Giants Shoulder

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Manoj Doss is a cognitive neuroscientist and one of the only people studying what psychedelics actually do to memory — trained inside the field's most prestigious lab at Johns Hopkins, he's now its most rigorous internal sceptic. His claim is heretical: the profound sense of revelation you get on a trip may be a memory glitch — a familiarity signal firing without the detail that would normally justify it, so the trip feels like downloading the truth while your brain quietly degrades what it's actually recording.
Expect to learn why the profound insights you get on psychedelics might be a memory glitch, why the entire default mode network story "needs to go to hell", what a 250-subject mega-analysis revealed that small studies missed, why salvia melts you into the couch while DMT builds whole worlds, whether DMT entities and mantises are real contact or just a brain built to see faces, why blocking a single receptor proves psychedelics aren't "keys to reality", the flaw Doss says sinks the entropic brain and REBUS, how you'd ever tell a true revelation from a beautiful lie, and much more…
Timestamps
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:24 The One Thing Psychedelic Science Ignores: Memory
0:05:38 Why Your Worst Beliefs Feel Like Hard Facts
0:07:38 The "Sense of Knowing" That Fools Everyone
0:09:00 How Psychedelics Rewire What You Remember
0:16:11 Why Yoga Feels Better on Psilocybin
0:20:27 "The Default Mode Network Story Needs to Go to Hell"
0:27:26 How Neuroscience Invents Stories From Noise
0:35:42 Why Psychedelic Studies Are Too Small to Trust
0:40:31 Salvia: Becoming a Sentient Piece of Corn
0:44:13 The Kappa-Opioid Door Into Another Reality
0:48:00 Why Salvia Is Heaven and Ibogaine Is Hell
0:53:03 Does the Brain Have Two Reality Generators?
0:59:24 Has 20 Years of Psychedelics Taught Us Anything?1:05:18 Are DMT Entities Real? The Mantis Problem
1:13:28 Why You See Machine Elves (But His Mum Wouldn't)
1:24:29 Tearing REBUS and the Entropic Brain Apart
1:36:21 "Do Stuff in the Scanner, Stuff Happens in the Brain"
1:44:25 The Debate Robin Was Warned Not to Do...
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Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned
Karl Friston — Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-IZOFs4qmY
Robin Carhart-Harris — No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-GkE4YtLRk
Michael Levin — Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM
Christof Koch — The Psychedelic Trip that Convinced Christof Koch Consciousness is Fundamental: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlV-b2bvaE
David Luke — Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLKD1gt1X5o
Guest Links
Manoj Doss — Dell Medical School: https://dellmed.utexas.edu/directory/manoj-dossX (Twitter): https://x.com/manojdossGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KFo44R0AAAAJORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2939-2522

Check out Scispace (JNGIANT20: 20% off the monthly plan or JNGIANT40: 40% off the annual plan): https://scispace.com/?via=jun1giantshoulderProfessor David Nutt is a neuro­psychopharmacologist, former UK chief drug adviser, and author of Drugs Without the Hot Air, Drink?, Cannabis, and Psychedelics. After two rounds that sparked an overwhelming response, round three goes fringe — ibogaine, salvia, mescaline, peyote, GHB, xylazine, the nitazines, and the Amanita muscaria "Santa Claus" mushroom — ranking each on Nutt's evidence-based harm scale.Timestamps:2:56 Ibogaine7:21 Salvia18:02 Mescaline & Peyote23:59 San Pedro Cactus28:55 GHB40:59 Kratom & 7-Hydroxy46:05 Xylazine ("Tranq")51:34 Nitazines54:53 Amanita Muscaria...Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.comBuy Nutt's BooksDrink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health: https://amzn.to/4dZTP9ZPsychedelics: The Revolutionary Drugs That Could Change Your Life―A Guide from the Expert: https://amzn.to/3SJXAX6Drugs without the hot air: Making sense of legal and illegal drugs: https://amzn.to/4kyu7eSCannabis (Seeing Through the Smoke): The New Science of Cannabis and Your Health: https://amzn.to/3FOiLo2Check out the amazing work of Drug Science (Dr David Nutt's Charity)Website - https://www.drugscience.org.uk/Prof Nutt Twitter (X) - @ProfDavidNuttDrug Science SocialsFacebook - @DrugScienceISCDTwitter (x) - @drug_scienceInstagram - @drugscienceinfoLinkedIn - @drugscience-ltdBlueSky - @drugscience.bsky.socialYouTube - @DrugScienceMore Resources on Drug SafetyMedical Cannabis: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-cannabis-working-groupMedical Psychedelics: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/medical-psychedelics-working-groupHarm Reduction: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/enhanced-harm-reduction-working-groupAcademic Research: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/research

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David Nichols is the chemist who made the molecules behind the entire psychedelic renaissance; Bryan Roth is the pharmacologist who cracked how those drugs actually work inside the brain. Together they reveal how little we still understand about the compounds now entering mainstream medicine — and how the same technology could, in Roth's own words, build a literal zombie apocalypse.
Expect to learn why the word "psychedelic" could once kill a research grant, how Nichols hand-made the MDMA, DMT and psilocybin behind the field's most famous trials, what profiling 41 psychedelics against 318 receptors actually revealed, why we still don't know what half of those receptors even do, whether the trip itself is the medicine or a side effect that can be engineered away, why a twitching mouse is the most reliable predictor of a human trip, how Roth's "remote control for neurons" could rewrite memory, pain and aggression, and much more…
Timestamps
0:00:00 Trailer
3:22 Two Godfathers of Psychedelics, Together
4:03 The Man Who Made the Molecules by Hand
7:34 How Roth Fell Into Serotonin by Accident
16:46 When "Psychedelic" Was a Forbidden Word
20:18 318 Receptors, 41 Psychedelics: The Big Paper
31:18 Nobody Knows What Half These Receptors Do
35:46 How Nixon's Drug War Killed the Science
46:06 The LSD in the Famous Structure Was Dave's
55:52 1.4 Kilos of MDMA for $4,000
57:29 The Psilocybin That Stunned Johns Hopkins
1:00:19 The Real-Life Walter White
1:01:20 Where Psychedelic Medicine Goes Next
1:07:13 "It's Just GQ": How Psychedelics Actually Work
1:11:35 The Hidden Proteins Behind Mental Illness
1:20:03 Is the Trip Itself the Medicine?
1:34:33 Why a Twitching Mouse Predicts a Trip
1:38:14 Your Personalised Psychedelic, Designed by AI
1:45:51 The Tech to Build a Zombie Apocalypse
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Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

GS Episodes Mentioned
David Nichols — Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6umTgXsW1lQ
Bryan Roth — Meet The World's Greatest Psychedelic Receptor Scientist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEmmmMma8QsGuest Links
Bryan Roth — UNC Pharmacology: https://www.med.unc.edu/pharm/directory/bryan-roth-md-phd/Roth Lab & NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program: https://pdspdb.unc.edu/rothlab/
David Nichols — Heffter Research Institute: https://www.heffter.org
The 318-receptor psychedelics paper (Neuron, 2025): https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(25)00470-2

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Joseph LeDoux is, by almost any measure, the greatest emotion neuroscientist who has ever lived. His work has been cited more than 185,000 times, he wrote The Emotional Brain — the book that defined the field — and he put the amygdala on the map as the brain’s fear centre. Then he spent a decade arguing that everyone, including himself, got the lesson wrong.
Expect to learn how a marketing student accidentally became the most-cited emotion researcher alive, what split-brain experiments reveal about why your brain invents fake explanations for your behaviour, why the amygdala is not a fear centre and what it actually does, how every act of remembering chemically rewrites the memory, why anxiety drugs have been targeting the wrong brain circuit for 50 years, what the Four Realms of Existence means for the concept of self, why emotions are culturally acquired schema rather than universal hardwired states, and much more…
Timestamps
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:43 From Marketing Student to Neuroscientist
0:06:18 Moving to New York and Meeting Gazzaniga
0:07:37 How Split-Brain Surgery Works
0:09:58 The Chicken and Shovel Experiment
0:12:13 We Are Confabulating 24/7
0:17:13 Why He Chose to Study Emotion in Rats
0:19:26 His Grant Was Rejected for Studying Emotions
0:22:30 Masquerading as a Learning Researcher
0:25:22 Growing Discomfort With the Amygdala Fear Centre
0:28:23 Rethinking the Emotional Brain
0:30:47 Why Fear Isn’t Universal — Danger Is
0:33:19 Emotions as Acquired Schema
0:35:22 The Four Realms of Existence
0:40:36 Cognition vs Consciousness in Animals
0:41:29 Tulving’s Three Kinds of Consciousness
0:47:57 The Brain Region Only Humans Have
0:53:40 Your Model Is Still on the Slide — And You Disagree
0:55:05 The George Martin Analogy
0:56:37 Why Anxiety Drugs Don’t Actually Work
0:58:21 The Three-Step Fix for Fear
1:01:27 Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness
1:05:36 Using AI to Decode Conscious vs Unconscious Speech...
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Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
Guest Links
NYU Faculty Page: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/joseph-e-ledoux.html
Personal Website: https://www.joseph-ledoux.com/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=iAqJssMAAAAJ&hl=en
Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/contributors/joseph-e-ledoux-phd
The Four Realms of Existence (Harvard University Press): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674291003

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Paul Cisek is a control neuroscientist at the University of Montreal who records from single neurons in the brains of monkeys as they think, and who has spent decades reconstructing how the brain evolved across hundreds of millions of years. His verdict cuts against everything Silicon Valley believes: the brain was never a computer — it's a control system built to keep a body alive, and the most advanced AI on Earth understands nothing it says.
Expect to learn why Richard Dawkins is wrong that Claude could be conscious, why every era wrongly compares the brain to its fanciest technology, how a baseball outfielder reveals what the brain is really doing, why large language models are "Eliza on steroids" and 100% illusion, where meaning actually comes from and why LLMs can never have it, why the real danger isn't ChatGPT but the agentic systems that come next, whether a paramecium could be conscious, what Michael Levin's neuron-growing biobots tell us about minds, and much more…
Timestamps
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:33 Why Paul Rescheduled to Watch a Monkey Learn
0:06:13 Probing Electrodes Into a Living Brain
0:13:42 What a Single Neuron Actually Sounds Like
0:20:41 The Brain Is Not a Camera Plugged Into a Computer
0:24:55 How an Outfielder Catches a Ball Without Doing Physics
0:33:24 Why Federer "Lets the Cerebellum Run the Show"
0:38:09 Richard Dawkins Says Claude Might Be Conscious
0:39:11 Every Era Thinks the Brain Is Its Latest Gadget
0:42:36 Why AI Is "Eliza on Steroids" and 100% Illusion
0:45:38 The Mechanical Turk and the Stage Magician
0:48:09 The Mimicry Irony at the Heart of Dawkins' Mistake
0:52:32 The One Thing AlphaFold and ChatGPT Both Lack
0:53:30 Where Meaning Actually Comes From
0:57:55 Language Is Persuasion: The Crying Baby Problem
1:03:14 The Paper With Friston and Clark on What AI Misses
1:04:48 Could You Build a Machine That Wants Things?
1:10:23 Build a Mind, Build a Rival: Do We Even Want To?
1:13:32 Is a Paramecium Conscious?
1:18:11 Why There's No Line Between a Lump of Cells and You
1:23:18 Population Thinking: It's All Continuums
1:30:36 The Mad Scientist Won't Be Sam Altman — It'll Be Michael Levin
1:36:29 Does Synthetic Biology Deserve Its Own Doomsday?1:39:37 Why Real Intelligence Would Be a Competitor We Should Fear
1:43:20 Why the Real World Humbles Every Robot
...

Want a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience?Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about

Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com...

GS Episodes Mentioned
Paul Cisek Round 1: https://youtu.be/C6frE6nj1tY
Michael Levin — Meet the Scientist Creating New Forms of Synthetic Life! Dr Michael Levin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTBZRVKUwyM
Anil Seth — No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSA06K0l1o
Karl Friston — Meet The Neuroscientist Who Created The Best Universal Theory Of Brain Function: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-IZOFs4qmY
Mark Solms — Meet the Scientist Proving Dreams Hold the Key to Consciousness! Dr Mark Solms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMWaQ1U6dcc...
Guest Links
Paul Cisek — Faculty page, Université de Montréal: https://neurosciences.umontreal.ca/en/our-team/staff-directory/staff/cisek-paul/Cisek Lab: https://www.ciseklab.umontreal.ca/Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Bbk0DEcAAAAJX / Twitter: https://x.com/PaulCisek...