Episode 654: Jo Marchant
May 25th, 2026
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Predictive Brains, Placebos, Awe, and the Mind–Matter Frontier
Jo Marchant is a science journalist and podcast host, and also the author of several books. Her latest works include In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment and Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body.
Greg and Jo discuss the shared threads across her work: a long view of the history of thought and the mind–body relationship. Jo explains how physics and neuroscience challenge a single objective “now,” describing perception as an active predictive process shaped by past experience and expectations, with examples from illusions and sensory priming. They discuss predictive coding, placebo effects, psychoneuroimmunology, anxiety as attention-weighted error monitoring, and how mindfulness and awe can rebalance attention and reduce stress. Jo also contrasts flow with mindfulness, explores choking and depersonalization-derealization as over-attention to self, and critiques medicine’s structural barriers to integrating context and meaning.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
Why once you hear it, you can't unhear it
14:49: There are other times when we can consciously override things where, for example, if you hear, I don't know, a record being played backwards or something, and it might not, you know, sound like anything, and you're told that actually there's a satanic message hidden within the sound, and you see written down a transcript of what the voice is meant to be saying. So you're listening for it, and so that's adjusting the filtering that your brain's doing. And so it will sort of tune down some things, tune up other things, and then suddenly the voice pops out and you hear it clear as day, and you think, “How on earth did I not hear it before?” You can't unhear it.
Perception is prediction
09:59: Everything that we perceive is being shaped by everything that we have perceived in the past and everything that we expect about the future.
There's no differentiation between real physical pain and psychological pain.
22:20: There's no differentiation between real physical pain and psychological pain. It's all exactly the same pain. All of that pain or fatigue or whatever it is , is that integrated output of the brain taking everything into account that it knows, and then it's giving you this warning signal, and it's that sort of overall picture. And it's the exact same pain, whether that is purely coming from you've just broken your leg or something, or whether it's coming from a lifetime of stress and trauma that's telling you that you're in a really dangerous situation and something is wrong. The pain is going to feel just as real.