Danny (4:17)

Right.

Dr. Elena (4:17)

Just working with that. So that was a great foundation to kind of start to move into working in extreme environments. And I wanted to, I wanted to work with cosmonauts because for me that was the. Not astronauts, but cosmonauts. When they launch in Soviet Union, Russia, they're called cosmonauts.

Danny (4:36)

Oh really?

Dr. Elena (4:36)

Yeah.

Danny (4:37)

Oh, interesting. I think that sounds cooler than astronauts.

Dr. Elena (4:40)

Well, I think Cosmo, you know, in astro there is a similarity, but I think in Russian is cosmos. So it's space, so it's cosmo, not. And so I wanted to fly, I wanted to, you know, to learn. But they wouldn't take women into aviation. And so I thought, well, if I studied parapsychology, which looked at extreme environments.

Danny (5:11)

What do you do? How do you define parapsychology?

Dr. Elena (5:13)

So parapsychology. So Noetic Science Institute. Have you met Din Radin?

Danny (5:20)

No, I haven't. I've heard about him though.

Dr. Elena (5:21)

Definitely speak with Dean Radin. That'd be extraordinary conversation. And Dean Vadin. It's IONS Institute. So Institute of Noetic Science. So that was founded by Edgar Mitchell. So a polar astronaut who actually done parapsychology experiments in space while they were traveling to. On Apollo missions to the moon. And so parapsychology is looking at our extra sensory perception, the phenomena. So that was before all more grounded under that term. And PEER labs in in US were one of the first labs. Well they were specifically actually calling it parapsychology. And they were doing experiments. What does pair stands for? Maybe you can ask Steve.

Danny (6:14)

Para. What is Paris Pier?

Dr. Elena (6:15)

Peer. Like P E A R Pear? Yeah, like a peer pear. And actually got the Grant to go for summer, but couldn't get the US visa at the time.

Danny (6:29)

So how did you get, how did you learn about this at such a young age?

Dr. Elena (6:33)

Well, because of, I think, martial art. Because I wanted to know, you know, how could you see with the back of your head? Because we would train with our eyes closed, right? We would, you know, have to sense, have to predict the movement, have to watch what is happening. So you have to be responding from the moment and that allows you. Then you start questioning, you know, how is that possible? You know, how did they know that, you know, you know, the, the movement was coming from there, like learning aikido. So have you. Are you familiar with aikido?

Danny (7:04)

A little bit, yeah.

Dr. Elena (7:05)

Yeah. So it's working with the energy that's coming in. So you're never working against it, you're working with it. So you, you're taking it in and amplifying it. So if the person is, let's say hitting or pushing, you just take it in, but you redirect. And usually it's got spinning movements. So you spin and in a way you keep spinning and spinning and it amplifies the angle. Like the forces are acting and they end up in the lock.

Danny (7:33)

Right.

Dr. Elena (7:35)

And so this allows you to work with the energy rather than against it, which is another philosophy, Right. That you can apply in everyday life. You know, I mean, all of that has this many layers you learn on physical level, but really it's a philosophy or tao or way of life. So that kind of was interesting. And then parapsychology was very prevalent as well as ufo. So Unidentified Flying Objects in Latvia, it was like an epicenter.

Danny (8:07)

Interesting.

Dr. Elena (8:08)

Yeah, I know. And so most of the studies, not studies, but the center of that research was in Latvia. When I was growing up as a.

Danny (8:17)

Team, I heard stories, anecdotal stories about how in Russia and in the Soviet Union this topic was not as stigmatized as it is in the United States.

Dr. Elena (8:29)

Yes. I think it's quite funny because I can see both sides having kind of grown up in that. And I think it is stigmatized exactly the same way.

Danny (8:40)

Okay.

Dr. Elena (8:42)

It's a perception because what we, I guess just like we see some articles, you know, now, like Dr. Kinos, you know, just recently published the review, right. With many, many authors like Ryan Graves and Kevin.

Danny (8:59)

Kevin Knuth.

Dr. Elena (9:00)

Yeah. Kevin Knuth, Yeah. So. Oh, Professor Kevin Knuth.

Danny (9:05)

Yeah, he's great. I love him.

Dr. Elena (9:06)

Yeah. So they've published now in peer reviewed journal, you know, reviews of other UAP or anomalous. Unidentified Anomalous phenomena. And so there were some that would get past, I guess the screening will be published and somebody will get that article and think it's, you know, popular or it's not a taboo. But yes, it was a taboo. There were books published and scientists, you know, as curious is here, you know, like Diana Pasulka, like Gary Nolan, you know, like, like professor, you know, like they're all.

Danny (9:47)

Yeah, it seems like there is this academic social club of elite UFO researchers in the United States and part of that club is like Jacques Valle, Gary Nolan and these types, these types of folks.

Dr. Elena (10:00)

Yeah.

Danny (10:01)

And how did you get in this group with them? Oh, and I know we're, I'm sorry, I don't mean to jump forward a little bit.

Dr. Elena (10:08)

No, no, it's fine.

Danny (10:09)

I want to go back and I want to learn about like the linear story and of how you get got into this stuff.

Dr. Elena (10:14)

Fine, it's good. So for me, UAPs were long, it was, it was familiar, so it wasn't something that is extraordinary. I personally haven't seen you know like say metallic looking UFO myself despite living in the epicenter. But my focus were always more into more human abilities, you know, human perception. And I wanted to explore this area, you know, more as I got into aviation. But when I speak with pilots about it, they all go hush, hush. So it's a pub conversation or it's a conversation out of the, you know, air force base or out of cockpit. So you don't discuss it and they will only talk about it if they know you, if you speak their language and they trust you. And so I have, you kind of gauge what you can't and can't talk about. Right. In the British culture especially, you know, it's between the lines what you can and can't say. You gauge it and then you just don't go in that direction with that person, for example.

Danny (11:34)

Right.

Dr. Elena (11:35)

So I was surprised when I was in Australia to find out that you can't talk about this. But for me it was, you know, if pilots see it, you can't deny it. You know, I'm, I wasn't there. But if it's distracting the pilot, that's a big problem. And I've raised this with pilots in Australia but as nobody's studying it, there was, you couldn't do research on that. So I started doing research in. I wanted to understand this extrasensory perception of information. So where do they get it, how do they know it and how to improve that decision making when they. It's fast it's tough and they need to make a quick decision. And my way into it was doing research with U. S Air Force, not U.S. australian Air Force. At the time they had, they were changing Hercules aircraft to a new model. So they were playing E model. Sorry, they were playing an H model and they were flying, wanted to go into J. So they were just about to receive a delivery of the Lockheed Martin cargo for prop aircraft, Hercules. And they wanted to understand what the workload is like and whether they can reduce the crew, which is usually two pilots, an engineer, a navigator and there are so flight master who is responsible for releasing the cargo or looking after the cargo. So they're all like one mind when they're flying. They just know when to deliver the information, when to.

Danny (13:23)

They just, they like a hive mind.

Dr. Elena (13:25)

Yeah, absolutely. They're able to know when to pierce the information in literally like, like needlework, you know, exactly at the right time. And, and the manufacturers were saying, you know, we can now reduce the crew, which means, you know, have to pay less salary, less workload. But it wasn't felt that way. Of course, people don't want to be eliminated. Right. So the navigating engineer had nowhere to go. In a way they will have to disappear from the cockpit. And they were saying that the machines will do, automation will do everything for you. So it will give you all the information at the right time. And of course that did not happen. You know, it doesn't. Because you could have the information but you still have to retrieve it. And the automation doesn't read your mind. It can only anticipate what you program it with and who is programming. It's usually engineers, it's not pilots. So pilots have their own information flow of what they rely on. They actually don't need to know how the engine works. They want to know can the engine get them from A to B or from this point of an emergency to that point, you know, and will they have enough power to get there? They just need that projection because that's what they're doing in their head. Because if it's broken, they can't fix it in flight. They can now have to work with, you know, anticipate. They're working with nature. Right, right.

Danny (15:02)

And they're working high level problem solving.

Dr. Elena (15:04)

Yeah. And also they're working with how much air, you know, that they can sustain under their wings, you know, with changing the peach depending on how much, how many engines they've lost or something like that. So. But even on just takeoff and or refueling, which is also quite Critical, you know, to keep it steady, both being alive in midair. Yeah. So all of that requires that anticipation, so. And having now dived in, into that environment and learning to fly myself, because they wouldn't really communicate with you. You feel like you are an outsider until you speak that language. And you can only speak that language if you went through that experience.

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Dr. Elena (17:11)

Can use the words because they fly. I mean, one of the sayings, they say they fly by the seat of their pants, which is true. So you feel your whole body has many more sensors. So, like, we have a. An understanding that we have, like five sensors. Typically, that's what I learned in psychology. But no, no, we've got. I can, you know, go over at least 12. And it's proprioception, right? You sense the temperature, you sense vibration. There is a kinesthetic sense. There is a gut feeling for some reason, you Know, and, you know, you get goosebumps and, you know, indications of something. You can feel the humidity in there. You know, how do you pick that up? It's all senses that we acknowledge in animal world, but not in the human world for some reason. But yet we scan all of that. We gauge the brightness and the changes. Okay. It's visual field, but it's slightly different in terms of how we could be perceiving.

Danny (18:05)

It totally makes sense.

Dr. Elena (18:07)

Yeah. And then if you go to parapsychology. So my colleagues that studied with me psychology, they actually did go into parapsychology. And one of them was teaching children to play computer games, not looking at the screen. So they were turned away and they would play computer screen games.

Danny (18:26)

Who was doing this?

Dr. Elena (18:28)

Well, there was a research. They do this in the US as well. I think it's called Mindsight. Mindsight. So have you come across the Psy Games that just recently was. It was like a big conference called Psy Games. They just started organizing. Maybe it's the second year.

Danny (18:44)

I've never heard of this.

Dr. Elena (18:45)

Yeah, it's extraordinary. So there's one lady, her name is. Oh, gosh. Her daughter is Lido, but her name I will remember. So she. She just demonstrated her abilities. I should know. So she. On psychimps, she showed people that she could, you know, she had like triple blinds. So she had glued patch. Yeah, like glued patches that you would medical. That you will glued. Then she wore a blind patch that you can't see through anyway. The ones that are foam patches. Yeah. And also I think she wore the. One of those flight patches underneath. So unglued flight patch.

Danny (19:28)

And then like a sleep mask or something.

Dr. Elena (19:29)

Sleep mask. Yeah. And then, you know, she had that. And she could read anything you have. She could.

Danny (19:37)

I think I have seen this. Yeah, I think I saw this online. Like on a YouTube video.

Dr. Elena (19:41)

Yeah. So that's. That's the side games. And the lady that was so that's, I think run. And they also. They do this for children as well. So there were children on there too. And so they were gonna run this next year. So I'm just thinking, I can't see the lady that is so all these people. That's the lady. So that Dahlia.

Danny (20:04)

I remember seeing her. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw her on a podcast. She was reading something through a screen with all those things on her face.

Dr. Elena (20:12)

It's, I guess Dahlia Bourgeois.

Danny (20:16)

Sounds like a French Dahlia Bourgeois.

Dr. Elena (20:18)

Yes. So she has a daughter who has some also abilities. So it's Telepathy tapes. If you come across Dr. Hennessy Powell, who has been studying savants. So it's children who have autism, but they also have these extraordinary abilities that they, for example, have photographic memory, or they can do math really well, or they demonstrate, like language capacities that they have never come across. And so her daughter Lido, she found out at 11 years old. So she has other children as well, but only at 11, she started speaking with her daughter through a spelling board. So these children are called spellers. And I think there's a new term that they would like to introduce because non speakers is incorrect, because they can speak through spelling in a way, they're communicating through spelling. Through spelling. So they have a board because they have a difficulty coordinating their body. So they. They can kind of punch the letters on the board one at a time. So it takes time. There's a lot of controversy in the medical, more science field for a long time that they're saying that the person who has the spelling board is helping them to spell. But it's unrealistic. You know, there are so many situations and things that these children know that.

Danny (21:52)

Are just extraordinary and they can't actually say the words.

Dr. Elena (21:56)

So Dalia is learning to speak now. So she's now several years into spelling and she, I believe she was able to sing before some because it's a responsible, different part of the brain. It's responsible for music and singing. So she was able to sing, but not to say the words because it takes a lot of coordination. It's a different part of the brain that's responsible for it. So they are able to spell. And they say, for example, there was one. And teachers who work with these children were called spellers. They are unable sometimes to tell their organizations that they're teaching, you know, for. Or sometimes parents that they're communicating telepathically with these children because it's not accepted. And also, parents want children to talk, of course. You know, they want them to be integrated into the world the same way that parents are. Right.

Danny (23:02)

So they want them to be able to adapt and fit into the rigid framework of society.

Dr. Elena (23:07)

Beautifully said. Exactly. So we've got a concept how we should be, and that's what they want. You know, that's, I guess, not just the parents. It's the society expectation. And we are trying to fit in as best we can. So these children. So for one example, that's in Kay Dickens. So Diana Hennessy Powell is a researcher, has been doing this for many, many years, and she worked in Harvard as well. And she had a very interesting story. If you can speak with her, that'd be extraordinary as well. And so, so one of the stories that parents, sorry, the teacher brought, bought biscuits, but brought one biscuit to the classroom, to these children, but forgot the others in the car. And so she gave the children these biscuits in this, in this classroom. And one boy came up to her and, and drew the biscuit that she left in the car because it was like a donut shape. So how could he possibly know?

Danny (24:16)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (24:17)

And. And this is just like one, you know, example, but it's just continuously, all the time. And Kai Dickens is, she's a producer and they're just filming a film with these children and parents and you really hear their stories. What parents had to go through where the, you know, the people, the experts that they go to, they say there's nobody there in their child.

Danny (24:43)

Like there's nobody home.

Dr. Elena (24:44)

Yeah. And, you know, parents feel otherwise. And when they discover that their children actually can talk and they're in there and more so they are, they are and have been communicating with them all the time. So they would actually drop things into their mind. And for example, you can't hide any food in the house because they know exactly where the food is and how many pieces are left. So you can't say, I don't have it, because the children know everything you think about.

Danny (25:21)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (25:21)

And when the parents start to pick up on that, they say that this feeling of this communication that is telepathic, it's more whole, more experiential. So, for example, one of the mothers says that Thanksgiving, like, if I tell you Thanksgiving, you would have your own concept that came through experience. And for me, because I don't have the experience I'll have, I know what, you know, something that I have read or watched. And. But for her, when she hears that concept from her child, she gets the smell, the love, the hugs, the food, you know, she will get the whole embrace, the excitement of being together. All of that will just flood over her. Not just word, like telepathically. Yes. And then she would, from that she will put it into a word. And moreover, these children are actually meeting each other, what they call the hill.

Danny (26:32)

The hill.

Dr. Elena (26:33)

The hill. So they talk to each other. They sometimes even meet at the specific time and they know each other. And then sometimes, I think there were stories that in Kai Deakin's telepathy tape radio show that she's created on Spotify, you can listen and YouTube, I think now. And they almost like plan to meet through parents Those who starts to spell, they want to go to certain places and then meet those children that they met telepathically in this virtual space called the hill.

Danny (27:12)

It's a virtual space.

Dr. Elena (27:13)

Yes. So it's telepathic. It's not virtual computer.

Danny (27:16)

Right, right, right. But it's somewhere out there in.

Dr. Elena (27:19)

Yeah. Conscious. You know, it's where they meet.

Danny (27:22)

And they can meet people they've never met physically before.

Dr. Elena (27:25)

Yes, yes. And some. So some conundrums that are challenging is that some children that don't have spelling ability yet, or their parents can't get to it, or they don't know their child can have it. Right. Because not all parents have the access to this particular method. Or maybe they don't know about it, maybe because it's so taboo. But it's been for many decades existing. But the speech society has rejected it as a valid method. And also there is this pressure, you know, for children to be able to speak. But does it matter if they can communicate? You know, like, if you can communicate with your child, of course you'd want to communicate in any way possible.

Danny (28:13)

Right, totally.

Dr. Elena (28:15)

Sorry. With information.

Danny (28:17)

Yeah. No, it. It.

Dr. Elena (28:19)

So you asked me this question.

Danny (28:20)

You make a good point. But. But yeah, no, obviously it is, right. If. If you're a mother and you have a child that's, say, three years old and you're surrounded by other mothers who have kids in the same age, you guys typically, in my. At least in my experiences, like, the mothers are always trying to, like, bounce ideas off each other. How is your child doing? Figure out how my child's doing compared to all these other kids. Get a little community. And like, you know, usually just in the society that we live in, you. You would expect your kids to start learning specific words at a certain age and stringing words together at another age. And then like, okay, well, now my kid's about to be four. We got to put them in, like, kindergarten. And, you know, this is just what we do in the society. So it's like, to step outside of that is kind of like uncomfortable for a lot of people. And if. And if kids start to develop in new ways, like, that's got to be so much more unsettling or uncomfortable for people if it's not. Because it's, It's. It sounds just at face value for somebody who's not initiated into any of this stuff. It sounds kooky.

Dr. Elena (29:29)

Yes, exactly. But these children are extraordinary. So they. They. Apparently they teach each other. So once the one child acquires the ability, they can meet on the hill and they can teach each other that skill. They, they have their own teachers. We, we can only hear from them what these teachers are. Some describe them as angel, like, some describe them as, you know, they come in form.

Danny (29:58)

So what is it about these children specifically? Is there, is there something that we can, that we know about them psychologically or developmentally that makes them all unique?

Dr. Elena (30:12)

So it's. So every child is different, just like we are, you know, we are put into one category in school, like, you know, as we're going through. But in a way we learn differently, we communicate differently, we pick up information through our perception differently, we mix it differently. But we are taught that we are the same, that you see the same orange as I do. No, we don't. So these children are so unique. That's why it's so challenging. Because their physical ability differs, their cognitive ability difference, their emotional regulation difference physically on how they work with their body. So this erratic movements that they have when they perceived as abnormal, they're actually trying to feel the edge of their body because they don't feel their body. So when they're doing this, you know, strange movements that look to us unsocial or inappropriate or, you know, whatever we've learned conceptually to see, they're actually trying to literally get into their body to feel the edges. So when some, when they're learning to spell, if somebody touches them before they start spelling, they feel more grounded and in the body. So they can then focus better and they can make that one directive movement which takes a lot of focus and concentration. They also now do tablets. They do it on tablets once they start advancing from aboard.

Danny (31:39)

But is there. Is there? They're all non verbal, right?

Dr. Elena (31:45)

Well, interestingly so Dahlia's daughter yet, Lido, she's learning now to pick up. So it's almost like the language working at different pathways. But of course it takes so much effort to say something, to string that together because it's new neural pathways, of course we can remap our neurology. And so it's harder. And so some of the children that parents have learned to telepathically communicate with them. So could you imagine so many discoveries. Their children, you know, are actually there. They're very clever. They learn history from you. So they, you watch a film, they can talk to you about that film. You've learned something. So when you put them in the classroom, they're reading everybody's mind. So yeah, so if they go into a property school, they would read what the teacher knows. So taking Them out of school just because of how they behave to us is actually not necessarily good. It's harder for the class management. And of course you can't talk to the child in the same way. But you know, I'm not an expert in it. I'm just communicating the fascination, the extent of what we don't know about extrasensory perception and our capabilities. That's why when that came out for me, it starts to explain some of the questions that I have that, you know, we were not allowed to test in our scientific methodology.

Danny (33:20)

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Dr. Elena (34:30)

Of the method that I was doing my thesis, my PhD thesis with pilots was reading their mind, literally reading their thoughts. And I got as close as possible using scientific methodology to be able to pick up what they're thinking at the time. Because all the methods beforehand were post event. So for example, if I'll ask you, can you recite to me all the morning from the moment you woke up? And if you are to recite to me, you would possibly filter who am I? Where we are, who is listening, you know, what is appropriate to say, what would be interesting for me to share, what kind of things I wish not to share. You know, there's a lot of context and, and result of it's a lot of filters and context concepts. You know, you will see what will I get? You know, you would probably wouldn't even name some pieces of food because I might not be familiar with it.

Danny (35:28)

Right.

Dr. Elena (35:29)

I don't know, like, you know, some cultural peculiarities.

Danny (35:32)

Sure.

Dr. Elena (35:33)

So, and so if I am to do that with pilots, so let's say the challenge that I had, so they'll land and I need to make sure to improve their performance in the new cockpit. So I'm designing as a cognitive engineer. That's the name of the profession. I am looking on what they are processing and what should go onto the display. Because now we are switching in year 2000 from clock, like instruments, so just, you know, dials into a screen. So initially what they were putting is those clock instruments onto the screen, which is pointless. Right. Because you can fit more of them.

Danny (36:14)

Right.

Dr. Elena (36:14)

But that's the pilot. It's again, it's an ingenious way of thinking.

Danny (36:18)

Well, when the screen breaks, then all your clocks were broken.

Dr. Elena (36:21)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's that too. You know, there's a lot of issues. So there's a lot of redundancy in the cockpit usually. But so in this case, the idea was, how can I understand what they're actually thinking, not what they want me to think. You know, as a psychologist, for one, which is another a big taboo. Like, if I tell you that I don't remember or that I don't know, I couldn't think that moment I was actually thinking of my, you know, did I tell my wife that the person's going to come fix the washing machine? I forgot to tell her, you know, and they're going to show up in the house. That's just, you know, it's a human thing, you know, like, that's what we do. So I came across this extraordinary couple, Mary Omidi and Dr. McLennan. They studied decision making of firefighters in Australia. And as, you know, like in California there are bushfires. And in Australia they have this. It's a, you know, very, very big challenge. And just like in any critical decision making, the people who are good survive. So. But how do you pass on that information of when to get out of the burning house or a burning area to save the crew and to save the people? Because you go, you don't want to lose, you know, the crew life as well as you want to save everybody in the area. Right. So where is that knowing? How do you know in that split second that you have to get everyone out of the building or out of that area versus staying Another second and saving somebody's life.

Danny (38:02)

Right. It's a very intuitive thing.

Dr. Elena (38:05)

Yeah.

Danny (38:05)

To be in the moment.

Dr. Elena (38:06)

Exactly.

Danny (38:07)

It's hard to put on paper.

Dr. Elena (38:08)

So what they've come up with is extraordinary. So they've just done the simplest thing. They put the camera on the firefighters helmet or like, actually I'm not sure if it's under, but anyway, it's exposed on the eye level. And the firefighters go in and when they ask them, just like I did, ask the pilot, you know, how did your landing go? And they say, fine. How did the touchdown go? Fine. You know, did you have all the information? Yes. You know, what else was, you know, what you need Nothing. You know, like, how do you improve from that? So I've learned to fly, to get that language, you know, to pick up. So I understand what kind of things, how the ground is coming up. You're actually not coming down to the earth when you're landing. You're watching how fast the ground is coming up and whether it's, you know, how the wind is reacting and you're literally feeling the extent of your senses in the aircraft. So your body is no longer your body. You are that frame. You know that you're flying and you are in it and you feel where the gear is and where the tail is, where the nose is, and you are part of that space. It's very extraordinary. If you ever flown, you know, by yourself when you're actually trying to land is my favorite part. Because takeoff is easy, but landing, it's just, you know, sometimes they say, you know, kissing the ground or else. So they call it controlled collision with the ground. So the firefighters had the same problem. It's just, how did you know to get out at that time? How did you know? Because they literally walk out and the building will go down or some crucial infrastructure will go. So when they put the camera on, when they came out, they look at the footage as soon as possible and there's nobody there apart from a cognitive engineer or a human computer interaction expert or training expert, you know, somebody who is just sitting like a sitter and we play the tape and they watch what has been happening from their point of view and what happens. Several sensors get activated. Not just your memory, because some of us work visually, some of us work auditorily, some of us work through, you know, smell as well. It has an effect. Some of us, we've got this vibration also when we speak. When you speak with me, you nod or you tilt the head when you're curious about something. And all of that that's cues that you don't usually think about. But if you look at the screen, it will all cue you to recall that moment. And you literally start. You can then because of all the skews are available. So you're cueing several memory paths through all the perception perceptual channels. And now you're able to pick up all of your memory that's been happening. And you have to pause often the recording that is being played back to them, sometimes for several minutes, for them to articulate what was actually going through their mind.

Danny (41:19)

Oh, wow.

Dr. Elena (41:21)

So the tape ends up, let's say if the exercise was half an hour, it could triple easily. Sometimes it's, you know, four or five times longer because they articulate what was happening through their mind and they will tell you extraordinary detail. So what they've discovered, which this firefighter did not know of what he was doing. So they've got this. Guards, heat guards on their head. And they're not supposed to remove them, but they would remove them, like bend them so they could hear the crackling.

Danny (41:53)

Oh, wow.

Dr. Elena (41:55)

And also they could hear the temperature change.

Danny (41:59)

They could hear the temperature change.

Dr. Elena (42:01)

No feel. So they can hear the crackling. So because the sound of fire, it changes. They could describe the fire in many words. Right. But also they can feel because there are gusts of air and it changes. It's a living, breathing thing for them, the fire. So they feel it on how it passes by them, them and they know the intensity and what to do. But they cannot, you know, like, they cannot come up to you and say, this is how the fire behaves. But through experience, through all of this flooding, they found that they could do this, you know, they could offload all of that information. So when I was defending my PhD, you know, the cognitive engineering literature would say, you know, we work, our decision making is tree, like so. Decision making tree. No, nothing like that. Nothing at all. Because with this method, you just. They just know what to do. And then if I am come to explain it to you why I made the decision, if you are my, I don't know, safety board of why somebody got injured and I didn't tell them in time, I'll tell them I follow this, this and that procedure. And of course it was yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. But at the time, that was not like that at all. And so I later applied this technology with pilots to improve their decision making by response time by 200%, which is unheard of in aviation.

Danny (43:34)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (43:34)

And I got U.S. air Force Grant then to come and disseminate knowledge to us.

Danny (43:40)

Really? Are you the first person to ever do anything like this?

Dr. Elena (43:44)

Well, there's breaking research all the time.

Danny (43:47)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (43:47)

Right. You know, but so I've used this extraordinary method. I've converted to pilots because they just have no time of the day for you. They're, you know, too busy, too fast, you know, to do anything. So I've just adapted it to aviation environment. I guess they were the founders of it. And so that was literally reading the people's mind. And then I've used that method to. For surgeons in the uk, in Scotland, there is a beautiful. Surgeons have saw my presentation and they said, can we do this with surgeons? And what the idea was there is rapid expertise transfer. So what they want to do or what usually happens and what they didn't realize. So before we started the study, they did not know that. And it took us a long time to get the grant. And we couldn't get the grant because it doesn't bypass all the scientific filters, because people who review your applications usually have not done that work. And it will be contrary to what they've said before, so it doesn't fall. So to do the really blue sky research, or the one that comes from the field, from observation, from practical experience, is really hard to fund because you have to make an assumption. And only now, in order to write the grant, you know, scientifically to be approved, you almost have to say what your results would be, what the outcomes, you know, what the benefits, what the impact, you know, all of that.

Danny (45:23)

You have to show a return, a return on investment beforehand. Right.

Dr. Elena (45:27)

But science, you know, like, you never know. You must be open to what will come forth. I mean, maybe, but, you know, the way it's said, like you put the hypothesis, it might be proven or disproven, but you not always have a hypothesis in these situations.

Danny (45:43)

Right.

Dr. Elena (45:44)

So, so what happened is that they were so far thinking, you know, surgeons, because they're also, you know, so quick, right? It's decision, life or death. Every single time, A lot, you know, many times through their procedure that they're doing or an operation in a theater. And so the idea was, is that they were doing. So this is Dr. Kennis, I'll remember.

Danny (46:13)

What kind of surgeon was he?

Dr. Elena (46:15)

So, so it's. I'll remember, I'll look it up. So we worked with Ken, we got the grant, they found the internal funding, which they could do, like small grants, and they basically put their own time to do that work. So essentially they got the bare minimum covered. And they invested their own time on top of their, you know, high workload.

Danny (46:41)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (46:41)

And so. And what we've done, we've took the cameras and we've done endoscopy. Endoscopy is when you're going, we've got two entry, you know, here and the other entry. And so endoscopies, you either swallow or you push up.

Danny (46:56)

Oh, a camera.

Dr. Elena (46:57)

Yes, a camera. And so it's investigating, untethered, tethered with the gut. And actually that was quite interesting that one of them, one of the surgeons endoscopist was, I think he was. So he was flying planes as well as a hobby. And so for him, when he was doing endoscopy, he felt like he was flying through the.

Danny (47:25)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (47:26)

Through the passages on how he would navigate. Because the equipment that they have, if you look at it, is very intricate. So they've got one hand to operate. It's like a cockpit control with all the many buttons and they have to invert that into the movement of the endoscope and where it turns because they have to not only pass, but they have to scan and watch everything that's happening. So they're working in this modeling. And so they're working with several fingers and watching it and watching it on the screen so it's not in front of you. So it's almost like they're astronauts, you know, like navigating robotic arm in space. And so we use that method to transfer expertise because it's really hard to learn that skill on how do you navigate. But also keep watching for all the peculiarities, discoloration, the changes in texture of the tissue. And there's a lot to consider. So as they were doing it, they found out that they work side by side. So literally the rooms in the hospital are side by side. And two surgeons who were general surgeons who were doing general operation, which are, you know, very tough operations when they remove the majority of the affected area by cancer or. And I've watched one of those 12 hour operations. So, you know, like it's a. And. And they, you know, can you imagine to be focused on all of that time? And so. And what they found is that because Ken was now they were able to watch each other and hear their thoughts. So they're looking through their eyes and they're hearing their thoughts. So they're literally immersed in another person's point of view and they're in their mind, hear their thoughts because they just tape them over. Right. That we sat down and we taped over.

Danny (49:29)

Right, right, right.

Dr. Elena (49:30)

And so what that allows, Then they were working side by side and they exchange after surgery. How did it go? Says, you know, it was, you're exhausted.

Danny (49:40)

How do you know? Oh, go back and articulate every single feeling and every single moment.

Dr. Elena (49:45)

But they would say, yeah, I had one of those too. But they never articulate what they actually done. So they never exchanged the expertise. And they assume that you as a surgeon would be doing the same as I would because we trained the same way or similar paths we had. But in actual theater and actual momentary decisions, they go against rules, against procedures, and they have the intuitive way of doing it. But when they have to justified to a medical board or teach somebody, they will do it differently. So this most precious professional intuition is not passed on unless you work really closely with a surgeon for a long time. Because in a teaching environment you're not allowed to teach certain things of how you.

Danny (50:34)

Sorry. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say surgeons have a very special personality type. I noticed.

Dr. Elena (50:40)

Yeah. Well, I found the most humbling people. You know, so is astronauts. So, you know, people who work, they're.

Danny (50:46)

Very, very confident and they have a specific type of demeanor. I've noticed that's pretty stereotypical for all surgeons I've met.

Dr. Elena (50:57)

Well, I, I was humbled.

Danny (50:58)

They're not easygoing people.

Dr. Elena (51:00)

Well, like astronauts, I found that a lot of them, you know, play instrument professionally, which is like, where do they get the time? You know, they've got amazing family and they, you know, some of them have also belief systems that they support, you know, through their study or reading. They constantly have to, you know, either teach or to, you know, support a younger generation.

Danny (51:23)

Right.

Dr. Elena (51:23)

They have to constantly write, you know, paper conferences and you know, to be on top, to be qualified all the time. They expected to perform on top of their profession, you know, share the expertise.

Danny (51:36)

So when you're sort of reliving these experiences that these high level surgeons are going through, or these surgical procedures that they're going through, or like a high level Navy pilot landing, you know, doing some sort of flight operation, you're trying to like download everything that they experience and understand exactly what they experienced. What is the goal of that? Like what are you trying to, are you trying to take like maybe a shortcut to sort of teach people this skill without going through the, going through the experience of it?

Dr. Elena (52:13)

Yes, exactly. Okay, so there's two goals that I've worked with. I'm sure, you know, another person who would read, you know, the, my thesis or something or some of the papers, they will pick up what they can do with this methodology. You can also improve interfaces, you know, our phones. I mean part. Another word for this profession is human computer interaction or user design, you know, interface design. That, that's all one of the same. So I used to teach that as well as part of my, you know, studentship and being at university teaching human computer interaction. So two things. One, originally I was to wanted to design displays because I was interested design spacecrafts. So I wanted to do the most modern look in how to. It's almost like being one with a craft. I wanted that feeling when you are connected with a craft.

Danny (53:12)

Spacecrafts?

Dr. Elena (53:13)

Well, aircraft, spacecraft, helicopter, you know, any, any kind of craft.

Danny (53:17)

Like the cockpit specifically.

Dr. Elena (53:18)

Yeah, cockpit specifically, yeah, well, to be integrated into that. So my idea was more sci fi related and actually, and well what I really. Well, I'll answer your question first. I'm diving into so many directions. So two ideas. One is to understand what is actually happening in our mind. So cognition, how we process. And I found out that we pick up through many more sensors than what we are traditionally taught in my, you know, clinical psychology training, which is the widest, the broadest training you get. And, and then how do you transport that to accommodate what's your next decision making would be what information points you want to be making decision from, be anticipatory. Because what I saw in the cockpits that were there, they were not supporting the decision making. They were just slams of information that were either, you know, engineers thought on how the aircraft works or what they thought they need to know.

Danny (54:26)

Hey guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video back to the show.

Dr. Elena (54:32)

So in year 2000 we have aircraft crashes every week. Major airlines crash every week in the year 2000. Yeah, yeah. So it's that period. Because that's when the cockpits got introduced is 1999, 2000, 2001.

Danny (54:52)

So this is when what got introduced?

Dr. Elena (54:54)

New cockpits. New cockpits, yeah. We went from analog to glass. So from dials to screens.

Danny (55:01)

All the major commercial airlines did that.

Dr. Elena (55:03)

Yeah, so Airbus introduced the A320. So I've learned to fly that. But in the training simulator, not an actual. I just sat with the pilots with one of the Australian airlines that now no longer exists. Onset. There was an onset. Australia. And also I was working for Emirates Lines. So I, I sat in the cockpits when you were flying different cities. And I worked as a psychologist for crew selection. And so, and, and so we wanted to Transport what the pilot needed rather than what engineer wanted them to know. So I wanted to merge the two. I wanted to get them to communicate. And later on I actually, once I finished my PhD, somehow I got to. I, I met with Marshall Air, which, which is in Cambridge. It's a privately owned aviation company. And I actually did get to apply all of it. And I trained and I got electronics, avionics, wire management, avionics, you know, all the, all the departments that usually make a cockpit and what they were doing, they will take a aircraft from the desert and from us, the, let's say. So we were doing aircraft for the Dutch Air force and they will bring it to Cambridge airfield. We even had a Scorpion on the floor on the cockpit. Not in the cockpit, in the aircraft.

Danny (56:38)

Oh, really?

Dr. Elena (56:39)

Yeah.

Danny (56:39)

Like a real Scorpion?

Dr. Elena (56:40)

Yes, yes. From, from, from, from the U.S. oh, wow. And, and then they strip it completely like to, to the thin metal that gets completely x rayed so there are no cracks that get replenished. And then we redesign the entirety. So I was responsible for what goes for what will be seen or worked with by pilots in the aircraft. So we would then order from different manufacturers displays and I had to integrate them. So it's all one system because from different manufacturers you would have different color philosophy, different information presentation philosophy. There's a lot of things. So I had to work that up and whatever what we found in the process, because nobody was familiar with new cockpits, but everybody was, you know, trying to catch up and trying to sell, you know, new equipment. We had to. We actually, they were so receptive, you know, considering I was very young, you know, as a scientist and also although I worked with pilots, I was not really, you know, like still a youngster.

Danny (57:45)

Right, right. You didn't have tons of experience.

Dr. Elena (57:47)

No, but this was new technology as well. So they're very wise men, I would say. And so they listened. And we build a mock up. We. They took an old Hercules, cut the face off, put it in the hangar because it was all in the airport. And the art department that would usually do manuals for pilots, you know, like for. Well, not pilots, but engineers as well, that like maintenance when they release the aircraft. And also for the aviation authority to do the checkups, they've actually built entire mock up cardboard cockpit. They built three model instruments because what you see in the cockpit has a big instrument at the back which with all the sensors and electronics. And so the Hercules has a small nose, like it's quite a modest nose versus other aircrafts. They say it's only mother can love the face of the Hercules. That's what the pilots say. So, so when. And so what was happening is that. So we had this perfect layout, you know, like all the instruments perfect. And. And then I would go to speak to one department, they say, no, no, no, it has to be here. And then I would say, well, let's, you know, let's do design a and put it up. And so we will put the instruments. But then the electronics engineers would come and they would say, well, actually we need to put the 2 inch connector at the back. So now we can't fit it into the cockpit anymore. So we have to. We can't move the display, we can't move the entirety of the display closer or pull the instrument out of the dashboard. So we have to rework an entire system. So I got them to actually learn and speak and I taught all of them human factors and cognitive engineering course on how to do human computer interaction design. And they including managers and sales team, because then they could upsell what they're doing to companies because they knew what they were talking about.

Danny (59:48)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (59:49)

And anybody can learn because it's all, in a way, what. It's also called common sense. Which is not common sense. It's like when you go into a cockpit or, you know, when you use your device.

Danny (60:00)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (60:01)

It's perfect. Right. It's easy. But it wasn't common sense when you start the design. So when you walk into the, you know, technology space or let's say, you know, any machine interface.

Danny (60:13)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (60:14)

And it's intuitive. A lot of work went to it, but it looks like you've done nothing because it's all easy. Mama, papa. Muy pronto. Conos precios bajos de la vuelta Clases de Amazon Amazon gasta menos son riemas. Right. It's like you want to push the button. You need that information. It's all long process of iteration. So we had like four or five iterations every time we'll sit at something will not work out either for engineers or for pilots. So it's like you're an interface between all of these engineering teams. So, so this is to answer your first question. So that was to understand what the pilot was doing in order for it to be presented in such a way that in that one instance when they have to save the plane from crushing, they would have access to that instrument while everything else would go out. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. So this is similar. Yeah. So this is an old cockpit.

Danny (61:17)

That's overwhelming.

Dr. Elena (61:18)

Yes. But this Is not it? There is above. There's all the switches above the head as well. Oh, my gosh, yes. And.

Danny (61:25)

Oh, yeah. Go to the next one, Steve. Well, this is the analog. And then I found a digital.

Dr. Elena (61:31)

Perfect date. So this is a simulator. That one. Yeah.

Danny (61:35)

Oh, my gosh.

Dr. Elena (61:36)

Yeah. So this is. And so I'm just trying to think which model it is. But so what you can see, you see with big rings. So this is a navigation display, or it's your. They call it situational awareness. So you can get your traffic, the weather, the maps, and then on the outer sides where you see the blue and yellow. So this is your primary flight display, where you get your, you know, what the aircraft is actually doing. And you will also, in addition to that, will have secondary instruments in case the system fails. You will have usually a manual also, but I don't see it here. So sometimes they use. So then the navigator display, which the two concentric rings will become a primary. So, like, there's a failure plugged in, you know, one of the instruments go out. They can all go out as well. And you can then have to fly just by the feeling, right?

Danny (62:37)

Yeah. I was flying with this guy a couple years ago on this really tiny little plane from the Bahamas back to here, Tampa. And this plane could only fit two passengers and two people in the front cockpit and then two people in the back. Super tiny plane. And there was lots of storms around us. And I was just, you know, it was like a really small, slow plane. So it was like three hours. And I was talking to him like, I'm like, what happens if you run into a flock of birds or lightning strikes us and you lose both energy. He goes, and he knew immediately, he's like, if I lose one engine, I know exactly where I can land. I can look like I'm already. I already know exactly every single place around me where that I can land. I know I can turn around and hit that highway that we just passed about 20 minutes ago. If I lose both engines, I know I can land there. I can land there. Worst case scenario, I can land in that lake or. He was like, his situ. His situational awareness was off the charts. And he made me feel comfortable. I was like, wow, we can lose both engines and we're going to be fine.

Dr. Elena (63:42)

Yeah. And so that is also interesting, so. Because this is a way of thinking, so you can't switch that off when you get to the ground.

Danny (63:50)

Right. It's like hyper vigilance.

Dr. Elena (63:52)

Yeah. So these, you know, these professions, surgeons as well as you know, pilots, war fighters too. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Any profession. So that becomes your train or how you think in, in your life.

Danny (64:09)

Right.

Dr. Elena (64:11)

But in a way you think of worst case scenarios and you plan for them. So that kind of thinking, if people don't look after themselves, that could become difficult because you always in your life also look for the worst case scenario and plan for it. And also due to the profession in aviation, they work in remote places. They had to maintain your circle because you've got odd hours, it's not your working hours and you end up going to the pub because there is nothing else do, for example. And there are a lot of depression, there's a lot of alcoholism for ptsd. Yeah. Post traumatic stress disorder. That, that's more. If people have had a stressful, you know, something they couldn't recover from experience. Post traumatic stress disorder. So that would be from the war time or surgeons could have that, you know, emergency personnel who are doing emergency, you know, the. So that is, it's very, very big problem, ptsd. I mean, it's not necessarily related to pilots because it's. Unless they had an accident that they had to then fly from or a personal traumatic situation.

Danny (65:22)

Well, there's so many stories, you know, famous stories of, of pilots, commercial airline pilots falling into drug abuse and alcoholism and things like this.

Dr. Elena (65:31)

Yes.

Danny (65:31)

You know.

Dr. Elena (65:31)

Yeah. It's because they don't have. Well, not always, but they may not have, let's say, if they're not actively doing this. Because, you know, if we're in our life, if we're balanced in our, you know, social, personal, physical, you know, emotional, intellectual belief system and values, if we're not touching all of that from time to time, holistically, then something will get out of balance. You know, it's sort of like you have to come. It's like a riding, you know, a wave you need to be. Once you've got a calm moment, you need to, you know, go dive under the water, enjoy the scenery, go up, you know, enjoy the sun when it's stormy, you know, keep it steady.

Danny (66:11)

Right, yeah. How could you have that? How could you have that balance when your job is to fly all over the country or all over the world every single day and be so detached from, you know, if you do have a significant other or children or anything like this, like that's going to be a huge strain on you?

Dr. Elena (66:26)

Well, it's the case in few professions, including, you know, people who work 24 7, you know, their schedule, sometimes they have night shifts or extra extraordinary type of environment that seems normal to them. I mean, we choose it, but we don't know what that means later in life. Like we could choose to be a surgeon, we could choose to be a pilot, we could choose to be an emergency, I don't know, nurse or something like that, but you don't know what comes with the job. It only then when you're already in.

Danny (66:56)

The crazy thing is people will pick these occupation or decide which one of these dreams to follow early on in life. Strictly on looking at it through the lens of money.

Dr. Elena (67:08)

Yeah.

Danny (67:08)

And Right. Like what career is going to earn me the most money or the most success or the most fame? And they don't consider any of these other things that could send you down a psychological black hole spiral.

Dr. Elena (67:22)

Yes. Well, I think in the outright, the humanity is optimistic, you know, in the outlook. So we see only what we, what we can imagine right now or what the picture is being painted and we're very trustful. So this touching these two points about the, you know, depression that you mentioned and also, you know, choosing the professions or what we are expected to do, what we need to do. So depression is actually an epidemic. It's a big problem, not just for pilots or, you know, other professions, but the World Health Organization has very, very sad numbers, if we look it up. And it's something like a quarter of a million diagnosed every every year. And so there are millions of people who are that, but they're also parents, these people. So can you imagine their children are suffering from what state is the parent is?

Danny (68:23)

Right.

Dr. Elena (68:24)

But in the UK and in the US is similar numbers. The women and fathers and mothers of newborn children suffer from postnatal depression. Both really? Yeah, 45 to 50%.

Danny (68:40)

I've never heard of the father suffering from that.

Dr. Elena (68:42)

Yes. So there's both because the life changes so much and it's an expectation. Sometimes people feel, oh, well, that's what motherhood or fatherhood is.

Danny (68:55)

Right.

Dr. Elena (68:56)

So. And especially in men, it would be hard to admit because it's not admitted otherwise. So it's not known in public. Right. So you meant to be coping well, you know, like you're a father, you're a man, you know, you're a holder of the family. I don't know, like whatever we have put on onto ourselves the expectations that we meant to be a certain way.

Danny (69:15)

Right. Well, yeah. It's like if you're raising a kid and you're stressed and you're sleep deprived and you're going crazy, like, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna Quit on your kid?

Dr. Elena (69:27)

Yeah.

Danny (69:27)

Or are you just gonna fight through it like it's the same thing? Like the kid learning to walk. Well, my kid's taking too long. He's. He's crawling, but he's not walking. Are we just gonna give up and decide, oh, he's never gonna walk? You know, it's like one of those things where you just. Like, it's a weird thing where you. You have no choice but to figure it out. I feel like, yes, if you're a parent.

Dr. Elena (69:46)

Yeah, but that's interesting, isn't it? That almost like a different type of schooling that comes to you with children. If finding out who you are, what you're capable of, and what. Your partnership, you know, what you. What you are as a team. And what is this? Yeah.

Danny (70:04)

In the United States, approximately 21 million adults experience at least one major depressive episode per year.

Dr. Elena (70:10)

Could you imagine? 20 million? So?

Danny (70:13)

Well, I feel like, again, I, you.

Dr. Elena (70:16)

Know, 280 million, and this is diagnosed.

Danny (70:19)

I would. I would imagine. Oh, this is diagnosed.

Dr. Elena (70:21)

Yeah.

Danny (70:22)

So 21 million. I mean, I. I experience depressive episodes all the time. Not all the time, but yeah.

Dr. Elena (70:29)

Yeah, per year.

Danny (70:30)

But it's like life is a roller coaster, you know what I mean? And you're. The chemicals in your body, the hormones in your body are constantly fluctuating all the time, depending on your diet, your sleep, your work, if you're traveling or not. There's so many factors that go into this.

Dr. Elena (70:46)

Yeah. The youth is terrifying. Because the bigger problem in youth is that it's one of the major causes of suicide.

Danny (70:57)

I have this thing that happens to me every. Almost every year where when the winter starts, I have this unexplainable sadness for like, a day or two. I'll tell my wife, like, I don't know what it is. I feel sad today, you know, but.

Dr. Elena (71:09)

It'S good that you're aware.

Danny (71:10)

There's no reason I can't come up with any external influences that could be contributing to that, but I can. I. It happens to me every once in a while, and. Yeah, I don't know what to do about it, but it eventually subsides, and I. Or I'll do something and I'll. I'll figure out a way to, like, either go for some crazy long run or work out and stress my body until I can't think about it anymore, and eventually it goes away.

Dr. Elena (71:34)

Well, that's good. So the biggest part is to recognize it and articulate it. And often we're told that it's not Appropriate, you know, to think that you have that ability, you have that feeling or you have that sensation to articulate, because it's not accepted in the circles, like depending on where you work. So, you know, let's say surgeons or pilots, you know, they have to just show up to work. And as a parent, you just have to show up, you know, every morning.

Danny (72:04)

Right, right.

Dr. Elena (72:04)

Or every night, you know, whatever, you know, of the 24 hours you'll get to be pulled on the spot, you have to show up. Right. So. And I find that this having the tools to cope with it. So in space psychology, coming to the topic of the very beginning is the most important part is prevention. Because if we are packing for Mars, we cannot take all the medications with us, right? We cannot have, you know, pack the aircraft with all possible medical aid. So you have to work for absolute prevention ahead of time. So, and usually you'd find that people like pilots, like surgeons, like astronauts, cosmonauts, they are very highly motivated people. They will always be ahead of the game, you know, ahead of their, you know, what is happening with them. Just like what you're describing, I just realize, okay, what I'm going to do about it. So you have a tool set. So you said, you know, I'll go for a run, or, you know, I don't take it easy for the day, or maybe find what has motivated me before, you know, look what it is about, and I can't find it, okay, So I feel it, Okay, I got it. I've registered. It's okay. You know, I know I have passed this before. What I have done that helped me, for example, to overcome. But also until you went through that symptom, you can't recognize it in other people. You can't articulate it to other people. And often those people cannot articulate it to themselves as well. They see something odd, but they feel out of place. But they don't know how to work with that or what language to use. And that's what telepathy helps, right? Imagine so when you're packing for Mars, what we did. So we've done a study for psychological support tools for Mars and Moon missions. So that was the first study commissioned in the UK. So, Margaret Tetcher, when. So this was 2005. 6.

Danny (74:12)

What was this year?

Dr. Elena (74:13)

2005. Not 25. 2005.

Danny (74:16)

Oh, 2005, yes.

Dr. Elena (74:17)

20 years ago. So Margaret Thatcher in the UK canceled all human space flight programs. So we were not to waste the budget to do human spaceflight. So when I came into the scene with aviation psychology, wanting to do space, there was nothing done in human spaceflight. There was a couple of people who were amazing. So there was, you know, like enthusiasts, I would say, who were trying to do or going to NASA, you know, to look for possibilities of working in the area of space psychology or medicine. Space medicine.

Danny (75:02)

Space medicine.

Dr. Elena (75:03)

Space medicine, yeah. Well, space medicine is like, you know, surgeons, right. Who would work, you know, support the team, the physiologist, who make sure that we maintain our natural physical health. You know, so like workouts and space and, you know, that they work out for two, three hours a day physically in order to keep them bone density and also muscles. But also the heart is the main component.

Danny (75:31)

Because I'd be worried about the mitochondria.

Dr. Elena (75:34)

Why?

Danny (75:35)

Because I feel like we've been. We've evolved. We've evolved to live on this Earth which has a specific atmosphere, a specific distance from the sun. And if we go there with a completely different atmosphere, different distance from the sun, it's gonna really screw us up.

Dr. Elena (75:52)

So, you know, one way to find out, I guess.

Danny (75:55)

Yeah, there's one way to find out, that's for sure. I don't want to be the one to do it.

Dr. Elena (75:58)

Ideally, it's a return way, not one way.

Danny (76:00)

Right.

Dr. Elena (76:01)

In addition to one way to find out.

Danny (76:02)

I do not want to die on Mars. I'd rather go to the rainforest.

Dr. Elena (76:08)

It's a beautiful place. Well, some people. So that's, you know, another amazing topic to touch. So why would people go to Mars?

Danny (76:18)

Right.

Dr. Elena (76:18)

And why would people go one way to Mars?

Danny (76:20)

I find it fascinating. I find it fascinating. Like who would be the person to sign up for something like that?

Dr. Elena (76:26)

Yeah, so. So there, there was a Dutch company that done. They wanted to do. So, you know, there are odd people that I consulted for, you know, organizations. So the idea was, is that they will have like. Is it called Big Brother? Do you have this program in the U.S. big Brother?

Danny (76:46)

Oh, yeah.

Dr. Elena (76:46)

It's like an eye, you know, watching everything that happens. And it's like a TV show. Maybe you've got something called the Island. I don't know what people go. Survival.

Danny (76:54)

The idea of, of like surveillance, are you talking about?

Dr. Elena (76:57)

Yeah, yeah. So it's when.

Danny (76:58)

Yeah, Big Brother, right?

Dr. Elena (76:59)

Yeah, yeah.

Danny (76:59)

Like a police station.

Dr. Elena (77:01)

Well, no, in the UK there's a show. It's just like. Well, I get all into one house and they have to leave in one house.

Danny (77:08)

Ah.

Dr. Elena (77:09)

Or they go on the island and they do survival on the island and they're being watched on how they're doing it.

Danny (77:14)

Okay, I have, I think I know you're talking about.

Dr. Elena (77:16)

Yeah. So, so in the uk there was like a big program, the Big Brother, and they had like, they would, there would be like, maybe it's called House, I don't know. But it's basically where you get people in one place and you watch how they get along. And of course they will select for characters that are, you know, very extravagant. I don't know. So it becomes a show.

Danny (77:36)

It's like, there's like the Survivor. Survivor. These types of reality shows where they all live in a house. They do things, they party, they have relationships.

Dr. Elena (77:44)

Yeah. I mean, they now have, you know, emergency doctors, you know, surgical, Surgical theater with all sorts of life events that are happening. So they, what they wanted to do, the idea for that Dutch company was to, to send people to Mars and do a live show about it. So it'll be a live TV show on what's happening with these people. And, and, and, and that's how we fund it.

Danny (78:12)

We get, we get, we get cable networks, tv. TV networks to fund a reality show on Mars.

Dr. Elena (78:20)

Exactly that. So what are the ethics of that?

Danny (78:23)

Right.

Dr. Elena (78:24)

So they meant to be funding and getting the funding for people to be paid as it, as they pay as you go, if you wish. Right. Like a mobile phone, like pay as you go. So. But what if public loses interest? Who is paying for their return flight? So I've raised all those questions because we've put into Science Museum. I think it was a debate, not a debate. They wanted to do like a marketing, I guess, to start talking about it. So we were doing like a talk and I, I was put on the spot. I did not know that that's what they're doing. They just were starting. So I've read about it, and they were selecting people. They were already selected individuals who are gonna, young people who are gonna go one way not knowing if they're gonna return. And this is like, you know, all very serious, all very, I would think, you know, like I, I had to raise the question, you know, to say, like, what will happen if people stop if they lose interest on what's happening? They're not invested anymore, you know, how are you going to bring them back if you only have funding for part of the way?

Danny (79:33)

Right.

Dr. Elena (79:34)

So that's why it's so difficult to consider and fund all of that venture. But, you know, I read the CVs of those individuals who chose to go, and I, I didn't speak with them individually, you know, because it was not the point. But you know, the point was to discuss at the time. And I think they were partly funded, you know, to start in doing it. I don't know what happened in the end, but you know, this idea is rise. And so. So what we had is that in 2005. Yeah. So there are all sorts of.

Danny (80:07)

What is this, Steve?

Dr. Elena (80:08)

This is kind of design.

Danny (80:10)

It's a. This is a 2003 show called Stars on Mars. Oh, stars on Mars. Oh, I love it. Could we send Snooki to Mars? You know, Snooki? No, of course not.

Dr. Elena (80:23)

So this is a cultural.

Danny (80:25)

You're, you're. It's a good thing that you don't know who she is.

Dr. Elena (80:28)

Okay. Anyway.

Danny (80:32)

Anyways.

Dr. Elena (80:33)

Yeah, so that's. That. That's kind of, you know, the, the idea. So in 2005, the European Space Agency is, you know, that we had many roadmaps to Mars that get reevaluated because of funding. Of course, it gets rebalanced and reevaluated.

Danny (80:53)

Why not the moon? Seems like it'd be much more manageable.

Dr. Elena (80:56)

Yeah, both. It's called Moon and Mars mission mode. Both.

Danny (81:00)

But how long would it take to get to Mars? Wouldn't it take like months to get to Mars?

Dr. Elena (81:03)

So it depends on which trajectory we take. So there's a more shortcut trajectory, but then you have to stay shorter on the moon or too long a period on the Mars. And the way they plan the trajectory so that it is because you have to plan the resources in terms of, you know, your fuel, what you can take. It's all have to be balanced out, how long you can support them and then when would you recover or get the crew back. And so that is about 500 days. And that's why there was a study in 500. Well, 520 days there was a study, it was called Mars 500. So this is one of the first long haul study in Moscow. They put the containers inside the big building because it's very cold in winter. So you want them to be regulated in temperature. And they were sitting in this container. So it was an international crew. There was a French, there was a Chinese, there was Italian or Spanish and two, three Russian crew. So they had a 520 days and they had a simulation of communication delay, which is what will happen. So as soon as you start departing from Earth, you will start going into communication delay of increasing incrementally. And by the time you get to Mars, it will be about 20 minutes, considering you're not abstracted. You know, the signal Is not obstructed.

Danny (82:31)

By something, by like a celestial body or something.

Dr. Elena (82:35)

Or maybe on the other side of Mars, I don't know, like. Because everything is rotating and moving, right? So it would take 20 minutes for the message to go. So it would be like, houston, I have a problem. 20 minutes one way. What problem? Oh, God, 40 minutes later, you know, so. So you have to learn how to structure the communication. And there's a beautiful company that we had also work called Braided Communication. They're working now. So they've got this clever design which I will not divulge because it's a ip, but they're working on that. And so we worked at the University College London when I was a director for center for Space Medicine. So we were doing that, evaluating that system on how that works.

Danny (83:23)

Would you be able to solve that problem, you think?

Dr. Elena (83:25)

Well, not really, but it's. It's all about the ideas, is making sure that you, like, you know, for example, I don't know, you spoke to your friend and you have a context for it and they might be doing something. You give them enough information and you know, just like Steve right now, you know, we're talking and he's on the background picking up the information. And then, although it's five minutes later, but it feels like no time has passed. And it's sort of as long as you give enough information that the person can problem solve. So if you say, houston, we have a problem, you describe it of what you want the outcome to be. So the packet that you are communicating, it's not unless you're absolutely lost in space.

Danny (84:10)

Well, I wonder if telepathy would work if we could figure that out.

Dr. Elena (84:13)

That's interesting.

Danny (84:14)

People that are in outer space and people that are on the ground and on the Earth.

Dr. Elena (84:18)

Yes. So that would be amazing to speak with Dean Radin and the team at ions. So.

Danny (84:24)

Because didn't one of the astronauts do this? We talked about this in the beginning.

Dr. Elena (84:28)

Yeah, Mitchell. Mitchell, yeah. So, yeah. So they were also talking about telepathic experiments. So. But what is interesting is that Dean Radin was looked at something called Presentiment. So what that means is that. So they were doing experiments with.

Danny (84:45)

So this is like a CIA paper or something that you talked about?

Dr. Elena (84:48)

Yes, that's right.

Danny (84:49)

Seoul conference.

Dr. Elena (84:50)

Exactly. Yeah. So. So rapid number generator. So it's usually on atomic decay based on atomic decay. So it's very random. So you don't know. And it's meant to produce zeros or ones. And so the experiment setup as such is that you go in and you sit there and you think up, up, up, up, up. And you're told what to think. Yeah.

Danny (85:14)

You're told what to think?

Dr. Elena (85:15)

Yeah. You're told like you've got like zeros or. Sorry, zeros or ones projected and you're thinking up, up, up or zeros down, down.

Danny (85:23)

I'm telling you what to think.

Dr. Elena (85:24)

The experiment is set up in such a way and in the background there is a random number generator which shouldn't be influenced. Right. It's just.

Danny (85:31)

Sure.

Dr. Elena (85:33)

It's an atomic decay. You know, it meant to produce random. The most random generation. You cannot predict what it does. Okay, so that's the concept. But once you run so many trials, you affect the random number generator. It produces more ones when you think up, up, up, and more zeros when you think down, which should not happen. 1. So how do we do that? It's almost like telekinesis. I mean, it's a different. But it's. We are affecting something physical.

Danny (86:10)

So up produced more ones and down produced more zeros.

Dr. Elena (86:14)

Well, you can think. You could think 1, 1, 1 up, up, up.

Danny (86:18)

Or, you know, you're correlating two things. You're correlating 1 with up or 0 with down or, or you can correlate them with whatever and is.

Dr. Elena (86:23)

Yes. But you're thinking like. Do you remember we talk about telepathy and thinking about that Thanksgiving. Is that. So when you're thinking of one, what does that mean for you? It doesn't. One is a concept.

Danny (86:36)

Right.

Dr. Elena (86:36)

So concept or number one could be a different thing for different people.

Danny (86:40)

Right, Right.

Dr. Elena (86:41)

So like you could, you could think of a, you know, pencil being one or something, a pen and, you know, zero being a donut. But it doesn't matter what you're thinking. But the point is that you are affecting that system.

Danny (86:54)

So consciousness could have an effect on physical machines.

Dr. Elena (86:59)

Yeah. So your, your conscious attention, which is an amazing topic that I really love to dive into, but more so. So you're talking about time delay right To Mars. That's what we are, you know, working towards. So if we think about. So the other experiments that they've done. So what if you run the experiment in the random generator right now with you. But we'll get people like Steve, you know, actually do the thinking about zeros and ones this afternoon. So I do the recording of random generator, which will Steve affect in the afternoon. So when they match the data, it matched the effect. So I.

Danny (87:47)

Across time.

Dr. Elena (87:47)

Across time. Then another experiment they run is that they have Done. They've run. They. They've run the person first. They said, you know, I'm gonna think of zeros and ones but we're gonna do a recording tomorrow at 10:00am okay. And they affected that too. Wow.

Danny (88:06)

In the future.

Dr. Elena (88:07)

Yeah.

Danny (88:07)

That's crazy.

Dr. Elena (88:08)

So another. So this is Dean riding, you know like. And this is just like a. Not even the tip of the iceberg. It's not. Not even a snowflake. If you start speaking to. To Dean Riding and not just him, but he's just published. He made this. This is. This is parapsychology. This is part of the.

Danny (88:24)

You mentioned something about the World Trade center. The. The 911 thing with the number generators.

Dr. Elena (88:30)

Yes. So what happened there is that. So that's again. So they had random number generators already running in several labs. So they wanted to do bigger experiments. They wanted to see if the world events have an effect on the random generator. But what is more interesting if the random generator could indicate or have a difference before it happens. And this is another experiment with in Ions Institute. I will come back to. So. So when these big events they were more looking at games World World Cups and the random generator is affected. So when there is a big wave of feeling, you know, or people kind of get elated. Emotion. Yeah. So people have a particular investment in how they're, you know reacting or thinking. And. And so random number generators are affected. And I believe I can be certain. But you can also look it up whether the random number generator produced different pattern before the World Trade center event.

Danny (89:45)

Interesting.

Dr. Elena (89:46)

Yeah.

Danny (89:46)

Can you find that Steve?

Dr. Elena (89:48)

Yeah. So if looking you. I'm sure there was a recorded effect. So this is going to the meditation, you know, this effect of 1% of the population. If people are thinking a particular way they can affect the. The situation. They were doing it in war zones and I believe it was repeated in several war areas. And so they meditated. They got a 1% of that population in that country or city. I'm not sure if it was the experiment. It was a transmeditation.

Danny (90:33)

They got the people in these war zones to meditate on certain things.

Dr. Elena (90:36)

The volunteers that meditated and the number of events and fires and deaths that they measured was less.

Danny (90:46)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (90:47)

Yeah.

Danny (90:49)

Several on 911 several of the art random number generators reportedly showed unusual spikes and deviations from randomness.

Dr. Elena (90:57)

Yes.

Danny (90:57)

Some deviations allegedly began hours before the first plane hit. Which was why people sometimes say that random number generators predicted 911. The project's own researchers were cautious. They didn't claim prediction, only that there Appeared to be statistical anomalies correlated with the event that. Wow.

Dr. Elena (91:17)

So, I mean, how do you use that data? What does that mean? So nobody knew that it's going to be Towers, for example.

Danny (91:22)

And there was also many, many reports of people having precognitive dreams predicting that happening.

Dr. Elena (91:30)

But you don't know what to do with them because some people have more of them and they don't know necessarily, you know, the peculiarities. But some. Some people do. Some people can be that precise. Yeah, but nobody would listen, you know, like, they're alone.

Danny (91:43)

Of course not. I know it's wacky. It's too wacky for people to take seriously. Seriously.

Dr. Elena (91:46)

Yeah. And what do you do? You know, how do you. Well, I don't know, but. Yes. So I think we should be more open, I guess, with our concept on what could happen.

Danny (91:54)

Yeah, totally.

Dr. Elena (91:55)

So. So, talking about the telepathy, you know, does it work across time? Possibly. You know, these children might be able to help us with that. You know, they might be. And some of them want to. So, for example, this girl Lido, she's actually volunteered. So lo and behold, you know, nobody knows that she's been doing this all along. So when she was telling her mom that there was a certain hour of the day, she'll come and pace in one part of the house. So she go back and forth, back and forth. And apparently she was talking to those children on the hill and those teachers at the time. That's when they would connect and do things together. Or one of the boys would run after he'd go to school, you know, their specialized place where they would go. He'll come back from school and run up to his bedroom and go under the pillow, under the duvet cover with the pillows and just stay there for a long time. And parents were thinking that, you know, he's overstimulated in school and he just wants quiet time. But he was actually running to get on the hill.

Danny (93:02)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (93:03)

So. So that he could cut out all other noise and just focus to be there.

Danny (93:08)

That's wild. You know, I always had this. I mean, I don't think it's uni. I don't think it's my theory. But I've always thought that kids, before they get. Like I said before, they get molded into society when they're young, they probably have more.

Dr. Elena (93:31)

More.

Danny (93:32)

They're more in touch or more in tune with more senses. Right. Like. Like you've been into. Like. We all know the stories of, like, you go into a house and if the energy's off, right? Or like something doesn't feel right about this house. You can't really. There's no. It's not smell, it's not sight, it's not. It's not sound, but it's something that you just. It's a feeling. And I always wonder, is that something that has been inside of humans for millions of years that has just atrophied with the rise of technology?

Dr. Elena (94:08)

So really pertinent question is exactly what we are working on right now. Part of that, you know, the baby box that I was looking into designing when our children were born is that I found that. That the. The child is so much more alert is what I was told, like in martial art, that they perceive things. And often we don't notice as adults and we say, don't worry about that, you know, don't pay attention to that. It's nonsense. How could you know? It's almost like we have a ready answer before they given us their experience or what they're experiencing. Because we are busy, you know, like, it's nothing wrong. It's just we are a culture that, that you can't hear this, you can't feel that, you can't sense that this is, you know, must be a coincidence. I don't know all sorts of things. But the child, if you are not paying attention, and you are the authority, you are the superman, you know, you can do things that the child. You can walk, you can run, you can lift, you know, you know how to, you know, drive this car. I don't know. You do super things as a dad, right? And they are like. Like, you know, I want to be like my dad, you know, like, he does this extraordinary things and so is a mother, you know, they're just capable and they. That's why they come and repeat after us all the time, right? And. But they are so the child. When they are born, their mind in the first year develops much more than it will ever develop in the lifetime of an adult.

Danny (95:46)

In the first year.

Dr. Elena (95:47)

In the first year here. So then the child with two or three years old has more neural connection than an adult. So what happens? There is a pruning period where the neural connections get pruned because they're not used. So they're made. The connections are made. But because these highways are not used, they overgrow if you wish. So nothing goes to waste, right, in the system because it needs to be all nourished, right? Processed and, you know, we need to run this body and if it's redundant.

Danny (96:24)

Get through the day.

Dr. Elena (96:25)

Yeah, if it's redundant and you don't need that sensor. So like children or adults growing up in urban cities, they can't see as far, they can't hear as well. We can't mix certain sensors. And you know, like there is a research on like, children have auditory processing issues. And you know, the 2.5% of children, it seems small, but it's a big percentage. And children who have some learning difficulties. And we know that children have, you know, learning disorders left and right now being diagnosed, you know, all over anyway, in, in Europe and the uk it's, you know, now become so recognized that like one third of the school would have these issues. And 43% of these children have auditory processing issues.

Danny (97:16)

Interesting.

Dr. Elena (97:17)

But more than that, this sensory processing is affecting how we pay attention to the worlds, how we process information. And if we can't process information, we shut down. So that means we are unable to develop those processes or they are too overstimulated or we are not. It's almost like we said, it's not normal. Normal, you know.

Danny (97:41)

Do you think it's possible to get it back later in life if you want to?

Dr. Elena (97:45)

Yes. So there are studies that look into.

Danny (97:49)

This is like plasticity, like brain plasticity type stuff.

Dr. Elena (97:52)

Yeah. So we can, our neurons can regenerate and can build new pathways, new experiences. You know, like you would learn new skill and it would just take you longer than versus to a child. And so for example, just I'm having a look at. So what we have is that because we can't integrate the sensory integration. So there's Dr. John Ayres who is looking at the sensory integration and it's a foundation for learning. So if we can't integrate information that's coming through our different perception, we're unable to put information together in an efficient way that I could do something about it. So then I either get distracted, you know, that I'm not looking at it. And so, and what happens is because we've got screens all the time and we know this problem like this is like pandemic right into. There's a term called techno ference. So like technology interfering with our life.

Danny (98:59)

Right.

Dr. Elena (99:00)

So infants before year, before year one. The data. This is us data. 1.6 to 1.6 hours children spend on the technology. The toddlers between 1.6 hours. Yeah. So one hour, 0.6 per day.

Danny (99:18)

From zero to one.

Dr. Elena (99:19)

Yeah. Under one year, under one. So toddlers two and a half to three hours before they hit two years old, adolescents, they spend A working day on technology, seven to eight plus hours. And this is a direct link, you know, so of course if you're on the screen, you have fewer live adult interaction. That includes us because we also go on devices. Right. Because of work and you know, whatever we need to do, we need to search up. I mean I find myself, you know, all the time thinking they'll ask me a question, where do I go? You know, so and so that, that is like we don't look up encyclopedia anymore. We go how to.

Danny (100:01)

It's way less work now.

Dr. Elena (100:02)

Yeah.

Danny (100:03)

It's so much easier to find information and to.

Dr. Elena (100:06)

Yeah.

Danny (100:07)

And when you're, when you're living that much of your life and spending that much of your time with your brain in that state, in that kind of like dormant lizard brain state, I can't imagine it would be good for us.

Dr. Elena (100:21)

Yeah. So what happens? So like, so you and I on.

Danny (100:24)

The screen, it's like, it's like it's turning us from, it feels like we're going from wolves to Chihuahuas, like we're being domesticated into this cute little animal that can't help, is helpless and can't defend itself because technology is compensating for everything.

Dr. Elena (100:41)

I, I think we're developing other skills too. But yes, we are, we are reducing like, you know, ability to see far right to, to perceive nature. In being like a surround sound, we're losing this spherical or 3D perception of sound. We, because we get earphones as well, it degrades our navigation, but it's also a sense our ear and has inner ear processing, you know, of our proprioception in space. And when we are zoomed in, like we have shores, you know, like the horse is running. So we're, we're cutting out part of the world.

Danny (101:18)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (101:18)

And if you and I on the devices, are we talking to children?

Danny (101:24)

Right.

Dr. Elena (101:25)

And if we're not talking to children, they are losing out on communication. If we are not problem solving together, we're problem solving through the screen. They're not acquiring it how to do it themselves. They're not looking for options, they're not looking, scanning for the environment on how they can problem solve.

Danny (101:43)

So, and even schools now my kids are in public school and they're being put in front of screens to do their work. It's making me, I like, I want to pull my kids out of school and like homeschool them because it's just, it's sad to see that this is the way it's going. It's making it more it's making it. I don't know what, I don't know why they do it. I don't know why like do they, do they think it's, it's gonna make it more efficient? Is it gonna be able to centralize all the learning and all the testing for the kids? Is it? I don't know, but I don't think they're really thinking it through.

Dr. Elena (102:16)

Well, it depends how we use technology always, you know, everything with everything. And so I think what is important is that we find how to benefit from what we have because we can't go backwards, you know, unless a major disaster happen.

Danny (102:32)

Right.

Dr. Elena (102:34)

And the idea that it looks like, you know, we can, can improve our attention, we can train our, you know, situational awareness, we can learn cross sensory experience. But what is happening because we're, you know, we've got this, you know, portal that we are looking at. We forgot how to scan for information and that scanning for information is what allow us to be better problem solvers because although we can get a lot from, you know, know, become very intelligent in terms of information grabbing but because we don't have the experience, but it's the experience that change it changing us, not the information that we just learn, right? Our belief systems are changed through experience.

Danny (103:21)

Yes.

Dr. Elena (103:22)

And if we, you know, experience something then we have this capacity for one to sense in others but also to do something about it and help, help others.

Danny (103:33)

Right.

Dr. Elena (103:34)

And so what, what is an interesting component is that when I'm picking up your emotions, my body does micro expressions. So I am mimicking your expression in order for my brain to recognize what you're feeling. So I'm not just watching you interest, my body is copying what, what I'm seeing. And also before I'm thinking something, my body might do this micro expression. There was a beautiful TV show done in the US that is called Lie to me, Lie to me and it was done by the. There was a British actor in the lead which was very nice to watch. And so it was based on micro expression system and they were teaching. Because that's exactly what he did. So he taught military police and you know, special forces and interrogation or whether people are lying to him. So what happens that we have this micro expression, it's a quarter of a second expression that something like our nose will go up or we get, you know, different, you know, things like surprise or something like that and it will just flash if you're not looking for it. It, your brain will pick it up but not know what to do with it, but if you're conscious about it and it will happen before some something is said, the person could be, you know, not comfortable with that information, not angry, surprised, you know, like. And if you are clever, meaning in terms of your gauging and asking multitude of questions, you can see how people are answering. So are they, are they answering it the same way or differently every time to the same question and what their micro expression reaction is. But it doesn't mean that the person is lying. They might be believing they're saying the truth. Yeah, it's same like galvanic skin response.

Danny (105:36)

Right.

Dr. Elena (105:36)

You know, you might be sweating because you are worried.

Danny (105:39)

Right. Not because you are also even just in like the syntax and the emotion and the depth and the richness of how somebody expresses something. You can tell.

Dr. Elena (105:51)

Tell.

Danny (105:51)

I can tell very easily. I think most people can. Whether somebody got that they, they, they articulated that idea through reading something or through hearing something or if they got that idea through experiencing something. Because when you're explaining something you experienced versus something you read about, it's way richer and it's way deeper and it's just, it's so much easier to pick up and it's like, it's almost like you don't even. They're not even thinking. It's just like they're, they're tell up, they're. They're just shuttling this information. They're. I don't know the, even the word to use, but they're, they're, they're basically transmitting this information to you in this way that is far richer and deeper than they could if it was just reciting something that they read and memorized, you know.

Dr. Elena (106:41)

Yeah. Experiential learning. It's beautiful in the way you explained it. It's exactly that. So it's pre verbal knowing.

Danny (106:48)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (106:48)

And part of the work that I did, including what this with pilots and surgeons. So what happened is that they could not articulate their expertise. So we had one anesthesiologist, so he was in the Scottish Hospital Ridgemore, it was called. And the professor I worked with called Kenneth Walker. And so he would do something crazy in terms of success of epidural. So it's. Epidural is when they blocking the signals and they do this sometimes in birth or lower part of abdominal surgery. And what they do is that they take the needle and they go into the spinal area and they are going through different types of tissues as they're inserting the needle and they are navigating through the pressure and knowing in their Head where they are. So how could you teach that skill?

Danny (107:58)

Yeah, how do you put that into words?

Dr. Elena (107:59)

Yeah. So they are doing it and because every part of the body, no matter where you put the needle and you can't, you know, sense it unless you are doing it. So can you imagine how extraordinary this work is? And that will determine, you know, how successful, you know, this person would feel. Successful mean how.

Danny (108:18)

Right.

Dr. Elena (108:19)

How non sensitive I guess the area would be for, for the person also how, how well they could do the surgery as well, how comfortable the person is. So, and, and so he was doing it the way that it was no longer allowed to do, not considered safe. So he would create air pockets which was no longer allowed to do air pockets because usually now they put. If, if I recall correctly, because I'm not medically educated, but this is from working with them, this is what I remember. And so everybody was thinking of this surgeon who was about to retire and I think he was even over retirement, already over the age of the retirement. But he would not share, he would not teach. And people were thinking that he's snobby, you know, that he's, you know, like, you know, all this cool, you know, person who just doesn't want other people to succeed. But on actual way, he did not know how to articulate that some people are just good teachers and some people are good experts.

Danny (109:24)

Right.

Dr. Elena (109:25)

And to merge the two, it's another skill.

Danny (109:27)

It is, yes.

Dr. Elena (109:27)

Yes. So just like you said, you could be really good once you've done it, you are much better. You should be much better articulating, certainly. But it doesn't mean that astronauts are not always taught by astronauts, they're taught by trainers. Not everybody who went to space teaches that skill. So once we got them through this methodology, I view expert of using the camera and helping them articulate all the, you know, perception, sensation, what's happening through their mind. So as soon he's, he's got his cues that he can put all this memory paths together. It's called pre verbal knowledge. So it's this professional intuition. He was starting to, able to put words to the experience that he had and it flooded. I couldn't stop him.

Danny (110:16)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (110:17)

And all his colleagues were like, wow. You know, we had no idea that he wasn't just not willing, he just couldn't put it into words. And this is, you know, different capacity, you know, to be able to do that.

Danny (110:31)

That's incredible. So yeah, I want to switch lanes a little bit and talk about how, talk about your interviews and the psychological Evaluations you were doing on astronauts.

Dr. Elena (110:44)

Okay.

Danny (110:45)

And there's a world. A world view shift that happens when these people go to outer space or not outer space, but. But like even in. Just into orbit, right into like low earth orbit where they experience it. And I think you described this word like psych.

Dr. Elena (111:03)

Overview effect.

Danny (111:04)

The overview effect. Yeah. But there was another word where basically, and it was like a Hindu word of. Of having the feeling of being attached and being a part of everything. On that. On that world, on the planet. They're looking at the planet and they had this feeling of being a part of it. It.

Dr. Elena (111:19)

Oh, yeah. Being one. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Steve said something. Did you say something?

Danny (111:26)

I thought. I thought you were talking about Tao way of life.

Dr. Elena (111:29)

Okay. Way of life. So the. So overview effect. So that's interesting. So we are. We are not changed by knowledge. We are changed by experience. From your words as well. You know, like you were saying that you really know what you're doing.

Danny (111:48)

Right.

Dr. Elena (111:49)

So. And that's when we become really good storytellers. And that's when we can communicate something. And that's why going with children out and doing things with them, you know, builds that language communication richness of describing things. And also our inability to assign words until we were able to process the experience something. So it takes us time. We cannot. Not all of us are rich in words, and not all of us are storytellers, and not all of us. You know, some people are artists able to do it through a different medium, express their feelings, but they can't put it into words. But we can gauge that somehow that notions or that feeling for that experience. So experience affects our life. It will change our life path. It will change how we will behave. And that's what happens when with astronauts, with people who come back from war, with post traumatic stress disorder, with surgeons after they save their first life, when they lose a patient as well, when they lose the person and they have to deal with it. Nobody teaches them how to deal. It's not part of training. So when astronauts go, their focus is to get it all right. When they walk onto the. When they walk to the spacecraft, they say, we feel super heroes. You know, we like, feel better than superheroes. So Chris Hartfield talks about that beautifully because, you know, instructors throw to them every possible scenario that could go wrong. And, you know, we are very ingenious and creative. So. So it's probably never likely to happen. But in order to keep the training hours, you know, and making sure that all the eventual eventualities have been dealt with, with, they do this problem solving all the time. But then. So they're so focused to getting out into space and achieving their mission. But what they're not trained to, is to articulate their experience. But yet when they come back, we're expecting them to articulate what they went through because they come back changed. They come back to their family and they're changed, they change their behavior. Apollo astronauts, there is only one person, if you wish, considered to be, you know, haven't lost their family, haven't, you know, had crisis and depressions and alcohol and, you know, all the challenges that they had to come back.

Danny (114:19)

Right. Because they came back, it was crazy. Their lives fell apart, they divorced their wives, they got addicted to alcohol or.

Dr. Elena (114:25)

Abusing alcohol, all sorts of things. But this part of also becoming, you know, dealing with all the attention, but also we don't know really what they've experienced. You know, they couldn't articulate that experience, or maybe they were not taught. And you get this small expressions. There's a beautiful book, I think, called Home Planet. It's like a three format and it's very limited edition. And you see the photographs of, from space and all of astronauts and cosmos from all nations have a expression, you know, to what they feel, feel put in a sentence. And this most beautiful book, you know, about human experience.

Danny (115:03)

What is it called in space?

Dr. Elena (115:05)

Home Planet.

Danny (115:06)

Home Planet Complaint.

Dr. Elena (115:07)

That's the book. Yeah.

Danny (115:09)

Yeah. And even the, the, the press conference after the first moonwalk.

Dr. Elena (115:13)

Yes.

Danny (115:14)

It looked like a hostage video.

Dr. Elena (115:16)

Yeah. Oh, I, I'd have a look at it again.

Danny (115:19)

Those guys, like, just their demeanor and, and the way they were talking, they, they looked so uncomfortable and not excited, not happy. It was just very odd, you know, like what were, what was going through their minds. I don't know how long after the mission that was. Maybe it might have been a. It might have been like a week or so after. But I wonder how is it, Is it this one? Yeah, that. I think that's it. Yeah. What, what, Admit what? Apollo. That was the first Apollo mission, right?

Dr. Elena (115:53)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Danny (115:56)

It's just, it's not how I would imagine I would be after walking on the moon. You know, it's. I wonder, I wonder how that psychological overview effect or that, that feeling of, of oneness or, you know, maybe when they get back. And like I've had this experience too, like going to another country, like a third world country for a week and being disconnected from technology, being disconnected from Western society, coming back to the same old, the same old routine again. Can Kind of be depressing, you know. I wonder maybe that. That if that is what they were experiencing there, you know.

Dr. Elena (116:40)

Yeah, yeah. It's very powerful look, isn't it? Yeah. What you're saying is very pertinent because. So there is a study by a Chinese, originally Chinese, but he's a Canadian professor and he studies newborns, how they recognize faces, you know, so capacity of how we're processing facial expressions. And so when. And that came from his personal experience. So when he was. He moved. Maybe he do his. I don't think it was bachelor's, maybe master's degree to Canada. And he said that when he was traveling in public transport, everybody looked the same. And.

Danny (117:28)

Oh, yeah.

Dr. Elena (117:29)

And for, you know, for. I don't know, I guess I grew up in Latvia. I mean, we had typical features and faces. And then when I worked for an airline was Air Baltic at the time. And there was a flight, it was originally set up by two Indian men whom I worked at. Was 16 years old only. And it was. That's when my English initially had Indian accent as well.

Danny (117:57)

Oh, really?

Dr. Elena (117:58)

Because I was learning from them for while I was working.

Danny (118:01)

That's so funny.

Dr. Elena (118:02)

But we were doing everything, was selling tickets, we were doing bookings online and we were getting them at the airport. And so they were transporting from India people to Germany. And so we were operating Frankfurt and another city in. So anyway, it was just a new company. So they're all coming through and they. I, you know, I haven't traveled abroad yet at that time, and they were all coming and they all looked the same. I would look at the passports. So we were doing everything, passport control and everything. So I'm looking at the photograph and I'm looking at the face and I'm thinking, I can't tell apart, you know, come next person I can't tell about. They were all wearing headwear, they all had beard. And for me, I couldn't tell apart the features. So I could absolutely understand what this Canadian scientist, you know, born in China, had experience when he came. But in time he was able to differentiate faces. But it was so fascinating for him that he then. So I later lived in Dubai. I could tell apart from which part of India people came from, you know, eventually. But to start with, I couldn't because we didn't have this registration. So what happens between ages of 6 months to 9 months? We become specialized. Our brains start to specialize in communication. So we're starting to ignore and pick up certain things. So children, before six months, they can differentiate a monkey Family. So family of monkeys, you know, Peter, I don't know Esther, you know, they can differentiate the names. You know, who is who is who.

Danny (119:48)

Right.

Dr. Elena (119:49)

But past nine months they just looked types of monkeys. They can't tell apart monkeys in that species. They all look the same.

Danny (120:00)

Interesting.

Dr. Elena (120:01)

So once we don't need to scan for those features, those peculiarities merge and the same thing happens with other processing signals. So like you were saying, you know that children narrow. There's a narrowing of their perception abilities. So all kinds of. To date, the science considers that we are all born with synesthesia. Synesthesia.

Danny (120:24)

Trip planner by Expedia. You were made to outdo your holiday, your hammocking and your pooling. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.

Dr. Elena (120:40)

Did you come?

Danny (120:41)

I'm familiar with it. You should explain it.

Dr. Elena (120:44)

So it's when we have different. We can process different sensors at the same time. And for example, we can hear a sound but have a color associated with that. So we have a mixture of sensors and overlap. Yeah. So we have a friend who can see music, for example. They could see shapes and colors and they're beautiful composer. So he does like an entire orchestra composition and he would see that. But we don't, you know, like we only hear that piece that he produces beautifully. So. And the music comes to him through these visual perception as well as sound. And so if we don't expose children to these sounds and scapes, we eventually lose them. And what happens people who are synesthes who are able to retain this cross, which in kind of in ordinary. I don't know. As we grow up, we shouldn't be seeing, you know, hearing color, for example. They would. Kids would be taught with. I mean, some children describe that they were outcasts in the school. If they talk about being, you know, talking about like this, because they shouldn't be able to. It's not normal. You're imagining it. You're imagining it. That's the word you use. But what happens the children who retain synesthesia, which is 4% and considered to be genetic, but we know that epigenetic is different. So we get activate. We can activate some of. Through experience, we can activate some of our genes and perception. Then we are better at executive cognitive functions. So we're better problem solvers. We see unusual connections. We have better memory retention. We have stronger, well, more capacity for working memory, which is responsible for our decision making. And while we blank out when we can't take any more information. So. And yet we're not Stimulating or ignoring that completely. So hence when our children were born, you know, And I saw, I actually cried when I, when I thought I'm going to go with the best books I can, the best techniques, technology, what I could develop children for birth. And as a, you know, a working mom to start with and you know, a scientist and you know, being a, the kind of at the top of the field in terms of extra sensory perception, decision making, I thought like, you know, want to give the best to my children. And I found black and white books and they were like, at the time it was like 470 reviews and they were like 4.8, you know, out of five. And so like, this is it, you know, getting my kids this book. And I got the book and I opened it and I started to cry. Possibly because, you know, still pregnant and full of hormones and well, not pregnant, but like still in that period when you're very sensitive to everything. But when I looked at and I said like, you know, the fish doesn't even look like this, you know, the mouse doesn't look like this. The sun doesn't look like this, you know, why are we showing this to children when we have this most beautiful, you know, artwork, nature, human design, you know. And that's when I started to design a book. I thought like, well, if we can take people to the moon, we build large hydrogen collider under three countries underground. We're colliding particles and we're not doing anything for younger generation. We don't know anything. We don't know about the ocean. Like Tim Gallaudet, the Admiral will tell you how much we don't know about the ocean. We know more about space than our ocean. We haven't mapped the floors in volumes. It's like 5% that we know.

Danny (124:29)

Right.

Dr. Elena (124:30)

So I thought, you know, I've designed cockpits, I can design an information display for kids. You know, I'm just going to design it. So I started looking to understand, you know, what is their cognitive, you know, what are they, what do we know scientifically about them. And I started to pick up that information and started to match of what they would be attracted to and what they're attracted to, to what kids are looking at when they're born. You've got a three month year old.

Danny (125:01)

What are they attracted to?

Dr. Elena (125:03)

Yeah, what do they look at?

Danny (125:06)

My newborn likes looking at ceiling fans.

Dr. Elena (125:10)

Yeah.

Danny (125:11)

They're like looking at 3D objects, right?

Dr. Elena (125:13)

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Danny (125:14)

Faces of the parents.

Dr. Elena (125:15)

Exactly. Yes. This is the most fascinating thing. If they can look into your Face. They don't look away and it looks odd, it looks socially inappropriate. Like the children look at people and parents get uncomfortable and adults get uncomfortable, but they just look like.

Danny (125:31)

Yeah, studying. Wow.

Dr. Elena (125:33)

You know, like fascinating. What is that?

Danny (125:34)

What are you looking at, kid?

Dr. Elena (125:35)

Yeah, did I get something stuck? But they are really studying you. And what it is is that child under three months old is able to pick up the intensity of emotion of your smile, sort of gauging of where you are at. And they're studying your face. And as we know by six months they stop being, differentiate differentiating certain features because they don't exist, you know, on our face. So I thought if we know this, we need to be exposing them to patterns because do you know what. Which was fascinating to me, you know, retrospectively starting to look at it. What is the predictor of the success of the future on how successful the people will be in there? For example, engineering or economy or you know, like top professions. What is the skill that is required?

Danny (126:29)

No idea.

Dr. Elena (126:30)

Problem solving.

Danny (126:31)

Okay.

Dr. Elena (126:31)

Pattern recognition.

Danny (126:32)

Right, Pattern.

Dr. Elena (126:36)

And we don't teach kids pattern at all.

Danny (126:38)

Right.

Dr. Elena (126:39)

It has to be intuitively learned. We don't teach them problem solving, you know, we teach them what is already how people solved problems before. But they're not always learning creatively solving through problems.

Danny (126:53)

Right.

Dr. Elena (126:54)

So with colleague, you know, we worked on the designing toolkit for psychological support for long duration missions. They learned how to help nature problem solves. And the nature solves problems differently than we do. We use resources, but nature uses whatever resources it have. And so we were designing problem solving toolkit for space missions only using resources that they have, you know, in that capacity because you can't take so many parts. And so we, we had three astronauts from European Space Agency and all of them luckily, because that's the only three we could get together. And they were in the US and NASA, not in Europe because they were training or training others. You know, it's always rotation. And so they were. One was learning on Mir station. So this very old station that obviously got decommissioned actually was decommissioned about the same time, 2000 when I was in Australia. We could see it deorbiting. And then one of them was trained on shuttle and the other one was trained on the US well there was only one transporter before Soyuz spacecraft. And so all of them when we were giving them a problem solving task, they all problem solved differently because of their background.

Danny (128:23)

Interesting.

Dr. Elena (128:24)

Yeah. And which was fascinating.

Danny (128:26)

And so how did you come up with these designs?

Dr. Elena (128:29)

Yeah, so yeah, yeah, that, yeah. So the idea Was is that I did not want to come up with something artificial because all those books I found were artificial. So I was. Yes. So these. This is actually a creature that lives near Japan and it's used by architects to how to design buildings to sustain earthquakes. I know. I mean it's like, wouldn't it be cool if you were dad and reading that underneath the book and then sharing it with other dads that you know this amazing fact. So in the beginning it tells you how to use the book to benefit. And then you have this.

Danny (129:14)

This is the design you have on your shirt.

Dr. Elena (129:15)

That's right, yes.

Danny (129:16)

This is the Asteroblastus stellatus.

Dr. Elena (129:20)

There you go. Isn't it? Both space and underwater.

Danny (129:26)

It looks kind of like a. Kind of like a starfish mixed with a sand dollar.

Dr. Elena (129:33)

Yes. So this talks about actually the. It is very ancient design and what you see is how it transports food via these little elevators or escalators to. To its mouth in the center. So yeah, it's.

Danny (129:51)

So what is the idea of you show these images, these black and white geometric images to newborns or to kids that are within 0 to 1. And what does that do to their brain?

Dr. Elena (130:07)

So they are recognizing more patterns. So our face, which is beautiful, is actually like a window, like a key to our reality here because it encodes all like golden section proportions.

Danny (130:24)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (130:24)

Fibonacci fractals.

Danny (130:27)

Yes.

Dr. Elena (130:28)

All of that coded in your face. So you are the key on how the world is structured. Nature, I mean.

Danny (130:37)

Right.

Dr. Elena (130:37)

Yeah, because we are nature and that's what they're studying. So if they're exposed to more of this pattern, they would be amazing designers. They would know how nature problem solves and they can pick up the patterns and unusual connections. It's what we teach in engineering school. We teach architects, we teach artists, we teach all the designers. So everything that you intuitively like or I intuitively like or we are attracted to actually follows those laws.

Danny (131:10)

Right, Interesting.

Dr. Elena (131:12)

So even Large Hadron Collider, if you look at it, all of that falls the proportions. So the most amazing designs that we have come up ingenuity, our ingenuity and most famous art pieces follow those. But we do this intuitively and it's those people because they studied that and they're usually amazing creators. That's why we advance in technology. So that pattern recognition. But pattern recognition comes from problem solving. So you're seeing the most. So the universities for last, I don't know, 15, 20 years, the idea is to cross disciplinary work because they've noticed that There is innovation. So it's when you're bringing your novel idea into another field. And that's where innovation happens in matching. Because just like the surgeons that worked side by side and never exchange how they do the work, but they assume that the other person does it. So sometimes we solve the problem in one domain, but we haven't solved it in another. So the innovation from like one of the benefits of doing human spaceflight because we always have to justify the budget. Right. Of how we're doing it to the public. So the surgeon was talking to, I believe, shuttle designer or rocket designer, and how the piping works, because our heart has piping too. And there was a cross feed on how they learned to each other. So it was innovation on both parts.

Danny (132:46)

Oh, wow.

Dr. Elena (132:46)

So. So this allows. So what I wanted to do is to expose them what they already attracted. And what happened is that it seems to be cross sections of a lot of creatures, you know, on Earth. Earth have these beautiful symmetries that follow because nature does it intuitively, right? Nature just does it. Yeah. So if you look at the pattern of the tree. Do you know, if you look at any tree that is. Is it called judicious? It's like leaf trees. If you look at the shape of the tree, if it's not artificially cut, it will have the same shape as the leaf. If you look from far away, it would look. It will have the same shape.

Danny (133:28)

Is that real?

Dr. Elena (133:29)

Yeah. Yeah.

Danny (133:30)

Wow.

Dr. Elena (133:30)

So if you take leaves with your children in the summer or autumn, anytime, and you would just put them together, you know, just as if they're trees on a piece of paper and walk away, it would look like it's a forest. Like you've painted the most beautiful forest.

Danny (133:47)

That's so cool.

Dr. Elena (133:48)

And if you look at any of those trees and you are, let's say, a surgeon or a physician, you would see the intricate pattern of how vessel vessels, like pathways in our body works. Because some would look more like the heart, some would look like a lung, you know, in winter when you look when the leaves lost their structure. And it happens everywhere. But if you can see. So, like, if there is a. The systems even pick up now. Like, it looks like the tree spreads its. Now that we have computers, we can actually see that there is a logic, there is a pattern. It just was harder to see. And the human eye can tell, but it cannot calculate it. So. And that's why we are good at pattern recognition, but not necessarily in calculational detail. But we don't need that. We only need to know and then intuitively act on it. So this allows. So this trains children for attention. So the. And also. But the bigger part, which is what we're doing in classes with parents, I am teaching via this medium to communicate with the child. Because there is assumption that the child can't communicate. But the child communicates with us all the time. And we communicate to the child. So they're much better at picking our communication, that we are theirs. They're talking to us all the time. And so the parents will get like, I had no idea. You know, they get like.

Danny (135:29)

So exposing the kids to these patterns can help the communication.

Dr. Elena (135:34)

It's a medium. Yes, it helps the child, but also it helps the parent. Because what we're doing is. I'm teaching the adult while they're watching the child. Watching the images.

Danny (135:46)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (135:47)

To pick up on clues on what's happening with the baby. Because once the baby doesn't want to look, they will look away. And usually what we do with the baby, we assume we don't even think about it. But like, if I need to go somewhere, I'll take the baby and go. But the baby might have been doing something. Even if the baby is, you know, know two years old, we're just like, time to go until they start to refuse. Right. And then you have to learn how to slowly get them out or give them enough time. But the idea that we are actually teaching children to have a shorter attention span because we have a short attention span.

Danny (136:26)

Right.

Dr. Elena (136:26)

We never walk into, you know, someone's office or our, even our partner if they're busy and just bust in. Right. We will watch. We may not be articulating to ourselves, but we would say, what are they doing? Can we intervene? Is it the right time? Shall I wait a moment? You know, like you're doing all of that, but we don't do that with children. And then we're teaching them manners instead of doing this right from the beginning, respecting their attention space awareness and their learning experience in the same way as we expect from other skills.

Danny (137:00)

And you think that by utilizing these things with kids at a young age and, and figuring out this communication, you seem to be optimistic that we can come up with some sort of like nature. Is this like natural universal language for humanity?

Dr. Elena (137:20)

Yeah. So there's a second part to that. Okay, so this allows this pattern recognition. But also we're learning not to distract children. We are increasing attention span. So Microsoft study showed that our attention span decreased by 30% with introduction of computer. It decreased by 30%, decreased by 30%. Yeah. Which is really bad. You know, in terms of. It should be, you know, helping us, but, but all with that attention, that means we are not able to focus and learn. Right. That. That's kind of consequences of that that. So we're unable, you know, to dive deeper. But the innovation happens when we're diving deeper. And so the next phase from that came is that I saw that the. The sound actually also produces similar things which you would call. Could call mandalas, you know, so shapes that are projected.

Danny (138:16)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (138:17)

So it's.

Danny (138:18)

Yeah, yeah. Sound resonates and the frequencies of sound. Yeah. So.

Dr. Elena (138:24)

And so I can. So part of one of the projects we did is voice analysis to detect fatigue. So when you are with your family, you probably over the phone can tell how person is changing, whether they're tired or not. So we do pick up, you know, sound information, but we just don't realize it could be delay in speech. It may be. That might be slower. They're actually. The muscles change, they get tired and we sound differently as well. Well not just cognitive delay in processing information. And so what happens is if we start. So the idea is to keep the synesthesia not stopped, the ones that we're born with, not just to give it to 4% of the population that naturally currently happening, but to keep that. To keep those neural pathways open.

Danny (139:18)

Right.

Dr. Elena (139:19)

So if we can perceive the sound not just through hearing, but visually. And see.

Danny (139:26)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (139:26)

How this, you know, like, like how any of this patterns, you know, sound. Because this would sound somehow. This is actually.

Danny (139:36)

Yes. Associated with that. You could have a. A visual.

Dr. Elena (139:40)

Yeah.

Danny (139:41)

Input associated with the sound.

Dr. Elena (139:43)

Yes, that's right. Right. So then when you see pattern, you'll hear the sound as well.

Danny (139:49)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (139:50)

And can you imagine that Earth has been communicating all the time, all the creatures. And I've done this one experiment which we are now working with two producers in the in. In New York for something extraordinary. I'm too excited about it. I'm keeping it under belt. But the idea is that we will allow the. This synesthesia to experience cross generationally so that you can go with your kids, your parents can go with your kids, or all of you can go together and have this joint experience of nature through sound. But. And to allow the senses to awaken. So when you walk out from that space, what we're doing, you will just start perceiving things differently because. Because the curiosity will awaken in you actually talking about the depression earlier. Do you know what's the. On the, on the opposite spectrum of depression. Do you Know what can cure depression?

Danny (140:50)

What can cue it?

Dr. Elena (140:51)

Yeah, cure it, Cure it.

Danny (140:53)

Oh, what can cure it?

Dr. Elena (140:53)

Yeah. Or what can we prevent it? It's probably better. What do you think?

Danny (141:01)

Drugs?

Dr. Elena (141:03)

Yes. I mean that's what we've been, you know, the society is. It's usually, you know, like even when I wake up in the morning and I feel groggy, for example, I don't want to go and do breath work, exercise, which will actually have a much better effect if going for a cup of coffee or going for a run. Right.

Danny (141:21)

Breath work.

Dr. Elena (141:22)

Well, breath work is one. But what's on the opposite side of depression is curiosity.

Danny (141:30)

Oh, is it? That's the opposite of depression?

Dr. Elena (141:32)

Yes.

Danny (141:32)

Yes. Wow.

Dr. Elena (141:33)

Yes. Well, think about this, Think about this. So people who are. What happens when we are starting to get the symptoms? What happens to us when we're starting.

Danny (141:49)

To get the depressive symptoms or the curiosity symptoms?

Dr. Elena (141:50)

No, no. When, when we are starting to get the symptoms of depression? You know, how do we feel? What happens?

Danny (141:56)

It's cascading. It affects everything. It affects your thoughts, it affects your physiology, it affects the way you communicate.

Dr. Elena (142:03)

Yeah. And you just.

Danny (142:04)

The way you eat. Sometimes people stop eating.

Dr. Elena (142:06)

Yes. But you are generally become disinterested. You lose your habits, you stop asking questions. In a way you kind of start to hide and almost like close in all of your perceptions slowly. And you are becoming kind of covered like almost under a cloth, cloth of this. Everything becomes gray, if you wish through all of the sensors. So suddenly everything loses color and you lose interest. You lose interest in food. You know, even if you're given, you don't perceive that food. Right. You lose interest in conversation. Everything is, seems to be not interested and so on. So. And what I have, you know, when I was looking at it, I was shocked because I was interested in, you know, what happens with this postnatal depression.

Danny (142:56)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (142:57)

You know what happened? You know, you've got this most precious, extraordinary gift that you know, that you possibly actually really wanted right now you don't know what to do because you can't, you can't go back.

Danny (143:09)

Yeah. How does nature make it so to where your mother can be depressed after something like that?

Dr. Elena (143:17)

This is not the case in. It's not as prevalent in non urban, let's say, you know, in traditional societies.

Danny (143:25)

Oh really? In like, in like, in like, like native cultures or like indigenous cultures.

Dr. Elena (143:31)

Because you're not told you can't co. Sleep. You're not told you have to work and go earn money. Right, Right. You've got Your bigger family to support you. You've got your sisters, you've got your, you know, aunties, you've got your parents, grandparents.

Danny (143:47)

You don't have the stress of society.

Dr. Elena (143:49)

Yeah. You, you, your task is, you know, what you have in your hands. You know, you still have to earn food and, you know, you have to look after the house. But the child is not disassociated from your life.

Danny (144:02)

Right.

Dr. Elena (144:02)

You sleep together, you eat together, you cook together, you go on the field together. It doesn't mean it's, you know, like, everybody has a perception what is better. Right.

Danny (144:11)

It's probably not. It's probably not natural to carry a child for nine months and then to all of a sudden have to go do something else.

Dr. Elena (144:20)

Yeah.

Danny (144:21)

Have something else. Somebody else raise your kid 90 of the time. You know, that's probably. I can see how that could be. Really.

Dr. Elena (144:26)

But also, we are taught that we should be a certain way when we are mothers or fathers.

Danny (144:31)

Right.

Dr. Elena (144:32)

The family should be that way. The children should sleep, you know, that they should be like, by. They should sleep apart and, you know, they, they should behave. They shouldn't shout out, you know, like. I don't know, like. And they shouldn't be affecting the vibes.

Danny (144:47)

And when something goes wrong, you're on Google. What's. Why is my kid doing this? Oh, my God. Your kid has this disorder, this laundry list of things wrong. Go see a psychiatrist. Give him this drug. Medicate your kid with these drugs.

Dr. Elena (144:57)

Yeah. So. And when I started looking, I thought, oh, my God, you know, the questions in the depression scale questionnaire is basically how curious you are still about life. Life.

Danny (145:09)

That's fascinating. And how. So how would one go about becoming or fixing their depression with curiosity? Like, how do you, how do you hack that? Is there a way?

Dr. Elena (145:19)

Well, I, I like to go, like, we'll. We'll also come back to this question about adults, right. It's basically nurturing what they're most interested in and going back to that. And this would be our first port of call to see that they stop doing hobbies. You know, this is when it's starting to become.

Danny (145:40)

When you stop doing hobbies.

Dr. Elena (145:41)

Yeah, when you stop doing, you know, like that balance that we talked about earlier of, you know, roundedness of our life. But with children, we're constantly telling them what they should be interested in, and we are, in a sense, slowly, slowly killing their curiosity. We're telling them what they should be paying attention to. We're telling them what they should be studying. That's what school Does. They're not teaching them through experience and discovery, through their senses. They're teaching them the curriculum. And it's not bad teachers. Yeah, it's not. It's just because we have to level up. Right. And we know there are some teachers that, you know, paid so little. They're doing extraordinary work and they ignite children. But there is less and less, less space and time to do that because they have to do all this electronic tick marks before they have to do, you know, marking papers by hand. But now, you know, there are other pressures on them. So it's not for the lack of teachers, but it's how they're taken out and what the expectations is. So like, you know, what I've experienced with my children is that the school was training children to do the exam that they didn't need to do the exam for. It was to show how well the teachers and the school performed in the entirety of the country. So they spent entire year training them to do well in the exam, not teaching them something valuable and engaging curiosity, but so they could perform to the exam that they didn't even need to do that they were not marked, you know, to go further.

Danny (147:21)

That's terrible.

Dr. Elena (147:22)

But they have to also, like, in a way, if you can imagine, it's KPI, right. In terms of performance measurements of how do you gauge on how well, you know, they need to measure it somehow. That's the best so far. The system has to do it.

Danny (147:37)

Right.

Dr. Elena (147:37)

Because we don't know how to measure how curious is the child, you know, we can only measure it when they're depressed.

Danny (147:43)

Right, Right.

Dr. Elena (147:45)

So this part of this work for the new generation, what I am interested in is that how do we keep the synesthesia progressing?

Danny (147:54)

Homeschool.

Dr. Elena (147:55)

Yes, homeschool. And a lot of people choose to do that. Another part is that how do we ourselves stop falling into our own concepts? How do we. How we keep questioning, should we do this? You know, is it something. What is this concept? Why do we have to do this? Why do we have to do it this way? You know, why do we like the children, I don't want to do it. Why do I have to do it?

Danny (148:18)

It.

Dr. Elena (148:19)

Do we ever stop and ask, like, why?

Danny (148:21)

Right? Like it's. This is typical toddler questions that I get from my toddler all the time. Like, yeah, daddy, why do you have to drive a car? Yeah, like things, like basic things that I'm like, good question, huh? Yeah, let me get back to you on that. I don't know.

Dr. Elena (148:36)

Well, this is it. They allow us, you know, this. So once their parents, you know, went through these six months, I do the six weeks course with the methodology for the newborns. They ask me what else can I learn. I don't want to now fall into the trap of society or my own concepts. I want to be refreshing because they feel the engagement, they feel communication, they feel reawakened that they're with the child. And so I've now progressed into the next kind of level. It's looking in what children are reawakening in us because we were children. So we can actually remap those curiosity because. Because if I met you probably, I don't know, in the playground when you, I don't know, six or nine, I don't know, 12. We would have been different people. We possibly wouldn't even recognize each other right now, you know, with. With how much excitement or how much, you know, what we wanted to do, how free we were to choose it and not to consider, you know, everybody else around us what we want to not want to do and how much more innovative we were in our, you know, know. I don't know, picking up and problem solving was very different.

Danny (149:47)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (149:48)

So this kind of next level is looking. How can we engage the, the child and adult together? Not through the device. Devices are helpful, Right. At some point we cannot wipe them out. It's just how can we make this into something that is helpful?

Danny (150:10)

Right.

Dr. Elena (150:11)

I'm thinking, can we take a break?

Danny (150:13)

Yeah, we can quickly break. I was gonna take a. Take a quick restroom break and we'll be right back. I want to get back to what we were talking about in the beginning of the conversation and how you started working with all of these organizations like NASA, Boeing. What is the big famous Air Force base.

Dr. Elena (150:37)

Right.

Danny (150:37)

Patterson Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

Dr. Elena (150:39)

That's right.

Danny (150:40)

And getting involved with all these aerospace companies.

Dr. Elena (150:44)

I know, it's fascinating. You know, life has its coincidences, which are not coincidences, as I come to believe. I. So I was interested, I wanted to go to space, you know, but I haven't had a chance to do so. And I slowly was just doing research and really following curiosity, following my own interest on how can we do this with science. You know, I wanted to discover more, but I found that, you know, it's narrows division continuously. So I was in Australia doing my PhD and one of my supervisors had to leave and I had to find another place to do it. So I end up in. I found an ad, a coincidence. And I looked at that ad and I was lost Because I thought I could never finish my Ph.D. because, you know, you're so dependent on your supervisor. And he didn't leave me, he just had to go and he helped me right through my. As Gavin Linton extraordinary cognitive engineering, know at the top of the field and also, you know, breaking kind of research, new research. And so I found. And then we, we didn't have. We had. We had to be on forums and so I was on forum and found that there's a PhD in the UK and I looked at the requirements, you know, what they want for you to do and it was all that I know and everything that was additional, I also knew, oh, interesting, you know, like the entirety. And I was like, oh, I wish I could go. And so I called this professor Peter Johnson in University of Bath and I spread all of my literature on the floor and on the phone just thinking I must, you know, I was so worried that I wouldn't answer, you know, some scientific question that he'd queried me and we chatted and literally an hour later he says, oh, so when, when you're coming. And I was like, really? You know, I get to continue my. Because it's very rare to find a supervisor that will take your line of work because not everybody agrees I couldn't find that in Australia. So I went and so I continued doing aviation. Then I went to work with Marshall Airspace aviation. Then I found this. So like I mentioned about Marshall Margaret Techy canceling human space flight flight. And there was no space flight program in the UK nor in Australia. So it was not likely that I would ever work in space and you know, not likely to work in Russia either because it's difficult. So it is, of course, yeah. It's a, it's a very different culture and I'm.

Danny (153:36)

But they have a. They have a pretty robust space.

Dr. Elena (153:38)

Oh, absolutely. And I've got colleagues, you know, space psychologists that I've actually found out later after I became. Became a space psychologist. So I work with Russian Space Agency. Well, like all European and NASA and Japanese and Indian and Chinese, they all work together.

Danny (153:56)

Oh, do they really?

Dr. Elena (153:57)

Yeah.

Danny (153:57)

So NASA works with Russia Space Agency, of course.

Dr. Elena (154:00)

Well, who was flying, you know, all the European and NASA and Canada and Japan to space before there used to be shut metal which got decommissioned and then in parallel there was always Soyuz. So that was the only if you wish way to go up and back was through.

Danny (154:23)

But I imagine there's a very like. The reason I'm. I'm kind of shocked by that is because there's a very blurry line between space exploration and like weapons and like defense, you know. So that's why I'd be. That's why I was kind of stunned by that.

Dr. Elena (154:38)

Yeah, but well, they will do their own things, right? I mean, that's why the, you know, shuttle program was there. But. And I'm sure there are mutual agreements and things you talk, talk and don't talk about and systems you launch that you don't communicate. And a lot of them are military in addition. So they were, they were not selected from. From public. They were usually progressed from military rank in, in Russia there was only two selections from civil as well. So mixed, I guess. So I end up in UK and suddenly there is a grant and I am asked to write this grant for psychological supports to the moon and Mars. So this is the book that I.

Danny (155:24)

Wrote based on toolkit for a space psychologist.

Dr. Elena (155:28)

Yeah. So this is based on that work with permission from European Space Agency. I've used this as a textbook for university course because it's literally our reports that we did for European Space Agency. This is the first study to how to support people, you know, traveling to moon and Mars and back ideally. And so we are bidding for the study. It's the first study after Tetra administration cancels all the human space flight. We're doing the first human spaceflight program after that. We. The. The UK Space Agency is established and we have first in first budget because you have to contribute to a European Space Agency budget depending on the program you want. So we were never contributing to human space flight. So this is the first time after this grant we as a country putting it was actually very tricky. So they selected Team Peak, who is the second British astronaut because there was not government funded, but there was Helen Sherman, Dr. Helen Sherman, who was the British astronaut, but she was funded by public and she flew with Russian Space Agency. And so Tim is selected and then UK is kind of pushed into contributing to human spaceflight as a budget. So we now have human spaceflight program. And so then we established center for Space Medicine. You know, like it's all kind of growing. And now I. My husband actually offers me to read the book by Diana Pasulka and says, like American cosmic. Yeah. He says, you must get in touch. You know, she's talking about things you think about and you know, you mentioned to me, yeah. And I said, well, this is, you know, taboo. You can talk about this in science.

Danny (157:22)

It's a career killer.

Dr. Elena (157:23)

Yes, absolutely. And literally, so, so. Yes, absolutely. So you have to be very gauging you know, what. What you do and can't do. But what I saw is that, you know, later seeing Ryan Graves as well, speaking up about it. And these are the people I know, you know, work with and I absolutely trust. If they say what they see, that means something is happening and we need to investigate. We cannot ignore it because it distracts from their time. You know, if they're focusing on this, what are they thinking? If they can't talk about this at home, how does that affect them psychologically? Right. And people who are having this phenomena experience, they then almost like become secluded and their life changes because they go down the rabbit holes. And the rabbit holes are far, go far and you can't discern the information. And so Diana Jacques Vallee has been Gary Nolan now for many years. You know, just. We see it in public now, but they've been scanning that what is nonsense, you know, and what is actually can be founded. But there is another layer, experiential layer, that we mustn't ignore. We say it's anecdotes, but when it's in thousands and millions, which is. What was with Whitley Strieber? Yeah, I saw the COVID of the book in your.

Danny (158:49)

Yeah, he's been on.

Dr. Elena (158:50)

Okay. Yeah.

Danny (158:52)

So what about. What about him?

Dr. Elena (158:53)

Well, he wrote a book about his experience. Right. And then that. So that was his first book about. Because he was writing fiction.

Danny (159:02)

Yeah, he was writing lots of crazy fiction.

Dr. Elena (159:05)

Yeah, yeah. And so better heard from Wheatley, I'm sure.

Danny (159:08)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (159:09)

And then so he writes this experience and some people don't believe him, right, that he is. That it's actually real, that it's like it's another fiction. But he's going through this experience and he's sharing it because he a writer, he's a good storyteller. He can actually articulate that, you know, all of this experiences, he's got this beautiful skill. And so. And usually he gets letters after his stories are released, you know, some after his books. But now he's getting a quarter of a million letters. They're flooded by letters. And his wife Anne is opening these letters and she read every single letter and selected some of the letters they've transcribed and put it into his book called Communion. And that book is like a scientific research, you know, or it's something that can be done using scientific research methods applied. Because there are categories of people, so why so many people? And all of the letters begin with, I am a surgeon, you know, I am a barrister, you know, I am. I don't Know, a policeman, you know, like they're trying to put the, that I'm not crazy, you know, but I have no one else to share it to. But in your book I read that other people have this experience and just writing that is, has a big opening for a person to share, even to share, to put it down on paper to validate, you know, something that everyone else saying you're crazy and you have to live with it, you know, how are you supposed to, to proceed when everybody else who you respect and love, they deny you that experience? And it's so visceral.

Danny (160:48)

Were there any astronauts that experienced anything like this? So whether it be like UFOs or.

Dr. Elena (160:57)

So I, I can't, you know, divulge some of the things, but you, you hear more and more something that I have not personally heard that it is in the public, public, you know, so, so we need to go by what is available, you know, what we can scan and talk about. So that's the problem, right? Declassifying certain things and allowing people to articulate what they have.

Danny (161:21)

Well, astronauts, according to Diana's book, she said astronauts have to sign like really robust non disclosure agreements.

Dr. Elena (161:28)

Yes.

Danny (161:28)

And I think there was a part in there where you, I think she quoted you saying that pilots are far easier to read than astronauts are.

Dr. Elena (161:38)

So, so I mean you can imagine that, you know, if they, if they go, if something is not right. So their career in space is about 3 to 5% of the entirety of the professional life. So they're called astronauts or cosmonauts, but in space they're 2% or I don't know if they're lucky much more in space. So the rest of the time they're on Earth either supporting other crew training, you know, designing other equipment or advising, you know, becoming you know, members of boards and retiring and sharing their experience. So they, in, in order to get assigned onto, you know, lucky to be assigned. There are astronauts who never flown for some reason. You know, they would be trained but then will never fly because something medical would come up or they, I don't know, their turn run out or I don't, I don't know, like lots of reasons, you know, life happens, right? To all of us. So I think it was, the book is Packing for Mars or something like that. One of the astronauts is like a biography and he's saying that he, he's hidden his neck injury. So when he was, he, he, he transported his medical history from one office to another and pulled out part of the history when he was going for Medical.

Danny (163:01)

So he would be pulled out of the program.

Dr. Elena (163:03)

So he would not be pulled out of the program. So. So if you can imagine if they speak to a psychologist or someone like me who is labeled something mythical, you know, something you say, and from your mimicry, I would say, well, actually, you know, they, they would be very cautious, you know, it could sabotage their livelihood.

Danny (163:22)

Yeah, that makes sense.

Dr. Elena (163:24)

So of course they learn, you know, they don't do this on purpose, you know, to sabotage anything, but they have to be aware, you know, they have to be cautious on how they communicate, what they do, how they behave, because all of that has an impact, you know, on their family including, you know, if they get, you know, lose their job, then what pilots too, you know, can you imagine the pilots being, you know, lost their job in a moment just because they shared it and this happened. So anyway, so I thought, you know, one person I could write to is Diana. So I wrote Diana a short email and I think she recites this in Encounters. She actually kept a copy, but I wanted her to pay attention, you know, because I thought she's getting a lot of flooded, you know, emails as well. So we connected eventually and we got to talk a lot through her series the Encounters. And that's how I got in touch with Ruchi Mital and Zach, whom we are now collaborating this on the new project for, you know, connecting our multisensory experience through nature. And so I reached out to Diana Dayana, made introduction to other people and I met Ryan Graves and part of the time I worked as a volunteer for American Institute of Aeronautic and Astronautics because Ryan set up an organization for UAP and pulling experts, volunteer experts from various fields together is an extraordinary and doing extraordinary job in addition to asa so American for safe airspace.

Danny (165:11)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (165:12)

And so we publishing a white paper which took us several years now to put it through all the checks and confirmations because it's a like over 30,000 aviation professionals and aerospace professionals part of that organization. So want to be, you know, presenting it in a length language, you know, coherently speaking from the community. And so we are talking about him putting forward human factors point of view. And yeah, so slowly, I guess there are not many people want to put forward their expertise because you do get side eyes and conversations in the background behind you. But you know, what you believe and what you feel is legitimate and not legitimate because we wear shores. So like if we have the same phenomena, phenomena and experience and this is reported by not just extrasensory, not, not just uap, but people could have the same experience and someone would remember and some would rewrite the they experience through telling themselves or telling others. So trying to fit in our conceptual framework. And this is where this non verbal knowledge and something that we cannot articulate and then we justify it to ourselves as well to fit into our framework or framework that surround us. So that's why something I'm new, I'm proposing, it's not new methodology, but it's a new way of looking is to allowing to people to release the need to speak about the experience before they're ready. So. And also to go into the experience and process it, what it actually means for us. Because if I will be explaining to you something extraordinary that I went through, I will be putting all those filters that we discussed earlier with you, you know, like what you would know, what I'm willing to, willing to say so.

Danny (167:19)

That you wouldn't be 100% open about.

Dr. Elena (167:20)

It, not even on purpose.

Danny (167:23)

Right.

Dr. Elena (167:24)

I would be just trying to communicate as best as I can.

Danny (167:27)

Right.

Dr. Elena (167:28)

What I, what I, you know, feel I can.

Danny (167:30)

Right.

Dr. Elena (167:31)

But also we are sometimes forced to communicate too early before we've processed it and layered it in such a way that we're comfortable talking about it. Because then we're not perceived as strange or having, you know, being not fitting into society or speaking out of framework in a way. So. And the way to go is, I feel, is breath work because we go into the states where we. Something that is prominent to us, comes back forth to us so we could have a concept or experience. And by flooding our system chemically through intense intensive breath work, we go into a state where we actually free our mind from concepts and also from. We actually could go through a lot of fears and breath work as well. And actually that's a good question. You know, where do fears come from? What do you think? I mean, there are many types of.

Danny (168:37)

Fears, but what fears come from? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know.

Dr. Elena (168:42)

Yeah, yeah. It's not a very simple question, isn't it? Like, and we ask kids, why are you afraid?

Danny (168:49)

Right.

Dr. Elena (168:49)

You know, or like. And often we tell them, you know, don't be afraid. And they're not even afraid. Yeah, it's our fear.

Danny (168:58)

It's us projecting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I often wonder if this stuff is like baked into the brain.

Dr. Elena (169:04)

Yeah.

Danny (169:04)

Or if it's like something that's just like. Like our brains just like an antenna for these things. You know, that's the stuff that Diana talks about in her book. But it's it's trippy. Yeah, it's trippy stuff.

Dr. Elena (169:17)

So the fears, they come from concepts.

Danny (169:23)

Concepts.

Dr. Elena (169:24)

Yeah. Sometimes we haven't experienced it yet and we are afraid.

Danny (169:29)

Right, Right.

Dr. Elena (169:32)

Or somebody tells us something.

Danny (169:36)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (169:36)

And. And if we didn't listen to them, we would be fine.

Danny (169:41)

Right? Well, yeah, it's like when kids don't want to try new foods, they decide they don't like it before they ever try it.

Dr. Elena (169:48)

Yeah. But they're not afraid of it.

Danny (169:51)

Right? Well, the kind. They're kind of afraid of it. You think they're kind of like they're afraid to try it.

Dr. Elena (169:57)

Yeah, well that, that's what I mean. It's just like we can also use words, you know, afraid versus fear. Could be fear that could be shaking in your boots. Right. We're disabling fear and it could be fear of, I don't know, something else that could also be to us. To me, for example, you know, what you could do would be completely disabling to me. I wouldn't be able to move and you're able to do it, you know, so things like that.

Danny (170:20)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (170:20)

So the fear perception is like pain perception. Different people have different tolerance difference. And that barrier, the pain barrier is very different for everybody.

Danny (170:29)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (170:30)

That's why we scale it. We ask, you know, when, like I do acupuncture. So you would go, you know, tell me from, you know, 0 to 10, you know, where is your pain?

Danny (170:39)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (170:40)

Because to me, you know, 10 could be something and for you seven would be exactly the same. You know, so that's why you were gauging it. And that's why the medication, when it's given physiologically would be different for different people. So it's not necessarily that it will work because we also psychologically can anesthetize to us and also become very pain sensitive.

Danny (171:04)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (171:05)

Despite the medication.

Danny (171:07)

Right.

Dr. Elena (171:07)

Even physiological physio. Physiology based. Yeah, yeah. So. So this is amazing, you know, like that we put things that we don't realize that we have concepts that we, we have so many preconceptions that it stops us in our track and stops us innovating, stops us being curious, stops us exploring. Because somebody said don't go there.

Danny (171:34)

Right.

Dr. Elena (171:34)

And it stops the experience and that stops that branch, you know, of us actually getting up, going and doing.

Danny (171:42)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (171:43)

Will never ever. Our life could change forever.

Danny (171:46)

Well, there's lots of factors. There's, there's preconceptions. There's also repercussions. And there's also.

Dr. Elena (171:53)

But repercussion is a concept I mean, clearly, you know, you're not gonna, you know, like, you, like there's expression you could do everything once in your life.

Danny (172:05)

Yes.

Dr. Elena (172:06)

Like you can jump off the hill, you know, very, very high. You can do this once, but probably never again. Anything else.

Danny (172:12)

Right, right. Sure.

Dr. Elena (172:13)

Yeah. So.

Danny (172:14)

But like, I'm talking about like, like, you know, things that are outside of the law, like psychedelic drugs or things like that or.

Dr. Elena (172:24)

Yeah.

Danny (172:24)

Not just repercussions.

Dr. Elena (172:25)

Yeah. This, it's not preconception. It's. It's like rules that we learn to live by itself.

Danny (172:30)

There's, there's, there's palpable consequences to some things.

Dr. Elena (172:35)

But do we have to be afraid of it or just know it? Like they make us, they say it's, you know, they make us fear it.

Danny (172:45)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (172:48)

Not make we, I guess taking a concept that we should be fearful, but fear in the moment of when we are acting is actually very different quality of what our mind makes of it. So, so, so let's, let's put it this way.

Danny (173:09)

Okay.

Dr. Elena (173:10)

So when. So skydiving, right?

Danny (173:13)

Yes. So, okay, I see what you're saying. The right. You're. The preconception of what actually is going to happen is way worse than what it actually is.

Dr. Elena (173:25)

Like or underestimated? Both. It could be both. Right. Like you say, if you don't know the law, you know, you cannot estimate the consequences either. So it's both. But in both cases, we imagine nothing will happen or we imagine, you know, the world will end. You know, both of these are consequences.

Danny (173:44)

Right.

Dr. Elena (173:45)

So absolutely. We live in a certain structure. We need to be, you know, rational, logical, you know, low obeying citizens, you know, you know, good, dad, good, mom, you know, good. You know, work that we are doing. There is a lot of preconceptions, but it, we don't have to be. So the fear that stops curiosity, including, including that in the moment of when we actually doing it, it's only, it's only when our mind picks up on the thought what could happen if. And we're already not doing anything in the moment. We're already in our thoughts.

Danny (174:23)

Right. Paralysis by analysis.

Dr. Elena (174:26)

Kind of. Yeah. So in martial art, you have no time when you are fighting.

Danny (174:31)

Right.

Dr. Elena (174:31)

Or when you don't have to be fighting. Could be learning, training, blocking, you know, you are working in that moment. There is no fear that you're gonna get hit. If you, if you are fearful, it paralyzing and then you're starting to retract.

Danny (174:46)

Yes.

Dr. Elena (174:46)

And. And that's when they, when the person doesn't even. And they somehow read the cues that it's the way in. But if you're in the moment and you're just working with it, you're fine. Just like with your child. Right. When they're on the playground, when you're just thinking. But if you are there with them, you're both exploring like, no, I don't.

Danny (175:10)

Want to go down the slide. Push. Oh, it's not that bad.

Dr. Elena (175:15)

So. But when you're doing it together, like, you know, my children really enjoy something like rope climbing now. This is very popular. They hook it around the trees. Webbing.

Danny (175:28)

Oh, like, like what is called in the US Gliding through the trees.

Dr. Elena (175:33)

Yeah, yeah. There's different names for it. It started in, it's actually in Australia and they then brought it into Europe. I don't know if in US Yeah, yeah.

Danny (175:40)

They have it all over Costa Rica too.

Dr. Elena (175:41)

Yeah, exactly. So it's when you can go in the canopy of trees or under canopy of trees and various level difficulties. Yeah, yeah, those extraordinary stuff.

Danny (175:52)

No, not that, Steve.

Dr. Elena (175:53)

Yeah, but that, I mean, it. Have that webbing too. But it's, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's when it's called, I think it's called Ape maybe in the uk. I forgot the name. But anyway, it's, but when you are doing it, it, you know, like, I did not want to go up, but once you go up, considering, you know, I, I, I did skydiving and, you know, flying and, But I'm very cautious about height.

Danny (176:20)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (176:20)

You know, I'm just, you know, and we need to be.

Danny (176:24)

Yeah, well, it's okay, Steve. Don't worry about it.

Dr. Elena (176:27)

Yeah, they, they do have, they do have that webbing too, you know, for kids to explore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Danny (176:36)

But fears are good too. Like, it's good to have fears.

Dr. Elena (176:38)

Absolutely.

Danny (176:39)

Yeah.

Dr. Elena (176:39)

It's a, it's a survival, you know, it's. But it's what we do with it. Right. And how we work with it. And so fear. And again, it's, again, it's different. Like, it's like a different color. We perceive different color. It's important for us, us to, to keep that in mind, but keep acting in the process. So otherwise we wouldn't be able, you.

Danny (177:11)

Know, training yourself to do that.

Dr. Elena (177:13)

Yeah, yeah. But children, they, they develop those concepts, a lot of them, because of us, because of the stories that we tell rather than, you know, discovering that themselves. And of course, you know, you don't want them to, you know, to break a Bone, you know, or something. It's horrific. You know, I wish you'd done it yourself than having your children to go through that.

Danny (177:38)

Right.

Dr. Elena (177:38)

So you. But also that fear could become paralyzing to, to us in our discovery. And when we become too fearful again, we fall into that gap of losing curiosity. Curiosity because it's all too scary to be everywhere else. So it's having that healthy level but also understanding that it's concepts and always asking about this, you know, where does this come from? Because a psychologist, we work with phobia, right. And there is some, some of it rational, some of it, you know, based on experience and some of it we don't know where it's based. You know, like we need to find. And there are many ways of, you know, addressing that. You know, you can go into long sessions or you can do cognitive behavioral therapy and yeah, there's many, many flooding therapy and.

Danny (178:32)

Yeah, that's fascinating. Well, iya, thank you. This has been an amazing conversation. I learned a lot today.

Dr. Elena (178:40)

Well, thank you. I enjoyed the conversation and much appreciate being here and hopefully they'll be interesting for listeners as well.

Danny (178:49)

Yeah, 100%, 100%. Tell where, where can people find these books like these kids, these cosmic baby books as well as the toolkit? Is that. Do you sell that?

Dr. Elena (178:59)

Yeah, yeah, that's on Amazon. So it's on Amazon. You can buy it. Just put my name hold it up.

Danny (179:04)

To the camera so people can see it. This is the cosmic baby book.

Dr. Elena (179:06)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you just put my name into Amazon.

Danny (179:11)

So you think we're going to be able to teach kids how to have a universal language in two, three generations from now?

Dr. Elena (179:15)

Now absolutely. I, I hope sooner than that because our brains are so malleable. And so the new project that we're doing is focusing on that is. Yeah, yeah, there you go. So just type my name and you'll find.

Danny (179:28)

And you think this will like unite mankind?

Dr. Elena (179:31)

Well, UNESCO considers that sound and music is cross cultural. So it's a way crosses borders. And we underestimate how much we pick up through sound, how much we can tell what nature is doing. And if we live in the urban city, sometimes people can't even sleep at home when they move on holidays somewhere in a nature spot because it's so noisy. But also it's frightening some people because of all this noise continuously, all the time. But when people are taken from nature into urban city, they feel unsafe because they don't have the sound nature because that soundscape tells that everything is okay. But once Something changes in that rhythm.

Danny (180:22)

It's completely unnatural to be. To be in a city.

Dr. Elena (180:25)

Yeah. So we lose those perceptual senses. So children can hear sounds that adults can't, because we don't need the capacity for that. And then. So that's why if children are not exposed to music or to some sensory perceptions or some accents, that then unable to reproduce them, but having this reversed. So seeing sound, for example, is one of the somatics options. But by keeping one synesthesia, there is more likely for you to have other types of synesthesia. Like 150 types already counted, wanted. And, you know, these people would not. Would not choose not to have it.

Danny (181:06)

Right. Well, I know it can be really beneficial for memory. There's like. I know people use, like, spatial memory to associate certain memories with certain things. Like, as far as, like, when you can correlate specific ideas and, like, attach different things to them, like, attach different sensory inputs to those things. And, like, run that you can. It's easier to run it back in your mind and to recall that there's different tools people use for that. Really, really interesting.

Dr. Elena (181:31)

Just watch the space. I'm very excited. You know, Earth Design language is coming. Life.

Danny (181:37)

Yes. It's amazing. It's fascinating stuff. And do you have a website or anything or.

Dr. Elena (181:43)

Yes, I do have a small website for that, but it. If you just follow me on social media, you. It will come up. I will.

Danny (181:51)

What's your. What's your t. Or your handle on social media? Dr.e away.

Dr. Elena (181:55)

Instagram mostly. I am not as good on Twitter or X. Yeah, okay. Yeah, perfect.

Danny (182:01)

Well, we'll link it all below so people can find it.

Dr. Elena (182:03)

Yeah, sure.

Danny (182:04)

And thanks again. I really enjoy this.

Dr. Elena (182:06)

Yeah, pleasure.

Danny (182:07)

All right, good night, everybody.