The Giants Shoulder

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Dr Simon Ruffell is a clinical psychiatrist and the CEO of Onaya Science, the research organisation that studies Amazonian ayahuasca healing alongside Shipibo curanderos in the Peruvian rainforest. His team ran the first-ever study on a psychedelic and human epigenetics — finding that ayahuasca methylates the trauma-memory gene SIGMAR1, mapping precisely onto what the Shipibo have called "cleaning ancestral lines" for thousands of years.
Expect to learn why a Maudsley-trained psychiatrist walked away from the NHS to apprentice as a Shipibo shaman, what happens when a curandero performs an exorcism on you mid-ceremony, how 80% of veterans no longer met PTSD criteria six months after a two-week retreat, why the curandero traditionally drinks the ayahuasca and the patient doesn't, what happened when Simon gave a Shipibo curandero a hit of pure crystal DMT, why DMT entities might be real and where Robin Carhart-Harris and Andrew Gallimore disagree about it, and much more…
Timestamps:
00:00 Trailer
03:20 What is Shipibo Curanderismo?
04:52 From disillusioned NHS psychiatrist to the Peruvian Amazon
10:14 First ayahuasca: shown two versions of myself
15:41 The demon attack and the three suckers
26:13 Bridging Western psychiatry and Amazonian shamanism
36:04 Are DMT entities real? Carhart-Harris vs Gallimore
49:50 Inside the multimodal veteran PTSD study
52:41 DMT vs ayahuasca — what's actually different
57:11 Should you try this? Preparation and "gringo wasca"
1:04:52 The first-ever psychedelic epigenetics study (SIGMAR1)
1:12:17 "Cleaning ancestral lines" — when Indigenous science met Western
1:16:51 80% no longer meet PTSD criteria — the real numbers
1:20:37 The shaman drinks, not the patient — traditional protocol
1:30:41 The spiritual mechanism of action
1:34:54 The dream experiment — plant personalities

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FOLLOW SIMON:
Website: https://www.drsimonruffell.comInstagram: @sgdruffell
Onaya Science: https://www.onaya.io
Heroic Hearts UK: https://www.heroicheartsuk.org

PAST EPISODES MENTIONED:
Robin Carhart-Harris — Entropic Brain, How Psychedelics Really Work and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk
Andrew Gallimore — DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USgWrxEFWDA
Grace Blest-Hopley — Psychedelics Expert: Who is Blocking Psychedelic Research?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBcLxMfUzxw

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Brett 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 Friston's Free Energy Principle.
Expect to learn how neurons on a chip actually play Pong and Doom, why unpredictable stimulation drives learning better than reward, what the Free Energy Principle really says and where Brett disagrees with Friston, why 200,000 neurons outperform 800,000 on certain tasks, how Brett's baby daughter staring at fractals led to a new theory of intelligence, why no AI system can walk into your kitchen and make a cup of tea, what biological data centres look like and why they already exist, and much more…
Timestamps:
00:00 Trailer
02:30 Brett Kagan — Neurons Playing Doom
03:04 The stepping stones from Pong to Doom
04:00 What is the CL1 and Cortical Cloud?
05:20 The moonshot goal of Cortical Labs
06:46 Giant buildings of neurons as computation hubs
07:13 The biocomputing data centre already running in Melbourne
07:38 Not building a brain in a dish
09:00 What does a biological computer actually look like?
09:29 Electricity as the shared language between biology and silicon
10:49 How neurons on a chip play Pong
11:10 Topographic mapping inspired by the whisker barrel system
13:10 Why the neurons hit the ball — and what happens when they miss
14:33 The Free Energy Principle explained simply
16:03 The trap door analogy for unpredictable stimulation
18:42 How the structure of neuron cultures shapes performance
19:19 Bees vs elephants: why bigger brains aren’t always better
21:37 Growing hippocampal place cells in a dish
24:12 Teaching neurons Morse code
28:27 The Free Energy Principle — cups, predictions and surprise
32:29 Where Brett disagrees with Friston
37:03 The dog treat problem — how do you reward a neuron?
39:40 Complexity as a hidden driver of intelligence
41:53 His baby daughter’s obsession with fractals
43:57 Defining agency — the three orders of information processing
50:33 Change how you change over time
53:27 Why scientists are incentivised to be vague instead of wrong
59:42 J.D. Bernal’s 1929 vision for brains beyond bodies
1:02:38 Standing on the shoulders of iPSC pioneers
1:03:14 Can neurons play chess? Moravec’s Paradox
1:04:12 No AI can walk into your kitchen and make tea
1:05:16 Augmenting what silicon is bad at
1:06:35 Is general intelligence even possible for silicon?
1:09:40 Why 200,000 neurons beat 800,000
1:11:16 Complexity and structure matter more than scale
1:11:58 Could biological neurons end up in your laptop?
1:13:36 Edge robotics and the future of biological computing
...
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Charles 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, you hear voices.
Expect to learn why inner speech is a Swiss army knife you use against yourself as often as you use it to plan your day, what "thinking in pure meanings" actually feels like when language gets stripped away, why spontaneous inner speech lights up completely different brain regions than scientists expected, how the dialogic structure of your inner voice explains human creativity, why 1 in 7 fiction readers hear characters as vividly as a real person in the room, what experiential crossing is and why a reader walked into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway, why prayer might just be a specific kind of inner speech, and much more…
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:30 Inner Speech as a Swiss Army Knife
05:39 Is Inner Speech the Same as Thinking?
06:58 Why We Should Abolish the Word "Thinking"
08:42 Chess Experts Don't Use Language to Think
10:03 Evan's 10-Week DES Experiment with Hurlburt
12:19 Condensed Inner Speech vs Unsymbolized Thinking
17:11 What Brain Scans Actually Show About Inner Speech
20:58 Spontaneous vs Elicited Speech Light Up Different Areas
25:16 Does It Matter How Much Inner Speech You Have?
30:02 When Inner Speech Becomes a Weapon Against Yourself
32:41 Are People Without Inner Speech NPCs?
36:02 It's Not How Much You Speak — It's What You Say
38:44 Why People Refuse to Believe Others Think Differently
42:26 Neurodiversity and the Inner Speech Revolution
44:35 The Dialogical Inner Speech Model Explained
49:55 Multiple Identities Inside Your Inner Dialogue
52:00 Prayer as Inner Speech with a Spiritual Being
54:20 Hearing Voices Without Being Mentally Ill
57:17 1 in 7 Readers Hear Characters Like Real People
58:34 Experiential Crossing — Walking Into Starbucks as Mrs Dalloway
59:48 Do Writers Actually Hear Their Characters?
1:01:57 Predictive Processing and Fictional Selves
1:04:20 Why Children Create Imaginary Companions
...
Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

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 parents' voices became the voice in your head, why writers hear their characters talk back, what tulpamancers are and how they build autonomous minds, what really separates inner speech from hallucination, what Evan's LSD experience revealed about the voice in his head, and much more…Timestamps: 00:00 Intro03:20 What everyone should know about their inner speech05:39 Is my inner speech really me?07:30 Why some people have no inner speech at all11:13 How your parents' voices became the voice in your head13:34 The age your brain learns to think in words15:25 What 10 weeks of sampling your own mind reveals18:13 Peep Show and why we think thinking means talking21:04 What Evan's inner experience was actually like23:00 The field was written by people who talk to themselves25:32 Why people refuse to believe other minds work differently28:39 Why you get furious when a character's voice is wrong in a film34:22 Reader Bank — find out what type of reader you are37:53 Can you train yourself to have richer inner speech?40:20 Writers who hear their characters speak42:27 What is a tulpamancer and how did this start?45:36 How to create a sentient being in your own mind50:20 "This sounds like you're channelling psychosis"52:45 "It's just like hearing a voice in the room"55:50 The time Evan didn't recognise his own voice on LSD58:31 Would a hallucination researcher ever try tulpamancy?...Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected] mentioned:Russell Hurlburt (Round 1): https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNgRussell Hurlburt (Round 2): https://youtu.be/N9tO1OLdJtoGualtiero Piccinini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkDIPLIuRg

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Matthias 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 to learn how your brain tells the difference between perception, memory, imagination and noise, why conscious vision lags 400 milliseconds behind reality, why every fast action you've ever taken was driven entirely unconsciously, why fish probably have no conscious visual experience at all, how aphantasics may have mental imagery they can't consciously access, why conscious mental imagery might actually be a bug in the system, what blindsight patient GY's experience reveals about unconscious vision, and much more
…
Timestamps:
0:00 Matthias Michel — What Is Perceptual Reality Monitoring?
2:58 How does the brain tell reality from imagination?
5:30 Snake fear in Malaysia: when prediction systems misfire
6:22 Blood vessel shadows and the stuff your brain erases
7:50 Motion-induced blindness: your brain deleting real objects
9:50 Is schizophrenia a broken reality monitor?
11:02 Where does reality monitoring happen in the brain?
12:53 Can you be conscious without a frontal cortex?
15:49 Mark Solms and brainstem consciousness
18:15 What does it mean to see without conscious vision?
18:40 "Tell me what it's like to see behind your head" — blindsight patient GY
20:48 Do fish have conscious vision?
22:05 Why conscious vision is 350-400ms too slow for action
24:07 Two visual systems: one conscious, one not
25:30 The hollow face illusion fools your eyes but not your hand
26:21 Binocular rivalry: your eyes know things you don't
29:24 Sensory horizons: why water limits conscious vision
33:17 Could coral reef fish or octopuses be the exception?
37:31 Are fish complete zombies? (60% confidence)
39:18 Should we still protect fish even if they're unconscious?
42:47 Aphantasia through the lens of reality monitoring
46:00 Why conscious imagery might be a "bug"
48:06 Blank access: using imagery without experiencing it
50:17 What is an unconscious visual representation?
55:54 The strongest counterevidence to unconscious imagery
58:50 Pupil dilation and Joel Pearson's results
1:01:18 How do we falsify unconscious imagery?
1:04:30 The PRM explanation for aphantasia: threshold differences
1:07:50 The future of consciousness and aphantasia research
1:10:29 Vividness is multidimensional — lessons from Russell Hurlburt
1:13:35 Brain imaging limitations and the next breakthrough
...

Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

GS Episodes Mentioned
Mark Solms — https://youtu.be/nMWaQ1U6dcc
Adam Zeman — https://youtu.be/SgA2up6-Bok
Russell Hurlburt (R1) — https://youtu.be/j0gKl-g3DNg
Russell Hurlburt (R2) — https://youtu.be/TfSuvAJB3JU
Merlin Monzel — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g21AqnSV1X4
Joel Pearson — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I_7HrWYMQ0
Alfredo Spagna - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8SBHefDnEk