Giants Shoulder

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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

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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: [email protected]

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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

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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: [email protected]

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Rick Strassman is the psychiatrist who ran the first new American psychedelic research in a generation — five years of DMT studies at the University of New Mexico, the first rating scale ever built specifically to measure a psychedelic experience, and the book that made DMT famous. DMT: The Spirit Molecule sold a quarter of a million copies and effectively created machine-elf culture. Thirty years on, he is the most sceptical man in the room about what those entities actually are.
Expect to learn why your brain spends energy importing DMT across the blood-brain barrier, why the pineal gland story he made famous fell apart, how brain DMT sits at the same concentration as serotonin and dopamine, why DMT floods the visual cortex of a dying brain, why a molecule that shrinks strokes and protects kidneys should not be psychedelic at all, what the endomatrix is and why it raises the simulation question, why he now thinks psychedelics are super placebos, what a DMT entity actually is and why talking to one is like talking to an AI, how you would actually test whether the entities are real, why only one scientist on Earth is studying endogenous DMT, 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
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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Steven Barker - Meet The World's Greatest Endogenous DMT Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/gTc5QjyZuvY
David Luke - Meet the Professor of Paranormal Consciousness - DMT Entities, Telepathy Tapes & OBE's: https://youtu.be/qLKD1gt1X5o
Deborah Mash - Meet The Ibogaine Psychedelic Scientist Who First Unravelled Its Big Mystery: https://youtu.be/z7eRtXV6ptA
Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk
Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA

GUEST LINKS
Official Site: https://www.rickstrassman.com/
Books & Publications: https://www.rickstrassman.com/publications/
Substack: https://rickstrassman.substack.com/
YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/RickStrassman
Biosynthesis and Extracellular Concentrations of DMT in Mammalian Brain (Dean et al., Scientific Reports 2019): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45812-w

TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:04:31 The First Legal DMT Studies in a Generation
0:07:41 The Bomb-Maker Who Became a Psychedelic Scientist
0:14:13 The Iron Curtain Reason We Know DMT Works
0:22:32 Why Your Brain Spends Energy Importing DMT
0:28:26 Your Brain Makes DMT at Serotonin Levels
0:29:26 DMT Floods the Dying Brain's Visual Cortex
0:30:28 Stroke, Kidneys and Heart — DMT as a Survival Molecule
0:32:39 The $64,000 Question Nobody Can Answer
0:36:33 Does DMT Regulate How Real Reality Feels?
0:39:32 Only One Person on Earth Studies This
0:43:52 The Endomatrix and the Simulation Question
0:49:48 "Psychedelics Are Super Placebos"
0:55:12 The Man Who Wrote Down "Bananas Are Really Yellow"
1:03:50 The Barking Patient — Entities as Dream Logic
1:05:42 Talking to Entities Is Like Talking to an AI
1:06:40 The Prime Number Test for Proving Entities Are Real
1:13:36 Half His Volunteers Met Beings — And a Conscious Apartment
1:18:08 "Your Brain On Drugs" vs Another Dimension
1:26:58 The Entities That Curse You
1:29:09 "Have You Started Yet?" — The Man Immune to DMT
1:33:30 Why DMT Is the Only Psychedelic Without Tolerance
1:36:12 Blocking 5-HT1A Tripled the Effect — Buried 30 Years
1:39:06 Aphantasia and Seeing For the First Time

.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

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Deborah Mash is a neuropharmacologist who holds the first FDA licence ever granted to give ibogaine to a human being, built one of America's largest brain banks, and discovered noribogaine — the metabolite now entering its first US clinical trial. She has spent over thirty years on a drug that appears to interrupt addiction after a single dose. This April a US president named it specifically. This is the scientist who was right three decades early.

Expect to learn what Trump's executive order actually changes for ibogaine, why Sasha Shulgin put ibogaine in a box of its own, how noribogaine blocks nicotine, alcohol, cocaine and opioid use in animal models, why ibogaine holds the brain's neuroplasticity window open for four weeks when ketamine manages days, why some patients get the full therapeutic benefit with no psychedelic experience at all, why the reported ibogaine deaths are almost impossible to interpret, why more than 80% of her patients said they never wanted to repeat it, and much more...
SPONSORS
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EPISODES MENTIONED
David Nutt - Meet the Neuroscientist Fired For Exposing the Truth! Dr David Nutt: https://youtu.be/BLk6a5Vb2O0
David Nutt - Neuroscientist Ranks Every Drug By How Hard They Are to Quit! Tier List: https://youtu.be/G-OZ_UBGvvo

GUEST LINKS
University of Miami Faculty Profile: http://neurology.med.miami.edu/about-us/faculty-list/deborah-c-mash-ph-d
X: https://x.com/drdeborahmash
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4383E7wAAAAJ&hl=en
DemeRx: https://www.demerx.com/team/deborah-c-mash-phd/
2018 Frontiers in Pharmacology paper (St. Kitts cohort): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2018.00529/full

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
0:02:00 Why Ibogaine Is Suddenly Everywhere
0:02:22 Trump's Executive Order and What It Actually Does
0:05:55 The Drug That Breaks the Cycle of Addiction
0:08:07 Why One Drug Treats Addiction, Depression and Trauma
0:11:30 Noribogaine: The Metabolite Nobody Talks About
0:14:20 The Real Risks Nobody Reports Properly
0:16:36 How Ibogaine Became a Vast Underground Experiment
0:17:44 Veterans, Brain Trauma and the Testimonials
0:22:55 The Master Molecule: Why Ibogaine Stands Alone
0:23:30 Sasha Shulgin Draws Four Boxes
0:26:48 Is a Psychedelic Just a Hard Reboot?
0:28:11 Four Weeks of Neuroplasticity, Longer Than Anything Else
0:28:44 Fast, Slow and Ultra-Rapid Metabolisers
0:31:39 The First Patient in St. Kitts, Decades Later
0:34:35 Do You Need the Trip to Reach the Destination?
0:35:05 One Molecule, Every Addiction
0:37:39 Miami Vice and the Bodies at the Morgue
0:41:18 The Man Who Slept Through His Own Trip
0:44:11 Why America Will Lead on Ibogaine
0:47:51 Dual Dosing: The Second Stage of the Rocket
0:54:52 Why More Than 80% Never Want to Repeat It
0:57:33 What Would Ibogaine Do to a Healthy Brain?
0:58:18 Why She's Never Taken Ibogaine
0:59:39 Psychedelics, Longevity and Ageing Brains

......Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

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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
Martin Picard is a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia University who just won the inaugural $1.5 million Baszucki Prize for a new theory of life. His radical claim: consciousness doesn't just run on energy, it might actually be made of it, generated inside your mitochondria rather than your brain.
Expect to learn why calling mitochondria "the powerhouse of the cell" does them a disservice, how mitochondria might generate consciousness rather than just power the brain that has it, why some of history's most rigorous physicists ended up believing consciousness is more fundamental than matter, how psychedelics might work by reshaping the way energy is patterned through your body, why grey hair can reverse itself within weeks of a stressful period lifting, how a simple blood test might one day predict whether you're about to have a good or bad trip, why "no drug actually heals you" and what does instead, and much more.
Timestamps:
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:00 What Actually Keeps You Alive (Not What You Think)
0:04:40 Why There's No Experience Without Energy Flow
0:07:11 Are You Conscious Because of Matter, or Despite It?
0:10:13 Why History's Greatest Physicists Became Idealists
0:17:17 The Doctor Who Watched Patients Come Back From Death
0:22:09 Don Hoffman and the Day the Beach Disappeared
0:24:12 What Actually Triggers a Near-Death Experience
0:24:51 You Are an Eddy in a River of Consciousness
0:31:59 Bernardo Kastrup's Idealism, Tested Live
0:33:34 Could We Scan Your Energy and Predict Your Mind?
0:39:37 Stop Calling Mitochondria "The Powerhouse"
0:40:03 Your Cells Are Basically Tiny GPUs
0:41:04 How Psychedelics Might Rewrite Your Energy Pattern
0:49:10 The Study Testing Whether Psilocybin Changes Your Mitochondria
0:52:06 "It's Not the Drug That Heals You"0:52:38 A Blood Test That Predicts Your Best (and Worst) Trip
0:57:27 The Psychedelic Paradox: Less Brain, More Experience
0:58:57 Aldous Huxley's "Reducing Valve" Theory of the Brain
1:02:03 "The Brain Is Overrated"

... Email for sponsorship enquiries: [email protected]

GS Episodes Mentioned:
Robin Carhart-Harris - No. 1 Psychedelic Scientist: The Entropic Brain Hypothesis, Consciousness & DMT Entities: https://youtu.be/t-GkE4YtLRk

Guest Links:
Columbia Faculty Profile: https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/profile/martin-picard-phd
Personal Website: https://www.martinpicard.energy/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/MitoPsychoBio

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IG2t_uMAAAAJ&hl=en
Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab: https://www.picardlab.org