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 page

https://jensnotroff.com/

Göbekli Tepe research project blog

https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/

Taş Tepeler research project

https://tastepeler.org/en

Recommended publications

https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/publications/

Skull cult at Göbekli Tepe

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1700564

Göbekli Tepe World Heritage Site

https://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

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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 page

https://marinacortes.org/

Introduction to biocosmology

https://marinacortes.org/cosmology-cortes-time-biocosmology-astrophysics-marina/#biocosmology

Marina launching biocosmology from Everest base camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HiNlqu0Lc

Short talk by Marina on biocosmology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TH4UsyE3fo&t=3s

2023 paper on biocosmology by Marina, Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle & Lee Smolin

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378

The universe as a process of unique events: 2014 paper by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolin

https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.084007

2021 paper on time and consciousness by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolin

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2021/00000028/f0020009/art00004

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Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada

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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-kaptchuk

Ted’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-body

Honest fakery: How placebos can treat chronic pain:

https://www.nature.com/articles/535S14a

Ted’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

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*** Edited highlights on YouTube

https://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.