Chasing Consciousness

Can Physics shed light on how synchronicity might work? “Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” C.J. Jung, from ‘Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principal’ The majority of us have experienced some meaningful coincidences in our lives - perhaps the right person to help with a problem got in touc...

Are our scientific assumptions justified? In this episode we’re going to be examining the assumptions of Western Science. All science is based on assumptions. In order to isolate systems in experiments and standardise measurements of the target data, other variables need to be pinned down so scientists can form precise mathematical models, that can then be repeated accurately in the peer review pr...

Can intention, attention or expectation affect random physical events? In this episode we’re going to be exploring the subtleties of an odd phenomenon: the Experimenter Effect, where the expectations of the scientist doing an experiment appear to affect the results measured. This is hugely important for the right practice of science, and for understanding why some experiments that seem watertight...

In episode #11 we explore the way emotions work, and particularly fear - the way it’s triggered, what happens in the brain and how much we are conscious of what’s going on. I think this is really relevant as we appear to be an extremely fearful, defensive and argumentative society in general, and perhaps if we understood what was happening inside us we might be able to limit some of the damage the...

'Psychedelics in a changing World: medicalisation, reciprocity and planetary healing' With: Ben Sessa, Gabriel Amezcua, Nick von Christierson, David Luke, Andrea Langlois & Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner. This is a recording of a fascinating panel chaired by Chasing Consciousness in the talks tent of Medicine Festival programmed by Ruby Reed. It included psychologists, psychiatrists, psychedelic entre...

Can psychedelic therapy help depression? We are now in the middle of the first psychedelic resurgence since the last bout of research in the 60’s and 70’s led by legends of the psychedelic movement like Dr. Stan Grof at Harvard. This resurgence is taking place on two fronts: Firstly, following promising results from Imperial College’s Psidep 1 study into the use of Psilocybin, the active ingredien...

In this episode we want to understand how easy it is to change our beliefs when we receive new information, a process that can be really uncomfortable and lead to great resistance in the psyche. The scientific community, whilst educated to update their world view based on new information and theory, are by no means immune to this resistance; today we’ll find out to what extent it is just a human t...

How important is story to to human understanding?   Today we take a step away from science per se, to look at the role of story in the formation of our world views, for generations our only method alongside direct experience of understanding the world, as opposed the more modern method of hard data from scientific research that we tend to examine on Chasing Consciousness. So we’re continuing...

How easy is it to change our Habits? Today we have the important job of working out what neuroplasticity is all about. 50 years ago we thought the adult brain remained the same after reaching maturity. Now since the discovery that in fact our neural networks remain ‘plastic’, which means adaptable, a host of research has opened up fuelled by our desire to thrive and improve rather than just surviv...

How much of our consciousness is shared? In this episode we have the fascinating job of trying to get to get to grips with Jung’s concept of the Collective unconscious. I’ve always loved Jung and I think his ideas can offer a brilliant framework in which to maximise our mental health, to use life’s challenges to harvest meaningful lessons, and just to navigate the subjective experience of being al...

What's the importance of safety to health?  In this episode we’re going to be talking about the neuroscience of safety and how our sense of safety can be hugely important to the way we communicate and learn. Research shows that when we perceive threat, we go into a hyper-vigilant state and certain circuits of the brain shut down to focus on self-protection. If we can become aware of this...

What does entanglement actually mean? So in this episode we’re going to be trying to get our heads around one of the most extraordinary phenomena ever recorded in subatomic physics: Quantum Entanglement. Famously dismissed by Einstein as ‘Spooky action at a distance’, it has been proved to exist in the lab over and over again since then. This non-local phenomenon is when sub-atomic particles remai...

Do we realise we invent explanations?  In this episode we look at the extraordinary phenomena of the Left Brain Interpreter, in which a part of the left hemisphere tends to literally invent an explanation for something we’ve perceived or done based on past experience, sometimes in a completely mistaken way. This is a very important phenomena to our first series as we introduce the cognitive l...

Wave or Particle?  So in this episode we have the interesting job of trying to get to the bottom of the famous mystery of the Wave Particle duality, and seeing if along the way we can’t bust a few myths about it. We’re also aiming to better understand whether Quantum mechanics can or can’t help us get closer to a complete theory of reality or not, and hopefully find out of it can give us some...

Subjective or Objective?  In this Episode we’re going to be introducing one of the oldest and most talked about problems in philosophy, the problem of consciousness. Just how does our subjective experience as humans relate to our existence as human bodies with brains? For most of the 20th century you couldn’t really talk about this as a serious scientist without being laughed at and told to s...

See www.chasingconsciousness.net/episodes for the full program. Here host Freddy Drabble introduces what he'll be covering with his guests in the first 15 part series. Please subscribe and leave a rating and review if you like what you hear.