Episode 45 – Dean Radin PhD

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been a thousand years since we’ve done one of these episodes I take full responsibility for that I have been completely slammed had 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 from us it admittedly feels great to be back behind a microphone so we will 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 we had such an amazing time with dr. Raiden his words have a very specific potency a huge thanks to dr. Raiden for lending us his time and doing this interview also big thanks to my good friend Misha for helping me co-host this episode dr.

Wheaton is a big hero of his so I hope you guys enjoy this 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 or just want to shoot me an email I welcome those thank you guys so much for listening the human experience is 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 co-host for the show dr. Raiden my good sir welcome to hxp thank you very much glad to be here so dr. Raiden I mean your your online biographies says that you were first interested in psychic abilities at the age of 12 you’ve written three books over 200 articles and you’ve done countless lectures and how how did this work start for you well I think like a

lot of children who start reading fairy tales and science fiction as soon as they discover books that I immediately was wondering as a child what of this is pure fantasy and what of this might be true and of course children don’t have a very good way to discriminate from one to the other when one topic to the next and of course then you go to high school you go to college and Beyond and you learn very rapidly that there are certain topics that are taken seriously

and others are dismissed so throughout my whole college career in graduate school and beyond I never heard anything mentioned about psychic or mystical experience within a scholarly tradition now that’s partially because I was going through engineering and going through psychology curricula and so that these topics wouldn’t necessarily come up but on the other hand our entertainment industry was saturated with it and I was thought that it was a little odd that

experiences that people report throughout history and in all cultures and even today many scientists report psychic experiences why isn’t this discussed so I started looking into it in a more serious way in terms of the science when I was in graduate school and I was surprised to read that there always been for about a hundred and thirty years a small group of scientists and in all countries who have been in applying the best methods of the day to

test whether in principle some of the experiences that people report or that are reported in legends could they have any credence to them at all and I was surprised I was surprised to find that there is such a literature and 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 and that that basically hooked me because it’s almost like there’s a secret in plain sight there’s something of very

high interest that should be of high interest to scientists but that the the way science has developed you’re simply not allowed to talk about it I thought that was just odd yeah I mean um you you have had quite the career here I mean your your experiments are quite far ranging how many experiments do you think you’ve done through your research oh that’s a good question actually I don’t have any idea come to think of it a couple of dozen maybe some

more I don’t I don’t really know is there anyone that is more remarkable for you than the others well no I can’t say that I’m blase about it at this point because I’m continued 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 almost as astonished as I was when it began and it’s it’s partially because we science in terms of theory has yet to catch up

with simply the empirical data there are hints about how Theory might go but we don’t have very good explanations yet so one of the things that I’ve discovered here is that people like myself who go into this as empiricists have to have a high tolerance for ambiguity and I have a very high tolerance or not 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. Reid

and this is Misha here I think I’ve read in some of your works that like you said you’re not blase but you’ve sort of moved on from wondering if the paranormal is real or sigh effects are real you’ve maybe 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 the most amazing thing you’ve seen is there some moment where you go where you

were in your career looking at some data or something like that and you said oh my gosh I just I just can’t believe this but it really is real that that moment when it clicked for you you know because you’ve mentioned some interest in your childhood but as you you know get a university degree and so forth you you learn other tools to look at problems more precisely and well I’m rambling but I’m wondering what is one of those moments for you well it’s actually a

very good question because you could just by reading the literature come to accept that these phenomena are real you would probably reach the conclusion that they’re 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 give them a ball and you explain what to do

I’m probably not going to do very well because they either don’t have the talent and they haven’t practiced so the same is true for the vast majority of science we’re giving people who don’t claim any special abilities that may or may not have any experience with it an artificial task that they have to do in a certain way right now right in front of us and even under those conditions you get people who can do things so that data alone for a lot of scientists who

haven’t worked with exceptional subjects I can see how they would would be interested but not really convinced and that’s where I was up until 1985 because 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 a research program and I got the top-secret briefing this is what they

would tell to people who are read on to the project and just from the the slides I remember I was blown away because I was seeing what at the time were highly classified examples of remote viewing many of those are now public domain so that was part of it and I was thinking Holy Smoke this this is the kind of thing that is being briefed at the top echelon of government and the military with some details that are not yet public like these are real missions

these are practical applications but 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 as 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 is that 1985 when when I was on that program at the time the 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 we’re 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 and a point of view of working on a secret program you don’t want people to know that this is possible because it it reduces the

effectiveness of the method as a tool now that it is public domain of 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 taking training courses here and there that this is a real phenomenon in some cases for talented people it could be used 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 would real yeah in terms of remote viewing I know that major ed Dame’s has made predictions that Obama will be the last US president 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 there’s going to be another election I want to hold his feet 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 let’s say some kind of information field or something that might be involved with SIA bilities then is there any sort of morality to sigh for example if someone used 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 sort of you know difference in

that regard I don’t think so I think we’re talking about a 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 and you look in in 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 but the same skills are there and I think that is probably the case dr. rignot you know I I find this the this very intriguing and I’d like to talk more about what you saw during this this top-secret experiment more of it later but do you feel like this is part R of our evolutionary biology is this where the next level of human is is headed by sort of understanding this using it I think it’s actually been around from the very

beginning in other words we’re not creating magic along the way we’re not making some something new if anything weird evolving away from what used to be a natural phenomenon or more readily available phenomenon a 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 where you find that very advanced meditators show and hibbett

inhibition of the frontal lobes and they also show a higher degree of spontaneous psychic experience and mystical experience the other thing is that a lot of the training involved in various forms of psychic effects 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 order certain psychedelics you people

invariably get better so from that perspective then I see an 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 and 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 you know the reason the reason I appreciate your answer and the reason that I ask is because I wonder for the people listening how does this a affect a person in their everyday existence I mean how does being able to affect the consequence of a random number generator you know how does that affect me how I mean how can i how can I use this for my benefit in my everyday

life most of us don’t need these abilities for everyday life at least most of us who live and work in a Western world where many of the things that used to kill us pretty readily don’t do that anymore because it’s relatively safe if you live in a war zone or you live in a place with enormous amounts of uncertainty then it can be useful because you get a you can get a glimpse of what’s about to happen so in thinking about the experiments like random number

generators and the ganzfeld telepathy experiment and all those sorts of things all of those are artificial constructs they’re designed very specifically to look for is this phenomena possible in principle and as an artificial construct as all experiments are it’s not really designed to say well what can we use this for we’re welcome what more can we learn about the nature of ourselves based on this kind of experiment there are tools specific kinds of tools to

allow us to probe the nature of these phenomena when it comes to what do we do that that then we can talk insightly different terms well 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 he knew who was calling before he looked at caller ID and that sort of thing so these are not typically life-and-death instances but they’re the

reminders that the phenomena are always there just to slightly below the level of awareness for most people and the folks that we call psychics or ones where it’s not quite as deep in the unconscious it’s more readily available dr. Raiden Misha again you know you about intuition and intuition is a loaded word because it’s generally understood to mean something that’s you know helping you make good decisions or have something 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 well the conventional explanation for intuition is forgotten knowledge like you you learn something at some point and then you don’t remember that you know that and the classic case is 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 wire 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 saved 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 maybe then it’s 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 so one time I had a dream where I was in a car accident and the airbags inflated and there was a lot of dust inside the car and broken glass and things of that sort so I woke up in the morning and was kind of disturbed by this dream because it didn’t seem to match anything I had seen during the day

or anything really and as a result I decided I was gonna drive to work a way that I knew was a little bit safer because it had traffic lights and was more controlled traffic pattern so I go to I get up to one of the traffic lights and I’m just sitting there waiting for the light to turn and then bang I get rear-ended by the car behind me well he was texting and 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 that 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 but I found well that’s interesting here’s something that 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 chance probability for such an event but this is from a skeptical perspective you’d say well there’s seven or eight billion people and there’s a lot of Dreams every night and some of them are going to come true all of which is true that’s why we go to the laboratory where we know exactly what a chance outcome is and because of those tests we know that in principle occasionally you can have actual

information from a future event that impinges on your present right yeah as far as the firefighters you mentioned the the the subtle clues like the different sounds and everything else and I guess I was more talking about an area where the person would have no expertise at all but to change gears a little bit in the historical literature mm-hmm gut feeling or intuition has had well has been associated with various body centers

heart stomach the gut etc regardless of the 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 your experiments with the skin conductivity and so forth do you have any thoughts on the body being psychic more so than the the thinking and the brain being psychic I think that the the body is probably

identical or almost identical to what we normally think of as the unconscious mind it’s all connected and maybe one of the reasons why when there are transplants that sometimes people take on the characteristics of the organ that was transplanted into them it’s kind of a cellular memory so it’s not clear to me then that just because you have strange gut feelings that it’s literally the belly brain that’s trying to get your attention you have maybe

more that the belly brain and your unconscious are one in the same thing slightly different ways of expressing itself we’re talking about it perhaps but that that I don’t make a strong distinction then between mind and body in fact one of the ways you can see this is and the the yogic tradition for example that after a while you get extremely good control over your autonomic nervous system in which case well how does that happen the whole

point of calling it autonomic is that it’s supposedly automatic it doesn’t need conscious control but we know with biofeedback or meditation training you can get incredible control all the way down to the single cells in your body so this is maybe a clue as to why advanced practices like meditation that people become or apparently become more psychically attuned simply because they can reach down deeper into the unconscious because I think that’s where

the vast majority of this information is lurking all the time hmm dr. Aden I mean that’s an interesting threaded and I you know I really want to bring up technology’s effect on research and and what you think about how the global connectivity that we all have through the internet and I mean how does that affect these these abilities that we have and this global consciousness and being able to communicate almost instantly with a person across the world

well in many ways technology is allowing us to do what could only be done through psychic means in the 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 you don’t need to Leppa the– if you have telephones and so on so from that perspective you can you imagine that and in the future all of these phenomena will have some technological underpinning to them but

of course be very different at that point and what we’re talking about which is purely mind based phenomena so you may have seen in the news that Mark Zuckerberg was talking about the future of Facebook as being telepathy of course what he means is brain based telepathy brain computer interface work and that’s probably feasible at some point that’ll probably be it’ll 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 psy phenomena are real it’s a strong argument that mind and brain are not identical and of course when neuroscience perspective that’s that’s anathema and from a neuroscience perspective the brain is the mind I think that’s probably not the case there certainly are strong correlates with mind like effects but I don’t think they’re the same thing in your experience do you feel that some

some people more than others have a proclivity or genetic sort of advantage in and have expressed stronger abilities than then others have you have you ever seen this oh absolutely no 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 schizotypy which is the

scale at one end you’re full-blown schizophrenic and the other blunt other end you’re completely not and also with a personality trait of openness how open are you to new experience and a number of other traits as well so you if you simply do surveys about people’s professions people’s beliefs you very quickly segregate people in two types of people who have these experiences and people who have the experiences tend to do a lot better

in actual control tests 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 they’re they’re going to be people at the far right of that curve dr. Raiden I’m assuming that some of these psy abilities can be trained which one of them you know like I don’t know seeing the future or reading other people’s thoughts that’s I don’t know

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 well maybe you’ll end up being a little bit better at telepathy than you might be a precognition if you find somebody who’s really really lucky in the casino well maybe they’re better at

precognition than telepathy and so on it’s not clear to me that somebody’s going to be the equivalent of a polymath in this domain although I imagine there there could be a small percentage of highly talented people that might fit that classification the other thing about training though is that if you imagine that we’re talking about a normal curve then by analogy everyone can learn to play golf a little bit but not everyone’s going to become a pro and

not everybody’s going to win the competitions either so you need both high talent very high talent and a huge amount of practice they actually get any better I understand what you’re saying but you know you mentioned being briefed on a secret program and everything and so that sort of implies that we all may have abilities greater than we are aware of and you know I know that you’re 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 non information do you think he was ahead of his time do you think that an information field or maybe a universal consciousness is behind these amazing amazing people that sometimes show these abilities in the lab and in in everyday life well first of all on the secret program there were a very limited number of highly talented people so there was 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 no one so the underlying question though is well where did these exceptional people get the information from and there you’ll probably get as many different answers from the individuals as you ask them they all have different concepts as a general overarching story it’s something like

the perennial philosophy that there simply is that that we have the 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 and so on like a classical physical perspective of the world that’s what common sense tells us that’s what the vast majority people accept unquestioning you go into modern physics and suddenly you start to see that all of those assumptions are actually wrong

that we’re talking about relationships between what looks like fundamental effects we’re talking about the core assumptions like reality locality and causality none of which are true in quantum mechanics and so a philosopher would say that common sense leads to a notion of naive reality you know we walk around as of what we’re seeing is literally all there is physics and science have repeatedly told us that that’s not all there is we’re seeing a

very thin slice of reality and the deeper we go into the fundamentals the stranger and stranger begins to look if you go deep enough it begins to look like it’s a holistic fully interconnected something or other that transcends space time and so if human experience can can kind of grasp that directly and maybe there’s an Akashic record and maybe there isn’t but at minimum it means that some aspect of your experience can access literally anything in space and

time well that’s what people talk about when they mentioned psychic or mystical experience the difference between the two is that psychic experience is almost as though you can tap into what is actually already there you’re not going anywhere to get it you are already embedded and a completely holistic or if you wish a holographic medium that contains all information throughout space and time and you pull that information back and you experience it

as a sense whereas a mystical experience is you don’t pull it apart you just feel like you are the hologram you are the matrix or though a 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 experience is usually just called ineffable something happened it transformed me but I can’t talk about it so that that’s why I may have gone beyond your original question

but that’s that’s the riff I usually have on that topic I’m I’m really thoroughly enjoying this conversation and what we’re discussing doctor right now I’d been sort of biting might I really want to know more about this secret project that you were working on and you know how how did you sort of get inducted into this group well first of all there’s two parts to it people like ed Dame’s and a number of other people who are now known for a remote viewing

we’re part of the operational mission in the in the US Army so they weren’t 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 or 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 phenomena do we need to worry about the Chinese or the Russians or somebody else who might be using this is it a threat the second part is if you think that the phenomena is real how can you enhance it what can we learn from it how do we shield it how do we block it and so on those kinds of things so as as far as 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 that we did maybe the Chinese too but we didn’t know we did know through defecting scientists and through articles that have been retrieved that the nature of the research was slightly different than what we were up to but that they didn’t know any more than we did so that was comforting we were convinced by the data that there was a real phenomena going on wasn’t as robust or repeatable as we would have liked but

nevertheless it was real and it was useful so we had very good reasons to believe that the Russians and maybe some other country has had a similar program so 20 years later when there was a date aunt not only between our two countries but also between the two programs and it turned out that indeed there was a program in the Soviet Union which was much much bigger than the one in the United States so there’s a very good recent book on this topic by EDA and a

few other authors it was the director of the Stargate program for about ten years and so he describes the US side and the Russian side both sides of the Iron Curtain at the time and what both sides were doing and so what used to be top-secret in the US and top-secret in Russia are now both in the pages of this book so what we don’t know still today is what is happening in China which is in probably India incident number of other countries I do know that

other countries track research in this area not so much because they’re actively doing something but they’re tracking it for the same reasons we did back in the 1980s we want to see how it looking at this as a kind of a technology is there something to worry about is somebody going to get way ahead of what we understand and that kind of thing so I know that that that kind of survey is still going on dr. Raiden since you mentioned different countries

one of the things I’ve noticed is that people in different parts of the world can recognize named differently for example if you ask someone in the US about Edgar Cayce they’ll know who that is but if you asked them about vaanga from Bulgaria or wolf messing from Poland they have no idea who you’re talking about I’m assuming you’ve heard of those latter two names in your field do you have any comments about the way that people understand this phenomenon

between the countries and sort of the superstars that seem to pop up from time to time yeah well it makes sense that there’s going to be cultural differences and also in language differences as well the the Russian side was always a lot closer to what we would call shamanism than in the u.s. the US has probably more traditional religious notions about these kinds of effects but there and of course the the Far East as their own

versions of Qi Gong and prana and the concepts like that so those put overlays on the nature of the phenomena but when you actually analyze what do you mean what what what are you talking about in terms of the experiences that people talk about or feel they all fall into basically the same kind of taxonomy and you find that even if you go back into the ancient yoga literature which is I’m referring to my book supernormal where I did this you find that people

were talking about these same phenomena 2,000 years ago and probably well before that so the basic phenomena are probably the same they get described differently and some distortions based on language and the history of each individual culture but I think they’re all the same hmm I’m very intriguing I you know dr. Reid night I find your answers very to the point and you have very eloquent way of explaining them you you say that

meditation is important to you and is there a spiritual benefit in your opinion to meditation or practicing these abilities well let me back up to the beginning of your question which is why what should we do with this and so imagine that you were to ask Benjamin Franklin why are you falling out with these with these little sparks and the kite flying and all that what what are you doing well the answer is he was curious hey here’s here’s something that looks

like a spark and maybe it’s 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’d have multi gigawatt power grids around the world but I doubt it you don’t need to even look that that long ago two people are developing the first computers who are thinking that why would anybody need more than a mainframe

for anything so we have very limited foresight even in a realm where we’re studying precognition it’s very difficult to know eventually what this is going to turn into the best we have are stories that we hear about from from science fiction and fairy tales but even those are pretty well constrained you do occasionally find a science fiction story that correctly anticipates something about future but most of the time it’s future technology and so here

we’re talking about something which is way more fundamental than simply a technological advancement so for example we go back to 1900 when Lord Kelvin otherwise known as Sir William Thompson gave a talk to the Royal Society about the state of physics and he said more or less that the physics is pretty well wrapped up except for two clouds and by the two clouds that he was talking about we’re 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 a luminous ether those were the two unsolved mysteries well one turned into relativity and the other turned into quantum mechanics so from 1900 to the beginning of the 21st century that span of a hundred years if you had talked to physicists at the beginning of the 20th century they would

have no idea at all about what was about to happen I mean they were in the midst of the Industrial Age where everything was thought to be totally modern and up-to-date and basically finished and the world completely changed because of these two little problems that had not been solved well today we have two little problems that haven’t been solved one is called qualia and the other ones called quanta so qualia refers to inner experience the sense of awareness and

quanta refers to the quantum measurement problem namely that somehow the physical world seems to respond to measurement some weird way so a lot of physicists was saying well 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 I really want

to be able to imagine a future in which we are actively using telepathy to communicate I mean is this is this something in the realm of of your imagination as as well I mean you you are a scientist and and you’ve kind of lived this and and this is your career so well if we are lucky enough to survive as a species given the accumulating apocalyptic scenarios the phases now 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 and our understanding about who we are our relationship to the universe how it all works and that sort of thing if you imagine at this point that we suddenly have the magic pill and can make everybody telepathic that would probably destroy the world pretty quickly and you can see this in fiction through stories or movies like Forbidden Planet that we simply don’t have the

capacity yet to have good control over our woman’s and desires and our society and our laws and virtually every piece of the way that we interact with each other assumes privacy and and also assumes responsibility for your actions well if you now are living in a hive mind you know how this is portrayed in fiction it’s the Borg it’s the invasion of the Body Snatchers it’s every alien invasion where you get absorbed into the into the grand mind this is always

presented as horrific and I think the reason is that it’s partially an American thing that we like to imagine where the the rugged independent cowboy but the reality is that were already extremely dependent on each other and the level of dependency would go up to such a higher degree that most of the engine of society would have to change it would change quickly you can’t have you can’t have for example a huge difference or the huge disparity and

people who have an enormous amount versus people who don’t have an enormous amount because part of the issue about becoming telepathic is that you feel other people’s pain so if you’re a billionaire and you’re walking past people who are starving on the streets that can’t happen and so of it if that’s going to go away how does it go away there has to be a gigantic redistribution of wealth there’s you can just spin out pretty pretty quickly

that the way that society is now will collapse very fast and that’s dangerous you don’t want things to collapse you want them to collapse collapse and in a graceful way and if slowly in a way so that it’s under control because otherwise who knows how it’s gonna build itself back up and this of course is another storyline and lots of science-fiction on the way that post-apocalyptic societies will rebuild themselves there are many different ways

of doing that so dart sorry so my hope is that when when we get closer to technologies and pharmaceuticals and other kinds of methods that can enhance psychic experience because I think we’re headed in that direction that a lot of attention is paid to the unintended consequences of it and so one possibility is that it will create secret cabal’s of super psychics who it which is himself is extremely dangerous because they could take over the world

pretty quickly and that yet another science fiction scenario it might if we’re very lucky and leaders pay attention to this it could be a way of slowly introducing these kinds of concepts and a case can be made without too much conspiratorial thinking that one of the reasons that there are movies about these scenarios is to find a remind the population that what if we were able to do this by movies like Lucy for example or limitless or kind of

pushing in that direction and the reason why I like both of those pictures is that although there is a lot of action in it and so on they were very different than a lot of the previous films all of which devolved very quickly into horror well Lucy didn’t evolve into horror and nor did limitless they have 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 no this is actually part of human potential and human evolution and there are positive aspects to it as well dr. Reid and in in some of the documentaries like DMT the spirit molecule I think it was Dennis McKenna was talking about how during some of the shamanic experiences they feel that they talked to various intelligences or get get pieces of information and you know you just mentioned the idea of plant or chemical

substances enhancing psychic ability and mmm one of the things that’s always I always wanted to ask dr. McKenna or his brother is you know if if a person were to get a piece of information in an altered state is there any way that that could be verified I guess that’s kind of a complicated 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 substantive way that

could be measured in the laboratory and that sort of thing I’ve spoken to researchers who had medical schools who are studying substances like psilocybin and DMT and they’re very interested in the same question because they’re subjects involved in the experiments talk about it all the time minimum they talk about telepathy is just overwhelmingly strong so we’ve talked about how do you do an experiment with somebody in these in these states

where we you have the same level of control as you would if in a laboratory where you know what chance is and you get people to do these somewhat artificial tasks and at this point we don’t know how to do it because one of the things that happens in an extreme altered states of awareness is that people don’t want to play anymore so I know from my own experience that if you’re intoxicated enough depending on the substance when somebody presents you

with a task now I want you to do this and this and that and that internally you’re thinking that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of why in the world would I want to do that I don’t want to do that now I want to enjoy the experience so the the closest we’ve come to thinking about how to do is to work with participants who have extensive experience for example with psilocybin so they know what the experience is like they are comfortable

with it and they can still do tasks and so there’s the possibility and still in the future of doing experiments like a presentment experiment where they don’t have to cognitively do anything we’re just monitoring their body and watching what happens there’s the possibility opening for experiments that can be verified the 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

ESP people doing psychedelic research don’t want to mix it with SCI even though there’s probably an overlap it’s simply too too sensitive to do that so we keep things separate for the sake of keeping the science clean well we are certainly covering some very intriguing material tonight and we are approaching the end here dr. Aden but I would like to ask you if you know if there if there was anything and you’ve been doing this for a while and you have you’ve learned

a lot and you know is there anything that you would tell your younger self to be aware of or anything that you would go back and kind of tell yourself yeah I would tell myself in graduate school to take courses in the sociology of science and probably the philosophy of science as well because it was a rude awakening for me after had gotten into this field and was working at it for a while to see that the aspiration of science as a

rational Enterprise is simply not true academic freedom isn’t true the idea that scientists will evaluate data rationally is not true all of those stories that we hear about the way that science is different from religion is different from politics and all that it’s simply not true science is another human activity and it has the same frailties as every every other kind of active 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 an enormous ly efficient block for things that don’t happen to fit to prevailing viewpoints so for many respects it’s amazing that science has done as well as it has and unfortunately as science becomes more and more of a career rather than a matter of expressing your curiosity people find it 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 professor’s all over the place who are just anxious to tell me about their interests and psychic phenomena and sometimes their experiences and then the end of every conversation is the same don’t tell anybody did I spoke to you don’t tell anybody that I did this experiment and I haven’t

published it and I’m not going to and publish it even though it turned out good because there is a taboo the taboo is you don’t it’s like Fight Club first rule is you don’t talk about it second rule in the third rule they’re all the same rule don’t talk about this because it’s damaging or you’re standing in your career so I would warn myself as a fledgling scientist to simply be aware that it carries a certain amount of risk whenever you you start pushing against

the prevailing viewpoint and I don’t think I would have done anything different because 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 in any other condition you’d consider to be very smart very accommodating very tolerant and completely insane when it comes to topics like this you know dr.

Reid and I can totally understand your frustration as a scientist I got a little bit bored doing molecular biology experiments and I’m off on a different direction right now I think that curiosity you mentioned is so key I mean you mentioned moving on from wondering if sigh effects are real and now wondering how their work 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 it’s they cannot be blocked by a Faraday cage they I think there was an experiment where they’re not blocked at the bottom of the ocean you know and it’s just totally amazing so I think your work is really it’s really cool and so what encourages me about all this is that if you were to segregate scientists by their age the younger the scientist is the more open they are about their interest and the

more willing they are to come out of the closet so to speak that’s a very encouraging sign and this essentially is how science has progressed that the you know science progresses by funerals as Max Planck said and in this case the evidence continues to compound the empirical evidence keeps compounding and gets better and better with time eventually with when people find better and better ways of presenting the evidence even with explanations that are not

completely correct but sound plausible that we don’t longer have to deal with the baggage of older scientists because they’re going to go away eventually and younger scientists of course that are immediately going to be attracted to these topics so the older I get the more important it is for what I can offer 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 and a site like frontiers we get tens of thousands of downloads well we don’t know what ages are doing the downloading but just statistically a lot of more young people are living on the Internet and older people so it’s a it’s a good bet that a lot of the interest is from younger folks and that’s that’s very encouraging well doctor reading you are one of the men who stared photons apparently and I really do appreciate your time sir me

should you do you have anything on closing here with our guest yeah I have one small question doctor reading you’ve done these experiments where people effect random number generators just real quick if is there an effect where if 10 people are folks focusing their attention or 100 people are focusing their attention it’ll be different than one person trying to show something in a laboratory well unfortunately we’re not dealing with the

linear effect the the the best metaphor I can think of is something like a soap bubble that if you you have a one person who is trying to balance a soap bubble they can do a certain degree and if you have two people helping that doesn’t necessarily help because they may not be handling it in the same way and you can burst it if you have 10 people all trying to do it at the same time it could burst real fast so the important ingredient that seems to help is

coherence among people and that does occur occasionally when it occurs people know it instantly there’s some kind of 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 demand but when that happens experiments like field consciousness experiments do show that randomness begins to respond very quickly it goes it basically starts to become patterned so that so it’s not a

it’s a nonlinear effect and the moment you get into non-linearity it’s a much more complicated answer than simply ten is better than one hmm Wow very powerful episode here dr. Aden where can people find your work what is what is the next step for you well two sites one is noetic org which is the Institute of noetic Sciences website my own website is Dean Radin comm the sites for testing your abilities include got cyborg and cyber Cade comm together

they’ve collected a half a billion trials from about a half a million people and we’re in the in the midst of creating a smartphone version of those tests that we call psych you which is an by analogy to IQ we’re 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 just want to thank my guest and Misha thank you we are gonna

get out of here we will see you guys next week