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.
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.
Episodes
Mentioned books
May 11, 2026 • 1h 4min
Meet The Inner Speech Expert Proving We Can Conjure Other Conscious Entities
Ben Alderson-Day, psychologist and hallucination researcher at Durham and author of Presence, studies inner speech, auditory hallucinations, and felt presences. He explores why many people lack a clear inner voice. He explains how parental voices shape inner talk, how writers and tulpamancers create autonomous minds, and what separates inner speech from hallucination.
May 7, 2026 • 1h 21min
#118 - Meet The MIT Philosopher Proving Aphantasics Have Unconscious Imagery
Matthias Michel, MIT philosopher and co-founder of the MIT Consciousness Club, outlines Perceptual Reality Monitoring. He explains how the brain separates perception, memory, imagination and noise. He discusses unconscious vision and blindsight, whether fish see consciously, and the provocative idea that aphantasics may have unconscious imagery their minds use without phenomenal access.
May 4, 2026 • 1h 29min
#117 Meet The Neuroscientist Proving We Got Imagination & Aphantasia WRONG!
Dr. Alfredo Spagna, a Columbia cognitive neuroscientist who discovered the fusiform imagery node, explains how imagination reuses perception circuits and why aphantasia shattered long-held assumptions. Short, punchy segments cover how imagery differs from perception, real-life aphantasia cases (including artists and architects), the visualizer and inner-speech fallacies, 7T brain scans, and links to consciousness theories.
Apr 30, 2026 • 1h 2min
#116 Meet The World’s Greatest Psychedelic Receptor Scientist
Bryan L. Roth, a leading receptor scientist who solved LSD’s serotonin receptor structure and develops non-hallucinogenic psychedelics. He recounts his path into receptor work and the DARPA-funded hunt for therapeutic but non-trip compounds. The conversation covers kappa opioid vs serotonin mechanisms, the claustrum’s role in perception, and ultra-large virtual screens for novel drugs.
Apr 27, 2026 • 1h 20min
#115 Consciousness Expert Explains The 6 Levels Of The DMT Experience
Andrés Gómez Emilsson, consciousness researcher at the Qualia Research Institute, explores a mathematical view of experience. He outlines six geometric levels of DMT and why phenomenal space becomes hyperbolic at high doses. He describes symmetry as the basis of pleasure, how bad trips arise from competing symmetries, and why topology shifts at the breakthrough.
4 snips
Apr 24, 2026 • 1h 22min
#114 No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness
Andrew Gallimore, neurobiologist, pharmacologist and chemist who created the DMTx protocol and directs Noonautics. He explains why DMT builds entire alien worlds, describes common non-human entity interactions, and outlines thalamocortical loops and attractor-state mechanics. He also defends the idea of stable, structured DMT worlds and explains the goals and methods of the DMTx extended-state protocol.
6 snips
Apr 22, 2026 • 1h 4min
#113 - Meet The Neuroscientist Decoding Your Bodies Cannabis System
Dr. Matt Hill, cannabis neuroscientist and former International Cannabinoid Research Society president, unpacks how the endocannabinoid system shapes brain and body. He explains why people react so differently to cannabis. He covers retrograde signalling, dose-dependent calming versus anxiety, sex differences in THC metabolism, the research setbacks from Canadian legalization, and why precision clinical trials remain elusive.
Apr 16, 2026 • 1h 22min
#112 - No. 1 Music Neuroscientist: How Music Hijacks Our Collective Unconscious, Emotion and Imagination
Dr. Elizabeth Margulis, Princeton music cognition professor and author, studies musical daydreams and groove. She describes why strangers imagine the same vivid stories to the same music. She contrasts US and rural China responses, explains speech-to-song shifts, explores why music makes us move, and links music to psychedelics, therapy, and consciousness.
4 snips
Apr 13, 2026 • 1h 37min
#111 - Tim Maudlin: Consciousness, Turing Machines, Problems with Quantum Mechanics and Ai
Tim Maudlin, philosopher of physics at NYU and founder of the John Bell Institute, challenges computational accounts of mind. He explains why running a Turing computation cannot by itself produce consciousness. Short, vivid thought experiments probe counterfactuals, neural nets versus brains, the limits of formal theories like integrated information, and why quantum mechanics likely does not solve the mind-body puzzle.
Apr 9, 2026 • 2h 14min
#110 - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness
Dr. György Buzsáki, a leading neuroscientist known for work on neural rhythms and the hippocampus. He explores how brain rhythms act like syntax for prediction and thought. He explains feedforward inhibition, rhythm hierarchies linking brain and body, why memory is sequential replay not static storage, and how rhythm breakdowns relate to disease.
