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June 3, 1998 - Art Bell
41:29
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Charles Tart - Life After Death (start of interview)
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The first holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is internationally known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness, particularly altered states of consciousness, as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, and for his research in parapsychology.
His two classic books, Altered states of consciousness and transpersonal psychologies were widely used texts that were instrumental in allowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.
Now listen to this.
Dr. Tartt was born in 1937.
He grew up in Trenton, New Jersey.
Active in ham radio as K2-CFP.
Worked as a radio engineer.
First class radio telephone license while still a teen.
Studied electrical engineering at MIT Before deciding to become a psychologist in order to
prepare for research in parapsychology and consciousness He was one of the founders of the student
Psychical research society at MIT and he worked as a research assistant in parapsychology for
Doctor I guess in the summer of 1957 whose name I would not try to pronounce
investigating whether electrically shielded enclosures could boost ESP
functioning Wow!
He transferred from MIT to Duke University at the encouragement of the founder, ...of modern parapsychology, Dr. J.B.
Wine.
Now, Dr. Tartt received his doctoral degree in psychology with thesis and dissertation research on influencing nighttime dreams by post-hypnotic suggestion from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
1963, received postdoctoral training in hypnosis research at Stanford.
As well as his current distinguished visiting professor position at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Absolutely goes on and on.
He even, let's see, at Stanford Research Institute, where some of his research was instrumental in influencing policy makers against the deployment of the MX missile system.
Holy moly!
We've got a lot in our backgrounds, Dr. Tartt, that is very, very similar.
Welcome to the program.
It's a pleasure to be here, Art.
I never got to the colleges that you did, but I was a ham at 12, and I had my first class at 13.
And I'm still a ham.
Active, by the way.
Are you?
No, I'm not active anymore.
I've been too busy to have time to talk, unfortunately.
I can see that.
I mean, this is some resume.
I can look at your studio cam and see that hand gear in the background.
It's very impressive.
Oh, you can see the studio cam.
All right, excellent.
So you're on the net, obviously.
And as a matter of fact, I see that you've got a website yourself.
Right, a lot of my scientific articles have now been placed on that website, so people can have free access to them.
Oh boy!
Parapsychology stuff especially, it's hard for most people to get at the original research there, so I really wanted to make that available.
Okay, I'm going to hope that Keith is listening right now, because I don't think we have a link up yet.
Yes, you do.
Oh, we do?
Yep.
Oh, all right.
In that case, great folks, you can go up, click on Dr. Tartt's name, And go directly to his website and read about what you're about to hear about.
So, Doctor, it's hard to know where to start with you.
You have done so many, been in so many interesting areas.
Altered states of consciousness.
I think that might be a really good place to start.
Just before the interview tonight, I do very little pre-interview of anybody ever.
We were talking about Something I did on the island of Okinawa as a stunt.
The radio station there decided they would have a marathon.
A disc jockey marathon.
And I was on the air for 115... About 115 hours and 15 minutes consecutively.
That's a long time.
Yes it is.
They had doctors and nurses checking me over and that sort of thing.
From Monday through Saturday.
And the only way I was allowed to keep myself awake was to either drink coffee until the doctor said my heart was racing too quick, or to, um, I got cold, you know, cans of frozen orange juice and I would hold those up to my carotid artery.
But the bottom line here is that about three quarters of the way through this, uh, this stupid stunt, I began to be elsewhere for periods of time.
And when I say I was elsewhere, I mean it was as real as everything that's around me right now.
I could touch things, feel things, talk to people, and it was in a completely different place.
I was gone.
I was in a... I don't know where I was.
I was in a different... it was like a different time.
Yeah.
What was happening to me?
Well, you know, a couple of days of sleep deprivation, most of us can handle it, we
feel sleepy, you know, but our consciousness pretty much remains intact.
But you get up to that third day or so, and it gets real hard not to fall asleep, okay?
I've done about three consecutive days at a time as part of some consciousness training
I was in.
So I would remember by about the third time, you know, if I wasn't actively talking or
moving or doing something, if I was just sort of sitting still, it would seem like less
than a second, you know, my eyes would close and I'd be off in another world.
Boom!
Just like that.
Just like your experience, you know, that old dream process that at least would just create another world instantly.
Was that... In other words, I... To the people that were watching me, I wasn't gone and I wasn't asleep.
Now, was I having a conscious dream?
Was my brain taking some kind of protective action?
What's your best guess?
Well, you'll like this analogy, Art.
When I've thought about what altered states of consciousness are,
the best analogy I've come up with is that our mind creates a virtual reality.
The old bio-computer in there is constantly creating a virtual reality.
We're in it right now, except it's heavily tied to what's coming in through our senses.
So the virtual reality that we actually experience is a real good replica of the everyday world.
When you go to sleep and you have a dream, that same virtual reality process creates a world that seems real while you're in the dream, but it doesn't have to deal with sensory input.
Now normally, you know, you have to go to sleep, you know, and it happens roughly every 90 minutes and so forth, but you get real fatigued like that, it can only take a second or two for your brain to go into a state where the virtual reality process creates a dream world instead of Thinking in with the ordinary world how long does a dream
take?
In other words that when I have my dream. I'm dreaming Boy, it could be
Long seems like long periods of time because I'm very involved in doing what I'm doing and a lot of time in the
dream passes In fact, how quickly do those dreams occur?
Well, you know, for about 100 years, everybody believed that dreams happened at a tremendously accelerated time-space.
And it's funny when you look back on it, because it all sort of came down to one report written by an 80-year-old man about a dream he'd had 50 years before that seemed to happen very fast, but somehow was what people wanted to believe.
What we now know, there's a specific brainwave pattern that happens that's associated with dreaming, right?
I don't want to say that is dreaming, but if you wake people from this brainwave pattern, about 90% of the time you get a dream report.
And time runs in that dream state, it's called stage one rapid eye movement period.
Time runs at about the same rate as it runs in ordinary life.
It does?
Yes.
So then how long would somebody who had a pretty wild dream, In real time, seem to be in that dream.
Well, if you look at these stage one rapid eye movement brainwave periods, they happen roughly every 90 minutes after you fall asleep.
The first one may be five to 10 minutes.
They get progressively longer to the last one, maybe 30 or 40 minutes, something like that.
Sometimes people feel as if the dream took a lot longer, but if you try to get a very specific description from them of exactly what they experienced and acted it out, You'll probably find it was about the length of that stage one period, but there were gaps in there where they feel like a long time passed, but they can't actually recall any specific period.
Well, can you give me an actual time?
In other words, is there even an average?
In a measured dream, a REM state, a dream would last roughly how long?
Uh, again, it depends on the time of the night.
You know, 5 to 10 minutes for that first one that starts 90 minutes in, but by the last one of the night, it may last 30 to 40 minutes.
So you could have a good, long dream.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Now, there's actually been some very special research to calibrate the time even more precisely.
There's another altered state of consciousness called lucid dreaming.
When I describe it, I bet a lot of listeners will realize it.
Okay, before we leave, though, before we leave the actual measurement of this crevice state, How are you able to discern that a person is actually dreaming during the entire measured REM period?
You can only make a sort of probabilistic connection here.
What it comes down to is you measure a person's brainwaves all through the night.
You find a certain brainwave state, it's called Stage 1, is also accompanied by rapid eye movement.
If you wake people up during that Stage 1 rapid eye movement period, You get reports, I was dreaming 80-90% of the time.
Okay, but here's what I would ask.
How do you know that you're not interrupting them during the third or fourth dream in that particular period?
Oh, you know you're interrupting them and in fact sometimes they will have several psychological dream episodes within that same brainwave state.
Ah.
And they're often punctuated by some body movement.
A person will be in this dreaming state, they'll roll over, they'll be back in the dreaming state.
If you wake them up right away, you're liable to find a second dream theme has just started
after the first one's completed. Ah.
Yeah, you can get some pretty precise measures here. This was a real breakthrough in dreams,
you know. When I was in graduate school back in the 60s, my advisors didn't really want me to do
research on dreams because dreams were subjective and hard to study and not real and all that.
I even read a book by an English philosopher who proved logically that dreams didn't exist.
Well, I have had nightmares about it all night long.
I've had people on the air with me who claim to be able to interpret dreams.
And I've always been suspicious of that.
It's kind of like palm reading or something.
But in your opinion, your professional opinion, do dreams have meaning that it might be important for a person to understand?
Well, you really have to break that down into two questions, Art.
I mean, you know, because otherwise you're asking, does life have meaning?
You know, I mean, anything that happens to you, whether you're awake or asleep, that you have some experience, if you work it over enough, you can connect it with other things in your life and find some meaning.
So, listen, sure, you know, having you recount your dream might reveal as much as having you recount how you went through breakfast.
The real question is, are dreams richer in meaning than everyday life episodes?
I think the answer is that some of them are, and a lot of them aren't.
You know, some dreams would really bear interpretation, but that's a very personal thing.
It's not like there's a code book that you can apply in any standard way.
And other dreams, you know, probably wouldn't be particularly revealing of anything about life.
Just random... Yeah, just sort of random thoughts.
Indecipherable.
How about...
A nightmare versus, lately I've been having funny dreams.
I've actually been having funny dreams for a change.
You can wake up laughing.
Oh yeah!
But what would cause a nightmare versus say a good dream or a funny dream or a flying dream or a cool dream?
If you want to talk about the content of dreams, you can only answer that question in terms of a particular individual and their particular mind.
We don't like it that way.
We want the universal code book, you know, where if you dream about a cat it means so-and-so.
But research has shown pretty conclusively there's no universal symbolism like that.
So then dream interpreters you're not a fan?
It's part of an ongoing psychological process with someone where they work out what a dream means to them.
That's great.
But in terms of I tell somebody who's a guest on the radio about a dream and they tell me what that means.
That's real pop psychology.
I wouldn't put my feet in it.
I thought not.
You've been in the area of parapsychology and that is of great intense interest to me as well.
Can you make any definitive statements with regard to a person's ability to Read minds, engage in telepathy, or, even more interestingly, move or affect a physical object with their mind.
Well, when I try to give, you know, the one-minute summary of a hundred years of research, I say there are five phenomena which are proven beyond any reasonable doubt now.
And I am saying anybody who disagrees with me as being unreasonable, frankly.
Okay.
And this doesn't mean you can do them at will or every time you want it, but it happens enough that people can read minds.
Yes, telepathy, that's one of the big five.
Second is clairvoyance, knowing what the state of the physical world is.
That happens sometimes.
Uh, yeah.
The typical test for those, to use the old-fashioned standard, if somebody's looking at a deck of cards and trying to send them, and you're getting correctly, telepathy.
If nobody's looking at the deck of cards, and the information isn't in anybody's mind, but you guessed more than you should by chance, now we've got clairvoyance.
Okay.
You ask somebody, tell me what this deck of cards will be like after I shuffle it 50 times, Uh, your precognition, you're predicting the future.
Right.
Those are the three kinds of extrasensory perception.
Well, there are hundreds of experiments supporting the existence of each of these things.
Of course, you know, as people, we don't just take in information, we affect the world also.
So you have the equivalent of motor actions, which is psychokinesis, affecting the world, the physical world, just by willing it.
Are you including psychokinesis?
I'm including psychokinesis in the Big Five, yeah.
Wow.
And then I'd also put in healing there, which might be a variation of psychokinesis on biological systems.
We do know that intention can affect biological processes at this point.
Again, dozens to hundreds of experiments supporting each of these things.
Oh, that's quite a statement.
Now, psychokinesis, actually moving something, have you observed this?
Yes, I've seen some dramatic sorts of things, but mainly I rely not on just my own experience.
I mean, I'm just one person and I could possibly be fooled or make mistakes.
I rely again on dozens to hundreds of experiments.
I understand.
Big-scale psychokinesis is very rare, but sort of statistical psychokinesis is much more common.
You know, the old The test was to have a machine throw dice while you stood over in the corner of the room and the experimenter said, make sixes come up this time.
Yes, but how do you delineate whether this is precognition or actually psychokinesis?
Ah, you set the schedule ahead of time.
Before you start the experiment, we're going to try it for sixes ten times in a row, then fives ten times in a row, and so forth, rather than calling it each time.
Because you're right, it might be a precognition experiment otherwise.
Nobody uses dice anymore, of course.
It's all done with computers nowadays, with electronic random number generators.
Which I find even more interesting.
So do I. I have one here.
Yeah.
I mean, here you've got something, let's say it flashes a green light and a red light, and it's set up with the equivalent of electronic coin flippers, so these things flash on and off, and about 50% of the time, each one lights.
And somebody says, make the green one come on more.
You get effects, you know.
You get, instead of 50%, you get 52, 48 something.
Oh, I'll tell you about the one I've got in a minute.
We're at the bottom of the hour, and we'll be right back.
Dr. Charles Tartt is my guest, and we are going to talk of many things that many people laugh at, but he doesn't.
Telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, the ability to move things with your mind, affect things with your mind, Did you know we have those abilities?
We do.
I wonder if they're newly acquired or very old.
This is Coast to Coast.
All right.
Once again, here is Dr. Charles Tarr.
Doctor, I have something called Shape Changer.
I imagine you know what it is.
It's a software program.
No, I don't know that particular one.
Oh, it's particularly interesting.
Put together by a man who studied at Princeton, in the research they did there.
And it simply offers you, at the top of the screen, about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8 separate photographs.
And you can drag any two of them down that you wish, into a position on the left and right.
Drag one image here, drag the other image there.
And one of them is white noise.
Alright?
Complete and utter white noise.
Just like a television with no antenna on it.
Okay.
And your job is to, in a prescribed amount of time, I can't recall what it is, I think it's two or three minutes, something like that, to cause, um, you'll immediately see the random generation begin, and you will see, um, for example, if you have the moon on the left and the white noise on the right, you'll see a little bit of the moon begin to appear in the white noise, and a little bit of white noise begin to appear in the moon.
And your job is to sit there and concentrate And cause one picture to come solidly to the fore, um, or, if, uh, the other way around, to cause it to go totally to white noise.
Oh, Art, this is very exciting, because I wanted to do some research like that about 20 years ago, and the technology wasn't quite available.
Well, it is now.
I wanted something with massive numbers of random number generators all operating in some kind of parallel circuit, because I think the mind would be more likely to have an effect on that than on something simple.
Now, at the end of the two or three minutes, A score is rendered.
A score from 0 to 100.
And here's what I found, Doctor.
If I would start the program running and just leave the room, go do something else, and come back, the score would inevitably be 13, 15, 17, 20 at the best.
If I sit there and concentrate throughout the entire time period, I can cause the score to consistently be 70, 80, even 90 percent.
Oh, that's excellent.
Now, isn't that amazing?
Yes.
We had this, uh, some people could download it and play with it for a while.
I don't think it's up there right now, but we have this software program.
It is astounding.
It's just astounding.
That means your mind is somehow influencing a microprocessor sitting there generating randomness.
Mm-hmm.
How can we do that?
Art, to me, that is very exciting.
Because, you know, if you ask about what's the mind, the conventional answer people give you today is that it's nothing but the brain.
You know, all your thoughts and hopes and fears, they're all electrochemical processes in your brain.
And the idea that mind is something different, even though it obviously seems like something different, is considered unscientific.
Yes.
But actually, I'm a dualist in that sense.
But a pragmatic or a scientific dualist.
I think mind is something different than the brain.
The reason I say that is because the mind can do things that a brain can't.
Okay?
I know what the electrical signals are like in a brain.
I have my radio and engineering background, and if you want to talk about trying to think of the brain sending out radio waves for telepathy, forget it!
Such a rotten transmitter!
You know, it takes really high-tech equipment and electrodes right on the head to get a decent signal.
Or you could pick it up a meter away if you put a million dollars into a shielded room, but it'll never explain telepathy.
So I think, you know, mind can do things that the brain can't do.
And, sure, we can continue researching the brain.
I mean, that's fascinating, but we've got to figure out what mind is on its own terms.
Well, could it be that science, while it does, of course, receive impulses and electrically measurable impulses from the brain, regarding telepathy is simply not, in effect, listening on the right frequency?
No, I don't think so.
I think about it in terms of power.
Think about it in terms, for instance, if telepathy is electromagnetic, you're going to find some kind of inverse square law, right?
The further you get away from the brain that's transmitting it, the worse your reception is going to get with it.
It should be true, yes.
But there's no indication of that.
The only distance that matters is psychological distance in experiments.
Did you know that Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell did an experiment on the way to the moon?
Oh yes, I know, Ed.
I know about that experiment, yeah.
So there would be no, it seems there is no particular, as you point out, it would become less as the distance would become greater.
Right.
If you believe distance is going to hinder you, that'll probably make you do worse.
But if you don't believe that, there's no effective distance.
You don't get any effective shielding either.
In fact, if anything, there's some suggestion that electrical shielding might make it work better, which makes no sense in terms of radio waves.
Really?
Yeah.
One of the experiments I did, the name you couldn't pronounce when you were reading my background material, I worked when I was a college sophomore, actually, for a man named Andrea Puharik, a physician who'd gotten into parapsychological research.
And so everybody knows why I didn't tackle it.
It's A-N-B-R-I-J-A-P-U-H-A-R-I-C-H.
Right.
Andrea Puharik wouldn't even try it.
And he has found, he stumbled on this accidentally, but when some of his talented psychics were inside a metal box, a Faraday cage as it's called, which should block pretty much any transmission through it, it affected their scores in telepathy experiments.
It didn't make sense electrically.
For instance, he found that if this cage was grounded to earth, it acted as a telepathic amplifier.
People did better.
But when the cage was electrically floating, They didn't do as well, or it knocked it out entirely.
And I've confirmed that in one experiment in my own laboratory.
Wow!
And it makes no sense at all electrically.
I mean, it shouldn't affect the signal that goes through the walls, whether it's grounded or not grounded.
But it works parapsychologically.
And one has to conjecture that there's a connection to the Earth itself.
In other words, you said when electrically grounded... Right, you've got a big copper bus from one corner of this copper room down to a stake in the ground.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
If I can hammer it, yeah.
Sure, sure.
Then what you've got to imagine is it's acting as some sort of antenna.
It's either acting as an antenna or maybe it's changing the way it filters out something that interferes with our ordinary telepathic abilities.
I don't know whether it's affecting the telepathic ability directly or getting rid of an interfering factor.
Question. Telepathic ability, these other abilities, very old things, new things that are on the increase as we
continue to evolve?
Well, I suspect that there is more of it in olden times because you needed it more.
You know, the party of mine needed to keep track of loved ones at a distance.
Now you can call them up on the telephone.
It's all speculation, you know.
We didn't have any tests 100 years ago, 200 years ago.
So you know I've seen lots of arguments arguing it's evolving or it's degenerating but it's all very speculative to me.
Alright, something that I've always wanted to try since I saw the movie Altered States is a sensory deprivation chamber and I would think that in your field of work you would have worked some with sensory deprivation.
What's the deal there?
If you think about it, we're in a state of consciousness right now.
We don't think that.
We think our mind is just normal because we're used to it.
But it's a construction.
It's a virtual reality.
It's got its good points and its bad points.
And so it's an operating system in our minds and it's maintained.
Okay?
And we talked about sleep deprivation earlier.
When you're having a hard time staying awake, one of the things you could do would be to get up and walk around.
Right.
You know, and you would see a lot of different things and touch things.
You'd get all that muscular sensation from your body moving around.
Sure.
Our ordinary state of consciousness is maintained by these familiar patterns of inputs from our body and from the world.
Okay?
So, you put somebody in sensory deprivation, what you're basically doing is taking away a lot of that stabilizing.
This is all covered in my theory of states of consciousness in a book called States of Consciousness.
So what it amounts to is in a sensory deprivation chamber, first off, it's completely dark, so there goes your sight.
Secondly, it's sound attenuated, particularly if you're floating in salt water.
You get about 70 decibels of attenuation just by having your ears immersed in it.
I mean salty water art.
So a little Wow.
Right.
So no effort whatsoever.
to float you in six inches deep. They put something like seven or eight hundred pounds
of Epsom salt in there to run the gravity up so you'll float right. So you gotta float
high, you know. So no effort whatsoever? No effort, right.
I mean if the water starts coming in your mouth it's hard to relax. That's right. And
obviously you don't want to have any open cuts in your body.
So it's like a return to override.
It's like a return to the womb.
Yeah, and it's body temperature water.
Now, it's still essential that you lie absolutely still, okay?
Anytime you move, you break the whole thing.
Because the interesting thing about our body senses that tell us about muscle tension and position and all that, is they're really designed to respond to change.
And if you lay still, relaxed for a long period of time, those receptors that send that information to your brain literally stop firing.
As far as your brain is concerned, your body can literally disappear.
Blood is a major source of stabilizing.
You can think of these as negative feedback loops, an analogy with transmitters that normally keep the circuit stable in constructing your state of consciousness.
So you get rid of the feedback.
Then, Assuming your mind is not, you know, generating ordinary fantasy at such a tremendous rate to stabilize itself, you have the possibility of going into an altered state of consciousness.
So the thinking deprivation tanks can be real powerful when used the right way.
Um, does it take somebody very, uh, uh, first of all, I've got all kinds of questions about this.
Like, for example, of those who volunteer for these kinds of experiments, how many are screaming and yelling, get me the hell out of here?
Well, that depends on what kind of psychological set they're giving, okay?
See, it's not just cutting down the sensory stimulation, it's the belief you take into it, the psychological set you take.
I'll tell you about a very funny experiment, okay?
People long ago decided that it was this taking stimuli away from the brain that caused the mind to go into altered states of consciousness, and particularly a psychotic-like state.
Because that was the original use for this, to see if you could make people temporarily psychotic and still learn something about psychosis.
Really?
Yeah.
I had no idea that was the original idea.
Oh yeah, that was the original idea.
Particularly because situations where people were... Well, people like you, DJs, who stayed up for long hours, started acting psychotic after five or six days.
So people thought, you know, you can take ordinary people and under extreme enough conditions, make them go psychotic, Yeah.
And since you know what they're like normally, maybe you could understand how psychosis develops better.
So here instead of, you know, keeping somebody up for five or six days, you took away all their sensory stimulation.
But it turns out people go psychotic if they believe that's what's going to happen.
So it's set in setting?
It's set in setting, right.
A guy named Sheeb once did a beautiful experiment on this where he didn't actually put people in sensory deprivation.
He just had them sit in a windowless room with the lights on for a couple of hours.
You know, and it wasn't soundproof.
You can hear the sound of people walking in the halls and all that sort of thing.
But one set of people, before they went in there, he met them, dressed casually, told them he was a graduate student and he had to have people sit in this room for a couple of hours and interview them afterwards as to what it was like.
Right.
And he mentioned also there was a button on the wall they could push if they couldn't take it, but nobody pushed it.
You know, and the interview showed that they were bored.
But in the other condition, when people would come in, he'd be wearing a suit and white lab coat and introduced himself as Dr. Sheeb, the psychiatrist.
Right.
I see the plot's thickening, because we know what psychiatrist that is.
I know, yes.
He then did a standard psychiatric interview intake for him.
The kind of things that says whether you need to be committed or not?
Yes, there was a tray of hypodermic syringes labeled emergency tray in the background.
He didn't say anything about it, but it was there.
He told them it was an experiment in sensory deprivation.
He had them sign a three-page legal release form, releasing himself, his supervisors,
the Massachusetts General Hospital of the state of Massachusetts, the National Institute
of Mental Health, the United States government, and any and all consequences resulted from
participating in this experiment.
How many people got up and walked out at that point?
A lot of people pushed the panic button.
And most of them reported all the classic symptoms that have been attributed to sensory deprivation.
I mean, he showed that the psychological setting that people took in was just as or more important than actually taking away sensory stimuli from people.
You know, I would think that our government, God bless our government, would be intensely interested in this sort of experiment in this sort of psychology in terms of for
example being able to get information from somebody without doing physical violence
upon them. What do you say?
You think psychological violence is more acceptable than physical violence?
Well, I know, I'm not making a falsification. I simply said, glean information without doing physical violence.
Yeah.
Oh sure, you can do that to some extent.
But that means, you know, you've got somebody under your control and can do all sorts of terrible things to them.
You know, when the ordinary person voluntarily gets in a flotation tank because they think it'll help them understand themselves better or something like that, it's a whole different experience than if somebody is forcing you into something like that.
And of course, if somebody forces you into an isolation tank, All you have to do is move every few minutes and your body won't fade away and you'll be able to keep your ordinary state of consciousness quite easily.
POWs sound that they were able to stay quite sane by mind exercises and little things that they would do repetitively over the years.
Right, physical exercises, yeah.
Yeah, kept them together.
So I'm sure that is true, but I would imagine the possible negative uses would be many, and knowing our government, any government really, they've got to be doing a lot in that area.
Oh yeah.
And I mean, that was one of the motivations for instigating this research, too.
The feeling, you know, that our boys were being tortured through sensory deprivation.
Something we had to understand what the effects were like.
Did any representative of the government ever come to see you on the subject?
No.
Not on sensory deprivation.
I had a couple of people from the military spy on me once when I was giving a parapsychology lecture.
Really?
I thought it was sort of silly.
I mean, they could have written me for a reprint and got the details better, but...
Uh-huh.
Uh, so they just came to collect information.
Yeah, there were a couple of people who came in and turned on their tape recorders.
You know, the way they sat, the way they acted, they were obviously bored stiff, and they were on assignment.
I see.
I found the whole thing quite amusing.
Um, alright.
When you say things like, um, leading minds, clairvoyance, precognition, uh, psychokinesis, these are real, and I would argue, uh, with anybody about these, uh, that these are real, When you say that to us here on the air, it's one thing.
When you say that to your colleagues, your professional colleagues, it's perhaps quite another thing, and I wonder what kind of reception you get.
Well, I often get extremely negative reception, and I don't respect the people I get them from for this reason.
I'm a scientist, Art.
And if you think about it, how did science get started?
It got started as a revolt against the Church's dominance of the mind, where they said, these authorities already know everything.
If you want to know how the physical world works, go read Aristotle.
Science was a revolution that said, no, I want to go out and actually look at things.
I want to see for myself what the data is, what actually happens.
Okay, the people I find who just, you know, automatically reject this stuff, they don't know the data.
And that's not science.
That's something that psychologists and sociologists long ago called scientism.
It's taking what should be real science and going psychologically rigid and arrogant and suddenly you know the truth and you don't have to be bothered with paying attention to anything that doesn't.
Well, that's not a new thing for science, is it?
No, scientism's been around for a long time.
I mean, the world of science has been rigid since we've had science, really.
Not completely rigid, I would say.
It changes, but it tends to change in certain narrow channels, you know?
When you get a field of science to start, it's very open.
The emphasis is really on the data, and all your theories are secondary, you know?
You have to keep going out and making better measurements and seeing things.
But then a funny thing happens.
A theory comes along that's really good.
Thomas Kuhn called it a paradigm.
It explains so much.
Yes?
And all of a sudden, people feel like they really know it now.
Like, in your physics classes, were you taught the theory of gravity, or were you taught the law of gravity?
What's that psychological change where theory comes into a law?
That tells you something about psychological rigidity.
A paradigm shift.
Yeah.
Now, a paradigm's alright in a way.
It focuses people.
You get real precise research within certain lines, but it ignores other things.
Okay, the scientific paradigm we have tends to just automatically throw out all these paranormal phenomena, but I have almost never met anyone who rejects this phenomenon, who's actually bothered to look at the data, and I can't respect people who aren't being scientific about it.
You know, I mean, if they want to say it's my religious conviction that this is all nonsense, I won't look, that's fine, but if they want to pretend to be scientists, they've got an obligation to look at the data, and that means thousands of experiments to read about.
So, you spend a lot of time defending positions, I'm sure.
Uh, as little as I can.
I usually don't waste my time talking with such people, right?
I feel like they've got elementary reading to do, and I don't spend my time arguing.
Yes, but at most institutions of higher learning in this country, there's a lot of politics that goes on.
Oh, I know about it, Art.
At least a couple of years of my career have been wasted dealing with crap like this.
Yeah, precisely.
And so, in fact, in my own research, my interest has never been to prove this stuff.
I mean, there are already hundreds of experiments.
My interest has always been to figure out what is it?
How does it work?
Why does it work the way it does?
What are the implications of it?
That's what's really interesting to me.
I hear that.
One subject that has been truly, truly interesting to me and to many other people
is the possibility of life after death.
and I guess you've done some work in that area.
Oh, it's probably only of interest to those of us who are going to die.
Yeah, that'd be the only ones.
Intensely interested, and So, we're at the top of the hour here, but when we come back, that is the avenue I would like to pursue, if you're up for it.
I'm up for it.
All right.
Um, actually, a scientist.
We have a scientist here who's actually researched life after death.
And as he said, it's only of interest to those of you out there who are going to die.
The rest of you can tune out.
I'm Art Bell from the high desert.
This is Coast to Coast AF.
Doctor, welcome back.
Are you there?
Yeah, I'm there.
Good, good, good.
All right.
I want to read you, before we move on, I want to read you a fact that I just got pretty interesting.
Here's a story about sensory deprivation and telepathy in one paragraph.
In 1976, I took part in a sensory deprivation lab study at UBC.
In 1983, I was on the East Coast in another city, and I had to call, quote, a guy with a van, end quote, out of the newspaper because I wanted to haul some furniture.
So, I called for a long list from the paper at random, and the guy who showed up loaded all my stuff into his truck and we were driving to the destination.
Within five minutes, the conversation with this total stranger went about like this.
Quote, I did a sensory deprivation lab at UBC once.
Oh really?
So did I!
The point is, how on earth could we zero in on the fact that we both had this in common?
We both did the same study ten years earlier on the other side of the country.
We brought this up and identified this within five minutes.
I never mention this topic to people.
It just isn't a common subject on the tip of one's tongue.
Something happened there.
Telepathy?
I think so.
Now, look, aren't we Lots of evidence for telepathy when people deliberately try to use it in a laboratory.
They're given a task of trying to use telepathy.
But there's some very interesting experiments pioneered by people like Rex Stanford, for instance, that shows that probably we use telepathy unconsciously, whether we know we're doing it or not.
The way these experiments are done is somebody comes in for an experiment and they're given a certain purpose and they don't know there's a hidden agenda.
They would have to use telepathy or something like it to figure out the hidden agenda, and if they do, it changes the way the experiment goes.
They get into a more desirable condition.
Doctor, we're having a little problem with our audio now.
I noticed that on this end, too.
Um, is there any way to pick up the phone?
Do you have one handy there?
Um, do you have the problem now?
Uh, no, it's a little better.
Okay.
That's better.
Whatever happened, it's better.
Alright.
Anyway, let us continue.
Okay, so as I said, this was experiments with a hidden agenda, where if you were unconsciously using some kind of ESP to keep track of your environment, to look for good contingencies, you would make a response which otherwise would seem random, and people showed those things.
Now that says that it may be that a lot of us are using telepathy unconsciously, without even knowing it, and so we just happen to be at the right place at the right time.
Unless, of course, you're stuck on bad luck, in which case you're very good at being at the wrong place at the right time.
What is what we call intuition?
Intuition's a really kind of vague word.
I mean, it means you get the answer and you can't trace the step by which you got it.
So sometimes it could mean unconscious thinking, and other times it's another word for some kind of telepathy or extrasensory perception.
Intuition's a more acceptable word than ESP for a lot of people.
Well, intuition is the way many of us, me included, make a lot of decisions.
I make a lot of decisions, believe me, based on intuition.
And many times it runs contrary to what would seem to be the appropriate, or the proper decision, or the money-making decision, or whatever.
I don't make it on the basis, I make it on the basis of something inside that simply says, do this, this is what you've got to do.
Well, intuition can be really valuable that way if it's used with ESP.
Let me tell you an interesting study that was done several times by a parapsychologist named Douglas Dean.
He would go to conventions of chief executive officers of major corporations, and after a speech on ESP, he'd give them a test of precognition, where they'd really have to be able to predict the future.
This was random number generated by a computer later.
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