Standing waves and resonant frequencies appear everywhere in the world around us, from musical notes and swaying bridges to electron orbits and animal coats. This week's guest, neuroscientist Selen Atasoy, wondered if they could also be found in the brain.Her work has led to a new way to understand different states of consciousness -- from anaesthesia through our normal waking state to meditation and psychedelics. She explains how changes in our awareness reflect a shifting balance between order and chaos, and why psychedelics may tune the brain closer to a critical point of maximum complexity.I talk to Selen about what this all means for our understanding of the mind, including how modern life may be blunting our awareness, and whether consciousness might be possible elsewhere in the natural world, beyond the human brain.This isn’t the end of Selen’s story, though, as she recently trained as a psychotherapist. We discuss what inspired her leap from objective science towards a more personal exploration of the mind, and how we can all find harmony within.Selen's home pagehttps://www.selenatasoy.com/Selen’s first paper on harmonics in the brain (2016)https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10340 Selen’s paper on harmonics and LSD (2017)https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612318301018 Selen’s paper on meditators (2023)https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.16.567347v1.abstract Video of Chladni sand patternshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFAcYruShowHarmonics and animal coat patternshttps://www.math.ttu.edu/~anpeace/files/Math5354Papers/murray_SciAm.pdf MeTruelyhttps://www.metruely.com/ *** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Hosted by Jo Marchant:https://jomarchant.comProduced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Spirits, skulls and scorpions: Journey into Göbekli Tepe
Steady your nerves and light up your torches, because this week we’re clambering into the deep, dark Neolithic underworld with archaeologist Jens Notroff.Jens, of the German Archaeological Institute, has spent years excavating one of the world’s most fascinating and mysterious prehistoric sites – Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. This is a series of circular stone enclosures, featuring giant T-shaped figures and carvings of fearsome predators – and possibly also once decorated with human skulls. It’s sometimes described as “the world’s first temple”, and according to conventional thinking, it shouldn’t exist.That’s because Göbekli Tepe is around 12,000 years old. It was built on the cusp of the most important transition in human history, the Neolithic revolution, just as hunter gatherers were about to start cultivating the species around them, and it’s located in just the region where farming was about to emerge. Before historians realised the significance of Göbekli Tepe, they assumed the invention of agriculture was the flashpoint that led to the other changes of the Neolithic, such as more settled communities, and the ability to build impressive monuments like Stonehenge. But the giant stones of Göbekli Tepe, dating to just before all of that, tell us something else – a dramatic, shocking shift in mindset – was already underway.With Jens as our guide, let’s travel back 12,000 years. What wild rituals played out at this deathly site? How did humans take that first leap in thinking, that has defined our species perhaps more than any other, of separating ourselves from – and elevating ourselves above – the rest of nature. And how does it feel to put ourselves into the mind of a young hunter, entering these terrifying caverns for the first time…Jens’ home pagehttps://jensnotroff.com/Göbekli Tepe research project bloghttps://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/Taş Tepeler research projecthttps://tastepeler.org/en Recommended publicationshttps://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/publications/Skull cult at Göbekli Tepehttps://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1700564Göbekli Tepe World Heritage Sitehttps://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1572/There’s a detailed discussion of Göbekli Tepe and its role in humanity’s split from nature in chapter 2 of my book: The Human Cosmos.https://jomarchant.com/human-cosmos*** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Hosted by Jo Marchant:https://jomarchant.com Produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Can life transcend physics?
We’re talking about life, the universe and everything – literally! My guest is cosmologist Marina Cortês of the University of Lisbon. Marina trained as a dancer before helping to shake up cosmology with some revolutionary ideas about the nature of time. As if that wasn’t enough – she’s now using the tools of theoretical physics to investigate the significance of life in the universe, in a new field that she and her colleagues call biocosmology. Marina’s work goes against many of the normal assumptions of physics. Put simply, you could see the conventional approach as attempting to describe everything in the universe through a set of fundamental laws and equations. And if something that we experience in the universe – like the forwards flow of time, say, or our ability to make our own choices – doesn’t fit into those equations, the mainstream view would be to say, well, that thing is an illusion. No matter how important it might seem to us, it doesn’t really exist.Marina is doing a different kind of cosmology, that puts life, and our experience of it, first. She’s asking, how can we use the mathematical tools of cosmology and theoretical physics to describe the universe we are actually living in? I think that’s such an exciting question, and it’s leading to some fascinating findings that could transform how we see life: from a process that simply shuffles atoms into different arrangements towards a force that continually rewrites the playing field, bursting beyond the fundamental equations and laws of physics to create completely new possibilities at every stage. I caught up with Marina for a tour of the “biocosmos”. Marina’s home pagehttps://marinacortes.org/ Introduction to biocosmologyhttps://marinacortes.org/cosmology-cortes-time-biocosmology-astrophysics-marina/#biocosmology Marina launching biocosmology from Everest base camphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HiNlqu0Lc Short talk by Marina on biocosmologyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TH4UsyE3fo&t=3s 2023 paper on biocosmology by Marina, Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle & Lee Smolinhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378 The universe as a process of unique events: 2014 paper by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolinhttps://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.084007 2021 paper on time and consciousness by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolinhttps://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2021/00000028/f0020009/art00004 *** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yadahttps://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The medicine that shouldn't work
Placebo effects are not about expectation, or positive thinking, and you don’t have to believe you’re taking a real drug to feel better. In fact, they are not in your mind at all, but your body.This is what self-confessed ‘deviant’ Ted Kaptchuk wants you to know, after conducting decades of research that has shocked the medical establishment and turned upside down conventional thinking about placebos.I’ve been a fan of Ted’s work ever since we first met in 2014, when I was researching my book Cure: A journey into the science of mind over body. He originally trained in Chinese medicine (one of the first westerners to do so in China), and he is now a professor of medicine at Harvard, where he directs Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter.Ted has been doing some wild things there: listening to patients; thinking carefully about what’s really making us better when we receive a treatment; and exploring what happens if you give people medicine without the drugs.His trials break all the normal rules, but they show us how we might approach medicine differently, particularly for the very conditions that our drugs are usually worst at treating – from depression, fatigue, and anxiety to many skin conditions, gut problems and especially chronic pain. His results also dovetail perfectly with the latest results from neuroscience about how we perceive not just bodily symptoms, but our entire reality.I asked Ted about his rebellious background, the inspirations for some of his craziest experiments, and how to unlock our inner pharmacy. Ted Kaptchuk’s home page at Harvard:https://ghsm.hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/ted-jack-kaptchukTed’s website:https://www.tedkaptchuk.com/Lecture series I presented for The Great Courses on mind-body links in medicine (the first two are all about placebos, including Ted’s work):https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/the-power-of-mind-over-bodyHonest fakery: How placebos can treat chronic pain:https://www.nature.com/articles/535S14aTed’s first 2010 trial on honest placebos:https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015591&Academic review on placebos for chronic pain (2020):https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m1668.abstract'The dress':https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress *** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram: @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sor2-Jhuwvc&list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Can we talk to whales?
This week we’ll be diving into the world of whales - as well as dolphins and other cetaceans - with biologist and filmmaker Tom Mustill, author of the fascinating book How to Speak Whale. I first learned about Tom’s work in 2023 when I attended a talk he gave at the British Library, and he began with the story of how on a kayaking trip he was almost crushed by a breaching humpback whale. After that experience, and the discovery that the whale may actually have saved his life by twisting in the air to avoid him, Tom became fascinated by the inner lives of these creatures, and by the exploding potential of technology, including AI, to monitor and understand what they’re getting up to beneath the waves. And there was one question he wanted to answer most of all about their complex communications: could we ever learn to understand them, even talk to them? That might seem a crazy question, but the availability of massive amounts of data, combined with AI algorithms, is now opening a door to decoding the patterns and structures in the vocalisations of all kinds of species, like a kind of Google Translate but for animals. I caught up with Tom to talk about the latest results, as well as what it’s like to be caught underneath a falling humpback - and why we should stop comparing animals’ abilities to ours, and instead open our minds to other kinds of experiences, to the alien horizons of their lives and worlds. Tom’s home pagehttps://www.tommustill.com/ Tom’s book, How To Speak Whale: A voyage into the future of animal communicationhttps://www.tommustill.com/how-to-speak-whale Footage of the humpback whale landing on Tom and Charlottehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee79_7CZ0uM How to be a whale: a half-hour listening journeyhttps://www.tommustill.com/howtobeawhale Project CETIhttps://www.projectceti.org/ Earth Species Projecthttps://www.earthspecies.org/ Happy Whalehttps://happywhale.com/home Tom’s humpbackhttps://happywhale.com/individual/1437 *** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram: @wildthoughts_pod *** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada:https://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We’re talking about science. But not just any science...Each episode, journalist Jo Marchant meets researchers who are doing things differently: challenging our assumptions, stretching our minds, and changing how we see the world.We’ll be pushing boundaries from cosmology and quantum physics to neuroscience, archaeology, ecology… Jo’s guests are asking deep questions, chasing outrageous dreams, and exploring the world in completely new ways.As well as learning about their pioneering ideas, we’ll hear their personal stories: what inspires their leaps of imagination; how they keep going despite the obstacles; the importance of thinking differently; and why we need creativity to survive. But most of all, Where The Wild Thoughts Are is about the wonder of peeking past supposed limits. Come into the wild with us, for a glimpse of what’s beyond… Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ireland