2:53:03The Basement: Jeffrey Mishlove | Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness. It Filters It
Parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove, the only person ever granted an accredited American PhD in parapsychology, walks his entire life across nearly three hours in The Why Files interview room: a Norman Rockwell childhood, group therapy with murderers at San Quentin, and the 1972 dream of his dying great uncle that redirected his career. The spine is Ted Owens, the PK Man, who claimed to control weather and summon UFOs and who warned Mishlove on Christmas Eve 1985 to stop the next space shuttle, a month before Challenger exploded. Mishlove recounts the psychic 1970s at SRI alongside Targ, Puthoff and Arthur Young, and the case that won him the Bigelow Institute half a million dollar prize for arguing consciousness survives death. It closes on the title idea, borrowed from William James: the brain does not create consciousness, it filters it, with terminal lucidity as the strongest exhibit.