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PODCAST

Giants Shoulder

Evan McGloughlin

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

science life sciences

All Episodes

01:17:03

#121 Meet The Neuroscientist Teaching Neuron's in a...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/05/18

Join the #1 Community Dedicated to Rigorous & Radical Biology: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutBrett 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

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01:08:30

#120 No.1 Inner Speech Expert: NPCs, Hallucinations,...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/05/14

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

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01:03:33

Meet The Inner Speech Expert Proving We Can Conjure...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/05/11

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

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01:20:39

#118 - Meet The MIT Philosopher Proving Aphantasics...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/05/07

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

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01:29:00

#117 Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/05/04

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

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01:02:29

#116 Meet The World’s Greatest Psychedelic Receptor...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/04/30

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

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01:19:45

#115 Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/04/27

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

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01:22:20

#114 No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/04/24

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,

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01:04:26

#111 - Meet The Neuroscientist Decoding Your Bodies...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/04/22

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

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01:21:36

#110 - No. 1 Music Neuroscientist: How Music Hijacks...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/04/16

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderDr. 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

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01:37:24

#109 - Tim Maudlin: Consciousness, Turing Machines,...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/04/13

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderTim 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

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02:13:56

#108 - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/04/09

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderDr. 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

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01:26:03

#107 Dr Wendy Suzuki: How The Hippocampus Weaves Your...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/04/06

Upgrade Your Shaving Experience With Henson (100 FREE BLADES): https://hensonshaving.com/thegiantsshoulderDr 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

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01:32:13

#106 - Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/04/02

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeDr. 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

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02:06:19

#105 Robin Carhart-Harris: Your Consciousness Exists...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/03/31

Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool): https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeDr 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

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01:24:54

#106 The Story Of How CO₂ Created ALL Life,...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/03/26

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

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01:46:05

#105 Meet the AI Researcher Proving Machines Will...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/03/23

Dr. Erik Bekkers is an associate professor in Geometric Deep Learning at the University of Amsterdam, an ELLIS Program Director, and one of the most original thinkers working at the intersection of mathematics, AI and consciousness.He reverse-engineered how the human visual cortex processes reality using the geometry of curved spaces — then used those same principles to build AI architectures that outperform standard deep learning. He recently published a paper arguing that AI will never be

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01:51:53

#104 GIANT'S DEBATE - Whats The SECRET to Engineering...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/03/19

Welcome to Giant Conversations — a new format where top experts debate, discuss and unravel the biggest questions in science. Dr. Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst and author of The Hidden Spring. Dr. Ryan Smith is a computational neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research who builds mathematical models of how the brain predicts and feels.Together they tackle the question: what does it take for a system to become conscious — and can we engineer it?Expect to learn why

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01:38:26

#103 Meet The Social Neuroscientist Proving We’re All...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/03/16

Chris Frith is a pioneering neuroscientist who helped launch the field of cognitive neuroscience — and his work has completely changed how we understand reality, consciousness, and mental illness.In this episode, you’ll learn why perception is just a controlled hallucination, how our brains build reality through social connection, why people with schizophrenia see the world differently, how consciousness evolved to help us coordinate with others, and why your sense of self might be an illusion

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01:58:21

#102 Meet The Scientist Proving Cells Are Conscious...

Giants Shoulder ·

2026/03/12

William B. Miller Jr. is a Medical Doctor, Evolutionary Biologist, and author of Bioverse and co-author of The Sentient Cell — one of the most radical rethinks of biology published in decades.Every cell in your body is conscious, intelligent, and making decisions right now. Evolution is not random. Cancer is not a genetic accident — it's a highly intelligent system we've been fighting completely wrong. And the central dogma of molecular biology, the foundation of modern medicine, is

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170 results

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