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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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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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 page

https://www.tommustill.com/

Tom’s book, How To Speak Whale: A voyage into the future of animal communication

https://www.tommustill.com/how-to-speak-whale

Footage of the humpback whale landing on Tom and Charlotte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee79_7CZ0uM

How to be a whale: a half-hour listening journey

https://www.tommustill.com/howtobeawhale

Project CETI

https://www.projectceti.org/

Earth Species Project

https://www.earthspecies.org/

Happy Whale

https://happywhale.com/home

Tom’s humpback

https://happywhale.com/individual/1437

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This week, we're digging into how living creatures – including us – sense and respond to magnetic fields with quantum biologist Margaret Ahmad of the University of Sorbonne in Paris.

For decades, biologists knew about striking examples of species apparently navigating by Earth’s magnetic field, from monarch butterflies to loggerhead turtles to racing pigeons. Yet for years, many physicists said any ‘magnetosense’ was impossible, insisting the Earth’s field is far too weak to affect any biological processes within living cells. And yet, life really had found a way, and Margaret was one of the key researchers who showed how.

Back in the 1990s, she discovered a blue light receptor in plants, part of a mysterious family of proteins called cryptochromes, and she has since has pioneered research showing how these receptors don’t just sense light but magnetic fields, too. Through quantum physical effects, these proteins magnify impossibly weak magnetic signals into measurable biological responses in a cell.

For Margaret, this connection with the magnetic fields around us is a fundamental characteristic of all life, that should transform our thinking about everything from bird migration, to plant growth, to health effects in humans – and might even lead to revolutionary medical treatments. I spoke to her about her research, what it’s like doing science ‘out on a limb’, as she puts it, and what to do when the evidence leads you off the beaten track…

Margaret Ahmad at Sorbonne University

https://www.ibps.sorbonne-universite.fr/en/ibps/directory/17216-Margaret-Ahmad

Hypersensitivity to man-made electromagnetic fields: 2024 case report

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39108419/

2024 review on cryptochromes

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38495372/

New Scientist story I wrote about Ahmad’s work in 2020 (£)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251835

2021 review on the bird magnetic compass

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2021.667000/full

Roswitha Wiltschko’s lab

https://www.goethe-university-frankfurt.de/47093824/Physiology_and_Ecology_of_Behaviour

Some bacteria sense magnetic fields via magnetite crystals. It's possible these play a role in other species too, maybe even humans

https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/2/ENEURO.0483-18.2019.abstract

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This week, we delve into one of the ancient world's biggest mysteries: the Herculaneum scrolls. Computer scientist Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky talks about a journey that has taken him from Mars to Beowulf to the Dead Sea and beyond. AI has been key to finally reading what's inside the scrolls -- but this is a story about human ingenuity, and what it takes to make an impossible dream come true.

These are hundreds of Greek and Latin papyri, buried by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD and dug up in the 1700s. The scrolls were crushed and carbonised; when anyone tried to read them, they crumbled. Scholars had to accept the rest would never be opened.

This is the only intact library we have from the classical world – complete texts, direct from the pens of ancient scribes. Yet we can’t read them.

Until now. These unopenable scrolls are now being read, through the Vesuvius Challenge, which offers prizes for teams using AI to find the ink in X-ray scans. I’ve written several articles on this, and the pace of discovery has been jawdropping: scholars could soon read the whole library.

But solving this problem hasn't just been about switching on AI. For me, the truly fascinating story is the 20 years of imagination, invention and persuasion that led to this point, all essentially due to one man who persevered even when everyone else thought the idea was crazy.

Brent Seales

https://educelab.engr.uky.edu/w-brent-seales

Vesuvius Challenge

https://scrollprize.org/

Schmidt Sciences

https://www.schmidtsciences.org/focus-area-ai/

My articles:

Scaling up the Vesuvius Challenge: Apr 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01087-y

AI could rewrite history: Jan 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04161-z

First passages revealed: Feb 2024

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00346-8

Brent Seales' quest: Jul 2018

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-scrolls-are-being-read-new-xray-technique-180969358/

Journal papers:

Reading En-Gedi scroll

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1601247

Recovering Herculaneum ink

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0215775

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This week, we’re exploring the secrets of bliss – with neurologist and epilepsy specialist Fabienne Picard of the Medical School of Geneva.

Fabienne became fascinated by a rare condition called “ecstatic seizure” after reading the work of 19th century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. He used his own experiences with epilepsy as inspiration, in particular a profound and intriguing feeling that would strike him just before the seizure itself. He wrote about how, for a few moments, all of his doubts and anxieties disappeared, and the world felt perfectly vivid and clear.

“I feel entirely in harmony with myself and the whole world,” he wrote, “and this feeling is so strong and so delightful that for a few seconds of such bliss one would gladly give up ten years of one’s life, if not one’s whole life.”

Fabienne asked her patients whether any of them had similar experiences, and found that some did, they’d just never had the opportunity to talk about it in conventional consultations. She has identified dozens of new cases, which has enabled her to pin down which part of the brain is involved, and even trigger this feeling in people who don’t have this kind of epilepsy.

I spoke to Fabienne about her patients, what she thinks is happening in their brains, and whether we might all one day be able to benefit from such episodes of bliss -- without the devastating seizures that follow.

LINKS

Fabienne’s home page at University Hospitals of Geneva

https://www.hug.ch/en/neurology/dr-fabienne-picard

Ecstatic or mystical experience through epilepsy: 2023 paper by Fabienne & colleagues

https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article/35/9/1372/116669/Ecstatic-or-Mystical-Experience-through-Epilepsy

Insular stimulation produces mental clarity and bliss: 2022 paper by Fabienne & colleagues

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ana.26282

Epilepsy and ecstatic experiences: 2021 paper by Fabienne & colleagues

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/11/11/1384

Fabienne’s talk to the Buddhist monks at Plum Village

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M16k8Djz29A&t=1957s

Epilepsy in the artistic creation of Dostoevsky: 2014 review

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2173580814000686

Dostoevsky’s epilepsy: 1990 case report

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2161565/

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In this first episode of Where the Wild Thoughts Are, I chat to Paco Calvo, prof of cognitive science from the University of Murcia in Spain. He’s author of the fascinating Planta sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence, and he researches the neurobiology of plants. From bean plants searching out supports to climb up, to parasitic vines chasing down prey, to slow-growing oak trees, Paco is convinced that not only are plants showing intelligent behaviour, they’re sentient, awake, aware.

Perhaps you’re convinced that of course plants aren’t thinking! But is that based on evidence? Could there be other routes to intelligence than the neurons we happen to find in our own brains?

Paco and I discuss how to tell if an organism is intelligent; some of plants’ most impressive abilities (my favourite is the chameleon vine); as well as the mechanics of botanical decision-making. And, of course, we talk about the ethical implications… What would it even mean to start considering our plant companions as sentient?

Paco’s lab at University of Murcia

https://www.um.es/mintlab/index.php/about/people/paco-calvo/

Paco’s book, Planta sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence (written with Natalie Lawrence)

https://www.um.es/mintlab/index.php/publications/planta-sapiens/

‘Do plants behave?’: 2024 paper

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/kr69e_v1

‘Plant sentience revisited’: 2023 paper

https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1830&context=animsent

‘The potential of plant action potentials’: 2023 paper

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04398-7

‘A case study of learning in plants: Lessons learned from pea plants’: 2023 paper

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218231203078

Video: ‘Reflections of a plant intelligence maverick’: 2025 lecture by Paco Calvo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-l1vJNm2H0&t=1s

Michael Pollan on how timelapse photography reveals the inner life of plants

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPql1VHbYl4

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