Chasing Consciousness

How much of our consciousness is shared? In this episode we have the fascinating job of trying to get to get to grips with Jung’s concept of the Collective unconscious. I’ve always loved Jung and I think his ideas can offer a brilliant framework in which to maximise our mental health, to use life’s challenges to harvest meaningful lessons, and just to navigate the subjective experience of being alive. But this is a science podcast, so we do want to get clear on what is just a useful idea and what is

What's the importance of safety to health? In this episode we’re going to be talking about the neuroscience of safety and how our sense of safety can be hugely important to the way we communicate and learn. Research shows that when we perceive threat, we go into a hyper-vigilant state andcertain circuits of the brain shut down to focus on self-protection. If we can become aware of this as it’s happening we can not only use certain tools to mediate it, but we can also help others not end up in that

What does entanglement actually mean? So in this episode we’re going to be trying to get our heads around one of the most extraordinary phenomena ever recorded in subatomic physics: Quantum Entanglement. Famously dismissed by Einstein as ‘Spooky action at a distance’, it has been proved to exist in the lab over and over again since then. This non-local phenomenon is when sub-atomic particles remain connected so that the physical properties of one will affect the other, no matter what the distance is

Do we realise we invent explanations? In this episode we look at the extraordinary phenomena of the Left Brain Interpreter, in which a part of the left hemisphere tends to literally invent an explanation for something we’ve perceived or done based on past experience, sometimes in a completely mistaken way. This is a very important phenomena to our first series as we introduce the cognitive limits of our brains, as it shows just how tricky our so called rational mind can be, and begs questions about

Wave or Particle? So in this episode we have the interesting job of trying to get to the bottom of the famous mystery of the Wave Particle duality, and seeing if along the way we can’t bust a few myths about it. We’re also aiming to better understand whether Quantum mechanics can or can’t help us get closer to a complete theory of reality or not, and hopefully find out of it can give us some clues about how matter and consciousness are related. We’re also going to trace the developments and

Subjective or Objective? In this Episode we’re going to be introducing one of the oldest and most talked about problems in philosophy, the problem of consciousness. Just how does our subjective experience as humans relate to our existence as human bodies with brains? For most of the 20th century you couldn’t really talk about this as a serious scientist without being laughed at and told to study something useful. But since the 90’s, with the advancement of MRI brain imaging in neuroscience, and the

See www.chasingconsciousness.net/episodes for the full program. Here host Freddy Drabble introduces what he'll be covering with his guests in the first 15 part series. Please subscribe and leave a rating and review if you like what you hear.