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March 15, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:38
Edition 387 - Dean Radin

Scientist and Author Dean Radin on the interface between science and paranormality

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the Return of the Unexplained.
Well, can you believe we're kind of more than halfway through March now?
Boy, this year.
I know I always say this.
Going so fast, isn't it?
You know, it's going to be middle of the year before very long.
And then it'll be Christmas.
But let's not go there now.
Thank you very much for all of your emails.
Those emails that have required a response have got one.
And please believe me that I do see each and every email that comes in.
If you want to email me, go to the website theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, and you can send me a message from there.
And if you're having any problems with the website or hearing the show, there's a little section there that allows you to communicate with the webmaster, that's Adam, and he will find an answer to your problem, whatever that may be.
I think we're getting decreasingly few issues with the new website, which is very, very good news.
It's taken a little time to bed in, but I think we're getting there, as they say.
And thank you very much, by the way, if you've made a donation to the show recently.
Very kind of you, and it's very gratefully received for this work to continue and to develop.
The guest on this edition of the show is somebody who I have wanted to speak with since the days of the old Art Bell show.
This man appeared, well, I certainly heard him about half a dozen times with Art Bell, but I think he appeared many times with him beyond that, maybe a dozen times.
And he was always fascinating and always remarkable in the things that he said, because Dean Radin occupies that space between science and paranormality, where you research in a serious way stuff that some people dismiss as being paranormal hooey.
And the research that he's done is always fascinating, is always detailed, and is always worth hearing.
So, Dean Radin, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, it is probably, what, 15 years since I heard him first with Art Bell.
Close on 20, I think.
So we're going to talk with him in just a moment.
Don't forget, of course, if you get in touch with me, if you want to email me, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And you can get in touch with me, make suggestions about the show, tell me which direction you think it should be going in, and that kind of stuff.
It's always nice to hear from you.
Okay, let's get to the US now.
A time zone difference of eight hours.
So it's evening time here in the UK and it's morning time, West Coast, USA.
And say hi to Dean Radin.
Thank you very much for coming on my show, Dean.
Very glad to be here.
Dean, I've wanted to speak with you for an awfully long time.
And for reasons like life intervening, we just haven't had that opportunity up until now.
But I have to tell you, and now I get the chance, that you were always in the great days of Art Bell.
And towards the end of his life, I got to know him.
You were one of my favorite guests with Art Bell.
You worked so well together.
Thank you.
We're going to talk about a lot of things now, but I think we have to introduce you to listeners who may not be aware of you, some of the listeners in the UK who may not, as I have, have heard you.
And your biography says that you are Chief Scientist of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Associated Distinguished Professor of Integral and Transpersonal Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
I hope I said that right.
Yes, and it all sounds very ponderous.
Well, no, it's a one.
I think it is probably the single most impressive title that I've ever come across on this show.
Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Now, a number of people who have interviewed you have not been able to pronounce that word.
I am not entirely sure what it means.
Can you explain?
Well, the word noetic comes from the Greek root word nus, which means to know, but to know in all possible ways.
In the modern world, we think of knowing as rational knowing only, but there's, of course, also emotional knowing, intuitive knowing.
And the Institute of Noetic Sciences that's started by Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut, was founded to study all forms of knowing.
And so since there's a lot of effort already being spent looking at rational forms of knowing, we focus on the intuitive ways of knowing, which is a superset of other ways of knowing that we use terms like psychic and mystical, but primarily because we don't have any other better terms.
But it's a broad range of ways of knowing directly that does not seem to pass through our analytical filters.
So that terminology, and in your case and Edgar Mitchell's case, that involvement, is kind of saying to the established scientific world, and indeed the rest of the world, that actually all of these things that are poo-pooed, as we say here, by mainstream science, have value.
Well, there are people in the mainstream who study intuition, but the assumption is that intuition is subliminal forms of ordinary knowing.
So, for example, if somebody does something and they don't know why they did it, a definition of intuition may be that you know something without knowing how you know it.
Well, some of that is going to be because a lot of processing that goes on in the brain and the mind is unconscious.
We're not literally aware of it, but something is happening in our unconscious.
So a mainstream perspective then is that all forms of intuition or what we call psychic or mystical is actually unconscious brain processing.
What we're interested in is seeing whether or not that assumption is correct.
And to make a long story short, we're pretty sure that it is not correct.
There are other ways of knowing that we call psychic and mystical.
Was there anything in your life, presumably there was, that led you to that thought and belief?
Actually, no.
When I grew up, I don't recall ever having any Psychic or mystical experiences, nor did anyone in my family ever describe such experiences, nor did I know anyone who did.
So, Dean, what is the attraction then?
The attraction was reading a lot of science fiction and fairy tales and tales about the mystic masters of the East, those sorts of things.
And simply being curious about why do these themes, especially psychic themes, but also sometimes mystical themes, why does it just keep showing up in literature all the time?
Every culture has talked about it.
It saturates our entertainment.
What's the appeal?
So from a conventional perspective, you'd say, well, the appeal is wishful thinking.
We wish we had more control over ourselves and our environment.
So it's simply a psychological coping mechanism.
And perhaps the desire, as you say, to fill a void.
You look up into the sky.
You're in the middle of the desert in ancient Egypt.
You want to be able to explain what you see.
Yeah.
So some of it is also from a cosmological perspective.
We wonder about the nature of ourselves and who we are and so on.
So I've always had this philosophical satrique as far back as I can remember.
Even as a little kid, I remember thinking, why are we here?
Like, what is the purpose of actually being here?
Why is there anything?
So one of the reasons why my first two degrees are in engineering is because I always wanted to know how things worked.
And as a kid, I would take things apart.
Sometimes I'd even put them back together again.
So that was the impetus.
It was curiosity.
And I've always been driven by curiosity.
But you sit at the moment in a very difficult intersection.
It's just as difficult now, perhaps, as it was 20 years ago, maybe.
And that is the intersection between real science and the paranormal.
And, you know, those two are uncomfortable, can be at times uncomfortable bedfellows.
I've been listening today to a lot of interviews that you've done with various people at various levels.
One of the interviews that I listened to, you say almost nobody is studying these things.
All of it's on the fringe.
You can get a PhD.
I love this quote from you with one of the interviews.
You can get a PhD on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
That's acceptable, but it seemed to be not acceptable to do any more than study the belief in psychic phenomena.
There's a taboo.
And that's a quote.
Right.
Yeah, it's quite true.
If you're interested in popular culture, you can get your doctorate on a television show about the hermeneutics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
And that's not a joke.
I mean, that is literally true if you start looking at the dissertations that are written in these areas.
As a psychologist, you can probably get your doctorate studying belief of strange things because you don't have to deal with whether or not the belief is correct or not.
The same is true for people getting doctorates in religious studies or anthropology, where concepts like psychic phenomena and mystical experience and magic come up again and again.
You cannot talk about it as though it is real.
Why do you think that is?
Is that fear?
Or is that the possibility that some of these things, and recent developments may suggest that is the case, some of these things may actually may say some of the things that science is saying?
Some of it is fear, but I think you can trace it all the way back to the Enlightenment, the so-called disenchantment of reality.
So when science began as such, perhaps three or maybe four or five hundred years ago, the models that were being created about reality, mostly materialistic models, were so successful in many ways and are still very successful.
They allow us to do this interview at eight time zones apart and sound like we're right next to each other.
Well, this is a demonstration that materialism as a doctrine, as a way of understanding reality, is really good.
So we don't want to throw it away.
Unfortunately, materialism also is completely at odds with the notion that there's something special about consciousness.
And consciousness is extremely difficult to understand from a purely materialistic perspective because it requires that a three-pound lump of tissue inside your skull somehow has an internal experience that we cannot see with any of our instruments.
And so, yes, psychic and mystical experience as real are a major challenge to the prevailing paradigm within science.
And that's why it's a taboo.
You're not supposed to counter your paradigm.
There seems to have been a suggestion in your work, certainly from those interviews that I've been listening to and those things that I've been reading through today to re-familiarize myself with you, Dean.
There seems to be a suggestion that, especially these days, as we are discovering more and more, that science is to some extent stealing the clothes on occasions of paranormality.
In other words, scientists are then saying, well, we didn't believe this in the past, but it seems that this is actually true.
Well, science has always expanded its worldview.
That's one of the powers of the scientific method, that you can separate the method itself, which is simply a way of inquiring about reality, from the theories that we use to explain it.
I mean, I really specifically think of science as two branches.
There is the theoretical explanation aspect, but there's also ways of inquiry.
So the ways of inquiry are completely neutral about the topic that you're studying.
If psychic phenomena are real, then eventually the rest of science will catch up.
Because if something is real, science is really good, it'll eventually bump into it.
At this point, one of the main reasons why these phenomena are not broadly accepted is because they're not that easy to see in the laboratory.
It's not that they cannot be seen because the evidence is actually quite good when you look at the total evidence.
But we're dealing with phenomena that are like you see in many aspects of psychology and social psychology, where they're difficult to replicate.
Now, for me, some people will say, well, it's so difficult to replicate, I don't even know if we can believe it.
And psychologists are always griping about the crisis of replication in psychology and in medicine and in social psychology.
I don't see this as a problem at all.
In fact, I'm really surprised that there's such concern about difficulties of replication when it comes to any form of human performance.
And the simple way of thinking about it is that if people weren't unpredictably unreliable, then we wouldn't be watching sports.
The whole point about watching sports and the fun of it is that you can't know in advance exactly what's going to happen, because if you did, it wouldn't be much fun to watch.
So humans are extremely difficult to predict.
That's a fascinating way of explaining it.
So you're basically, and I've never thought of it this way before, you are basically saying, Dean, that in sports we will accept it that an exceptional athlete can jump 10 centimeters higher than he or she may have been able to on the previous occasion and 10 centimeters higher than on the next try simply because he or she is not able to attain that again.
We accept that out of sport, but we don't accept that out of what some people call paranormality.
Right.
And I should also then constrain what we're talking about in terms of the paranormal.
The paranormal is a term that covers a huge range, like every anomaly you've ever heard of, from Bigfoot to UFOs and everything beyond that.
I'm interested in psychic phenomena primarily because those phenomena, those experiences can be tested under controlled conditions in the laboratory.
That makes it really different than almost all of the rest of what's called the paranormal.
And in fact, it really does bring psychic phenomena in particular into the range of the normal, completely normal, for two reasons.
One is that we can study it and has been studied for a century and a half, and we have pretty good evidence for it.
And the other is that the nature of the phenomena themselves are not rare in the sense that if you simply ask people, you do surveys in virtually every country and you ask people without using terms like psychic, you say, well, have you ever felt the sense that you're being stared at and you turned around and sure enough, somebody was staring at you?
The vast majority of people will say yes.
Have you ever thought about somebody and then they called you on the phone all of a sudden?
The vast majority of people say yes and so on.
We created a list of 25 such experiences, said a broad survey across the United States, along with a subset of people where we knew that they were either scientists or engineers.
And we asked them, well, this list of 25 things, not what you believe about them, but what have you personally experienced?
So what we found is that the general population, 94% of people said that they experienced at least one of the 25 experiences.
And then we asked, well, okay, what about scientists and engineers, who generally are taught that at least psychic phenomena don't exist?
93% had experienced at least one of the 25, and on average, eight of the 25 experiences.
So they may interpret the experiences differently than the general population, but the fact is that the experiences themselves are very, very common.
So if something very common should be called paranormal, I don't think so.
It's the mu-normal in a way.
Does this mean then that there is such a thing as a universal consciousness, a grid of consciousness that we are all somehow plugged into?
Well, that's one interpretation.
So the two basic forms of interpretation are to try to fit our understanding of these phenomena into the existing scientific paradigm, which means primarily to think of these effects as signals, some kind of strange signal, perhaps, but ultimately carried by electromagnetics or some other force that we already understand.
And also a whole range of different kinds of psychological biases and filters and bring coincidence in and all of those other things.
So some of my colleagues are working on that.
Many have been over many years to see if we can understand psychic phenomena from that perspective.
The other main way of looking at this is from a philosophical perspective, more like idealism, that ultimately everything is made out of consciousness, and this is a consciousness that is not in ordinary space or time.
It's somehow beyond that.
And from that perspective, suddenly psychic and mystical experiences become predictable.
They should exist.
Whereas from the materialistic side, it's actually very difficult to come up with models that would explain why these things exist.
And I lean more towards the idealistic side than the materialistic, but that's my own preference.
But rather like the sports man or woman that we talked about, who could on occasions produce an amazing feat of performance, but not always.
These things don't always work for everybody, do they?
I can remember an occasion where I was in mortal danger.
I was on a ship in the Middle East working and I was in the middle of a storm and I really thought this ship was going to sink.
And I remember thinking of my mother and in my mind shouting, mum, you know, I was very young.
She actually heard my voice at that time say that.
That proves that there is some, well, to me it proved, that there is some kind of communication that rational science cannot explain.
But I can't always do that.
I mean, I can't page my friends at will.
Right.
So maybe if you did want to page your friends, you should go into a boat, a little boat, into the middle of the Atlantic during a storm, and then you would have the level of motivation to be able to do whatever you did with your mother.
In other words, we don't completely understand all of the, actually, we don't understand the mechanism at all, but the motivational aspects of these kinds of phenomena are really critical.
And so, what you described is classically called a moment of crisis telepathy.
That during crisis, we are motivated in ways that we cannot fake in the laboratory, and things happen in a strange way.
So, yeah.
So the other way of responding to what you said, though, is what can we do 100% of the time without fail?
The answer is nothing.
Even under ordinary circumstances, sometimes my cell phone doesn't work, even though it's extremely reliable.
Well, why?
Well, we call it our dead zones and so on, where you can't get the signal.
Well, when it comes to human performance, if people were 100% reliable on anything, literally anything, that would be a miracle.
And so that's why we put up with the fact that our most elite athletes cannot do the same thing time and time again.
Occasionally, you will find an athlete who for a while, I think of someone like Tiger Woods, who in his prime was like a walking miracle.
He couldn't fail.
Well, that didn't last and never does.
And you can think through history of people like Jack Nicholas, if you want to look back forever.
Absolutely.
I understand where you're coming from.
So are you saying that scientists need to lighten up on themselves a bit?
Well, science as a profession has the same problems as politics and any other domain where people are trying to do something and have a career.
That you immediately start seeing constraints on what you're allowed to do and how you're allowed to talk about what you do.
So the aspiration in the academic world is to have academic freedom, to be able to study anything that you want.
That doesn't exist anywhere.
It has never existed.
It's an aspiration.
And like many aspirations, it's something we strive towards, but it doesn't really exist.
And so if you look at how people who do research in particular, how do they get their grants?
They have to please people who are the ones who make the decisions in making the grants.
Well, who are those people?
They're ones who previously got the grants and generally have progressed in their career.
This is not always the case, but oftentimes what happens is that people who stick very closely to whatever is considered the mainstream, a very thin slice of mainstream, they are the ones who get into position of ensuring that the status quo remains the way it is.
And one of the consequences of this, and we see this in the United States with the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, which are the primary sources of funding for research, what happens is that they are constantly calling for innovative projects.
We want true innovation, frontier-level science.
What they mean by that is existing science with a very tiny baby step beyond where we currently are, so that it's easy to predict, first of all, it's easy to select which project is likely to succeed.
That means that there's almost never any money for true blue sky kinds of research.
And this is true around the world.
It's very, very difficult to get funding for ideas that are pushing hard against the mainstream.
Do you think that scientific developments may actually provide that impetus and that push?
Last week on a radio show that I did, I interviewed a professor called Hog Lipson, who's created a robot, well, his team have created a robotic arm that appears to be almost thinking for itself, able to be aware of where it is and what it's doing and make decisions based on that.
In other words, it seems that devices, artificial intelligence, machine learning, are approaching consciousness in a way.
So if science, if actual mechanical science gets there first, science has got to accept these things, hasn't it?
If we find ourselves able to create a kind of consciousness, then science has to be more accepting, doesn't it, of all the things that you research, or does it?
Well, only if you talk about artificial consciousness, we can certainly simulate it.
We immediately run into the problem of knowing whether it's actually conscious or not, just like I can't tell that you're actually conscious.
You could be an AI as far as I'm concerned.
And this is a problem that Turing was trying to talk about way back when with the Turing test, right?
How can you tell if the creature on the other end of the line is actually conscious?
It turns out it's very difficult.
But Turing himself said that maybe one of the ways you could tell is if the creature on the other end of the line had ESP.
He wrote that.
And it's because it looks as though there's something peculiar about consciousness as we enjoy it, which doesn't seem to fit into the ordinary way of thinking about a materialistic or a physical system.
On the other hand, if you create a system that from all external appearances appears to have consciousness of the same type that we do, we could give it a test to see whether or not it's psychic and actually predict that it would show that it's psychic.
This doesn't mean that we are mechanical creatures, but rather from an idealistic perspective, everything is already conscious.
And of course, people also use terms like panpsychism to try to resolve this problem that we face in science, that we don't know how internal experience or subjective experience can arise from a purely mechanical system.
This is considered of the list of the top 10 outstanding problems in science.
This is one of them.
You talked about experiments and research.
What sorts of experiments do you do to further knowledge and perhaps prove these things?
Well, in science, we don't talk about proof.
Proof is only for alcohol and mathematics and logic.
In science, especially empirical science, we talk about degrees of confidence in the measurements or in the observations.
So we can provide extremely high confidence, which some might take as proof.
But the proof in the pudding, so to speak, happens when we can take the things we learn from science and turn it into reliable technologies.
So we don't have to prove that a cell phone works.
We can just demonstrate it and it works almost every time.
We take that as proof.
So at some point that will happen, I think, for this domain as well.
So the research that we can do is, first of all, listen to someone's explanation of their experience.
It could be telepathy or clairvoyance or lots of different terms, but basically they slot into four or five different categories.
Then we create a laboratory version of that experience, and we, by design, exclude all of the usual mundane explanations.
So we would, to get rid of the idea that it's coincidence, we will do the experiment many times, and we know in each case the probability of a chance outcome.
We exclude the possibility that they're ordinary signals by using things like electromagnetic shielded rooms.
We exclude the possibility that there are Confederates involved or that fraud is involved by using security measures and so on.
And if you do that experiment many repeated times and you have colleagues around the world who also get similar results, that provides greater and greater confidence that you're dealing with something which is not explainable by any mundane explanation.
So what sorts of things, say, recently, have you shown?
Well, what I've been working on for the past 10 years or so is to find ways of demonstrating that these phenomena are not far out on the fringe, but are actually, at least some of them, are directly related to outstanding problems in the mainstream.
And so the approach I've been taking is to look at the quantum observer effect, which is recognized as an issue within physics.
And it pertains to the idea that if you observe an elementary system at the quantum level, that its behavior changes.
So from a conventional perspective, the reason why observation of a quanta changes its behavior is because it's not possible to observe something at that level without interfering with it.
And that may be a viable explanation.
But another explanation, especially within simple systems like the double-slit optical system, you can show that if you gain knowledge about the behavior of a photon in the double-slit system, that the knowledge alone will change the behavior of the photon.
So you look back at the founders of quantum mechanics, many of them were saying that there's something peculiar about awareness or knowledge of a quantum system that seems to change its behavior.
So in the case of a photon, like the photon is shy and doesn't like to be observed and somehow knows that it's being observed, and that changes its behavior.
So I devised an experiment based on a similar study that colleagues had done a decade before, where we take a very simple double-slit optical system.
We send photons through either trillions per second or one at a time.
And we have people mentally imagine that they could see which of the two slits that a photon goes through.
And so we know already from many years that if you can capture what's called which path information, which is the path that the photon takes through either one slit or the other, if you knew which one it took, then the photons would always behave like particles.
Your detection of them would make it look like they're particles.
And if you can't tell which of the two slits the photon goes through, it behaves like a wave.
And this is a very clear effect.
So I simply ask people to imagine with their mind's eye that they could tell which of the two slits it goes through.
And if clairvoyance is true, then that observation would give you information about which path information, and that would cause the photons to behave differently.
So as of today, we've done 19 experiments with four or five different double-slit systems, some commercial that we bought, the others that we built.
And we find evidence that, sure enough, the system changes behavior.
Photons change their behavior depending on being observed from a distance with the mind itself, purely in the mind's eye, not with your physical eye, but your mind's eye somehow can gain information from a distant system and cause the photons to change their behavior.
So I've tried to get others to replicate this experiment.
So far, only one colleague has done so at University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.
He too has found very similar results to what we did.
His pilot experiments were exactly in alignment with what we saw.
He then ran a couple of formal experiments, pre-planned experiments.
Those didn't show the same result that we saw, but they were also showing anomalous results that wasn't explainable by chance.
And then another colleague from France independently looked at a big batch of our data, 80 gigabytes of data, and he also confirmed that what we had found using his own form of analysis, that there are anomalies that shouldn't be there in these data, and yet they're there.
So I've been able to publish most of my work in physics journals because it is relevant to physics.
And this is part of a longer-term Strategy to help break the taboo by simply showing that the great unwashed paranormal, some of it actually is directly relevant to outstanding problems in the mainstream and therefore should be considered mainstream.
Science is all about publishing, getting your peers and the public to read and see what you've come out with.
What have been the reactions of your peers to this?
Well, for my peers, they all think it's great.
It's fun stuff.
Fun stuff.
Yeah, it's fun.
I mean, it's nice to be able to break into disciplines that generally have not wanted to publish this kind of work.
From a mainstream perspective, I've been contacted many times privately by physicists, some of whom want to look at the data, others are interested in maybe replicating the effect.
I haven't seen too much criticism of the criticism that I've seen in the physics literature.
Most of it is along the lines of, am I interpreting the data correctly?
I have so far yet to see criticism of the sort that says this is nonsense.
This cannot be.
But no front page headlines saying, you know, this could be an amazing thing.
This could allow you to...
Aaron Powell, no.
No mainstream science publication has dared to pick this up.
That seems to be, in my small brain, that's a shame, isn't it?
Well, it's a shame, but for mainstream publications, they have the same constraints that you find in academia.
They're okay to present amazing results for something which is already accepted.
So like you mentioned the example of artificial intelligence.
So AI has been studied for 50 years now.
It's a very straightforward and evolutionary steps from where we were to where we are today.
Yes, the implications are very interesting, and what we can do now is becoming more and more interesting, but it's not really changing the paradigm at all.
In fact, it's completely in alignment with the existing paradigm.
And if you do something within the existing paradigm, another example might be CRISPR.
So we're all used to genetic engineering now.
CRISPR is just the latest version of it.
It happened to be quite good.
It's not pushing the paradigm.
It's very difficult for a mainstream science journalist to promote something that is going to challenge the paradigm.
And so it simply does not happen.
These experiments and this work are only one step away from, very close to, some other work that you've done on the power of intention.
And I listened today to a fascinating interview that you did with my radio hero, Art Bell, about the power of intention.
And you talked on that occasion, which I think was probably about seven or eight years ago, maybe nine years ago, about the possibility of being able to establish some kind of mind amplification device to amplify the power of intention.
I'm trying to imagine what that might have been.
Maybe, well, one of the examples that you gave on that conversation, and it's probably nine years ago, a way to be, some kind of way to, and I thought it was a great example, to think your garage door to open.
Do you remember that?
Oh, right, right, yeah.
An application.
This, in fact, is a project now at the Institute of Nuetic Sciences.
They call it IONS X. It's just like Project X. And it's to take the fairly small statistical effects that we see in the laboratory and make it do something practical, to make an application out of it.
So part of this is simply to demonstrate that the effect is real for someone who doesn't know about statistics or doesn't trust statistics, but also to make it pragmatically useful, because you can finesse the whole scientific controversy in an instant the moment that you have something which is pragmatically useful.
So the ways that we're going about this, and we have colleagues around the world who are also interested in pushing on this idea, to make a garage door opener that would respond to your intention would be, it may be interesting as a demonstration, but it would also be a waste of time because we have lots of ways of doing that already and we don't need to duplicate the wheel.
What would be much more interesting is a form of communication that does not rely on existing methods of communication.
So for example, if you wanted to send a message to a submarine, the whole point about submarines is that you can't contact them once they're deep enough in the ocean.
Or if you do contact them, you need extremely exotic methods to be able to penetrate down into umpteen numbers of meters of seawater, which are very effective at blocking electromagnetics.
So that would be useful, to have a submarine anywhere in the world.
You don't even need to know where it is and send it a message.
Another example is eventually we may have people on Mars and it takes many minutes to get a signal to Mars.
Well, maybe they would like to talk to you in real time.
Well, perhaps there's a way of doing real-time signaling independent of distance.
Well, that would be something new.
And the application that would be most interesting is what I'm calling a telegraph from tomorrow, a method of communicating backwards in time.
That also, we don't have any existing way of doing that, but through psychic means, we might.
in fact there's already evidence and within parapsychology that it there's some form of retro causation and so that
Like those people who said that they were on some level Aware of the events of 9-11 before they happened would suggest that there is some kind of ripple effect from that cataclysmic event backwards through time to people who say that they received that.
Right.
Yes, there's that kind of evidence, precognitive evidence, but there's also even in the domain of intentional effects that it appears as though intention is not limited to real time either, that that can go backwards in time, as tested in the laboratory.
Then, of course, you have the possible power to change the timeline.
I mean, this would assume then that people in, I don't know, in 1945 who knew how evil Hitler had turned out to be could then project an intention backwards that he does not succeed?
Maybe yes and maybe no.
I think we don't know enough yet at this point about whether or not it's possible to influence the past.
And so there's a subtlety here that all of the retrocausal effects that we see in the laboratory do not suggest that you can change something which has already happened.
In a sense, though if something happens and it's being observed, especially by a lot of people, it becomes fixed.
It's a historically true thing.
That can't be changed.
What can be changed, or at least influenced, are things that are happening in real time that are not being observed.
So right now we're in real time.
It's conceivable that there's a ton of things happening right now that are not being observed by any human at least, or maybe not being observed by any conscious creature at all.
It's possible that there are intentions in the future which are guiding or manipulating those unobserved things that are happening to behave in a way that is in conformance with the future observation.
So it's as though the trajectory of the present can be steered a little bit, like a trim tab on a big ship.
That seems to be the way of explaining these retrocausal influences that we see.
And so it sounds like, well, who cares if you trim tab the world?
When it comes to something like health, it might make a big difference.
Because if you imagine that an illness is developed over a long period of time, most of that is not observed by anyone, including the person who has the illness.
But if it turns out that a healer is able to heal someone, and occasionally you hear about miraculous healings, it's conceivable that maybe what's going on in these cases is that the healer is able to change the future course of a disease by manipulating aspects that are still unconscious in the present,
but can be steered just slightly so instead of turning into some horrible disease, it actually steers it away from the disease.
So the future progression actually turns towards health rather than death.
And is there any evidence that anybody currently alive is able to do that?
Well, there's certainly evidence that there are healers who can make people heal in ways that we don't understand.
The way that they do that, the mechanism underneath it is unknown.
We don't know exactly how that happens, but that it happens, I think, is pretty clear.
And of course, the problem is that there are some fakes in this world.
There are some people who are deluded and believe they have powers and actually don't.
All of these things muddy the water.
And then, of course, there were the famous case of James Randy, who, and you know what I'm going to say, managed to, with a bunch of people who he schooled, fool a bunch of serious scientists and basically put them off doing the kind of research that they were doing for a very long time.
They were doing research into all kinds of psychic effects.
It appeared that these people had something going for them, and then at the end they revealed, I can't remember when this was, was it the 1970s or 80s?
I think it was the early 80s.
And then they revealed that it was all trickery.
Right.
So if you wish to use fraud to demonstrate fraud, well, of course, that could happen in any domain.
And is it also true that there are people who either are delusional or intentionally faking that they can do various kinds of psychic things?
Of course.
But again, name anything that anybody does in any domain where there aren't frauds.
And the answer is it's just endemic.
Of course, people will try to fake things if they think they have something to gain from it.
Makes the research difficult, though, doesn't it?
Well, it makes everything more difficult.
I mean, they're fraudulent judges.
They're fraudulent police.
They're fraudulent politicians.
Does that mean that we immediately assume that they're all fakes?
Well, of course not.
Yes, some people will take advantage of these phenomena and then for reasons that don't make any sense to me at all, some will then immediately jump to the idea that all psychics all the time are 100% fake.
And that's just crazy.
That is not the case.
In fact, I mean, we know that's not the case because we can see these effects in the laboratory.
And at least from an academic perspective, there's a huge amount of pushback for presenting evidence, positive evidence.
So unlike being a fraudulent healer, you may gain a huge amount of money as a result, you gain nothing as an academic to provide positive evidence for something which is challenging the mainstream.
Anything, you get such a pushback that you'll never do it again.
So the usual motivations for someone to produce fraud in this area simply don't exist as an academic.
Right.
So do you think that, I mean, look, a lot of us have come across people who we believe have psychic abilities.
I certainly have.
Let me lay my cards on the table.
Not very many of them.
And it's always made me wonder, do such people, rare though they are, are they, you know, do they have abilities that they are born with or are they somehow schooled in these things?
Do they learn them?
So do you think the good psychics, good people in these fields learn how to do that or they have some innate ability that they come into this world with?
I think most are naturally talented.
And so we're doing a study now to look at people with psychic abilities who come from families that have other people with psychic abilities.
Turns out that it's actually pretty common that individuals who either are professional psychics or have spontaneous experiences that seem psychic, they will oftentimes talk about other people in their family who've described similar things.
The underlying research question is, is this nature or nurture?
Are they simply brought up in a family that can talk about these things and that's why it happens to them?
Or is there a genetic inheritance?
So we're doing a study which we call psygenes, where we're looking at the genetics of people who are psychic, from psychic families, and comparing them against people who are from non-psychic families who don't report anything psychic to see if there's any discernible genetic difference between these people.
And the reason why this is now viable, of course, that we can do these kinds of analyses, but because also that there's reason to suspect that there might be something like not a gene, but a constellation of genes which predisposes somebody to being able to have these kinds of experiences more often.
But that makes them more receptive.
Right.
Well, that would be quite a discovery, wouldn't it?
It would, yeah.
And so actually just two days ago, we finally got all the genomes back from this study that we're doing, where we identified a number of people who are the psychic type and a number of match controls who are the non-psychic type.
We got their DNA and we got the genomes back.
So the bioinformatics portion of the experiment is now underway where we're going to analyze these genes and see is there a difference or not.
You write, Dean, and talk about real magic.
I don't entirely understand what that phrase means.
What is the difference between somebody who says that they create white magic spells and create good outcomes for people?
The difference between that and real magic, as you call it?
Well, the real magic as opposed to fictional or fraudulent magic.
So it's not Harry Potter and it's not Harry Houdini.
It's the other kind.
It's the thing which gives rise to the fiction and the thing which gives rise to tricks on stage and to fraud.
It's an underlying sense that there's something actually going on.
So if you, the reason I'm interested in this is because if you look through the whole gigantic literature on magic, the phenomena fall into three classes.
There's divination, and these are all magical practices that go back throughout history.
Divination, where the stereotype is the crystal ball and looking in a mirror and the tarot cards and all that.
The idea of divination is that you can perceive through space and time.
That is exactly the same as what we call clairvoyance and precognition.
So even though it's a magical practice, there's already a long lineage of science that has been looking at this issue of perceiving through space and time.
So because that evidence is quite clear, at least to me and my colleagues, it means that the magical practice of divination actually is based on something which is real.
Now, again, some people are going to be delusional about it.
Some people are going to be faking it.
Some are going to be using it and it will be quite real.
The second category is called manifestation or force of will, which is all about intentional effects in the physical world.
That's classically what we think of in terms of spellcasting.
And spellcasting is the same as prayer, which is the same as in parapsychology we call it psychokinesis, the effect of intention on the physical world.
The evidence there suggests that, yeah, intention does push the physical world, in which case some spells will work.
Right, so we go back to the photons.
We go back to photons, and typically in a grimoire, which is a list of spells, they're not interested in the behavior of photons.
And the effects are generally quite small in the laboratory, and I suspect in magical spells, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
But it's not zero.
It's not as though they never work, at least what we can tell from the laboratory.
Some of it would actually work to a small extent.
And the third category in magical practice is theurgy, which is all about communicating with spirits, with non-human, invisible entities.
So in parapsychology, this is studied in the form of mediumship, channeling, near-death experiences, and so on.
And so in that domain as well, we find that we still can't tell whether they're actually spirits, but we can tell that in the case of mediumship, the mediums can get accurate information not by using cold reading or other techniques, but actual information under double and triple blind conditions.
So there's something going on in that domain that looks like it's real.
So this is then connection between real magic, which is the title of my most recent book, and parapsychology, showing that science actually can study these traditional magical practices.
And to everyone's amazement, including mine, except maybe not practicing magicians, it turns out that some of those practices are actually based in fact.
They're real, hence real magic.
Isn't that astonishing?
This wondrous and intangible thing that we have called consciousness, that we think we have, and we think we all have it equally, we're all the same.
Maybe we are, maybe we're not.
Have you found any suggestion, I'm not going to say evidence or I'm certainly not going to say proof, that that consciousness survives beyond this existence, this life?
Well, I have colleagues who will say definitely yes, and there's a whole range of evidence that they can point to.
For me personally, I'm still agnostic on this.
I'm well aware of the different kinds of evidence, but I'm also well aware of what I would say is psychic effects in the living.
I mean, we study psychic effects in the living in the laboratory.
We don't have any way of directly studying psychic effects in the dead or in invisible spirits.
I have many friends who are mediums who they can see, they perceive that there are invisible entities all over the place, and they can communicate with them.
But at this point, we don't have any method, at least any scientific method, that allows us to directly test what it is that they're perceiving.
What we can do, and this was done in a study of mediumship that we did, we took the EEGs to look at electrical brain activity in the brain, or in the head, of mediums under different conditions, one of which was to listen to a story about a person,
to imagine that they were speaking to a dead person, to actually do mediumship and have their internal experience that they're talking to a dead person, and so on, to have different kinds of internal states that they went into.
And we looked at their brain activity to see if, for example, imagining that you're speaking to a dead person is the same as what's happening when they feel that they are actually talking to a dead person.
Because if their experience, if the mediumship experience is a hallucination, essentially, or imagination, then the brain state would look the same.
But in fact, the brain state did not look the same.
When they're doing mediumship, it was a very different brain state than simply imagining that they were doing mediumship.
So there's some clues like that where we're starting to get objective measures, which suggests that whatever is going on inside a medium when they're talking to the dead, they're not making it up.
It's some state that we don't understand very well yet, but it's not hallucination and it's not imagination.
It's something else.
So it may be some kind of opening up of some kind of perception that allows them to communicate with this big universal grid in which time is infinite.
And what's really interesting about this is that relatively recently, there's been a discovery about a structure, a morphological difference in the brains of people who report these kinds of anomalous experiences as compared to normal people.
This was discovered by looking at the MRIs of people who report anomalies.
And these were primarily people reporting things like ET contact in UFOs.
They'd see UFOs and they'd feel that they were in communication, typically telepathic communication, with some kind of extraterrestrial.
So in some cases, maybe they made it up.
Maybe it's hallucination.
Maybe they have brain damage.
We don't know.
But some of the people who have these experiences, by every test that we know of, psychiatric tests and physiological tests, they seem perfectly normal.
And yet they're talking about telepathic contact with ETs.
So some cases like that.
We have their MRIs.
And a colleague of mine is a professional forensic neurologist who studies these things.
He has found 150 cases of people who report ET contact and exceptional psychic ability.
And they have a different structure in their brain than people who don't report these things.
And it's a similar structure.
It's in an old portion of the brain called the caudate, which is part of the basal ganglia.
It's this very old part of the brain, deep inside.
There's a portion which is relatively the same among all these different people.
That particular spot is four to five times the density of neurons than you find in a normal person.
And it looks like when you find a morphological change or difference in the brain, it suggests there's the genetic basis of it.
These things did not occur as a result of injury or lesions.
It's simply there, probably was there from the very beginning.
Or do you think it had been put there by some kind of extraterrestrial intelligence if such a thing exists?
Well, conceivably.
I mean, we can speculate about such things.
I would guess more that it doesn't, at least from the MRI perspective, it doesn't look like it was put there.
It looks like it simply grew there.
It was there.
And we know that young children, many young children, will see invisible friends, and then they eventually grow out of that.
They're socialized out of it.
Maybe those children have these structures even as young child.
So what makes this story even more interesting is that in the 1960s, there was an interview, a psychiatrist in the U.S. was interviewing various psychics because she was interested in that sort of thing.
One of the psychics was able to channel, and the channeler reported that in the future, there will be a brain structure which is found, which she called is the antenna for higher sense perception.
The antenna that she mentioned, and I put antenna in quotes, was this particular spot.
It's in the caudate, in the brain.
So you have this channeler 40 years before we've had this empirical evidence already talking about this particular portion of the brain acting as a kind of antenna to be able to perceive what psychics perceive.
So it's always been there.
Some people just have it more acutely.
That seems to be the case.
Yeah.
So that's another reason for looking at the genetics to see whether there's a difference between people who are naturally talented and people who are not.
Well, you proved to me, Dean, over the last hour, and thank you for giving me this time, why you were so popular with Art Bell's audience then.
And I'm delighted to, all these years later, to have had the chance to speak with you.
One last thing to ask you.
I interviewed Edgar Mitchell for an hour.
We spoke almost entirely about space because there was so much to talk about, and we could still have talked some more about it.
And I was very grateful to be able to speak with him a year or two before he sadly left us.
Why was he interested in these things?
Well, he was interested in all kinds of noetic experiences because on the way back from the moon to the earth, he had a very classic mystical experience.
He later said it was a form of samadhi, which is the yogic term for mystical experience.
And this wasn't a vague sense.
It was a very palpable, transformative experience, as mystical experiences often are, that transformed him from a technologist, essentially, and a scientist, and a military person, into somebody who became extremely interested in what in the world is that?
How is it even possible to conceive of the idea that your mind can expand the entire, can encompass the entire universe?
And that's why our institute was founded with his vision, essentially, that science needs to understand these kinds of phenomena better, because it tells us something about who and what we are.
So that was part of it.
The other part was that there's something about that encompassing vision, which changes our idea about the nature of the Earth, of us on the Earth, because the Earth from space looks like a very fragile, very bright blue ball with no boundaries and nothing to suggest that it's anything other than a Garden of Eden.
The moment you land, of course, you immediately learn there's an enormous amount of anxiety and strife going on constantly, which is completely at odds at this beautiful thing that you see from space.
So you become very motivated to figure out what in the world is going on in terms of our consciousness, which ultimately is the reason, is at least the conscious reason for why there's so much trouble on our planet.
So that was a sociological motivation for Edgar's vision, and that's what we do.
Well, he was a remarkable person, and I wish I'd had the chance to have that conversation with him, but I'm pleased that I've had that conversation with you.
Dean Radin, you have an excellent website.
Can you tell me and my listeners the address of it?
Either deanraden.org or realmagicbook.com, and they both end up in the same place.
Thank you for giving me this hour.
I hope we have a chance to speak again, Dean.
Thank you for asking me.
The remarkable Dean Radin, I'm sure he will be back on the show, and we may even put him on the radio show quite soon, too, to answer your questions directly.
Please keep your emails coming.
They are gratefully received.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained, so until next we meet here on The Unexplained Online.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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