Giants Shoulder

Giants Shoulder

By Evan McGloughlinScienceLife Sciences
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Giants Shoulder episodes

  • #125 Meet The World’s Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist

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    Steven Barker is the world's longest-running DMT researcher and the analytical chemist who helped prove the molecule exists in the mammalian brain. He argues your brain manufactures its own psychedelic at the same concentration as serotonin — and floods your cortex with it under stress and as you die.Expect to learn why Steven believes your brain produces DMT at serotonin-level concentrations, how 29 years of drug-testing racehorses gave him the tools to find it, why he says David Nichols is wrong about endogenous DMT, why stress can make brain DMT spike tenfold, how a hidden receptor inside your neurons may explain how psychedelics rewire the brain, why the DMT trip might be neuroplasticity you can actually feel, what DMT entities really are, and much more…

    Timestamps

    0:00:00 Trailer

    0:02:40 The Recurring Dream That Started a 50-Year Obsession

    0:06:53 Hunting For The Brain's Own Psychedelic In 1972

    0:12:54 The Discovery That We ALL Make DMT

    0:19:07 Were Psychedelics Ever Meant To Be Medicine?

    0:22:17 How The War On Drugs Killed The Research

    0:24:02 Funding Psychedelic Science With Racehorse Drug Tests

    0:34:56 Why You Can't Patent A Psychedelic

    0:36:31 The Psychedelic Trip Is Just An "Overdose"

    0:41:58 Why David Nichols Is Wrong About DMT

    0:50:16 The "Pineal Is Too Small" Argument Is Ludicrous

    0:54:20 DMT Is In Your Brain At Serotonin Levels

    1:01:00 Stress Floods Your Brain With DMT

    1:02:32 Why Everyone Else Failed To Detect DMT

    1:12:05 The Hidden Receptor Inside Your Neurons

    1:19:54 Is The DMT Trip Just Neuroplasticity You Can Feel?

    1:26:09 What DMT Entities Actually Are

    1:32:15 Are We Building A New Psychedelic Religion?

    1:42:11 50 Years of DMT and The Nature of Consciousness

    1:44:26 Why He's Still A "Proud Reductionist"


    ...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=sEmmmMma8Qs

    Andrew Gallimore — No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA

    Guest Links

    ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven-Barker-8

    Cottonwood Research Foundation: https://www.cottonwoodresearch.org

    1 hr 47 min
  • #124 - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's

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    David Luke is the world's first and only Professor of Exceptional Experience — a parapsychologist and psychedelic researcher at the University of Greenwich who has spent two decades running experiments on the phenomena mainstream science refuses to touch. His naturalistic DMT field study found that 90% of participants encountered autonomous entities, 85% believed they were real — and some were blocked from returning by the entities themselves.

    Expect to learn why 90% of DMT users encounter entities and 85% say they're real, what happens when the entities refuse you entry, how your body responds to images before you've seen them, why someone with zero visual imagery can still meet elves on DMT, how entity encounters shift people's sense of purpose and meaning more than any other psychedelic effect, what the telepathy tapes are and why they show 100% success rates, why physics gets to be weird but consciousness doesn't, what a neo-pagan shamanically-informed lazy mystic actually believes about reality, and much more

    …

    0:00:00 Trailer

    0:04:03 Double Career Suicide

    0:07:32 The DMT Field Study

    0:13:45 Your Body Predicts the Future

    0:16:01 Huxley's Reducing Valve Theory

    0:20:23 Chris Timmermann's DMT Research

    0:23:20 90% Encounter Entities

    0:24:48 Punched in the Head by God

    0:27:17 The DMT Entity Taxonomy

    0:29:03 Experiencing Entities Without Vision

    0:48:28 The Aphantasia DMT Trip

    0:53:47 Entities Leaking Into Other People's Trips

    0:54:23 DMT Blocking

    0:56:30 The Entities Said Bugger Off

    0:59:57 Endogenous DMT and the Pineal Gland

    1:02:55 David Nichols Dismantles the Pineal Theory

    1:05:52 Giant Mantis Entities1:11:12 Purpose & Meaning: The #1 Wellbeing Shift

    1:12:06 The Telepathy Tapes

    1:19:54 The Ganzfeld Experiment

    1:24:16 Physics Gets To Be Weird But We Can't

    1:26:33 Why DMT Entities Are So Reliable

    1:29:33 Pablo Amaringo's Ayahuasca Art

    1:36:34 Do You Have a Stable Ontology?

    1:38:12 The Lazy Mystic

    1:39:34 In the Province of the Mind There Are No Limits...

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    1 hr 46 min
  • #123 - Meet The Most Persuasive Panpsychist Alive Today

    Want to go deeper on consciousness? Join our community where we run live discussions, inner experience challenges and early ad free access to every episode: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

    Philip Goff is a professor of philosophy at Durham University and author of Galileo's Error and Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Stephen Fry called him the most persuasive panpsychist alive.Physics tells us everything about what matter does — but nothing about what it actually is. Goff argues this isn't a gap we'll close — it's a permanent hole. And the best candidate to fill it is consciousness itself.

    Expect to learn why physics can only describe what stuff does and not what it is, how Evan's sister discovered at 31 she has zero mental imagery, why Bertrand Russell may have already solved consciousness a hundred years ago, what 5-MeO-DMT revealed to a philosopher about the nature of reality, the difference between weak and strong emergence and why it matters for AI, and much more…

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Trailer

    02:21 What Makes Consciousness Radically Different

    05:24 Evan's Descriptive Experience Sampling Experiment

    06:42 Discovering Aphantasia at 31

    08:27 Change Blindness and the Invisible Gorilla

    10:40 Mary's Room: What Red Looks Like

    13:21 Why Consciousness Theories Ignore Subjective Experience

    16:48 The Resurgence of Panpsychism

    18:14 Bertrand Russell: The Darwin of Consciousness20:13 Evan's Psychedelic Journey Toward Biopsychism22:12 Taking 5-MeO-DMT as a Philosopher24:38 Michael Pollan, Plants and Psychedelic Openness28:45 Is Consciousness Computational or Biological?

    30:43 The Combination Problem: How Tiny Minds Become One

    37:17 Russell's Inversion: Start With Consciousness

    40:21 The Hole in Physics: What Stuff Does vs What It IS

    41:50 Why Bernardo Kastrup Gets Cross

    44:41 Galileo's Error: The Decision That Broke Science

    47:20 Aphantasia, Visual Decoding and the Consciousness Gap

    49:50 Front Brain vs Back Brain: Where Is Consciousness?

    52:40 Eric Schwitzgebel's Snail Problem

    55:40 Philosopher-Scientist Teams: A New Model

    1:03:01 Strong Emergence and New Causal Dynamics

    1:04:47 Will We Fall in Love With Robots?

    1:07:22 The Genome Didn't Solve Life

    1:10:54 The $10 Billion Consciousness Experiment

    ...


    GS Episodes Mentioned

    Anil Seth — Consciousness, Controlled Hallucination, Perception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o

    Philip Ball — Quantum Mechanics, Brain Organoids, How Life Works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNbG5lnp51E

    Kevin Mitchell — Free Will, Neuroplasticity, Strong Emergence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VGWzGqA32E

    Matthias Michel — Consciousness Philosophy, Aphantasia, Fish Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtVWgpVPr1s

    Russell Hurlburt — Inner Experience, Descriptive Experience Sampling: https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg

    Robert Prentner — Conscious Agent Theory, Mathematics of Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTKE8eLo8CU

    Charles Fernyhough — Inner Speech, Hearing Voices, Memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJFY6dypPc4

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    1 hr 18 min
  • #122 - Meet the Psychiatrist Training To Be An Ayahuasca Shaman

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    Dr Simon Ruffell is a clinical psychiatrist and the CEO of Onaya Science, the research organisation that studies Amazonian ayahuasca healing alongside Shipibo curanderos in the Peruvian rainforest. His team ran the first-ever study on a psychedelic and human epigenetics — finding that ayahuasca methylates the trauma-memory gene SIGMAR1, mapping precisely onto what the Shipibo have called "cleaning ancestral lines" for thousands of years.

    Expect to learn why a Maudsley-trained psychiatrist walked away from the NHS to apprentice as a Shipibo shaman, what happens when a curandero performs an exorcism on you mid-ceremony, how 80% of veterans no longer met PTSD criteria six months after a two-week retreat, why the curandero traditionally drinks the ayahuasca and the patient doesn't, what happened when Simon gave a Shipibo curandero a hit of pure crystal DMT, why DMT entities might be real and where Robin Carhart-Harris and Andrew Gallimore disagree about it, and much more…

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Trailer

    03:20 What is Shipibo Curanderismo?

    04:52 From disillusioned NHS psychiatrist to the Peruvian Amazon

    10:14 First ayahuasca: shown two versions of myself

    15:41 The demon attack and the three suckers

    26:13 Bridging Western psychiatry and Amazonian shamanism

    36:04 Are DMT entities real? Carhart-Harris vs Gallimore

    49:50 Inside the multimodal veteran PTSD study

    52:41 DMT vs ayahuasca — what's actually different

    57:11 Should you try this? Preparation and "gringo wasca"

    1:04:52 The first-ever psychedelic epigenetics study (SIGMAR1)

    1:12:17 "Cleaning ancestral lines" — when Indigenous science met Western

    1:16:51 80% no longer meet PTSD criteria — the real numbers

    1:20:37 The shaman drinks, not the patient — traditional protocol

    1:30:41 The spiritual mechanism of action

    1:34:54 The dream experiment — plant personalities


    Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]


    FOLLOW SIMON:

    Website: https://www.drsimonruffell.comInstagram: @sgdruffell

    Onaya Science: https://www.onaya.io

    Heroic Hearts UK: https://www.heroicheartsuk.org


    PAST EPISODES MENTIONED:

    Robin Carhart-Harris — Entropic Brain, How Psychedelics Really Work and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

    Andrew Gallimore — DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA

    Grace Blest-Hopley — Psychedelics Expert: Who is Blocking Psychedelic Research?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBcLxMfUzxw

    1 hr 40 min
  • #121 Meet The Neuroscientist Teaching Neuron's in a Dish to Play Video Games

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    Brett Kagan is the Chief Scientific Officer at Cortical Labs, the Australian startup that fuses living human neurons with silicon chips to create a fundamentally new kind of intelligence. His team's DishBrain paper showed that neurons in a dish learned to play Pong in under five minutes — without any reward signal — providing some of the strongest experimental evidence for Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle.

    Expect to learn how neurons on a chip actually play Pong and Doom, why unpredictable stimulation drives learning better than reward, what the Free Energy Principle really says and where Brett disagrees with Friston, why 200,000 neurons outperform 800,000 on certain tasks, how Brett's baby daughter staring at fractals led to a new theory of intelligence, why no AI system can walk into your kitchen and make a cup of tea, what biological data centres look like and why they already exist, and much more…

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Trailer

    02:30 Brett Kagan — Neurons Playing Doom

    03:04 The stepping stones from Pong to Doom

    04:00 What is the CL1 and Cortical Cloud?

    05:20 The moonshot goal of Cortical Labs

    06:46 Giant buildings of neurons as computation hubs

    07:13 The biocomputing data centre already running in Melbourne

    07:38 Not building a brain in a dish

    09:00 What does a biological computer actually look like?

    09:29 Electricity as the shared language between biology and silicon

    10:49 How neurons on a chip play Pong

    11:10 Topographic mapping inspired by the whisker barrel system

    13:10 Why the neurons hit the ball — and what happens when they miss

    14:33 The Free Energy Principle explained simply

    16:03 The trap door analogy for unpredictable stimulation

    18:42 How the structure of neuron cultures shapes performance

    19:19 Bees vs elephants: why bigger brains aren’t always better

    21:37 Growing hippocampal place cells in a dish

    24:12 Teaching neurons Morse code

    28:27 The Free Energy Principle — cups, predictions and surprise

    32:29 Where Brett disagrees with Friston

    37:03 The dog treat problem — how do you reward a neuron?

    39:40 Complexity as a hidden driver of intelligence

    41:53 His baby daughter’s obsession with fractals

    43:57 Defining agency — the three orders of information processing

    50:33 Change how you change over time

    53:27 Why scientists are incentivised to be vague instead of wrong

    59:42 J.D. Bernal’s 1929 vision for brains beyond bodies

    1:02:38 Standing on the shoulders of iPSC pioneers

    1:03:14 Can neurons play chess? Moravec’s Paradox

    1:04:12 No AI can walk into your kitchen and make tea

    1:05:16 Augmenting what silicon is bad at

    1:06:35 Is general intelligence even possible for silicon?

    1:09:40 Why 200,000 neurons beat 800,000

    1:11:16 Complexity and structure matter more than scale

    1:11:58 Could biological neurons end up in your laptop?

    1:13:36 Edge robotics and the future of biological computing

    ...

    Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

    1 hr 18 min
  • #120 No.1 Inner Speech Expert: NPCs, Hallucinations, Imaginary Friends, Prayer and Experiential Crossing

    Do you really inner speak? Join my Skool community and find out: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about


    Charles Fernyhough is the world's leading Inner Speech Researcher, Cambridge-trained Psychologist, and author of *The Voices Within*. His three decades of research have uncovered something most people never suspect: the voice in your head isn't a monologue — it's a compressed conversation between internalised versions of everyone you've ever spoken to, and when that compression fails, you hear voices.

    Expect to learn why inner speech is a Swiss army knife you use against yourself as often as you use it to plan your day, what "thinking in pure meanings" actually feels like when language gets stripped away, why spontaneous inner speech lights up completely different brain regions than scientists expected, how the dialogic structure of your inner voice explains human creativity, why 1 in 7 fiction readers hear characters as vividly as a real person in the room, what experiential crossing is and why a reader walked into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway, why prayer might just be a specific kind of inner speech, and much more…

    Timestamps:

    00:00 Intro

    02:30 Inner Speech as a Swiss Army Knife

    05:39 Is Inner Speech the Same as Thinking?

    06:58 Why We Should Abolish the Word "Thinking"

    08:42 Chess Experts Don't Use Language to Think

    10:03 Evan's 10-Week DES Experiment with Hurlburt

    12:19 Condensed Inner Speech vs Unsymbolized Thinking

    17:11 What Brain Scans Actually Show About Inner Speech

    20:58 Spontaneous vs Elicited Speech Light Up Different Areas

    25:16 Does It Matter How Much Inner Speech You Have?

    30:02 When Inner Speech Becomes a Weapon Against Yourself

    32:41 Are People Without Inner Speech NPCs?

    36:02 It's Not How Much You Speak — It's What You Say

    38:44 Why People Refuse to Believe Others Think Differently

    42:26 Neurodiversity and the Inner Speech Revolution

    44:35 The Dialogical Inner Speech Model Explained

    49:55 Multiple Identities Inside Your Inner Dialogue

    52:00 Prayer as Inner Speech with a Spiritual Being

    54:20 Hearing Voices Without Being Mentally Ill

    57:17 1 in 7 Readers Hear Characters Like Real People

    58:34 Experiential Crossing — Walking Into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway

    59:48 Do Writers Actually Hear Their Characters?

    1:01:57 Predictive Processing and Fictional Selves

    1:04:20 Why Children Create Imaginary Companions

    ...

    Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

    1 hr 9 min
  • #119 Meet The Inner Speech Expert Proving We Can Conjure Other Conscious Entities

    Do you really inner speak? Join my Skool community and find out: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutBen Alderson-Day is a hallucination researcher, Professor of Psychology at Durham, and author of the award-winning book *Presence*. His work reveals that the line between your inner voice, hearing voices, and deliberately creating a mind inside your own head is far thinner than anyone assumed.Expect to learn why not as many people truly inner speak as you might think, how your parents' voices became the voice in your head, why writers hear their characters talk back, what tulpamancers are and how they build autonomous minds, what really separates inner speech from hallucination, what Evan's LSD experience revealed about the voice in his head, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Intro03:20 What everyone should know about their inner speech05:39 Is my inner speech really me?07:30 Why some people have no inner speech at all11:13 How your parents' voices became the voice in your head13:34 The age your brain learns to think in words15:25 What 10 weeks of sampling your own mind reveals18:13 Peep Show and why we think thinking means talking21:04 What Evan's inner experience was actually like23:00 The field was written by people who talk to themselves25:32 Why people refuse to believe other minds work differently28:39 Why you get furious when a character's voice is wrong in a film34:22 Reader Bank — find out what type of reader you are37:53 Can you train yourself to have richer inner speech?40:20 Writers who hear their characters speak42:27 What is a tulpamancer and how did this start?45:36 How to create a sentient being in your own mind50:20 "This sounds like you're channelling psychosis"52:45 "It's just like hearing a voice in the room"55:50 The time Evan didn't recognise his own voice on LSD58:31 Would a hallucination researcher ever try tulpamancy?...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] mentioned:Russell Hurlburt (Round 1): https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNgRussell Hurlburt (Round 2): https://youtu.be/N9tO1OLdJtoGualtiero Piccinini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkDIPLIuRg

    1 hr 4 min
  • #118 - Meet The MIT Philosopher Proving Aphantasics Have Unconscious Imagery

    Get A Full Breakdown Of Your Own Conscious Inner Experience (100% Free): https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about


    Matthias Michel is an MIT philosopher and co-founder of the MIT Consciousness Club who has developed one of the most provocative theories of consciousness in recent years: Perceptual Reality Monitoring. He argues your brain runs a constant reality check on every signal it receives — deciding what's real and what's noise — and that this mechanism IS consciousness.

    Expect to learn how your brain tells the difference between perception, memory, imagination and noise, why conscious vision lags 400 milliseconds behind reality, why every fast action you've ever taken was driven entirely unconsciously, why fish probably have no conscious visual experience at all, how aphantasics may have mental imagery they can't consciously access, why conscious mental imagery might actually be a bug in the system, what blindsight patient GY's experience reveals about unconscious vision, and much more

    …

    Timestamps:

    0:00 Matthias Michel — What Is Perceptual Reality Monitoring?

    2:58 How does the brain tell reality from imagination?

    5:30 Snake fear in Malaysia: when prediction systems misfire

    6:22 Blood vessel shadows and the stuff your brain erases

    7:50 Motion-induced blindness: your brain deleting real objects

    9:50 Is schizophrenia a broken reality monitor?

    11:02 Where does reality monitoring happen in the brain?

    12:53 Can you be conscious without a frontal cortex?

    15:49 Mark Solms and brainstem consciousness

    18:15 What does it mean to see without conscious vision?

    18:40 "Tell me what it's like to see behind your head" — blindsight patient GY

    20:48 Do fish have conscious vision?

    22:05 Why conscious vision is 350-400ms too slow for action

    24:07 Two visual systems: one conscious, one not

    25:30 The hollow face illusion fools your eyes but not your hand

    26:21 Binocular rivalry: your eyes know things you don't

    29:24 Sensory horizons: why water limits conscious vision

    33:17 Could coral reef fish or octopuses be the exception?

    37:31 Are fish complete zombies? (60% confidence)

    39:18 Should we still protect fish even if they're unconscious?

    42:47 Aphantasia through the lens of reality monitoring

    46:00 Why conscious imagery might be a "bug"

    48:06 Blank access: using imagery without experiencing it

    50:17 What is an unconscious visual representation?

    55:54 The strongest counterevidence to unconscious imagery

    58:50 Pupil dilation and Joel Pearson's results

    1:01:18 How do we falsify unconscious imagery?

    1:04:30 The PRM explanation for aphantasia: threshold differences

    1:07:50 The future of consciousness and aphantasia research

    1:10:29 Vividness is multidimensional — lessons from Russell Hurlburt

    1:13:35 Brain imaging limitations and the next breakthrough

    ...


    Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]


    GS Episodes Mentioned

    Mark Solms — https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc

    Adam Zeman — https://youtu.be/SgA2up6-Bok

    Russell Hurlburt (R1) — https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg

    Russell Hurlburt (R2) — https://youtu.be/TfSuvAJB3JU

    Merlin Monzel — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g21AqnSV1X4

    Joel Pearson — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I_7HrWYMQ0

    Alfredo Spagna - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8SBHefDnEk

    1 hr 21 min
  • #117 Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!

    Dr. Alfredo Spagna is a Cognitive Neuroscientist at Columbia University who discovered the Fusiform Imagery Node — the brain region that activates every time you imagine anything. But when he scanned people with aphantasia using an ultra-high-field 7T brain scanner, the node was firing perfectly — it just wasn't connected to the frontal lobe, suggesting that consciousness itself might depend not on what your brain computes, but on what it connects.

    Expect to learn how imagination hijacks the brain's perceptual system, why aphantasia shattered 40 years of assumptions about mental imagery, what the "visualizer fallacy" is and why it affects everything from therapy to education, how a painter with aphantasia creates art without ever seeing it in his mind, why your brain imagining a lemon makes you salivate even though there's no lemon, what the 7T brain scanner revealed about the architecture of imagination, how aphantasia may support the Global Neuronal Workspace theory of consciousness, why Olympic athletes spend hours visualizing routines they never physically perform, and much more…

    Timestamps

    00:08 What Happens in the Brain When You Imagine

    01:02 Where Imagination and Perception Diverge

    03:44 Would Perfect Imagination Be Hallucination?

    05:49 Voluntary vs Involuntary Imagination

    06:50 Why Do People with Aphantasia Still Dream?

    07:33 What Is Aphantasia — The Discovery That Changed Everything

    09:30 The Dissociation That Frightened Scientists

    11:06 The Visualizer Fallacy

    12:01 How Aphantasics Solve Problems Without Images

    14:31 Evan's Sister Discovers Aphantasia at 31

    16:55 Could Imagery Be Unconscious in Aphantasia?

    18:19 The Architect Who Lost His Imagination

    21:11 Eric the Painter — Creating Art Without Seeing It

    24:51 The Inner Speech Fallacy and Neurodiversity

    29:02 "I Can't Visualize My Mom's Face"

    29:57 Why Aphantasia Breaks Psychotherapy

    33:06 Empathy, Conflict and How Inner Experience Shapes Society

    36:42 The Chemistry Exam Problem

    39:09 Is Hypervisualization Actually a Disadvantage?

    41:21 Imagination as a Double-Edged Sword

    43:37 What Is the Fusiform Imagery Node?

    46:10 The Cafeteria Conversation That Started It All

    50:07 Three Bombshells From One Meta-Analysis

    52:23 Domain-General vs Domain-Specific Imagination

    54:05 The Brain Still Imagines in Aphantasia — It Just Disconnects

    56:36 Is Aphantasia a Disconnection Syndrome?

    58:59 Step-By-Step: What Your Brain Does When You Imagine an Apple

    1:05:05 Non-Visual Imagination — Taste, Touch, Sound

    1:09:38 What Aphantasia Reveals About Consciousness

    1:13:26 Does This Support IIT or Global Workspace Theory?

    1:15:49 Can Aphantasia Be Trained Away?

    1:18:53 The Olympic Skier Who Visualized Gold

    1:22:25 $10 Billion to Solve Imagination — Where Would You Spend It?

    ...


    Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] ❤️ Subscribe to our main channel - https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder?sub_confirmation=1💚 Follow on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M?si=Ka2rAQv7TyqiC9wvGwERpA💜 Follow on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249Download my FREE EBook 26 Neuroscience Books for 2026 HERE: https://thegiantsshoulder.com/

    1 hr 29 min
  • #116 Meet The World’s Greatest Psychedelic Receptor Scientist

    Bryan L. Roth is a drug receptor scientist who solved the crystal structure of LSD inside a serotonin receptor and took $26.9 million from DARPA to build a non-hallucinogenic psychedelic — a compound that hits the same receptor as psilocybin, produces antidepressant effects in mice, and doesn't cause a trip.

    Expect to learn how his mother's schizophrenia launched a 40-year career in pharmacology, why Salvia divinorum has zero serotonin activity and works entirely through the kappa opioid receptor, why serotonin and opioid receptors converge in the claustrum, why DARPA funded non-hallucinogenic alternatives for soldiers, how his lab screens a trillion compounds that don't physically exist, why only 100 of 26,000 protein targets have ever been drugged, and much more…


    Timestamps:

    00:00 Bryan L. Roth — The Man Who Builds Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelics

    02:41 Falling Into Receptor Science by Accident

    04:58 When Only 5 People on Earth Studied Psychedelic Receptors

    06:07 Why "Psychedelic" Was Banned From Research Grants

    07:28 The 2016 Papers That Changed Everything

    08:26 The Scientist Friend Who Got "Cured" by Psilocybin

    10:41 The Vietnam Vet With a Gun in His Mouth — Ibogaine's Power

    12:50 What Is Ibogaine and Why Can It Kill You?

    18:06 Why the Kappa Opioid System Breaks Reality

    19:07 The Hidden History of Psychotomimetic Opioids

    22:16 Why Opioid Researchers Deny Kappa Causes Hallucinations

    23:18 The Claustrum: Where Serotonin and Opioid Receptors Meet

    24:14 Multiple Entry Points Into Reality-Altering Brain Systems

    28:35 Why Psychedelic Experiences Feel So Meaningful

    29:58 DMT: "More Real Than Reality" — And Nobody Knows Why

    31:28 Salvia: Becoming Plaid on a Wall

    33:48 Trump's $50M Psychedelic Order Won't Buy One Clinical Trial

    35:33 No Other Psychedelic Touches the Kappa Receptor

    38:10 The Real Reason He Built a Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelic

    41:33 DARPA: More Psychiatric Casualties Than Physical in the Military

    44:48 Biased Agonism: Stripping the Trip From the Therapy

    47:19 How GPCRs Work and Why Drug Design Is Still Trial and Error

    49:50 People Who Will Never Touch a Psychedelic But Do Cocaine Weekly

    52:27 "I Don't Discuss That" — Whether He's Taken Psychedelics

    52:47 Screening a Trillion Drugs That Don't Exist

    55:02 The Real Bottleneck: 26,000 Targets, Only 100 Drugged...


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    1 hr 3 min

About Giants Shoulder

From the publisher's feed

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.