Giants Shoulder

Andrés Gómez Emilsson runs research at the Qualia Research Institute and thinks consciousness has a literal mathematical shape. We walk through the six geometric levels of DMT, why phenomenal space goes hyperbolic at high doses, why bad trips are competing symmetries fighting for territory in your visual field, and why he thinks AI on silicon will never be conscious.

Expect to learn why pleasure is symmetry, what makes DMT phenomenologically alien at the topological level, why your breath being out of phase with your heartbeat might be most of what anxiety is, where the free energy principle stops being a theory of consciousness, and why a swimming pool full of logic gates breaks every computational theory of the mind.

Timestamps

00:00 The 6 Geometric Levels of DMT

02:30 Can Subjective Experience Be Studied Like Physics?

03:58 Mapping Experience as a Hypergraph

09:33 Introducing the Symmetry Theory of Valence

12:19 What Symmetry Actually Is (And Why Physics Cares)

19:21 Why Energetic Blockages Feel Bad — Yoga, Jhanas and Wave Propagation

23:06 Is Pleasure Necessarily Symmetrical?

26:31 The Annealing Metaphor: Healing a Broken Cymbal

29:18 Symmetries in the World vs Symmetries in the Brain

32:54 The Bucket Brigade: Why Coupled Oscillators Have to Be in Phase

36:27 Where the Free Energy Principle Stops Being a Theory of Consciousness

39:33 Marr's Levels: Why Friston Describes But Doesn't Explain

42:12 What's Actually Symmetric in the Brain? (Thalamus and Biorhythms)

47:52 Anxiety as Hyperpressurisation

50:13 Connectome Harmonics and the Brain as a Musical Instrument

52:18 The Six Levels of DMT — Threshold, Symmetry Hotel, Magic Eye

55:06 The Magic Eye Level Explained

57:31 Crystal Worlds and the Waiting Room

59:48 The Breakthrough: When Topology Itself Changes

01:01:43 Why Bad Trips Are Competing Symmetries, Not Missing Ones

01:04:35 Square vs Hexagon Universes Fighting for Territory

01:05:54 The LSD Christianity Example

01:07:32 Andrew Gallimore's Alien Worlds — Pre-Configured Reality?

01:09:04 Beam Splitter Holography and the Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer

01:10:21 Why DMT Feels So Real — Cross-Modal Coherence and the Tactile Field

01:12:48 The Coupling Kernel and Opposite-Phase Oscillators

01:13:53 DMT Archetypes and the Specificity of Encounters

...

🔗 GS Episodes ReferencedAndrew Gallimore (DMT, alien worlds): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Gallimore

Elizabeth Margulis (music neuroscience): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Margulis

Mark Solms (homeostatic theory of valence): https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/search?query=Solms

🔗 Andrés Gómez Emilsson

Qualia Research Institute: https://qri.org

Qualia Computing (blog): https://qualiacomputing.com

Substack: https://andrsgmezemilsson.substack.comEmail for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

Andrew Gallimore is a neurobiologist, pharmacologist and chemist who developed the DMTx protocol — a technology that extends the most intense psychedelic experience known to science from minutes to hours. He is the author of Alien Information Theory, Reality Switch Technologies and Death by Astonishment, and is Director of Noonautics, a nonprofit dedicated to the scientific exploration of consciousness. He currently lives and works in Tokyo.

Expect to learn why your brain builds alien worlds on DMT, what thalamocortical loops and attractor states actually are, why DMT may have once been an ancient neurotransmitter, why 94% of users encounter non-human entities, what Jungian archetypes can and can't explain about DMT, where Andrew disagrees with Robin Carhart-Harris on the reality of entities, what the DMTx extended state protocol is and how it works, why DMT is the only psychedelic that doesn't produce tolerance, what happens when entities deny you access to the DMT world, what darkness retreats and breathwork have to do with endogenous DMT, and much more...

Timestamps:

0:00 Trailer

2:11 What Is the Building Alien Worlds Thesis?

4:06 What Makes DMT Unique Among Psychedelics?

6:57 World Space Landscape and Consensus Reality

8:11 DMT Entities — Prevalence and Types

11:04 Consistency of Entity Interactions

13:31 Is the DMT World Real or a Hallucination?

17:34 Thalamocortical Loops and World-Model Construction

20:34 Attractor States Explained

24:21 Why DMT’s Stability Suggests an Evolutionary Role

27:25 Parallel Lives — The DMT Sleep Cycle Hypothesis

28:36 What Was the Evolutionary Purpose of the DMT World?

33:35 Melatonin, Serotonin and DMT — Pharmacological Cousins

35:57 Is DMT Still Doing Something Important in the Brain?

36:36 Noonautics and Endogenous DMT Research

38:43 Debunking DMT Breathwork Courses and Pineal Myths

40:45 What Does a Stable Pattern of Brain Activity Actually Look Like?

43:53 Order Within Chaos — Chris Timmermann’s DMTx Findings

47:16 Robin Carhart-Harris and the Jungian Archetype Debate

48:37 What Jungian Archetypes Actually Are

53:36 Why Archetypes Can’t Explain Alien Entities

54:32 The Directed World Model — Do Entities Control Access?

56:55 DMT Lockout — When Entities Deny You Entry

58:30 Can You See Entities in Brain Scans?

1:00:06 Future Brain Scanning Technology

1:01:24 The Speed of the Switch as Evidence

1:04:40 Dimensionality and Topology of the DMT World

1:06:39 DMTx — What Is the Extended State Protocol?

1:09:03 Target-Controlled Intravenous Infusion Explained

1:11:23 Sending Specialists Into DMT Space

1:13:35 Time Perception on DMT

1:16:16 Surprises from DMTx Experiments

1:18:15 The Future of DMT Consciousness Research

1:19:12 Andrés Gómez Emilsson and the Mathematics of DMT Space

...

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Dr. Matt Hill is one of the world’s leading cannabis neuroscientists, former president of the International Cannabinoid Research Society, and a researcher with over 21,000 citations studying how the endocannabinoid system regulates the brain and body.Cannabis affects different people in completely opposite ways — calming one person while causing crippling anxiety in another — and Hill explains why the biology makes this inevitable, why both sides of the cannabis debate are getting it wrong, and why legalisation in Canada accidentally destroyed the very research that could have answered our biggest questions.Expect to learn why CB1 is the most widely distributed receptor in the brain yet almost nobody has heard of it, how endocannabinoids work backwards across the synapse unlike any other signalling system, why low-dose THC calms the amygdala but high-dose THC causes paranoia and anxiety, why women get higher than men on the same dose of cannabis due to a liver enzyme difference, why only a third of people genuinely benefit from medical cannabis while a third get nothing, how cannabis triggers schizophrenia in genetically vulnerable people without actually causing the disease, why Canadian legalisation killed cannabis clinical trials through a bureaucratic GMP-versus-GPP standoff, what the real cardiovascular risks of chronic cannabis use are, why cannabis users paradoxically have lower obesity rates, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer02:00 Dr. Matt Hill — Cannabis Neuroscientist02:25 The Endocannabinoid System: Your Body’s Own Cannabis04:23 Every Biological Function It Controls06:30 The Most Distributed Receptor Nobody’s Heard Of07:20 Why Cannabis Science Is So Politically Toxic09:35 Both Sides Are Wrong: The Three Blind Men Problem10:23 The Frustrating Polarity of the Cannabis Debate12:37 Your Personal Experience Doesn’t Generalise16:25 Why Cannabis Feels Like a Different Drug for Different People17:52 Retrograde Signalling: How Cannabis Works Backwards20:08 Low Dose Calms, High Dose Causes Paranoia — Here’s Why22:24 Women Produce More 11-Hydroxy-THC Than Men25:52 Why Receptor Distribution Makes Cannabis Unpredictable27:11 The PET Scan Problem: Why We Can’t Map Your Receptors29:04 Why Cannabis Companies Don’t Fund Real Research31:25 How Legalisation Accidentally Killed Cannabis Science34:46 The GMP vs GPP Bureaucratic Disaster38:09 David Nutt: Drug Policy Driven by Politics Not Science43:01 Why You Can’t Standardise Cannabis Dosing Like Alcohol49:44 The Three Thirds Rule: Benefit, Side Effects, or Nothing53:05 The Best Evidence: Where Cannabis Actually Works53:36 Schizophrenia Risk — It’s a Trigger, Not a Cause55:52 Cardiovascular Risk: The Under-Discussed Real Danger57:02 Does Exercise Cancel Out Cannabis Heart Risk?58:14 The Obesity Paradox: Why Cannabis Users Are Thinner01:01:03 Chronic Pain, MS, Epilepsy and PTSD — The Medical Evidence01:03:18 Final Thoughts and a Plea for Billionaire Stoners...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/

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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?

...

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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

...

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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

...

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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

...

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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

...

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Dr 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-Harris

03:01 The Journey into Psychedelics

06:10 First Brain Scans with Psychedelics

12:06 Understanding Brain Activity and Psychedelics

17:49 The Entropic Brain Theory

24:02 Consciousness and Brain Entropy

30:10 Decoding Conscious Experience

40:49 Exploring the Entropic Brain Model

45:24 The Limits of Consciousness and Ego

50:11 Psychedelics and Evolutionary Perspectives

53:31 Shared Psychedelic Experiences and Archetypes

01:00:06 The Nature of Hallucinations and Collective Unconscious

01:04:34 Entropy, Connectivity, and Brain Function

01:17:02 The Role of Serotonin Receptors in Psychedelic Experiences

01:20:46 The Mechanisms of Psychedelics

01:30:18 Cultural Perspectives on Psychedelics

01:39:13 Psychedelics and Self-Understanding

01:48:36 Cross-Cultural Studies in Psychedelic Research

01:53:25 The Future of Psychedelics in Mental Health

...

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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

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

...

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