People have long told stories about the moon’s power, from werewolves shapeshifting by the moon, to the belief that drinking water soaked with moonlight could help women conceive. And monthly rhythms appear across nature, from corals and cacti to gorillas.

But while there's lots of research showing that the daily cycles of the sun are crucial for biology, scientists have largely ignored the role of the moon – or dismissed it as pseudoscience, particularly in humans. That’s partly because there hasn’t been a convincing mechanism for how the moon might influence life on Earth - which is what my guest this week, Kristin Tessmar-Raible of the University of Vienna, is working to uncover. She studies lunar timing in marine bristleworms: four-eyed, many-legged creatures that swarm according to the phase of the moon and have light receptors buried in their brains.

Forget biological clocks, this is a biological calendar. And the fascinating thing is, she’s uncovering surprising parallels with human biology, which means what’s happening in the worms could help to reveal our own deep connection with the moon, from fertility to sleep to mental health. Jo and Kristin discuss just how far-reaching the moon’s influence may be, the colleagues who once thought she was crazy, and what it takes to change minds in science.

Kristin's home page

https://neurodevbio.univie.ac.at/tessmar-raible-research/

2024 review by Kristin & Andrés Ritter on lunar timing in biology

https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/s44319-024-00196-5

Excerpt from Jo's book The Human Cosmos about the moon's influence on biology

https://www.wired.com/story/oysters-that-knew-what-time-it-was/

2021 study on lunar rhythms in women's menstrual cycles

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abe1358

2025 study on effect of LEDs and smartphones on timing of women's menstrual cycles

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adw4096

2024 review of links between lunar cycles, sleep and mental health

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2214756121

2021 review of links between lunar cycles and human biology

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.202100054

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How does using AI change who we are? Last week on Where the Wild Thoughts Are, we talked about freeing AIs to have their own creative ideas and express their own realities. This week we’re flipping that theme, with philosopher Caterina Moruzzi of Edinburgh College of Art, to explore how people and AIs work together, and what that relationship does to us as humans.

There’s evidence that when we use AI chatbots to effortlessly generate pretty much anything we want – an essay, poem, painting – that may erode our own ability to think and create. Even if the end result looks impressive, we engage and learn less. But what if we turn that relationship on its head? Instead of using AIs to generate stuff (so we don’t have to); what if we design them to provoke and stimulate our thinking; to expand the possibilities that we can explore; to inspire us to new artistic heights?

I asked Caterina how we can move beyond simply typing prompts into chatbots, and the conversation took us from pianos and provocateurs to mindfulness and magnetic poetry. What if AIs could make us more engaged, more creative, even more human?

Caterina's home page

https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-caterina-moruzzi

Artificial Intelligence and Creativity (2025 paper by Caterina)

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/phc3.70030

Can AI be truly creative? My recent feature for Nature (£)

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03570-y

Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies

https://obliquestrategies.ca/

Mimetic Poet

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11984

Authenticity Unmasked

https://inspace.ed.ac.uk/authenticity-unmasked-unveiling-ai-driven-realities-through-art/

Slow AI project

https://aixdesign.co/posts/slow-ai

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Can an AI have wild thoughts? Are machines capable of true creativity, true art, of going beyond the training and the prompts we give them in order to explore new worlds?

My guest this week is Simon Colton of Queen Mary, University of London. He’s a professor of computational creativity who has been working towards this goal for decades, and he thinks the answer is yes… but only if we give AIs the freedom to choose what they create and to use their own experiences as inspiration.

It’s an interesting approach that invites us to think about AI from the inside. Whether or not you reckon an AI can be conscious, AIs do have interactions every day – so many of them – and what you could think of as experiences that they could perhaps express in a poem or a painting.

Simon and I discuss how to develop truly creative AIs – including projects of his such as the Painting Fool and the What If machine – as well as what the inner world of an AI might be like. What would it express, if it was able to do that through art?

 My feature for this week’s Nature: Can AI be truly creative?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03570-y

Simon Colton’s home page

https://www.seresearch.qmul.ac.uk/cmai/people/scolton/

Simon’s paper: “The Machine Condition”

https://research.aalto.fi/en/publications/on-the-machine-condition-and-its-creative-expression/

Painting Fool

https://www.cs4fn.org/creativity/paintingfool.php

What If Machine

https://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/horizon-magazine/creative-computation-and-what-if-machine

Simon and Louis Bradshaw’s AI piano miniatures

https://computationalcreativity.net/iccc24/papers/ICCC24_paper_178.pdf

Mario Klingemann’s Botto

https://verse.works/botto

Harold Cohen’s Aaron

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/harold-cohen-aaron

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Thinkers don’t come much wilder than Albert Einstein. His out-of-the-box physics transformed how we think about the universe: with his famous equation E=mc2 he showed that energy and matter are one and the same; through his theory of relativity he joined space and time into one malleable fabric that can morph according to your point of view.

But we’re talking about a very different side to Einstein. My guest is Kieran Fox, a physician and neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, all-round spiritual explorer, and author of a fascinating book called I am a Part of Infinity. Kieran argues that Einstein didn’t confine his revolutionary thoughts to the physical world. The physicist was also deeply spiritual: he followed what he called a “cosmic religion”, that he hoped would unify science and religion; mind and matter; us and the cosmos.

Biographers and historians have tended to skate over this aspect of Einstein’s life… maybe they felt it wasn’t a suitably rational topic for such a hero of physics. But Kieran has pieced together Einstein’s religious thinking and traced influences from Pythagoras and Spinoza to the Tao Te Ching. He argues that Einstein’s spirituality wasn’t a minor sideshow, and it didn’t just co-exist with his physics, it was central, his ultimate motivation for wanting to understand the nature of reality in the first place.

What was this sacred path - and is it still relevant today? I asked Kieran to tell me all about it.

Kieran's home page

http://kieranfox.net/about.html

Kieran's book: I am a part of infinity

https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/kieran-fox/i-am-a-part-of-infinity/9781541603578/

Some of Einstein's writings on science and religion

https://www.silene.ong/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/AEinstein-Religion-and-Science_1930.pdf

Quantum Questions, ed. by Ken Wilber

https://archive.org/details/quantumquestions0000unse_n5j0

Some of Kieran's neuroscience papers - on meditation, cognition, creativity and whales

http://kieranfox.net/research.html

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Standing waves and resonant frequencies appear everywhere in the world around us, from musical notes and swaying bridges to electron orbits and animal coats. This week's guest, neuroscientist Selen Atasoy, wondered if they could also be found in the brain.

Her work has led to a new way to understand different states of consciousness -- from anaesthesia through our normal waking state to meditation and psychedelics. She explains how changes in our awareness reflect a shifting balance between order and chaos, and why psychedelics may tune the brain closer to a critical point of maximum complexity.

I talk to Selen about what this all means for our understanding of the mind, including how modern life may be blunting our awareness, and whether consciousness might be possible elsewhere in the natural world, beyond the human brain.

This isn’t the end of Selen’s story, though, as she recently trained as a psychotherapist. We discuss what inspired her leap from objective science towards a more personal exploration of the mind, and how we can all find harmony within.

Selen's home page

https://www.selenatasoy.com/

Selen’s first paper on harmonics in the brain (2016)

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10340

Selen’s paper on harmonics and LSD (2017)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612318301018

Selen’s paper on meditators (2023)

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.16.567347v1.abstract

Video of Chladni sand patterns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFAcYruShow

Harmonics and animal coat patterns

https://www.math.ttu.edu/~anpeace/files/Math5354Papers/murray_SciAm.pdf

MeTruely

https://www.metruely.com/

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https://jomarchant.com

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https://www.yada-yada.net/

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Steady your nerves and light up your torches, because this week we’re clambering into the deep, dark Neolithic underworld with archaeologist Jens Notroff.

Jens, of the German Archaeological Institute, has spent years excavating one of the world’s most fascinating and mysterious prehistoric sites – Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. This is a series of circular stone enclosures, featuring giant T-shaped figures and carvings of fearsome predators – and possibly also once decorated with human skulls. It’s sometimes described as “the world’s first temple”, and according to conventional thinking, it shouldn’t exist.

That’s because Göbekli Tepe is around 12,000 years old. It was built on the cusp of the most important transition in human history, the Neolithic revolution, just as hunter gatherers were about to start cultivating the species around them, and it’s located in just the region where farming was about to emerge. Before historians realised the significance of Göbekli Tepe, they assumed the invention of agriculture was the flashpoint that led to the other changes of the Neolithic, such as more settled communities, and the ability to build impressive monuments like Stonehenge. But the giant stones of Göbekli Tepe, dating to just before all of that, tell us something else – a dramatic, shocking shift in mindset – was already underway.

With Jens as our guide, let’s travel back 12,000 years. What wild rituals played out at this deathly site? How did humans take that first leap in thinking, that has defined our species perhaps more than any other, of separating ourselves from – and elevating ourselves above – the rest of nature. And how does it feel to put ourselves into the mind of a young hunter, entering these terrifying caverns for the first time…

Jens’ home page

https://jensnotroff.com/

Göbekli Tepe research project blog

https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/

Taş Tepeler research project

https://tastepeler.org/en

Recommended publications

https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/publications/

Skull cult at Göbekli Tepe

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1700564

Göbekli Tepe World Heritage Site

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572/

There’s a detailed discussion of Göbekli Tepe and its role in humanity’s split from nature in chapter 2 of my book: The Human Cosmos.

https://jomarchant.com/human-cosmos

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https://jomarchant.com

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We’re talking about life, the universe and everything – literally!

My guest is cosmologist Marina Cortês of the University of Lisbon. Marina trained as a dancer before helping to shake up cosmology with some revolutionary ideas about the nature of time. As if that wasn’t enough – she’s now using the tools of theoretical physics to investigate the significance of life in the universe, in a new field that she and her colleagues call biocosmology.

Marina’s work goes against many of the normal assumptions of physics. Put simply, you could see the conventional approach as attempting to describe everything in the universe through a set of fundamental laws and equations. And if something that we experience in the universe – like the forwards flow of time, say, or our ability to make our own choices – doesn’t fit into those equations, the mainstream view would be to say, well, that thing is an illusion. No matter how important it might seem to us, it doesn’t really exist.

Marina is doing a different kind of cosmology, that puts life, and our experience of it, first. She’s asking, how can we use the mathematical tools of cosmology and theoretical physics to describe the universe we are actually living in?

I think that’s such an exciting question, and it’s leading to some fascinating findings that could transform how we see life: from a process that simply shuffles atoms into different arrangements towards a force that continually rewrites the playing field, bursting beyond the fundamental equations and laws of physics to create completely new possibilities at every stage.

I caught up with Marina for a tour of the “biocosmos”.

Marina’s home page

https://marinacortes.org/

Introduction to biocosmology

https://marinacortes.org/cosmology-cortes-time-biocosmology-astrophysics-marina/#biocosmology

Marina launching biocosmology from Everest base camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HiNlqu0Lc

Short talk by Marina on biocosmology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TH4UsyE3fo&t=3s

2023 paper on biocosmology by Marina, Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle & Lee Smolin

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378

The universe as a process of unique events: 2014 paper by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolin

https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.084007

2021 paper on time and consciousness by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolin

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2021/00000028/f0020009/art00004

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Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada

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Placebo effects are not about expectation, or positive thinking, and you don’t have to believe you’re taking a real drug to feel better. In fact, they are not in your mind at all, but your body.

This is what self-confessed ‘deviant’ Ted Kaptchuk wants you to know, after conducting decades of research that has shocked the medical establishment and turned upside down conventional thinking about placebos.

I’ve been a fan of Ted’s work ever since we first met in 2014, when I was researching my book Cure: A journey into the science of mind over body. He originally trained in Chinese medicine (one of the first westerners to do so in China), and he is now a professor of medicine at Harvard, where he directs Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter.

Ted has been doing some wild things there: listening to patients; thinking carefully about what’s really making us better when we receive a treatment; and exploring what happens if you give people medicine without the drugs.

His trials break all the normal rules, but they show us how we might approach medicine differently, particularly for the very conditions that our drugs are usually worst at treating – from depression, fatigue, and anxiety to many skin conditions, gut problems and especially chronic pain. His results also dovetail perfectly with the latest results from neuroscience about how we perceive not just bodily symptoms, but our entire reality.

I asked Ted about his rebellious background, the inspirations for some of his craziest experiments, and how to unlock our inner pharmacy.

Ted Kaptchuk’s home page at Harvard:

https://ghsm.hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/ted-jack-kaptchuk

Ted’s website:

https://www.tedkaptchuk.com/

Lecture series I presented for The Great Courses on mind-body links in medicine (the first two are all about placebos, including Ted’s work):

https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-power-of-mind-over-body

Honest fakery: How placebos can treat chronic pain:

https://www.nature.com/articles/535S14a

Ted’s first 2010 trial on honest placebos:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015591&

Academic review on placebos for chronic pain (2020):

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m1668.abstract

'The dress':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

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We're diving into the world of whales - as well as dolphins and other cetaceans - with biologist and filmmaker Tom Mustill, author of the fascinating book How to Speak Whale. I first learned about Tom’s work in 2023 when I attended a talk he gave at the British Library, and he began with the story of how on a kayaking trip he was almost crushed by a breaching humpback whale.

After that experience, and the discovery that the whale may actually have saved his life by twisting in the air to avoid him, Tom became fascinated by the inner lives of these creatures, and by the exploding potential of technology, including AI, to monitor and understand what they’re getting up to beneath the waves. And there was one question he wanted to answer most of all about their complex communications: could we ever learn to understand them, even talk to them?

That might seem a crazy question, but the availability of massive amounts of data, combined with AI algorithms, is now opening a door to decoding the patterns and structures in the vocalisations of all kinds of species, like a kind of Google Translate but for animals.

I caught up with Tom to talk about the latest results, as well as what it’s like to be caught underneath a falling humpback - and why we should stop comparing animals’ abilities to ours, and instead open our minds to other kinds of experiences, to the alien horizons of their lives and worlds.

Tom’s home page

https://www.tommustill.com/

Tom’s book, How To Speak Whale: A voyage into the future of animal communication

https://www.tommustill.com/how-to-speak-whale

Footage of the humpback whale landing on Tom and Charlotte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee79_7CZ0uM

How to be a whale: a half-hour listening journey

https://www.tommustill.com/howtobeawhale

Project CETI

https://www.projectceti.org/

Earth Species Project

https://www.earthspecies.org/

Happy Whale

https://happywhale.com/home

Tom’s humpback

https://happywhale.com/individual/1437

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We're digging into how living creatures – including us – sense and respond to magnetic fields with quantum biologist Margaret Ahmad of the University of Sorbonne in Paris.

For decades, biologists knew about striking examples of species apparently navigating by Earth’s magnetic field, from monarch butterflies to loggerhead turtles to racing pigeons. Yet for years, many physicists said any ‘magnetosense’ was impossible, insisting the Earth’s field is far too weak to affect any biological processes within living cells. And yet, life really had found a way, and Margaret was one of the key researchers who showed how.

Back in the 1990s, she discovered a blue light receptor in plants, part of a mysterious family of proteins called cryptochromes, and she has since has pioneered research showing how these receptors don’t just sense light but magnetic fields, too. Through quantum physical effects, these proteins magnify impossibly weak magnetic signals into measurable biological responses in a cell.

For Margaret, this connection with the magnetic fields around us is a fundamental characteristic of all life, that should transform our thinking about everything from bird migration, to plant growth, to health effects in humans – and might even lead to revolutionary medical treatments. I spoke to her about her research, what it’s like doing science ‘out on a limb’, as she puts it, and what to do when the evidence leads you off the beaten track…

Margaret Ahmad at Sorbonne University

https://www.ibps.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/ibps/directory/17216-Margaret-Ahmad

Hypersensitivity to man-made electromagnetic fields: 2024 case report

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39108419/

2024 review on cryptochromes

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38495372/

New Scientist story I wrote about Ahmad’s work in 2020 (£)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251835

2021 review on the bird magnetic compass

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.667000/full

Roswitha Wiltschko’s lab

https://www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/47093824/Physiology_and_Ecology_of_Behaviour

Some bacteria sense magnetic fields via magnetite crystals. It's possible these play a role in other species too, maybe even humans

https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0483-18.2019.abstract

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Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada

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