Dean Radin, the experimental parapsychologist who has spent about forty years testing psychic phenomena in the laboratory, delivers a slide talk in Pinchbeck's online series, following an earlier speaker. Radin sets aside popular paranormal imagery and defines his subject pragmatically as interconnections that cross space and time, labelled telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. Most of the presentation walks through methodology: the ganzfeld telepathy protocol with its red light, halved ping-pong balls and white noise, a shielded two-thousand-pound steel chamber at his institute, and a worked example in which a receiver's impressions of stone and monolithic scale matched the target image. He reports 117 published studies and 3,885 sessions with a 30.6 percent hit rate against 25 percent chance, and notes coverage in mainstream psychology journals from 1994 to 2020. He closes on why the work matters to him.
Guest: Dean Radin
In brief
- Radin frames his interest as the last mile between claims about reality and what can actually be demonstrated without accepting fantasy or delusion.
- He argues that the ganzfeld design reduces telepathy testing to a simple one-in-four judgement, making accumulated results statistically tractable.
- He reports 117 published ganzfeld studies and 3,885 sessions yielding a 30.6 percent hit rate where chance is 25 percent, with newer data slightly higher.
- He notes that this class of experiment has been debated in top-rated psychology journals from 1994 through 2020, which he treats as evidence of mainstream engagement.
- Radin says he wants laboratory tests of folkloric claims such as levitation, because a positive result would expose gaps in current physics.
- He argues that transformative experiences, whether psychic, psychedelic or mystical, almost always move people in a prosocial direction, which he gives as his larger motivation for the research.
Full text
Okay, Dean, I'm going to pass the uh the baton to you. Thank you. That is a very difficult act to follow. And and so as as my buddy John Cles would say, now for something completely different. Uh one of the phrases that Jamie said, which I thought was interesting, is the one about the last mile. And I take that as a matter of pragmatism. And so I'm I'm a scientist. I'm an empiricist. who has been studying psychic phenomena for about 40 years as part of my the my day job. And so I'm interested in this last mile between the uh the the world as Jamie presented versus what can we actually demonstrate is true and not accidentally accept something that is fantasy or delusional.
So I've I've made a a little talk here this. So, we're talking about science and the paranormal. And I presume everyone can see my slides at this point. Well, first of all, what I'm not going to talk about, I'm not talking about this, even though this is uh I am a fan of all of these. Uh but of course, these are elaborations of reality. They're not reality itself. And so unfortunately the term paranormal is so closely associated with these kinds of ideas that uh we need to take the next step and look at the neuralizer and when it flashes you'll forget all of those stories and we take a more pragmatic approach all gone.
So we're talking about this or interconnections that transcend space and time. So if information somehow through entanglement or some other means gets between two minds at a distance, we have a label for that. And if your intentions can be impressed into the world, we have labels for that. And if you if images or events in the world get into your mind from a distance or split in time, we have words for that. These are the kinds of interconnections which the reason I'm interested in them is because they can be studied and have been studied now for about 150 years. We call them psychic phenomena and the labels that we give to the phenomena are things like telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis and we know that they're all real.
So, I didn't know exactly what kind of audience to expect for this, but having heard Jaime speak. Uh, I can imagine that you don't need to be convinced that these things are real because you've probably experienced them. But then the question still remains that we can personally have these experiences and I have and I'm sure many in the audience have had too. Uh, how do we know that they're actually real and not a coincidence? Because coincidences do happen. uh maybe it's fantasy, maybe it's delusion, and maybe it's all kinds of things. Well, as a scientist, that's what has been my main interest. How do we test these things?
So, I'm going to go through some of the classic ways that we have been able to test some of these phenomena and then show you what the results are. So, we'll begin with telepathy. So, in telepathy, the the standard method which has been developed over the past 50 years or so is called the Gansfeld telepathy test. Gansfeld is a German word meaning whole field and it's a state where you take somebody who plays the role of the telepathic receiver and you sit them down and you put a red light shining in their face and then you take uh a ping pong ball and you cut it in half and you put a half over each eye so with their eyes open all they see is pink and then you give them headphones which is playing white noise and this is kind of a sensory deprivation condition except that you're wide awake. And in this condition, you tell some the the receiver that somebody at a distance will be sending you mental information and we want you to speak it aloud.
So here you have somebody at a distance. They're given a random target, usually a photograph or a video, and they're told to mentally send that to the person in the Gunsville condition. So that's how we're testing for telepathy. Uh so in this case uh you hope that something like this correlation appears that this person is given a picture of a rabbit and the other person starts talking about rabbits. So in a real experiment uh you might have an elephant and what the what the receiver will say sometimes is the actual target but more often they're talking about impressions. So they'll get something about animals, something about gray and that may be all that they get.
Then you take them out of the Gunsfeld condition. You play back anything that they said aloud to remind them because when you're in that that Gunsfeld state, it's very difficult to remember what what you were saying because you're just gaining impressions. So you're then shown four pictures, one was the actual target and three decoys. Uh any one of which could could have been selected randomly, but this makes a very simple experiment because the chance of getting it right is one in four. you could accidentally say it was an elephant. So, here's where we've done these experiments at at our institute. This is this box over here on the left is 2,000 lb solid steel doublewalled electromagnetically grounded chamber where when you put somebody in there, the outside world is effectively gone.
So, they're stuck inside a box. And meanwhile, somewhere else in the building, you have a sender who's going to send them images. So here's my friend Gail who's getting put into the Donsfeld state. So these are the ping pong balls over her eyes. Meanwhile, at a distance, we have four possible pictures that we can use in this experiment. One of those is going to be selected at random and given to a person to mentally send to Gail in the box. So this is what bo what Gail is said over a course of around 20 minutes. This is all she said. So she said something has a a rough texture.
It's tall looking up high like in an art museum, art gallery or a museum. A yuseite kind of image of a tall rock monolithic images of Mount Rushmore. Halfstone like a big stone. So if you were a judge in this experiment and you knew that one of the targets being sent is one of these four and this is what Gail's image was, what would you say the answer would be? Well, most people would say this. And in fact that is the image that was being sent. So in this experiment it took 90 minutes. It took three people and you get a single data point and it's either a hit or a miss.
This would be an example of a hit. These studies have been discussed in one of the top rated academic journals for psychology starting in '94 and the last one in 2020. Again and again mainstream psychology discussing this kind of experiment. So, as of 2020, and it's recently been updated, but the results are more or less the same. 117 studies have been published, a total of 3,885 sessions. So, the session I described with Gail was one session, 90 minutes. And of those, 1188 hits, which is a hit rate of 30.6%. And you take the new data into account, it's actually a little bit higher than that. But remember that chance was 25%.
So now you do a statistical test and you say well what's the likelihood of getting 30% if chance is 25% given this many sessions and the answer is a probability of 10 theus 16th. You can turn that on its head and say what are the odds against chance of getting a probability that low and the answer is 10,000 trillion to one. So, one way of thinking about what what these odds figures means is that first of all, it's extremely unlikely to be due to chance. But more importantly, if you look at 3,885 sessions, each of which took 90 minutes, you can calculate how much time was involved in doing all these experiments. And then you'd say, well, we'd have to run this 10,000 trillion times in order to get a result at least this big or larger, which is way longer than the length of the universe, the how long the universe has been around, many, many times longer.
So, this is probably not a chance outcome. 30.6%. If you take people who have claimed that they have had these experiences before, typically artistic populations, meaning writers and artists and so on, they get 41%. So we we see in general that if you select people who say that they've had these experiences they get much better results than these people because this 30 30% is mostly college sophomores who are doing the experiment because they get credit for their psychology class. So this is like everyday person average people who may not have ever said that they were psychic or anything and they still can show these effects whereas talented people especially creative people give much higher effects.
So even among just these artistic populations with only 367 sessions still have odds against chance of 10 billion to one. Some of these by the way were students at Giuliard school. So there are many ways of then checking is you know if can we believe that result of the Dfeld experiment. Well let's look at brain activity because brain activity correlates with conscious experience. So there have been lots of studies now something like three dozen experiments looking at two people separated at a distance one of whom gets a stimulus and you look at the other person's brain and to see if it has a response at the same time.
It's been done with EEG and also functional MRI and these experiments work. I'm not going to go into details because I don't have the time. You can do the same thing with a class of studies called direct mental interactions with living systems. One type of which is called the feeling of being stared at. So, if you take two people and you separate them and you have one stare at the other one through a closed circuit TV link, so the person being stared at doesn't know that they're being stared at, but you're recording their heart rate and you're recording their physiology. When somebody is staring at you at a distance without knowing that they're staring at you, your physiology changes.
It changes in the direction of sympathetic arousal. And when they're not staring at you, you there's no change. So this is a type of telepathy only responding at the body level. What about remote viewing which is a fancy new term for clairvoyance? So here's one example again one session. So you take somebody who's going to do a remote viewing and you say describe where your friend is now. So your friend says does a little sketch and says something like this. A very open and airy place. Lots of poles, maybe used for construction, something like a fence, like looking at something that narrows at the distance, and it's quiet with solitude.
So that's the entire information that they have. Meanwhile, what you don't know is that there were four possible places that your friend could have been sent. A random decision is made to choose one of them. So again, they have a one in4 chance of a judge being able to take the description of the of the remote viewer and match it to one of these four places. So in this case, the random decision said the person should go to this location. So they went to this location and this is what it looks like. It's it's in Redwood City and in the Bay Area in California. And so now you go to judge duty and you give this target a sketch to judge Judy and say,"Well, here are the four possible places where the person could have gone and this is what the remote viewer said." So your job as the judge is to choose which one of the places you think this matches to.
And when you do that, in this case, Judge Shudy would say, "Well, that one looks like the closest match." So again, one in one in four chances to be a hit or a miss. And so these are representative tests from 1973 to 1998. Uh SRRI and SIC were the former former classified program called Stargate which was run by the US government. Uh and this was um a program at Princeton University which ran for about 30 years. You combine all of that and all this everything I'm talking about has been published in journals. The combined logic as chance is 115 quintilion to one. So yes, clairvoyance is real.
And these these experiments are not that difficult to do, but they generally take a fair amount of time. Like the like the Gansfeld would take about 90 minutes typically. These could take an hour or two for each one of these tests. But the results are are clear. But what about precognition? Precognition the word is the term is used because you're cognizing you are aware of something that's going to happen in the future. Presentiment is more about a feeling. You have a feeling of something about to unfold. You don't cognize you don't know what it is but you you feel that something is about to happen. So in the laboratory the way we test this is to record part of your physiology like skin conductance and then you look at a blank screen for 5 seconds.
You press a button, there's another 5 seconds and then at that point a true random process selects an image from a large pool of images and presents it on the screen. It might be a bunny, it might be a snake, it could be something calm or emotional and then the screen goes blank for 10 seconds and then you repeat this a bunch of times. And so if you are able to feel the future, if you're about to see a snake, you're probably going to respond differently than if you're about to see a bunny. And so this is what you get in this kind of experiment. So this green line here is showing what happens u when you press the button.
A picture is selected that is calm. You remain pretty calm. You then see the picture which is calm and you have a small reaction but not very much. If you press the button at this point and an emotional picture is selected, you get a much bigger response, then you see the picture and you have a big response. So this is a pretty typical result for this experiment. So this area here, this difference is then called a presentiment response. So this was reviewed in 199 what is it 2012 I guess uh to do a meta analysis of all the experiments that were done of this type. And there were 40 experiments published with combined odds against chance of 602 billion billion to one.
And what's interesting in this case is that the method that is used is standard psychophysiology. People are doing these kinds of experiments all the time where you press a button, you see a picture and they look at how your physiology changes. The only thing that we did different in these experiments which I started back in 1996 uh was we look at what happened to your body before the picture is actually selected. So we're looking anywhere between around 500 milliseconds to 10 seconds before a picture is selected to see if her body is responding and and the answer is with odds against chance. of 602 billion billion to one.
Yes, we can we can feel what's about to happen. This has also been the topic of two physics symposia sponsored by the tripleas uh because within uh the in thermodynamics and also in quantum mechanics the idea that the the past and the future are part of the present is considered pretty much hoham. That's like that is that's how the way the physics works. The the missing mile here, put it in Jaime's term, is how does that how do we know that what is happening at the quantum scale is happening in human physiology. We don't know how to make that connection yet, unless there are aspects of quantum processing that are happening in the body, which is probably true.
I could give a two-hour presentation on mind matter interaction, uh, but I don't have time, so I won't do that. So instead I'll just say that in 2018 in American Psychologist which is the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association there was this article written by Edel Cardinho who's a professor at Lond University in Sweden. So he did uh 10 metaanalyses which covered a whole bunch of experiments like the types that I've been talking about and his conclusion was that the evidence for sigh is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines. It's very clear when you look at the actual data he did he looked at 1700 experiments that involved 10,000 people four dozen labs around the world and then he presented all of these these results. So for telepathy the probability is 10 the -16th for precognition for telepathy and precognition in dreams remote viewing presentiment precognition no question that these kinds of ESP types of phenomena are are very real in the laboratory and then there's the category that we euphemistically call anomalous perturbation meaning psychoinetic or mind matter interaction.
And so the effect of staring at a distance, effect of healing at a distance, tossing of dice using random generators and something called the global consciousness project will look which looks at this at a collective scale around the world. Very strong evidence for that. There have been independent analyses of whether or not these experiments are any good. The answer is yes, they're very good. So it's not a matter of experimental quality. And then you ask people who are experts in evaluating the nature of data, namely statisticians. So one of my buddies is Jessica UTS who was president of the American Statistical Association in 2016. And she said as part of her address to the collected statisticians in the United States, the data in support of precognition and possibly other related psychic phenomena are quite strong statistically and would be widely accepted if they pertain to something more mundane.
So in other words, this is we we don't like to talk about these things because it doesn't quite match a materialistic philosophy within science. But if we didn't think about it that if we went somehow able to bypass our philosophical prejudices, this would be well accepted in science. So why isn't it part of the scientific mainstream? There's stigma. There's taboo. There's a belief because these that the phenomena are impossible. Again, having to do with scientific materialism. Uh because of that it is assumed that positive experiments can only be due to two things. It has to be flawed or it has to be fraud because that's the only possible explanation for the results even though we know that neither of those are the case.
And as a result there's a certain willful ignorance. You find this again and again. Uh and it one of the reasons then why it's extremely difficult to get these kinds of studies published in the mainstream although we're doing better and better as years go by is because of willful ignorance. People look at an article on Wikipedia and say well it's these things are impossible so I'm not even going to pay attention to it. But why is it important to know about this? Well, first of all a lot of science is done with blinders. it. I didn't really want this picture, but this is what Dolly gave me when I asked for a picture with blinders.
Uh I wanted a picture more like a horse would have where you're only allowed to look in a certain direction. So, science is forced to look in a certain direction. Uh and the reason why it's important to understand this better is because it says something about our assumptions is not right. And in this case, I would say that it is not the case that that scientific materialism is wrong. It is demonstrabably correct. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to use this technology that we're using today. Instead, I would say that scientific or reductive materialism is a special case exactly by analogy the same way that classical physics is a special case of quantum physics or relativity.
Materialism works really, really well, but only in a certain context. then we need a more comprehensive philosophy to accommodate the kinds of phenomena we're talking about here. It's also important because it immediately questions the the question of who are we and what are we capable of? What's our potential? This is I thought where Jamie gave a very good riff for an hour about what actually are we what are our potentials? And as I had mentioned as a a short comment to when he talked about magicians is that the most recent experiment that I've I've completed now and I'm going to stop sharing is all about testing whether magicians are actually able to to do enchantment because we we used them in one of our mind matter interaction experiments and they did significantly better than meditators.
uh and the reason again was because magicians especially those who do spellcasting it's all about changing the physical world beyond us. So even though they many will do different kinds of meditation, the direction of the intention is outward as compared to a lot of meditative styles where it's inward. And that's not a hard and fast rule, but in general, I would say that that's true. And that's why I recruited people around the world. We started with 50,000 people and ended up with 50. About one in one in a thousand of the original recruits, half were meditators, half were active magicians who are either using methods like sigils or other type of magical practice to influence something outside themselves and they did quite well.
So I'll I'll leave it there for questions. Very cool, Dean. Thank you so much. Uh, one thing I just wanted to ask you just kind of my own my own kind of information. Um, is it the case that a lot of times when there are studies that get significant correlations with psychic or paranormal activity, when there's an effort to replicate those studies, they often show less of a correlation. That is true in some cases. It is not true so far in doing remote viewing experiments, clear points experiments. It doesn't seem to be true in presentiment experiments either. And so one of the big differences in between these and something like uh card tests and random number generator tests, they're very very easy to do to get a huge amount of data, which is nice from a statistical perspective, but they also become exceedingly boring very quickly.
And so one of the reasons why you tend to get reduction in in results is because people get tired of it after a while either both within the subjects who are doing it and across subjects because we tend to get burned out. So the reason why presentament experiments don't show this effect is because it's completely unconscious. You're just sitting there looking at pictures and the signal that we're using is is unconscious reflections in in the body. So that's one of the reasons we get declines. There are also some who say that there's an inherent uh reaction in the universe itself that doesn't like to see these sorts of effects and come into play and try to reverse it.
Uh I'm not a fan of that that answer. I don't think that actually the case. I think it has more to do with conscious and unconscious resistance on the part of the participants and the experimenters. And one of the easiest ways of showing that is that in the Stargate program where remote viewing was being used for active intelligence and military missions, they never saw a reduction because they have very high motivation re like real world life and death reasons for doing these kinds of of remote viewing tasks. And they were very conscious about not burning people out. So sometimes you'd only do one remote viewing session in a week.
Whereas if you do this in a laboratory context, you usually you're running subjects. I mean that's how you talk about it in the psychological world. You run subjects. You get them through your system as fast as you possibly can and it's exhausting for the experimentter. So no wonder the results begin to to decline. Uh another question for you. I was always really um inspired by a comment you made maybe in self-worth universe around um that maybe with psychic energy or sigh. Uh it was a little bit like the early history of electricity uh where at first there was a kind of noticing uh you know in that case of lightning and its power maybe to store and trans transmit energy.
Then you know sort of successive generations of experiment we figured out finally how to take this form of energy and make use of it and store it and it was obviously we transformed the whole geoysical environment of of the earth in in a in a century once once once we learned how to do that and that maybe something like that could be true for sigh where at the moment you know it's still sort of on on the edge of what we can understand or or you know make use of but maybe there is um a point uh at which uh yeah it becomes something much more accessible and transferable and so on. I'm curious if you still find that to be um an idea that you agree with and where are you seeing that was maybe like 15 years ago or something where 10 years ago where do you see us in that path if that if that if that's if that's kind of the trajectory? Yeah. So the there's two elements to that. One is the effects that we see in the laboratory at least is being psychic on demand, which which is actually not that great when you're trying to study the the limits.
All we can study really is what what's true kind of on average at a weak level because when you ask even if you ask somebody who is naturally psychic to come into the lab and be psychic, there's performance anxiety which immediately squashes any kind of performance. Nevertheless, we still see results. The results are tend to be weak in magnitude typically in the lab. But of course that doesn't matter from the point of view of what is real from an ontological perspective. It's a real thing. So the next part of your question is can you scale it up to become what amounts to a technology. I think the answer is yes.
But it also raises a a very important question here because the whole point about psychic phenomena suggests that epistemology and ontology are blurred and and it's it creates an entirely different way of thinking about what's going on. It means that what other people think about you what what they think about your experiment about your results all of all of it matters. So in the magical traditions typically if you're doing a some kind of a enchantment or spellcasting you don't announce it to the world because you know that your intentions are going to get mixed in with the intentions of other people. This is why in the sorcery uh traditions you don't tell people what you're doing. You don't tell people how you did something.
You don't say anything about it. There's secrecy. And I think that came about for the same reason that we see it in the laboratory. If we claim that intention can change something in the physical world and if a whole bunch of people out there are saying, "Oh, no you don't." It's going to get much more difficult to be able to to do an effect. So imagine that we get really really good at creating super psychics and I believe that there is a way that we we can do that. Among other things, it means that there will no longer be any secrets. So imagine a civilization in terms of how how the current justice system works, how politics works, how business works where there are no secrets because telepathy is good enough so that you will know immediately if somebody is lying.
That would not be the world that we see today. And so there's an enormous amount of pressure out there for people to maintain secrets. And those are intentions. And do those intentions then affect what we can then see in the laboratory and actually see in the real world too in terms of how good psychic phenomena are. And the answer is yes. So we know from our experiment called the global consciousness project where we've been looking at uh largecale effects of mental coherence around the world. We've been doing this for over 20 years now. There's no question that the physical world is affected by the coherent attention of millions to billions of people.
And so if you have a lot of people out there who say, "I don't want you to be able to know what I'm thinking," that affects what we can see in the laboratory and will also affect whether or not this ever becomes a technology. If it did become a technology, it would almost certainly be classified uh by our intelligence people as something that would make a significant impact on national security and it would go into a deep dark hole and it would not become public. And in addition, it would probably find itself uh being it would find that the taboo is only increased. there would be a lot of pressure to say this stuff doesn't doesn't exist and I know that that was the case during the the Stargate program and Stargate was using clairvoyance for military and intelligence operations. There was a lot of pressure in in the public sphere to say this stuff is stupid.
It maintained this the taboo and there it made a lot of sense to do that because if you have a secret weapon, you don't want to let other people know that your secret weapon is even possible. And of course then people discussing things about UFOs now uh the the same idea comes up that maybe some of these UFOs or UAPs are actually our own stuff but we completely deny it for a long time because it devalues the abil the the usefulness of that as a tool. So can we turn this into a technology? I would say yes. I and I think there are ways of doing that uh which maybe I'll talk about.
Uh but the consequences would change civilization so dramatically that I'm not sure we'd ever be able to achieve it publicly. Uh okay. Do I have a question for you? Uh I'm not sure if anybody else has one, but um uh what uh let's say you had like a you know very uh lavish budget to do what you wanted to do. What what do you think would be the uh experiments that could be done that would be most likely to kind of uh accelerate uh progress around around um around all this? Well, a number of things. One thing I would do is immediately create a uh career track in the educational world to allow there to be thousands of of well-trained scholars and scientists working on this problem rather than what is currently the case where we have about 40.
So you you there you're not going to make much of a of a field with 40 people who are actively pursuing this. Uh and so the way you do that is you follow the uh what what is true at Harvard, at Stanford and the University of Edinburgh where endowments were given for uh chairs. So you have endowed chairs for people to do this kind of research. The one at Harvard eventually went away because all the money was eaten up by the psychology department and the same was true for Stanford. They both got pretty large endowments and they've got eaten up. One in Edinburgh uh is uh is in danger right now because the person who has held the chair is retiring and it's not clear that that's going to continue.
And the other long-term program is at the University of Virginia. So there they've actually done quite well. They have a couple of endowments and their primary focus is on evidence for survival after bodily death. And so they they they're still pretty healthy. So I would that's what I would do if I had unlimited funds. I would endow probably 10 university chairs around the world to to create a a legacy where you can do this in the academic world and not have to worry about losing your job. The second thing I would do is say that there's uh there are open questions in physics and this is where I've been spending most of my time the last 15 years or so.
open questions in physics in terms of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Two of which are complete overlaps with parasychology. One is that the quantum observer effect requires consciousness. This is what vonoman and Vner and a bunch of other physicists had said that in order for if you look at something at the quantum scale, it changes its behavior. And there are a lot of questions on well why does it do that? Why does the photon care if it's being looked at or not? Well, that is that falls into the class of mind matter interaction and I've been doing a lot of studies on that showing I think that consciousness is required.
You need someone to be aware of the results in order to see an effect. Uh there are physicists who claim that there are other re other ways that this could happen too and they're probably correct. You could have interaction with physical system that would change the behavior of a photon. But there are a lot of ways of doing this without any connection other than awareness and that also makes a difference. And the other one is uh something called a transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics which requires retrocausality and of course retrocausality in cy research is precognition or presentiment. So there is an there overlaps there and I would push both of those directions hard and physicists recognize that the kinds of experiments that I was presenting here today like like presentiment is completely relevant to understanding something like the transactional interpretation and the experiments I've been doing with the double sit system is completely relevant to understanding the quantum observer effect.
That's why I've been able to publish my work in physics journals. So that's that's a direction I think could push really hard. And then the other direction is I would take people who are who claim to be psychic from psychic families because there's a lot of of folklore about these kinds of of natural skills running in families. And so a colleague of mine when I was at the University of Edinburgh uh did a study of second sight among Scottish northern northern Scotland and found that there seemed to be something that was inherited generally because not only was it gen usually passed from uh the um matriarchal side of a family oftentimes skipping a generation from grandmother to granddaughter and that sort of thing. uh but that it it's found actually in in every every culture that has some some people who are identified as being psychic naturally.
It it's in the family. The question though is nature nurture. How much of it is nature? How much of it is nurture? So to begin to answer that question a few years ago we we got a little grant to find people who were psychic from psychic families and then we tested them to see if they were actually psychic. And then we got their DNA. And then we matched them with people who had never had any psychic experiences and nobody in their family ever did either. We got their DNA too. So this became a genetic test that's called a case control comparison. So the cases were the psychics, the controls were the non-csychics and we did a biioiniratic analysis to see is there any any difference in their genetics because most maybe all of the differences we have in talent can ultimately be traced to a very large degree to genetic inheritance.
Even things as subtle as the kinds of intelligence that people have. So the the two general classes are crystalline intelligence like somebody who's really good in mathematics or analysis and fluid intelligence, somebody who's really good in creativity. There's different sets of genes. There's hundreds of genes involved. It's not a single gene, but those are a way of looking at how uh where does talent come from. So we thought, well, maybe there's psychic talent. And we did find a difference between the psychics and the non- psychics. So as a result of that, that was a couple years ago, I co-founded a biotech company where we wanted to see could we use modern genetic engineering methods like crisper and other methods to modulate genes, gene expression in the brain uh to enhance cognition.
And so we we ultimately want to go to uh creating what amounts to a cocktail and we do this interasally. So interasal delivery goes into the through the bloodb brain barrier into the brain. Uh which would make you a temporary or permanent depending on kind of edit you use. Super psychic. We think we can do that. But in order to get enough money to do that, it would cost probably $10 million minimum because it still takes a lot of of data and analysis to be able to figure this stuff out. To get to that point, the company is focused on uh creating a treatment for early onset Alzheimer's and mild cognitive impairment.
And the reason we chose that is because it's relatively simple from a genetic perspective as to how to treat memory loss. And so we've created a compound. We're now raising money to do clinical trials which is an interasal delivery of a compound that will treat a very specific serotonin receptor. And we know that it works in mice and in rats. Uh over 100% improvement as compared to controls. And so you would take this as a n you'd sniff it. it would take a little while to come to to come into play, probably a matter of weeks because it is literally downregulating certain receptors in the brain that is associated with with things like loss of memory.
So, if we're able to to get to the point where we make this into an actual compound and get enough money as a result, we'll be able to take the next step, which is to see if we can make uh super psychics on demand. Now, anytime we're talking about cognitive enhancement through genetic means, there's a huge range of ethical issues that come about and we're completely aware of that. And in this case in particular, if we were able to create a whole bunch of telepaths who are really, really good, again, we're going to end up with a lot of pressure saying, "Don't do that." So, there is a slight danger that if we were successful, it would disappear. it would be sucked up into some program somewhere and super soldiers would be made or something like that and we don't like that where we talk about it to make it clear to the public that we're working on this so if some someday I disappear and all this research disappears at least somebody else will know what went on u but I think it it you can think of this in some ways as any kind of genetic enhancement uh has all kinds of downsides but it may also be part of our evolutionary development. I mean, we have now in the first time in our history the ability to actually direct what we're going to be in the future.
So, and it's getting both easier and easier to do this. I mean, like any high school kid now can just get a a a crisper kit and start creating hybrid animals if they want. They're already doing this. So, that genie is out of the bottle. What is not yet out of the bottle is the method that we created which was a easy intraasal delivery of methods of changing receptors in the brain. So that that will scare everyone. Scares us a little bit too. Yeah. Thanks for taking us into the science fictional realm. I mean our world's definitely becoming more science fictional anyway. So um yeah, except it's no longer fiction.
Yeah. I mean we're doing it. Um, what about um I mean something like a hog Hogwarts for real like or you know mutant you know professors avier academy for real. I mean what about something where you know do you think that's also possible where people are actually um uh given trainings? I I think that the thing about the the Hogwarts and the X-Men and all that sort of thing, these are not people who developed their methods. they're they're already born with it. And that suggests again that there's some kind of genetic difference. And so then the question is, can we create these genetic differences based on people who we select very carefully around the world who seem to have the talents?
And the answer is yes, we we have the tools. The tools now are being used to study things like uh why is schizophrenia something that you find in families? And so the huge amount of money, huge amount of genetic studies that have been done to find what what is the genetic basis of schizophrenia and then could you cure it? And the answer that we're approaching is yes, you can actually cure it. We can already cure things like cickle cell anemia by changing the genetics. So there's something like 8,000 identified uh health problems, both physical and mental health problems that have a genetic basis. we have the potential at this point to fix any of them to cure them.
Uh when it comes to neurodeenerative problems like Alzheimer's and dementia and so on, we are beginning to understand what causes that from a genetic perspective and we have the potential to fix that too. So again, my reason for being interested in all of that and the reason why I co-ounded that company is really what I want is to get people who are so good at psychic phenomena that we can do things in the laboratory that we're not able to do yet today. Like I'm I'm interested in magical folklore about levitation. Well, I want to see that in the laboratory because that would tell us all kinds of interesting things about not only what we're capable of, but things about physics that we don't understand very well yet. So, some of this is predicated on simply basic science to understand the nature of reality better.
But it overlaps very strongly with what what is happening in terms of consciousness. So, we we I mean think about how much do we actually know about consciousness from a scientific perspective versus the physical world. Do we know a lot about the physical world? Actually, overall, we don't really know that much. I mean, we're relatively clever apes that have been on a planet for a short period of time, and we know a few things. Uh, but we know probably more there than we do about consciousness. If you go into the esoteric traditions, they probably know more. So the the challenge here is how do we meld the two together in a way that doesn't cause violence and and actually uh improves us in some significant way.
So, one of my one of my underlying reasons why I think it's so important to study all of this besides just the scientific curiosity of it is that the kinds of experiences that we're talking about, almost any kind of transformative experience, whether it's something as simple as telepathy or a psychedelic experience or mystical experience, they are transformative and almost always in a pro-social direction. And if we if we the world needs anything, it needs as many people as possible to be moving in a pro-social direction because otherwise we're going to wipe ourselves out. So the more we understand about consciousness, about the nature of transformation, about why we move into pro-social directions, those are all really, really important. And that's again one of the motivations like a larger motivation for why I've been interested in this topic for a very long time.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.