached out for the body, why every neurobot develops its own movement personality, how a brainless blob forces you to redefine agency and goals, why the neurons switched on genes for eyes despite having none, what a seizure drug revealed about which biobots truly have nervous systems, what might happen if you gave the neurobots DMT, and much more

…

Timestamps

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:05 What Is a Neurobot?

0:02:39 Building a Living Robot From Frog Cells

0:08:46 Why These Cells Secretly Want to Be Neurons

0:10:48 What's the Point of This Research?

0:16:26 Brain Cells in a Dish Playing Doom

0:18:16 A Warehouse Full of Human Neurons

0:19:16 What Happened When the Neurons Grew

0:21:36 The Neurons Reached Out for the Body

0:25:51 Why Each Neurobot Has Its Own Personality

0:28:51 Can a Blob of Neurons Have Goals?

0:39:42 Braitenberg's Vehicles: Complexity From Simplicity

0:42:25 Biology Is Cognition All the Way Down

0:49:12 The Eyes That Shouldn't Exist

0:54:18 Xenobots Grew Genes for Hearing

1:01:16 The Role of Bioelectricity

1:04:02 One Question for Michael Levin

1:06:53 What If You Gave the Neurobots DMT?

1:07:27 The Seizure Drug That Surprised Everyone...

...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

GS Episodes Mentioned

Michael Levin — Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM

Brett Kagan — Meet The Neuroscientist Creating New Forms of Sentient Biological Intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlJc4tu1F8

Philip Ball — Biology Is Infinitely Weirder Than We Thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SseGx0R0fY

Josh Bongard — Meet The Scientist Who Created The First Living Robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h908uoH6n4

Guest Links

Allen Discovery Center (Tufts) Profile: https://allencenter.tufts.edu/our-team/haleh-fotowat-ph-d/Art Website: http://www.halehfotowat.com

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=W5KTeEMAAAAJLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haleh-fotowat/

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Haleh-Fotowat-2245482149

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Michael Levin is a developmental biologist who builds living creatures that have never existed before, and Earl Miller is a neuroscientist who has spent thirty years arguing that your thoughts live in the brain's electric fields, not its wiring. In the same room together for the first time, they agree on something that sounds insane — that bioelectricity is the engine of mind at every scale of life, from a single cell deciding to grow an eye to a human deciding what to eat for lunch.

Expect to learn how cells use a bioelectric code you can read and rewrite to grow an eye on a tadpole's tail, why no single cell knows what an eye is but the collective does, how a flatworm regrows a whole new brain and keeps its old memories, why the brain is an orchestra of electric waves and not a telegraph of wires, how three different anaesthetics switch off consciousness through one mechanism reductionism can't explain, why consciousness may just be the story your brain tells about what it already did, whether memories can be transplanted between bodies, what the Platonic space of minds is and why Levin thinks physicalism died with Pythagoras, and much more

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Timestamps:

0:00:00 Trailer

0:02:46 The Vacuum Tubes That Started It All

0:08:36 How to Read and Rewrite the Bioelectric Code

0:12:36 Why No Single Cell Knows What an Eye Is

0:15:22 Your Brain Is Not a Telegraph System

0:19:30 Why They Called It Magic and Bullshit

0:24:56 Flatworm or Human Brain — Same Code?

0:30:00 Where Is Memory Actually Stored?

0:32:24 The Flatworm That Regrows Its Memories

0:34:34 People Living Without Most of Their Brain

0:40:32 Can Memories Live Outside the Brain?

0:43:26 Will a Rat Pop Down to the 7-Eleven for Smokes?

0:49:14 Consciousness Is Overrated (Says a Neuroscientist)

0:53:17 Hey Liver, Why Do I Feel Like Crap?

0:54:20 Nobody Knows Why Anaesthesia Works

0:57:21 Three Drugs, One Mystery, One Mechanism

0:58:50 Why Anaesthesia Is Dangerous When You're Old

1:02:12 What Is a Neurobot?

1:08:18 The Eyes That Shouldn't Exist

1:13:28 What Is the Platonic Space of Minds?

1:20:44 Devil's Advocate: Have We Just Not Figured It Out?

1:24:03 The Free Lunch: More Out Than You Put In

1:29:36 Why Physicalism Died With Pythagoras

1:32:52 How Bioelectricity Touches the Platonic Space

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GS Episodes Mentioned

Anil Seth — No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o

Guest Links

Michael Levin — Allen Discovery Center (Tufts): https://allencenter.tufts.edu/our-team/michael-levin/

Michael Levin — Website: https://www.drmichaellevin.org

Earl Miller — The Miller Lab (MIT): https://ekmillerlab.mit.edu/

Earl Miller — X: https://x.com/MillerLabMIT