Giants Shoulder

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILYBecome a YouTube Member for exclusive episodes, early access + ad-free viewing 👇https://www.youtube.com/@thegiantsshoulder/joinAlexander Batthyány is the philosopher and psychologist who turned a deathbed anecdote into a science. He ran the first modern study of paradoxical lucidity, co-authored the field's founding definition with Bruce Greyson, and has now collected around 450 cases of severely demented patients unexpectedly getting their memory, speech and personality back. Victorian doctors documented the phenomenon at length and called it "lightening up before death"; twentieth-century medicine stopped writing it down because there was no way to phrase it in a case study. He is now working with a group at the Mayo Clinic to put cameras in patients' rooms so the episodes stop being missed. In one case a woman came back for two hours, discussed her own diagnosis, died — and imaging taken immediately afterwards showed no change whatsoever.SPONSORSGet One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqeGS EPISODES MENTIONEDRick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYscAndrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDAGUEST LINKSX: https://x.com/Alxdr_BatthyanyGoogle Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VRL8CPYAAAAJPersonal Site: https://sites.google.com/view/alexanderbatthyany/startViktor Frankl Institute Vienna: https://www.viktorfrankl.org/Threshold (2023): https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250782298/threshold/Psychology Today - Magic Mushrooms and Terminal Lucidity: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/consciousness-and-meaning-at-lifes-end/202607/magic-mushrooms-and-terminal-lucidityBatthyany & Greyson (2021), Spontaneous Remission of Dementia Before Death: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2021/04/terminal-lucidity-PC.pdfSKOOLWant a full breakdown of your own conscious inner experience? Join the Giant's Shoulder community: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/aboutFOLLOW EVANhttps://x.com/evan_mcglTIMESTAMPS0:00:00 Trailer0:02:29 What Terminal Lucidity Actually Is0:05:33 Why He'd Rather Call It "Paradoxical Lucidity"0:06:01 "Call Your Grandma - She's Back Again"0:09:11 The Victorians Documented It, Then Medicine Stopped0:10:55 "We Saw It, But We Didn't Write It Down"0:12:58 Frankl's Rule: Treat Them As Fully Present0:17:35 What Brain Age Was She Speaking From?0:18:36 "It Was All As If In A Fog"0:21:11 The Wife Who Filmed It So People Would Believe Her0:25:40 The Art Historian Who Gave Back His Books0:30:27 Is It Comforting For Families, Or Crueller?0:32:02 The Three Shocks Every Family Goes Through0:38:05 450 Cases And Counting0:41:29 Does It Have Anything To Do With Death At All?0:45:12 Steven Pinker: "You're Seeing Figures In Clouds"0:47:10 "Everywhere And Nowhere"0:49:47 They Overdosed Her On Psilocybin. She Woke Up.0:51:37 She Got Her Sense Of Humour Back0:55:18 Dresden: The Brain Hadn't Changed At All0:56:37 "Some Of Our Personhood Is Platform Independent"1:02:40 Near-Death Experiences vs Paradoxical Lucidity1:05:52 Rick Strassman, DMT And Neuroprotection1:11:22 "How Can We Get Them Out?"1:20:20 When Vienna Gave Psychiatric Patients Malaria.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com

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Carl Hart is a human drug scientist — the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia University and Chair of its Department of Psychology, who runs one of the very few laboratories on earth licensed to give people real doses of crack cocaine, methamphetamine and MDMA. His volunteers live inside a sealed four-room lab for weeks at a time, originally built for NASA to study astronauts, with no contact with the outside world while he measures their sleep, their food intake and how much they speak. He started that work believing drugs were what had gone wrong in neighbourhoods like the one he grew up in. Thirty years of data refused to agree with him.

Expect to learn why there is no such thing as drug addiction in a rat, why "hard drugs" is a category the human body doesn't recognise, why he refuses to use the word "psychedelic", how one extra methyl group is the only difference between methamphetamine and the main ingredient in Adderall, why psychiatry still runs on a theory formalised in 1967 when only six neurotransmitters were known, what heroin actually feels like and why the real danger is constipation rather than overdose, why addiction tracks access rather than pharmacology, and much more…

SPONSORS
Get Jenni Your Intelligent Research Assistant (GIANT20 for 20% off) - http://jenni.ai/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=inf&utm_campaign=thegiantsshoulder

GS EPISODES MENTIONED
David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o

GUEST LINKS
Columbia Psychiatry Profile: https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/carl-hart-phd
Personal Website: https://drcarlhart.com/
X: https://x.com/drcarlhart
Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Use_for_Grown-Ups
High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Price_(book)

FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:16 Why Human Rights Became His Whole Mission
0:03:45 "I Believed the Bullshit About Drugs"
0:07:42 The Brain-Imaging Studies That Prove Nothing
0:10:32 Why "Hard Drugs" Is a Made-Up Category
0:12:42 There Is No Such Thing as Addiction in a Rat
0:14:18 Put Cocaine on Your Gum and See What Happens
0:15:50 Rat Models for Autism, ADHD and Depression
0:18:03 How Many Hoops to Give a Human Crack Cocaine
0:20:38 "Psychedelic" Is a Political Word, Not a Real Thing
0:22:40 Why the One-Receptor Story Is Bullshit
0:23:56 Psychiatry Is Still Running on a 1967 Theory
0:31:17 One Methyl Group: Meth vs Adderall
0:34:41 The Lab NASA Built for Astronauts
0:37:45 The Phenomenology Gap Nobody Studies
0:39:01 "I Was a Virgin to These Drugs, And Not Even Curious"
0:44:14 What Heroin Actually Feels Like
0:47:04 The Real Danger Is Constipation
0:52:47 The Overdose Myth He's Trying to Destroy
0:55:39 Education, Not Harm Reduction
0:58:40 Addiction Isn't About Drugs, It's About Access
1:01:38 Not Whether to Legalise, But How
1:05:30 Dublin's Cocaine Problem, Evan Pushes Back
1:06:46 "That's Quite Arrogant of You"
1:09:05 The Same Argument That Delayed Emancipation
1:12:50 "We Put People on the Moon. This Is Not Complicated."

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

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Luca Turin is a biophysicist who has spent thirty years arguing that the nose reads a molecule's vibrations rather than its shape, published in Nature at twenty-three, and co-wrote the definitive critical guide to perfume with his wife Tania Sanchez. The vibrational theory of olfaction was declared dead twice before he revived it, and he is still waiting for the one experiment that would settle it. His newest result has nothing to do with smell: fruit flies sealed in separate opaque wells, with no sight, sound or scent between them, coordinate their movement anyway — and the coordination vanishes the moment the plate is made of metal. This is a scientist who went looking for anaesthesia and found something that looks like insect telepathy.

Expect to learn why creating a smell stimulus is nothing like creating a colour, how a startup elicited smell sensations with ultrasound for the first time in history, why the only two chemical groups in the universe that share one vibration are also the only two that smell of rotten eggs, how a receptor could read vibrations with no lenses or prisms anywhere in your nose, why the famous "trillion smells" figure was a mathematical error, why nobody in pharmacology can predict what a drug will do once it binds, how Google Quantum AI's xenon question led to fruit flies, what happened when the plates were swapped for aluminium, why radio frequency would be the perfect brain-wide reward signal, and much more…

SPONSORS
Download the most scientifically rigorous nutrition app MacroFactor! Use code GIANTS for a 2 week FREE trial - https://app.macrofactor.com/mfgiants

GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Earl K Miller - Meet the MIT Neuroscientist Showing Brain Waves Are the Secret Engine Behind Consciousness: https://youtu.be/7OFb-NG3jIw
Marjorie Woollacott - Neuroscientist: "Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness" — NDEs, Telepathy and Terminal Lucidity: https://youtu.be/mDWtmfmIUHA

GUEST LINKS
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fgXXdQYAAAAJ
Wi-Fly Project: https://wi-fly.eu/
X: https://x.com/LucaTurin
Substack: https://lucaturin.substack.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lucaturin

SKOOL
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

FOLLOW EVAN
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:20 Biophysicists Are Dreamers, Biologists Are Doomed
0:07:07 The Startup That Triggered Smells With Ultrasound
0:12:22 The Rotten-Egg Coincidence That Convinced Him
0:18:34 What The Receptor Is Actually Reading
0:19:54 Electron Tunnelling, Explained Simply
0:23:33 The Trillion-Smells Figure Was A Maths Error
0:28:21 What Perfumers Perceive That You Don't
0:32:14 Why Every Drug Receptor Might Be Electrical
0:33:12 The Mystery Nobody Admits: Drug Efficacy
0:39:28 "Cascade" Is A Word That Masks Ignorance
0:44:04 The Receptor As A Transistor
0:48:40 Google Quantum AI And The Xenon Puzzle
0:52:24 Two Years Of Work, A Definite Maybe
0:53:55 30 Flies Freeze Like The Guards At Buckingham Palace
0:55:28 One Fly Per Well, No Way To Communicate
0:56:17 To My Total Astonishment, They Coordinate
0:58:45 Metal Plates Kill The Signal
0:59:36 The Wi-Fly: A Radio Network For Flies
1:11:26 Radical Pairs: How A Fly Could Listen
1:16:34 What Is The Brain's Reward Signal?
1:19:59 Standing Waves And The Binding Problem
1:23:58 Could Humans Ever Do This?
1:27:46 Ramanujan And Latent Abilities
1:36:16 Giving Fruit Flies DMT

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

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Karen Konkoly is a dream scientist who led the first study to hold a real-time, two-way conversation with a person inside a dream, putting maths problems to sleepers in REM and getting answers back through their eye movements. She is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cambridge Consciousness and Cognition Laboratory, completed her PhD in the Paller Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, and has spent her career building tools to engineer dreams — from targeted lucidity reactivation for narcolepsy nightmares to planting unsolved problems into REM sleep. She has also asked a dream character to swap bodies with her, and woken up inside it. This is the strangest conversation we have had on the channel.

Expect to learn how scientists prove someone is awake inside a dream, why you still cannot fly in your own dream even when you know it is a dream, what happened when Karen swapped bodies with a dream character, whether time really slows down while you sleep, why practising darts in a lucid dream works about as well as practising awake, what galantamine and acetylcholine actually do to REM sleep, the exact protocol for having your first lucid dream, why Karen no longer believes lucidity is the key to consciousness, and much more…

SPONSORS
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

GS EPISODES MENTIONED
David Spiegel - World's Greatest Hypnosis Scientist Hijacks My Mind Live On Camera!: https://youtu.be/eCtRBZHIsgQ

GUEST LINKS
Personal Website: https://www.karenkonkoly.com/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=teYHEFIAAAAJ&hl=en
Cambridge Consciousness & Cognition Lab: https://www.ccc-lab.org/
Dust Systems (Dream Engineering): https://www.dust.systems/people/karen-konkoly
X: https://x.com/KarenKonkoly

LISTEN ON
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5m3Gta5MtIYdk59pb2GJ7M
Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249

SKOOL
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

FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:03:18 What Lucid Dreaming Actually Is
0:05:37 Wake Back To Bed: The 4am Method
0:06:40 Why You Still Can't Fly In Your Own Dream
0:09:20 How You Prove Someone Is Lucid In A Dream
0:11:53 Are The Sleep Stages Even Real?
0:15:28 When A Dream Dissolves But You Don't Wake Up
0:19:19 The Reality Check You Can Do Tonight
0:21:00 Does Time Run Slower Inside A Dream?
0:24:45 Trying And Failing To Become Her Dog
0:26:10 Swapping Bodies With A Dream Character
0:27:51 Is Lucidity A Glitch In Consciousness?
0:33:37 Hyperphantasia And Maladaptive Daydreaming
0:37:53 Practising Darts While You're Asleep
0:41:52 When Lucid Dreaming Is A Bad Idea
0:46:09 Why A Giraffe Can't Appear While You're Awake
0:49:54 Galantamine, Acetylcholine And Dream Drugs
0:52:17 The Squat Experiment
0:58:38 The Full Protocol, Step By Step
1:04:55 What This Teaches Us About Consciousness
1:09:15 Who Are Your Dream Characters?
1:12:55 "You're Not You"
1:14:41 Hypnosis, David Spiegel And Lucid Dreaming
1:18:20 What She's Working On Next

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

🧠 JOIN THE GIANT'S SHOULDER FAMILY
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David Spiegel is the world's leading hypnosis scientist — fifty years at Stanford spent proving that trance is a measurable brain state rather than a stage trick, across thirteen books, four hundred papers and roughly seven thousand patients hypnotised personally. I told him to his face that I thought his entire field was a scam, so he ran the hypnotisability test on me live on camera, my left arm floated off the desk and stopped obeying me for the next forty minutes, and he scored me seven out of ten.

Expect to learn what hypnosis actually is and the three components it breaks down into, how stage hypnotists secretly screen their audiences before the show even starts, what changes in three separate brain networks the moment you go under, why "suggestibility" is the wrong word and cognitive flexibility is the right one, how hypnotised subjects cut their brain's electrical response to pain by 50%, why one in four smokers quit after a single session, the two very different childhoods that both produce highly hypnotisable adults, why eight-year-olds are the most hypnotisable people alive, how Rory McIlroy used self-hypnosis to break a seven-year Masters curse, what it feels like to have your own arm stop belonging to you, and much more…

SPONSORS
Try Reveri, Dr David Spiegel's Self-Hypnosis App (use code SPIEGEL20 for your discount) - https://reverihealth.app.link/e/spiegel
Get One Month Free of Consensus (The Best Ai Science Tool) - https://get.consensus.app/we00d2cmjpqe

GUEST LINKS
Stanford Profile: https://profiles.stanford.edu/david-spiegel
Reveri: https://www.reveri.com/
Reveri on X: https://x.com/reveri_health
Stanford Center on Stress and Health: https://med.stanford.edu/stresshealthcenter.html
Trance and Treatment (his clinical textbook): https://www.appi.org/Products/Hypnosis/Trance-and-Treatment-Second-Edition

SKOOL
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

FOLLOW EVAN
https://x.com/evan_mcgl

TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:27 Who Is David Spiegel?
0:03:39 What Hypnosis Actually Is
0:05:37 Why He Calls Stage Shows "Dumb Shows"
0:06:29 How Hypnotists Secretly Screen The Audience
0:09:08 The Student Who Relived Being A Newborn
0:10:46 What Hypnosis Does To Three Brain Networks
0:13:23 It's Not Suggestibility, It's Cognitive Flexibility
0:16:12 Cutting The Brain's Pain Signal By 50%
0:17:05 One In Four Quit Smoking In A Single Session
0:18:33 The Meditator Whose Migraines Vanished
0:22:36 Why Hypnotisability Is Partly Genetic
0:23:54 The Two Childhoods That Make You Hypnotisable
0:27:16 Hypnosis, Flow States And Peak Performance
0:32:54 How Rory McIlroy Broke His Masters Curse
0:38:05 Why You Can Forget Your Own Name
0:44:29 Filtering The Hurt Out Of Pain
0:55:00 The Hypnotisability Test, Live On Camera
1:00:15 "It's Actually Going Up"
1:08:52 Evan Scores 7 Out Of 10
1:18:42 Trying To Erase The Number Four
1:31:04 "Please Don't Do This On My Other Arm"

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