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Harvard Doctor: “I Witnessed a Test That Shouldn’t Be Possible” | Diane Hennacy

Diane Hennacy Powell trained in medicine, neurology and psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, sat on the Harvard Medical School faculty, and has studied autism since 1987. Over three hours with Danny Jones she walks the whole arc of how a Harvard psychiatrist ended up testing non speaking autistic children for telepathy, the research that became the seed of The Telepathy Tapes, and what she recorded when a teenage girl named Haley returned 165 of 172 randomly generated digits across six hours of controlled testing. Along the way the conversation covers the hippocampus and the brain's spatial map, a woman strangled into permanent amnesia, ketones and Navy diver seizures, Oliver Sacks and the twins who traded twelve digit primes, astrocytes and microtubules, biophotons and nasal infrared light, the Antikythera mechanism, and a Scottish woman who can smell Parkinson's twelve years early. Hennacy is precise about where she is confident and where she is not, names the materialist explanation she takes most seriously for her own data, and says out loud which controlled test she has not yet run. This page rebuilds the entire conversation in its own order, with an honest look at where the science actually sits placed at the end.

Published Feb 2, 2026 3:03:24 video 84 min read Added Jul 25, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

Diane Hennacy Powell trained in medicine, neurology and psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, sat on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, and has been studying autism since 1987. She is the author of The ESP Enigma and the researcher whose work on non speaking autistic children became the seed of The Telepathy Tapes. On Danny Jones she gives three hours to the whole arc: how a Harvard psychiatrist got pulled into this, what the brain actually looks like when you stop staring at neurons, and what she saw a teenage girl named Haley do in a controlled room over six hours of testing.

This page rebuilds the entire conversation in the order it happened. It starts with a patient Hennacy was sent to commit and ends with a young man on a Zoom call naming her dead half aunt. In between it goes through the hippocampus and the brain's GPS, the woman whose husband strangled her into permanent amnesia, ketones and Navy diver seizures, Oliver Sacks and the twins who traded twelve digit primes, the analytical couch, the Zener card statistics she finds unpersuasive and the digit runs she does not, astrocytes and microtubules, biophotons and nasal infrared, the Antikythera mechanism, and a Scottish woman who can smell Parkinson's twelve years early.

Hennacy is precise about where she is confident and where she is not. She names the materialist explanation she takes most seriously for her own data, says out loud that she has not yet run the separate rooms test she wants, and she keeps moving her research toward the questions that cannot be explained by the obvious loopholes. All of that is in here in her own words, in her own order. An honest look at where the science sits sits at the end of the page, where it belongs.

Chapters

Timestamps are clickable. Click one and the player jumps there and keeps playing while you read. These are the video's own 40 chapter titles, verbatim.

The patient she was sent to commit

Danny opens with the obvious question. How does someone at that level of academic medicine end up here. Hennacy answers with a specific afternoon.

She was a psychiatrist at Harvard, consulting to the medical floors at Cambridge Hospital. A patient wanted to sign out against medical advice. The patient had told the staff she was psychic and that she was seeing ghosts. You cannot leave a hospital against medical advice if you are mentally ill, so Hennacy was called in to evaluate her, sign the paperwork, and if necessary hold her against her will.

The woman immediately told Hennacy she was psychic, that she knew her test results would come back normal, and that the ghosts were spooking her out. Hennacy played it straight and a little kindly. "Well, I imagine that hospitals are kind of spooky places. If you see ghosts, this would be a place where they are." But she was worried the woman had had a heart attack and wanted her to stay.

Then the patient looked at her and said she was getting a reading. Did Hennacy mind hearing it. Hennacy said go ahead.

The reading, in the order the patient gave it: you are married to a chemist. Hennacy's husband was a biochemist as well as an MD. He is applying for a job in two different cities right now. That very week he was applying for jobs in two different cities. In his heart of hearts he wants one of them, but you will go to the other one. Name some cities and I will tell you which. Hennacy named a list. The patient picked San Diego. And then, unprompted: you will eventually leave psychiatry to write books, and then you will have a daughter.

Every one of those came true. They moved within six months. She left psychiatry to write books. She had a daughter.

"It blew my mind because she was saying things that I knew to be true." (1:32)

That is the hinge. Hennacy had gone into the field wanting to understand the brain and build a model of consciousness. If a thing like that was real, she would have to be able to explain it. So she went looking. In the early 1990s that was hard. Then in the mid 1990s the remote viewing program material began getting declassified. She attended a conference where Russell Targ spoke about his work, the research that ran under what is now public as the Stargate Project, and her reaction was simple: there is a lot of evidence here that I had no idea about.

Two things she already knew made her willing to look. The first was physics. Century old physics, she says, had already shown that what we take for reality is not the real reality. Quantum mechanics, and Einstein's work on time, and the physicists who concluded that past, present and future all coexist rather than time being a single arrow. The brain, on her reading, is a construct engine. Space and time as we experience them are constructs. Physics says there are more than three dimensions and that time is not linear the way it feels.

Savant syndrome, the second clue (4:46)

The other thing she already knew about was savant syndrome: people who know things and we do not understand how they know them. Individuals doing high level mathematics who had never been taught arithmetic. Musical savants performing on an instrument who had never had a lesson.

Her question was not "is this magic." It was the same question a neuroscientist asks about anything: where is the information coming from, and how is it being accessed. If the brain is our means of constructing sense out of sensory information, and if some people are getting information the senses cannot account for, then the model of information access is incomplete.

Why psychiatry pushes back (6:48)

Danny asks if she told anyone at Harvard. No. She told her husband, who had trained at Hopkins with her and was an internist, hematologist, oncologist and biochemist, and who found the reading remarkable. But she did not know who else she could talk to, and she is blunt about why.

"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, a condition like schizophrenia." (6:52)

That is the structural problem the rest of the interview keeps circling. The professional vocabulary available for these reports is a diagnostic vocabulary. To report the experience is to be scored on a symptom checklist.

Down the hall from John Mack (7:20)

Here is the detail that lands. At the moment this was happening to her, Hennacy's office was down the hall from John Mack.

Mack had started the department of psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital where she was working. She knew him because both were part of a group of physicians deeply concerned about nuclear war. She knew he had written a book on Lawrence of Arabia and had won a Pulitzer Prize for it. She knew he was articulate and intelligent. She did not know he was, at that same moment, interviewing people who said they had been abducted by aliens.

"It would have been really interesting to have had that conversation with him. I regret that I didn't." (9:12)

The Harvard fight over Mack's tenure unfolded after she had already moved to San Diego. She remembers sitting in her living room, watching the news, seeing John on television and going "oh." Danny fills in the rest: the combination of studying abduction reports and then going on Oprah and every large talk show was what Harvard decided did not paint the university in a good light.

Hennacy is honest about her own first reaction to Mack's work. When she heard the neurologists' counter explanation, sleep paralysis, she found it convincing. She explains it properly: during REM sleep the body is paralysed so we do not act out dreams, and sometimes people end up in a hybrid state, more common in conditions like narcolepsy, where the body is paralysed and dreamlike imagery appears while the person is awake and in their own bedroom, able to move only their eyes.

"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 had been so trained and so immersed in that, as a neuropsychiatrist, to really think of things in those kinds of terms. And it wasn't until much later that I realized, no, there's a lot more here." (10:38)

That is one of the more useful things she says all interview, because it shows the direction of her own drift and how slow it was.

The neurosurgeon she almost became (11:28)

Danny asks how her neuroscience background fits with the psychiatry. Hennacy goes back to arriving at Johns Hopkins medical school intending to be a neurosurgeon.

She did a lot of surgery. Ben Carson was there, a more senior resident at the time. She was there when he separated the conjoined twins whose brains were joined, and remembers seeing them in the neonatal intensive care unit.

The reason for neurosurgery was not the surgery. As a neuroscientist, what she was actually interested in was human consciousness, and she did not see how you answer those questions by studying rats, which she also did not want to do. The most exciting research at the time was being done by neurosurgeons performing awake craniotomies. The brain has no pain receptors, so the patient can be awake while different regions are stimulated to map function before cutting. The surgeon is caught between two constraints: remove all of the tumour with adequate margins, and preserve function. That trade off creates an opportunity to map the brain while the person tells you what they are experiencing.

She had already done the hard version of that as an undergraduate. She pulled her own microelectrodes out of glass, inserted them into a crayfish axon in a petri dish, and recorded the action potential. Then she would add something that affected ion flow, calcium for instance, and watch what it did to the potential. She knew oscilloscopes. The idea of doing that inside a living human brain while the human describes the result was, to her, the most exciting thing in science.

Then she did her psychiatry rotation and fell in love with psychiatry, because of who was running it. The chairman was Paul McHugh, a neurologist first and a psychiatrist second, and he ran the department essentially as behavioural neurology and neuropsychiatry, focused on the neural correlates of cognition and memory.

So instead of neurosurgery, where most of the day is not spent on the interesting part, she chose neuropsychiatry and neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders: cases where a person either never acquires an ability, acquires it in a quirky way, or acquires it and then loses it. Then you correlate symptoms and cognitive testing against what neuroimaging shows about brain function. Same aim as the neurosurgery plan, different instrument.

  • 1980s Undergraduate neuroscience at a time when neuroscience was not yet a major. She crafts her own. Hand pulls glass microelectrodes and records action potentials from crayfish axons.
  • Med school Johns Hopkins, aiming at neurosurgery. Ben Carson is a senior resident. She is told in year one that half of what she is being taught will be obsolete by the end of her career, and that it is her job to help make it obsolete.
  • 1986 Reads Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, then meets him when he lectures at Hopkins. The autistic twins trading six digit primes lodge permanently.
  • 1987 Wins a fellowship to the Institute of Psychiatry in London, six months with Michael Rutter, then the world's leading authority on autism. Her autism work starts here and never stops.
  • Early 1990s On Harvard faculty, consulting to the medical floors at Cambridge Hospital. A patient she is sent to commit reads her accurately. John Mack's office is down the hall.
  • Mid 1990s Remote viewing material is declassified. She hears Russell Targ speak and realises there is a body of evidence she never knew existed.
  • ~2005 Makes the call that shapes everything after: if anyone can produce extraordinary evidence, it will be an autistic savant. Not a card guessing meta analysis.
  • 2009 Publishes The ESP Enigma, including her argument about the hippocampus, before the brain's GPS work wins its Nobel.
  • Later Darold Treffert connects her to Haley. Six hours of testing, 172 random digits, 7 misses.
  • 2024 The Telepathy Tapes takes her research to a mass audience. Over a hundred families have now contacted her directly.
  • 2026 New book due in the autumn. A 501(c)(3), the Hennacy Institute, exists to fund the next round of experiments.
Figure 1. The path Hennacy walks Danny through in the first half hour, assembled in order. Note the shape of it: every step is conventional academic neuroscience, and the turn comes from a patient encounter she could not explain, not from a prior belief.

Where memory lives, and the man who could not keep any (16:34)

Danny brings up Henry Molaison, the most studied person in brain science, whom he read about in Moonwalking with Einstein. In his twenties Molaison had severe epileptic seizures. Surgery partly controlled them and left him unable to form new memories. Every day was a new day. Only the old memories from early life survived.

Hennacy corrects one thing immediately and precisely: it was not a frontal lobotomy. That is a different part of the brain. What Molaison had was a bilateral temporal lobectomy. She adds the clinical reason it was aimed there: a high percentage of epilepsy is temporal lobe epilepsy, and the temporal lobes are an area that can be scarred or damaged during passage through the birth canal. Doing it bilaterally, in the 1950s, before we knew what we know now, is what produced the catastrophe.

The hippocampus does two jobs, and one of them is weirder (18:42)

The hippocampus lays down memory. It is the archicortex, older than what we normally call cortex.

It also does navigation. Hennacy points at the 2014 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the brain's positioning system, and notes that she had written about that circuitry in The ESP Enigma before the prize was awarded. In the hippocampus and adjacent areas such as the entorhinal cortex there are grid cells laying out a map of physical space, place cells that fire when you are in a particular location, and head direction cells that track which way your head is facing. An internal mapping system, built in.

Then the frequency argument. The hippocampus is particularly active during dreaming sleep and is the main source of theta activity. Theta is roughly 4 to 8 Hz, and around 7 Hz it sits at the lower end of the Schumann resonances, the electromagnetic standing waves in the cavity between the Earth's surface and the ionosphere. That 7 Hz band, she says, has been associated with remote viewing and other reported psychic abilities.

Her example is Ingo Swann, one of the most famous remote viewers. Studies on Swann showed unusual 7 Hz activity in what she believes was his occipital lobe, the visual cortex, while he was remote viewing. Separately, an imaging study showed the parahippocampal area becoming very active during remote viewing and telepathy tasks.

There is a good comic beat here. Danny has an E-meter on the desk, a gift from a friend, because the area is synonymous with Scientology. He explains auditing: you hold one in each hand and answer questions about your life while the needle moves, which supposedly removes body thetans. Hennacy, who has never seen one: "it's a technological exorcism." Danny notes that all of the top remote viewers were Scientologists. Hennacy is unsurprised.

The reason the frequency story matters to her is a hypothesis. If the hippocampus navigates physical space and generates the frequency band that keeps showing up in these tasks, maybe it is not only navigating physical space.

"It made me wonder whether or not the hippocampus could be involved in not just navigating physical space, but actually navigating mental space." (22:44)

And from there, the bigger claim. She thinks memories are organised in a field rather than in the brain, and that the brain is our access to that field. Danny offers "like an antenna." She takes it and improves it: more than an antenna. Think of the brain as our computer. It has computational aspects, but it also has the ability to help us surf the net, to surf an informational field.

Her supporting citation is old and good. Karl Lashley spent years removing different parts of rat brains hunting for where memory was encoded, the search for the engram. What he found was that it was not the location of the removed tissue that determined memory loss, it was the amount. Lashley came to believe there was something holographic going on.

She then pulls back to the conventional and correct point: the hippocampus does play a real role in converting short term memory into long term memory.

What happens when the oxygen stops (25:51)

Because the hippocampus is extremely metabolically active, it has a very high oxygen requirement, and metabolically active tissue is the first thing to die when oxygen delivery fails. Carbon monoxide poisoning and cyanide poisoning both wreck the ability of blood to carry or deliver oxygen. Survivors of carbon monoxide poisoning have trashed hippocampi. So do people brought back from drowning or other suffocation. They frequently cannot form new memories.

Then the case that stops the room. Hennacy had a patient whose husband tried to kill her by choking her. She survived with her hippocampi wiped out. The husband ended up in a psychiatric ward at Hopkins for having been murderous. He did not go to prison. He was considered mentally ill, was out on some form of bail after psychiatric evaluation, and killed himself.

Every day Hennacy walked in, the woman asked why her husband was not coming to visit. Every day Hennacy told her he was no longer alive. And every day the woman cried as if she were hearing it for the first time.

"After a while, I just thought, I'm not going to put this woman through this anymore." (29:15)

Danny asks what she started telling her instead. Hennacy said: I don't know, you haven't heard from him. And the woman would say, no, I haven't heard from him, when is he coming. And Hennacy would say I don't know when he's coming. She made the call that a daily re-delivery of the worst news of a life, to someone who would never retain it, was not medicine.

Breath holding, and whether conditioning protects you (30:49)

Danny asks whether habitual breath holders, free divers, surfers duck diving through wipeouts, do damage to the hippocampus. Hennacy's answer is about the difference between an acute insult and an adaptation. If you are conditioning yourself toward something, the system has had a chance to adapt, and it is the acute event with no adaptation that is most damaging. Her comparison is people who live at high altitude, who compensate with a higher hematocrit, a higher concentration of red blood cells. Her verdict on conditioned breath holders: she doubts they are depriving the brain of that much oxygen.

Ketones, Navy divers and rediscovered knowledge (32:14)

Danny brings an anecdote from a previous guest, a metabolic scientist who ran a study for the Navy. Navy divers using rebreathers so they produce no bubbles and stay stealthy were getting oxygen toxicity seizures. What the study found was that putting the divers into ketosis, or giving them exogenous ketones, wiped the seizures out. That finding is now being carried into epilepsy, with a large fraction of patients on a strict ketogenic diet reporting little to no seizure activity.

Hennacy's reply is a small grenade.

"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." (33:07)

Danny is surprised, having assumed it was recent. Her broader point: a lot of what gets announced as discovery is rediscovery of things we knew a long time ago.

She then corrects the framing on the metabolism. The brain can run on glucose or on ketones, and ideally it runs on both. That is part of why intermittent fasting became popular, with people going roughly 15 hours between meals: long enough to switch on ketogenesis, without being like a diabetic in ketosis all the time. Glucose is the immediate fuel. You want the ketone generator available for when you are not eating.

Danny extrapolates into the wild. A lion or a cheetah often goes many days between meals because it cannot catch prey, so after five days without a kill the animal has to be sharper and quicker, not slower. The metabolism is built to make the hungry animal more dangerous.

How autism entered the picture (35:25)

Danny asks when she connected ESP to autism. Hennacy goes back to savant syndrome and to 1986, when she read Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. She then met Sacks when he lectured at Hopkins, and got private time with him because she sat on the student social and cultural affairs committee.

The case that fascinated her is the twins, institutionalised in the 1960s. One of their games was to trade consecutive prime numbers, six digits at a time, back and forth. Sacks came in one day having consulted a prime number table and said an eight digit prime. The twins looked at one another, and then switched to eight digit primes. He tested them at twelve digits and they were accurate. They offered twenty digit primes, but 1960s computers could not verify twenty digit primes, so Sacks could only validate them to twelve.

They could also do calendar calculation, thousands of years forward and backward: give them a date, they give you the day of the week. They were in their late teens or early twenties. And they could not do simple arithmetic.

"What they said was, they just saw the answers. And they saw the answers out here in physical space, just floating in space, like a hallucination. And just who hallucinates twelve and twenty digit prime numbers?" (37:30)

Then Daniel Tammet, the autistic savant who won the pi recitation contest, reciting over 22,000 digits effortlessly in five hours. He says he never memorised it. He sees it out in what we think of as physical space, visualising the numbers as complex landscapes with colours and shapes.

The two populations, and the decision that follows (39:44)

Savant syndrome is found predominantly in two populations: autistic individuals, and people who are congenitally blind. Both are conditions where something is different about the wiring, where there are things the person cannot do, and where the brain rewired itself around the gap during the plastic years.

The crucial observation for Hennacy is that the savant abilities are not calculation.

"It's not that they are deriving the answers or calculating them. It's perceptual. And it's hard to wrap your head around." (43:05)

They do it faster than a mathematician who has been handed an algorithm, on problems we do not have good algorithms for. If you want to crack the code for consciousness, she reasoned, study the people who can reliably demonstrate abilities we would otherwise call impossible, and who have demonstrated them more than once and in more than one individual.

So she started studying autistic savants, and she has been studying autism since 1987. After meeting Sacks she won a fellowship to the Institute of Psychiatry in London, where she spent six months with Michael Rutter, the world authority on autism at the time and later knighted for that work. Very few people have been in the field as long as she has.

Two of her framing complaints land here. First, we segment things that belong together. Generating prime numbers untaught is filed as a "savant skill" and treated as respectable, but telling you something before it happens is filed as impossible, when to her both are the same phenomenon: accessing information by a route we do not understand. Second, we lump things that do not belong together.

"I wouldn't have created autism spectrum disorder, because that's really multiple different conditions all lumped under one label, and that confuses things." (44:38)

Neuroscience as an incomplete model (45:51)

She is careful to establish that she is not an outsider throwing stones. She studied the materialist model, she has an autographed book from Eric Kandel, whose Nobel work was done on the sea slug Aplysia. She calls herself a dyed in the wool neuroscientist. And her verdict is that neuroscience has a really incomplete model, that we have accepted explanations that do not explain everything, and that we then ignore all the phenomena that do not fit. That recognition is what produced The ESP Enigma.

Danny brings in Eddie Chang, the neurosurgeon at UCSF, who said on a podcast with Andrew Huberman, as Danny recalls it, that something like 90% of the medical literature and textbooks you study is outdated or wrong. Danny's read: spending your life reading old literature makes the framework rigid, and few people step outside it.

Hennacy's response is the best line of the segment, and it is institutional memory rather than rebellion.

"When I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins, we were told 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. And it's your job to contribute to making it obsolete." (46:38)

She went to Hopkins precisely because it wanted to be on the cutting edge and a high percentage of graduates stayed in academia. Ten percent of her class were in the MD PhD programme, her husband included. She was initially going to do the PhD and decided against it. Neuroscience was not even a major when she went into it, so she crafted her own. And all of her psychiatry training happened before Prozac, which means before the field had a fraction of the psychotropic drugs available today.

The analytical couch, and the two psychiatries (51:06)

When she arrived at Harvard on faculty, everybody there was talking about where to buy an analytical couch, because the department was still heavily psychoanalytic. So was John Mack.

Danny does not know what an analytical couch is. Hennacy explains: like a Victorian fainting couch. The patient lies facing the ceiling while the analyst sits behind with a pad, because not making eye contact reduces the inhibition against saying embarrassing things, and you encourage the patient to free associate without worrying about judgement. That was psychiatry under the influence of Freud.

Hopkins was different from day one, and for a specific historical reason. When the psychiatry department was created there, in the late 1800s or early 1900s, the psychiatrist they brought in was a contemporary of Freud's named Adolf Meyer. Meyer's approach was not analytical. It was biological, psychological and sociological: the biopsychosocial model.

She works the example properly. Someone arrives apathetic, not wanting to live, with the cluster of symptoms we call depression. In her training you had to figure out why. Biological: they could be deficient in vitamin B12, or have a thyroid condition. Danny: "we're walking chemical bags." Psychological: their mother abused them as a child, they are now married to someone who abuses them the same way, they are trapped and they shut down. Sociological: you live in a totalitarian state as a persecuted minority and the problem is genuinely at that level. Danny adds American inner cities where everyone you know is involved in crime.

"I wouldn't have gone into psychiatry if it was just, here's a drug to manage the symptoms. I loved being like a detective, trying to figure out what creates that, and then getting at the root of the problem and addressing it there." (55:52)

She notes that the tradition survives today under the names integrative psychiatry and functional medicine.

Danny's objection: how would you ever disprove it (57:45)

Danny lays out his actual problem, and it is a good one. He is bad at estimating probabilities, and he thinks most people are.

His example: walking through the kitchen, not thinking about anything, he says to his wife "do you want to get tacos," and she says "get out of my head, I just had that thought." It was not dinner time. It was not a normal thought for that time of day. Or: people call him who he has not thought about in years.

Then he supplies his own counter argument, which is the honest one.

"How many times have you thought about a person that you haven't thought about in a long time and they didn't call you? You don't categorize that into a meaningful memory. When they do call you, that's when you attribute meaning to it, and that's when you memorize it." (59:00)

So how many people can you put in a room, how do you repeat it, and is it possible to disprove.

Hennacy's answer starts by conceding a great deal about the field she is in. A lot of parapsychology research is Zener card shaped: five cards, one in five chance, 20%. Run large numbers of people and large numbers of trials, and the meta analyses come back with hit rates a couple of points above chance, 32% against a 25% baseline in the version she quotes, over thousands of trials, producing astronomical statistics. That is the body of work Dean Radin frequently cites.

Her verdict on it is blunt and worth quoting in full, because it is the intellectual hinge of the entire interview.

"I saw that a lot of parapsychology is done that way, and I thought, that's not the way I would go about it. Because it's not that convincing. Even though, okay, the p value is amazing. That's not going to change perception." (1:00:29)

That is a researcher inside a field saying that her field's headline evidence does not do the job. And it explains the decision she made over twenty years ago: if anybody could produce evidence extraordinary enough to move anyone, it would be an autistic savant. She says she predicted that from what she knows about how their brains work.

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% accuracy 25% 32% Zener card meta analyses thousands of trials 10% 96% Haley, random digit runs 165 of 172 digits, 6 hours "the p value is amazing. That's not going to change perception." chance observed
Figure 2. Why Hennacy walked away from the standard parapsychology paradigm. Card guessing meta analyses beat chance by a few points across thousands of trials, which produces spectacular statistics and, in her judgement, changes nobody's mind. A single subject producing 165 correct digits out of 172 against a one in ten per digit baseline is a different kind of claim. Baselines as stated in the interview: five Zener symbols give 20%, the four card variant she quotes gives 25% against 32% observed; single digits give 10%.

Haley: six hours, 172 digits, seven misses (1:01:57)

Danny asks for a concrete example. Hennacy gives one.

Her subject was a girl named Haley, on whom she did six hours of research. Among the tests, she used a random number generator to produce six digit random numbers. On one run there were 172 digits. Haley missed seven. She got 165.

"It's just like, okay, something's going on here." (1:03:12)

The setup, in her own description: Haley and the therapist she worked with were in one room, with a visual barrier between them. Cameras were on either side, on the ceiling, in front and behind. Hennacy and her cameraman were in a separate room watching the camera feeds. And Haley could do it with two separate therapists, not just one.

TEST ROOM therapist reads the digits from the RNG Haley types what she perceives visual barrier no line of sight camera, ceiling and front camera, behind side side SEPARATE ROOM researcher + cameraman watching all four feeds one run: 172 random digits, 7 misses. Repeated with a second, independent therapist.
Figure 3. The protocol as Hennacy describes it on the record. Note what it does control for (line of sight between sender and receiver, unobserved movement in the room, a single collaborating therapist) and what she says openly it does not yet control for: full acoustic separation into different rooms. She wants that test. She has not been able to run it the way she wants.

How Haley was found

The origin story is the best narrative stretch in the interview, and it is worth all of its detail.

Haley's father knew Darold Treffert, the leading authority on savant syndrome, and knew about mathematical savants. He thought his daughter was one, because she could do remarkable mathematics she had never been trained to do.

Then, one day, the therapist working with her had her calculator die. She switched to a different calculator. The new calculator was not within Haley's line of sight, and until she reset it, it returned the answer in logarithmic notation, which is a completely different set of numbers on the display.

Haley typed the answer in logarithmic notation. She had never done that before.

The therapist asked how she knew it was in logarithmic notation. Haley typed: I see the numerators and denominators in your head.

The therapist said, what, you can read my mind. Haley said yes. So the therapist tested her. What am I thinking of right now. She was thinking of the purple dinosaur Barney. Haley typed Barney. What is the name of my landlord. Haley typed Helmet, which was his name. The therapist's first reaction was that she was losing her mind, and she was afraid to tell the parents.

A second therapist came into the home separately. This one had a habit some of us have of transposing letters, always making the same kind of spelling mistake. She noticed Haley making the same mistakes she did. She joked that it was like Haley was tapping into her mind. Haley said, I am. So the therapist, who was fluent in German, asked how you say I love you in German. Haley, who had never been exposed to German, typed it out.

Those accounts are what reached Treffert. He knew Hennacy had come back from working with savants in India and was pursuing questions of telepathy, so she was contacted and she went out and ran the tests in as controlled a fashion as she could manage.

Treffert is no longer alive. He went publicly on record saying he thought telepathy was a real thing and that it was a savant skill. On this, Hennacy says, he was on the same page as her.

The separate rooms problem, stated honestly (around 1:07)

Danny asks the obvious question: has it ever been done with the child in a completely different part of the house, no line of sight at all.

"No, not really in the way that I would like to see it done." (1:07:22)

She describes what has been done: studies in houses with a contiguous dining room and living room, giving a separation of 20 to 25 feet, as wide as Danny's studio, but with some visibility between the mother and the child.

Then she explains the practical obstacle without pretending it is not an obstacle. Skeptics want separate rooms, and so does she. It is easier said than done, because autistic children are rigid about routine, they do not like changes, and they become emotionally dysregulated very easily. Doing that, keeping them calm, with a crowd of people and cameras present, is hard.

Danny proposes his own version: not separate rooms, just a piece of plywood between them that goes to the ceiling all the way around, so there is no possible line of sight, plus a stage magician or mentalist present to observe and ask questions. Hennacy says there is definitely no trickery going on, but agrees people should be assured of it. Danny is careful: he does not think there is either, he just wants the check.

There is also a nice exchange about the "skeptic in the room ruins it" claim. Hennacy's version is specific rather than mystical.

"It's okay for somebody if they're an open minded skeptic. You would qualify as that. You've got some skepticism, but you're not there as somebody whose job it is to figure out how they are scamming us. Which is a totally different kind of energy to introduce." (1:09:35)

The materialist explanation she takes seriously (1:11:21)

This section is why the interview is worth watching. Instead of waving off the alternatives, Hennacy names the strongest one and does the work on it herself.

Suppose the materialist model is correct and nothing is being picked up outside the ordinary senses. Then the most likely mechanism, she says, runs through the fact that these children have hypersensitive senses in general. Their hearing is extraordinary. They can hear a conversation at the other end of the house.

And then the piece that makes it plausible: when we think silently, we still vibrate our vocal cords. That is subvocalization, and it is real. So her own leading materialist hypothesis is that these children's hearing is acute enough to pick up the vibration of somebody's vocal cords while they are thinking.

Against that she puts the things that do not fit. The parents contacting her are not fame seeking. She has probably had over a hundred people contact her from around the world, without the funding to go and test all of those reports, and the parents are in shock. Many of them would never have wanted to be on The Telepathy Tapes at all, and would not have wanted the publicity. Ky Dickens was introduced only to the families willing to be filmed, which is not a representative sample of the people who have contacted Hennacy over the years. And some of those children do not use a spelling board at all. They can hold a pencil and write.

Danny presses on a real problem with the subvocalization theory from the receiving end. His own train of thought is all over the place. He is often thinking about many things at once. Communicating an idea is not one perfect stream of consciousness turned into words, it is drafting and redrafting until you have the condensed version somebody else can digest. If you projected his raw stream of consciousness, the result would be massive miscommunication. Vocal cord vibrations carrying that would be just as confusing.

Hennacy's answer is what the children themselves report.

"What these autistic individuals say is that they hear all of these different people's thoughts. It's like being in a crowded restaurant." (1:14:44)

They have to tune into the individual they are supposed to be telepathic with, block out the rest, and communicate at the same time. Whatever the mechanism is, she says, what they do is extraordinary. And she concedes the deeper framing point: it might not be telepathy in the way we picture telepathy. We might not be perceiving it the right way, thinking about it the right way, or fitting it into the right framework.

Why autistic people, specifically (1:16:25)

When she wrote The ESP Enigma she went at this demographically: where do the most reports of ESP experiences come from.

The answer was a gradient. Higher incidence of reporting in people who are artistic and creative. The lowest in people who are scientific, analytical and logical. And then a large group who have never had anything they would call ESP in waking life but have occasionally had a dream that was precognitive, or that contained an after death communication. The classic: someone dreams their grandfather comes to them, and in the morning learns he died in the night, at the same time.

That pointed her at the dreaming brain, and there is a real experimental literature there. Dream telepathy studies had a sender in one room concentrating on a picture or painting, and a receiver asleep in another. A researcher who did not know which picture had been chosen would wake the dreamer when the eye movements showed REM, and ask what they had been dreaming about. The description was then compared against the target image. Hennacy reports an amazing correspondence between the two.

So the dreaming brain is in a more receptive mode, and the pattern she kept seeing was the same one over and over.

She simplifies deliberately and says so. Treat the right hemisphere as the creative and intuitive one, and the left as the analytical, logical, language based one. In waking life the left hemisphere is dominant. Western education is built to develop left hemisphere skills, reading, writing, arithmetic, and has deemphasised the arts, during exactly the years when the brain is most plastic and is being shaped into whatever tool we tell it we need.

In dreaming sleep two things flip. The right hemisphere becomes dominant over the left. And the frontal lobes shut down their activity. The frontal lobes are what create expectations.

"Our dreams can be so magical because the analytical, logical, setting the expectation and thinking of consequences, all those parts of the brain are shut down. So it's free to access information that gets shut down by people during their waking life where it's like, well, that can't happen." (1:21:19)

Now put the autistic savant into that frame. Savant skills are mainly right hemisphere skills: gestalt thinking, pattern recognition, visual spatial processing, rather than linear verbal thinking. And the main deficits in autism are left hemisphere: language, the linear things. So if anybody is going to be able to do this in a waking state, she reasoned, it is somebody whose waking brain is already in the hybrid condition the rest of us only reach in dreams.

That is also, she notes, what hypnosis is trying to do: put somebody into that state just before you wake, when you can still access your dreams before they slip away. Meditation is trying to hold that hypnagogic window open for longer than a couple of seconds, because when you expand it you get more access to what is normally unconscious.

Danny's analogy: it is like opening the encrypted part of the hard drive that your waking consciousness is not allowed into.

STATE LEFT RIGHT FRONTAL GATE

ordinary waking closed

hypnosis / meditation ajar

dreaming sleep (REM) open

autistic waking state open, while awake

analytical, logical, verbal, linear gestalt, pattern, visual spatial, intuitive

Figure 4. Hennacy's core structural argument, drawn. Two dials move together: hemispheric balance, and whether the frontal lobes are running expectation and consequence. Dreaming opens the gate but you are unconscious. Hypnosis and meditation crack it open deliberately. Her claim is that the autistic brain sits in the bottom row by default, awake, which is why she predicted twenty years ago that this population would be the one to produce extraordinary evidence. She flags her own simplification of hemispheric lateralisation out loud.

Memory is not a recording (1:25:25)

Danny finds it bonkers that there are memories in his head he cannot access, that in some sense do not exist for him, and yet can be pulled out in the right state.

Hennacy pulls the brake. There are lots of problems with memory in general. Memory is not a video recording. It gets modified, and it gets modified by subsequent events. Reconstructive memory is the standard term. Danny adds the evolutionary purpose: memory exists to help us get through future situations, not to archive the past accurately.

So when people tell you their memories you have to hold that. And memories accessed under hypnosis are three steps further removed from anything accurate. You cannot trust it entirely. That is her own caveat, applied to a technique that is popular in the world she works in.

The people who cannot forget (1:26:50)

The mirror image of Molaison. There are people who cannot forget a thing to save their life.

She cites the psychologist Alexander Luria, who wrote The Mind of a Mnemonist about a man who could not forget anything. Name a date, June 12th 1988, and he tells you what the weather was and what he had for lunch. The retention of mundane detail that most of us never put into long term memory at all.

Danny pulls up the term on screen: hyperthymesia, also known as hyperthymestic syndrome or highly superior autobiographical memory, from the ancient Greek "hyper", excessive. Extraordinarily rare, with fewer than 100 people in the world diagnosed as of 2021.

Is it congenital or acquired. Hennacy has a clue rather than an answer, and it comes from a colleague. Jason Brandt, a neuropsychologist from her Hopkins days, contacted her years ago about a patient like this. He had imaged him. The finding: an excessive amount of white matter around the hippocampus.

That rhymed with something she already believed, that Einstein's brain had excess white matter around the angular gyrus, the region associated with calculation. Danny is delighted to learn Einstein's brain was dissected at all. Hennacy tells the story with appropriate hedging: it got pickled and ended up in somebody's custody in some strange place rather than in a vault at Princeton where you would expect it, and she asks not to be quoted on the details.

White matter, and the 90% of the brain nobody talks about (1:30:41)

Now the mechanism. White matter is myelination, the insulation on the wiring. Grey matter is the neurons. Heavily myelinated areas have faster conduction, the difference between an insulated wire and a bare one. So more white matter around a structure means faster signalling through it.

But myelin is not the only white matter. There are also astrocytes, named for being star shaped, and Hennacy finds them fascinating.

The classical picture of a synapse is two neurons in communication: an axon, a dendritic spine, a neurotransmitter crossing the synaptic cleft. Some synapses are electrical, with a gap junction instead. What we now understand, discovered maybe ten years ago, is the tripartite synapse: the connection between two neurons also involves an astrocyte, which sends out its own process and monitors what is happening at the synapse.

Then the numbers that reframe everything. Astrocytes are about 20% of our brain cells. Neurons are only about 10% of the brain. The rest are glia, of many types, of which astrocytes are one. And some people think astrocytes may be involved in quantum processes.

Microtubules (1:34:48)

Danny had Stuart Hameroff on the show recently and could not remember the word. Hennacy supplies it: microtubules. And she does not hedge.

"He thinks the microtubules have something to do with consciousness." "Yeah. Absolutely. I think he's right." (1:34:56)

Then she explains her own method, which is the most useful methodological statement in the interview. She is studying the brain the way somebody reverse engineers a machine. She is deliberately looking at all the things people do not talk about much, because people focus so heavily on neurons and neurotransmitters, and that is a tiny fraction of the brain. She is interested in all the rest of it as a system.

Her analogy comes from a year she spent as a genetics fellow during the Human Genome Project, and it is exact.

When the results came back, the field was shocked that there were only about 22,000 genes in the human genome, when they had expected at least five times that. Protein coding DNA is only about 10% of the chromosome, and the rest had been treated as scaffolding for the important stuff. Then it turned out there were not enough differences in the genetics to explain the variability we see. Only about 1.5% of our genome differs from chimpanzees. We share roughly half our genome with vegetables.

"Think of the genes that code for proteins as the keys on a player piano. And then all the rest of it plays a role in what sequence those keys are played in, to make the music." (1:38:44)

The brain is the same situation. We have been focusing on the 10%, the neurons, because that is where the action potentials are.

The "10% problem"GenomeBrain
What we counted~22,000 protein coding genes, about 10% of the chromosomeNeurons, about 10% of brain cells
What we expectedAt least five times more genes than we foundThat neurons and neurotransmitters would carry the whole explanation
What we called the restScaffolding for the important stuffSupport tissue, glue (the literal meaning of glia)
The gap it cannot explain1.5% genomic difference from chimpanzees, and roughly half our genome shared with vegetablesEverything the standard model treats as impossible, plus consciousness itself
Where Hennacy looks nowThe non coding 90%: what sequences the keys on the player pianoAstrocytes (~20% of brain cells), the tripartite synapse, and roughly 10,000 microtubules per neuron
Her framing"I think more like a systems engineer, as opposed to looking at one thing and attributing everything to just one thing."
Figure 5. The structural parallel Hennacy draws between the Human Genome Project's surprise and the state of neuroscience. In both cases the field counted the visible 10%, called the other 90% scaffolding, and then found that the counted part could not account for the observed variability. Numbers are as she states them in the interview.

Danny remembers Hameroff saying there were hundreds of thousands of microtubules per neuron. Hennacy corrects him carefully: it depends which neurons, but certainly about 10,000 per neuron. And when you see them in a neuron they are packed so tightly that they cannot be there as scaffolding.

Then she gives the tour of what microtubules actually do, which is the point.

They are in every cell of the body and perform multiple different functions. They form organelles, which literally means little organs. The hair cells in the ear that respond to different frequencies of sound are chock full of microtubules in a very specific array. The photoreceptors at the back of the eye are modified cilia, and cilia are microtubule based. When cells divide in mitosis, the organelle that organises the chromosomes and ensures each daughter cell gets a complete set is the spindle apparatus, which is microtubules. And during brain development, microtubules lead the way for connections being made between neurons in very different parts of the brain.

"Microtubules are fascinating. They're like little superconductors. And they clearly play a huge role in consciousness." (1:40:30)

Hold onto the fact that the sound sensor, the light sensor, and the machine that divides your cells are all built out of the same tubes. It comes back later.

How you would push microtubule research forward (1:40:53)

Danny asks what study you would run, and whether it is a funding problem. Hennacy says she has a model for the whole thing, that she cannot go into all of it today, and that some of it will be in the book coming out in the autumn.

What she will say is that she is very interested in designing experiments that answer the question, working with people like Stu Hameroff. She and Hameroff have both been invited to be part of a group of about 15 scientists getting together specifically to brainstorm what experiments can be done. Some are physicists, some are neuroscientists. Danny calls it an intellectual salon. She likes that.

Ultrasound, and the brain as a frequency generator (1:43:00)

Danny relays what Hameroff told him about Alzheimer's: using ultrasound waves on the brain to somehow clear the plaque that develops there.

Hennacy fills in the actual state of the field. Very low intensity ultrasound is being used for neuromodulation. She names where: the University of Arizona, by Jay Sanguinetti, whose SEMA Lab does exactly this work in collaboration with the Center for Consciousness Studies.

Danny asks what neuromodulation is. Her explanation is clean. You are trying to modify the way neurons behave, and you can target a very specific area within the brain. That means doing an MRI first, because you need that person's particular brain anatomy and skull shape, since people's skulls differ. Then you beam in sound waves at very low intensity and get the target region to respond to the frequency you are putting in.

"If you think of the brain as being a generator of frequencies, and if you can get a specific area of the brain to be receiving that frequency, you're going to be entraining it to that frequency. And then you're looking at what are the effects of that." (1:44:47)

So the whole approach is modifying brain function with sound waves rather than chemicals. Given what she just said about hair cells being packed with microtubules, the choice of instrument is not incidental.

Infrared light, the nose, and a helmet that is not ideal (1:45:30)

Same logic, different carrier. People are using infrared light therapy, photobiomodulation, for Alzheimer's.

Danny asks the obvious engineering question: how do you get light through the skull. There is a helmet, and he is right that the skull is a problem. The bone blocks it to some extent. Danny mentions they own a helmet, but it is for hair growth.

The better route is a nasal probe, and the anatomy is the reason. The olfactory nerves pass through the cribriform plate, which means you effectively have holes in the skull there. And the nucleus basalis of Meynert, the cholinergic nucleus that is predominantly affected in Alzheimer's, sits toward the base of the brain. Going up the nose gets you closer to the target.

Has it worked. Hennacy first met the people doing this work at a Science of Consciousness conference maybe ten years ago and got excited about it. She had a couple of patients with neurodegenerative conditions and cognitive problems, and after assessing them she asked whether they would be willing to try it, since it is commercially available. She names the maker: Vielight. Danny's producer Steve finds them on Amazon at around 1,700 to 1,800 dollars.

"It did reverse some of her cognitive decline. She was extremely grateful to me for it." (1:48:52)

She states clearly and unprompted that she is not a paid employee of theirs and has no commercial interest. On the price, she says to consider the cost to quality of life. Danny asks whether insurance covers it. She thinks it should, and does not know.

The Jack Kruse stories

Danny brings in Jack Kruse, the neurosurgeon and internet figure who calls himself a mitochondriac and is a heavy proponent of red light, sunlight and UV light for mitochondrial health.

Three stories, as Danny tells them. First, in surgery Kruse used red light panels instead of the large white LED surgical lights, so that when he opened the skull he was shining red and near infrared on the exposed brain rather than white and blue light, which he thinks is toxic. Second, he gave patients an IV of methylene blue, a dye also used as a fish tank treatment, on the grounds that it is good for mitochondrial health. He did a highly invasive spinal surgery on a patient in his eighties that no other surgeon would take, on the condition that he could do it his way, and wheeled the patient out into the courtyard afterward to recover outdoors in sunlight instead of inside under blue lights. The man walked out the next day, where the normal recovery is several days.

Third, Kruse's father in law had cataract surgery scheduled months out, then injured his knee falling off a ladder. Kruse gave him a red light panel and told him to sit in front of it for 20 minutes, three times a day. At the pre operative appointment about a month later, the ophthalmologist told him his vision was restored and he no longer needed the surgery. Kruse asked whether he had worn eye protection. He had not.

Danny says it seems crazy. Hennacy's reply is the pivot into the next section.

"It only seems crazy if you don't realize the role of biological light." (1:53:40)

The body's fibre optic system (1:54:12)

Here is the piece of the interview where her own original idea shows up, and it is worth following step by step.

Alexander Gurwitsch discovered biophotons roughly a hundred years ago. He called what he found mitogenetic rays, and they were blue and purple. Fritz-Albert Popp came later and helped validate the work.

Then Royal Rife, who built microscopes with lenses configured so that he could get magnification and visibility without shining an external light source on the specimen. Hennacy explains exactly why that mattered.

"If you're shining light on something, you're not going to see that it has its own light that it radiates." (1:55:32)

One of the things Rife saw was that different species of bacteria emitted different frequencies of light. Danny asks if it is like bioluminescence. No, she says, that is something different. It is UV that the body creates, and Gurwitsch's mitogenetic rays were the purple blue end.

Now her contribution. When she first saw a picture of the mitogenetic rays, her reaction was immediate: that is the spindle apparatus. The spindle apparatus has a very specific shape. And Gurwitsch only saw these rays during mitosis, which is driven by microtubules.

"I said, oh, microtubules must carry light." (1:56:44)

So we have our own fibre optic system inside our bodies. And she gives a supporting argument from rates: the number of biochemical interactions in a cell is on the order of 100,000 per second, and the only way you could drive all of those processes is under the influence of something travelling at the speed of light.

Where do biophotons come from. She has read accounts saying DNA, and accounts saying mitochondria. Mitochondria provide the energy for everything: rebuilding, detoxifying, all of it. Which is why she takes the poisoning of mitochondria seriously, whether it is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, present in a lot of food, or LED lighting, or people being increasingly indoors, staring at screens emitting blue light that interferes with the dopamine system and with sleep and circadian rhythm. Danny shows his phone, which runs a red filter.

So her conclusion on red light therapy is not mystical, it is symmetrical.

"The idea that something like red light could be helpful makes sense, because light is causing some of the problems, and light could be some of the solutions. It's just a different frequency light." (1:57:52)

SOURCE CONDUCTOR STRUCTURES BUILT FROM IT mitochondria DNA biophotons, Gurwitsch 1920s validated later by Popp microtubules ~10,000 / neuron seen only during mitosis, which microtubules drive hair cells (sound) photoreceptors (light) spindle apparatus (mitosis) TWO WAYS IN, BOTH DISCUSSED IN THE INTERVIEW infrared up the nose cribriform plate to nucleus basalis of Meynert low intensity focused ultrasound MRI targeted, entrains a region to a frequency
Figure 6. The chain of reasoning Hennacy builds between 1:34 and 1:58, drawn as one picture. The step that is hers is the middle one: Gurwitsch's mitogenetic ray images looked like the spindle apparatus, Gurwitsch only saw them during mitosis, mitosis is driven by microtubules, therefore microtubules carry light. Everything downstream, red light through the nose and ultrasound through the skull, is an attempt to put energy back into that system at the right frequency.

Atrophy: what the last few centuries did to us (1:58:21)

Danny quotes Jack Kruse's framing of modern environments: indoors under blue lights, surrounded by screens and electromagnetic fields, is the human equivalent of a killer whale in a tank at SeaWorld. The dorsal fin collapses, the animal gets depressed, loses the desire to mate, eventually kills a trainer. We did not evolve for these environments. And if telepathic ability was innate in humans long ago, industrialisation and the explosion of technology would correlate with the atrophy of that part of the mind.

Hennacy agrees and adds a twist Danny does not expect. Yes, decades of a heavily left hemisphere biased educational system have wired our brains toward the logical and analytical way of being. But what is happening now with younger people is that they want things with a video component, they are less interested in reading and more interested in accessing information in a way that carries a lot more information per second. That, she says, is rewiring our brains as a species, back toward the right hemisphere.

Which sets up her actual recommendation, and it is the reverse of what you might expect from someone worried about technology.

"Here we have AI, which is language based learning, doing all of this stuff that's really more left hemisphere skills. What I'd like to see is our educational system bringing back the arts, bringing back a lot of these things where we develop our right hemisphere. That is the pattern recognising, gestalt thinking process, and intuition." (2:00:00)

Why. Because we need to be able to discern what is real and what is not, and language can be very deceptive. Language can lead us away from the truth. The more we develop pure perceptual processes, intuition and the ability to ask whether a thing fits, the better off we are, compared with a siloed way of approaching information.

The schools, and why parents are leaving (2:01:17)

Danny mentions that his wife had been reading about the number of elementary and middle school children being pulled out of public school for homeschooling, to the point where schools are debating staff cuts or closure. His producer pulls it up: Florida saw a 46% increase in homeschooling over the past five years.

Hennacy is not surprised at all.

"Unfortunately our schools have become all about testing. It's become more about memorising and less about learning how to critically think." (2:02:20)

She thinks the pandemic changed a lot, because parents saw what their kids were actually doing in school and started realising what education their child was and was not getting. And she frames the parental motive precisely: they do not want their children to be dependent. A certain independence comes from flexibility in thinking, and a rigid memorise this model where success is a score on a meaningless test does not prepare anyone for the real world. Kids already knew that. Kids are not enthusiastic about school. The only thing they are enthusiastic about is seeing their friends.

Which she immediately says is critical and must be preserved. Where she lives in Oregon there are homeschooling programmes where parents can send children somewhere for socialisation, maybe three hours a day, team sport or band or whatever it is. Danny's local community sailing centre sets aside a day for homeschool co-ops, who then go sailing or to a museum on other days, getting real world experience rather than sitting in a room under blue lights staring at screens. All the schools are on iPads and computer screens now, which scares him. He says he might follow suit.

Did ancient humans have this (2:05:13)

Danny asks whether early humans thousands of years ago had these abilities innately, and whether it atrophied.

"Oh, absolutely. Absolutely." (2:05:31)

Danny extends it: even the written word, the ability to write on scrolls, offloaded memory and probably atrophied our ability to store memory in the brain.

Hennacy generalises it into a rule about technology. Every technology brings unintended consequences. Smartphones have made travel and logistics enormously easier, and they are also dumbing us down. A lot of people do not know the phone numbers of the most important people in their lives because the phone remembers. Some people would not know how to use a map. They are becoming dependent on something that could be taken away by an event like a Carrington event.

She lands the historical detail: when the Carrington event happened in 1859, the solar flare burned up telegraph stations. Back then things were not so electrified and people were not so dependent. What would happen today.

Danny answers from experience. Two hurricanes hit about a year ago and knocked out power. Some people had no power for two weeks, and it was like Mad Max, in a small town, people not knowing what to do. Life restructured around when to run the generator, and around three items: water, propane, toilet paper. The things nobody thinks twice about became the entire day.

"It's crazy how it resets your mind, resets your daily rhythm of life. I kind of liked it, actually." (2:08:29)

Hennacy notes there is a podcast where every episode teaches the old ways: how you would navigate, find food and stay warm with none of this. And she closes the loop on books as technology: they enormously increased our ability to acquire information, and equally increased the ability to distribute harmful information and disinformation. Then the internet, more so. Too much information, and no way to tell what is real.

What the tree of knowledge might have been about (2:09:45)

Hennacy did not grow up with any religion. Her father was a scientist and an atheist. But she became interested in stories from the Bible, not as literal history but as stories that carry something true about people and about life, which she says is equally true of Native American spirituality, of Hinduism, of any of them.

The story she keeps turning over is Adam and Eve being cast out of the garden. What got them thrown out was eating from the tree of knowledge.

She flags it as her own fantasy rather than scholarship, and then gives the reading.

"It's going from knowledge as a pure knowing, pure perception, which is what a lot of indigenous cultures still trust most, to trusting the written word. That created the possibility to get us to deviate from truth." (2:11:00)

Once we started believing what we read in a book, then if the book contains a model of reality that contradicts your direct experience, you have a conflict. Suppose you had an experience you would call ESP, and your school books tell you it is pseudoscience. What do you believe. Suppose you had the message in your head to call home and then found out your father had just had a heart attack. What do you believe. And what if you have those experiences on a regular basis.

"What happens is that we rationalize away our direct experience." (2:12:15)

Danny gives the everyday version, and it is a good one. He will do a podcast, come out feeling strongly a certain way, then the episode goes public and he reads the comments and thinks, I was wrong, they must be right. His perception gets warped. Which is how he learned never to read comments.

Hennacy's professional conclusion follows from that. When people tell her their experience, who is she to tell them they did not have it. Danny goes further: why would you even want to. The parents contacting her are living with the child, and they experience the telepathy in other ways, not just through the spelling board. For her to say no, it could not be that, because it says right here it is pseudoscience, achieves nothing except convincing that person you will not believe them because of your training. You cannot talk somebody out of a direct experience that profound.

"So let's explore. That's enough people's experience. Let's explore what's going on there and try to have an understanding come out of it, as opposed to, well, I read that that can't happen, therefore it can't." (2:14:32)

Why the children mention biblical characters (2:15:09)

Danny asks about the children who talk about biblical characters. Hennacy's answer is a good demonstration of how she handles a confound.

Some of them, like Houston from The Telepathy Tapes, come from an explicitly Christian household. Houston's mother was raised a fundamentalist Christian, and wrote a book. So when Hennacy first encountered a child saying I walk with Jesus, or when I go to the hill I see God, her reaction was: alright, they had that upbringing. But then she has other families that are Hindu, and the content shifts accordingly.

She notes the same pattern in near death experiences. If you were raised Christian you are more likely to see Jesus or Mary. If you are Buddhist you are more likely to see Buddha. Culture influences the content of the experience. And then her actual point: that still does not tell you what the experience is.

Her frame is archetypes. The deeper she got into consciousness, the more important archetypes became. Jesus and Krishna are very similar archetypes in their life stories and their way of being in the world. Danny adds the parallels between mythological and biblical figures across cultures, and the shared stories, like the flood myth.

"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. I'm interested in what's the code." (2:17:22)

Then the information theory version, which is genuinely elegant. Images and symbols are a shortcut. They are condensed information. A picture speaks a thousand words, and a symbol has far more conceptually packed into it than a sentence does. She could write a book on what a single symbol represents.

So the model she is building is this. Our brains are navigating informational fields. We live in a sea of information. Think of it as quantum vacuum fluctuations, waves that carry information within them, and our brains help us navigate that. The waves are light and vibration, and every sensory system we have is picking up different frequencies of light and vibration. Microtubules in the cilia in the hair cells differentiate frequencies of vibration. Our eyes differentiate frequencies of light, and we only see the narrow visible spectrum. We only hear a fraction of the vibration that exists. Even touch is picking up information encoded in vibration.

"It's all about waveforms. Our senses are giving us information from that, but only a narrow spectrum of it. And so there's other information out there, which is what we think of as non-local, because our sensory system is oriented to here and now." (2:19:20)

The sixth sense, and Joe Rogan's fart hypothesis (2:19:43)

Danny offers Joe Rogan's fart hypothesis, and it is a genuinely good intuition pump. Someone farts and there is a plume of disgusting smell, and we can detect it because we evolved a nose to detect danger: fires, gas leaks, prey. So what else is floating around that we simply have no organ to perceive. A dog or a cat senses something in a house. A room feels off, feels spooky. Maybe we are getting a faint version of a smell we cannot smell.

Hennacy answers with pattern recognition, which is how she says the brain works, whether that is recognising your face ten years older or hearing a cover version and immediately identifying the original song. We pick up patterns. And crucially, we can pick up patterns without it feeling like perception, because we are so visual that only visual pattern recognition feels like experiencing something. More of the brain is devoted to vision than any other sense. Everything else feels like guessing.

Her exhibit is Joy Milne.

The nose (2:24:02)

Joy Milne is the Scottish woman who can tell whether somebody has Parkinson's disease by smell, and Hennacy says she is essentially 100% accurate. Danny's producer pulls up the article: scientists drew on the 72 year old Scot's rare condition to help identify people with neurological conditions, and have harnessed her hypersensitive sense of smell to develop a test for Parkinson's. She noticed that her late husband developed a different odour when he was 33, twelve years before he was diagnosed. She has also identified somebody else years before they developed the condition.

Ask her how she does it and she just does it. Which is the same category as a mother of a newborn.

Hennacy cites the study, done decades ago, in which researchers took the little night shirts from around ten babies and gave them to the mothers to smell, asking which one belonged to their baby. The women could match them.

"You're not having to think about it, and it even feels like you're guessing, but you're accurate." (2:26:31)

Then two more examples of information arriving below the threshold of awareness, both real and both well documented.

People can detect as little as one photon of light. You do not see it. There is not enough density of light for visual experience. But if you ask people whether the light flashed just then, they are accurate.

And blindsight, which she is careful to distinguish from mind sight. The visual cortex is damaged, the person is blind because that part of the brain is not working, and yet if you put a picture of a circle or a cross in front of them they can tell you which it is. It feels to them like guessing. The information is still getting into their eyes and into other parts of the brain that can do a rudimentary form of vision without 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 give us information." (2:28:10)

How your nose picks a mate (2:28:36)

Danny brings up a study he heard about from a previous guest: a scent that men emit attracts women, subconsciously, and it is all based on immune systems. If his immune system complements hers, filling the gaps where hers lacks, then a child of theirs would have a more robust immune system.

Hennacy confirms the shape of it: if he smells good to her, that is true. The t-shirt studies are the classic version, women smelling worn shirts and ranking which they find more attractive.

Then the anatomy, and this is the fact that makes the whole thing work. Smell is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus. Every other sense goes to the thalamus, the relay centre where sensory gating mainly happens. Smell goes straight to the limbic system, which is involved in memory and emotion. That is why smell of all the senses is the most evocative of emotion and memory.

She adds a second, older study in the same direction: attraction based on smell toward someone who is not your relative, a way of reducing inbreeding using the sense most associated with raw emotion.

And a bit of industry trivia: some perfumes actually used pheromones, and the ones that do tend to have a muskier smell. Meanwhile we live in a society that has become anti-olfaction outside of food, having decided that human smells are dirty and undesirable.

The comic peak of the whole three hours lands here. Danny says that every morning, lying in bed half asleep, he wakes up to his wife sniffing him like a dog, and that she says if she could bottle his scent she would. Hennacy's verdict, delivered instantly: "you have no worries, she'll never cheat on you."

Two ways to be human from here (2:32:23)

Danny asks how humans evolve now that we are separated by technology, working behind screens, doing Zoom meetings and swiping on apps to find mates.

Hennacy predicts a divide, and describes both sides without contempt for either. On one side, people who love technology and love living in the artificial world. People hacking their bodies, inserting technology into themselves, and people who want to develop chips to insert into brains. Danny supplies the word: transhumanists.

On the other side, people hungering for a more natural existence, who want to meet in person again. Her framing of the difference is not technological, it is anatomical in her own vocabulary: one of them is more heart centred. When you are with people you feel things in a way you do not on a screen. The screen makes it a mental process. Danny adds that you miss the small subconscious cues, and you do not get a real sense of the person.

She links it to the homeschooling trend. More and more people want to get away from the technology, want vacations in nature, want to see people in person. And some realise they need practical skills, because technology can be taken away.

"I also see more and more people interested in developing their own innate abilities, their own innate intuition, these abilities that I think our ancestors had developed to a very high degree. That's how they survived." (2:34:55)

Danny notes that a lot of indigenous cultures still have these, and that they still exist right now, in the Amazon and on North Sentinel Island. It is genuinely strange, he says, that we live in a world with autonomous cars and drone deliveries while there are people running around in the rainforest shooting seven foot arrows at anyone who comes close.

Antikythera, and the reset theory (2:35:32)

Hennacy brings up the Antikythera mechanism, the device recovered from a shipwreck. Danny remembers the gears, like the inside of a clock, doing astronomical alignments. A 2,000 year old device showing that they understood astronomy well enough to predict eclipses.

Her suspicion, stated as suspicion:

"Human beings were far more technologically advanced thousands of years ago than we realize. And a lot of that knowledge has been lost." (2:36:35)

It is possible, she says, that they had technology destroyed in a Carrington type event long ago, or a flood, or a meteor strike, such that only the people who knew how to survive in the forest made it through. Then we start over, eventually rediscover similar technology or variations on it, and work our way back up to a level of dependence where the next big event again leaves the survival knowledge as the thing that matters.

She backs it with recovery ecology. Look at Mount St. Helens: the eruption destroyed everything in its path, and within ten or fifteen years plants were coming back and animals were returning. Nature finds a way. But it happens in pockets, where people already have the biodiversity and already know how to live within it.

Danny adds the megalithic puzzle, ancient structures with alignments and precision we struggle to reproduce, and his read that they were on a different technological trajectory than ours, one we try to interpret through our own lens. He guesses it was not electricity and combustion, but something closer to whatever is going on with these children: knowledge that cannot be put into language.

Hennacy's closing point on it is a good methodological one. We still do not understand how the megalithic cultures built those structures. And it makes sense that those structures survived, given how massive they are. But that does not mean the structures were the totality of what that culture had. They could have had all kinds of things that did not survive.

The filter hypothesis, and what DMT does to the gate (2:40:59)

Danny lays out the filter hypothesis: the senses are filters that help us get through the world, and what is really out there is far more. He cites brain scientists working with extended state DMT, putting people on an intravenous drip to map the DMT realm, who believe what is happening is a melting away of the filters.

Hennacy says the idea of the brain as a filter has been around for decades, and that we know our sensory system picks up only a narrow spectrum of sound or light. What DMT does is change the sensory gating. And then the observation that makes it research rather than philosophy.

"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." (2:42:00)

She lists the overlaps, and they are specific. People who take ayahuasca describe synesthesia. All of the autistic individuals she works with have synesthesia, and they tend to have more than one form of it: auras around people and animals, colours around letters, sounds associated with colours, everything blended. She calls it a kaleidoscope world. Second overlap: a mind body disconnect, not feeling entirely inside the body. Third: people on psilocybin or ayahuasca frequently report telepathy.

And DMT is endogenous. The brain makes it. Danny adds the lungs. Hennacy generalises: it is like endocannabinoids and endogenous opioids, the reason the synthetic versions work on us at all is that they mimic something natural.

So one of her actual research plans is to look at endogenous DMT like compounds in autistic individuals, to see whether something is different about that system in them, because what they describe is so similar.

Danny brings in Chris McCurdy, the scientist based in Florida best known for his kratom work, who is studying an enzyme that regulates the production of endogenous DMT, and who thinks people with high level schizophrenia could be lacking that enzyme and therefore carrying too much endogenous DMT.

Hennacy says that is quite possible, and cites a study that found more of a DMT like compound in the urine of both autistic individuals and people with schizophrenia compared with controls.

Then she names the professional reflex she is trying to work around.

"What we as psychiatrists are trained is, when people say that they have certain experiences, we're trained to say, oh, those are hallucinations, and then treat it as though it's imaginary and therefore there's no truth to it." (2:46:00)

Against that she puts the shamans who purposely take psychedelics to get information, where the plants tell them what they are medicinally good for. Which raises the question of where that information is contained. Somewhere within nature. People have ingested substances to access it. And these autistic individuals have something different about them biologically that lets them access information we would never have thought they had access to. That is the lens she says she is using, rather than getting caught up in the controversy about any particular individual.

Where the burden of proof actually sits (2:48:10)

This is her clearest argumentative move of the interview, and it is about the null hypothesis.

"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, by having a null hypothesis that's what you need to disprove." (2:48:30)

Her charge is that the materialist model has been installed as the thing that does not have to be defended, and that it is set up so that it is hard to disprove. To her there is already enough evidence out there that the presumption should have flipped, because the other side does not have a model that explains anything. And the bar keeps moving, which is the standing complaint of parapsychologists: every time a condition is met, another condition is imposed, because if your mindset is that this is impossible you can always generate one more requirement.

She closes it with William James, and the line is the best compressed statement of her whole position.

"To prove that all crows aren't black, all you need to find is one white crow. But instead it's like we're being asked to find a lot of white crows. If there is an exception, then something's wrong with that rule as an absolute rule." (2:50:20)

What she wants to do next (2:51:38)

Danny asks about her ambitions. She has several, and they are notable because each one is chosen to sidestep the loophole in the last one.

Biochemistry. Looking at DMT and bufotenine to understand that whole system, and trying to correlate it: do the autistic individuals who are highly psychic have more DMT like compounds in their systems.

Danny interrupts to ask whether it is only highly autistic people. No. There are non autistic people with these abilities. The autistic ones have it to the highest degree.

Precognition, prospectively. Rather than collecting stories after the fact, she is documenting predictions with timestamps. Her example is a 19 year old woman she works with who saw, in her mind's eye, her father slipping on ice, breaking his hip and ending up in hospital. She told her mother and father. They were living in Arizona at the time, where there is not a lot of ice. Six weeks later he went on a business trip, slipped on ice, broke his hip and ended up in hospital.

The methodology matters more than the anecdote. She has the mother email her when a vision occurs, so there is a timestamp, and then they watch how it plays out. They have a hard time saying exactly when something will happen, so the point is to have it documented in advance and ongoing rather than reconstructed afterwards.

The same young woman works with police as a psychic detective finding missing children, which gives Hennacy an external documentary trail: she can contact the police department and see the record.

Mediumship. And here is where the chapter title comes from.

The reading she did not expect (2:54:20)

Many of these children reportedly see dead people. Hennacy has only once asked one of them to do a reading on her.

It was a Zoom call with a mother and her son. The mother mentioned her son does mediumship readings for friends of hers, and that people have been amazed and it has been helpful for them. Hennacy asked if he would do a reading on her. This was within the first half hour of meeting him. He is around 20 or 21.

He said sure. She asked who he saw. He said there were so many that it was a little confusing. Then: this one woman tells me she's your half aunt.

Hennacy's father had a half sister. He described her.

Then he said he saw her grandfather by marriage, and his name was Harold. Her father's stepfather's name was Harold.

"That was two highly specific statements, both of which were very accurate." (2:55:50)

She then does the work of showing why this case is harder to explain away than the telepathy cases, and this is the most careful reasoning in the interview.

He and his mother were using a spelling board, which normally creates suspicion. But this boy's mother knew nothing about Hennacy, and certainly would not have known about her dead family members. So it does not matter whether they were using a board, because even if you treat the pair as a single unit, neither of them had the information. Same for precognition: neither of them should know the answers.

She contrasts it explicitly with cold reading, which she describes accurately and dismisses. A professional will say there is somebody here with a lost loved one whose name starts with an M, and of course somebody in the audience lost a Mike. She says she could probably do a cold reading herself, that she has a good ability to read people, and that she would not call it psychic, she just knows how to read what is on people's faces. Danny, who says that is what he has done for a profession, gets called a black belt human reader, and he is literally wearing a black belt.

The half aunt was not public knowledge. Hennacy did not know her father had a half sister until about 25 years ago, because her father had cut off his relationship with his own father after the man remarried, so she did not know that branch of the family existed. She found out while doing genealogy, by which time the aunt had already died of cancer. It is not in the public record.

That is why her research interest is moving. She says she has already seen a really strong demonstration of telepathy with the setup she could get, and short of separate rooms, which she would love to see, she is not going to keep waiting. Because even in separate rooms, if these children have hearing acute enough to pick up subvocalisations a microphone does not catch, separation does not eliminate that explanation. Mediumship does. And it points at a different question.

"Do we survive after we drop our bodies? And that to me is a more interesting question." (2:58:50)

Danny agrees that is one of the biggest questions there is, alongside is there a god and who built the pyramids.

Hennacy is also on the scientific advisory board of the Forever Family Foundation, one of the organisations that certifies mediums with rigorous research and high criteria, so she knows how to set such a study up.

And there is one more research line she mentions almost in passing at the very end: looking at these individuals' ability to influence random number generators.

Danny's closing: wild stuff, and he cannot thank her enough, this has been an exhilarating three hours. Hennacy, genuinely surprised: "has it been three hours?"

She points people to her personal site, drdianehennacy.com, where the newsletter is the best way to stay in contact, and to her new 501(c)(3) research nonprofit, the Hennacy Institute.

Best quotes

"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, those are thought of as signs of some kind of psychosis." (6:52)

"It would have been really interesting to have had that conversation with him. I regret that I didn't." (9:12), on working down the hall from John Mack without knowing what he was doing.

"When I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins, we were told 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. And it's your job to contribute to making it obsolete." (46:38)

"They just saw the answers. And they saw the answers out here in physical space, just floating in space. Who hallucinates twelve and twenty digit prime numbers?" (37:30)

"It's not that they are deriving the answers or calculating them. It's perceptual." (43:05)

"Okay, the p value is amazing. That's not going to change perception." (1:00:29), on why she abandoned the standard parapsychology paradigm.

"It's just like, okay, something's going on here." (1:03:12), on 165 correct out of 172 random digits.

"What these autistic individuals say is that they hear all of these different people's thoughts. It's like being in a crowded restaurant." (1:14:44)

"Our dreams can be so magical because the analytical, logical, setting the expectation, thinking of consequences parts of the brain are shut down." (1:21:19)

"I said, oh, microtubules must carry light." (1:56:44)

"It only seems crazy if you don't realize the role of biological light." (1:53:40)

"Our schools have become all about testing. It's become more about memorising and less about learning how to critically think." (2:02:20)

"It's going from knowledge as a pure knowing, pure perception, to trusting the written word. That created the possibility to get us to deviate from truth." (2:11:00)

"What happens is that we rationalize away our direct experience." (2:12:15)

"I'm interested in what's the code." (2:17:22), on the deeper structure under the archetypes people report.

"You're not having to think about it, and it even feels like you're guessing, but you're accurate." (2:26:31)

"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." (2:50:20)

"Do we survive after we drop our bodies? That to me is a more interesting question." (2:58:50)

Where it stands

Everything above is the conversation as Hennacy and Danny had it. This section is the separate question of how the claims sit against the published record, kept out of the way until the end deliberately.

Solid, uncontroversial mainstream science in this interview. The hippocampus and memory consolidation, and the Molaison case. Place cells, grid cells, head direction cells and the 2014 Nobel Prize. Hippocampal vulnerability to hypoxia. Theta rhythm and its hippocampal origin. Astrocytes, the tripartite synapse and the fact that neurons are a minority of brain cells. Microtubules in cilia, photoreceptors, hair cells and the spindle apparatus. The Human Genome Project gene count surprise and the non coding majority. Reconstructive memory. Blindsight. Single photon detection, which was demonstrated in a 2016 Nature Communications paper. Smell's direct route to the limbic system. Joy Milne, whose ability is documented and has fed real diagnostic research. The ketogenic diet's efficacy in drug resistant epilepsy, which is genuinely decades old.

Live and contested, but real research programmes. Orch OR, the Penrose and Hameroff quantum microtubule theory of consciousness, is published and seriously argued and also seriously disputed. Transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation is a genuine and growing field. Photobiomodulation for cognitive decline has early stage trials and no consensus. Biophotons are measurable and their functional significance is unsettled. Hennacy's own inference that microtubules carry light is her original argument and is not established.

Where it departs from the mainstream, and what the specific objections are. The central telepathy claims rest on subjects who communicate through a letter board or spelling assistance. That method has a contested history under the names facilitated communication and rapid prompting method, where controlled testing has repeatedly found that message authorship traces to the facilitator rather than the speller, often without the facilitator's awareness, in the same way the horse Clever Hans was reading his questioner rather than counting. That is the exact failure mode a sender who knows the answer and sits in the same room is prone to. Hennacy engages the ideomotor style objection in her own way (she raises hyperacusis and subvocalisation), states plainly that she has not achieved the separate room condition she wants, and says the difficulty is the children's dysregulation rather than a reason to skip it. She is right that this is unresolved. Skeptics are right that until it is resolved, the sender knowing the target is the whole ballgame. Her pivot toward mediumship and prospective precognition, where neither party has the information, is a direct response to that and is the strongest methodological move she describes.

On the wider parapsychology literature: the ganzfeld and card guessing meta analyses she describes do exist, do report above chance results, and have been argued over for forty years without resolution, with the usual disputes about file drawer effects, protocol variation and replication. Notably, Hennacy herself does not lean on them. Her judgement that they will not change anyone's mind is shared by many of her critics, for different reasons.

Two other things worth flagging as speculation rather than finding, and which she flags herself: the reading of Adam and Eve as a parable about the written word replacing direct perception is explicitly offered as her own fantasy, and the lost advanced ancient civilisation idea is offered as a suspicion. The claim about ancient structures we could not build today is a common talking point that the archaeology generally disputes.

What this interview is unusually good at. Hennacy repeatedly names the strongest counter explanation for her own data before anyone asks her to, refuses to defend her field's headline statistics, says out loud which experiment she has not run, and treats the difficulty of running it as her problem rather than the skeptic's. That is not how this subject usually gets discussed, and it is why the three hours are worth the time regardless of where you land.

Resources

People and organisations

Concepts, conditions and studies

Full transcript
All right, Diane, thank you for doing this. Yeah, you're welcome. So how does a Harvard trained psychiatrist, or Johns Hopkins trained who you teach taught at Harvard, right? Yes. How does someone like you, high level academic, get into something like ESP and telepathy? Well, it actually began when I was a 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 that, 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." And so she then looked at me and she goes, "You know, 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, what? What can you tell me about that?" And she said, "Well, in his heart of hearts, he wants to go to one of the cities, but you'll go back. You'll go to the other city." And I named up, 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 then 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 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 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 1990s it was really hard to find information and parapsychology. But I did and then in the mid 1990s things started getting declassified and I saw 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 a level 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 not the real reality. You know that for example we that quantum physics that all of the 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 is a linear arrow moving forward only and 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. You know, individuals who could do high level mathematics and yet they'd never been to school or taught, taught arithmetic or, people who were musical savants who could perform on an instrument and they'd never had lessons. I thought, well, somehow people are getting information that we don't understand. How did they get this information? And so anyway, so that's what set 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 a making sense out of information that we get from our senses. But it's it's all just a construct. You know, 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 time is not linear in the way that we think it is. And what And you have a background in neuroscience? Yes. 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 were did you have any conversations with people who may have not may not had been exposed to this information about parapsychology and declassified documents and stuff like that? 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 he was internist and hematologist oncologist and biochemist and he thought it was remarkable that 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 I mean 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, a condition like schizophrenia. And so I didn't really know what to say. And and we did move, 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. Oh, wow. And 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 the 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 and he had written 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 it 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 were you aware of the stuff that he was doing with people? No, At the time. No, I wasn't. Because he was like kicked out of Harvard, wasn't he? Well, they tried to remove his tenure. And they ended up moving him like off campus or something because that was I guess not a they thought 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 com 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 wasn't painting Harvard in a good light. Right. Yeah. And that and all of that unfolded after I had already moved to San Diego. So I remember being, in my living room in San Diego and watching the news and seeing John and going, "Oh," You know, and then and I 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 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 but they're awake and so they're having those they're seeing those hallucinations within the context of their bedroom and the only thing they can move is like their eyes and so when I heard 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 to really think of things in those kinds of terms. And it wasn't until, much later that I realized, no, there's there's a lot more here. Yeah. Yeah. That's 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 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 and different regions of the brain correlate with your work in psychiatry and psychotherapy and that stuff, Right? Yeah. So, when I first when I first went to medical school at Johns Hopkins, my intention was to be a neurosurgeon. Oh. And and I actually did a lot of surgery. Really yes because that was my initial intention. Ben Carson was there. I knew Ben Carson. I mean he may not remember me because I was just a medical student but but he was there as somebody who was a more senior resident. And I was there when he separated these twins who whose brains were conjoined. Oh wow. Conjoined twins. Yeah. And so I remember seeing them in the in the NICU, the where you where you have infants that are 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, rats. 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, Right? 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 you it's this you're you're between those two constraints. And so it's an opportunity to be mapping things out by just and I had done research as an undergraduate in neuroscience where I was making micro electrodes and I was inserting out of a glass and I was inserting them into a crayfish axon and recording the action potential of the of the crayfish axon in a you petri dish And then putting different things in there like maybe something that would affect the flow of ions like calcium etc. And then seeing what influence it had on the action potential. So I already knew about working with oscilloscopes and working with 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 intention. But when I went to Johns Hopkins and did my psychiatry rotation, I fell in love with psychiatry because our 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 really focused on kind of trying to understand the neural correlates of of these phenomena like whether you're talking about cognition or memory those sorts of things. For some reason most dress shirts make you have to choose between looking good and feeling comfortable. 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It says In an attempt to cure his epilepsy although the surgery was partially successful in controlling his epilepsy a severe side effect was that he became unable to form new memories. His unique case also helped define ethical standards of neurological research, emphasizing the need for patient consent and consideration of long-term impacts Of medical interventions, which is crazy that we I don't think we still don't know like which parts of the brain hold long term, short-term. It seems like it might be somehow partitioned off in multiple different parts of the brain memory. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's Yeah. So, just a so just a correction here. It wasn't a frontal lobotomy that he had. Yeah. That's a different part of the brain. What he had was a bilateral temporal lobectomy. Okay. So, so and most Most epil I'd say a high percentage of epilepsy is in the temporal loes. The temporal loes 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. Wow. Yeah. This was in the 50s, I believe. Yeah. Yeah. Before we knew what we know today. Yeah, so the hippocampus is involved in laying down memory. Okay. And it's the oldest, it's called the archo cortex. In other words, it's it's an older cortex than what we think of as the cortex. And the hippocampus is also involved in navigation. You do you remember several years back when people received the Nobel Prize for discovering sort of the brain's GPS? No, I remember that. And I and I and I wrote about it in my book, The Espanma. And before they got the Nobel Prize for it. Yeah, we have in the in the hippocampus and then areas adjacent to the hippocampus like the entorhinal cortex, we have these we 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 fi start to fire become active when say we are in a certain location. So, so that you have a maybe a map in your mind of your neighborhood. Okay. And there are cells that are associated with different parts of that map that will start becoming active when you're in that area. Whoa. Yeah. And then there are also cells that be, they're that are involved in like your orientation of what way your head is, facing. So their head position cells and as I said there's like these grid cells and place cells and so it really is an internal mapping system and but the hippocampus is also involved in laying down memory and it's particularly active in dreaming sleep. It that 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 seven hertz okay that's theta is between four and 8 hertz and seven hertz that seven hertz activity has been associated with things like remote viewing and And various psychic abilities. Like there was this Here pull them off and then put them back on. Yeah. You don't want you to look like you're being electrocuted. There you go. So so like when they when they did studies on Ingo Swann who was one of the most famous remote viewers they saw this very Also a Scientologist. My one of my buddies got me that as a as a funny joke because this this area is synonymous with Scientology. So Oh he got me an E-meter as a gift. So, we put it up here as a fun prop. Oh, that is that's fun. I've never seen one before. 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 some this thing bounces around and it somehow removes your body theans which are like aliens that live inside you. Oh, I see. Okay, there you go. It's like it's like it's a it's a techn it's a it's a technological exorcism. Yes, exactly. And all of the top remote viewers were Scientologists. Yeah, I know a lot of them were. Yeah. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all. Yeah. So, so he had this really very unusual seven hertz activity in his I believe it was in his occipital lobe which when he was remote viewing and the occipital lobe is the the visual cortex. So anyway so there's this association between that sort of frequency the theta frequency and psych and dreaming and psychic abilities And the main source of the theta is the hippocampus. And then the parahippocampal area was there was another imaging study that showed that area of the brain would become really very active during these kind of whether it's remote viewing or some other kind of you or telepathy there was research that had shown that area would become more active And so, 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, how are memories organized, right? You know, and I really think that they're actually organized in a field, rather than being organized in the brain. That the brain is our access to that. Like an antenna. Yeah. Sort of like an antenna, but it's it more than just an antenna. Yeah. You know, I think of it as being think of the way I think of the brain is I think of it as being like like our computer, okay? In terms of it's got computational aspects but it also think of it as also having an ability to help us surf the net surf the cloud surf anformational field Right I mean there was 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,. And so Interesting. And so he really he believed that there was sort of some kind of 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 shortterm 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 or cyanide poison it affects the ability of blood to carry oxygen then deliver it where it's needed. Well, people who have who've survived carbon monoxide poisoning, it they've trashed their hippocampus. And I remember seeing patients like this or people that who had suffocated and then been brought back to life from, some other source of like drowning or some other source of suffocation. They oftenimes just they cannot form new memories. And it's because it's because their hippocampi have been wiped out. And And I and I've had 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 tried to kill her by choking her and she survived it. And he ended up he ended up in one psych ward because he at Hopkins because of 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 In prison or something. Well he didn't go to prison. He didn't go to prison. No, he was 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, having been, evaluated psychiatrically. But anyway, but he killed himself, Right? She I 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. She something and 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 your husband's no longer alive and that you've grieved them and cried over it And every day you're putting her through the most psychological pain she could imagine. And so I I realized it's it's not I'm not going to do that. So what did you start telling her? I just I I just said I don't know you yet you haven't heard from him and she no I haven't heard from him when's he coming I said I don't know when he's coming and I just kind of cuz I figured that was better to just kind of Sure yeah totally Then put her through that And every day was the same she completely was a it was a new day she didn't remember the day before Yeah it's a new day yeah This week prize picks has a special max discount for the big game live in the app right now. 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Download the Prize Picks app today and use the code Danny to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code DNY to get 50 bucks in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. Prize picks. It's good to be right. How long was she unconscious for when he choked her? And how long did she lose oxygen? Do? I don't I don't really know the details of it. I just know that what I what I told you of the story 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 like that. People who habitually practice breath holds. I wonder if there would be any negative effect to the brain or the hippocampus. 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 it's the acute process where your system hasn't had a chance to adapt that's the most problematic. You know just like people who live at high altitudes I mean the body compensates you have they have higher hematocrits which is the number of red blood cells that you have You know the concentration so there's there's these so people that are conditioning themselves like that I doubt that they're depriving their brain of that much oxygen Interesting anecdote I had a I have a friend who's been on this podcast before who is 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 keto ketogenic diet. And a vast like a very high percentage of them are experiencing like little to no epileptic seizures anymore. But I was told I was taught that back when I was in my training 40 years ago. We already knew that. We already we've known that for a long time. No way. Oh, I thought this was more recent. Well, I there's a lot of things that are rediscoveries of things that we knew, a long time ago. It's So something about glycogen versus ketones. The brain pref 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. Well, the brain can either run on glucose which is glucose. Yeah. And 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 an long enough fast that you kick in that ketogenesis but you're but you're not like a diabetic who's in ketosis all the time. It. So, it's it's yeah, that's a healthier way of being is to have this kind of it's you've got the glucose is the like immediate sort of thing, but then the you want to be able to tune turn on the ketone generation for when you're not eating. And when you're in a fasted ketogenic state, you are you're you're sharper, you're quicker, you're faster to respond to stuff. And it just extrapolates out into nature like if an if a lion or a cheetah, often times they go many days between meals cuz they can't catch prey. So if they have gone 5 days without catching anything, their body has to be more dialed in, more optimal, more quicker, Sharper,. So that makes sense. At what point did you make the connection between this ESP telepathy stuff and folks with autism? Well so as I mentioned earlier I really was interested in savant syndrome and these indiv these case reports of people who knew things that we just like how do how do that and I read Oliver Sacks book the man who mistook his wife for a hat back in 1986. I met I met Oliver Sacks back then. He really Yeah. Yeah. He came to he came to Johns Hopkins and I attended his lecture and then we had a private sort of I was 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. Ution back in the 60s who could one of the games they played was to spit out con consecutive prime numbers and they would 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 to and then they looked at one another and like oh okay and then they switched to doing eight-digit prime numbers. Whoa. And then they he did tested them on 12 digits and they were doing accurately doing 12digit prime numbers and they even gave 20digit prime numbers but back then in the 60s computers couldn't calculate 20digit 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 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. How old are these guys? Oh, they were at the time he would he studied them. I think that they were in their like late teens, early 20s. But the thing is that they couldn't do simple arithmetic. And what they said was the just saw the answers. They just saw the answers. And they saw the answers out here in physical space just like Floating in space. Yeah. Just floating in space like a hallucination. And just like who hallucinates 12 and 20digit prime numbers. And so I thought that's really fascinating. And then then and then I I learned about Daniel Tammet who is an autistic savant who he's won the pi contest the pi contest in as in pi the mathematical constant which is 3.14 you know blah that's the ratio of the the circumference of a circle to its diameter. And he can recite it to over 22,000 digits effortlessly and he says it he never memorized it he just sees it out here in what we think of as physical space and I and so when 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 a the nature of reality and where information is where is information stored. But I remember seeing a documentary on this guy. Yeah. And 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 congenally. And so those are both conditions in which there's something different about the wiring of their brain. It where there's 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 You know but with autistic people there are certain things that they struggle to do that I mean I think that like these autistic individuals who were institutionalized that Sacks studied I think they couldn't even tie their shoes or something I mean just basic a lot of basic things and yet their brains somehow wired that they can do these kinds of things that we don't really have good algorithms for. I mean they and they can do these things faster than a mathematician even who was given an algorithm. And so it's not that they are deriving the answers or calculating them. It's it's it's perceptual and it's hard to h wrap your head around. But But to me that was like a clue that there's 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 are 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 then what and I've been studying autism since 1987. Oh, really? I so after I met Oliver Sacks, I won a a fellowship to go to the Institute of London in I mean sorry the Institute of Psychiatry in London And work with Michael Rutter who was kned for his work on autism afterwards but he because he was the world expert on autism at the time and really Yes and I was fascinated by developmental neurodevelopmental conditions as a way of trying to understand this relationship between the brain and consciousness. So, 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 I what I want my breadand 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, 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 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 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 pe 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 you sounded a lot like ESP and I thought well accessing information that we don't understand how you access it why do we why do we Accept this these things like generating prime numbers and u musical talent was for somebody who's never been trained why do we why do we put that call that a savant skill and yet we if they can tell you things before they happen or if they can, see things that are, like something like clairvoyance or remote viewing. If they can do that, It 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 is it's telling us that our our way of conceptualizing information and how the brain accesses it is it's fundamentally flawed within the materialist model and because I as a neuroscientist I studied that model I have a book Eric Kandel he did work on this u on the snail and a lot of the and I have an autographed book of his and so I just like I mean I was a died in the wool neuroscientist and what I knew is neuroscience has a really incomplete model there's so many things that we've accepted an explanation it's accepted something as an explanation That's that really doesn't explain everything and it's so it's so incomplete And then we're ignoring all of these phenomena that don't fit into it. And so that's Yeah that's what led to my writing my book the ESP enigma was my recognition that yeah there's all this data that shows that these things are possible and why are we saying it's impossible? 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 Chang at Stanford came out and said that out of and he did 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 studying for your PhD in like neuroscience for or neurosurgery whatever it 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 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 clairvoyance and all this is you can't do it with you can't test it with the scientific method. Right. Well, I don't know why you say you can't test it with the scientific 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. It seems to be very anecdotal. 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 Eddie Chang, I'm sorry, Eddie Chang, Neuroscientist at UC I thought it was Stanford. Okay. Yeah. Well, what he's saying there? 50%. Well, what's interesting is Is UCSF Stanford? No, UCSF is University of California, San Francisco. Got it. Okay. But Shows how much I know about college. I didn't make it. I barely made it out of high school. Well, when I was in when I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins, we were told while we were there, in the my first year, half of what we're going to teach you is going to be obsolete by the time you finish your career. And it's Wow. And it's your job to contribute to making it obsolete. Yeah. And so 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 that and they 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 MDPhD 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 But it was I mean very very academic but with the idea of really you're you're allowed to question okay 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 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 cra crafted my own major and similarly when I did all of my training in psychiatry it was before Prozac And so we didn't we didn't have a fraction of the psychotropic drugs that are available nowadays to psychiatrists. And so what I saw hap 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. That when I when I went to Harvard, when I first arrived at Harvard on faculty, everybody there was talking about where to buy an analytical couch, because they were still heavily psychoanalytic in their orientation, as was John Mack. An analytical couch. What is that? Do what that is? They it's like a like those Victorian fainting couches. Oh yes, the fainting couches. Okay. Is it like a therapist couch? I know what a fainting couches. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are analytic. And so you would have, 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, You know, it's 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 or. And so that was that was the that's how psychiatry was under the influence of Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition was very strong where I went to medical school and then also did my training in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins was different from that from day one because at the time that the psychiatry department was created in either the late 1800s or the early 1900s at Johns Hopkins, they 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 bio biocschosocial psychiatry meaning that when someone came to you and let's say they complained of being apathetic and not wanting to live anymore. Okay? You know 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, and so is it, 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 have a thyroid condition, Right? Or We're walking we're walking chemical bags. Yeah. Yeah. And so yeah, so there are all these things that can bring that about and that's what you want to correct, or it could be that it's psychological. It could be, that it's, that they're their mother used to, 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, things that have to do with their psychology. You know, or it could be something sociological, like you're you're you're you're living in, a totalitarian state and, and society, and you're a persecuted minority and, and it's really more at that level that things are problematic. And so, Or in like inner cities of America, too, people who grow up in like ghettos that are surrounded by crime, everyone they know is involved in crime and Yeah. Exactly. And so what is the what is the cause of this individual's whatever You know symptoms they have. Yeah. 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 and then getting at the root of the problem and addressing it there. And so that's that's how I was trained to practice psychiatry and there's a branch there's a there are people who today as psychiatrists Still practice that way and it's what we call integrative psychiatry or functional medicine but it where you're still you're still looking for what is the what is the what is the root the root cause of this syndrome It's the mushroom everyone's heard of before The one with the bright red cap and the little white spots, the one you see in Mario and your favorite Christmas fairy tales. It's not psilocybin and it's not a psychedelic. It's amanita miscaria. It's legal and it provides stress relief like I've never experienced before. I would have never touched this stuff if it wasn't for Amantara because we see sketchy gas station products all the time causing harm and it damages our perception of the real thing. Amantara is the complete opposite. They are the largest Ammonita supplier in the US. 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Go to amantara.com/go/dj and use the code dj22 for 22% off your first order. Again, that's amantara a m t a r a.com/go/dj first order. Yeah, when I to clarify what I meant about the scient like not passing the scientific method muster is that like when I say like you can't measure it like I have this thing I have a problem and I think a lot of people also share is that I'm very bad at measuring probabilities. M So like for example the other day I'm walking through my kitchen and I was walking up to my wife not even thinking and I was like do you want to get tacos and she goes get out of my head. I just had that thought in my head and I was like that was weird. That was some sort of weird te telepathy thing. Like it wasn't even dinner time. It wasn't even like the thought that was not a normal thought for that time of day. And another time I've had people like call me that I haven't thought about or talked to in years, right? Where it's like, whoa, why are you calling me? And a lot of people talk about this, but how many times have you thought about a person that you haven't thought about in a long time and they didn't call you, you don't categorize that into a meaningful memory, right? When they do call you, that's when you attribute meaning to it and that's when you memorize it and you want to talk about it and it's like ah wow this is something divine so when you're measuring this with lots of people like how many people can you put into a room and repeat the same experiment with how do you prove it wrong can you is it is it possible to prove wrong to is it possible to disprove this stuff Is it possible to disprove it well It's boy, you've asked you. So, you brought up several things. I have to think to think where My stream of consciousness is highly uneditorialized. Oh yeah. So, well, let me just make a few content comments. 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 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 one out of five or 20%. That it's going to be one of the the if I say it's the card that looks like a cross it's like it's the chances of that are one out of five 20%. Right. And so a lot of the research has been done on 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 that's that's, they're metaanalyses, 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, even though Yeah. Okay, so the p value is, amazing. You know, it that's not going to that's that's not going to change perception, right? 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 in a little bit, but and so with the autistics that individuals that I've worked with, I mean, they get, 95 97% accuracy on things that, chance might be, Like what, for example, like how does it work? Like give me an example of like one exercise that they would get that high level accuracy on. 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 doing like I did like there was one run where it was like 167 okay digits. And she only missed seven. No, it was 172 and she only missed seven. She got 165 of those. Right. Wow. Now, it's just like okay, something's going on here,. And how many people were in the room? 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 a with camera feeds and we had cameras on either side on the ceiling in front and be behind and then we had a visual barrier between the therapist and Haley and so it was it was 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 Darold Treffert and knew about mathematical savants and thought that his daughter was a mathematical savant because she was 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 calculator died on her and she had to switch calculators and the calculator wasn't within eyesight of Haley and the 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 that the answer in logarithmic notation. I had never done that before. And the therapist's like, "Well, wait a minute. How'd 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 the that purple dinosaur Barney, and she typed Barney. And then she goes, "Well, what's the name of my landlord?" And then she typed helmet, and that was the name of her landlord. And she's 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 how like some of us will transpose letters and we'll just we always do that kind of spelling mistake and as soon as you see it it's wrong and you want to correct it Right like I after E or something like that kind of, or, or people with dyslexia will, 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, and she and she and she just said, it's funny. It's like it's like you're tapping into my mind,." And Haley said, "I am." you know, and then 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 accounts and Darold Treffert knew that I after having come back from India and having worked with these savants over there that I was interested in pursuing questions of telepathy and so I was contacted and I went out there and I did the studies in as controlled of fashion as I could. Yeah. And and Darold Treffert'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 response skill. He was on the same page as me, that really that there's there's something going on here. 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 is saying or thinking? No, not really in the way that I would like to see it done. I mean there there was a there's been stud studies where how you have these houses where you have a contiguous dining room and living room and so you've got a huge separation a separation that's as big as your studio here so easily 20 25 ft separation. Okay. But you still have some visibility between the person the mother and child. Sure. And For sorry go. Yeah. So it that's been one of the things that I've I recognize that a lot of skeptics would like to see them in separate rooms 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, they like things to be the same, they don't like changes to their routine. They're they're they're really extremely oh they're they get dysregulated Very easily emotionally dysregulated and so they 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 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, right? Like they can't do it because there's the energy of somebody who doesn't believe could kind of ruin it, right? Well, it's it's it's it's okay for somebody if they're an open-minded skeptic. You know, so like you would qualify as that, you're 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, 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, Right? Totally. Which is a totally different kind of energy to introduce in 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? Like you could both be here. 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. A 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,. Yeah, there's definitely not trickery going on. I mean, I don't think I don't think there is either, but I'm just saying just to Sure. Sure. For people to be assured of that. There's definitely not trickery going on,. 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. Okay, let's say that the materialist model is correct. Okay. That that there's nothing going on here that is a sense picking up information outside of the ordinary senses. Okay. If there's something like that's going on then it's going to be something more along the lines of the fact that these children do have hyper sensitive senses in general. Okay. You know, their ability to hear is extraordinary. And so they could, they can hear a conversation, somebody that, is totally other end of the house. Okay. And we know that when we think silently that we actually still vibrate our vocal cords. Really? Yeah. And and so one of the things that I've wondered is whether or not it's something along those lines. You know, that they're 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 a hundred 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 to become famous. It's not they're they're in shock. That 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, that the people that Ky wanted to be introduced to were the people who were willing to be filmed. But that doesn't mean that represents all of the individuals that I've been contacted by, over the years. 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 writing. And so and some of them and one of them it goes against this idea that it's just as listening to the sub the sub auditory vibrations. 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 it's it's To communicate an idea. It's not just one perfect stream of consciousness onto 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 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. 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 it's like being in a crowded restaurant. For them, if you can imagine, That makes sense. Yeah. That's 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. It's I mean it's extraordinary what they do and whatever the mechanism is. It's extraordinary. It's just I think that where people get hung up on is like is it telepathy in the same way that we think of telepathy 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? 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 is I looked at like who are all of the where do we find the most reports by people that they experience ESP, okay? You know, who are these people, right? Okay. You know, and you see a higher incidence of that kind of reporting in people that are artistic and creative. Okay. And 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- deathath communication. You know, 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 and 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. Rapid eye movement. Yeah. And 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 a an amazing sort of correspondence between the two. And so I knew that there was something different about the dreaming brain that made it a state of consciousness that 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 in 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. Yes. And analytical hemisphere. I'm sorry. That's the analytical hemisphere, Right? Yeah. And then and then in our western culture, that's also the way that our educational system is set up. It, it's set up to develop the left hemisphere skills. Everything is, reading, writing, and arithmetic, analytical, logical, right? And it's really deemphasized the arts and the creative and all of that. Okay. So we're w 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 it's undergoing all of this capacity for rewiring depending upon what do we need for what do we what abilities do we need and just like as I was saying earlier like people who are blind born congenitally blind or people who were born with or it's quickly within the first couple years of life lose their ability to speak. They there's these, the brain's still rewiring itself to trying to find a workaround for, 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. I realized is that a lot of these savant skills are right hemisphere skills and there and it's and the right hemisphere is associated with gestalt thinking not this linear verbal thinking it's it's associated with pattern recognition or visual spatial processing And then another and then in dreaming sleep the right hemisphere is dominant over the left hemisphere but also So in dreaming sleep, our frontal loes shut down their activity and our frontal loes are what create expectations. And so during dreaming sleep you 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 it's able to do, to it's free to access information that gets shut down by people during their waking life where sort of like well that can't happen. And so autistic individuals they're not only are savant skills mainly right hemispheres but their main deficits are in the left hemisphere Language right 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 is more one of these sort of hybrid conditions or more either more right hemisphere dominant or that they're or they're able to have this kind of that 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, a couple of seconds. They're they're trying to expand that because when you expand that, you have more access to things that are normally unconscious. So what is happening is 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? Yeah. I mean, what you're doing is you're you're you're you're basically trying to put the put them into a place where instead of the left, the left hemisphere analytical, logical thing being driving, kind of what we have access to. You're you're you're you're allowing the unconscious to kind of be, ac accessed. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. 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. Yeah. Well, it's it's one of those things. It's a wild idea to me that we have that I have memories in my brain that I cannot access that aren't that don't aren't even real 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, or just something I just straight up forgot. That idea is just so bonkers to me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. But there's, there are people who have, accessed me. So, here's the thing, though. There's there's lots of problems with memory in general. Yes. You know, because memory is not it's not it's not like this video recording. No. And over time it gets it gets modified Almost instantly gets modified, right? I think there were studies on this. Yeah. It gets modified by subsequent events, And the brain's doing something. The me the what the brain is doing is it's taking from what I understand is 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 helped us evolve. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so, memory is so imperfect and, and so I mean, I, I you have to when people tell you their memories, you have to realize that. And so then, when people are accessing memories under hypnosis, I mean, that's even another three separation away from what might be an accurate memory. I mean, you can't, you can't trust it entirely is the point I'm making,. So, yet at the same time, what's fascinating to me is you mentioned earlier this man who had his temporal losses removed and he had he couldn't lay down new memory. Well, there are people who can't forget a thing to save their life. Really? Yes. Yes. There was this Nothing new. They can't forget anything. They can't forget anything. There was a there was a psychologist whose last name was Laura and L u r i a and he wrote a book u on the ne mnemonist and it was this man that he met who he couldn't forget anything. I mean, you could say to him, oh, ju June 12th, 1988. And then they'd say they'd tell you what the weather was like, what they had for lunch, everything. Just a retention of all these mundane things that most of us never ever put into long-term memory. Is this what it is? Hyperthymesia. Hyperthymesia, also known as hyperthymestic syndrome or a highly superior autobiographical memory. Wow. Condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. It's extraordinarily rare with fewer than 100 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. Wow. Only a hundred people in the world. What would lead to have is are you born with that or do you develop that? Well, it's a good question. So one of my former colleagues from Johns Hopkins Jason Brandt who was a neurossychologist he he contacted me I don't know 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 the brain that's associated with calculation doing being able to calculate Really yeah and so I should have known they would have done a dissection of his brain I've never thought about that Oh yeah oh yeah they yeah there's an interesting story about his brain 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 it being stored in a jar in somebody's like, barn in 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 I but it'd be like hearing that. Okay. You know, it was just like, 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 and at Princeton where you would expect it, right? You know, right? You know, it was in some strange place. In a giant cylindrical vat. Yeah. I Yeah. I but anyway but the point is that when you think about what white matter is that that's the like that's the that's the myelination of you've got you've got the gray matter which are like the neurons and then the white matter is the isolation I mean the myelination 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, have faster conductivity. And so Oh, wow. And but another form of might 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, it oh, I don't know when this was discovered, maybe 10 years ago or so. What we realize is that the synapse that we when we think of a synapse, we think of two neurons that are in communication with one another, right? You know, so you've got you've you've got the axon, and you've got, you've got the dendritic spine and, and so and across that synaptic cleft, there's a neurotransmitter that's that's sent. Okay? 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'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 has it sends out its own process and it's monitoring what's going on at the at the synapse. And so it's actually it's like the these white cells which are about 20% of our are our brain cells are astrocytes And that's the white matter. They're white they're part of the white matter. Yeah. So 80% of the brain well neurons are only 10% of the brain. Okay. They're they're only 10% and then another and so the rest of it is 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 in this cold weather I have to work out twice as hard just to break a sweat and that's why I choose Mando to take care for me while I take care of the workout. And if you order now using my code, you can get 20% off from your pitch to your package to everything in between. Mando controls body odor for 72 hours, which is perfect for long workouts or running from the feds. 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What is I can't even think of the word that he studies. He studies this certain part of the microtubules. Microtubules. That's what it is. He thinks the microtubules have something to do with consciousness. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I Well, I think he's right. I mean, so this is the thing is that, I the way that I'm studying the brain and in this book that I'm I'm writing that's going to be published in the fall. I've been studying the brain the way that somebody is I'm trying to retroengineer things, okay? You know, and what I mean by that is I'm looking at the brain for 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, And so I'm interested in all the rest of it as a system. How does it work? It's like it's like when I was I did a fellowship I did one year of a fellowship in genetics at the time of the human genome project and at the 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 and we were expecting it to be at least five times that and so what we realized is that You know here you have this these are very parallel situations okay where you have with genetics gene coding DNA is only about 10% of the of the chromosome and the rest of it was treated like it was just scaffolding for the important stuff the gene coding protein protein Grading 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 one and a half% of our genome differs from chimpanzees. 1% of our genome differs from chimpanzees. One and a half%. Yeah. And we share like half of our genome with the, like vegetables, you know, it's it's it's it's astounding. That's wild. 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, You know, to make the music. Yeah, you've got the keys, but then what controls the sequencing, of how those keys are played? Well, it's the rest of it. And that's that's we're just beginning to, I mean, that's going to be a much harder sort of thing to, to To to decode. It because it's just so much more complicated. Well, similarly with the brain, we've been focusing on the 10% the neurons, Because, that's where you get the, these action potentials, but Stuart was saying there's like hundreds of thousands of microtubules per neuron or something, right? It depends upon what neurons you're talking about, but there's certainly about 10,000 or so per neuron,? 10,000. That sounds about right. And and when you see them I in the in the neuron it's like they're packed so tightly in there. They're not 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 organels within the body. So like a lot of our sensory cells like you look at the hair cells that are in the ear okay that respond to different frequencies of sound th those are chalk full of microtubules in a very specific array. Similarly the photo receptors 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 mitosis similarly there's a there's an an organel which means little organ there's an organel that is called the spindle apparatus which is what organizes the chromosomes and makes that each cell has the same complimentary set of chromosomes. So, so, so, so, so microtub 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, that microtubules are leading the way there. So, so anyway, so, so the point is that microtubules are fascinating. They're like little superconductors And they clearly play a huge role in consciousness. And What can what can we do to push forward this or to study the connection between microtubules and consciousness? Like is there any hypothetical study or research that can be done that maybe isn't funded to study this stuff? Well, oh, I, I'm I'm really I'm really interested in, looking at I, I have a model for this whole and I can't go into all of it today, and, when my book comes out then, then, it'll have some of this definitely have some of this in there. But I'm 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. To really kind of see what brainstorm about what kind of experiments can we do so that we can really Intellectual salon Yeah what can we yeah what can we do with what we what we have here to because as I said it's a system it's it's a it's a system and I and that's how I think I think more like a systems engineer As opposed to, just looking at one thing and attributing everything to just one thing. 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 is the god am I Neuropibr No what is the thing that 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 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 that before, but Well, yeah. Yeah. So, I know that ultrasound is being used I mean this is very low voltage ultrasound is being is being used for neuromodulation. And that's being done at the University of Arizona by Jay. What is neuromodulation? Yeah. Well, neuromodulation, it's when you're you're you're basically trying to modify the way that neurons behave, and you can target a very specific Area within the brain. You know, you're having to, do like an MRI to get, know that person's particular anatomy, of their brain. And then you can and, in their skull, 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, right? But then what you're doing is you're beaming in, sound waves, and a very, low voltage and what you're doing is you're just see you're you're you're basically getting you're 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 if it's receiving that frequency, you're going to be in kind of entraining it to that frequency. And then you're 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, by using sound waves as opposed to chemicals, You know. Similarly, there are people that are using infrared light therapy for Alzheimer's, and so there Alzheimer's. Yeah. And so there you're you're you're using light By just looking at it. No, no, no, no. This is this is How would you get it in through the skull? Well, so there's a helmet that you can put on that and you're right that the skull the skull does not Helmet. We actually have one, but it's for it's for hair Hair growth. 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's developed a helmet that you wear that delivers infrared. It's not ideal because you're going to the bone of the skull is going to block it to some extent. But what is also being done is a nasal probe. Oh, I've seen that. Yeah. And and that's because you're actually you can get it you can deliver it to the brain At a place where you don't have this you have a porous Because of the olfactory nerves going through the cribriform plate. You've you've you've got holes in the skull basically and the main the main the nucleus basalis of Meynert is the cholinergic basal nucleus that's predominantly what's affected in Alzheimer's and that lays at towards the base of the brain. Oh, interesting. And so, so you're you're you're you're getting closer to, by going up the nose, you're you're you're actually getting you're pretty close. Has this shown any positive signs this infrared light therapy for Alzheimer's? Has there been any effective treatments for this? Like, has it worked? Well, yeah. I 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 neurodegenerative ative conditions, cognitive problems. And after doing an assessment of them, I said, would you be willing to try this because it's commercially available? You can, you can go online and Nasal red light or nasal infrared filter. Yeah, Vielight, is See if you can find one, Steve. Yeah. Vielight, V I E L I G H T, Vielight. That and so I recommended to this patient that she That she get one and it did reverse some of her cognitive decline. She was extremely grateful to me for it. How much are one of these bad boys? See, you can find one on Amazon. Oh, look. She's got up one nostril instead Yeah, you just Yeah, you just put it up one nostril. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not I'm not a paid employee of theirs. I'm not, I didn't I was didn't come on thinking. So I have no commercial interest in this. Oh, they're 17 1,800 bucks. Yeah. I mean, this one's not bad. 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 Will insurance cover the cost of this? I can. I don't know. I think they should, but I do too. Yeah. Have you ever heard of Jack Kruse? Of who? Jack Kruse. I'm I'm sure Of neurosurgeon. Neurosurgeon guy, internet guy. He's all over Twitter. He talks about anyways, he's like 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, what he would do was instead of using those big round LED lights that they usually use for surgeries, 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 humans. And another thing that he likes to do is give the brain the patient during brain surgery an IV of methylene blue, Which is like a dye. It's like a blue gene 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 80s 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 gonna 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 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 going to 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 knee or I think it was his knee. He went in to go get his preop appointment for his cataract surgery about a month later and the doctor the ophthalmologist was like, "What the hell's going on with you? Like you don't 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 the eye 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 regenerating neurons in your eye." And he believes that was the what restored his vision And the reason he didn't need cataract surgery anymore. Yeah. Well, Which seems crazy. Well, it only seems crazy if you don't realize the role of biological light. Right. Right. You know, I mean, and it was one of those things where like Gurwitsch, discovered, biophotons 100red years ago. Fritz-Albert Popp is another one of those guys. Well, he was subsequent, and he was one of the people who then, helped to, validate Gurwitsch'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 to he had lenses that were configured in a certain way such that he could get magnification and visibility of the 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 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 like that like one Similar to like bioluminescence but much less right Bioluminescence is something different. Okay. This is this is actually It's UV light that the body creates. Is that right? Isn't that right? We do create UV light. Right. AB: Absolutely. And that was like Gurwitsch's mitogenetic rays, which were blue rays, like I they were, purple bluish rays,. Well, when I first saw a picture of the mitogenetic 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 saw these rays during mitosis which is driven by these microtubules. I said, "Oh, microtubules must carry light." And so it's so they it's it's sort of like we have our own kind of fiber fiber optic system within Our bodies and it makes sense that if you if you look at cells the number of interactions that 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 would be if it's under the influence of light traveling at the speed of light, And so anyway, so I think that if you if you realize then that well where does, where do biophotons in the body where did they come from? No. You know, I've I've read accounts that say they come from DNA. They also come from mitochondria And which mitochondria are the what provides energy 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, chemicals, whether it's glyphosate, which is Roundup, that's in a lot of our food And LED lights, You know, whatever. Yeah. LED, 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. Blue light. Or phones that emit blue light that are screwing around with your dopamine system. Yeah. And your sleep wake cycles, Your circadian rhythm. Yeah. Yeah. So, so anyway, so the point is that yeah, that the idea that something like red light could be helpful Makes sense because light is causing some of the problems And light could be, some of the solutions. It's just a different frequency light. This is what my phone looks like. Ah, yeah. I got a red filter on it so I don't get the blue light or at least not a ton of it. Yeah. Some I had a one of the things that Jack was describing to me, he's like the environments that we built for ourselves being indoors underneath these blue lights with all these screens and techn surrounded by technology and these crazy EMFs is like it's similar to a killer whale in a tank at SeaWorld. It's like the same thing is going to happen psychologically like the sham the shamu at SeaWorld the killer whales his fin goes down starts getting depressed has no desire to mate ends up killing the trainers going crazy like that's what we're doing to ourselves we're not we're not meant to be in these environ 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 leftrained, more analytical and less creative. This could be if perhaps this ability of humans to have telekinesis or te 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 mind. I think what's happening is that we're 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 we have been 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 they're 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, You know, per second Than what you than what you can get from reading. And so I think that it's it's rewiring our brains, as a species Towards one that's more balanced towards, right hemisphere and less towards left hemisphere. And so what I think what I would like to see is, here we have AI, which is, 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 deceptive. You could you can Language can lead us away from the truth. Right. Totally. And so the more we can get back to developing our pure perceptual processes and our intuition and our ability to discern. You know, does that fit in? You know, does that, how does this fit together, right? As opposed to this more, siloed way of approaching information, Right? I was just my wife was just show 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 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 was in Florida. 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's one of those things where they're it's become more about memorizing and less about learning how to critically think. Whoa. Florida sees 40% in 46% increase in homeschooling over the past 5 years. That's crazy. Yeah. Well, it doesn't surprise me at all. Doesn't surprise me at all. 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, Right? It, oh, well, they started realizing that, what kind of education their child is and is not getting And every, 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, what is, 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 going into the future. You know if all you're having is this sort of rigid way of thinking and memorize 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. They the only thing they're enthusiastic about is seeing their friends, Right? Yeah. I think that's the biggest thing they get from it is the social interaction aspect of it, 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 3 hours out of the day. To get that, the kinds of things that you could, whether it's playing on a team sport or being in a, a band or whatever it is that you, 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 sale 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 in a room under blue lights all day, staring at a TV and all 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 back in time, way back thousands of years ago, that early humans were had some of these parapsychology abilities like innately and that this has just atrophied over millennia? Oh, absolutely, Absolutely. With the development of technology and Communication and the written word and that kind of stuff, I would imagine that even things like the written word and the be able the ability to start writing on scrolls and texts and stuff like that. That developing that ability to offload memories probably atrophied our ability to store memory in our brain,. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that, it's it's interesting to think about how it with every development of a technology there's the unintended consequences right so you I mean 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 light 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 right of really important people in their life because it's it's always programmed into their phone. And and some people I mean they wouldn't know how to use a map if they needed to they're they're 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 And which I mean when the Carrington event happened in 1859 it burned up the telegraph stations, because of the solar flare,. Well, look at how, back then, I mean, things weren't so electrified. People weren't so dependent upon that. What would happen if we had some kind of event like that today? I mean, it would wipe out. A lot of people would die. Well, it if we lost if we lost electricity for a long period of time, we just had two crazy hurricanes here about a year ago, and we lost power. Lots of folks that didn't have power for like 2 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 cuz 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 daily rhythm of life. I kind of liked it actually. Yeah. In a weird way. Yeah. Well, yeah. And there's I mean there's a podcast that's out there I know that where every episode of it is Teaching kind of like the old ways so that that if you if you didn't have any of this techn if you were just out in the middle of a forest or whatever how would you You know h how would you navigate how would you find food how would you this how would you stay warm so so each one of these technologies and so you Similarly, books, books as a technology on the one hand, it has 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. Oo, Right. And the I mean the internet. Yeah. Yeah. It's like It's too much too much info. You don't know what's real and what's not. Exactly. And so, I thought about this and, it's it's it's interesting. I mean, I didn't grow up with any religion. I, 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 I'm not saying that as somebody who like who treats it as necessarily literal, that there's there's a lot of stories that tell you something truthful about, about people or about life. You know, that's true for a lot of, relig, 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, the story of Adam and Eve in the garden and how they got kicked out of the 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. But I was thinking Knowledge is satanic. It's well it's it's it's going from when we changed from knowledge as a pure knowing, Pure perception, You know, which is what a lot of indigenous cultures still trust most to trusting the written word, That That's interesting. That created the possibility to get us to deviate from truth. You know, we started we 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 book your books at school tell you that's possible. That's what's it called? Pseudocience. Yeah. It tells you it's pseudoscience. Then are you going to believe the the telepathic experience that you had? Are you going to believe when when you had the message in your head saying call home and then you find out your dad just had a heart attack. You know are you going to believe that? Are you going to and what if you have those kind of experiences on a regular basis? What are you going to believe? Are you going to believe that experience or are you going to believe what you read but where it says, "Oh, well that kind of thing's impossible." And so what and then what happens 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, it's blah. 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 p podcast will go public and I'll read a bunch of comments about it. I'm like, I was wrong. They must be right. My perception completely gets warped. And that's how I've learned never to read comments. Yeah. You see how you're influenced away from your direct experience. And so then and I think about when people tell me their experience it's like who am I to tell them they didn't have that experience or to it's like it's it's and so that's why like I think that these these parents who contact me about their child they're living with this child their experience that it's not just with this the spelling board or whatever. That they experienced 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, I mean, she the person who's having that experience, they're just going to think, okay, you're you're not going to believe me because of your training. And they're they're not going to be convinced by me just saying, well, look right here. It says, You can't you can't talk somebody out of their direct experience when it's very profound, You know, that kind of experience. I mean, for you, you Why would you even want to? Huh? I don't Why would you even want to talk them out of it? Yeah. Yeah. And so, but so anyway, so, to me, it's like let's explore. Let's just, so that's enough people's experience. Let's explore what's going on there and try to have a an understanding that that come out of it as opposed to just well I read that can't happen therefore it can't. Yeah. That's a that's a really powerful metaphor about Adam and Eve in the apple. I've never I've never heard it described that way. It makes a ton of sense. And what do you make of some of these these children talking about biblical characters or talking about the Bible? Right. 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 was raised a fundamentalist Christian and so when I first was running into that I thought well that's interesting But he's already coming from a Christian home so the fact that I mean some of these individuals will say, "Oh, I I have a I walk with Jesus. You know, when I go to the hill, I see, I see these, I see God or they'll they'll say these things and, but if they've had a religious upbringing, you think, well, okay, they've had that upbringing." And then I have other people who were raised in a family that's Hindu or a family Oh, that's interesting. So, their religious background sort of bleeds over. It does. And the same thing is true in the same thing is true in with near-death experiences from the standpoint of if you were if you have a near-death experience. So your body literally, dies, but then some 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're you're more likely to see Jesus or Mary or someone that's that religion and if you're Buddhist you're more likely to see Buddha and And so 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 and Krishna from Hinduism are both very similar archetypes. If you if you read their life story, and their way of being in the world, Very similar. This is this there's a lot of parallels between different characters, mythol mythological people, mythological characters and biblical characters across religions and cultures and everything. Even like stories, there's similar stories like the flood myth. Right. Exactly. And so, so, so what I think is that when people encounter this, 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. You know, it's sort of like, I'm interested in what's the code, Right? I see what you're saying. You do. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of like, that there's there's something that they're responding to and but we just put a face onto it because we need to have we need something that we interface with, Right? I mean, Yeah. So we can so we can process it, right, without going crazy. Yeah. It's it's it's a it's a images just like symbols are a shortcut for a lot of it's condensed information. It's a 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 if you can experience it as an image symbols are have so much more conceptually packed into them than like one I could write a book on some symbols just that symbol alone in terms of what it represents. So what I think is that we our brains are navigating informationational fields that are we live in a sea of information. Okay, think of it as like the quantum vacuum fluctuations that there 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, it's it's light and vibration, right? And all of our sensory systems are picking up different frequencies of light and vibration. You know, sound is, You know, that the microtubules are, in the cilia, in the in the in the hair cells, they're They're differentiating different frequencies of vibration. And, our eyes are differentiating different frequencies of light. We're 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 a fraction of the amount of vibrational sound that's out there, Right? Our senses aren't able to pick up the others. And then and then if you look at just even the sensation of touch that once again that you're you're you're you're picking up information that is encoded in vibration And so it's all about waveforms and our and so our senses are giving us information from that and then but only a narrow spectrum of it and so there's all There's other information out there which is what we think of as non-local. Okay? Because our sensory system is just it's oriented to here and now. There's a funny theory. Have you ever heard of Joe Rogan's fart hypothesis? No. 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 or prey coming at us, whatever it is. So we have this extreme test of smell. Were 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 we 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 loca like where we're at. This room feels spooky. Like maybe like we're just getting a little bit of a 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. Yeah. I mean our brain, our brain how it works is it works on pattern recognition, right? You know that whether we're talking about how I recognize your face, and it may be that I could, see you 10 years from now and you've aged a little bit, but but I'd still recognize your face, Or or for example, well, anyway, you get the idea. 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 so and so's song. It's just a new, Right, Version of it. So we're picking up patterns and so but what 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 we're so visual that like when we recognize a pattern visually we're more convinced that we experienced it because more of our brain is devoted to vision than any other sense But there's this woman for example, who she can tell if somebody has Parkinson's disease by smell. She's she's like 100% accurate. One woman. Yeah. She's a Scottish woman. She's still alive. Yeah. Yeah. And she Yeah. If you look, he's he's going to he's on it, right? Yeah. Yeah. She can tell if somebody has Parkinson's disease by smell. And so what what scientists think is that there must be some chemical that's in the yeah Woman who can smell Parkinson's help science scientists develop tests. Scientists drew on 72-year-old Scott's rare condition to help identify people with neurological conditions. Scientists have harnessed the power of a woman's hyper sensitive sense of smell to develop a test to determine whether people have Parkinson's disease. Whoa. Yeah. She noticed that her late husband developed a different odor when he was to 12 years before he was when he was 33 12 years before he was diagnosed with the disease which let 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. 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 that if you asked her how she was doing that, she I mean, 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, decades ago where they took, the little nighties, little night t-shirts, that you put on a baby, they took those from like 10 babies and then they gave them to mothers And said, "Just smell this and tell us which one belongs to your baby." And the women were able to match it. And yet So crazy. And so even though you're not thinking about it, There's there's there's there's a pattern there. Okay. There's a p, there's all of these different chemicals, I'm sure, that go into your particular baby's smell. That you're you're you're you just got this pattern, right? And you're not you're not having to think about it and it even feels like you're guessing, but you're accurate. And 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. It's not enough of a density of light for you to actually visually see it. But if you say to people did the light flash just then or not they're very accurate in being able to detect that's a form of detection to just You know it's just like If as I said it feels like they're guessing You know similarly there there's a condition called blind sight which is this is not mind sight blind sight is a 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, 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. Wow. But the information is still getting into their eyes and still getting into other parts of their brain that can do a 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 Awareness that gives us information and I think that's pertinent to, this whole question of, To 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 pheromone or some sort of a smell that attracts women to men. Something about 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 for evolution, which is blew my mind. I think it was that if he smells good to her, then that is true. Yeah, they did this study with like t-shirts of men and they let the women smell it and which one is more attractive to you? That's in and smell. Smell is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus. That doesn't let me say this. All of the senses go to the thalamus which is like our relay center and it's where we have sensory gating. Okay. You know it's mainly associated with the thalamus although And but smell goes right to the limbic system. Yeah. And the limbic system is involved in things like memory. Yeah. 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 one of the things Is weird how that happens. 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 relative. You know, it's it's a way of reducing inbreeding By using the sense that is the most associated with exactly You know these raw emotions and smell plays a huge role and it's a lot of the the perfume industry it some of the perfumes actually would use pheromones Really. Yeah. Yeah. Because what you what why does a woman wear Strong immune systems is bottle their scent. Well, well, it's I mean, it's, there's pheromones that a woman emits that also, attracts a man, 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, smelling food cooking or something like that. But we've made human smells something that's dirty and undesirable. And Every morning when I'm laying in bed, half asleep, I wake up to my wife sniffing me like a dog. She's like sniff She says if she could bottle my scent, she would. Oh my goodness. All right. Wow. Well, there you go. Very strong scent attraction there going on. Wow. But then you have this is really weird. Well, you have no worries. She'll never cheat on you. It's funny. It's funny. But it like when you hear these stories, it's like it does make sense and it makes you wonder like 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. 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, they just love technology. They just love living in the artificial world. Okay. And they just I mean there are people who are hacking their bodies just with trying to I mean you've seen some of these things haven't you people that are engaged in biohacking where they're even they're they're themselves inserting technology into their body and then and then there are people who want to develop chips to insert into in people's brains and Transhumanists Yeah transhumanist 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 they're they're hungering for a more natural kind of existence and they're they're going to want to be in meeting in person again and that there And the way I see it is if you're if you're really it depends upon what your orientation is, it and like one of them is more heart-c centered to me, it's 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. The screen the screen podcast in person, The screen makes it more of a mental process, whereas You miss little cues too, like little sub subconscious cues. 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 this trend towards more and more parents leaving public education and going into homeschooling. There's there's more and more people that are wanting to go and get away from the technology. They're wanting the vacations out in nature. They're they're they're wanting to see people in person. I mean, and so So I think that we're really going to see people that go these two different ways. Okay. And And there are the people also who realize they need to develop these practical skills Because technology can be taken away like that, And so it's going to be very interesting to see how things evolve. But I also see more and more people interested in developing their own innate abilities, their own innate intuition, their own the these abilities that I think our ancestors had developed to a very high degree. That's how they survived. It I these a lot of these indigenous cultures still have these Which still exist by the way. They're still roaming around different parts of the earth in the Amazon rainforest, Sentinel Island. That's crazy. It's crazy that we can have live in this technological world that 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,. Yeah. And and one of the things that I wonder about, when you when you hear of things like, the what's the name of that device? The Antikythera or Oh, yeah. Yep. The device they found in the in that ship. Yeah. Yeah. Which was a very sophisticated It was like it was like an astronomical alignments they could do. Yeah. It look like gears inside of a clock. Yeah. There it is. Antikythera. Antikythera. Yeah. 2,000y old device. Okay. That really unders 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, who knows? It's it's possible that they had some of this technology that got destroyed like in a Carrington type event long ago, or a flood or getting hit by a meteor or something such that only the people who Knew how to survive in the forest, Made it. And so then so then we start it all over again. Okay. You know and then event eventually we rediscover similar technology or variations on it and then we've worked our way up to 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. Because the earth will I mean look at what happened with like Mount St. Helens when the volcano erupted and it destroyed everything in its path. But within within 101 15 years you already have plants coming back and animals are starting to come back and nature will will find a way. But it's it's going to be in pockets where people already know have the diversity the biodiversity and the and already know how to live within that. Yeah. It doesn't make sense how, some of the like there's ancient structures all around the world that have like crazy alignments and precision and stuff 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, 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 all these types of things that they were using. I think it's probably something that along the lines of, what is going on with these children and having some sort of some sort of knowledge that is not able to be put into language. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, who knows what they had because you, when we look at like some of these ancient cultures like the megalithic cultures, I mean, we still don't understand today how they built those And it makes sense though that those structures survived when you consider how massive they are and etc. And but that doesn't mean that their whole culture was like that's the totality of what they had. I mean, they could have had all kinds of other things that didn't survive, Right? Yeah. 100%. Going back to what you're talking about with the sensory stuff, have you ever heard of the filter 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 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 there, Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. No, that's the idea of the brain operating as a filter is that's been around for quite a while. I mean, decades, that hypothesis and, 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, people who do ayahuasca They describe having synesthesia, Well, well, all of these autistic individuals have synesthesia. Yeah. And in fact they tend to have more than one form of synesthesia. They they see auras around people and animals and they they see colors around letters. They they hear sounds associated with you colors. They all of these different things are blended together for them. So it's it's I think of it as being almost like a kaleidoscope world And then another thing they share in common with people who do ayahuasca is that there's a mindbody disconnect they don't they don't feel totally within their body And so so they so that's another similarity and then a lot of people when they do psychedelics like psilocybin or ayahuasca they'll they'll experience telepathy as well. Yep. And so when I and then we know that the that the brain makes DMT. It's an endogenous neurotransmitter. The lungs as well. Yeah. It's Yeah. It's we it's it's it's just like cannabinoids we have endogenous cannabinoids and endogenous opiates and so we have all of the reason why these synthetic things can operate 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 the looking at these endogenous DMT like compounds in autistic individuals, to see If, if they if there's something different about that system in them, because it what they describe is so similar. Yeah. I think Rick Strassman was explaining to us how or no, no, it wasn't Rick Strassman. It was the gentleman who did the study on Cretam. 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 endogenous DMT. And he thinks that the people that suffer from schizoph like high level schizophrenia could potentially be lacking in that enzyme. So they would have too much endogenous DMT which could be correlated to that stuff which is wild. Yeah. Yeah. No, but 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, for both of them compared to controls. Yeah. And so I'm I'm that's one of the things I'm really interested in because is and is 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 is can be validated. Yeah. Yeah. DMT is, has been found in both autistic individuals and people with schizophrenia. And so I'm I'm interested in, because what we as psychiatrists are trained is like when people say that they have certain experiences, we're 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, but when you have people that take purposely, shamans who purposely take these psychedelics to get information, You know, when they when they do ayahuasca in the jungle, the plants tell them, "Oh, this is what I'm good for. This is this is this is my medicinal properties." I don't know if you've heard stories like that, but the point is that So that information is somehow contained within, where's that information? It's contained somewhere within this Nature Within nature. And so, 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 of this and rather than getting caught up in this whole controversy about what's going on with these particular individual. I'm trying to just I'm I'm looking at it from a a high perspective of like why is the null hypothesis 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 Right that's how science evolves is by having a null hypothes is that it's it's that's what you need to disprove. And it's it's harder to it's it's harder to disprove the materialist model the way that they set it up, if you see what I'm saying. It's it's hard It's harder to disprove the materialist model Because there because it's like how 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 the prove that this stuff isn't real. You know, they don't they don't have a model, That explains anything And how can it how and what they're wanting is a burden of proof. They set the bar so high, Right? It No. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. Yeah, it they've 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 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 I it's like that saying, I think it was William James who said, it to prove that all crows aren't black, all you need to find is one white crow. Hm. You know, but instead it's like we're being asked to, find, a lot of white crows, Right? Yep. I see what you're saying. You know, it's like that, if there is, if there is an exception, then something's wrong with that rule as an absolute rule. That makes a lot of sense. What are you interested in doing as far as like pushing the expan e experimentation of this forward in the future or like what sort of ambitions do you have to study this further? Well, with the I have a lot of ambitions about doing this. So one of the things I'm doing is looking at looking at things like DMT and bufotenine to look at that whole system and then and try to understand it better. Okay. And see if I can correlate that with like are the ones who are the autistic individuals who are highly psychic is it that they have more DMT like compound in their system okay so that's that's one type of research that I'm doing 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 Oh there are people who are yeah there are people who aren't autistic that have these abilities it's just that the ones that who are autistic are the ones who have it to the highest I see Degree. Another thing I'm interested in studying though is these other abilities they have like some of them are reportedly highly precognitive. You know that there all of these anecdotal stories if you if you listen to the telepathy tapes you'll hear of some of them on that. You know, there was this there's this one young woman I'm working with. She's 19. And she had, in her mind's eye, she saw her father getting into an accident where he slipped on ice, broke his hip, and ended up in a hospital. She told her mother about it, her mother and father about it. And they were living in Arizona at the time. 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 lot of lot of precognitive stories like that. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what I want to do is study the pre precognit and so we have 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 time stamp this is when the mother sent me the email telling me about that for example okay and then we just see 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 in the it's something that happened in the past but actually ongoing do that kind of research the same this same young woman who's doing that I mean she's she's working as a with police as a psychic detective to find missing children Oh wow So I'm very interested Ed in how that how that plays out. Okay? You know, and once again having, documentation, I can I can 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 some of these many of these children, reportedly, see dead people. And I never as I've only once asked one of them, oh, would you do a 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, could you do a reading on me?" And this is literally within the first half an hour of meeting him on a Zoom call. How old is he? Oh, he's like maybe 20, 21. And he 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 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 well that's that's something that I would love to do research on that as well. So, it's not just that the telepathy, one of the problems with the telepathy is so many of them They need to use the letter board to communicate and then that creates all this suspicion, because it's the letter board. 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 they're just a, they're a unit together,. It doesn't matter with if you're looking at precognition either, because Neither of them should know the answers to these things. And so I'm so I'm actually more interested in moving beyond just the telepathy because of the 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 since I started doing this research is to try to get that kind of separation ation, but I now there's all of these other things that have been reported that are just as interesting, if not more so. Yeah. Yeah. I would really love to see one of those experiments done with a 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 conflicting. So, I really would love to see that interaction there and to see if like they can Yeah. Well, the people who do, like mediumship, I like 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, they do rigorous research. They have very high, criteria for whether or not they'd certify somebody as a medium. And And so I know, the the way you would set that up. And so, that's that's one of the things that I that I want to do. And but I know that one of the ways in which somebody who's like a professional psychic or medium that goes out there, they do what's called cold reading, which is like they'll they'll say something like, "Oh, there's somebody here who has, a lost loved one whose name starts with an M, and then, and then which, They're searching. They're they're searching, and of course you're going to find somebody in the audience who, lost somebody named Mike. You know, the odds are That's the problem. That's one of the biggest problems with this stuff is there's charlatans. That's right. Everywhere. That's right. And so, so, 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,. You know, I have a pretty good ability to read people, but I wouldn't call it psychic, you I just, I just know how to read, Information that, is on people's faces, et Yeah. Yeah. That's what I've done for profession. A black belt human reader, Literally wearing a black belt. But this boy, when when he did that reading on me, there was no there was nothing that he did that was anything like a cold reading, Right? He went straight to the book. He just went straight to it. He just went straight to it. Your half aunt is here and someone named Harold, who's your step, who's your grandfather by marriage. And this kid has no developmental issues like autism or anything. No, this he's autistic. Oh, he's autistic. Okay. He's autistic. That's what I'm saying. His mother and he were using the spelling board. But it's not 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. Right. I mean, I didn't even know I have I didn't even know my father had a half sister until like 25 years ago. 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 about it. Right. 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 that's and to me in a way that's a more interesting question because then you're I can come up with I can come up with ways of explaining I can 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. Then even having them separated like that it's not going to eliminate that as a possibility but mediumship And then and that suggests something about the nature of You know our existence do we do we survive After Yeah. Do we survive in some form after we, we drop our bodies? And that to me is a more interesting question. Yeah. That's one of the biggest questions. What happens when we die? Is there a god? And who built the pyramids? Right. Right. And then and then some more research that I'm involved with is looking at it their ability to influence random number generators. M wild stuff. Diane, I can't thank you enough for doing this. This has been an exhilarating 3 hours for me. Has it been 3 hours? Yes, it has. Time flies when you're having fun. Tell people where they can find your work online, your books, all that fun stuff. Okay, great. Yeah. So, so my personal website is drdianehennacy.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 and then I also I now have a nonprofit, so 5013C institute for doing this research that I've been talking about. And that's hennacyinstitute.org. And we're almost done with the website. By the time you do this podcast, it should be up and running. And Fantastic. Awesome. Well, we'll link all that stuff below. And I can't thank you enough for coming down here. I really had fun. Yeah, thank you. I did, too. All right. Good night, folks.
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