Quantum Physics Reveals Magic Is Real: Top Scientist Dean Radin Shares Evidence

there always seemed to be one or more people within a tribe who had access to information and abilities that the others did not they were able to see what was happening a couple weeks from today and see what was happening right now but maybe a thousand miles away Dr Dean Raiden is a renowned scientist author and chief scientist at The Institute of noetic Sciences he has dedicated his career to studying psychic phenomena and mind matter interaction and his research has been published in over a 100 academic journals worldwide in this conversation we examine the scientific

evidence for latent human abilities that could fundamentally transform our understanding of what it means to be a human the effects are real and that in turn tells us there's something about today's model our worldview that is missing a significant chunk and what's important about that chunk is a case can be made that most of the greatest advancements in science and technology comes from that realm Deanie RS how modern science is validating things previously considered impossible or magic well right now we're studying it as brain-to-brain correlations at a distance the question there is will the brains

go into synchrony well the answer is yes it does go into synchrony using straightforward Neuroscience techniques we can see that the experience of telepathy happening in the brains this groundbreaking research may not only change science but the society that we live in we're working towards what we f expect someday will be part of mainstream science imagine that we got really really good at developing methods for telepathy then that means that there's no secrets it would require a major change to the structure of civilization itself before we get into this conversation I want to ask you

to join this amazing community of Consciousness explorers this whole idea of pursuing expanded Consciousness and the boundaries of human potential while living a modern life is relatively new which is why we interview revered Masters teachers experts and practitioners to help you on your own journey to stay up to date on the latest conversations simply click subscribe below and you'll be notified each time a new episode comes out I am so grateful for all of your support and comments I love reading them now let's dive into this conversation Hey Dean how are you I'm doing well

thank you wonderful well I'm very excited to have this conversation um you know these emergent possibilities for humans and our reality and how it all works is something I'm endlessly fascinated in and I think maybe where we could start the conversation is just giving the audience a little bit of background on the noetic sciences and its origin story well it its origin is the beginning of human history so so I don't think we want to start there but the idea that the idea is that uh as we know from stories from anthropologists and what we

know about Shamanism that there always seemed to be one or more people within a tribe who had access to information and abilities that the others did not they were sometimes considered eccentric at best and crazy at worst but the tribe knew that they actually had skills that were very important for their own Survival rival because they were able to see what was happening a couple weeks from today and see what was happening right now but maybe a thousand miles away so that's what the shamans were all about they were also healers that eventually turned into

many of the esoteric traditions and both eastern and western philosophies slightly different um methods but the origins were more or less the same and the the underlying philosophy of all of those was that Consciousness was fund mental in some way that ultimately all we actually can know comes through our conscious awareness and in which case everything that we know about the rest of the world including all of our Science and Technology are inferences based on our awareness Consciousness and so the irony is that here we are thousands of years after the shamans and science really

still doesn't understand what Consciousness is like where does it come from is it really our sense of of experience and personal awareness a result of activity electrochemical activity happening in three pounds of neural tissue in your head that is the prevailing idea because of philosophy of materialism which is where we are today uh the leading I would say that the Leading Edge in many scientific disciplines today is that we we got that wrong that materialism is extremely successful as a method that accounts for many aspects of everyday awareness or everyday experience but it doesn't explain

the experience itself and so you find thought leaders in the neurosciences and in physics and elsewhere saying well maybe we need to pay attention to the philosophy of science because that's after all the assumptions on which we base everything that we think about and that that philosophy is materialism everything's made out of matter and energy and that's the of the story from that perspective it's very very difficult to understand why we have any internal experiences at all right we can that the easy way of describing the the problem called the hard problem is that we

can watch somebody eat a lemon and we can trace from the outside everything all the way down almost to the atomic level about what happens when you bite into a lemon all of the physiology the chemistry the Electro chemistry all of that all the way down but we can't tell from any of that which is the scientific approach well what was it like to taste the lemon that's not seen from the outside you have to look at it from the inside well what does that mean that means from internal experience which apparently is not really

well accounted for not accounted for At All by by science today so it just tells us that there's something important that's missing in our our worldview and the noetic Sciences then are addressing the things that don't fit more or less it's the anomalies it's mystical experience and psychic experience and spiritual experience what are those things that are so important for people and yet science is really struggling to try to understand what they are and even to demonstrate that they actually do exist and when did this whole field that is beyond the scope of materialism become

an area of interest and focus for you well the the field it just broaden the question a little bit the field was more or less defined by William James the the psychologist and philosopher 150 years ago or so uh for me the uh my interest in this as a discipline and as my my career as a scientist uh was sparked probably when I was a pre-teen reading fairy tales so like in today's term or 10 years ago would have been reading Harry Potter or something like that it Sparks the imagination uh and some kids are

just naturally drawn to wondering about that a lot and I think kids still today this is why in movies and in fiction children and then adults as well are just drawn to to mythology to fairy tales and then to science fiction we it's a sense of wonder but what else are we capable of so I never forgot that wonder and so all through college and graduate school and then even afterwards I had learned through a friendly librarian that my interest in fairy tale and science fiction and mythology and Science and Mathematics just drawn to all

of those was actually brought together in a discipline of parapsychology so that was a section of the library I hadn't wandered into but she brought me there and said you might be interested in these books and I was really fascinated because now there was a connection between what science is really good at and these kinds of experiences and I was able to see that you you could connect the two and use the tools of science to begin to understand what are these experiences and how do we understand them and talk to me about what the

process is like at The Institute of noetic Sciences for studying these phenomena well everything ultimately starts with experience somebody has an experience and we give him labels like somebody has an experience of a mind- to- mind connection and it doesn't look like it's any of the usual or mundane explanations like like coincidence or something like that so we get the label of telepathy and of course it's not us doing this it's been around for hundred years people have developed labels for these kinds of experiences so we either have uh a competitive grant that we we

go for where we get an idea I'd like to study telepathy in this particular way like for example right now we're studying it as uh brain-to-brain correlations at a distance and the neuroscientist today there's this notion of hyperscanning which is kind of a social Neuroscience where if you take two people and you look at their brain activity and they're both looking at the same screen or playing the same game the same time you find that the brains go into synchrony almost like there's they're two brains but they're being synchronized by a common source all that

we're we're doing and and has been done about 20 24 experiments have already published uh by by colleagues and ourselves we we take the same ideas is hyperscanning except that we take one person over here and we isolate the other person so they're not they're no longer looking at the same game or same screen one typically is isolated and just sitting there and they're told keep in mind your friend who's at a distance and the friend is getting some kind of stimulus the question there is will the brains go into synchrony well the answer is

yes it does go into synchrony it's not anywhere near as strong as you see in hyperscanning but you do see the Cor ations arise and and then this is a way of saying well using straightforward Neuroscience techniques we can see that uh that the experience of telepathy which is not mind reading it's more like like the word itself meaning feeling at a distance that's generally what it's more like that we can see that happening in the brains and then colleagues have done it with functional MRI and they see where in the brain these connections are

occurring and so we're right now in the midst of recruiting people for a larger scale study doing this sounds very interesting it I I don't know if you've been following the um there's a new podcast out called the telepathy tapes that studies uh autistic children it's incredibly fascinating and and so it's yeah I'm really happy that you guys are putting some energy towards studying that phenomenon as well yeah I was I was interviewed for one of those episodes nice amazing and and so you know and maybe you could just give a broad spectrum of like

some of the other areas that you guys have studied at The Institute of noetic Sciences Beyond telepathy just so people have an understand of some of the other the scope of these anomalies well for for years we did uh studies uh that are an analog of distant healing so there's lots of people who practice various forms of so-called Energy Medicine things like raiki and Jo and Therapeutic Touch and all that sort of stuff most healers who do that kind of healing will admit after three beers and privately that their methods work at a distance just

as well as they do closeup now we're talking about some sort of physiological connection or me Mind Body connections from a distance so we've did many many studies like that where uh similar to brain-to-brain connections you have a Healer or somebody playing the role of a Healer and then you have isolated a person playing the role of a patient you measure their physiology and you see what is the role of the Healer or the sender's intentions and attentions on the body of the person who's isolated so many hundreds of sessions of of that kind of

experiment and those have been replicated by by colleagues around the world as well and it does show then that there's something happening the B the body of one person will respond when the mind of the other person is focusing on them so that's the jargon in the field is called dils DM I LS distant mental interactions with living systems so that's an area of research we've done we've also done quite a few studies on precognition both conscious precognition where you're you're like looking at a series of buttons on a screen and you press the one

that you think will be selected by the computer later so that's conscious response but we've also done a bunch uh that we call presentiment which is not pre- knowing as in precognition but preeing so the pre-feed somebody up to look at physiology they look at a screen they press a button screen remains blank for 5 seconds and randomly an emotional or a calm picture is shown and is selected at random from a large pool of pictures and then you see that for 3 seconds it goes away maybe for 30 seconds and then you repeat so

you might do 30 or 40 of these these short stimuli in a row and the hypothesis is that unlike conscious precognition in this case it's as though your your body can be used as a reflector of conscious awareness and so does your body respond before an emotional picture differently than before a cal picture and the answer is yes there's four dozen experiments replicated around the world now that show from a metaanalytic perspective that there's very little doubt that this kind of phenomena is real everything I'm saying by the way always does come from somebody's experience

the experience of pre sentiment is uh an easy way of describing it is you you're driving along the street and you're going to work and you do this a thousand times and at some point you get to an intersection with a with a light traffic light so you see a green lights ahead of you and normally you would speed up to get through the intersection but today you feel there's just something wrong it doesn't feel right somehow you don't you don't have any cognition about it but it's just you have a green light and you're

slowing down and you continue to slow down all the way up to the light itself cars behind you are wondering what what's going on and so you actually get to the intersection and by by that time you're actually stopped and you still have a green light and then boom through the intersection a big truck blast through because maybe their brakes failed or something like that but the point is if you had not slowed down you'd been hit broadside and may be killed or at least a big accident so what what is that I've heard this

reported by lots of people in lotss of different contexts so we call it presentiment because you had a feeling as though you're unconscious is always scanning for for danger typically and and it sometimes will bubble up into awareness not of what the cognition was but of the experience itself so we have a way of then simulating that in the laboratory that's his present an experiment and we in that experiment we look at uh skin conductance and heart rate and pupil dilation and EEG lots of different uh physiological measures and basically all of them show that

they show it at different time scales because physiology is different for each one of these sensor systems uh so that's one thing we've done uh another you want me to keep going maybe we do one more and I think you know where I was interested to understand is like what have all of these experiments LED you to believe about the nature of experience and reality well two things uh first of all all of these have something to do with Consciousness and not just not just conscious awareness like everyday conscious awareness but deeper levels of of

awareness that generally you would reach either through long-term meditation and sometimes through psychedelics so there there everyday awareness is a very very thin slice of of what's going on out there and so the the moment you drop into sleep you have a different kind of awareness like lucid dreaming or or just dreaming in general in a meditative states you have a different level of awareness and so on so the everyday waking state is the worst possible state to be in to experience a psychic or a mystical experience so that's one thing we learn the other

thing is that uh it this sounds trivial but we learned that those experiences of telepathy and Clairvoyance and precognition and even psychokinetic effects mind matter effects they are quite real there's there's a long list of things that look like that coincidence and um confabulation and fraud in some cases a long list of things that are mundane that are not psychic or mystical but the phenomena themselves can be Dem at in the laboratory at very high levels of confidence mainly through metaanalysis through lots of replications by ourselves and our colleagues and that tells us that the

the effects are real and that in turn tells us there's something about today's model our worldview that is missing a significant chunk and what's important about that chunk is a case can be made that most of the greatest advancements in science science and technology and religion and politics and You Name It Whatever the discipline is it comes from that realm some of it comes from our everyday analytical capabilities but The Inspirations the insights the things that actually become the next worldview the things that that that shows our our greatness as human beings that comes from

this other place so you would think then it would behoove us all to better understand what is that space how can we do that how do we take these kinds of experiences that seem to transcend space and time and Link it back into the rest of the scientific worldview I think we can do that that's kind of what we're working towards but it it does suggest I think pretty strongly that the uh the world viw that we have today is simply a special case scientific worldview is a special case I hope you're enjoying this conversation

so far if you like what you hear let me know by clicking like subscribing to the channel and responding with a comment around something that you found interesting in the conversation so far in addition to these videos I do a lot of writing on the exploration of Consciousness and my own personal revelations in my newsletter called Consciousness the doorway to human evolution to receive these updates and more all you need to do is simply head to the link in the description below and you'll be added to the community of 20,000 plus Consciousness explorers receiving weekly

ideas and inspiration in their inbox I look forward to hearing from you there now let's get back to the show and you know it I I'm with you right this this notion of a much greater and more compelling expansive human potential that we've read about if anybody's you know explored wisdom Traditions is incredibly exciting why is there so much resistance to opening to that and investigating it more broadly well one of the primary reasons is that we we cannot yet plug what we know about science into these experiences so think back a hundred years ago

it it was the the data was pretty much the same as it is today the methods have changed over time and gotten better but with classical physics there was no way to be able to connect these kinds of experiences with what was understood about physics and so a skeptic could say and many did that what you're describing is impossible it's it violates the laws of physics and we still hear that today by people who don't know what they're talking about because physics has changed and so the notion that there are non-local connections that transcend space

and time is now mainstream physics we still don't know how to connect Human Experience to that physical world this non-local connection world but at some point through development of of quantum biology I think we'll probably get a lot closer to it the other thing to to keep in mind is that physics is not over right we're we keep learning new things both from a classical physics perspective and Quantum and there'll be something Beyond Quantum as well and the direction then the physics has been going is more and more compatible with the nature of these kinds

of experiences so the this experience ultimately is that something about Consciousness thinking of it as a spectrum conscious awareness and maybe superc Consciousness and subconscious with the whole thing is not tightly locked into a local SpaceTime it seems to transcend space and time uh and so at some point we will look back on this and say well back then meaning in the 21st century at least the first couple of decades they didn't know about Fillin the blank something Quantum biological whatever like the the brain developed over hundreds of millions of years it does operate in

a Quantum fashion which is now kind of Leading Edge of quantum biology that being the case it means that yeah a lot of our perception and cognition are driven by local senses but it's also Quantum so it must have Quantum senses whatever whatever that means if that is the case then we should be able to perceive throughout space and time so there we have Clairvoyance and precognition but we also have agency Consciousness is is both a matter of perception and agency we can do things with our Consciousness in which case maybe through the quantum observer

effect cast into humans we could also influence the World At Large in which case now we've covered the whole psychogenetic side of these experiences so we and our colleagues around the world about 40 of us perhaps that are actively working in this area uh and then hundreds hundreds more who are deeply interested and know about what we're doing but they may not be active in the laboratory uh we're working towards what we fully expect someday will be part of mainstream science what there's there's a lot of pressure then against why we shouldn't do that so

this is this goes back to your original question if if these things are demonstrable in the laboratory why is there so much resistance so part of it is because it has been thought for a long time but people who don't know what they're talking about that it's impossible well that's just simply a matter of Education you say no it actually is possible now the second thing is that these kinds of phenomena from a an orthodox religious perspective have been pushed aside and and are called demonic by most religions unless the phenomena are performed within the

the hospices of the church the easy way to look at that is through the Catholic catechism where psychic phenomena all of these kinds of phenomena and magical phenomena which are very closely related are considered demonic unless they are performed by a priest who is Anointed in the right way and is performed in the right context that has that still has a very strong push from some people who do not want who who don't want this to be studied they don't want the topic to be studied because they consider it to be demonic like you're you're

not doing it within the church so don't do it and there's pressure there the other side of it is from the scientific perspective going all the way back to Galileo and and his his contemporaries plus or minus 100 years they knew back then that if they countered the church's interests they would be killed and some were killed so there was a very strong pressure within science to only look at the objective physical world and there was kind of a uneasy Alliance that was made with the church at the time where the church said we have

everything to do with Spirit don't touch it don't even research it by Spirit they meant among other things Consciousness and spirituality all of that anything having to do with the intern internal world so science developed right from the very beginning with a sense that we can study this but we shall not study that that includes psychic phenomena so we have pressure both from science and from religion saying don't do that and you see it reflected among other things by saying how much federal dollars are spent studying these things zero all of our money comes from

a few foundations in the world world one in particular in Portugal and individual donors who are interested in what we do that's that's how we do this and yeah you see even echoed in the academic world there's very very strong pressure to say uh we we either will completely ignore this domain even though privately most academics like most lay people have had these experiences and are vitally interested in them uh or we will say we can study beliefs about these experiences but the reason why people believe in things like telepathy and Clairvoyance is because they

have they have some sort of cognitive deficit that's you see this again and again in mainly in psychological papers so yeah there's there's pressure from both sides and then there's a third level which is fear right and the fear is an interesting one because imagine that we got really really good at developing methods for for telepathy take an average person and we can turn them into what amounts to a telepath then that means that there's no secrets if you have that on a large scale everything having to do with politics and government and business and

law and everything else we can think of that doesn't have secrets that is not the world that we live in it would require a major change to the structure of civilization itself so you can imagine the amount of pressure coming from government from business and from other areas where secrets are necessary or at least thought to be necessary and so they they don't want that to be studied either except maybe under highly classified conditions because then it could be useful because you can figure out what your adversaries are up to and that has been the

case there are classified programs that went on for a very long time yeah the things like the Gateway papers come up for me as um you know just examples of like things you see from our government and like you guys knew this stuff and were studying it and that was going on you didn't tell us and it's you know what strikes me is that yeah there's this underlying like I've had a lot of scientists on the show uh who have been studying this stuff and there seems to be just this like kind of underlying uh

egocentric Paradigm that we've been in that people people are afraid that they're wrong that everything they've done is wrong people are afraid of what this could lead to people are afraid that this could destroy businesses if this is and profits and all of these things and all of these people studying these amazing things are struggling to get funding and it's it's it's just the wildest thing to me and I'm wondering like what is the what change needs to happen do you think for real resources to start to flood into the type of work that you're

doing and just the whole noetic science and studies of all of these things because it seems like that's kind of a critical blocker right now yeah certainly one of the of the blocks uh is funding but that I mean that every scientists in every discipline will say the same thing we always need more funding we're in a special case because don't get Federal funding and because of pressure on other large uh foundations that could provide funding that don't because they're worried about their image so they don't do it interesting so the other thing I I

think the the model that I like to keep in mind is the University of Edinburgh so the University of Edinburgh in in Scotland in 1985 got a request from the uh the um from Arthur kesler's estate the author for half a million pounds to establish a endowed chair for parapsychology within the psychology department and so that that program is still going that was 1985 and now there over 100 phds that have come through that program that have been trained in the the methods the history the literature of parisology and it has made the UK the

world center for interest and more importantly it has also significantly reduced the taboo so in the UK that's also that the UK responds to people who are considered eccentric in a slightly different way than they would in the US for example if you're eccentric as an academic in the US you better have tenure because otherwise you won't remain in the academic system very long in the UK it's a little different somebody who's almost expected to be eccentric as an academic it's it's like it's okay that's what the do they're pushing the envelope but every culture

every country has slightly different reactions to it and some countries like the us if you deviate from the norm you don't stay in Academia for very long even when you get tenure there's pressure to not deviate from the norm which when you think about it is completely insane because that's exactly especially when you get 10 you want people to push the envelope all the time that means you're going to be studying anomalies you're going to be studying things that people may find uncomfortable going to be challenging ideas that's where Innovation comes from but we see

happening then to a large extent is that happens through business in the United States like our entrepreneurs are the ones who are pushing it which is fine and I mean it works that's where Innovation comes from but it also is constraining because it means that much of that push the entrepreneurial push is towards products like how do we make money out of this thing that we came up with whereas if you look at as say you have a business and they have a a big section within that business of pushing to figure out how can

we eventually use psychic phenomena how can we create something that by which we can make money from people who become really really good at telepathy or really good at precognition or really good at fill in the blank well it may take 20 years to get there so maybe you need a GI company like Google they have a whole division focusing on this a small company would find it difficult mainly because of again of how do you support people for 20 years to figure out something which at this point is a promise rather than something which

is certain so so go back to Edinburgh so it the way I think you want to change this is multiple multiple directions one is you need many many more people who know about the literature so that you don't keep read Reinventing the wheel a lot has been learned about methods about what we think works and doesn't work and so on but you need training for people they need to go through some kind of a system well that's what the academic system is good for you create 10 endowed shares and universities around the us and within

a couple of generations you'll have thousands of people who are now applying their interest to these areas that's when you begin to see I mean like we're at the beginning of an exp curve but that's that will bring it up to the knee and then you know then we learn quickly uh so that's part of it it's the educational part the other part is that there are lots and lots of areas that could be looked at but you need money to do so so I'll give one example so one of my interest is applying the

the uh Quantum observer effect as a kind of a Quantum level mind matter interaction and this is one of the viable interpretations of quantum mechanics that that something about Consciousness collapses the way function so-called and I've done many experiments in this domain using things like double slit Optical systems and we've used the money that we have to build the best equipment that we we are able to put together and we we find interesting effects and we've now inspired several other Laboratories to do similar work and they see similar effects that's a major game Cher If

we can show that one of the 13 or 14 interpretations of quantum mechanics uh roughly six of them have something to do with observation being important and two of them two of these interpretations say that Consciousness is involved in the physical world directly that's important to know so what I would rather do having worked in in academic uh Optical systems before is to have rather than $10,000 or $30,000 to build Optical system for this kind of experiment a couple of hundred thousands of dollars to get a proper Optical bench and all of the equipment and

to do things at the level that you find in mainstream science today like top tier level science because you can just do a lot more than you can if you're building by hand which I have done small Optical systems that are that you still get effects with but it would be so much more efficient to have the ones that just cost a lot of money so that would be that would be a major advancement too that simply have more money to build better equipment and to find people who are exceptionally good at these various tasks

so we generally will choose meditators uh because meditators can pay attention which is what most of these tasks require but just recently I finished a study which was again looking at the quantum observer effect but I selected can you define that just really quickly just so people that may be less familiar with it can understand what you're referencing the quantum observer effect correct yeah so one of the one of the many strange things about quantum mechanics is that in the in the quantum World Before You observe a Quant a particle like an electron or Photon

or whatever Before You observe it it had it it doesn't have properties in the way that we understand properties of everyday object right we we look at an object and we say well it's this weight and it's this color and it has has properties that's what defines the object in the quantum World it appears that quanta do not have properties in that way until that it's observed or measured the moment you measure something it gains the property which means the interpretation of it is that a Quant an electron say which may have spin it may

have charge it may have a certain amount of mass it has all possible properties all at the same time and then it is measured or observed and then suddenly it gains that property well so this is like a collapse there's something about the knowing that collapses the system from a superposition of all possible States into one state and so that the way that this is demonstrated in physics 101 is you you have an optical system where you send a photon through through two little slits so the photon will either go through the left or through

the right you measure the interference pattern that that you get when the photons go through the two slits and you end up with this band of bright and dark bands it's from interference of the of the photon well you get that band because of the wav likee nature of light and this is why light is wav like and particle like at the same time it's wave like until you know which of the two slits the photon goes through and there's lots of ways of measuring when that happens the moment that you know it no longer

behaves like a wave behaves like a particle so this this is this wave particle duality of light uh it's not that it is a particle or that it is a wave but it can act in that way because we don't really know what a photon is the packet of energy that is strange so the point of this is there's something about measurement which implies observation and that's where the that's where the real question begins what does it mean to observe something do you need to consciously observe it do you can a machine observe it does

it require Consciousness all of all of those kinds of things so our experiment is looking specifically at the at whether Consciousness is necessary oras Consciousness is a factor in the collapse of the wave fun function that's what these Optical experiments are all about so so that's what I mean by the quantum observer effect it's one of the many outstanding puzzles that suggest that there's a role for Consciousness in the behavior of the physical world one of the things I was interested to zoom into is that you mentioned you had started a a business that was

about um enhancing or modifying human Consciousness uh and I was definitely curious to learn more about that so one of the many projects that we've been interested in is we call S genes and this comes about from folklore that you find in every culture that there are some families that seem to be naturally talented in this domain so I was at the University of Edinburgh some time ago and there was a graduate student at the time who was studying Scottish second site which which is the idea it's basically precognition or Clairvoyance in some families in

Northern Scotland well you find this similar ideas everywhere but it's not it's called something else but it usually has to do with my my grandmother knew when somebody at a distance had died that sort of thing and then it seems to to go through generations typically on on the female side but not always sometimes it will jump it'll jump Generations it'll jump genders but it's in the family of course this immediately raises the nature versus nurture idea that some families May simply be open to it and allow the ability to be seen or Andor maybe

there is a genetic component because after all there's a genetic component for sports ability for musical ability for intelligence for all kinds of things so maybe there's some kind of genetic basis for psychic ability as well in fact most of the naturally talented psychic people I know will say someone else in the family has that too has the ability so we did a a smallscale experiment where we got the DNA from people who said that they were psychic and came from Psychic families and did some online tests to vet that they actually had some ability

and then we got DNA from controls who are matched by age and gender who never reported anything psychic and nor did anybody in their family and so this is called the case control study and it's done with tens of thousands of cases and controls for studying things like schizophrenia like what's the genetic basis of that particular disease which is also a genetic thing but we we didn't have that kind of money so we did a small scale study and we found a difference well we've also recently done additional studies using data from 23 and me

where we got the data we asked people a bunch of question questions and we find that there's certain kinds of psychic abilities that seem to show up in in their genome so this that study we did maybe five or six years ago and at the time I was thinking that well this is interesting because it was around that time that crisper the the DNA editing method was becoming popular and we thought well maybe we could make we could do a genetic edit to enhance somebody's natural abilities through a genetic means by manipulating receptors in the

brain so that they would become momentarily or even permanently more psychic because now we're able to basically give somebody a talent that they didn't have before around the same time I was contacted by uh a person I didn't know but now is is my co-founder in the company who said many many years ago 50 years ago when he said this during an LSD experience that he got a download and and it was about how would you begin to manipulate some aspects of the way that the brain works in order to essentially open one's Consciousness that's

what he he got and he was telling me the story and I was thinking oh you know we we almost have a technology that can do that now at the time was crisper we pretty quickly moved over into RNA so would be a temporary fix because we don't know enough about we don't want to permanently change somebody's brain at this point until we're really sure what we're doing so an RNA would be a temporary thing so we're using R RNA interference as a way of downregulating certain receptors in the brain and rather jumping directly into

something like cognitive enhancement which would include psychic enhancement we decided that for pragmatic purposes that we we first need to focus on psychiatric indications mental health indications our first indication was can we manipulate certain receptors in the brain to to essentially cure or at least a long-term treatment for chronic anxiety the answer is yes it's 5 hd2a that receptor same receptor that psychedelics work on so we we have a way of doing to The receptors directly only those receptors in the brain through an internasal delivery of RNA interference it's actually it's short hair pin RNA

shrna so it we we know where it goes we know in our animal models that it works really really well significantly well for reducing anxiety and increasing memory so it's the second part which was a guess on our part it turns out that it's even stronger than an anti-anxiety effect because it goes into the hippocampus it reduces hyperactivity so we are now gearing up to do clinical trials that we're we're pretty sure that this is going to work in humans and it would provide an entirely new class of treatments for mild cognitive impairment and for

dementia and maybe for early onset Alzheimer's but this this is like product number one of a long long list we have like 50 different things that we can think that would work it would work potentially for uh for OCD for PTSD for schizophrenia for psychosis for the whole range of psychiatric disorders that have a known neurological basis so internasal delivery is very easy we know where it goes in the brain we know how to only make it work on certain receptors so we publish a bunch of papers on this now and I think what's interesting

about this besides the fact that we were working on a new kind of treatment is that the the reason why it comes about which is more often true than not is the combination of an LSD download right that I was that that was that was told to somebody who was able to decipher it because these downloads typically are not highly technical it's like the it's like a concept like a concept of a plan well here's here's a download I thinking of oh we we actually can do this now because I've Heard lots and lots of

downloads from people in meditative States in mystical States and so on most of which we don't know what they're doing we don't even understand it at all it's like too far Advanced well this was a download from 50 years ago took 50 years to get to the point where we actually have the technology now that we could do it so somebody gives me a download on how to do anti-gravity machine maybe they're 500 years ahead you know it involves crystals and things and light and okay but we don't know I don't even know how to

interpret that whereas in this case I did and it looks like it's leading to a new class of treatments for psychiatric problems that in some cases are completely intractable and in other cases require drugs like SSRI drugs that have all kinds of horrible side effects whereas our approach wouldn't have any side effects because of this precise medicine wow what an amazing uh what an amazing story and and I'm excited to to learn and watch more as you guys progress with that and it also speaks to the notion of yeah there's information beyond space and time

that's available and there's different ways that people can tap into it and then apply it and that's exactly what's happening with this business which is so cool one of the the qu one of the qu things that also came up for me as you were talking about this is I've heard a lot of people talk about how humans have you know DNA that isn't turned on it's like junk DNA and it's like the evolution of our Consciousness leads to certain dnas becoming activated um have you explored that at all is that is there a potentiality

there well you're talking about epigenetics right so we we're we all come into this world with a certain group of genes the genes are not all turned on at the same time so some are never turned on but through gentic methods this is that used to be called Junk DNA but it it's now not it's there's the the portion of the DNA that does not code for protein called the intron sequence so the the sequence of DNA is billions of of uh nucleotide pairs only a small percentage of that actually codes for protein so our

body is made up of proteins what's what's happening with all the rest of it the rest of it essentially is kind of a software switch so if you meditate a lot you're going to start turning on genes that otherwise may not be turned on you find that your physical and mental uh existence begin to change as a result of all of these genes that are being stimulated to turn on that otherwise may not have it goes in the other direction too that you can find that if you're under an enormous amount of stress that genes

will get twiddled in a way that is generally not good for you and that's an epigenetic effect as well so yeah so we have a a a given set of of building blocks to work with but we also have this huge somewhat metaphorically software that can begin to modulate the the hardcoded portions of it so well what do we know about that in in terms of psychic phenomena we know that meditation somebody begins to meditate the very first thing that they start to notice is increase in synchronicities so is that it might be a simply

paying attention to things that they hadn't paid attention to but at very longterm meditation or people who are are have talent for meditation because you can have a talent they will discover pretty quickly what the yogis have known thousands of years ago which is that the yogis would call these kinds of abilities cities so the the S DHI so a city from the yogic tradition is what we today would call psychic phenomena there were roughly 25 cities that were defined by pangel who wrote The Yoga suas sutras y yeah so when you look through those

25 cities they include things like invisibility and levitation and so on which we don't see today but they but the first couple of cities we do see the very first city that that potentially mentions is the ability to see past present and future all at the same time well we call it Clair or precognition so that is the very first city that is considered very Elementary from a yoga perspective and in fact when we've surveyed beginning meditators they start talking about oh yeah I'm getting the synchronicities where I'm like I know what's about to happen

or I I can somehow feel what's happening at a distance well that's City number one and then it it goes down becomes more complex after that that strongly suggests that because medit a is an epigenetic switch in many ways that that yeah if we learn the right kinds of switches to throw most of us will will not only find that we can have some of these abilities but some people who are probably talented and may not know it yet would find that they're actually very talented in in one or more of these domains because like

any other kind of talent you may be really good at these two things but you can't do that at all well you may never know about any of it until you start trying to do some kind of exercises that will bring your awareness to what you're actually capable of yeah and it's interesting because I also observe a lot of unconscious competence with these things where like I hear very famous entrepreneurs talking about following their intuition for example and I mean they're some of the most successful people in the world but at the same time I'll

hear them talk about how they are not spirit spiritual and and so they're like tapping into this source of information that to me appears to be a psychic ability but they would never ever ever admit to that or or know that or seek that out or learn to do more of it and it's it's it's pretty amazing to see yeah so there's a a big cultural taboo that that prevents people from being open about these kinds of topics uh it's not clear to me I mean we we don't really know what spiritual means if you

ask a thousand people you get a thousand different responses and as a as a general maybe an overarching way of thinking about it it's a sense that there's something more something bigger something more larger capacity something like that occasionally you'll have people say well it's going into the Divine well now it's we're talking about the supernatural well we're pretty comfortable with the natural we don't science certainly doesn't know how to go into the supernatural other than things like super abilities but Supernatural is suggesting above the natural world beyond the natural world we don't even know

exactly what that means because if you look at the history of science it has always started with here's the natural world oh now we understand this and now we understand this and now quantum mechanics and relativity our natural world is probably already out into aspects of what used to be called the super Supernatural it's just simply an expansion of what we understand so whether the Supernatural and what we think of what we called the Divine we don't know what that means and so one of the reasons I think that some are not comfortable talking about

spiritualities because they know they're going to start intruding on people's religious beliefs and so it simply becomes a pragmatic way of avoiding a topic because you never know who you're going to piss off or some people you might attract as a result but I can see them from a very pragmatic business perspective you want to keep it sort of straight and narrow and be careful about uh about disrupting people's sensibilities and so you may want to avoid certain words and that goes on all the time in the academic world as well you don't talk about

this stuff in public it is very much like Fight Club you don't talk about Fight Club you don't talk about psychic ability you avoid talking about spirituality except in certain contexts and and that's a self-preservation thing you think it's a social construct right what people tell you in private after three or four beers is very very different than what they're willing to go on a stage and talk about do you have a hypothesis and I know in your book real magic um you talk about kind of three examples of Merlin type abilities that have been

docu dou umented throughout history and then we have things like the yoga sutras that I mean I I presume those don't just come out of nowhere why historically there have been a greater capacity to witness these things or documentation of these things than we currently are experiencing in our present day uh because of this this thing that's why so take take this as a as an analogy for the everyone just really quick that was a phone that for people listening that Dean just put up on the screen yeah I showed an iPhone and so it's

an an analogy for the ways that we are distracted so we have so many distractions for a person living in a developed world doing normal kinds of jobs and so on we're constantly distracted and so when you you look at historically somebody like St Joseph of copertino who was to have levitated many many times by thousands of people and became a saint as a result it turns out though that there was there something like two dozen of the saints were were people who became uh became Saints as a result of hundreds or thousands of people

who saw them levitate or bilocate or both so these are considered Miracles today we don't see anybody who can do that today or why not because they're all on their cell phones all the time and they're you know they're looking at Tik Tok or something so those people the people in in our historical past who were able to do this and by the way there's still people today who are claimed to be able to do bilocation generally in religious context but they're not saturated with with these distractions they're in contemplative environments like ashrams or or

monasteries their job essentially is to meditate or to pray and so some people today have that job but not too many right uh and it's also more importantly it's not valued in the way that it it would have been back then so it's a combination also of people today who do have those talents but know very well that they should not become public with them because if they did go public their lives would be in danger there would be lot of people who want to get rid of them real quick right and so they have

to be very very careful about not revealing that they have those abilities so my guess is probably about one in 10,000 people are talented and maybe one in a million is extremely talented like in the stories of Merlin but you know it still means there's 8,000 people in the world who have these super abilities but they know very well not to they know among other things that I would love to study that kind of person in the laboratory but they would see me coming a thousand miles away and a thousand days in advance and know

where to be so that I would never find them right and this is not I mean I don't blame them right we have a storied history of persecuting these people uh in Europe and the United States and and people that seem to have access to something that people in power didn't and didn't like that they had access to that yeah yeah it's not it's the modern Inquisition in this case you can think of it uh with a slight put on your paranoia hat that the government all governments would not like the idea that somebody has

a capacity to learn all of their secrets it's just right it's too dangerous we already have gotten a preview of that with John McAfee uh the person that invented the McAfee software who gave people who gave the laptops to the government to and then knew what was happening and you know he mysteriously disappeared so yeah we we have that evidence um well Dean this has been a tremendous conversation thank you for explaining kind of just the state of things in the scientific world of of studying these phenomena and how that might shift I think it's

I think we're just at an incredible inflection point in history and I want to give you an opportunity to talk about where people could learn more um the work that you're doing the books you published some of the things that you're putting out there if they want to just continue to follow along and also if they want to support you well I'm at The Institute of noetic Sciences so you probably will already have neic.org as a link somewhere uh my personal website is Dean ren. comom and there I I posted my my books I have

a fifth book coming out the title is enchantment H which will come out in 2025 in the summer something like that and it's a followup of my previous book uh real magic and that those these two books are showing how how psychic ability and magical ability are exactly the same thing seen from different cultural perspectives and so the the value of this is that uh psychic ability has studied by science has has verified that some of the ideas have about magic which I I put in the categories of Enchantment which is mind matter interaction divination

which is perceiving through space and time and theor which involves things like mediumship or or interacting with Spirits or non-human intelligence in some way all of those have been studied by science most of it has been verified as something that is real that is what we traditionally think of as magic and so part of the story then behind this is that uh science is slowly gaining the competence of being able to look at ideas about magic and finding out what works what doesn't work and more importantly why it works which for thousands of years was

considered part of esoteric knowledge but now we're beginning to to plug in some aspects of science to understand why were these magical ideas so prevalent for so long and some of them actually do work and are they going to be seen as threats by someone somewhere well as I already mentioned before that one of the pressures to not do this kind of research is a fear that people will become too powerful and there governments generally don't like people to be all that powerful so there's ethical considerations and sociological considerations lots of interesting side topics besides

just the raw the the the basic science itself this by the way is is true for any advancement in science there's always going to be ethical and sociological issues that come about like the development of crisper right do we want designer babies or not well it's going to happen independent of of any kind of regulations that are put on that technology I believe the same will happen for what we currently call psychic methods but someday we're going to have other names for it and magical methods as well well uh an exciting time to be alive

and I look forward to reading enchantment when it comes out great and uh I just want to say thank you everybody for listening as well it's been a real pleasure Dean and yeah just continue continue doing what you're doing man it's really it's really needed and awesome stuff thank you [Music] I I be