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A
All right, Diane, thank you for doing this.
B
Yeah, you're welcome.
A
So how does a Harvard trained psychotherapist or John Hopkins trained who you teach, taught at Harvard, right?
B
Yes.
A
How does someone like you, high level academic, get into something like ESP and telepathy?
B
Well, it actually began when I was a psychiatrist at Harvard and I was consulting to the medical floors there, and they had this patient who wanted to sign out against medical advice, and she had told the staff that she was psychic and that she was seeing ghosts and she wanted to leave. And you can't leave a hospital against medical advice if you're mentally ill. And so I was called in to basically evaluate her and sign the paperwork and hold her against her will if she wasn't willing to stay. And when I went in to see her, I mean, she immediately told me that she was psychic and that she knew her results would come back normal and that there were all these ghosts there and it was spooking her out and she wanted to leave. And I said, well, I imagine that hospitals are kind of spooky places. If you see ghosts, this would be a place where they are. And I said, but I'm really concerned about the possibility you had a heart attack and I'd love for you to stay. She then looked at me and she goes, you've got this really wonderful energy around you. She says, I'm getting a reading on you right now. Do you mind if I tell you what I see? And I said, oh, no, go ahead, sure. And she said, well, you're married to a chemist, and my husband was a biochemist in addition to being an md and then she said, and he's applying for a job in two different cities right now. And that very week he was applying for a job in two different cities. And she had my attention now. And I said, oh, well, you know what, what can you tell me about that? And she said, well, you know, in his heart of hearts, you know, he wants to go to one of the cities, but she'll go back, you'll go to the other city. And I named up, you know, she said, name some cities and then I'll tell you which one it is. And I. And I named off a bunch of cities. And she said, oh, San Diego, that's where you're going to move, and you'll eventually leave psychiatry to write books, and then you'll have a daughter. And, you know, she just went on telling me about these things in the future. Well, it blew my mind because she was saying things that I knew to be true. And as time went on, all of the things that she predicted for my future came true. And as someone who went into this field with the intention of not just helping humanity, but with the intention of really understanding the brain and understanding consciousness and wanting to come up with a model for. For that, I knew that I would have to explain something like this if it was real. And so what I did was, is I started looking into. And back then, it was really hard to. This was in the 90s, it was really hard to find information in parapsychology, but I did. And then in the mid-90s, things started getting declassified. And I saw, I. I went to a conference where Russell Targ spoke about his work that he did on remote viewing. And I said, wow, okay, There's a lot of evidence that I had no idea about. And I already knew that. I knew a couple of things that made me open to this as an area of inquiry. And one thing I knew was I knew that physics from over a century ago had already shown us that what we think of as reality is really not the real reality. You know, that, you know, for example, you know that quantum physics, you know that, all of that. And we can get into talking about that, but all the things that we learned from quantum physics or Einstein's work on time and how our sense of time as a linear arrow moving forward only is an illusion, that there were physicists who said that the past, present, and future all coexist. And so I already knew about that. And then I already knew about a syndrome called savant syndrome, in which people know things that we don't really understand how they know them. Individuals who could do high level mathematics and yet they'd never been to school or taught, you know, taught arithmetic or, you know, people who were musical savants who could perform on an instrument, and they'd never had lessons. And I thought, well, you know, somehow people are getting information that we don't understand. How did they get this information? And so anyway, so that's what sent me off on my journey was really this deep curiosity and this understanding that the brain is really. The brain is our means of constructing, making sense out of information that we get from our senses. But it's all just a construct. What we think of as space and time is just a construct. And yet, if you look at what physics is telling us, it's telling us that there's more than just three dimensions and that that time is. Is not linear in the way that we think it is.
A
And you have a background in Neuroscience?
B
Yes.
A
Did you talk to anyone else at Harvard or in your department or any colleagues about this after you spoke with this lady? Did you. Did you have any conversations with people who may have not. May not have been exposed to this information about parapsychology and declassified documents and stuff like that?
B
No, not. No, not at the time. I spoke with my husband, I mean, who had trained at Johns Hopkins with me, only he was internist and hematologist, oncologist and biochemist. And he thought it was remarkable that she told me what she did. But, no, it was one of those things where I didn't know who I could talk with about it. Because the problem is that within psychiatry, those things are considered to be evidence of somebody being mentally ill. If they say to you, I'm telepathic or I see ghosts or whatever, those are thought of as signs of some kind of psychosis, you know, a condition like schizophrenia. And so I didn't really know what to say. And we did move. You know, we did move. Within six months, we were in San Diego. And so. And at the time, I was just down the hall from John Mack.
A
Oh, wow.
B
And John Mack was. I mean, he had started the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital, where I was. Where this happened. And I knew John because we were both really concerned about nuclear war. And so we were both among a group of physicians who were really interested in. In that matter. And so that's how I knew him. And I. You know, and he had written, you know, a book on Lawrence of Arabia, and he had gotten a Pulitzer Prize for that. And he was just a really very articulate, intelligent man. And I didn't know that he was somebody. I mean, it would have been really interesting to have had that conversation with him. I regret that I didn't. But did you.
A
Were you aware of the stuff that he was doing with people?
B
No.
A
At that time?
B
No, I wasn't.
A
Because he was, like, kicked out of Harvard, wasn't he?
B
Well, they tried to remove his tenure, and they.
A
They ended up moving him, like, off campus or something, because that was, I guess, not a. They thought that that was not a good look. They had all kinds of meetings to get him removed from Harvard, and they didn't, like. Well, it was a combination of, like, the craziness of studying people who thought they were abducted by aliens combined with going on Oprah and going on all these huge talk shows and talking about it, and they thought that that wasn't painting Harvard in a good light.
B
Right. Yeah. And that. And all of that unfolded after I had already moved to San Diego. So I remember being, you know, in my living room in San Diego and watching the news and seeing John and going, oh, you know, and then. And I. And. And I had no idea that he was. He was doing that kind of research. And. But I had. I had a lot of respect for him. And at the time when I first heard about his work and I heard the criticism that neurologists were saying, well, what we think's happening during abduction is really sleep paralysis. And sleep paralysis is this condition in which your body. It's like a hybrid state between dreaming sleep and waking life. And so what I mean by that is, during dreaming sleep, our body's paralyzed so that we don't act out our dreams. And what can happen is that sometimes people will be in this hybrid state. And it's more common to see in people who have a condition like narcolepsy where their body's paralyzed and they see hallucinations, so imagery that is kind of dreamlike, but they're awake. And so they're seeing those hallucinations within the context of their bedroom, and the only thing that can move is their eyes. And so when I heard that that was an explanation for what people thought were abductions, I thought, yeah, well, that makes sense. Maybe this is sleep paralysis. Because I still was. I had been so trained and so immersed in that sort of, as a neuropsychiatrist, really think of things in those kinds of terms. And it wasn't until, you know, much later that I realized, no, there's a lot more here.
A
Yeah. Yeah. It's wild to. I mean, one of the things about this is, it's like to be able to go down one of these rabbit holes, it's. You have to be very interdisciplinary. Right. Like, you can't just be. You can't have your blinders on in one area of study. You kind of have to have a peripheral knowledge of. Of different things to be able to put these pieces of the puzzle together. You know, that's why I was curious about your background in neuroscience and how, like, the neuroscience and, like, the anatomy of the brain in different regions of the brain correlate with your work in psychiatry and psychotherapy and that stuff.
B
Right. Yeah. So when I first. When I first went to medical school at Johns Hopkins, my intention was to be a neurosurgeon.
A
Oh.
B
And I actually did a lot of surgery. Oh, really? Yes. Because that was my initial attention. Ben Carson was there. I knew Ben Carson. I mean, he may not remember me because I was just a medical student, but he was there as somebody who was a more senior resident. And I was there when he separated these twins whose brains were conjoined.
A
Oh, wow.
B
Siamese twins. Yeah. And so I remember seeing them in the. You know, in the nicu, you know, the. Where you. Where you have infants that are, you know, have a medical condition. And so, anyway, so the reason why I wanted to become a neurosurgeon was that as a neuroscientist, I realized that what I was most interested in was human consciousness. And I didn't see how I was going to answer the kinds of questions I was interested in by studying, you know, rats. Um, and. But I also didn't like doing research on animals. And I thought, well, one of. And one of the most exciting branches of research at the time was being done by neurosurgeons who would. While somebody is having their brain operated on, they can be awake.
A
Right.
B
Because you don't have pain receptors. And so they would stimulate different parts of the brain to see what functionality it had before cutting, because they would try to. If you're dealing with a tumor, you want to remove all of the tumor with enough margins, but you also want to preserve functionality. So it's this. You're between those two constraints. And so it's an opportunity to be mapping things out. And I had done research as an undergraduate in neuroscience where I was making microelectrodes, and I was inserting out of a glass, and I was inserting them into a crayfish axon and recording the action potential of the crayfish axon in a petri dish and then putting different things in there, like maybe something that would affect the flow of ions, like calcium, et cetera, and then seeing what influence it had on the action potential. So I already knew about, you know, working with oscilloscopes and working, you know, with that aspect of things. I thought, wow, to be able to be inserting tiny electrodes into somebody's brain and stimulating it and measuring it and then also getting them to tell you what they're experiencing. I thought, that's really exciting. And so that was my initial attention. But when I went to Johns Hopkins and did my psychiatry rotation, I fell in love with psychiatry because the chairman of Our department, Paul McHugh, was a neurologist first, and then he became a psychiatrist. And the way that he ran the psychiatry department was really basically behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry. And so it was focused on kind of trying to understand the neural correlates of, of, you know, of these phenomena. Like you know, whether you're talking about, you know, cognition or you know, memory, you know, those sorts of things.
A
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B
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's. Yeah. So just to. So just a correction here. It wasn't a frontal lobotomy that he had. Okay. Yeah. That's a different part of the brain. What he had was a bilateral temporal lobectomy.
A
Okay.
B
And most epilepsy, I'd say a high percentage of epilepsy is in the temporal lobes. The temporal lobes are on the sides here. And so when you're coming through the birth canal, that's an area that can get scarred or damaged. And so anyway, so it's interesting. They did a bilateral and. Wow.
A
Yeah, this was in the 50s, I believe.
B
Yeah, yeah. Before we knew what we know today. Yeah. So the hippocampus is involved in laying down memory. It's the oldest. It's called the archaeocortex. In other words, it's an older cortex than what we think of as the cortex. The hippocampus is also involved in navigation. Remember several years back when people received the Nobel Prize for discovering the brain's gps?
A
No, I don't remember that.
B
And I wrote about it in my book the ESP Enigma before they got the Nobel Prize for it. Yeah. We have in the hippocampus and in areas adjacent to the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex, we have these cells that some of the cells are involved in laying out a grid, which is like a map of physical space. And those cells will start to fire, become active when, say, we are in a certain location. So that you have maybe a map in your mind of your neighborhood. And there are cells that are associated with different parts of that map that will start becoming active when you're in that area.
A
Whoa.
B
Yeah. And then there are also cells that are involved in your orientation of what way your head is facing. So their head position cells. And as I said, there's these grid cells and place cells. And so it really is an internal mapping system. But the hippocampus is also involved in laying down memory. And it's particularly active in dreaming. Sleep. It's the source of most of the theta activity, which is theta is that activity that is at the lower end of the Schumann frequencies. So around 7 Hz. Theta is between 4 and 8 Hz and 7 Hz. That 7 Hz activity has been associated with things like remote viewing and various psychic abilities. Like, there was this.
A
Here. Pull them off and then put them back on. Yeah, you don't want you to look like. Like you're being electrocuted.
B
There you go. So. So, like, when they. When they did studies on Ingo Swan, who was one of the most famous remote viewers, they saw this very.
A
Also a Scientologist. My. My. One of my buddies got me that as a. As a funny joke, because this. This area is synonymous with Scientology, so.
B
Oh, is it?
A
He got me an E meter as a gift, so we put it up here as a fun prop.
B
Oh, that is. That's fun. I've never seen one before.
A
Yeah, so the idea is you hold on to these things, and they go into auditing sessions, and you hold one of these in each hand, and then they ask you questions about your life. Like, they do a deep dive psychological review of your life, and you talk about all the negative things that have ever happened to you that. Your deepest, darkest secrets. And so this thing bounces around and it somehow removes your body thetans, which are like aliens that live inside you.
B
Oh, I see. Okay. There you go. It's a technological exorcism.
A
Yes, exactly. And all of the top remote viewers were Scientologists.
B
Yeah, I know. A lot of them were. Yeah. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all. Yeah. So he had this really very unusual 7 hertz activity in his. I believe it was in his occipital lobe, which, you know, when he was remote viewing. And the occipital lobe is the, you know, the visual cortex. So, anyway, so there's this association between that sort of frequency, you know, the theta frequency and dreaming and psychic abilities. And the main source of the theta is the hippocampus. And then the para. Hippocampal area was. There was another imaging study that showed that that area of the brain would become really very active during these kind of, you know, whether it's remote viewing or some other kind of. Or telepathy. There was research that had shown that that area would become more active. And so I'm very interested in it because it made me wonder whether or not the hippocampus could be involved in not just navigating physical space, but actually navigating mental space. If you think of how are memories organized? And I really think that they're actually organized in a field rather than being organized. Organized in the brain. That. The brain is our access to that like an antenna? Yeah, sort of like an antenna. But it's more than just an antenna. Yeah. You know, I think of it as being the way I think of the brain is. I think of it as being like our computer in terms of, you know, it's got computational aspects, but it also think of it as also having an ability to help us surf the net, you know, surf the cloud, you know, surf an informational field. Right. I mean, there was research that was shown by Lashley, who was doing. He was looking at memory and he was trying to remove. Find where's memory encoded. And so he was removing different parts of a rat's brain. And what he found was that it wasn't the location of where he removed brain tissue that determined loss of memory. It was more the amount of brain tissue you took away. You know, and so interesting. And so he really, he. He believed that there was sort of some kind of, you know, holographic component to it. You know, that. But getting back to the hippocampus and memory, though it is true that the hippocampus plays a role in converting short term memory into long term memory. And so the hippocampus is extremely metabolically active. It has very high need for oxygen. For example, anything that's metabolically active needs more oxygen. And so if somebody has something happen that interferes with oxygen. So, for example, carbon monoxide poisoning, which affects the ability of blood to give you. Or cyanide poisoning, it affects the ability of blood to carry oxygen and deliver it where it's needed. Well, people who've survived carbon monoxide poisoning, they trashed their hippocampus. And I remember seeing patients like this or people who had suffocated and then been brought back to life from, you know, some other source of, like drowning or some other source of suffocation, they oftentimes just. They cannot form new memories. And it's because. It's because their hippocampi have been wiped out. And I've had patients like that. And it really is like every single day I had this one woman who. She. Her husband tried to kill her and he. He tried to kill her by choking her. And she survived it. And he ended up. He ended up in one psych ward because he, you know, at Hopkins, because of, you know, having been murderous. Murderous. And she ended up under my care. And what happened was, is that when he got out of the psych hospital, he killed himself. Because he.
A
In prison or something.
B
Well, he didn't go to prison. He didn't go to prison? No, he was considered mentally ill. And he did not. No, he did not go to prison. I know, I know, it's hard to believe, isn't it? But he did not go to prison. He was out on some kind of bail, you know, having been, you know, know, evaluated psychiatrically. But anyway. But he killed himself, right? And she. Every day she would. When I'd go in to see this woman, she'd ask me why her husband wasn't coming to visit her. And I would have to tell her, he's no longer alive. And she would cry as though she was hearing the information for the first time each time. And after a while, I just thought, I'm not going to put this woman through this anymore. The reason why I tell that story is because if there's anything you're going to remember, it's going to be something like that. That your husband's no longer alive and that you've grieved them and cried over it.
A
And every day you're putting her through the worst psychological pain she could imagine.
B
And so I realized it's, it's not, I'm not going to do that.
A
So what did you start telling her?
B
I just, I, you know, I, I just said, I don't know, you know, he had, you know. You haven't heard from him, you know? No, I haven't heard from him. You know, when's he coming? I said, I don't know when he's coming, you know, And I just kind of. Because I figured that that was better to just kind of.
A
Sure, yeah, totally.
B
Then put her through that.
A
And every day was the same. She completely was a. It was a nuke new day. She didn't remember the day before.
B
Yeah, it's a new day. Yeah.
A
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B
I don't. I don't really know the details of it. I. I just know that what I, what I told you of the story.
A
I'm curious if there's any correlation with effects to the hippocampus with people who are like free divers who do long period breath holds, or even like surfers who hold their breath a lot when they're surfing and like wiping out duck diving waves and stuff like that. People who habitually practice breath holds. I wonder if there would be any negative effect to the brain or the hippocampus.
B
Yeah, I don't know. Because if what you're doing is you're conditioning yourself towards something, then that's not an acute process. And it's the acute process where your system hasn't had a chance to adapt that's the most problematic. Just like people who live at, you know, high altitudes, I mean, you know, the body compensates. You know, you have, they have higher hematocrits, which is the number of red blood cells that you have. You know, the concentration. Yeah. So there's, you know, there's these. So people that are conditioning themselves like that, I doubt that they're depriving their brain of that much oxygen.
A
Interesting anecdote. I had a friend who's been on this podcast before who is a. A metabolic scientist who did. He developed, he did a study for the Navy for Navy divers who were getting oxygen toxicity seizures from the rebreathers for. So when the Navy divers, they go underwater, they have to be stealth. There can't be any bubbles. So they have, they use these special tanks that are rebreathers, and they were getting toxicity seizures from it. And what he was able to figure out with his studies is that putting these people in ketosis or giving them exogenous ketones was wiping out the seizures. And what they're doing now, what they've started doing was, is implementing that into, like, epilepsy patients, people who have epilepsy, and putting them on a strict ketogenic diet. And a vast, like, a very high percentage of them are experiencing, like, little to no epileptic seizures anymore.
B
But I was told, I was taught that back when I was in my training 40 years ago. We already knew that. We've known that for a long time.
A
No way. Oh, I thought this was more recent.
B
Well, there's a lot of things that are rediscoveries of things that we knew a long time ago.
A
Yeah. So something about glycogen versus ketones. The brain prefers to be in a ketogenic state and burning ketones versus glycogen, and it's some weird way that makes the brain more optimal at function at a higher level.
B
Well, the brain can either run on glucose, which is. Or it can run on ketones. And ideally the brain is actually running on both. And so that's one of the reasons why intermittent fasting has become very popular where people will go 15 hours or so in between meals, so that you give yourself a long enough fast that you kick in that ketogenesis. But you're not like a diabetic who's in ketosis all the time. So it's. It's. Yeah, that's a healthier way of being, is to have this kind of. You've got the glucose. Is that like immediate sort of thing. But then you want to be able to turn on the ketone generation for when you're not eating.
A
And when you're in a fasted ketogenic state, you're sharper, you're quicker, you're faster to respond to stuff. And this extrapolates out into nature. Like if a lion or a cheetah, you know, oftentimes they go many days between meals because they can't catch prey. So if they have gone five days without catching anything, their body has to be more dialed in, more optimal, more. More quicker, sharper, you know, so that. That makes sense. At what point did you make the connection between this ESP telepathy stuff and folks with autism?
B
Well, so as I mentioned earlier, I really was interested in savant syndrome and these case reports of people who knew things that we just. Like, how do you know that? And I read Oliver Sacks book the man who Mistook His Wife for a hat back in 1986. I met Oliver Sacks back then.
A
Really?
B
Yeah. He came to Johns Hopkins and, you know, I attended his lecture. And then we had, you know, a private sort of. I was on the social and Cultural Affairs Committee as a student. And so I got to meet a lot of really interesting people. And I read his book before he came. And I was just so fascinated by these autistic twins who had been admitted to this institution back in the 60s, who could. One of the games they played was to spit out consecutive prime numbers. And they were doing it in six digits. And so one of them would say some six digit number and then the other one would say the next one, and then they would just go back and forth doing consecutive six digit prime numbers. And Oliver Sacks came in one day having looked at a prime number table, and he said an eight digit prime number. And then they looked at one another and like, oh, okay. And then they switched to doing eight digit prime numbers.
A
Whoa.
B
And then he tested them on 12 digits and they were doing, accurately doing 12 digit prime numbers. And they even gave 20 digit prime numbers. But back then in the 60s, computers couldn't calculate 20 digit prime numbers. And so Sacks was only able to validate it to 12. And they also could do calendar calculation. Being able to tell you, you could give them for thousands of years forwards and backwards. You could give them a date and they would tell you what day of the week it was.
A
How old are these guys?
B
Oh, they were at the time he studied them. I think that they were in their late teens, early 20s. But the thing is that they couldn't do simple arithmetic. And what said was the. They just saw the answers. They just saw the answers and they saw the answers out here in physical space. Just like, you know, floating in space. Yeah, just floating in space. Like a hallucination. And just like. Who hallucinates, you know, 12 and 20 digit prime numbers? And so I thought, that's really fascinating. And then, you know, then, and, and then I learned about Daniel Tammet, who is an autistic savant who. He's won the PI contest. The PI contest, as in PI, the mathematical Constant which is 3.14, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. And he can recite it to over 22,000 digits effortlessly. And he says he never memorized it. He just sees it out here in what we think of as physical space. And so in five hours, he's just visualizing the numbers as complex landscapes with colors and shapes. And I thought, that's very similar. And so it really got me to thinking about the nature of reality and where information is. Where is information stored.
A
I remember seeing a documentary on this guy.
B
Yeah, but the other thing is that savant syndrome is found predominantly in two populations. And one population is individuals who are autistic, and the other population is people who are blind, but blind congenitally. And so those are both conditions in which there's something different about the wiring of their brain, where there's something that they. There are things that they can't do. Like, in blind people, obviously, it's that they can't see. But autistic people, there are certain things that they struggle to do. You know, I mean, I think that, like, these autistic individuals who were institutionalized at sac, studied, I think they couldn't even tie their shoes or something. You know, I mean, just basic. A lot of basic things. And yet their brain's somehow wired that they can do, you know, these kinds of things that we don't really have good algorithms for. I mean, and they can do these things faster than a mathematician even who's given an algorithm. And so it's not that they are deriving the answers or calculating them. It's perceptual, and it's hard to wrap your head around. But to me, that was like a clue that if I want to sort of crack the code for consciousness, the way to do so is to really to study these autistic savants who can reliably demonstrate these abilities that we would consider just as impossible if it wasn't for the fact that they're so reliably demonstrated and have been demonstrated by more than one individual. And so that's why I started studying autistic savants. And I've been studying autism since 1987.
A
Oh, really?
B
So after I met Oliver Sacks, I won a. A fellowship to go to the Institute of London in. I mean, I'm sorry, the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and work with Michael Rutter, who was knighted for his work on autism afterwards. But he. Because he was the world expert on autism at the time.
A
Really?
B
Yes. And I was fascinated by developmental neurodevelopmental conditions as a way of trying to understand this relationship between the brain and consciousness. So instead of going into neurosurgery, where a lot of your time as a neurosurgeon isn't spent doing the really interesting stuff, and I decide, no, what I want my bread and butter work to be is neuropsychiatry, where I'm studying neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegenerative disorders, where something goes on such that people either never acquire an ability or they kind of acquire it in a quirky way or they had an ability and they lose it. And then finding the correlations between what their symptoms, their behaviors are, and their testing on cognitive tests with what we can learn from neuroimaging about their brain function. So that's why I shifted to neuropsychiatry from neurosurgery. But it was always with the same aim. And so, yeah, I went over there to study these kids with him. And so there were very few people who've been in the field as long as I have. And I realized when I started studying these autistic savants, I realized that they had some abilities that really sounded a lot like esp. And I thought, well, accessing information that we don't understand how you access it, why do we accept these things like generating prime numbers and musical talent for somebody who's never been trained, why do we call that a savant skill? And yet if they can tell you things before they happen, or if they can see things that are, you know, like something like clairvoyance or remote viewing, if they can do that, you know, to me it just is all people accessing information that we don't understand how they're doing it. And so there are some things that I feel that we tend to segment away from one another and we lose information by treating them as though they're different. And then there's other things that we tend to lump together that I wouldn't lump together. Like, I wouldn't lump, I wouldn't have created autism spectrum disorder because that's really multiple different conditions all lumped under one label. And that confuses things. But to me, I think it actually brings more clarity if we just look at a lot of these phenomena that are like accessing non local information as being really probably something that it's telling us that our way of conceptualizing.
A
Information.
B
And, and, and how the brain accesses it is, it's fundamentally flawed within the materialist model. And, and you know, because I, I, you know, as a neuroscientist, I studied that model. You know, I have a book, you know, Eric Kandel, you know, he did work on this, you know, on the snail. And you know, and a lot of the, and I have an autographed book of his. And you know, so I was like, I mean, I was a, you know, dyed in the wool, you know, neuroscientist. And what I knew is neuroscience has a really incomplete model. There's so many things that we've accepted an explanation, you know, accepted something as an explanation that's, that really doesn't explain everything. And so it's so incomplete. And. And then we're ignoring all of these. These phenomena that don't fit into it. And. Yeah, so. So that's. Yeah. Yeah. That's what led to my writing my book. The ESP Enigma was. Was my recognition that, that, yeah, there's all this data that shows that these things are possible. And, and why are we saying it's impossible?
A
Well, two things. The one interesting thing to point out is there's this. I believe he's a neurosurgeon. Steve. I've talked about this guy many times, but I got to get his name right. I think it's Eddie. I think it's Eddie Yang at Stanford came out and said that out of. And he did it. He was talking to. I think it was Andrew Huberman on a podcast. He's friends with Andrew Huberman. He said that, like 90% of all of the literature, all of the medical literature in textbooks, when you're going to. Studying for your PhD in like, neuroscience for. Or neurosurgery, whatever it is, is outdated or wrong, which was crazy coming out of the mouth of a guy like that. And it's just like. Just goes to show you that just because you spend your life studying something and, and reading all this old literature and it's like, it gets. It's. It's very rigid and not many people kind of like step outside of that framework, which is kind of scary. Another thing is a problem with. A fundamental problem with studying this stuff like ESP and. And clairvoyance and all this is you can't do it with it. You can't test it with the scientific method. Right?
B
Well, I don't know why you say you can't test it with a scientific.
A
Method, because it's not. It doesn't. It doesn't pass scientific method muster. Right. It's not repeatable. You can't measure it. You can't weigh it.
B
It.
A
It seems to be very anecdotal.
B
No, there. No, there's. There's a lot of research that. Where they're using that. They're using scientific methodology to study it. I mean, the telepathy tapes is full of a lot of anecdotes and some of the most.
A
Eddie Chang. I'm sorry? Eddie Chang, neuroscientist Ed. That uc. I thought it was Stanford. Okay.
B
Yeah. Well, you know what he's saying there? 50%. Well, you know what's interesting is.
A
Is UCSF Stanford?
B
No, UCSF is University of California, San Francisco.
A
Got it. Okay. But shows how much I know about college. I didn't make it. I barely made it out of high school.
B
Well, when I was in. When I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins, we were told while we were there in my first year, half of what we're going to teach you is going to be obsolete by the time you finish your career. Oh, wow. And it's your job to contribute to making it obsolete. Yeah. And so, you know, my having gone there at Johns Hopkins, the main reason why I went there is that I knew that they wanted to be on the cutting edge. And, and they, you know, a high percentage of the people who go to medical school there stay on in academia. And I mean, 10% of my class were people that were also in the. Were in the MD PhD program, as was my husband. And initially I was going to be in the MD PhD program, but I decided not to do the PhD component of it. But it was, I mean, very, very, very, very academic. But with the idea of, really, you're allowed to question. You were, at least back then. I can't say how things are nowadays, but I know at the time that I was in training, you were encouraged to try to, as I said, figure out what is it that is incorrect. And at the time that I went into neuroscience, I mean, neuroscience wasn't even a major. I crafted my own major. And similarly, when I did all of my training in psychiatry, it was before Prozac. And so we didn't have a fraction of the psychotropic drugs that are available nowadays to psychiatrists. And so what I saw happen. So at the time I was training in psychiatry, it was still a fairly new field to be entering into a biological approach to psychiatry. When I went to Harvard, when I first arrived at Harvard on faculty, everybody there was talking about where to buy an analytical couch, you know, because they were still heavily psychoanalytic in their orientation, as was John Mack.
A
An analytical couch.
B
Yeah.
A
What is that?
B
Do you know what that is? You know, it's like. Like those Victorian fainting couches.
A
Oh, yes, the fainting couches. Okay. Is it like a therapist couch?
B
Yes.
A
Yeah, I know what a fainting couch is.
B
Ye. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are analytic. And so you would have, you know, in psychoanalysis, you would have the patient lay down on the couch facing the ceiling, because it was. And then you, as the analyst would be sitting there with your pad of paper while they're talking, and it was that it would reduce their inhibitions to tell you things that were embarrassing. They're not looking you eye to eye.
A
Right.
B
You know, and you encourage the person to free associate, just say whatever comes to your mind. Don't worry about any judgment or this or that. And so that was the. That's how psychiatry was under the influence of Freud. And the psychoanalytic tradition was very, very strong. Where I went to medical school and then also did my training in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins was different from that one, because at the time that the psychiatry department was created in either the late 1800s or the early 1900s at Johns Hopkins, the psychiatrist they brought in was a contemporary of Freud's named Adolf Meyer. And Meyer's approach was not analytical. His approach to psychiatry was biological, psychological, sociological. And so this biopsychosocial psychiatry, meaning that when someone came to you and let's say they complained of being apathetic and not wanting to live anymore, okay, and they just. All of these different symptoms that we would call the syndrome depression. Well, in my training, we would have to figure out what was the reason why, you know, and so is it. You know, is it something that is biological? So, for example, people can have depression because they're deficient in vitamin B12, or they can have depression because they. They have a thyroid condition.
A
Right. Or we're walking. We're walking chemical bags.
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So there are all these things that can bring. And that's what you want to correct, you know, or it could be that it's psychological. It could be, you know, that it's. You know, their mother used to, you know, abuse them as a kid, and now they're married to a woman that abuses them the same way, and they're trapped, and they don't know what to do, and they kind of shut down because there's a psych. There's all of these, you know, things that have to do with their psychology, you know, or it could be something sociological, you know, like your living in, you know, a totalitarian state and, you know, in society, you know. You know, and you're a persecuted minority and, you know, and it's really more at that level that things are problematic.
A
And so we're in, like, inner cities of America, too. People who grew up in, like, ghettos that are surrounded by crime, everyone they know is involved in crime and.
B
Yeah, exactly. And so what is the cause of this individual's whatever, you know, symptoms they have. And so that's how I was trained. And that's what. I wouldn't have gone into psychiatry if it was just, here's a drug to manage the symptoms or whatever. I Loved being like a detective trying to figure out, well, what creates that, you know, and then getting at the root of the problem and addressing it there. And so that's how I was trained to practice psychiatry. And there's a branch, there's, there are people who today as psychiatrists still practice that way. And you know, that's what we call integrative psychiatry or, you know, functional medicine. But it, you know, you're still, you're still looking for, you know, what, what is the, you know, what is the, what is the root, you know, the root cause of this syndrome?
A
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B
Is it possible to disprove it? Well, you know, it's. Boy, you've asked you. So you brought up several things. I. Sorry, I have to think about where it is.
A
My stream of consciousness is highly uneditorialized.
B
Oh, yeah. So. Well, let me just make a few comments. Sure. So, first of all, you have a lot of parapsychology research has been of the order of. Let's say we've got Zener cards and we've got five Zener cards, and the chances of you, you know, whether it's Precog or it's telepathy or whatever the experiment is that you're using those Zener cards for, it's a chance of 1 out of 5 or 20% that it's going to be one of the. If I say it's the card that looks like a cross, it's like the chances of that are. Know one out of five, 20%. Right. And so a lot of the research has been done on, you know, using a system like that, using large numbers of people, large numbers of trials. And then what they get is like, they get a percentage like where 25%, you know, say it's four cards. 25% is just random chance. And what they get is 32%. And it ends up with these astronomical statistics that it has to be something more than just chance. And that's their meta analyses that look at thousands of trials. And that's one of the things that Dean Radin frequently will quote. And I saw that a lot of parapsychology is done that way. And I thought that's not the way I would go about it. The way that I would go, because it's not that convincing, you know, even though. Yeah, okay, you know, so the P value is, you know, amazing. You know, that's not gonna change perception. And so that's why I thought, well, if anybody could do it to the degree that would give you extraordinary evidence, it would be somebody who is an autistic savant. That was a decision that I made over 20 years ago and predicted it because of what I know about how their brain works. And I can get into that more in a little bit. But. And so with, with the autistics that individuals that I've worked with, I mean, they get, you know, 95, 97% accuracy on things that, you know, chance might be, you know, know like what, for.
A
Example, like, how does it work? Like, give me an example of like one exercise that they would get that high level accuracy on.
B
Oh, well, there was this, this girl named Haley that I did six hours worth of research on, and she had that kind of accuracy. And I did everything from using a random number generator to generate six digit random numbers. Okay. So. And just doing, you know, doing like, you know, I did like, there was one run where it was like 167. Okay. Digits, and she. She only missed seven. No, it was 172 and she only missed seven. She got 165 of those. Right.
A
Wow.
B
Now, you know, it's just like, okay, something's going on here, you know, and.
A
How many people were in the room?
B
So it was just Haley and the therapist that she was working with. And then the cameraman and I were in a separate room with camera feeds, and we had cameras on either side, on the ceiling, in front and behind. And then we had a visual barrier between the therapist and Haley. And so it was pretty phenomenal. I mean, and then and she could do this with two separate therapists. And how I met Haley was that her father knew Darrell Treffer and knew about mathematical savants and thought that his daughter was a mathematical savant because she was able to do, like, all of these amazing mathematical equations, and yet she really hadn't been trained how to do it. And he already knew about savant syndrome, and he thought, oh, well, she's mathematical savant. And then one day, when the therapist was working with her, the therapist's calculator died on her, and she had to switch calculators, and the calculator wasn't within eyesight of Haley, and the calculator died on her, and she switched calculators and the new calculator until she reset it. It actually gave the answer in logarithmic notation, which is going to be a different set of numbers. And so she and Haley immediately typed the answer in logarithmic notation. It had never done that before. And the therapist was like, well, wait a minute. How'd you know that that was in logarithmic notation? And Haley typed, I see the numerators and denominators in your head. And then the therapist said, what? What, you can read my mind? And she goes, yes. And then she goes, well, okay, if that's the case, then what am I thinking of right now? And she was thinking of that purple D dinosaur, Barney, you know, and she typed Barney. And then she goes, well, what's the name of my landlord? And then she typed helmet, you know, and that was the name of her landlord. And she was like, holy cow. You know? And at first, she thought she was losing her mind, and she was afraid to tell the parents. And so then eventually she did. In the meantime, another therapist that was coming into the home to do work with Haley, she noticed that Haley would, like, do the same, you know, how, like, some of us will transpose letters, you know, and we'll just. We always do that kind of spelling mistake. And, you know, and as soon as you see it, you know it's wrong, and you want to correct it, right?
A
Like I after E or something like that.
B
Yeah, yeah, that kind of, you know, or, you know, or people with dyslexia will, you know, will do that. And so she would do that kind of a thing, and she would see that Haley would do the same things that she would do, and she's just like, oh, that's funny. You make the same mistakes as me, you know, and she just said, you know, it's funny. It's like, you're tapping into my mind, you know, And Haley said, I am, you know, and she says, well, then, if that's so, how do you say I love you in German? Because this woman was fluent in German as well. And then she types out, Haley had never been exposed to German, and she types out the German for I love you. And so, anyway, so it was after those. Those accounts and Darrell Trefford knew that I, after having come back from India and having worked with these savants over there that. That I was interested in pursuing questions of telepathy. And so I was contacted and I went out there and I did the studies, you know, in as controlled of a fashion as I could. And. And Darrell Trefford's no longer alive, but he was convinced. He publicly went on record saying that he thought that telepathy was a real thing, that it was a svant skill. He was on the same page as me, that really. That there's something going on here.
A
Has it ever been done where one of the children was in a completely opposite part of the house or a different part of the room where there's no visual connection, no line of sight or anything like that, where they're able to read the mind or communicate what the other person's saying or thinking?
B
No, not really in the way that I would like to see it done. I mean, you know, There's been stud, you know, studies where, you know how you have these houses where you have a contiguous dining room and living room. And so you've got a huge separation. You know, a separation that's as big as your studio here. You know, so easily, you know, 20, 25ft separation. Okay. But you still have some visibility between, you know, the person, the mother and child.
A
Sure.
B
And.
A
Sorry, go ahead, continue.
B
Yeah, so that's been one of the things that I've, you know, I recognize that a lot of skeptics, you know, would like to see them in separate room, and I would like to see that as well. It's easier said than done because autistic children are so. They're very. They're ocd. You know, they like things to be the same. You know, they don't like changes to their routine. They're really extremely.
A
Oh.
B
They'Re, they, they, they. They get disregulated very, very easily. Emotionally dysregulated. And, and so they, so, so they just. It's. It's really hard to just kind of do that and have them calm and have all of these people there with cameras and.
A
And one of the other things that people Say is that if you have someone there who is skeptical, it automatically like ruins the trick.
B
Right.
A
Like they can't do it because there's the energy of somebody who doesn't believe could kind of ruin it. Right.
B
Well, it's okay for somebody if they're an open minded skeptic.
A
Okay.
B
You know, so like you would qualify as that. You know, you're open minded, you've got some skepticism, but you're not, you're not there as somebody who, whose job it is to, you know, kind of where you're convinced that it's, it's got to be a scam. And your job is to figure out how are they scamming us.
A
Right? Totally.
B
Which is a totally different kind of energy to introduce.
A
Well, I mean, even what I would like to see not just in different rooms, but just a, like a piece of plywood in between them. Right.
B
That's the thing I have here.
A
We just have a giant piece of plywood that goes to the ceiling all the way around. So there's absolutely no way we can see each other. And, and like one of those mentalists or stage magicians also there just to. Just to observe it and to ask questions and make sure there's no trickery going on, you know.
B
Yeah, there, there's definitely not trickery going on. I mean, I don't think that, I.
A
Don'T think there is either. But I'm just saying just to.
B
Sure, sure. For people to.
A
Right.
B
To be assured of that. But there's definitely not trickery going on. You know, I mean, if there's something that's going on that is, let's say more that would be in keeping with a materialist model. Let's say that the materialist model is correct, That there's nothing going on here that is picking up information outside of the ordinary senses. If there's something like that that's going on on, then it's going to be something more along the lines of the fact that these children do have hyper, hyper, hyper sensitive senses in general. Okay. You know, their ability to hear is extraordinary. And so they could, you know, they can hear a conversation, you know, somebody that, you know is totally other end of the house. Okay. And we know that when we think silently that we actually still vibrate our vocal cords.
A
Really?
B
Yeah. And so one of the things that I've wondered is whether or not it's something along those lines, you know, that their hearing is so extraordinary that they can even pick up the vibration of somebody's vocal cords vibrating when they're thinking and because, I mean, these parents are quite sincere in their. I mean, most of the parents. And I've had people contact me from all around the world. I've probably had over 100 people contact me. I haven't had the funding to go and test all of these reports. But when the parents are contacting me, it's not because they're trying, trying to become famous. They're in shock. They're in shock. I mean, a lot of them would never want to have been on the Telepathy Tapes podcast. They would not have wanted the publicity. So the people that Kai wanted to be introduced to were the people who were willing to be filmed. But that doesn't mean that that represents all of the individuals that I've been contacting, affected by, you know, over the years. And, and, and some of those individuals that the kid doesn't use a spelling board at all. They're, they're capable of using a pencil and, and writing. And so, you know, and some of them, and one of them, it, it goes against this idea that it's just as listening to the sub, you know, the, the, the, the sub. Auditory, you know, vibrations.
A
Well, that doesn't make sense to me because when I think about telepathy, one of the biggest problems that boils up for me is as it's probably become obvious to you, my train of thought is all over the place. Like, I, It's. It's hard for me to even think about one thing at once. I'm often thinking about many things of at once. So, like, I mean, and this is common with writers, they'll under, you know, it's, it's to communicate an idea. It's not just one perfect stream of consciousness on. To pay into words to communicate something. Usually there's a lot of editorializing that has that. A process that people have to go through to refine drafts, refine drafts until you can come up with the most condensed, distilled version of that idea for other people to be able to digest and understand. Like, if you were just, if I was just somehow projecting my raw stream of consciousness, consciousness to you right now, it would be. Result in massive miscommunication. Right. And if somehow that could correlate to vocal cord vibrations, I mean, that would just be just as confusing, I would imagine.
B
Yeah, well, what. One of the things that these autistic individuals say is that they hear all of these different people's thoughts. And so they hear. It's like being in a crowded restaurant for them. You can imagine.
A
That makes sense.
B
Yeah, that's how they experience it. And so they're having to tune into the individual that they're supposed to be telepathic with and block the rest of it out while they're also having to communicate. I mean, it's extraordinary what they do. And whatever the mechanism is, is it's extraordinary. It's just, I think that, you know, where people get hung up on is like, you know, you know, is it telepathy in the same way that we think of telepathy? Right.
A
You know, and are we perceiving it the right way? We might not be perceiving it the right way. We might not be thinking about it the right way. It might not fit into our framework of how we imagine the world, the physical world. Right?
B
Yeah. And so one of the things about autistic individuals that made me think that besides savant syndrome, that made me think that they might be the most likely to demonstrate this was that I looked at when I wrote my book, the ESP Enigma, what I did was I looked at like, who are all of the. Where do we find the most reports by people that they experience? Esports. Okay. You know, who, who are these people?
A
Right.
B
Okay. You know, and you see a higher incidence of that kind of reporting and people that are artistic and creative. Okay. And, you know, so the opposite. And you see the least reports in people who are scientific and analytical and logical. And then we also have people who have never had anything that you would call ESP in their waking life, but they've had a dream occasionally that was precognitive or it was like it contained like an after death communication. These dreams where somebody has a dream about their grandfather coming to them and then that morning they find out that, oh, grandpa died last night. Oh, he died at the same time that I had that dream. There's all kinds of reports of that kind of thing. And then there was a lot of research that was done on dream telepathy where you had people who'd be sitting in one room looking at a picture or painting and then trying to send it to somebody who was dreaming. And there'd be a researcher who didn't know what the picture was, who would wake up the dreamer when they could tell that the dreamer had been in REM sleep. And you can tell that because the eyes go back and forth.
A
Rapid eye movement.
B
Yeah. And so. So you wake up the dreamer and just say, what were you just dreaming about? And then they would take that description of what they were dreaming about and compare it with the picture that somebody was sending them. And there was an amazing sort of correspondence between the two. And so I knew that there was something different about the dreaming brain. The, that made it a state of consciousness where you're in a more receptive mode. And what I kept seeing over and over and over again was the same pattern. And what it was is that, and this is oversimplifying what's happening with the hemispheres, but just for simplicity's sake, think of it as the creative and intuitive hemisphere is associated with the right hemisphere. And the analytical and logical and language based hemisphere is the left hemisphere. And when we're in waking life, our left hemisphere is dominant.
A
Yes.
B
And particularly the analytical hemisphere.
A
I'm sorry, that's the analytical hemisphere, right?
B
Yeah. And then in our western culture, that's also the way that our educational system is set up. It's set up to develop the left hemisphere skills. Everything is reading, writing and arithmetic. Analytical, logical, and it's really de. Emphasized the arts and the creative and all of that. So during the time when the brain is still very plastic and capable of being shaped into whatever kind of tool we need it for, because it's, it's undergoing all of this capacity for rewiring depending upon what do we need, what abilities do we need? And just like as I was saying earlier, people who are born congenitally blind or people who were born with, or quickly, within the first couple of years of life lose their ability to speak. There's these. The brain's still rewiring itself to trying to find a workaround for whatever it is so that you can still navigate, you know, this world and get your needs met. And so back to left hemisphere versus right hemisphere. What I realized is that a lot of these savant skills are right hemisphere skills. And the right hemisphere is associated with gestalt thinking, you know, not this linear verbal thinking. It's associated with, you know, pattern recognition or visual spatial processing. And then in dreaming sleep, the right hemisphere is dominant over the left hemisphere. But also in dreaming sleep, our frontal lobes shut down their activity and our frontal lobes are what create expectations. And so during dreaming sleep, our dreams can be so magical because we're not the analytical, logical and sort of setting the expectation and thinking of consequences. All those parts of the brain are shut down. And so it's able to do, it's free to access information that gets shut down by, by people during their waking life where it's sort of like, well, that can't happen. And so autistic individuals, they're not only are savant skills Mainly right hemisphere, but their main deficits are in the left hemisphere language, you know, right. You know, the linear things. And so I thought, well, if anybody is going to be able to do this, it's going to be somebody whose brain, when they're in their waking state state is more one of these sort of hybrids conditions or either more right hemisphere dominant or. They're able to have this kind of. There's that in hypnosis, what you're trying to do is you're trying to put somebody into kind of more of a hybrid state or like that state that you're in just before you wake up and you still can access your dreams and then they slip away if you don't. It's that state, that kind of twilight kind of state that you're in. And what people try to do in meditation is they try to stay in that state for more than just, you know, a couple of seconds. They're trying to expand that because when you expand that, you have more access to things that are normally unconscious.
A
Wow. So what is happening is that that state that you're explaining, that twilight state is. That's what happening when you hear about stories of being people being put into like a hypnotic regression to like access buried memories or suppressed memories.
B
Yeah. I mean, what you're doing is you're basically trying to put them into a place where instead of the left, you know, the left hemisphere, analytical, logical thing, being, driving, you know, kind of what we have access to.
A
Yeah.
B
You're allowing the unconscious to kind of be, you know, you know, accept. Accessed. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
A
It's like. It's like you're somehow opening. You're. You're allowing access to like the encrypted part of the hard drive that your consciousness is not allowed to, like when you're. You're waking consciousness.
B
Yeah, well, you know, it's. It's one of those things.
A
It's a wild idea to me that we have, that I have memory in my brain that I cannot access that aren't. They don't. Aren't even real. Like. Like they don't exist, but they're somehow in there if I'm in this state. You can somehow pull these things from like my early childhood, maybe some trauma that I experienced that I buried, you know, or just something I just straight up forgot. That idea is just so bonkers to me.
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. But, but there's, you know, there, there are people who have, you know, accessed. So here's the thing though. There's. There's Lots of problems with memory in general.
A
Yes.
B
You know, because memory is not, it's not, it's not like this video recording.
A
No.
B
And over time, it, it gets, it gets modified almost instantly.
A
Gets modified. Right. I think there were studies on this.
B
Yeah. It gets modified by subsequent events.
A
Right. And the brain's doing something. The, what the brain's doing is just taking. From what I understand is this. The memory has a purpose and the purpose is to help us get through the world in the future. Like how we, how can we take this and apply this to future situations? So it helps us get through the, you know, helps us evolve.
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, you know, memory is so imperfect. And, you know, and so, I mean, and I, you know, you have to. When people tell you their memories, you have to realize that. And you know, and so then, you know, when people are accessing memories under hypnosis, I mean, that's even another third degree separation away from what might be an accurate memory. I mean, you can't, you know, you can't trust it entirely is the point I'm making. You know, so yet at the same time, what's fascinating to me is you mentioned earlier this man who had his temporal lobes removed and he couldn't lay down new memory. Well, there are people who can't forget a thing to save their life.
A
Really?
B
Yes, yes. There was this.
A
Nothing new. They can't forget anything.
B
They can't forget anything. There was a psychologist, his last name was lurking and L U R I A. And he wrote a book on the mnemonist. And it was this man that he met who. He couldn't forget anything. I mean, you could say to him, oh, you know, June 12, 1988. And then they'd say, they'd tell you what the weather was like, what they had for lunch, punch, everything. Just a retention of all these mundane things that most of us never ever put into long term memory.
A
Wow. Is this what it is?
B
Hyperthymesia.
A
Hyperthymesia. Also known as hyperthymestic syndrome or highly superior autobiographical memory. Wow. Condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormal, probably an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. It's extraordinarily rare with fewer than a hundred people in the world being diagnosed with this condition as of 2021. Holy smokes. What does this say about ancient Greek? The authors wrote that they derived the word from the ancient Greek hyper. Excessive.
B
Wow.
A
Only a hundred people in the world.
B
World.
A
What, what would lead to have is. Are you born with that or do you develop that?
B
Well, it's a good question. So one of my former colleagues from Johns Hopkins, Jason Brandt, who was a neuropsychologist, he. He contacted me several years ago and told me about this. He had a patient like this and he was able to do neuroimaging on him. And what was interesting is that he had an excessive amount of white matter around the hippocampus. And so that to me is a clue. And when he told me about that, I said, oh, that's really interesting because I believe that Einstein had a lot of excessive white matter around his angular gyrus, which is the part of the brain that's associated with calculation, you know, being able to calculate. Really? Yeah. And so I should have known they.
A
Would have done a dissection of his brain. I've never thought about that.
B
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. They. Yeah. There's an interesting story about his brain, you know, because, I mean, it was. I forget what exactly what it was, but it was like, it was like. To me, it was like. So it was like being stored in a jar in somebody's like, you know, barn and Texas or something. I mean, it was some bizarre thing like that. I don't remember, I don't quote me on any of the details, but I, but, but I, but it'd be like hearing that. Okay. You know, it was just like, you know, it was one of those things where his brain got pickled and then somehow it ended up in the custody of somebody. And it wasn't like in this vault at Princeton where you would expect it. Right. You know, it was in some strange.
A
Place in a giant cylindrical vat.
B
Yeah. But anyway, but the point is, is that, you know, when you think about what white matter is, you know, you know, that's the, like, that's the, that's the myelination. You've got the gray matter, which are the neurons, and then the white matter is the isolation, I mean, the myelation that causes faster conductivity. So it's like the difference between having a wire that is insulated and a wire that's not. And so we know that heavily myelinated areas have faster connectivity.
A
Oh, wow.
B
But another form of white matter are astrocytes. And astrocytes are fascinating. Their name comes from the fact that they're star shaped. And one of the things that we discovered about the brain, I don't know when this was discovered, maybe 10 years ago or so, what we realized is that the synapse, when we think of a synapse, we think of two Neurons that are in communication with one another. So you've got the axon, and you've got the dendritic spine. And so. So. And across that synaptic cleft, you know, there's a neurotransmitter that's. That's sent. Okay. And. And then there's some synapses that are electrical where there's no neurotransmitter involved at all. You know, you've got a gap junction that. That's connecting them. Okay. So. But then what we now realize is that there's something called a tripartite synapse, which means that the connection between two neurons also has an astrocyte involved. And the astrocyte sends out its own process, and it's monitoring what's going on at the synapse. And so it's actually. It's like these white cells, which are. About 20% of our brain cells are astrocytes.
A
And that's the white matter.
B
They're part of the white matter.
A
Okay.
B
Yeah. So 80% of the brain, you know, well, neurons are only 10% of the brain. Okay. They're only 10%. And then another. And so the rest of it are glial cells. And then there's all these different types of glial cells. And one type of glial cell are the astrocytes. And the astrocytes, there's some people who think that the astrocytes might be involved in, like, quantum processes. Whoa.
A
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B
Yeah.
A
You familiar with him?
B
Oh, yeah.
A
What. What is. I can't even think of the word. That he studies. He studies this certain part of the brain, microtubules. Microtubules. That's what it is. He thinks the microtubules have something to do with consciousness.
B
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think he's right. I mean, so this is the thing, is that the way that I'm studying the brain and this book that I'm writing that's going to be published in the fall, I've been studying the brain. The way that somebody is. Is I'm trying to retro engineer things. Okay. You know, and what I mean by that is I'm looking at the brain and all of these things that people don't talk that much about. Okay. You know, people tend to focus so much on the neurons and on the neurotransmitters, and that's just a tiny fraction of the brain.
A
Right.
B
And so I'm interested in all the rest of it as a system. How does it work? It's like when I. I did a fellowship, I did one year of a fellowship in genetics at the time of the Human Genome Project. And at the time, we were shocked. When the results finally came back, we were shocked that There were only 22,000 genes in the human genome. We were expecting it to be at least five times that. What we realized is that, that here you have. These are very parallel situations where you have with genetics, gene coding. DNA is only about 10% of the chromosome. And the rest of it was treated like it was just scaffolding for the important stuff, the gene coding protein. Protein creating genes. And then we discover, no, it's like, okay, there's not enough differences in the genetics to explain the variability we see. I mean, there's only 1 1/2% of our genome differs from chimpanzees.
A
1% of our genome differs from chimpanzees.
B
1 1/2 percent.
A
1 1/2 half percent.
B
Yeah. And we share like half of our genome with vegetables, bulls. You know, it's astounding.
A
That's wild.
B
And so what you realize is that. So I think of the genes that code for proteins as being kind of Like a. Think of them as like the keys on a. On a player piano. Okay. And then all of the rest of it is like, is like, plays a role in what sequence of those keys being played.
A
Right.
B
You know, to make the music. Yeah, you've got the keys. But then what controls the sequencing, you know, of how those keys are played? Well, it's the rest of it. And we're just beginning to, you know, I mean, that's going to be a much harder sort of thing to, you know, you know, to decode because it's just so much more complicated. Well, similarly with the brain, we've been focusing on the 10%, the neurons, right? Because, you know, that's where you get the, you know, these action potentials, you know.
A
But Stuart was saying there's like hundreds of thousands of microtubules per neuron or something, right?
B
It depends upon what neurons you're talking about. But there's certainly about 10,000 or so per neuron, you know.
A
10,000. That's sounds about right.
B
And when you see them in the neuron, it's like they're packed so tightly in there. They're not there as scaffolding. They're not there. I mean, microtubules are in every cell of our body, okay? They perform multiple different functions, and so they form different organelles within the body. So like a lot of our, our sensory cells, like you look at the hair cells that are in the ear that respond to different frequencies of sound, those are chock full of microtubules in a very specific array. Similarly, the photoreceptors in the back of our eye, those are also modified cilia, and cilia are microtubules based, okay? And so similarly, when our cells are dividing into two, like cells, you know, mitosis, similarly, there. There's an organelle, which means little organ. There's an organelle that is called the spindle apparatus, which is what organizes the chromosomes and makes sure that each cell has the same set of chromosomes. So microtubules are involved in. During brain development. Microtubules are what are leading the way for the connection to be made between neurons that are in very different parts of the brain. Okay. Microtubules are leading the way there. So anyway, so the point is that microtubules are fascinating. They're like little superconductors, and they clearly play a huge role in consciousness.
A
What can we do to push forward this or to study the connection between microtubules and consciousness? Is there any hypothetical study or research that can be done that maybe isn't funded to study the this stuff.
B
Well, oh, I, you know, I'm, I'm really, I'm really interested in looking at. I, you know, I have a model for this whole. And I, I can't go into all of it today, you know, and when my book comes out, then, you know, then it'll have some of this, definitely have some of this in there. But I'm really very interested in designing experiments that can answer that question and working in collaboration with people like Stu Hameroff. And he and I have both been invited to be part of this group of scientists who are going to get together to actually talk about that. There's about 15 of us. Some of us are physicists, some of us are neuroscientists, scientists, to really kind of see, you know, what. Brainstorm about what kind of experiments can we do, you know.
A
Right.
B
You know, so that we can really.
A
You know, intellectual salon.
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What can we, yeah, what can we do with, you know, what we, what we have here? Because as I said, it's a system, you know, it's, it's a, it's a system. And, and, and, and I, and that's how I think. I think more like a systems engineer as opposed to, you know, just looking at one thing and attributing everything to just one thing.
A
Right, yeah, I see what you're saying. When Stu was down here, he was explaining to me that he's been looking into some stuff with Alzheimer's and he was talking about. What, what is the God.
B
Neurofibrit?
A
No, what is the thing that you, you scan on pregnant women to see the baby? Ultrasound. He was using ultrasound waves to potentially come up with a treatment for Alzheimer's. And something about, he was explaining something about the ultrasound waves hitting the brain that can somehow like, eliminate the plaque that develops in the brain or something like this. And, and this can help potentially be a treatment for Alzheimer's or different cognitive impairments. It's fascinating stuff. I don't know if you ever heard of, of, of that before, but.
B
Well, yeah, yeah. So I know that ultrasound is being used. I mean, this is very low voltage ultrasound. It's being, is being used for neuromodulation, and that's being done at the University of Arizona by Jay. Sandra.
A
What is neuromodulation?
B
Yeah, well, neuromodulation, it's when you're basically trying to modify the way that neurons behave and you can target a very, very specific area within the brain. You're having to, to do like an MRI to Get know that person's particular anatomy, you know, their brain and then you can, you know, in their skull, you know, people have differences in the shape of their skulls and whatnot. So you're having to do all these, you know, measurements to make it very specific for the individual you're doing it for.
A
Right.
B
But then what you're doing is you're beaming in, you know, sound waves and very, you know, low voltage. And what you're doing is you're just, see you're getting it to respond to that particular frequency that you're putting in. If you think of the brain as being a generator of frequencies. Okay. And if you can get it to, if you can get a specific area of the brain to be, you know, if it's receiving that frequency, you're going to be in kind of entraining it to that frequency and then you're looking at what are the effects of that. Right, right. You know, and so what you're doing is you're just trying to modify brain functionality by using sound waves as opposed to chemicals. Chemicals. You know. Similarly, there are people that are using infrared light therapy.
A
Oh yeah.
B
Alzheimer's, you know, and so.
A
Alzheimer's.
B
Yeah. And, and so, so there you're, you're, you're using light by just looking at it. No, no, no, no. This is, this is.
A
How would you get it in, in through the skull?
B
Well, so there, there's a helmet that you can put on that, that you're right, that the skull, the skull does not, not.
A
Ideally we actually have one. But it's for, it's for hair, Hair growth.
B
No, this, well, this is. I see. Yeah. No, this is. No, I know that there's somebody who has a helmet. Yeah, I know there's somebody who, who's developed a helmet that you wear that, that delivers infrared. It's not ideal because you're gonna, the bone of the skull is going to block it to some extent. But, but what is also being done is a nasal piece probe.
A
Oh, I've seen that.
B
Yeah. And you know, and that's because you're actually, you can get, you can deliver it to the brain at a place where you, you don't have this, you have a porous because of the olfactory nerves going through the cribiform plate. You've got holes in the skull basically. And the main, the main, the nucleus basalis minor is the cholinergic based nucleus. That's predominantly what's affected in Alzheimer's. And that lays it, you know, towards the base of the brain.
A
Oh Interesting.
B
And so, you know, so you're, you're, you're, you're getting closer to, you know, by going up the nose. You're, you're, you're actually getting pretty close.
A
Is this shown any positive signs? This infrared light therapy for Alzheimer's? Has there been any effective treatments for this? Like, has it worked?
B
Well, yeah, you know, I, what I can say is that I first met the people who were doing this kind of work at a science of consciousness conference, which is. And that was, gosh, I don't know, at least maybe 10 years ago or so. And I became really excited about it. And I've had a couple of patients who had come to me with, you know, neurodegenerative conditions, you know, cognitive problems. And after doing an assessment of them, I said, you know, would you be willing to try this because it's commercially available? You can, you know, you can go online and.
A
Nasal red light or nasal infrared filter.
B
Yeah, Vielight, you know, see if you can find one.
A
Steve.
B
Yeah. V, I, E L I G H T V light. That. And, and so I recommended to this patient that she, that she get one. And, and, and it did reverse some of her cognitive decline. She was extremely grateful to me for it.
A
How much are one of these bad boys? So you can find one on Amazon. Oh, look, she's got up one nostril instead.
B
Yeah, you just. Yeah, you just put it up one nostril.
A
Oh, interesting.
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm not, I'm not a paid employee of theirs. I'm not, you know, I, I didn't, I didn't. Come on. Thinking. So I have no commercial interest in them.
A
Oh, they're 17, 1800 bucks.
B
Yeah.
A
I mean, this one's not bad. Yeah.
B
But when you consider, when you consider the cost to one's quality of life, of course, you know that. And so I know that I.
A
Will insurance cover the cost of this?
B
I, I can't. I don't know. I think they should, but I don't do too. Yeah.
A
Have you ever heard of Jack Cruz?
B
Of who?
A
Jack Cruz, I'm sure neurosurgeon. Neurosurgeon guy, Internet guy. He's all over Twitter. He talks about. Anyways, he's like a. A big proponent of light, like mitochondria, mitochondrial health. He calls himself a mitochondriac. And he's a big proponent of, like, red light, sunlight, UV light, all this stuff. And when he was doing surgery, neurosurgery surgery, what he would do was, instead of using those big Round LED lights that they usually use for surgeries. You know, he would use red light panels and when he would. So when he'd open up the skull and expose the brain, he was shining red light, red and infrared light on it and not those big LED white lights, blue lights, because he thinks the blue light is like really toxic for him humans. And another thing that he likes to do is give the brains, the patient during brain surgery an IV of methylene blue, which is like a dye, it's like a blue jean dye. And it's also used as fish tank cleaner, but allegedly it's good for mitochondrial health. And he also did this thing where he had this 80 something year old patient who needed like a crazy invasive spinal surgery. And he did this. And normally he's like, no other neurosurgeon was going to do it. And he came to Jack to ask him to do it and he was like, I'll do it, but the only way I'm doing it is if I give you, I'm going to do this with like red lights and the IV of methylene blue and I'm going to. Your recovery is going to be a little bit unconventional. So what he did was after the surgery he wheeled the guy out into the courtyard to recover outside under the sunlight instead of inside under all the blue lights. And apparently the guy the next day walked out of there. When normally it takes patients like multiple days to recover from that kind of an invasive spinal surgery. Which was, blew my mind. Another story he told me was that his father, I believe his father in law was had to get cataract surgery and before leading up to the surgery was like planned out months in advance, pants. And the guy like fell off a ladder or something and like injured himself. So Jack said, go stand in front of, go. I'm gonna give you this red light panel. Sit in front of this red light for 20 minutes, three times a day for like the next couple weeks. And he did it to like fix his, his knee or I think it was his knee. And he went in to go get his pre op appointment for his cataract surgery about a month later. And the doctor, the, the ophthalmologist was like, what the hell's going on with you? Like you don't, your, your vision is restored, like you don't need cataract surgery anymore. And then Jack asked him, he's like, were you wearing, were your eye, were you looking at that red light when you were trying to fix your knee for 20 minutes a day, three times a day he's like, yeah, he's like, I never put e protection on. And he's like, oh, it must have been the red light and the near infrared light that was in that panel, somehow. Somehow regenerating neurons in your eye. And he believes that that was the. What restored his vision and the reason he didn't need cataract surgery anymore.
B
Yeah.
A
Well, seems crazy.
B
Well, it. It only seems crazy if you don't realize the role of biological light.
A
Right, right.
B
You know, I mean, you know, and it was one of those things where, like, Gurwich, you know, discovered, you know, biophotons 100 years ago.
A
Fritz Pop is another one of those guys.
B
Well, he. He was subs, and he was one of the people who then helped to validate Gurwich's work. But from over 100 years ago, and then you had Royal Rife who had. He developed these microscopes that didn't require light to be used. He had lenses that were configured in a certain way such that he could get magnification and visibility of whatever he was looking at without having to put in an external source of light. And that revolutionized and that revolutionized microscopy, because if you're shining light on something, you're not going to see that it has its own light that it radiates. Right. And so one of the things he saw was that different species of bacteria emitted different frequencies of light that, you know, like. You know that, like when bacteria.
A
Similar to, like, bioluminescence, but much less. Right.
B
Bioluminescence is something different.
A
Okay.
B
That. This is. This is actually.
A
It's UV light that the body creates. Is that right? Isn't that right?
B
We do create UV light.
A
Right?
B
Absolutely. And that was like Gurwich's mitogenic rays, which were blue rays. Like, they were, you know, purple bluish rays, you know. Well, when I first saw a picture of the mitogenic rays, I was like, oh, my gosh. That is the spindle apparatus. The spindle apparatus has a very, very specific shape to it. And when I realized, well, he only saw the. That saw these rays during mitosis, which is driven by these microtubules, I said, oh, microtubules must carry light. And. And so, you know, it's. So they. It's. It's sort of like we have our own kind of fiber, you know, fiber optic, you know, system within our bodies, you know, and it makes sense that if you look at cells, the number of interactions that, you know, biochemical interactions that occur per second is like 100,000 per second or something like that. And the only way that you could drive all of those processes is with, would be if it's under the influence of light, traveling at the speed of light.
A
Right.
B
And so anyway, so you know, I think that if you, if you realize then that, well, where does, you know, where do biophotons in the body, where do they come from? You know, you know, I've read accounts that say they come from DNA. DNA. They also come from mitochondria and you know, which mitochondria are the, you know, what provides energy.
A
Right.
B
For everything. And you need energy to rebuild, to detox, to do all those things. And so the fact that our mitochondria have been poisoned by, you know, chemicals, you know, whether it's glyphosate, you know, which is roundup, you know, that's in a lot of our food and LED light, lights, you know, you know, whatever. Yeah. Everything that's poisoning our mitochondria and people being increasingly indoors. Right. It's like staring at a, at a computer screen that emits blue light.
A
Blue light. Or phones that emit blue light that are screwing around with your dopamine system.
B
Yeah. And your sleep wake cycles, your circadian rhythm.
A
Yeah, yeah.
B
So, so anyway, so the point is, is that, yeah, the idea that something like red, red light could be helpful makes sense because, because light is causing some of the problems and light could be, you know, some of the solutions. It's just a different frequency light.
A
This is what my phone looks like. Ah, yeah, you got a red filter on it. So I don't get the blue light or at least not, not a ton of it. Yeah. So I had a, one of the things that Jack was describing to me, he's like the environments that we've built for ourselves, being indoors underneath these blue lights, with all these screens and technology surrounded and these crazy EMFs is like, it's similar to a killer whale in a tank at Sea World. It's like the same thing is going to happen psychologically. Like the sham, the Shamu at Sea World, the killer whales, his fin goes down, starts getting depressed, has no desire to mate, ends up killing the trainers, going, going crazy. Like that's what we're doing to ourselves. We're not, we're not meant to be in these environment, we're not evolved to be in these crazy technological environments. And potentially that could be one of the effects of the human mind becoming more left brained, more analytical and less creative. This could be if, if perhaps this, this ability of humans to have telekinesis or telepathic abilities, the parapsychology we call it. If this was something that was innate in humans long ago, the industrialization and the explosion of technology is definitely going to correlate with the atrophy of that part of the, of the mind.
B
I think what's happening is that we're actually for decades now with a high percentage of the population going through the educational system and it being so left hemisphere biased in terms of what we learn, that our brains have been increasingly more wired towards that sort of logical, analytical way of being. But what's happening now with younger people is that they're more interested in things having a video component. They're less interested in reading and more interested in accessing information in a way that's like a lot more information per second than what you can get from reading. And so I think that it's rewiring our brain, you know, as a species towards one that's more balanced towards, you know, right hemisphere and less towards left hemisphere. And so what I think what I would like to see is, you know, here we have AI which is, you know, language based learning, right? We have AI doing all of this stuff that's really more left hemisphere skills. Right. What I'd like to see is our educational system bringing back the arts and bringing back a lot of these things where we develop our right hemisphere. That is the pattern recognizing gestalt thinking process and intuition. Because we need to be able to discern what is real and what's not. And the problem with language is language can be very, very deceptive.
A
You can, right?
B
Language can lead us away from the truth.
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Right? Totally.
B
And. And so the more we can get back to developing our. Our pure perceptual processes and, And. And our intuition and our ability to discern, you know, does that fit in? You know, does. Does that, you know, how does this fit together?
A
Right.
B
As opposed to this more, you know, siloed way of approaching information.
A
Right. I was just. My wife was just. Was showing me something she read on some sort of. Some sort of website that was explaining how. I don't know if it was. It was nationwide or if it was only in Florida, but there's, like, a high number of children in elementary and middle schools who are being pulled out of public school by their parents to do homeschooling. And it's getting so bad that some schools are, like, debating whether, like, to, like, how much staff they need to cut or do they shut down. But apparently this is, like, becoming a huge thing. Homeschooling on the rise in. Okay, so it wasn't Florida.
B
Yeah, well, it's. It's. It's happening in a lot of places because, I mean, unfortunately, our schools have become all about testing. Right. And so it. It's one of those things where they. They're. It's become more about memorizing and less about learning how to Critically think, whoa.
A
Florida sees 40% in 46 increase in homeschooling over the past five years. That's. That's crazy.
B
Yeah, well, it doesn't surprise me at all. Doesn't surprise me at all. And I think that the pandemic changed a lot of things because a lot of parents started to see, oh, is this what my kid's doing in school?
A
Right.
B
You know. Oh, you know. Well, they started realizing that, you know, what kind of education their child is and is not getting. And everyone who's a good parent, I mean, that's one of the first things that they care about is how is my kid being educated? And what is, you know, what is, you know, and they want. They don't want them to be dependent either. They want them to. There's a certain independence that comes from having the kind of flexibility in thinking that is required going, you know, going into the future. You know, if all you're having is this sort of rigid way of thinking and memorize this, this. And the measure of success is what's your score on some meaningless test, really, then that's not really preparing you for the real world. And kids already knew that. Kids have not been happy in school. Kids don't enthusiastically go off to school. The only thing they're enthusiastic about is seeing their friends.
A
Right. Yeah. I think that's the biggest thing they get from it is the social interaction aspect.
B
Right. And they still need that. That's critical. And so where I live in Oregon, there are a lot of people who homeschool and they have these programs that are set up so that parents who do the homeschooling still have a place where they can send their children for the socialization. So they still have a place where they go maybe three hours out of the day to get that, you know, the kinds of things that you could, you know, whether it's playing on a team sport or being in a, you know, a band or whatever it is, is that you're, you know.
A
Yeah. There's a local community sailing center right down the street from here. And when my kid was doing sailing camp during the summer, one of the days they set aside there is for the homeschooling kids. So, like there's a bunch of group of homeschool kids, like co ops that every day on a certain day of the week, they all come sail and another day they'll maybe go out and do another thing, go to a museum or something like that. And like they're getting real world experience, like in the real world, like doing real things. And they're not stuck, stuck in a room under blue lights all day, you know, staring at a tv. And that's another thing. All the schools are on screens now. They have them all on iPads and computer screens and doing all this digital stuff, which scares me. So I think I might be following suit. Do you think it's possible that.
B
Back.
A
In time, way back, thousands of years ago, that early humans were. Had some of these parapsychology abilities, like innately, and that this is just atrophied over millennia?
B
Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
A
With the development of technology and communication, the written word and that kind of stuff. I would imagine that even, even things like the written word and the be able. The ability to start writing on scrolls and texts and stuff, stuff like that, developing that ability to offload memories probably atrophied our ability to store memory in our brain.
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that it's interesting to think about how with every development of a technology, there's the unintended consequences. Look at how our smartphones, for example, have. On the one hand, boy, they have sure made a lot of things a lot easier. When it comes to travel, for example, whether it's the GPS or making arrangements or checking on my flight or any of that stuff. And yet, at the same time, our smartphones are also dumbing us down. A lot of people don't know the phone number of really important people in their life because it's always programmed into. Into their phone. And, you know, and some people, I mean, they wouldn't know how to use a map, you know, if they needed to, you know. You know, there are people that they're losing some of these skills such that they're becoming so dependent upon a technology that could be taken out by something like a Carrington event.
A
Right.
B
And, you know, which, I mean, when the Carrington event happened in 1859, it burned up the telegraph stations, you know, because of the solar flare, you know. Well, you know, look at how, you know, back then, I mean, things weren't so electrified. People weren't so dependent upon that. What, what would happen if we had some kind of event like that today? I mean, it would wipe.
A
A lot of people would die.
B
Well, it.
A
If we lost. If we lost electricity for a long period of time. We just had two crazy hurricanes here about a year year ago, and we lost power. Lots of folks didn't have power for like two weeks. And it was like Mad Max. And just in this little town, people didn't know what to do. It was wild. It was a completely different way of living because now you're only focused on, like, you're planning your day around, like, when you're going to run your generator, right? And like, what we need water, we need toilet paper. All the things that we never really think twice about is, like, now what everyone focuses on, like, what time can I go look for propane for the generator? What time should we go to the grocery store to find water and propane and toilet paper? Like, those are the three things. And it's. It's crazy how it's just resets your mind, resets your. Your daily rhythm of life. I kind of liked it, actually.
B
Yeah.
A
In a weird way.
B
Yeah. Well, yeah, and there's. I mean, there's a podcast that's out there. I know that. Where, you know, every episode of it is teaching you, you know, kind of like the old ways, you know, so that you, you know, that if you, if you didn't have any of this technology, you know, if you were just out in the middle of a forest or whatever, you know, how would you, you know, how would you navigate? How would you find food? How would you do this? How Would you stay warm? You know, so. So, you know, each one of these technologies. And so, you know, similarly, books. You know, books as a technology, on the one hand, it has increased. Increased our ability to acquire information, which is wonderful. The downside has been it's also increased. Well, it's also increased the ability to provide harmful information and disinformation. Right.
A
And the. I mean, the Internet.
B
Yeah, yeah.
A
It's like it's too much. Too much info.
B
Yeah.
A
You don't know what's real and what's not.
B
Exactly. And so, you know, I thought about this, and, you know, it's interesting. I mean, I didn't grow up with any religion. My father was a scientist and he was an atheist. But I became interested in stories from the Bible. And one of the things that. There's so much truth in the Bible. But, you know, I'm not saying that as somebody who, like. Who treats it as necessarily, you know, literal. You know, there's a lot of stories that tell you something truthful about, you know, about. About people or about life. You know, that's true for a lot of, you know, religion. You know, whether you're talking about Native American spirituality, you're talking about Hinduism or whatever, there's all these stories that have truth embedded within them. And one of the things I started thinking about, you know, the story of Adam and Eve in the garden and how they got kicked out of the ground garden. Well, what is it that got them kicked out of the garden? It was eating the apple from the tree of knowledge. And I started thinking about that and thinking, this is just my fantasy.
A
But I was thinking, knowledge is satanic.
B
Well, it's going from when we changed from knowledge as a pure nature, knowing pure perception, which is what a lot of indigenous cultures still trust most, to trusting the written word.
A
Right.
B
That created the possibility to get us to deviate from truth. We started. We started believing what we read in a book. And so if we read in a book this model of reality that goes against kind of what our own direct experience is. Let's say you had an ESP like, experience, but your books at school tell you that's impossible.
A
What's it called? Pseudo. Pseudoscience.
B
Yeah, it tells you it's pseudoscience. Then are you gonna believe the telepathic experience that you had? Are you gonna believe when you had the message in your head saying, call home, and then you find out your dad just had a heart attack? Are you gonna believe that? Are you gonna. And what if you have those kind of experiences on a Regular basis. What are you gonna believe? Are you gonna believe that experience, or are you gonna believe what you read where it says, oh, well, that kind of thing's impossible? And so. So what? And then what happens is, is that we rationalize away our direct experience. We talk ourselves out of it. That couldn't have been true. That couldn't have happened. Oh, you know, it. It's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
A
And so that happens to me sometimes on podcasts. I'll do a podcast with somebody, and I'll come out feeling a certain way, right. Very strongly about something, and then the podcast will go public and I'll read a bunch of comments about it. I'm like, oh, I was wrong. They must be right. My perception completely gets warped. And that's how I've learned never, never to read comments.
B
Yeah, you see how you're influenced away from your direct experience. And. And so then, you know, and I think about, you know, when. When people tell me their experience, it's like, who am I to tell them, them they didn't have that experience? Or, you know, it's like, you know, it's, it's. And so that's why, you know, like, I think that, you know, these, you know, these parents who contact me about their child, you know, they're living with this child, they're experiencing it. It's not just with the, you know, the spelling board or whatever that they experience the telepathy. They're experiencing it in other ways. And so it's like, for me to just say, well, no, it couldn't be that, because it says right here it's pseudoscience. Then, you know, I mean, the person who's having that experience, they're just gonna think, okay, you know, you're not gonna believe me because of your training, and they're not gonna be convinced by me just saying, you know, well, look, right here it says you can't talk somebody out of the. Their direct experience when it's very profound, you know, that kind of experience. I mean, for you, you know, why.
A
Would you even want to.
B
Huh?
A
I don't. Why would you even want to talk them out of it?
B
Yeah, yeah. And so, but, but, so anyway, so, you know, to me, it's like, let's explore. Let's just, you know, so that's enough people's experience. Let's explore what's going on there and try to have an understanding that, you know, that, you know, come out of it as opposed to it just. Well, I read that that can't happen. Therefore, it Can't.
A
Yeah, that's a, that's a really powerful metaphor about Adam and Eve and the apple. I've never, I've never heard it described that way. It makes a ton of sense. And what, what do you make of some of these, these children talking about biblical characters or talking about the Bible. Right.
B
Yeah. Well, it's, it's interesting because I, I mean, so some of them like, like Houston, who's in the telepathy tapes, I mean, his mother is, if you read her book, I mean, she, she was raised a fundamentalist Christian. And so, so when I first was running into that, I thought, well, you know, that's interesting. But, you know, he's already, you know, coming from a Christian home, you know, so the fact that, I mean, some of these individuals will see, say, oh, I, you know, I've heard, you know, I walk with Jesus. You know, when I go to the hill, I see, you know, I see these, you know, I see God or, you know, you know, they'll, they'll say these things and you know, but if they've had a religious upbringing, you think, well, okay, you know, they've had that upbringing. And then I have other people who were raised in a family that's Hindu or, you know, a family.
A
Oh, that's interesting. So their religious background sort of bleeds over.
B
It does. And the same thing is true in. The same thing is true with near death experiences. From the standpoint of if you have a near death experience, so your body literally dies, but then somehow you get revived and then you come back and you say what you experienced on the other side, if you were raised Christian or if you have that kind of belief system, then, you know, you're more likely to see Jesus or Mary or someone that's from that religion. And if you're Buddhist, you're more likely to see Buddha. And so there's some influence of your culture on what the experience is, but that still doesn't tell you what the experience is. And the way that I think of it is there's. The deeper I got into studying consciousness, the more I realized how important archetypes are to the understanding of it. In other words, Jesus. Jesus. Jesus and Krishna from Hinduism are both very similar archetypes. If you read their life story and their way of being in the world, very, very similar.
A
There's a lot of parallels between different characters, mythological people, mythological characters and biblical characters across, across religions and cultures and everything. Even like stories, there's similar stories. Like the flood myth, right?
B
Exactly. And so what I think Is that when people encounter these archetypes, we put a face onto them that is the face that's familiar to us, but there's a deeper structure to that archetype. It's sort of. Of like, you know, I'm interested in what's the code. Right.
A
I see what you're saying.
B
You do? Yeah, yeah. It's sort of like, you know, there's. There's something that they're responding to and, and. But we just put a face onto it because we, we need to have. We need something that we interface with. Right. I mean.
A
Yeah. So we can. So we can process it. Right. Without going crazy.
B
Yeah. It's a. Images, just like symbols are a shortcut for a lot of. It's condensed information. It's a way of. It's like that saying, a picture speaks a thousand words. It's just like there's all that information there. And so if you can experience it as an image, symbols are, you know, have so much more conceptually packed into them than, you know, like one I could write a book on, you know, some symbols, just that symbol alone in terms of what it represents. So what I think is that we, our brains are navigating informational fields that are, you know, we live in a sea of information. Information. Okay. Think of it as like the quantum vacuum fluctuations. You know, that there are. There are all of these waves out there that contain information within them. Okay. And our brains are helping us to navigate that. And the, and these waves are, you know, it's light and vibration. Right. And all of our sensory systems are picking up different frequencies of light and vibration. You know, say sound is that the microtubules are in the cilia, in the hair cells. They're differentiating different frequencies of vibration. And our eyes are differentiating different frequencies of light. We're only seeing a narrow. The visible spectrum of light, but that's not all the light that exists. You know, similarly, we're only hearing, you know, you know, a fraction of the amount of vibrational sound that's out there.
A
Right. Our senses aren't able to pick up the others.
B
And then if you look at, you know, just even the sensation of touch, you know, you know, once again that you're picking up, you know, information that is encoded in vibration. And so it's all about waveforms. And so our senses are giving us information from that, but only a narrow spectrum of it. And so there's all this other information out there, which is what we think of as non local. Okay. Because our sensory system is just. It's oriented to human them out.
A
There's a, a funny theory. Have you ever heard of Joe Rogan's fart hypothesis?
B
No.
A
So he has this hypothesis called the fart hypothesis that is like imagine how many things are out there, floating around that we just don't have the organs to perceive, right? Like someone farts, you have this plume of like disgusting smell. But we have this nose that has evolved over time to detect danger, whether it be like fires or gas leaks. Leaks or prey coming at us, whatever it is. So we have this extreme sense of smell. We're able to detect this thing. But what other stuff is there that we haven't evolved the sensory organs to perceive? Right? Like when a dog is in a house or a cat can like sense a weird like sense something like the. Even when you're like you're in a room in a house, like the energy, it feels off in here, right? Like something feels off about this location. Like where we're at, this room feels spooky. Like maybe like we're just getting a little bit of so called smell that we can't smell, right? That we don't have the organs to perceive. Like some sort of like what you're saying, like an energy or some sort of a weird vibration that we haven't, we don't. We're not evolved to pick up or translate.
B
Yeah. I mean, our brain, you know, our brain, how it works is it works on pattern recognition, right? You know, whether we're talking about how I recognize your face, you know, and it may be that I could, you know, see you 10 years from now and you've aged a little bit, but, you know, but I'd still recognize your face, right? Or, you know, or for example. Well, anyway, you get the idea, you know, you know, you can hear a piece of music and it's somebody else's take on that song and you can quickly go, oh, that's, you know, so and so's so song. It's just a new, you know, know version of it. So we're picking up patterns. And so but what we, we can pick up patterns without even. It feels like we're guessing because we don't understand it as the same kind of perceptual process with, you know, we're so visual that like when we recognize a pattern visually, we're more convinced that we experienced it because, you know, more of our brain is devoted to vision than any other sense, right? But there's this woman, for example, who she can tell if somebody has Parkinson's disease. By smell.
A
Whoa.
B
She's. She's like 100% accurate.
A
One woman.
B
Yeah, she's a Scottish woman.
A
She's still alive.
B
Yeah, yeah. And she, yeah, if you look. Yeah, yeah, she, she can tell if, if somebody has Parkinson's disease by smell. And so what, you know, what scientists think is that there must be some, you know, chemical that's in the. Yeah.
A
Woman who can smell Parkinson's Helped science, scientists develop tests. Scientists drew on 72 year old old Scots rare condition to help identify people with neurological conditions. Scientists have harnessed the power of a woman's hypersensitive sense of smell to develop a test to determine whether people have Parkinson's disease. Whoa.
B
Yeah.
A
She noticed that her late husband developed a different odor when he was 33 to 12 years before he was. When he was 33, 12 years before he was diagnosed with the disease. Disease, which leads to part of the brain which leads to part of the brain become progressively damaged over many years. Wow. And they, so I assume they tested this on lots of people.
B
Yeah, they tested this on lots of people. And she also diagnosed somebody years besides her husband, somebody else years before he developed the condition. And so the point is, is that if you asked her how she was doing that she, you know, I mean, you know, she just does. Okay. You know, just like a mother of, of a newborn. Okay. You know, an infant. There was this study that was done, you know, decades ago where they took, you know, their little 90s, you know, little night T shirts, you know, that you put on a baby. You know, they took those from like 10 babies and then they gave them to mother and said, just smell this and tell us which one belongs to your baby. And the women were able to match it.
A
Wow.
B
And so even though you're not thinking about it, there's a pattern there. Okay. There's all of these different chemicals, I'm sure, that go into your particular baby's smell, that you just got this pattern rec and you're not having to think about it. And it even feels like you're guessing, but you're accurate. And so we've similarly discovered that people can detect as little as one photon of light. But you don't see the light. Okay. It's below. It's not enough the density of light for you to actually visually see it. But if you say to people, you know, did the light flash just then or not? You know, they're very accurate in being able to detect. That's a form of detection to just, you know, it's just like as I Said it feels like they're guessing.
A
Right.
B
You know, similarly, you know, there's a condition called blindsight, which is. This is not mindsight. You know, blindsight is a condition. Condition in which people. Their visual cortex is damaged and they're blind because that part of their brain isn't working. But if you put something in front of them, like a picture of a circle or, you know, or a cross or whatever, they could tell you if it's a circle or a cross. It feels to them like they're guessing.
A
Wow.
B
But the information is still getting into their eyes and still getting into to other parts of their brain that can do a rudimentary form of vision, even though they're not having the conscious experience of vision. So the point I'm getting at is that there's a lot of things that can be below our threshold of awareness that gives us information. And I think that that's pertinent to this whole question of, you know, to.
A
Your smell, to the thing you said about smell. I had a woman on here describe to me how there was a study that showed how women. There's a. A pheromone or some sort of a smell that attracts women to men. Something about the. The. The pheromone or whatever the smell is. I forget the word that. There's a specific word she used that the. That the men emit. It's a subconscious thing that attracts the woman to the man. And it's all based on immune systems. So the smell of the man means his immune system matches hers, which means it fills in the gaps where hers lacks for procreation. So if they were to create a baby, that baby would have a very robust, strong immune system revolution, which blew my mind. I think it was that if. If he smells good to her, then. Then that. That is true. Yeah. They did this study with, like, T shirts of men, and. And they. They let the women smell it. And which one is more attractive to you?
B
That's in. In smell. Smell is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus. That doesn't. Let me say this. All of the senses go to the. The thalamus, which is like our relay center, you know, and, you know, it's where we have sensory gating. Okay. You know, it's mainly associated with the thalam, although. And. But smell goes right to the limbic system, and the limbic system is involved in things like memory and emotion. Okay. And so that's one of the reasons why smell, of all the senses, can be the most evocative of emotions. And memories for us. And so, so one of the things.
A
Is weird how that happens.
B
Yeah. And I remember hearing about this study that was done a long time ago that relates to what you're talking about, which was that there is this based on smell. That there is more of an attraction to mating with someone who is not your realm.
A
Right.
B
You know, it's a way of reducing inbreeding by. By, by using the sense that is the most associated with.
A
Exactly.
B
You know, these raw, you know, emotions. And smell plays a huge role. And you know, it's a lot of the, you know, the perfume industry, you know, it, you know, some of the perfumes, you know, actually would use fermented hormones.
A
Really?
B
Yeah, yeah. Because what you, what, you know, why.
A
Does a woman wear strong immune systems, just bottle their scent?
B
Well, well, it's. I mean, you know, it's, you know, there's pheromones that a woman emits that also, you know, attracts a man, you know, and they've got kind of more of a musky kind of that. The ones that use pheromones have more of a musky smell. But at the same time, we also live in a society that has become kind of anti olfaction other than, you know, you know, smelling food, cooking or something like that. But we've made human smells something that's dirty and undesirable and, and every morning.
A
When I'm laying in bed half asleep, I wake up to my wife sniffing me like a dog. She's like, she says if she could bottle my scent, she would.
B
Oh, my goodness. All right. Wow. Well, there you go.
A
Very strong scent attraction there.
B
Oh, wow.
A
Really weird.
B
Well, you, you have. She'll never cheat on you.
A
It's funny. It's funny, but it like, like when you hear these stories, it's like it does make sense and it makes you wonder like how, how human beings are going to evolve now that we're becoming so separated by technology. You know, people aren't going out anymore. They aren't going out to bars and clubs and parties and social events as much. You know, people are working behind computer screens, having zoom meetings and swiping on apps to find their mates. It's very weird.
B
I think that what we're going to see is more and more of this sort of divide that occurs where you have people that go that route that are just like, you know, they just love technology. They just love living in the artificial world. Okay. And they just, I mean, there are people who are, you know, hacking their bodies, you know, you know, Just, you know, with, with, you know, trying to, I mean, you've seen some of these things, haven't you? People that are, you know, engaged in biohacking, you know, where they're even, you know, they're, they're themselves, you know, inserting technology into their body, you know, you know, and then, and then there are people who want to, you know, develop chips, you know, to insert into their brain, in people's brains, you know, and.
A
Transhumanists.
B
Yeah, transhumanists. And so there's people that, for whom that's an attractive way of being. And then there are people for whom it's like they're really, they're hungering for more natural kind of existence and they're gonna want to be meeting in person again. And you know, and the way I see it is if you're really, you know, it depends upon what your orientation is, you know, and like one of them is more heart centered to me. You know, it's when you're with people, you feel things in a way that's different than when you're interacting with them on the screen.
A
The screen, the screen makes more than podcasts in person.
B
The screen makes it more of a mental process, you know, whereas you miss little cues.
A
Cues too. Like little subconscious cues.
B
Absolutely, absolutely. You don't get a real sense for the person. Yeah. And so the point I'm getting at is that just like there's this trend towards more and more parents leaving public education and going into homeschooling. There's more and more people that are wanting to go and get away from the technology. They're wanting the vacations out now, nature. They're wanting to see people in person. And so I think that we're really going to see people that go these two different ways. And there are the people also who realize they need to develop these practical skills because technology can be taken away like that.
A
Right.
B
And so it's going to be very interesting to see how things, things, things evolve. But I also see more and more people interested in developing their own innate abilities, their own innate intuition, their own, you know, these abilities that I think our ancestors had developed to a very high degree. That's how they survived. You know, I, I, these, a lot of these indigenous cultures still have these.
A
Abilities which still exist, by the way. They're still roaming around different parts of the earth. Amazon Rainforest Sentinel island that's crazy. It's crazy that we can have live in this technological world that has, it has autonomous cars and drones delivering your Amazon groceries at the Same time there's people running around naked in the rainforest shooting seven foot arrows at anyone who tries to get close to them, you know.
B
Yeah. And you know, and one of the things that I wonder about, you know, when you, when you hear of things like, you know, the. What's the name of that device? The Anticaria.
A
Oh yeah, yep. The device they found in that ship.
B
Yeah, yeah. Which was a very, very sophisticated, you.
A
Know, it was like, it was like an astronomical alignments.
B
Yes.
A
It could do.
B
Yeah.
A
It looked like gears.
B
Yes.
A
Instead of a clock.
B
Yeah, that is.
A
And TIF. Antichythera. Ant antikythera.
B
Yeah. 2000 year old device that really showed that they understood the astronomy and could predict when eclipses would occur and whatnot. Well, what I suspect is that human beings were far more technologically advanced thousands of years ago than we realize and that a lot of that knowledge has been lost. And it's possible that, you know, who knows, it's possible that they had some of this technology that got destroyed like in a Carrington type event long ago go, you know, or a flood or getting hit by a meteor or something such that only the people who knew how to survive in the forest.
A
Right.
B
Made it. And so then, then, so then we, we started all over again. Okay. You know, and, and then eventually, you know, eventually we rediscover, you know, similar technology or variations on it, you know, and, and, and then we've worked our way up to you technological advances that increasingly people become dependent upon that if some big event happens, it's going to be the people who know how to survive. Yes, because the Earth will. I mean look at what happened with Mount St. Helens when the volcano erupted and destroyed everything in its path. But within 10, 15 years you already have plants coming back and animals are starting to come back and you know, nature will, you know, will find a way, but it's going to be in pockets, you know, where people already know, you know, have the diversity, the biodiversity and the, and already know how to live within that.
A
Yeah. It doesn't make sense how, you know, some of the, like there's ancient structures all around the world that have like crazy alignments and precision and stuff that, that like we can't compute with our technology today. It seems like they were certainly on a different trajectory technologically than we are. And we're trying to look at it through our lens and come up with theories on, on, you know, what the ancient world was through our lens. But I think you're right. I think the reality of it is they There was something else going on that we probably can't understand. I don't think it was electricity and combustion and, and all these types of things that they were using. I think it's probably something that, along the lines of, you know, what is going on with, with these children and having some sort of, some sort of knowledge that is not able to be put into language.
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, who knows what they had? Because you, you know, when we look at like some of these ancient cultures, like the megalithic cultures.
A
Yeah.
B
I mean we still don't understand today how they, they built those. And, and, and, and it makes sense though that those, those structures survived when you consider, consider how massive they are and, etc and, but that doesn't mean that their whole culture was like that. That's the totality of what they had. I mean, they could have had all kinds of other things that didn't survive.
A
Right? Yeah, 100%. Going back to what you're talking about with the sensory stuff, have you ever heard of the filter hypothesis? Hypothesis where it's the, it's the idea that our senses, our smell, our touch, our vision are all just filters to help us get through the world and to help us evolve. And essentially what's really out there is way more like there's certain scientists, brain scientists that I've talked to that do study with like extended state dmt where they put people on an IV of DM dmt, so they can sort of like map the DMT realm, whatever that is, and they believe that whatever is happening there is like melting away these filters that we have, our sensory, our vision and our smell and all that, and exposing us to more of what could be really, really there. Right?
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, that's, you know, the idea of the brain operating as a filter is, you know, that's been a real around for quite a while, I mean, decades, that hypothesis. And we know that our sensory system only picks up information within a really narrow spectrum, whether you're talking about sound or light. And what happens with DMT is it does change the sensory gating that's going on. Okay. And it does so in a way that is so similar to what these autistic individuals I work with describe as their day to day reality. In other words, you know, people who do ayahuasca, they describe having synesthesia, right? Well, well, all of these autistic individuals have synest. Synesthesia. Yeah. And in fact, they tend to have more than one form of synesthesia. They, you know, they, they see auras around people and animals and, you know, they, they, they, they see colors around letters. They, you know, they hear sounds associated with, you know, you know, colors. They, you know, all of these different things are blended together for them. So it's, you know, I think of it as being almost like a kaleidoscope world.
A
Right.
B
And then another thing they share in common with people who do ayahuasca is that there's a mind, body disconnect. They don't, they don't feel totally within their body and.
A
Right.
B
And so, you know, so this, they, so that's another similarity. And then a lot of people when they do, you know, psychedelics like, you know, psilocybin or ayahuasca, they'll experience telepathy as well.
A
Yep.
B
And so, you know, when I, and then we know that the brain makes, you know, dmt, it's an endogenous neurotransmitter a lot.
A
Lungs as well.
B
Yeah, it's, yeah, it's just like cannabinoids. We have endogenous cannabinoids and endogenous opiates. And so we have all the reason why these synthetic things can work on us is because they're mimicking something that's a natural compound. And so one of the things that I'm going to be looking at is looking at these endogenous DMT like compounds in autistic individuals, you know, to see if, you know, if they, if there's something different about that system in them, you know, because it, what they describe is so similar.
A
Yeah. I think Rick Strassman was explaining to us how or. No, no, it wasn't Rick Strassman. It was the, the gentleman who did the study on Kratom, Chris McCurdy. Chris McCurdy, yes. He's a scientist based in northern Florida, I think Tallahassee. He is working on a study trying to find the correlation between people with schizophrenia and high levels of endogenous dmt. He's studying a certain enzyme that regulates the production of, of endogenous dmt. And he thinks that the people that suffer from schiz, like high level schizophrenia, schizophrenia could potentially be lacking in that enzyme. So they would have too much endogenous dnt, which could be correlated to that stuff. Which is wild.
B
Yeah, yeah. No, but no, it's quite, it's quite possible. I mean, there was a study that was done looking at autistic individuals and people with schizophrenia finding more of this compound that is dmt, like in their urine, you know, for both of them compared to controls.
A
Yeah.
B
And you Know, and so that's one of the things I'm really, really interested in. Cause, you know, it's like looking at that and then looking at what kind of experiences these individuals have, documenting that. And I'm interested in how much of it can be validated. Yeah. Bufotenin has been found in both autistic individuals and people with schizophrenia. And so I'm interested in, you know, because, you know, what we as psychiatrists are trained is like, when people say that they have certain experiences, we're trained to treat, say, oh, those are hallucinations. And then treat it as though it's just. And therefore it's imaginary, and therefore there's no truth to it. Well, you know, but. But when you have people that take purposely, you know, shamans who purposely take these psychedelics to get information, you know, when they do ayahuasca in the jungle, you know, the plants tell them, oh, this is what I'm good for. This is my medicinal properties. I don't know if you've heard stories like that. But the point is. So that information is somehow contained within. Where's that information? It's contained somewhere within this nature. Within nature.
A
Yeah.
B
And so, you know, and people are. Have ingested substances to access that information. Well, these autistic individuals already just something different about them biologically enables them to access information that we just, like, we would not have thought of them as having access to. So that's kind of the lens through which I'm looking at all. All of this, you know, and. And, you know, rather than, you know, getting caught up in, you know, this whole, you know, controversy about, you know, what's going on with these particular individuals. I'm trying to understand just. I'm looking at it from a, you know, a high perspective of, you know, like, you know, why is the null hypothesis, you know, you know, that like, can we disprove esp? Why is the burden on those of us who are researching it to prove it's real? People haven't proved that it's not real. That's how science evolves, is by having a null hypothesis that that's what you need to disprove. And it's harder to disprove the material, materialist model, the way that they set it up, if you see what I'm saying, it's hard.
A
It's hard to disprove the materialist model.
B
Because it's like, because how do you like? To me, there's already enough evidence out there that it should have already flipped already where it's like, well, prove that this stuff isn't real. You know, they don't have a model, right, that explains anything and how can it. And what they're wanting is a burden of proof. They set the bar so high.
A
Right, no, yeah, I understand what you're saying.
B
Yeah, they set it so high that it's just like, and then each, and this is one of the complaints a lot of parapsychologists have is that every time, you know, know, they, they, they keep moving the bar because if you, if it's in your mindset that this stuff is just impossible, you can always come up with other conditions that you want to impose on this. And it's just like, but what about all this evidence? You know, what, what about all these experiences people have had across time, across cultures? You know, it, you know, I, I, it's like that saying, I think it was William James who said, you know, it to, to prove that all crows aren't black, all you need to find is one white crow, you know, but instead it's like we're being asked to, you know, you know, find, you know, a lot of white crows, you know.
A
Right, yeah, I see, I see what you're saying.
B
You know, it's like the, you know, if there is, if there is an exception, then something's wrong with that rule as an absolute rule.
A
Yes, that makes a lot of sense. What, what are you interested in doing as far as like pushing the exp. Experimentation of this forward in the future or like, what, what sort of ambitions do you have to study this, this further?
B
Well, you know, with the, I have a lot of ambitions about, about doing this. So one of the things I'm doing is looking at, looking at things like DMT and ufotenin, you know, to, to, to look at, you know, that whole system and then, and, and, and try to understand it better and see if I can correlate that with, you know, like, are the ones who are the autistic individuals who are highly psychic, is it that they have more dmt, like compound, you know, in their system? Okay, so that's, that's one type of research that I'm doing.
A
And also. Sorry to interrupt real quick. Is it only the autistic, highly autistic people that are telepathic like that, or are there any non autistic people that are like this?
B
Oh, there are people who are, yeah, there are people who aren't autistic that have these abilities. It's just that the ones who are autistic are the ones who have it to the Highest degree. Another thing I'm interested in studying, though, is these other abilities they have. Like, some of them are reportedly highly precognitive. All of these anecdotal stories. If you listen to the telepathy tapes, you'll hear of some of them on that. There's this one young woman I'm working with. She's 19, and she had, you know, in her mind's eyes, she saw her father getting into an accident where he slipped on ice, broke his hip, and ended up in a hospital. And she told her mother about it, her mother and father about it. And they were living in Arizona at the time. And, you know, and there's not a lot of ice in Arizona. But then he went on a business trip six weeks later and slipped on ice and broke his hip and ended up in the hospital.
A
A lot of precognitive stories like that.
B
Yeah, yeah. So what I want to do is study the precognition. And so we have that capacity to do that. It's just like she can tell me whenever she gets those kind of visions. And then we have that recorded. We have a timestamp. You know, this is when the mother sent me the email telling me about that, for example. Okay. And then we just see, you know, they have a hard time telling you when exactly something's going to happen, but then just see how does that evolve so that it's documented and it's not just I'm hearing the whole anecdote and that, you know, something that happened in the past, but actually ongoing. Do that kind of research. You know, the same. The same young woman who's doing that. I mean, she's working as a. With police, as a psychic detective to find missing children.
A
Oh, wow.
B
So I'm very interested in how that plays out. Okay. You know, and once again, having, you know, documentation, you know, I can. I can come contact the police department or whoever it is that she was working with and say, okay, tell me, and you'll see the documentation for it. Looking at things like that. Another thing I'm interested in is many of these children reportedly see dead people. And I've only once asked one of them, oh, would you do. Do, you know, a reading on me? And it was when I was in a zoom call with this mother and this son. And the mother mentioned that her son does mediumship readings for friends of hers. And I said, oh, that's interesting. She said, and he's really got people amazed, and it's been really helpful for them. And I said, oh, that's interesting. I said, well, you know, could you do a reading on me? And this is literally within the first half an hour, meeting him on a zoom call.
A
How old is he?
B
Oh, he's like maybe 20, 21.
A
Okay.
B
And he said, sure, you know, and then I said, okay, you know, who do you see? And he says, well, there's so many that it's a little confusing. He says. But he says, this one woman tells me she's your half aunt. Well, my father had a half sister. And he described her, and I thought, well, that's interesting, you know. And then he said he saw my grandfather by marriage, and his name was Harold, and my father's stepfather's name was Harold. And so I was like, wow, that was two highly specific statements, both of which were very accurate. And so, once again, it makes me go, okay, okay, well, that's something that. I would love to do research on that as well. So it's not just the telepathy. One of the problems with the telepathy is so many of them, they need to use the letterboard to communicate, and then that creates all this suspicion because it's the letterboard. But this boy's mother didn't know anything about me, certainly wouldn't have known about any of my dead family members. And so it doesn't matter if they're using a spelling board. They're just a. You know, they're a unit together. You know, it doesn't matter if you're looking at precognition either, you know, because neither of them should know the answers to these things. And so I'm actually more interested in moving beyond just the telepathy because of the challenge. I've already seen really strong demonstration of that with the kind of setup that I could get. And short of being able to get them in separate rooms, which I would love to see, but in the meantime, I'm not going to be. That's one of the things I was waiting around for, for, you know, since I started doing this research, is to try to get that kind of separation. But I. Now there's all of these other things that have been reported that are just as interesting, if not more so.
A
Yeah, yeah. I would really love to see one of those experiments done with, like, a stage magician there to see, because it's the stage magicians and the mentalists are the ones who are the biggest skeptics of this stuff, and they all say they can explain it away and they can. They can do this stuff themselves, too, which is kind of conflicting. So I. I really would Love to see that interaction there and to see if, like, they can.
B
Yeah, well, the people who do, you know, like mediumship, you know, I, I, like, I, I'm on the scientific advisory board of the Forever Family foundation, which is one of the, one of the places where they certify mediums. You know, they, they, they do rigorous research. They have very high criteria for whether or not they'd certify somebody as a medium. And so I know the way you would set that up. And so that's one of the things that I want to do. But I know that one of the ways in which somebody who's a professional psychic or medium that goes out there, there, you know, they do what's called cold reading, you know, which is like, they'll, they'll say something like, oh, there's somebody here who has, you know, a lost loved one whose name starts with an M, you know, and then, you know. And then. Which, you know, they're searching. They're. They're searching, you know, and of course you're going to find somebody in the audience who, you know, lost, somebody named Mike. You know, the odds are.
A
That's the problem. That's one of the biggest problems with this stuff is there's charlatans.
B
That's right.
A
Everywhere.
B
That's right. And so that's a cold reading, which you can. I think I could probably do a cold reading, so I don't give that a lot of credibility. I have a pretty good ability to read people, but I wouldn't call it psychic. I just know how to read information that is on people's faces, et cetera. Yeah, that's what I've done for professors.
A
You're a black belt human reader, literally.
B
Wearing a black belt. But this boy, when he did that reading on me, there was nothing that he did that was anything like a cold reading.
A
Right. He went straight to the book.
B
He just went straight to. Just went straight to it. Your half aunt is here, and someone named Harold, who's your grandfather by marriage.
A
And this kid has no developmental issues like autism or anything?
B
No, he's autistic.
A
Oh, he's autistic. Okay.
B
He's autistic. That's what I'm saying. His mother and he were using the spelling board. But you can't accuse them of colluding together with some kind of code between them, which is what some people accuse them when neither of them knew me from Adam. And it's not public knowledge, these relatives of mine. Right, right. I mean, I didn't even know. I Had. I didn't even know my father had a half sister until like 25 years ago.
A
Wow.
B
Because my father had cut off his relationship with his father after his father remarried, so I didn't even know that branch of the family had existed. But when my father, when I was doing genealogy, that's when I found out. Out about it.
A
Right.
B
And by the time I found out about it, she was already. Had already died from cancer. So anyway, so it's. It's not something that's out there in the public record, you know, and so, so, you know, that's. And to me, in a way, that's a more interesting question because then you're, you know, I can come up with. I can come up with ways of explaining, you know, I can come up with ways of explaining this sort of telepathy thing even if I had them in separate rooms in the same house as I said. Because if these kids have such super hearing that they can even hear sub vocalizations that a microphone doesn't pick up.
A
Yeah.
B
Then, you know, even having them, you know, separated like that, it's not going to eliminate that as a possibility. But mediumship, and, and then, and then that suggests something about the nature of, you know, our existence. You know, do. Do we. Do we survive after. Yeah. Do we survive in some form after we, you know, or we drop our bodies? And that, to me, is a more interesting question.
A
Yeah, that's one of the biggest questions. What happens when we die, guy? Is there a God? And who built the pyramids?
B
Right, right, right. And then. And then some more research that I'm involved with is looking at their ability to influence random number generators.
A
Wild stuff. Diane, I can't thank you enough for doing this. This has been an exhilarating three hours for me.
B
Has it been three hours?
A
Yes, it has.
B
Wow.
A
Time. Fl when you're having fun, tell people where they can find your work online, your books, all that fun stuff.
B
Okay, great. Yeah. So my personal website is Dr. Diane Hennessy, h e n n a c y dot com. And they can sign up for my newsletter. That's the best way to be in contact with me. Yeah, there we are. And then I also, I now have a nonprofit, so 513c institute for doing this research that I've been talking about, and that's hennessyinstitute.org and we're almost done with the website. By the time you do this podcast, it should be up and running and.
A
Fantastic.
B
Yeah, awesome.
A
We'll link all that stuff below. And I can't thank you enough for coming down here. I really had fun.
B
Yeah. Thank you. I did, too.
A
All right. Good night, folks.
B
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Date: February 2, 2026
Host: Danny Jones
Guest: Dr. Diane Hennacy (Harvard-trained neuropsychiatrist, author of The ESP Enigma)
In this episode, Danny Jones explores the intersection of neuroscience, consciousness, and so-called "parapsychological" phenomena with Dr. Diane Hennacy, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and neuroscientist. Together, they unravel the origins of Dr. Hennacy's interest in telepathy and ESP (extra-sensory perception), her decades of research into autistic savants with alleged psychic abilities, and the possible biological bases for these phenomena. The discussion weaves through neuroscience history, personal anecdotes, and cutting-edge ideas about brain function, memory, and consciousness, challenging mainstream materialist models.
Catalytic Incident at Harvard
Dr. Hennacy recounts an encounter with a "psychic" patient (00:27–05:30) who made a series of strikingly accurate predictions about her personal life, which came true over the years, prompting her to re-examine the boundaries of human cognition.
“As time went on, all of the things that she predicted for my future came true. … I knew that I would have to explain something like this if it was real.” (05:16 – Dr. Hennacy)
Openness Born from Neuroscientific Curiosity
Early exposure to quantum physics, the nature of time, and phenomena like savant syndrome led Dr. Hennacy to question the completeness of contemporary neuroscience and to see the brain as an interface to deeper realities, not merely a generator of consciousness.
Hippocampus, Memory, and Psychic Phenomena (18:01–28:57) Explains classic neurological cases (e.g., Henry Molaison/HM), hippocampal injuries, and the neural “mapping” of space, suggesting overlapping functions with the types of “information access” seen in psychic and remote viewing experiments.
“The hippocampus is extremely metabolically active. … People who’ve survived carbon monoxide poisoning, they trashed their hippocampus. … they cannot form new memories.” (24:18 – Dr. Hennacy)
Theta Brainwaves & ESP
Correlates 7 Hz theta brain activity (notably found in remote viewers such as Ingo Swann) with both dreaming and reported psychic episodes, positing that the hippocampus is a key node for “navigating” both physical and informational terrain.
Extraordinary Abilities of Savants (35:37–41:47) Describes research into autistic twins who recited long strings of prime numbers and Daniel Tammet’s “visualization” of π, arguing these cases hint at non-ordinary information access.
“They just saw the answers and they saw the answers out here in physical space. … Who hallucinates, you know, 12 and 20 digit prime numbers?” (37:15 – Dr. Hennacy)
Overlaps Between Autism, Blindness, and Savant Skills
Observes that savant skills (musical, mathematical, calendrical, etc.) are most common in individuals with autism or congenital blindness (“quirky wiring” leading to compensatory genius).
ESP in Autistic Savants
Dr. Hennacy correlates reports of ESP, remote viewing, and clairvoyance in autistic individuals with their other well-documented, inexplicable talents, critiquing the tendency to pathologize ESP while valorizing “acceptable” savant abilities (45:15–46:31).
The Experimental Barrier (47:50–59:19) Addresses criticisms that ESP isn’t testable using classical scientific method, countering with meta-analyses of parapsychology research and Dr. Hennacy’s preference for high-exceptional cases (e.g., autistic savants scoring 95%+ on “mind reading” replication experiments).
“A lot of parapsychology research ... gets a percentage … like where 25% is just random chance and what they get is 32%. … that’s not gonna change perception. That’s why I thought ... if anybody could do [ESP] … it would be somebody who is an autistic savant.” (59:34 – Dr. Hennacy)
Controlled Experiments with Autistic Children (62:20–67:39) Details a series of rigorous experiments—with video documentation, barriers, and independent verification—demonstrating high rates of correct information transfer (“mind reading”) in non-speaking autistic children.
Possible Skeptical Explanations Dr. Hennacy entertains, but largely discounts, explanations such as hypersensitive audition or clever sub-vocalization recognition, noting the authenticity and shock of most families and therapists involved.
Cutting-Edge Brain Research (94:57–100:49)
“Microtubules are fascinating. … They clearly play a huge role in consciousness.” (99:29 – Dr. Hennacy)
Light as Biology’s Information Processor
Cultural and Cognitive Atrophy (118:50–132:06)
The “Tree of Knowledge” Metaphor
“When we changed from knowledge as a pure nature … to trusting the written word … that created the possibility to get us to deviate from truth.” (132:09 – Dr. Hennacy)
Reflects on myths (Adam and Eve) as metaphors for losing direct, experiential knowledge—a loss further driven by written language, books, and modern information overload.
Experimental Design (171:37–178:23)
Push for Paradigm Shift in Science
“Why is the null hypothesis that ESP can’t happen? … To prove that all crows aren’t black, all you need to find is one white crow. … But instead, we’re being asked to find a lot of white crows.” (170:24 – Dr. Hennacy)
On the Origin of Her Curiosity:
“What we think of as space and time is just a construct... There’s more than just three dimensions and time is not linear in the way that we think it is.” (04:53 – Dr. Hennacy)
On the Limits of Materialist Science:
“Neuroscience has a really incomplete model. There’s so many things we’ve accepted as explanations that really don’t explain everything. And we’re ignoring all these phenomena that don’t fit into it.” (45:16 – Dr. Hennacy)
On Psychic Children’s Real-World Abilities:
“She typed out the German for ‘I love you.’ … it was after those accounts ... that [expert] Darrell Trefford knew that I ... was interested in pursuing questions of telepathy.” (66:11–67:39 – Dr. Hennacy)
On the Educational System’s Societal Impact:
“Our schools have become all about testing... It’s become more about memorizing and less about learning how to critically think.” (122:57 – Dr. Hennacy)
On Information Overload & the Written Word:
“We started believing what we read in a book. And so if we read in a book this model of reality that goes against our own direct experience … then we rationalize away our direct experience.” (133:35 – Dr. Hennacy)
On the Role of Language:
“Language can lead us away from the truth. The more we develop our pure perceptual processes … our intuition … the better we are at discerning what is true.” (120:44–121:35 – Dr. Hennacy)
The dialogue moves seamlessly between rigorous scientific skepticism, open-minded exploration, and personal anecdote, maintaining a tone of curiosity grounded in empirical experience. Dr. Hennacy punctuates her thoughtful explanations with humility, humor, and a clear passion for uncovering the mysteries of the mind. Danny maintains an accessible, enthusiastic presence—skeptical, but open.
Dr. Diane Hennacy, drawing on decades of neuroscience and psychiatry, argues for a paradigm shift in understanding consciousness and psychic phenomena. She offers compelling evidence from autistic savants, critiques the limits of materialist science, and urges for more integrative, systems-level research. The episode blends deep science with radical curiosity, challenging the boundaries of what we consider possible about the mind.
End of Summary