Giants Shoulder

Dr. David Hone is a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and author of How Fast Did T. rex Run?, a myth-busting investigation into the surprising behavior, intelligence, and complexity of dinosaurs. Forget the lumbering monsters of Jurassic Park — dinosaurs were social, strategic, and sometimes even spectacularly weird. From display structures and pack hunting to nesting behaviour and brain evo...

Erica Komisar is a psychoanalyst, clinical social worker, and author of Chicken Little, The Sky Isn’t Falling, a fiercely debated book about raising resilient adolescents in an anxious world. With over three decades of clinical experience, Erica argues that the roots of childhood mental illness—depression, anxiety, even ADHD—can be traced back to emotional stress in the earliest years of life, esp...

Dr. Anina Rich is a cognitive neuroscientist and one of the world’s foremost experts on synesthesia — the rare phenomenon where senses merge, allowing people to see music, taste shapes, or feel touch by sight alone. But synesthesia isn’t a neurological glitch — it’s a window into how all of our brains construct reality. In this conversation, we explore how synesthesia reveals the brain’s hidden ar...

Dr. Nicholas Fabiano is a psychiatrist, researcher, and rising star in the world of mental health who’s challenging the foundations of how we diagnose and treat mental illness. He believes depression isn’t just in your head — it’s in your whole body. From prescribing exercise as medicine to exploring the role of creatine in mood and cognition, Dr. Fabiano is pioneering a new, evidence-based psychi...

Dr. Chris Summerfield is a neuroscientist, cognitive scientist, and author of These Strange New Minds — a groundbreaking exploration of whether machines like ChatGPT are starting to think, and what that reveals about human intelligence itself. Summerfield has spent his career studying how the brain perceives, predicts, abstracts, and decides — and now he's using that knowledge to decode how ar...

Tom Ebeyer is the founder of the Aphantasia Network, the world’s largest organisation dedicated to understanding the invisible differences in how people experience mental imagery — or in some cases, don’t experience it at all. Aphantasia is the inability to visualise images in the mind’s eye — a condition that affects how we remember, dream, feel emotion, and even plan for the future. Most people...

Check out the Full Podcast with leading consciousness researcher Dr Anil Seth here - https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and one of the world's leading experts in consciousness research. His TED talk Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Experience has captivated over 17 million viewers, and his groundbreaking book Being You explores the incredible mystery of perce...

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist and author of My Stroke of Insight, one of the most powerful and widely viewed neuroscience stories of all time. At 37, Dr. Taylor suffered a catastrophic hemorrhagic stroke that shut down the entire left hemisphere of her brain. As a brain scientist, she watched her mind unravel from the inside out—losing language, identity, memory, and se...

Dr. Nick Enfield is a linguistic anthropologist and author of Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists, a mind-bending exploration of how words shape — and distort — the world we live in. Language isn’t just a tool for communication. It’s a tool for persuasion, manipulation, and coordination. It rewires our perception, memory, emotions, and beliefs — often with...

Mike Long is a playwright, speechwriter, and co-author of Taming the Molecule of More — the practical sequel to the bestselling neuroscience book The Molecule of More. Dopamine doesn’t bring happiness — it brings anticipation. It’s the molecule that keeps us scrolling, swiping, craving, and chasing. But when understood and tamed, it can also drive purpose, focus, and deeply fulfilling lives. Expec...

Dr. Joel Pearson is a psychologist, neuroscientist, and founder of Future Minds Lab at UNSW — a cutting-edge research group exploring consciousness, intuition, mental imagery, and the psychology of decision-making in the age of AI. He’s the world’s leading expert on aphantasia — the inability to visualize mental images — and author of The Intuition Toolkit, a science-backed guide to harnessing the...

Dr. Robert Prentner is a philosopher of mind and consciousness researcher working alongside Donald Hoffman, co-authoring the *Conscious Agent Theory* — a radical scientific framework that challenges our deepest assumptions about reality. Buy The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes - https://amzn.to/42uSB11 According to their work, we don’t perceive the world as it truly...

Dr. Paul Cisek is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Montreal, and focuses on understanding how the brain controls behaviour. Particularly through the lens of motor control and decision-making. His interdisciplinary approach combines neurophysiological recordings, computational modelling, and evolutionary biology to explore how the brain mediates interactions with the world. This typ...

This Giant Moment was taken from #10 Behavioural Geneticist Dr Robert Plomin - How DNA impacts Personality and the Future of Genetic Testing and Manipulation Check out the full episode here - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0vIhY07qFBNms01I1yJvc2?si=InaapK9iTWKHJJU4me8TJQ

Dr. Will Ratcliff is an evolutionary biologist, professor, and researcher pioneering groundbreaking experiments in evolutionary biology and synthetic biology. Understanding how complex life evolved from single-celled organisms is one of biology's greatest mysteries. By evolving yeast from simple single cells into increasingly complex multicellular forms in his laboratory, Dr. Ratcliff is unloc...

Dr. Daniel Z. Lieberman is a clinical professor of psychiatry and author of *The Molecule of More*, one of the most influential neuroscience books of the last decade. Dopamine drives our ambition, creativity, addictions, obsessions, and even our experience of love — but it’s not the pleasure molecule you think it is. It’s the molecule of *desire*. And understanding how it works could change your l...

Giant Moment taken from Dr Christof Koch - Consciousness, Psychedelics and Mental Health Giants Shoulder 3

Kevin Mitchell is an associate professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. His research is aimed at understanding the genetic program specifying the wiring of the brain and its relevance to variation in human faculties, especially to psychiatric and neurological disease and to perceptual conditions like synaesthesia.

Get the Comfiest Sleep Mask on the Planet at https://bit.ly/4ilzfBL (use Code GIANTSMANTA10)Dr. Guy Leschziner is a neurologist, world-renowned sleep expert, and acclaimed author specialising in the fascinating complexities of sleep disorders and their extraordinary impact on human behaviour. Sleep is not just an 'on or off' state—it's a complex spectrum where different parts of our br...

Dr Taylor Guthrie is a social neuroscientist, researcher, and one of the leading experts in how our sense of self emerges from our relationships, our goals, and the powerful social forces around us We all assume we know what’s happening inside our own minds. But what if the way you describe your identity—your inner narrative, your motivations, your beliefs—turns out to be incomplete? What if you’v...

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz is a board-certified gastroenterologist, bestselling author, and a leading expert on the microbiome. Understanding your gut is a lifelong journey. Repairing a troubled microbiome, fueling your “second brain,” and harnessing the power of short-chain fatty acids are all part of the process. So how do we move beyond the confusing myths around gut health to support our mood, energy...

This first giant moment is from episode #20 with inner experience expert Dr Russell Hurlburt. In this clip Dr Hurlburt talks about the clinical case that shaped his 50 year career in the field of Inner Experience research. It blew my mind. Dr Russell Hurlburt is a psychologist, researcher, and one of the leading experts in the study of inner experience. We all assume we know what’s happening insid...

Dr Russell Hurlburt is a psychologist, researcher, and one of the leading experts in the study of inner experience. We all assume we know what’s happening inside our own minds. But what if the way you describe your inner thoughts—your inner monologue, mental images, emotions—isn’t accurate? What if you’ve spent your entire life mischaracterizing your own experience? Russell’s research suggests tha...

Dr William Li is a medical doctor, internet personality with over a million combined followers and author of Eat to Beat Disease. His viral Ted Talk “Can we Eat to Starve Cancer” has been viewed over 11* million times where he lays out his pioneering work in the field of angiogenesis. The process by which our body forms new blood vessels. Correction from video as I state only 5 Million times. In 1...

Dr. Paul Cisek is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Montreal, and focuses on understanding how the brain controls behaviour. Particularly through the lens of motor control and decision-making. His interdisciplinary approach combines neurophysiological recordings, computational modelling, and evolutionary biology to explore how the brain mediates interactions with the world. This typ...