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What’s up, folks? While it feels like it has been 1000 years since we’ve done these episodes, I take full responsibility for that. I have been completely slammed a family member in the hospital and that has taken up all of my time. So my dearest apologies for all of you out there that have been looking for episodes, for it admittedly feels great to be back behind the microphone. So we do our best to make sure that we get more episodes out for you guys this year, I got a bunch of emails and messages. Thank you for those.

This was a great episode. I really had such an amazing time with Dr. Ring Lords. A huge thanks to the doctor for lending us his time and doing this interview. Also, thanks to my good friend for helping me cohost this episode with the doctor. Please make sure you give our Facebook page and like; subscribe to our YouTube channel; follow us on Twitter; and if you have any feedback, send an email. I welcome those. Thank you guys so much for listening to the Human Experience.

Traversing the realms of parapsychology as we welcome my guest Dr. Dean Radin. My good friend Misha, from the near-death experience research foundation, whose background is in microbiology, is going to be helping cohost for the show.

Dr. Radin, my good sir, welcome to HXP. Thank you very much for being here. Dr. Radin, your online biography says that you were first intersted in psychic abilities at the age of 12. You’ve written three books and over 200 articles, and you’ve done up countless lectures. How how did this work start for you?

Well, I think like a lot of children who start reading fairytales and science fiction as soon as they discover books. I immediately was wondering, “As a child of what of this is pure fantasy and what of this might be true?” and since children don’t have a very good way to discriminate from another one topic to the next. And, of course, then you go to high school. You go to college and beyond and you’ll learn very rapidly that there are certain topics that are taken seriously and others are dismissed. So that my own college career graduate school and beyond I never heard anything mentioned about psychic or mystical experience within the scholarly tradition. That’s partially because I was going to engineering and going to psychology curricula, so that these topics would necessarily come up.

With any other hand, our entertainment industry is saturated with it and I thought that it was a little odd that experiences of people reported throughout history and all cultures — and even today many scientist report psychic experiences — why isn’t this discussed? So I started looking into a more serious way. I was in graduate school and I was surprised to read that there had always been, for about 130 years, a small group of scientists from all countries who have been applying the best methods of the day to test whether in principle some of the experiences of people report where that are reported in legends could they have any credence to them at all. I was surprised to find that there is such a literature. I started to do experiments as I had read and to my surprise I was able to repeat some of the things that I had read about. That basically helped me, because it’s almost like there’s a secret in plain sight, or something of very high interest, that should be of high interest to scientists, but that leads off with the way science is developed. They are simply not allowed to talk about it. But that which is odd.

Yeah, I mean you have had quite the career here. And your experiments are quite for arranging. How many experiments you think you’ve done through your research? but

That’s a good question. Actually, I don’t have any idea. I think a couple of dozen maybe. Somewhere writer Carbonell. Is there anyone that is more remarkable for you then the others? I can’t say that I’m blasé about it at this point because I continue to be interested in the nature of these experiences and what they might mean. But I think every time I plan an experiment, run it, and get a significant outcome, I’m almost as astonished as I was when it began. And it’s it’s partially because western science in terms of theory has yet the catch-up with that. Simply the empirical data, there are hints about how theory might go, but we don’t have very good explanation. So one of the things that I’ve discovered here is that people like myself who go into this have to have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and I have a very high tolerance for not knowing and it doesn’t bother me. But for a lot of colleagues, it does bother them a lot that they don’t have a good explanation and they don’t like it at all.

Dr. Radin, this is Misha here. I think some of your works, like you said, you’re not blasé, but you sort of moved on from wondering if the paranormal’s real or side effects a real, you may be moved on from that to really wondering what the mechanism is? And I can completely identify with that as a scientist, but maybe for the listeners, I was wondering, you know, what is most amazing thing you seen? Is there some moment for you where you were in your career looking at some data or something like that, and you decent, Oh my gosh! I just can’t believe this! But it really is real that the moment when it clicked for you, because you’ve mentioned some interest in your childhood. But as you know, get university degree and so forth you you learn other tools to look at problems more precisely. And well I’m rambling. Been wondering what is an account of one of those moments for you?

Well, it’s actually very good question, because you could, just by reading the literature, come to accept that these phenomena are real. You’d probably reach the conclusion that there, in the general population, we’re talking about fairly weak effects. And the best analogy I can think of is: If you described to somebody how to play golf and they had never actually done it before, you give them a club and you explain what to do. And probably nothing to do very well, because they either don’t have the talent and they haven’t practiced. Just the same is true for the vast majority of sign experiments.

People who don’t claim any special abilities have made minute have any experience, with it an artificial task that they have to do in a certain way. Right now, right front of us, even under those conditions you get people who can do things, so that they alone for life scientists who haven’t worked with exceptional subjects. I can see how they would they would be interested, but not really convinced, and that’s where I was up until 1985, as I was getting results, but not spectacular but enough to keep my interest.

So, what convinced me was when I was recruited for what is now known as the “Stargate” program — the US government’s secret at the time. I got the top-secret briefing. This is what they would help to people who are read on to the project. And just from the slides a remember I was blown away because I was seeing what, at the time, were highly classified examples of remote viewing. Many those are now public domain, so that was part of it. A dosing of holy smoke! This is the kind of thing that is being briefed at the top echelons of government and the military with some details that are not yet public, like these are real missions in practical applications.

But what really cemented it for me was meeting the people, the remote viewers who had done those tasks and watching them do it in person. The briefing is one thing but watching it happen as it happens is another thing. That’s what convinced me, that not only is it real, but it is extremely odd in the sense that at the time — this is 1985 when when I was on that program — at the time the prevailing opinion within the scientific community is that this stuff simply is impossible. It does not exist. And yet so from outside the building where working in a realm where nobody believes it. Inside the building it’s taken for granted and we’re trying to push hard and trying to understand what’s going on.

And so, in retrospect, it actually made a lot of sense — the point of you working on a secret program you don’t want people to know — that this is possible, because it reduces the effectiveness of the method. Is a tool now that it is public domain course remote viewing is sometimes vastly embellished beyond what it actually can do. But at least a lot of people have a sense because they’ve taken training courses here and there, that this is a real phenomenon. In some cases, for talented people took abuse for practical things. But to make a long story short, the thing that really convinced me was seeing very high level of performance in a in a condition where there was high credibility, that this is real year in terms of remote viewing, I know that the majority deems has made predictions that Obama will be the last US presidents and elections will be canceled and so forth, I think he’s even said that a group of remote viewers came to sort of a consensus about that so if this can be another election, I want to hold his seat to the fire on that.

But since you brought up remote viewing, you know many of the world’s teachers talk about love being the fabric of the universe and if love is the foundation of with say some kind of information field or something that might be involved with psi abilities, then is there any sort of morality to side. For example, if someone uses remote viewing to help a loved one, would that work? When maybe trying to use remote viewing to kill someone would fail? Is there any difference in that regard?

That I don’t think so. I think we’re talking about natural phenomena, which is simply wrapped into the fabric of reality. The way that we use it is up to each individual and you see this new look and an almost every spiritual tradition there are warnings and cautions about how much your ego is involved in this. So in story form, the only difference between a Jedi Knight and Darth Vader is whether the ego gets inflamed. It’s the falling to the dark side and with the same skills. I think that is probably the case.

This very intriguing. Let’s talk more about what you saw during this this top-secret experiment, more of it later, but ido you feel like this is part our of our evolutionary biology? Is this where the next level of human is headed

Through understanding this, using it, I think it’s actually been around for the very beginning. In other words, are not creating magic along the way, making up something new, if anything, where devolving away from what used to be a natural phenomenon or more readily available phenomenon case can be made. For example, that the frontal lobes get in the way of most psychic experience, and the evidence for that includes things like looking at the neuroscience of meditation. We find that very advanced meditators show inhibition of the frontal lobes and they also show a higher degree of spontaneous psychic experience and mystical experience.

Go thing is that a lot of the training involved in various forms of psychic affects is getting the analytical side of the brain out of the way. And, of course, if you can do that with the frontal lobes you find a way of inhibiting it through stimulation, through meditation, or whatever, or certain psychedelics. People invariably get better, so from that perspective, NAIC and evolutionary push is to maintain the ability of an organism to survive, and if you have the capacity to pay attention to what’s happening on Pluto you may miss the tiger in front of you.

So think about a couple million years of evolution that will constrain human beings to get closer and closer to attention on here-and-now as opposed to there and then. The more you do that the less and less capable we are of paying attention to things far away, which is the essence of psychic phenomena.

The reason I appreciate your answer and the reason I ask is because I wonder, for the people listening, how does this affect a person in their everyday existence? I mean, how does being able to effect the consequence of another random number generator? How does that affect me how and how can I possibly use this for my benefit in my everyday life?

Most of us don’t need these abilities in everyday life. At least most of us who will live and work in Western world. Where many of the things he used to kill is pretty readily. Don’t do that anymore because it’s relatively safe. If you live in in a war zone, live in place with an enormous amounts of uncertainty, then they can be useful because you get a glimpse of what’s about to happen. So thinking about the experiments like random number generators on the console, telepathy experiment in all sorts of things, all of those are artificial constructs. They’re designed very specifically to look for this phenomenon. Possible in principle and as an artificial construct is all experiments are. It’s not really designed to say, well, can we use this for we’re welcome?

What more can we learn about the nature of ourselves based on this kind of experiment? Specific kinds of tools to us to probe the nature of these phenomena?

When it comes to what we do with it, then we can talk. And 70 different terms where we wouldn’t talk about psychic phenomena, but rather, did you ever have a gut feeling about something that turned out to be true? Or about a person? Or did you ever pick up the phone and knew who’s calling before you look at caller ID? And that’s what I think these are not typically life-and-death instances, but they’re the reminders that this phenomena are always there. They are just slightly below the level of awareness for most people, and the folks so we call psychics are ones where it’s not quite as deep in the unconscious, more readily available.

Dr. Radin, Misha again. You note you talked about intuition, and intuition is a loaded word because it’s generally understood to mean something that’s, you know, helping you make the decisions. Are some in supporting your growth? If you agree with that basic definition of intuition have you ever had any amazing things, like, you know, don’t fly on 9/11 or something like that? But that the conventional explanation for intuition is forgotten knowledge — that you you learn something at some point and then you don’t remember that you know that. And the classic cases, a fireman who just suddenly runs outside of a burning building and doesn’t know why, but at that moment it crashes. And so the explanation for that is that the firefighter, after a while, learns. And when you hear certain sounds and you see the flames in a certain way, that is just that happens just before a building collapses, so their intuition and training save them. More interesting a case, of course, is when things happen where you don’t have any expertise and there’s no way to anticipate what’s happening, in which case may be minute precognition. So do I have personal examples of this?

Yes. Nothing quite as dramatic as that. But to give an example, for me most of these kinds of experiences occur in the in dreams. One time I had a dream where I was in a car accident and the air bags inflated and there’s a lot of dust inside the car, broken glass, and things of that sort. When I woke up in the morning I was kind of disturbed by this dream. It didn’t seem to match anything I’d seen during the day or anything really and as a result, I decided to drive to work a way that I knew was little bit safer because it had traffic lights, seems more controlled traffic pattern. So I go to the get up to one of the traffic lights and just sitting there waiting for the light to turn and then bang get rear-ended by a car behind me. While he was texting he thought he saw the light change and accelerated and rammed into the back of my car. Well, this was an accident. I’ve never had an accident before. This was not something I caused because I was just sitting there and it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the dream was. The airbags didn’t inflate, for example. I found, well that’s interesting, never happened to me before. The previous night had a dream which is kind of like this involving a car in an accident. It’s never happened before that, never happened since.

So, it’s difficult to assign a chance probability for such an event, but this is the premise. Skeptical perspective. You’d say, well there’s 7 or 8 billion people that have a lot of dreams every night, and some of them are to come true, all of which is true. That’s what you go to the laboratory, where we know exactly what chance outcome is. And because of those tests we know that, in principle, occasionally you can have actual information from the future event that impinges on your present. Yet, as far as the firefighters you mention, the subtle clues like the different sounds and everything else. And I guess it was more talking about some an area work. The first would have no expertise at all.

But to change gears a little bit, in the historical literature that feeling or intuition has had has been associated with various body centers: heart, stomach, the gut, etc. Regardless of location there always seems to have been this respect for the mind and the body. Do you have any thoughts about when the body is trying to give information and I know some of this relates to experiments with the skin conductivity and so forth. Do you have any thoughts on the body being psychic more so than the thinking in the brain being psychic?

I think that the body is probably identical or almost identical to what we normally think of is the unconscious mind. Talk connected and it may be one of the reasons why whenever transplants that sometimes people take on the characteristics of the person’s organs it was transplanted into them in a cellular memory. So it’s not clear to me than that. Just because you have strange gut feelings that it’s literally the belly brain trying to get your attention. And maybe more that the belly brain and your unconscious are one and the same thing, slightly different ways of expressing itself, are talking about. Perhaps, but I don’t make a strong distinction between mind and body affect.

One of the ways you can see this is in their the yogic tradition. For example, if after a while you get extremely good control of your autonomic nervous system, in which case will, how does that happen? Though point of calling it autonomic is headed supposedly automatic doesn’t need conscious control. We know with biofeedback or meditation training you can get incredible control of it out of the single cells in your body. So this is maybe a clue as to why advanced practices like meditation, the people apparently become more psychically attuned simply because theories they can reach down deeper into the unconscious. Because I think that’s where the vast majority this information is working all the time.

That’s an interesting threaded ends i.e. you really want to bring up technologies affect on the research and what you think about how the global connectivity that we all have through the Internet? And how does that affect these abilities that we have in this global consciousness and being able to communicate ostensibly with the person across the world?

Well, in many ways technology is allowing us to do what could only be done through psychic means of past, so this is even further reason why we don’t need to express these abilities anymore. You don’t need clairvoyance if you have TV and the only telepathy via telephones and so on. So in perspective you can imagine that will then in the future all of these phenomena will have some technological underpinning to them. But of course be very different that point and will what were talking about which is truly mind-based phenomena. So you may have seen in the news, Mark was talking about the future Facebook is being telepathy. What he means is brain-based telepathy brain computer interface work and that’s probably feasible at some point. That’ll probably be happening and people then assume that the kind of work that I’m doing is the same as that. And, of course, it isn’t. It’s totally different, because if phenomena are real, it’s a strong argument that mind and brain are not identical.

And, of course, from neuroscience perspective that’s an athema. And from neuroscience perspective the brain is the mind. I think that’s probably not the case there certainly are correct strong correlates with mind, like effects, but I don’t think that the same thing in your experience.

Do you feel that some some people more than others have a proclivity or genetic to the damage and have expressed stronger abilities than others? Have you ever seen this?

Absolutely. There’s no doubt that the distribution of talent in this domain is probably normal in the same way that it is for sports or musical talent some people are simply more attuned to these kinds of phenomena. We know that it correlates with schizo type B, which is the scale at that one, and your full-blown schizophrenic. And the other blood, other end here completely not. And also, without a personality trait of openness, how open are you to new experience? And at a number of other traits, as well?

So you feet simply do surveys about people’s professions, people’s beliefs, you very quickly segregate people into types of people who have these experiences. And people have the experiences tend to do a lot better intellectual control test than people who don’t have the experiences. So this is not surprising to me at all, given that virtually anything you can think of that humans do will eventually fall into a normal curve, so there are definitely people far right of the curve

Dr. Radin, I’m assuming that some of these liabilities can be trained. Which one of them, you know, like, I do know, seeing the future we’re reading people’s thoughts that’s are at all the terminology. But which one do you think would be the easiest to train for somebody?

That depends on the person’s talent. If you start with zero talent you’re never going to learn anything. Start with some talent and it happens to be along the lines of empathy, for example. Or maybe you’ll end up a little bit better telepathy than you might be a precognition. You find somebody who is really really lucky in the casino will maybe the better precognition and telepathy, and so on. It’s not clear to me that somebody’s been be the equivalent of a polymath in this domain, although I mentioned there could these small percentage of highly talented people that might fit that classification. Guilty about training though is that if you imagine that word we’re talking about a normal curve and by analogy everyone can learn to play golf a little bit, but not everyone can become a pro. And not everybody’s going to win the competitions either. We need both high talen,t very high talent, and a huge amount of practice. Actually getting better.

I understand what you’re saying, but you know you mentioned being briefed on a secret program and everything and so that’s sort of implies that we all may have abilities greater than we are aware of. And you know I’m kind of familiar with Edgar Cayce and his ideas about the akashic record containing all information and that people just need to learn better how to tune into that nonlocal information. Do you think he was ahead of his time? Do you think that information field or maybe universal consciousness is behind these amazing, amazing people that sometimes show these abilities in the lab? And then, in everyday life?

First of all, in the secret program there were a very limited number of highly talented people so there is no implication that this is a widespread ability. In terms of Edgar Cayce, that was easy for him to say that everyone has this capability. I don’t buy it. Nobody has exceptional capability in all domains. So that the underlying question, though, is where will these exceptional people get the information from? In there you’ll probably get as many different answers from the individuals. And as you ask them, they will have different concepts, that as a general overarching story, it something like the perennial philosophy that there simply is that, that we have that, the sense that we are separate objects, that space and time are not really the same thing, and it’s that matter and energy are different. It’s a lot of the classical physical perspective of the world that’s a common sense tells us that with the vast majority people accept unquestionably modern physics and suddenly you start to see that all of those assumptions are actually wrong — that were talking about relationships between what looks like fundamental facts. We are talking about the core assumptions like reality locality and causality, none of which are true. And quantum mechanics. So philosopher would say that common sense leads to the notion of naïve reality. We walk around us of overseeing is literally all there is.

Physics and science have repeatedly told us that that’s not all there is. We’re saying a very thin slice of reality and that the deeper we go into the fundamentals, the stranger and stranger it begins to look. If you go deep enough it begins to look like it’s a holistic, fully interconnected something or other that transcend space and time. And so, if human experience can incarnate grasp that directly, then maybe there’s some caution record, maybe there isn’t. But it minimum he means that some aspect of your experience can access literally anything in space and time, well that’s when people talk about when the mentioned psychic or mystical experience — that the difference between the two is that psychic experience is almost as though you can tap into what is actually already there, is not going anywhere to get it you, are already embedded in a completely holistic, or, if you, wish a holographic medium that contains all information throughout space and time. And you can you pull that information back and you experience it as a sense. Whereas with mystical experiences you don’t hold up, you just feel like you are a hologram. You are the matrix. Or the holistic environment. And you get everything all at the same time, but then you can’t talk about it because language fails at that level. That’s why mystical experiences usually just called ineffable — something happened and it transformed me, but I can’t talk about it. So that’s why. I may have gone beyond your original question. But that’s the roof I usually have on the topic.

I’m really thoroughly enjoying this conversation and more discussing doing have been biding my time really want to know more about this secret project you’re working on, and know how how did you get inducted into this group of first of others?

There’s two parts to it. People like Ed Dames and a number of other people were now known for remote viewing part of the operational mission in the early in the U.S. Army so they were concerned about research they were getting tasks every day, find out what’s happening here, and what’s going on there, and they didn’t have interest in order, time really to do research. I was part of the research program where we didn’t have any operational day-to-day stuff to do. We were tasked with two things: one was whether this represents a threat to national security, like, if this is the real phenomenon do we need to worry about the Chinese or the Russians or somebody else who might be using this as that a threat? The second part is, if you think that the phenomena is real, how can you enhance it accordingly, learn from it? How do we shield it and we block it and so on. Those kinds of things so far is threat analysis. We were pretty sure during that time in 1980s that the Russians, at least at the time, the Soviet Union, probably had a similar program we did. Maybe the Chinese, too. That we didn’t know. We did know through defecting scientists and through articles that have been retrieved that the nature of the research were slightly different than what we were up to. But that they didn’t know anymore than we did, so that was comforting. We were convinced by the data that there was a real phenomenon going on, wasn’t as robust or repeatable as we would’ve liked. The never list of Israel news useful so we had very good reasons to believe that of the Russians. And maybe some other countries had a similar program.

So 20 years later, when there was a detente, not only between our two countries, but also between the two programs and it turned out that indeed there was a program, and the Soviet Union, which was much, much bigger than the one in the United States. There’s a very good recent book on this topic and a few other authors and was the director and Stargate program for about 10 years and so he describes the US side and the Russian side. Both sides of the very curtain at the time on what both sides were doing. So what used to be top-secret in the US and top-secret in Russia, now both in the pages of this book. So we don’t know still today is what is happening in China, which is improbably India and the number of other countries. I do know that other countries track research in this area, mental, much because there are actively doing something. But they’re tracking it for the same reasons we did back in the 1980s. We want to see how, in looking at this as a kind of a technology, is there something to worry about? Is somebody way ahead of what we understand and that kind of know that that is that kind of survey is still going?

Back to read and since you mentioned different countries, one of the things I’ve noticed is that people in different parts the world, it can recognize names differently. For example, if you ask someone in the US about Edgar Cayce some will know who that is. But if you asked them about Longer from Bulgaria or Wolf Messing from Poland, they have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m assuming you’ve heard of this letter to names in your field. Did you have any comments about the way that people understand this phenomenon between the countries, in sort of the superstars, seem to pop up from time to time?

You will make sense it is going to be cultural differences and also and language differences, as well. The Russian side was always a lot closer to what we would call shamanism than in the US. The US has probably more traditional religious notions about these kinds of effects. But there, in the course the Far East, and as their own versions of Chi Gong in front, and concepts like that. So those put overlays on the nature of the phenomena. But when you actually analyze what you mean, what are you talking about, terms of the experiences people talk about, they’ll fall into basically the same kind of taxonomy. And you find that even if you go back into the ancient yoga literature, which is referring to my book “Supernormal”, where I did this, you find that people were talking about the same phenomena 2000 years ago and probably well before that. So the basic phenomena are probably the same. They get described differently in some distortions, based on language and the history of each individual culture.

I think the Rollison’s very intriguing. You got remarried. I find your answers very to the point and you have very eloquent way of explaining them. You say that meditation is important to you and is there a spiritual benefit in your opinion to meditation, or practicing these abilities. Let me back up to the beginning of your question, which is whole reason, which are we do with this answer. Imagine that you are Benjamin Franklin. What are you falling out with his? With the little sparks? All that what what are you doing. The answer is, he was curious. Years, here’s something that looks like a spark, which related to these bolts of lightning. And this is the essence of scientific exploration. And you don’t need a reason other than curiosity. Benjamin Franklin might have been able to imagine that someday we have multi-gigawatt power grids around the world but I doubt it. You don’t need to even look that long-ago to people who were developing the first computers were thinking that. Why would anybody need more than a mainframe for anything? So they had very limited foresight, even in a realm where studying precognition. It’s very difficult to know eventually what this is going to turn into. The best we have are our stories that we read from science-fiction fairytales, but even those are pretty well constrained. You do occasionally find a science fiction story that correctly anticipates something about the future, but most of the time it’s future technology. And so here were talking about something which is way more fundamental than simply technological advancement.

So, for example, we go back to 1900 when the Lord Kelvin, otherwise known as William Thompson, gave a talk to the Royal Society about the state of physics. And he said, more or less, that physics is pretty well wrapped up except for two clouds. And by the two clouds that he was talking about, where you are saying that thermodynamics looks like it explains everything in the natural world. So if you’re thinking about going into physics, don’t even bother, except for these two things: The ultraviolet catastrophe and the luminous ether. Those are the two unsolved mysteries. Well one turn in relativity, any of the turn and quantum mechanics. So from 1900 to that the beginning of the 21st century that span of 100 years if you had talked the physicists at the beginning of the 20th century they would have no idea at all about what was about to happen mean they were in the midst of the industrial age where the everything was thought to be totally modern and up-to-date basically finished. And the world completely changed because of these two little problems that have not been solved well.

Today we have two little problems that have been solved. One is called quality of the Netherlands called quantum, quality of first to in our experience, the sense of awareness, and quantum refers to the quantum measurement problem — mainly that somehow the physical world seems to respond to measurement some weird way. So a lot of physicists are saying while those are two minor things that will eventually wrap up. I don’t think so. I think when we begin to understand these two little clouds it will have as big an impact as the two clouds that William Thompson was talking about in 1900. It will totally revolutionize civilization. Really want to be able to imagine the future in which we are actively using telepathy to communicate. This is something in the realm of your imagination, as well.

I mean you are scientist and in youth kind live this, then, and this is your career, so well if we are lucky enough to survive as a species given the accumulating apocalyptic scenarios that faces now. And then eventually science will catch up to a better understanding of psychic and mystical experience. As I said just before that, that will cause a very radical change in our understanding about who we are. A relationship to universe, how it all works natural. To think, if you imagine, at this point that we suddenly have the magic pill and make everybody telepathic, that would probably destroy the world pretty quickly. And you can see this in fiction through stories of movies like “Forbidden Planet”, that we simply don’t have the capacity yet to have good control over our whims and desires. And our society and our laws and virtually every piece of the way that we interact with each other assumes privacy and also assumes responsibility for your actions.

Well, if you now are living in a hive mind, you know this is portrayed in fiction, such as the Borg. It’s the invasion of the body snatchers. It’s every alien invasion, where you get absorbed into the grand mind. This is always presented as horrific, and I think the reason is partially an American thing — that we like to imagine we’re the rugged, independent cowboy, but the reality is that we’re already extremely dependent on each other and the level of dependency would go up to such a higher degree that most of the engine a society would have to change. It would change quickly. You can’t have, for example, a huge difference there is a huge disparity and people will have an enormous amount. People who don’t have an enormous amount, because part of that the issue about becoming telepathic is you feel other people’s pain. Or your billionaire in walking past people who were starving on the streets. That can happen. And so it is.

How does it go away? There has to be a gigantic redistribution of wealth. There begins to spin out pretty great, pretty quickly, that the way that society is now will collapse very fast and that’s dangerous. You don’t want things to collaborate quickly, one thunderclap collapse in it in a graceful way, and it slowly in ways that it’s under control, because, otherwise, who knows how to build back up? And this, of course, is another storyline, science-fiction on the way that post-apocalyptic societies will rebuild themselves in many different ways of doing that.

My hope is that when when we get closer to technologies in pharmaceuticals and other kinds of methods that can enhance psychic experience, because I think we’re headed in that direction. A lot of attention is paid to the unintended consequences of it, and so one possibility is that it will create secret cabals of super psychics, which is in itself, is extremely dangerous, because they can take over the world pretty quickly. And at yet another science-fiction scenario, it might, if we’re very lucky and leaders pay attention to this, they could be a way of slowly introducing these kinds of concepts. And a case can be made without too much conspiratorial thinking. That’s one of the reasons that there are movies about these scenarios, is to remind the population that, what if we were able to do this? Movies like “Lucy”, for example, or “Limitless”.

The kind of pushing in that direction and the reason I like both of those pictures is that, although there is a lot of action and they’re very different than a lot of the previous films — all of which devolved very quickly into horror. “Lucy” didn’t evolve into horror and ordered limitless. They had much more positive spin to the story, so I’m encouraged to see that. And I know that there are a number of people in Hollywood who are interested in the same trend — to say now this is actually part of human potential in human evolution, and there are positive aspects to it, as well.

Dr. Radin, in some of the documentaries like “DMT: The Spirit Molecule”. I think it was something Dennis McKenna was talking about how during some of the shaman experiences they feel of the talk to various intelligences, are getting pieces of information, and, you know, you just mentioned the idea of plantar chemical substances enhancing psychic ability, and one of the things I’ve always wanted to ask Dr. McKenna, or his brother, is, you know, if a person were to get a piece of information in an altered state, is there any way that can be verified? Is it a cover comfort you to question, but maybe you could just speak to that or even to the whole issue of, do you feel that any plant substances can enhance psychic ability in any real substance of way that can be measured in the laboratory?

That sort of thing I’ve spoken to researchers, who at medical schools, were studying substances like a psilocybin and DMT and they’re very interested in the same question, because subjects involving experiments talk about it all the time. That minimum they talk about telepathy is just overwhelmingly strong, so we talked about, how do you do an experiment with somebody in these states where we view have the same level of control as you would if in the laboratory, where, you know, what chances and you get people to do these somewhat artificial tasks, and at this point we don’t know how to do it because when the things that happens in an extreme altered states of awareness is that people don’t want to play anymore. So I know for my own experience that if you’re intoxicated enough, depending on the substance, with somebody present, you with the task now. I wanted to do this medicine that Matt internal. You’re thinking that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. What I want to do that on now, I want to enjoy the experience. So that the closest we’ve come to thinking about how to do this is to work with participants who have asked the lots and lots of experience, example was psilocybin. So they know what experiences like they are comfortable with it and they can still do tasks and so there’s the possibility still in the future of doing experiments like a present, an experiment with you at the cognitively do anything were just of monitoring the body and watching what happens.

There’s the possibility opening for experiments that can be verified that the difficulty with it is that because those the drug experiments are still considered controversial, that just like I don’t want to mix UFOs, and the SP people doing psychedelic research don’t want to mix it with some even those probably overlap. It simply too sensitive to do that, so we keep things separate for the sake of keeping the science.

We are certainly covering very intriguing material tonight and we are approaching the end here, Dr. Radin. But I would like to ask you if there was anything we’ve been doing this for a while and you have you learned a lot of, is there anything that you would tell your younger self? Be aware in that you would go back and could tell yourself?

Yeah, I would tell myself and graduate school to take courses in the sociology of science, and probably the philosophy of science, as well, because he knew it was a rude awakening for me after I had gotten into this field and was working on it for a while. To see that the aspiration of science is a rational enterprise is simply not true. Academic freedom, as in true the idea that scientists will evaluate data rationally, is not true. All of those stories that we we hear about the way that sciences different from religion is different from politics — all that it simply not true. Science is another human activity and that is the same frailties is every every other kind of activity. The only thing that science has going for it is that there’s very strong emphasis on rigorous methods and consensus opinion. So those are good. Unfortunately, consensus opinion is also enormously efficient block for things that don’t happen to fit the prevailing view points. So, for many respects, it’s amazing that science has done as well as it has. And unfortunately science becomes more of a career rather than a matter of expressing your curiosity.

People find more and more constraints about what they talk about, and what I mean by this is, I’m kind of a lightning rod for scientists who are interested in this topic, so I get a lot of phone calls and emails from professors all over the place who are just anxious to tell me about their interests and psychic phenomenon. Sometimes are experiences and in the end of every conversation is the same: “Don’t tell anybody that I spoke you. Don’t tell anybody that I do this experiment”. In heaven published in the not going to publish it, even though it turned out good, because there is a taboo. The taboo is like fight club: The first rule is you don’t talk about it; second, will never go there. All the same rule don’t talk about this because is damaging for your you’re standing in your career. So I would warn myself, even the fledgling scientist simply be aware that he carries a certain amount of risk whenever you start pushing against the prevailing viewpoint. And I don’t think I would’ve done anything different class.

I guess I’m enough of an iconoclast, that I don’t care very much about what other people think. But I have just been astonished, really, to see firsthand, cases of people who, under any other condition, you consider to be very smart, very accommodating, very tolerant, and completely insane when it comes to topics like this introductory. And I can totally understand your frustration is a scientist I don’t want to be doing molecular biology experiments and I’m off in a different direction right now. I think the curiosity you mentioned is so key. I mean, you mentioned moving on from wondering if side effects are ola, now wondering how they actually work and I think that is so, so true. I mean, I can’t think of any other question more fascinating at this time in history then, how are these effects working? You know they cannot be blocked by 30 Keach.

I think there was an experiment with are not blocked at the bottom of the ocean. You know, it’s just totally amazing. So I think your work is really, it’s really cool, and so it but encourages me about all this is that if you fight, were to segregate scientists by their age, the younger the scientist is the more open, they are about their interest and more willing they are to come out of the closet, so to speak. That’s a very encouraging sign and this essentially is how sciences progressed, that the note science progresses by funerals. As Max Planck said, in this case the evidence continues to compound, the empirical evidence keeps compounding, it gets better and better with time. Eventually with my people find better and better ways of presenting the evidence, even with explanations that are not really correct, but sound plausible. That we all have to deal with the baggage of older scientists because it go away eventually and younger scientist, of course, that are immediately to be attracted to these topics.

So the older I get the more important it is, site that for when I can offer it, at this point, is to write papers and books mainly targeting younger scientists. And when we can tell, for example, when we publish a paper on a site like frontiers, we get tens of thousands of downloads. Well, you don’t know what ages are doing the downloading, but just statistically, a lot of more young people are living on the Internet than older people. So it’s a it’s a good bet that a lot of the interest is from younger folks and that’s encouraging.

Dr. Radin, you are one of the men who stare at futons, apparently, and I really do appreciate your time. Certain should you giving on closing here with our guest, you have one small question doctrine used in these experiments where people affect random number generators. Just real quick years, is there an effect where, if 10 people are first focusing their attention, or hundred people are focusing their attention, it will be different than one person trying to show some in the laboratory?

Well, unfortunately, without dealing with the linear effect they live, the best metaphor I can think of is something like a soap bubble — that if you have all one person who is is trying to balance soap bubble, they can do it to a certain degree, and give to people helping. That doesn’t necessarily help, because they may not be handling in the same way and he conversed it. If you 10 people all trying to do it at the same time, he conversed real fast. So the important ingredient that seems to help is coherence among people, and it does occur occasionally. When it occurs, people know it instantly. They’re in the zone. They feel something gel in the crowd. But it’s relatively rare. It’s very difficult to actually produce on the mail, but when that happens, experiments like field consciousness experiments do show that randomness begins to respond very quickly. They basically start to become patterned, so it’s not a nonlinear effect. And in the moment you get into nonlinearity, it’s a much more complicated answer than simply 10 is better than one, while very powerfully absurd here.

Where can people find your work with his was the next step for you well to sites.

One is noetic.org which is the Institute of noetic sciences website. My own website is DeanRadin.com. Together they’ve collected a half 1 billion trials from about half 1 million people and burned up in the midst of creating a smart phone version of those test that because thank you which is in by analogy to IQ were attempting to establish population norms for different kinds of psychic ability that people can carry around on their cell phones.

This is the Human Experience. My name is Xavier swapping my guest and we should think you we are to get out here. We will see you guys next week.