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PODCAST

The Giants Shoulder

Evan McGloughlin

A Neuroscience podcast. Each week I talk with experts on a range of topics from consciousness and neuroplasticity to evolution and everything in between. I have a particular interest in consciousness and understanding our inner subjective conscious experience. Evan has a Neuroscience degree from Trinity College Dublin and is the co-founder of 2 (failed) edtech startups. He is a professional tennis coach and Triathlete enthusiast.

science life sciences

All Episodes

01:33:48

#91 Meet the Philosopher Questioning Everything...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/02/02

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a philosopher of mind and leading voice on psychedelics, panpsychism, and the metaphysics of consciousness. He’s a research fellow at the University of Exeter and author of Noumenautics and Modes of Sentience — books exploring whether mind is fundamental to the universe.In this episode, we dive into why your brain might not produce consciousness, how psychedelics could reveal deeper truths about reality, the philosophical roots of mystical experience, and why matter itself

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01:25:08

#90 Meet The World’s Leading Executive Function...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/29

Dr. Adele Diamond is one of the world’s most influential developmental cognitive neuroscientists and a pioneer in our understanding of executive functions — the brain’s core control processes that shape attention, self-regulation, problem-solving, and goal-directed behaviour.Her groundbreaking research was the first to show that the prefrontal cortex is active in infants, transforming how we understand child development and reshaping clinical treatment for ADHD and PKU worldwide. She’s also led the

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01:23:52

#89 The Real Reason We Should Revive Extinct Animals

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/27

Andrew Pask is Chief Biology Officer at Colossal Biosciences and a professor of genetics at the University of Melbourne. He’s spent over 30 years on the front lines of marsupial conservation and now leads one of the most ambitious projects in biology: the genetic resurrection and rewilding of the extinct Tasmanian tiger.Sponsors:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements:

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01:41:10

#88 Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/25

Karl Friston is one of the most influential neuroscientists alive and the creator of the Free Energy Principle, a unifying theory that aims to explain how brains perceive, act, learn, and remain alive in an uncertain world.SPONSORS:Get 1 Week Free of ConsensusAi: https://get.consensus.app/giantsshoulder1Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements: https://www.mindlabpro.com/?a_aid=67fd1cb8d9ad3&a_bid=6d45f5c3The brain is not a passive receiver of information. It is an active prediction

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01:49:25

#87 Challenging a Famous Neuroscientist On When...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/19

Dr. Michael Graziano is a neuroscientist, professor at Princeton University, and creator of Attention Schema Theory — one of the most provocative scientific explanations for consciousness to date.He argues that awareness isn’t magic or mystery — it’s the brain’s simplified internal model of its own attention. A trick of information. A self-portrait painted by neurons. And it just might explain why you think you’re a “you” at all.Expect to learn why consciousness is a useful illusion, how awareness

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01:28:15

#86 Meet The Most Influential Social Scientist Of The...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/15

Charles Murray is one of the most influential — and most cancelled — social scientists of the last fifty years. Whether you see him as a dangerous contrarian or a data-driven truth-teller, Murray’s ideas have transformed how we think about intelligence, inequality, class, and what makes a society thrive.SPONSORS:Get Manta Sleep Mask: https://mantasleep.pxf.io/9LXagy and Code GIANTSMANTA10Mind Labs Pro Scientifically Rigorous Supplements:

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01:28:02

#85 Meet the Psychologist Who’s Guided 100+ Mushroom...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/12

Dr. Rosalind Watts is a clinical psychologist and one of the most thoughtful voices in the modern psychedelic renaissance, known for her work in psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression and her pioneering focus on psychedelic integration.Psychedelics are often praised for their power to unlock mystical states and treat mental illness, but the real transformation, she argues, happens after the trip ends — in how we integrate what we've seen. And her own harrowing experience with ayahuasca radically

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01:24:49

#84 Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/08

Try Sentia Spirits this Dry January: https://tinyurl.com/giantsshoulder (10% Discount with Code GIANT10)Professor David Nutt is a neuropsychopharmacologist, former UK chief drug adviser, and author of Drugs Without the Hot Air, Drink?, Cannabis, and Psychedelics. He built the first evidence-based Drug Harm Scale, ran the world’s first LSD brain-scan, and is now engineering hangover-free “alcohol” with GABA science.After the first drug tier list sparked an overwhelming response, this round two

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01:16:29

#83 Meet The Leading Behavioural Change...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/05

Dr. Tali Sharot is a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Affective Brain Lab, whose research reveals the hidden rules that actually change human behavior, beliefs, and motivation.Most people think facts and logic should be enough to persuade someone, quit a bad habit, or finally convince their dad to exercise. But the brain doesn’t work like that. In this episode, Tali explains why our “priors” and identity make beliefs stubborn, why emotion and storytelling sync brains in a way statistics

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01:19:58

Biology Is Cognition The Whole Way Down! Best of...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2026/01/02

I've condensed the best moments from a year of Giant conversations with scientists such as Michael Levin, Terrence Deacon, Anna Ciaunica and more on Diverse Intelligence and multi-scale cognitive biology.We explore the radical idea that biology itself is cognitive, all the way down, and that intelligence, agency, and problem-solving did not suddenly appear with brains but emerged gradually across evolution. Its the most incredible idea in modern biology. Are cells themselves intelligent or even

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00:53:54

52 Minutes Celebrating Inner Experience, Aphantasia &...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/12/29

I’ve distilled the most revealing moments from a year of Giant conversations on inner experience & neurodiversity into 52 minutes. This episode explores how radically different our minds really are, why most of us misunderstand our own thoughts, and what happens when you rigorously examine consciousness from the inside out using Descriptive Experience Sampling.Through deep discussion and lived examples, Russell Hurlburt reveals why inner speech is far rarer than people believe, how imagery,

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01:42:33

#82 I Spent 90 Days With The No.1 Inner Experience...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/12/18

Final episode of the Giant's Shoulder Inner Experience Mini-Series. I spent 10 weeks undergoing the process of descriptive experience sampling in order to peal back the layers of my own inner world. What I discovered truly shocked me. Experiment Website (All 10 Hours of Interviews and transcripts dissecting my experience): https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/ieo/evan/evan_sampling.htmlCheck out Sentia Spirits the future of drinking (Use Code GIANT10 for 10% discount off your first purchase) -

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01:39:48

#81 Meet the Scientist Who Mathematically Proved...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/12/15

Dr. Robert Prentner is a philosopher of mind and consciousness researcher whose work bridges mathematics, phenomenology, information theory, and the foundations of reality. In this episode, he offers a rare deep dive into consciousness as a fundamental feature of the universe, the interface theory of perception, and the radical idea that physics itself may emerge from networks of conscious agents.Consciousness is not just subjective experience. It may be our only window into an underlying structure

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00:58:35

59 Minutes of The Best Drug Science and Psychedelics...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/12/11

I've condensed a full year of Giant conversations on topics of drug science and psychedelics into just 59 minutes. From life-saving medical cannabis to MDMA therapy, the serotonin myth, DMT entities, and the future of psychedelic mental health care, this episode brings together the most shocking, eye-opening and culturally important insights from leading experts — all in one place.Expect to learn from David Nutt on why medical cannabis laws are still failing sick children, from Dr Joanna

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01:44:03

#80 Meet the Scientist Creating The Mathematics Of...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/12/08

Black Friday Sale: Get 15% OFF + Free Kit Manta Masks for limited time: https://mantasleep.pxf.io/9LXagy and Code GIANTSMANTA10Dr. Johannes Kleiner is a mathematician, physicist, and one of the leading architects of mathematical consciousness science — an emerging field attempting to describe subjective experience with the same rigour that physics brings to space, time, and matter.He studies the deep structure of awareness itself, from the geometry of colour and time to the dynamics of minimal

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00:41:12

42 Minutes of the Best Moments in Consciousness...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/12/05

I've condensed the best moments from a year of consciousness conversations on The Giant's Shoulder 2025 into 42 minutes. Truly the most Giant episode of the entire year! You’ll hear groundbreaking ideas from Anil Seth, Michael Levin, Nick Lane, Peter Godfrey Smith and Mark Solms as they explore the deepest scientific questions we can ask. Is perception just the brain’s best guess? Do bacteria have primitive feelings? Why are nervous systems so central to the evolution of subjectivity? Could

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01:01:37

#79 Adam Frank: Consciousness, Quantum Mechanics, AI...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/12/02

Dr. Adam Frank is a theoretical astrophysicist, NPR science commentator, and professor at the University of Rochester whose work spans the cosmos—from dying stars to the deep nature of consciousness.In this episode, we explore why life—not black holes—is the most mind-blowing problem in physics, how bacteria challenge our view of machines, and why the science of the future must take subjective experience seriously. We break down why LLMs aren’t even in the right stadium when it comes to sentience,

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01:50:58

#79 Dr Kevin Mitchell: Bad Science, Autism, Tylenol &...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/11/28

Dr. Kevin Mitchell is a neurogeneticist at Trinity College Dublin and author of Innate and Free Agents, two very influential books on how brain wiring shapes who we become.Autism is one of the most heritable conditions in psychiatry — yet for years, headlines have claimed gut bacteria, probiotics, and mouse models could explain or even treat it. Kevin’s new paper tears that story open, revealing how tiny samples, noisy data, and weak statistics created an illusion of evidence that never truly

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01:26:43

#77 Lee Cronin: Origin Of Life, Aliens, Controversial...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/11/25

Professor Lee Cronin is one of the world’s most visionary chemists — the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow — whose work is redefining how we search for alien life, invent new drugs, and understand the fundamental rules of the universe.He’s the creator of Chemputation, the first real attempt to program matter itself, and co-author of Assembly Theory, a radical new framework that measures the “memory” embedded in molecules — revealing how chemistry becomes biology, how complexity

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01:38:31

#76 Meet the MIT Neuroscientist Proving Brain Waves...

The Giants Shoulder ·

2025/11/21

Earl K. Miller is an MIT neuroscientist and one of the most influential thinkers in modern brain science. His 2001 paper on prefrontal cortex function is one of the most cited in the entire field, transforming how we understand thought, control, and the architecture of the mind.Miller’s research reveals that the brain doesn’t compute like a digital machine — it builds models of the world and uses top-down control to guide perception, attention, and action. He discovered mixed selectivity, showing

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100 results

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