Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Top Neuroscientist's New Research on After Death Communication: Dr. Tara Swart’s Exploration of Consciousness, Intuition & Extra-Sensory Abilities

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

Can You REALLY Talk to the Dead? MIT Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart Says Yes—And Brings the Science to Prove It What happens when one of the world’s leading MIT neuroscientists, Dr. Tara Swart (Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan and author of THE SIGNS: The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts) loses her husband and begins receiving undeniable messages from the beyond? In this groundbreaking episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, Dr. Tara Swart opens up about her journey from respected neuroscientist and leadership advisor to spiritual explorer after the sudden loss of her husband, Robin. Known globally for her work on neuroplasticity, brain science, and intuition, Dr. Swart reveals how grief led her to a profound awakening: vivid dreams, ancestral connections, angel numbers, and even a visitation she refuses to dismiss as hallucination. She blends her rigorous background in neuroscience with her lived experience, challenging us to rethink the boundaries between science and spirituality. Dr. Tara Swart breaks down: - Neuroscience of Intuition: How to train your brain to tune into instincts and signs - Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and why the brain may be filtering out reality - Grief and trauma in the body: Why talk therapy alone isn’t enough - The surprising link between creativity, movement, and trauma healing - Why altered states of consciousness don’t require drugs - The health benefits of ancestral healing and spiritual connection - Why beauty acts as a healing frequency for the brain - The thin line between mental illness and genius - Why she believes in angel numbers—and how they’ve shaped her decisions - Her most radical theory: Consciousness may not live in the brain at all This isn’t just another conversation on neuroscience. Dr. Tara Swart pushes us to expand the limits of what it means to be human by merging brain science, spirituality, and the mysteries of consciousness into a powerful roadmap for life after loss, trauma, and fear. Dr. Tara Swart's latest book, THE SIGNS: The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts: https://www.taraswart.com/the-signs/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Six weeks after he passed away, I saw my husband standing next to my bed in the middle of the night. I know I wasn't asleep. I wasn't dreaming. I can see the shape of my husband, life size, and he just became clearer and clearer as if he was pushing through something to make himself seen. Oh, I just got chills. Dr. Tara Swart. She's an Oxford-trained neuroscientist. Discovering new research on consciousness, intuition, and the afterlife. Most people know that we have five senses. Humans have potentially 34 senses. What is your belief about your ability to communicate with your deceased husband?

For you to be able to communicate with someone that's passed on. You have to be able to believe that their mind or psyche or soul can still exist when it's not part of a body. Prior to this latest amount of research, I would have explained intuition as life lessons that you've picked up, but you can't remember consciously. Because skeptics love to say, well, if this is a thing, Well, if this is a thing, why isn't everybody walking around talking to dead people? There are some humans that have some more acute senses. If people found ways to altered states of consciousness and expand their consciousness,

maybe everyone can do it. Hi, I'm I'm Bielic. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be talking about intuition. We're going to be talking about potential communication with people who have left this realm, but from a very unexpected source. We're talking to Dr. Tara Swart.

She's an MD PhD, she's a neuroscientist, an Oxford University-trained medical doctor, and her latest book, The Signs, The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts, talks in depth about an interaction that she had with her deceased husband that has led her to an entirely new way of understanding consciousness and practical ways that we can all get in touch with our intuition and really have it impact our daily lives. And if you think talking about spirituality and mysticism is esoteric, this conversation helps you bridge it practically into your life

to help you navigate, increase your intuition, synchronicity, and ways to get ahead. We're also going to talk about ways to make sure that your access to other realms does not dominate your life, your thinking, and your functioning. Dr. Swart is visiting from London. We're so excited to get to talk to her in person. And before that, Jonathan, tell the folks about Substack. If you haven't already found us on Substack, you can find exclusive content that is not released anywhere else. Deep Dibes into the episodes and things you just won't find anywhere, but on Substack, Bialik Breakdown on Substack.

Let's welcome to The Breakdown in person, Dr. Tara Swart. Tara, welcome to the breakdown. Break it down. Thank you so much. This is a conversation we've been hoping to have with you, and it's really special to be able to do it in person. So maybe just as a starting point, if someone has not seen you or heard of you, which I find hard to believe, tell us sort of the mission that you're on and what your platform allows you to do. Okay, thank you. So I'm a former medical doctor with a PhD in neuroscience, and very much like you, I would say my mission is to sit at the intersection of science and spirituality. So I wrote a book five years ago called The Source, which was about manifestation and visualization, but backed by cognitive science. And then since the pandemic, really, I've been doing a deeper dive into the spirituality side of things. Really, because at the start of the pandemic, I saw. sort of predicted a potential mental health crisis and sort of posed that some sort of spiritual

evolution or revolution was probably the only answer to that. And I'm quite glad I actually said it on a podcast, so it's on record. Because I feel like, you know, that's what's panned out, sadly. With the rise of technology, which I'm a, you know, a fan of, I feel, however, that we're more lost, lonely and disconnected than ever before. Can you talk a little bit more about what you predicted would happen in terms of mental health globally when COVID began? Yeah, I mean, because I was a practicing psychiatrist. So that's usually the angle that I look at. Obviously, there was a physical health issue. It was like an invisible threat. And it just made me think, what is this going to do to people, the social isolation, the fear of death, potentially, you know, having loved ones actually

pass away. Not knowing how long it was going to go on for was a big thing that came up for people. They kept asking me, how long do you think this is going to go on for? Do you think it will be a few weeks? And I started quite early on saying, you better prepare yourself for a few months. because otherwise you're continually setting up this expectation that fails, and that's really not good for your mental health either. And then there were really interesting things. Like, I personally had a very vivid dream that was like a health anxiety dream. And then a journalist called me up and said,

can you comment on this global phenomenon of vivid dreaming? And I was like, is that a thing? I knew it happened to me, but I didn't realize it was happening all around the world. and apparently the only two times it's happened before is during the world wars. So when something happens to everyone around the world, it doesn't matter who you are, where you are, how privileged or, you know, how sort of, you know, under-resourced you are, that threat was the same for everyone.

And psychologically, it was obviously playing out through dreams, that they were mostly an anxiety type of dream. It might not have been to do with health necessarily, But yeah, so I found that fascinating. And then I think, as you'll agree with everything, when emotions are repressed or they're not understood, well, you don't sort of manage to regulate your nervous system in a way, then there are going to be knock on problems.

And I think there was just this chronic background stress all the time. And then probably peaks of acute stress for people for different reasons. And it just made sense to me that that's, was going to become a problem. At the same time, one interesting thing is that there were no planes in the skies, there was no traffic, you could hear a bird song, people really valued being able to go outdoors and spend time in nature. And so it's almost like the answer was coming at the same time as the problem. But then I feel like as soon as it was officially over, which, you know, that's debatable. But people just went back to concrete jungle, you know, rat race, because sort of

of like, I know a lot of people started working from home more, but I still feel like that wasn't beautiful quality time in nature or with art. And I didn't, you know, the art is an interesting thing that I noticed because I got really interested in the area of neuroesthetics, which is about art and beauty and creativity and the benefits for our mental health, physical health and longevity. So I've trained myself to notice nature and beauty. And you'll find that that will happen all the time.

I'll be like, oh, that's so pretty. Look at that. Because I think that's very similar to gratitude. It's putting your brain in the oxytocin state of love and trust rather than the cortisol state of stress and anxiety. I think a lot of people during that time period realized something that may have been happening in the background because it was amplified,

which is this high level of chronic stress all the time that they didn't notice because they had acclimatized. to it. And then all of a sudden, the rise was like, oh, wait a second, I really don't know where baseline is. Can you talk about the role of that level of stress in people's lives and the impact on them? Well, let me start by asking you both a question. Did you notice that you put on weight during that time? Yeah. I mean, a lot of, well, the reason we started this podcast is because we were noticing things that were happening for us. And we figured with the resources we have, the background, the training, the access to therapy, if we were freaking out, what about people who don't have a vocabulary

for it? Eating was one of the things, sleep, you know? You'd hear people saying, like, I'm having trouble sleeping. I can't figure out why. And those of us who are anxious all the time, we're like, oh, that's your anxiety. Let me train you. Or 12-step people were like, oh, we've got this down. You know, when the pandemic hit, 12-step people were like, we know how to fellowship, turn it over to God, right? Like, there are all these kind of tools that many people had that most of us kind of didn't have. I think a lot of people noticed weight despite walking more because that's the only thing you could do. But especially in the early days when no one really understood what it was, all of a sudden it was like, are we going to die? Is this it? Like, am I going to get like,

is this the end? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I'd really like to pick up from where you said that, you know, we understand things maybe that not the average person does. And so when I noticed that I had put on weight. And I think probably what's more noticeable is that afterwards, all of my sort of girlfriends were like, I need to lose weight. You know, we need to get back to how we were. But when I noticed that I put on weight and it was particularly around my belly, normally that would start my whole internal narrative of like, you know, I don't want to have a pot belly and I need to lose weight. But I looked in the mirror and I thought, because I know it's the action of cortisol, I thought, this is what my body's doing to survive and that's actually amazing. And for the first time in my life,

I was like, I like my little pop belly because it's showing me that I am stressed so I can acknowledge that, but also that my body is this incredible thing that's doing what it can to survive. And basically now I kind of need to be kinder to it. And the other thing I really noticed, because when you've got high levels of cortisol, is that it dehydrates your whole system. So, you know, my hair was like so dry and frizzy. And I spoke to a friend who was a hairdresser and she said, just don't wash it for as long as possible,

let the natural oils that kind of work their way through. So, yeah, it's quite a feral time, you know, kind of like. But I think, in a way, actually just really made me appreciate, you know, what the brain does. And then, of course, you know, try to do all the healthy things later to sort of rectify some of those things, yeah. My NBi-Lex breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office

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Head to superpower.com. use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention My Ambiotics Breakdown to help support the show. That particular time in our history, right, as a people, that, you know, as you indicated, a spiritual solution might be on the other side of. And I wonder, you know, I can't help but think of it. And I think you do as well.

And I can tell from your writing that you do as well. I can't help but think of sort of the, you know, adaptive neurochemical stew that is going on. And when we talk about anticipatory anxiety, right, this notion of there is a pervasive anxiety. We don't know how long, whatever it is, is going to go on. We don't know when it will end. We don't know what the long-term consequences are. In addition, and we talk about this a lot, you know, we had, you know, kind of a political system, at least in this country, where truth itself was being questioned. And we're now seeing that

there were a lot of things that we were not told, that the government was not honest about, specifically in regard to COVID, its origin, whatever it was. When you couple anticipatory anxiety like in a nervous system that is already primed for stress, can you talk about that and then how a spiritual solution might be a remedy for that? So what's happening? in the brain when we are we're always predicting and sort of you know trying to plan for the future in terms of survival at minimum

in the good days we will be able to do that for thriving not just surviving but in that scenario obviously it was actual physical and mental survival so to protect us the hippocampus and the amygdala so the memory part of the brain and the emotion part of the brain it's almost like they gang up

and produce imagery of all the times that things have gone wrong in our life to stop us from taking risks. But it does mean that, you know, not necessarily in the pandemic, but let's say you think of applying for a promotion or a new job or you think of starting up your own business, your brain is likely to remind you of all the times that you asked for a raise or you, you know, changed jobs and it went wrong to sort of stop you from just not stop you from doing anything that's not just keeping you safe in the same spot. So we really have to be able to override that

to thrive in life. But there was also an interesting debate at the beginning where some people were like, oh well, you know, this is a time I could learn a new language or I could start up that business that I always wanted to. And I was kind of like, I don't think people should be doing that. I think people should be just, you know,

working on staying calm and doing the minimum at the moment until we have a clearer idea of how long this is going to go on for or even how it works. I mean, if you think about it, we were all wearing gloves and wiping our groceries and not wearing masks at the beginning. I refused to wipe groceries.

I drew the line there. I was like, I will die from a dirty carrot. But yes, other people were. Yeah, so, you know, dealing with that amount of change and then if there's like lack of trust in society, then, you know, that's another big stressor as well. So just huge amount, you know, unprecedented amounts of uncertainty, really. And, yeah, so like I said, the brain,

would be going to its sort of negative wiring to try and keep us safe. Cortisol levels would be high all the time. Ironically, that actually erodes your immunity. So, you know, if you were exposed to anything, it would probably make you more vulnerable. And so I think, like I said, we naturally saw that time in nature was really replenishing and important to us. And interestingly, it physically does actually boost our immune systems. So certain types of trees, particularly cedars, cypresses and furs and pines, release chemicals called phytonsides that trigger the release of natural killer cells in our immune system.

So probably even if you're not a neuroscientist, you may have felt that on a primal level. Like it makes me feel good and it makes me feel healthy and strong. Things like the fact that birds won't sing if predators are around. So if we hear birdsong, again primarily we know we're safe. so that reduces our blood pressure and our cortisol levels. And again, that feels good. That's why I don't sing around you. You know, I think people were obviously like cooking more, exchanging recipes.

I mean, I do remember saying to my colleagues at MIT, how many more things can I come up with with just potatoes and turnips? You know, that's all I'm getting in my farm box. And so in a way it was a time of creativity. And often restriction is. So a lot of the antidotes were coming, as part of the problem, which is really interesting. And I think, obviously, we would have appreciated more than ever

the difference between naturally meeting people during the day and at least handshaking or hugging and then suddenly not being able to do that. You know, I can't imagine what it was like for people that were living alone. I mean, I had a few clients at the time that were living alone, and I think it was an extremely isolating and depressing time. which probably would lead some people, you know, younger, healthy people living alone to take more risks because it's just actually like it's not really surviving to just be on your own for that length of time

and, you know, hardly be able to go out and things like this. The way that I started looking at it, in retrospect probably, is that feeling connected to something greater, having purpose and particularly purpose that transcends yourself, understanding the importance of community and, you know, even if that had to shift how you could keep that as part of your life. And then going back to ancient wisdom, I mean, I think maybe a gift that I had during that time was I had more time to go down some rabbit holes of things that I was interested in. So I personally did, you know, I had these eight tabs open on things like Kabbalah and Sufi mysticism and Buddhist philosophies. I never had time to read.

when I was working full time, but I had time, and they felt relevant. And I started thinking about the fact that, you know, our ancestors didn't have resources to do anything that wasn't crucial to survival, but they danced and they drummed and they sang and they made cave art and they adorned themselves. One of the, so we think, generally speaking, people think that cave art is really the first sign of the fact that, you know, art is part of what makes us human and it was crucial to our survival. But I found out in my research that tens of thousands of years before that we made tools that were more beautiful and symmetrical than they had to be to do their job.

So that was important to us. And so that's kind of what I mean by spirituality is a return to things that are beautiful, things that are natural, things that are creative, what the human spirit can do from you know out of oppression and restriction a lot of dance forms came out of things like slavery and apartheid and um yeah so so as i went down that rabbit hole i sort of extended it to things like the border of life and death the importance of um the arts and culture and um or you know experiencing awe and wonder whether it's at nature or an impressive building or something um are really important to us as opposed to having a mundane sort of existence that doesn't really make you feel alive. You had a loss in the middle of kind of all of these years, and your book, The Signs, talks in detail about some of the transformations that you have experienced.

But can you talk about what your own personal grief experience was like in terms of it giving birth to, really an entirely new way of thinking. Yeah, so to just give a bit of backstory, my husband had an underlying condition. So he'd had aplastic anemia in his 30s, and so he was immunocompromised. The treatment that allowed him to live for the next 30 years compromised his immune system.

So he was one of those people that was very vulnerable during the pandemic. And so we had to move out of London and live in the countryside, literally in the middle of nowhere, and see no one. And at times when we got the messages from the NHS, I had to shield him. And so, you know, we had even less choice than the average person in terms of sort of, you know, being isolated and how we lived.

But we lived in the countryside and, you know, we had a lovely home with lots of greenery around it. And, you know, in a way, that time, we got to spend 24-7 together for about 18 months, which most couples don't get. get to do. So I'm grateful for that. And you still liked each other and loved each other. Yeah. I mean... A lot of people found out during COVID they didn't like the person that they were married to. I know. I know. And do you know what? In the early days when people said things like, I hate my husband or I got divorced, I was like, I really, really loved my husband and he died. You know, it's kind of, there's no sense to these things sometimes. So actually, just as things were sort of starting to open up again, but it was still very much like COVID was around.

My husband's condition progressed to acute myeloid leukemia, and he started the treatment, which was really brutal, and he was hospitalized for a lot of the four months that he was between diagnosis and death. And during that time, I had to hold on to this unwavering belief that he was going to make it, and I just had to keep doing everything that I could to try to make that happen. I mean, I had to COVID test every single day to be allowed to visit him in hospital. And suffice to say, it was an absolutely savage time of my life and it ended in the worst possible result. And even though I understand how the brain works, I'd never had, I was very fortunate in that I hadn't had an experience of grief apart from losing my grandparents

when I was younger. I just completely fell apart. Like, I was. I didn't know how to, I didn't know how I would get through a day, let alone what was going to happen to me over time. But, and I think some of my friends thought that I might throw myself back into work as a way to just cope. But I had this really strong feeling that I couldn't do that. I mean, I wouldn't, I don't think I would have been capable of actually, you know, sort of performing.

But also, I felt like I had to go to the bottom of all of these emotions, like really go as far down as it was going to take me to be able to, you know, come back, come back again. And, you know, in a way that was actually in a healing way, not sort of covering up, you know, the emotions. Actually, one of my favourite books is called I Dreamed of Africa, and it's by Kuki Gorman, who experienced a lot of loss. And there's a quote in that book where she basically says, you have to go to the bottom, because at the bottom there's two choices.

One is that you just lay down and die, and the other one is that you have to come back up again. And that feels like it describes my journey really well. Can you explain what the grief felt like, meaning, was it lost possibility? Was it loneliness? So it's interesting that you've put it like that because I don't think I even had the ability to articulate it.

I remember the day after Robin passed away, a neighbour came into the house and said, how are you? And I just stared at him. And I literally, that no words came into my head. I couldn't say I'm okay like you normally do because I wasn't. But I didn't actually know what to say. And then the following week was actually my,

would have been my wedding anniversary. So some of his friends came over in the evening. and obviously said, how are you? And I said, the second week isn't as bad as the first week. That's all I can say. So what it felt like, I can only give you an analogy, not really words, was it felt like being in a bottomless black pit and just falling forever. And thinking there's no end to this pit, I'm just going to keep falling.

Yeah, that's all I can say. And I mean, I think their absence physically is very much in your face as well because like I said, this was somebody I spent 24-7 with. So, I mean, this actually feels, I feel quite distant from this in a way now. But I do remember I would walk around the house crying saying, where are you? Yeah, just and and then later, I guess, coming back to the things that you said, thinking, you know, I thought I was going to be married for the next 30 years. Like, what's going to happen to me now, you know? I found myself being a widow in my 40s. That's not

what I had, you know, planned for at all. So just a whole sort of gaping different future ahead of you as well, that you have, you know, you feel like you can't really control what that's going to be like. And a few of my friends said, you're going to be able to help so many people after you going through this experience. But I was like, you know, I've been a doctor and a coach. I do not want to have to go through this so that I can help other people. But, you know, it's almost four years later now. And I do feel like I can help other people. I feel like being able to go through it as a human being, but also being able to step back as a neuroscientist and kind of watch what was happening to me was really interesting. And I always said, I'm never ever just going to share a sad story.

But if I learned something through the benefit of hindsight that I think would help others, then I would share that. And, you know, how that started was that everything I had believed before about spirituality, love, abundance, manifestation, I just felt so angry like it was all wrong and it had all let me down. And so anything that I'd believed before wasn't going to help in my grief because I would just keep going back to thinking, well, the one time that it mattered the most to me, it failed. But then, literally from the day after he passed away, every single time I went to the windows in both my houses because I started going back to London more to be with my friends more, I would see Robbins in the garden.

And now in the countryside, that's more likely to happen, less likely in London. But even in the countryside, every time I went to the window. I mean, it was like I wanted to receive a sign. I'd heard people who'd lost others saying that they got signs. But I was trying too hard and I wasn't really getting anything apart from seeing these birds. And his name was Robin, so it's more meaningful than just any bird. And then I had this experience where I saw him standing next to my bed in the middle of the night. Tell us about that.

So it was about six weeks after he passed away. And it was literally four in the morning. I was fast asleep. But I do remember I was lying on my left at the edge of the bed, and my right shoulder wasn't covered by the blanket. I had briefly woken up because I'd heard a noise and I just went to check that it wasn't an alarm going off and then I thought it might be birds in the distance

but in retrospect there was never that kind of sound there so I went back to bed and then I got woken up by a massive thump to my shoulder I literally was like woken up I wouldn't I wouldn't thump you to show you how hard it was because it's like so obviously I opened my eyes And now you're awake I'm awake

And I'm just like looking into the darkness Thinking what was that And then I can see like the shape of my husband Life size In the dark I was like Is this am I, you know Am I seeing this?

And he just became clearer and clearer As if he was pushing through something To make himself seen Oh, I just got chills I did I was a bit like But if I think about it now this genuinely was a man

that if there was any way that he could let me know that he was still around he would do whatever it took. Why do you say that about him? Well, we met kind of later in life so we really cherished each other and he literally acted like a 16 year old

I remember once we went to the orthopedic surgeon about his hip and as we were leaving he said oh well a lot's changed since we last saw you because we've got engaged and I was like, why are you telling the orthopedic surgeon that we got engaged? He couldn't help himself. I think, you know, he was 62 when we met,

so I don't think he thought that he was going to find love in his life. And, yeah, we were just very, very lucky and really loved and cherished each other. And he obviously constantly told me that he loved me, but he also used to say to me, you're totally safe and totally protected, which I think is, like, for me, or I think most women or people is, like, just the most reassuring thing that someone can say. In the five and a half years that we were together, there was not one time that he didn't drive me to the airport

and come and pick me up and I travel a lot for work. So actually arriving at Heathrow was really awful for me for the first year or so. And sometimes I would just actually think maybe somehow God or whatever can just make this all have gone away and he'll be there. and I'll act like nothing happened I'll just accept that he's there

and we'll carry on our life again and then of course every time he wouldn't be there So take us back to the bedroom so you see this image of him the image of your dead husband I mean it's an image makes it sound like it's two dimensional but it was like he was standing there I could see the outline of his hair and his features

was he in just like normal robin clothes I actually don't think he was wearing clothes I was about to say it's the bedroom at night. But then he sort of dissolved from the top down and the last thing I saw were his shins and his feet and then he was gone. And I did actually gasp out loud. And was this like an instant?

It was pretty quick. I mean, it took some time for him to come through, but then he just dissolved. Did you feel scared? A bit. Yeah. I'm assuming you've never seen a ghost before. No.

Do we call it a ghost? I don't know. I don't know either. No. It's not an apparition. What are you believe? leave you saw. Well, I, then I fell asleep again and when I woke up in the morning. I would never sleep again. I'd be like, okay, sleep was fun, but never going to sleep again. Just going to wait

and see if that happens. I think I probably slept for at least four hours and deeply. And then I obviously remembered it. So I googled in the morning, is it possible to see a deceased loved one? And Google said 60% of older people can have an auditory hallucination after they lose their spouse. And I remember thinking, that feels very sad to me that that's the explanation. I know I wasn't asleep. I wasn't dreaming. What I saw was present. Also, you're a doctor. Yeah. And, you know, and I'm a scientist that also questions things. And, but, of course, I thought, do I tell anyone about this?

Because maybe they'll think I'm literally, like, you know, deranged with grief. Did that occur to you that you might be deranged with grief? Yeah. There have been a few times in the last few years that I thought, like, am I okay? Am I depressed? Am I having psychotic symptoms? So one of my neighbors wanted to go to the Christmas market to get flowers because I think it was December.

and I didn't know her that well. I didn't know if she was spiritual or religious or anything. But I guess on the drive back, I just couldn't help myself. And I said, oh, I saw Robin by my bed last night. And she turned to me with the most beautiful smile on her face and she said, you are so lucky. And then she shared that her father had passed away a year ago and that she hadn't experienced anything like that.

So I thought, okay, that's a good response. Usually when I have a dilemma, I ask three different people, what they think. And I'm quite good about making sure I'm not just choosing people that will tell me what I want to hear. So I also then shared with my friend who's a psychotherapist. And she said something like, well, what does it mean to you? Oh, those psychotherapists. Exactly. So I thought, okay, she's neither validating nor denying.

And then I told some friends of Robbins who I went round to lunch at their house, their daughter was there because he was so much older than me, I'm kind of in between the age of his friends and their children. And they're all very old school British military people. So telling them was probably my biggest risk. And as soon as I said it, they said, yes, I'my had the same experience when

her aunt, my friend's wife's sister, passed away. She said she felt her sitting at the end of her bed. And that's when I thought, okay, if these people think it's okay and they've got a similar experience, then maybe it is okay. And I had a guy that lived on the grounds of my property for security and stuff, and I knew that he had lost his partner to suicide just before he'd started working for us. And so I said to him, is it okay to him?

to ask you something about grief. And he said, sure. And I said, do you think it's possible to communicate with people that passed away? And he got really quite head up and said, absolutely not. And if that was the case, why wouldn't, you know, people would be talking about it. But even in my grief,

I thought that can't be the reason it's not true just because people aren't talking about it. And if that is a potential barrier, then I'm going to talk about it. And the more I did, I honestly don't think I've had a conversation. with anyone that hasn't had some kind of experience, either of someone that's passed away,

like feeling their presence or smelling or hearing something, or at the very minimum, if I say to someone, have you ever thought of someone really randomly that you've lost touch with and then they message you? Everyone I've said that to has said yes. And then imagine this. Fast forward three years. I'm doing research for the book,

and I ask AI if it's possible to see someone that's passed that's passed away and it's a totally different answer and it says that it's it's common and often comforting to see here or smell someone that's passed away or feel their presence and of course then I went down another rabbit hole of ancient wisdom and in our genetic inheritance as humanity there were people that could communicate with the deceased And quite similar to near-death experiences, people who have that ability don't fear death as much and they don't fear like failing in life, so they're more likely to take healthy risks.

So what anthropology says is that those genes were more likely to have died out because these people were risk takers. However, genetics isn't as simple as that. So somewhere in genes that are inherited down, you know, the ages, there will, be a propensity to be able to sense the other side or the other plane. That's potentially an explanation for mediumship or being psychic if we believe that's a thing. Well, it also explains why not everyone can do it, right? Yeah. The skeptics love to say, well, if this is a thing, why isn't everybody walking around dug into dead people? But that's also the notion that there could be some sort of sporadic, right? Yes. Some sporadic representation of this kind of ability, whether it's

you know, neuroanatomically based or psychically based or whatever. Or neurochemically. Yeah. And so let me give you some other similar examples. So dogs and cats, for example, can smell much more sensitively than we can. And they can even smell some diseases and impending death. So in nursing homes, people realized over time that these cats and dogs were going to sit next to people who were about to pass away. And actually that makes complete sense, because when you're dying, your cells die off in a certain order.

And as those cells and tissues are dying, they release a certain smell, which these animals can recognize. We can't smell it. Except Nurse Joy has what's called hyperosmia. She's smelt her husband's Parkinson's disease. What? Yeah. And because of her ability to do that, they've now created a swab test that can produce. Parkinson's disease years before any of the other, you know, ways of testing that we had previously.

So what I'm kind of trying to say there is, there are animals that have senses that we don't have. There are humans that have senses that we don't have. And there are some humans that have some more acute senses than other people. So that kind of answers this whole thing about, well, why isn't everyone doing it? Although in some respects, I feel like I would like to think that maybe if people tried, if people found ways to, you know, altered states of consciousness and expand their consciousness, maybe everyone can do it. I don't know. What was your mission when you started this particular book?

You were in this intense time of grief. You had to choose to come out from the black hole that you described yourself going into. when you went out and started to do research, was it that you were looking to try and prove your own experience or were you trying to explain the mechanism or something else? A bit of both, I think. So about two and a half years after Robin passed away, I had got to a place where I felt I could communicate with him

and receive messages from him, mostly through signs, mostly that come from nature. Signs. but also through, you know, like a dialogue in my head. And that's why I said that at one point I had to question if I was psychotic because I would either just, I would either ask a question and get an answer or I would just get a thought in my head that I knew wasn't mine. But having been a psychiatrist, I know that that's called thought insertion

where you believe there are thoughts in your head that aren't your own. So I was like, am I okay? But to me, the nature of them, because I, you know, knew him, so well, he speaks in a way that's not the same as I speak or think. And so it definitely felt for me like these were messages from him. And

at first it was just the sort of comfort of thinking that he's still around me, somehow still, you know, saying you're safe and protected. But then at kind of difficult times in my life, because obviously there are a lot of practical and material ramifications of becoming a widow,

I was getting like certain types of guidance, things like, you know, waiting to make certain decisions. When I was kind of thinking, you know, I really need to get back to these people and it would be like, no, wait, wait, wait. And then like something positive would like happen. And I would have actually gone and probably done something, you know, quicker. That's a huge one. That's like my whole life. That is one of the biggest, actually, I think, ways that people can have. a practical application of spiritual or intuition, spiritual guidance or intuition, because there is a flow

to life that when we act too quickly, we can actually get in our own way for how things can work out. I'm curious, you know, I want to get further into this because this is, I think, the meat of how this stuff can help people practically in their lives. But what would you have said to someone five, six years ago, if they had come to you saying that they're having an experience of hearing a voice that is not theirs, that they're getting guidance, even if it was helpful to them, what would you have said if they had come into your clinic or seeing you personally? I haven't heard voices. Okay, okay, clarify.

I just want to make that clip. But the thought insertion? Thought insertion, you know, even the visual hallucinations aren't strictly speaking, like, and they don't happen in schizophrenia. But, I mean, I haven't been a practicing psychiatrist for over 15 years. But in that time, I would have diagnosed them with schizophrenia and suggested that they take medication. For sure. I mean, that was my job. And what do you believe now? I still believe that there is certain forms of psychopathology, which is the basis. of mental illness. I think that, you know, for me, or someone else who says they're experiencing guidance

or their, you know, experiencing thoughts or signs like I've described, who is otherwise mentally functioning, has like a normal range of mood, has kind of like, you know, doesn't feel hopeless or worthless, all the criteria that I would use to assess someone for their mental health, I would be okay with that because I did have a spiritual belief as well alongside my professional life. And because I was brought up Hindu, I was told that reincarnation was absolutely a thing. And, you know, we did worship our ancestors and stuff.

So I grew up with that. There was that small period of time where I just felt like rejecting it all and felt really angry like it wasn't true. And I still, you know, I mean, of all the things I've written about in the book, the one that probably has the least research behind it is past life memories and reincarnation. But where I've looked at things like near-death experiences and terminal lucidity, which are sort of, you know, what goes on at the border of life and death, there's some really, really interesting, you know,

there's compelling research, there's interesting questions, there's, you know, scientists like David Eagleman and Donald Hoffman, saying that, okay, you know, some of these things can't be proven, but they certainly can't be written off. And even a lot of the things that we accept and believe can't actually be proven or disproven. So there's choices that we've made as a society. And I just think that if we look back at all the different types of humans,

like how often do you think about what Homo erectus believed or thought whilst he walked around the earth? I think about it a lot That's just me I mean I feel like We're so arrogant that we think we're the last type of human that's ever going to exist And we know more than any other type of human

That's existed before Even though we don't know How the pyramids Or the Mayan temples or Stonehenge You know how people What we call primitive people Managed to create those things I just think it's really

I just think it's really interesting Well I guess my question This is something Jonathan and I talk about a lot, how do you not get lost in this? Because if you're experiencing a constant interface with people who have died, how do you not get caught up in the magical thinking? How do you not get caught up in a sense of guidance? How do you distinguish what your autonomy is versus what you believe you're perceiving from another realm? Really good question. And I would say, say two things. One is that I'm extremely fortunate to have the people around me that I do,

and they will challenge my thinking. Having said that, this is going to make you laugh, because it was actually my astrologer that said, you might be taking this too far. Tell me you've gone too far without telling me you've gone too far. So interestingly, he always said, I don't predict the future, I'll never tell you what to do. and your sort of astrology is like a coat and you choose how to wear it but when I asked him to help me to choose dates for our wedding he said to me you should not marry Robin

and I remember at the time thinking you're never supposed to tell me what to do this is really weird but I'm just going to leave that there because I am going to marry this man and then after he passed away I said to him do you remember that you said that to me and you're not supposed to tell me what to do, so why did you say it? And he said, because I could see that you were going to experience terrible pain.

And I said to him, you've always said to me that if I try to avoid a lesson that astrology is trying to teach me, it's going to come and get me some other way. Because time's not linear anyway. Exactly. You're just going to keep looping on it. And, yes, I have experienced terrible pain, but I also got to be married to this wonderful man that showed me unconditional love, and I don't regret it at all.

And I actually said to one of my friends who has lost, she's much younger than me, but she had lost her father and her sister when I first met her. She said, eventually I had to accept that that was my sister's journey. And I remember thinking I don't think I could do that. But because she put that in my head, I got there quicker as well and I sort of accepted it. And basically I said to her, I would go through what I've been through a million times over. to know that Robin knew he had love at the end of his life. I mean, I had to like bathe him, dress him, feed him.

And I remember once I was like kneeling on the floor, putting his socks on, and he just started crying and said, what would I have done without you? And I said, well, you don't have to think about that because, you know, I'm here and I'll do everything. So, yeah, basically I said to the astrologer that I have got to this level of communication with Robin. and that I'd watch the Disney movie Coco

about like the Day of the Dead and the veil, lifting of the veil. And I was like, I think I can go further. I think, you know, I'm going to explore this further. And that's when he said to me, you would be opening yourself up to some potentially dangerous things. And that's when I had the good sense in myself to say, I could do exactly what you said. I could go down that rabbit hole and that could become my whole life

and it could consume me. and actually the things I'm really grateful for now are that I'm alive and that I'm healthy because I've seen what it's like when that's not true and I would be not taking the gifts that, you know, everything about Robin that he gave me if I didn't engage in this life now, for real. And that's when I decided this is enough.

I've received enough to feel comfort and guidance and joy now. I don't need to take it any further and I need to re-engage with life and that's when I thought I've got to go back to work now and I had a few options of which way around I could have done things but I decided to write the book first

Well this is a great segue back into the practical you talked about timing as one of the ways that you can use an intuitive ability or a connection to something greater than us in order to help us practically navigate life. If someone is starting out on their journey, trying to increase intuition, first, it's the awareness that it's possible, right? What would you start to say to them to sort of open their minds that there's more to their experience than they're currently having?

Well, in the practical section of the book, and I thought about the order of this really carefully, I've, the chapters are called connect with your senses, connect with your intuition, connect with creativity, connect with nature, connect with your tribe. So I would start with the senses

because most people know that we have five senses. We have 34 senses at our disposal. Yeah. There is this phrase the six sense and sometimes people think it's balanced, sometimes people think it's intuition, but I made a very strict kind of definition

of what a sense is. So it had to be a stimulus that causes a receptor to produce a chemical that creates a response in the body. And so as I started, I found this journal paper that said humans have potentially 22 to 33 senses. Now, obviously, having been at medical school, I knew about some of the ones that maybe the average person doesn't, which is like thermoception for temperature, nosyception for pain. Rectal fullness, not something most people think about. flattorfulness, stomach fullness, the pH of your blood, etc. And so taste, for example, is subdivided into five.

But umami was only discovered in the 1980s. So, you know, discoveries were going on. So I did a fuller literature review comparing a lot of sort of tables. And I came up with 34 senses. Yeah. You know, the immune system has recently been recognized as a sense. So yeah, super interesting But just already an example of that

We're so much more complex and sophisticated than we realise And if you have senses that you don't even know exist Then you're obviously not consciously tapping into them So that was the kind of first step And then a big game changer for me with intuition That I've learned through my grief Is that

You know that book The Body Keeps the Score? There's a lot of research on how trauma is held in the body. And in fact, that the Brockers area of the brain, how we articulate speech, can get shut down by PTSD. And so there's a limit to how far talking therapy can actually access all of that trauma and that things like yoga and dance and art

and craniosacral therapy and certain types of massage are actually more effective. fascia work. Facia, exactly. I discovered that during my grief. At times, I went for some massages because I'd been so tense whilst Robin was ill that I, you know, and I hadn't gone for a massage for at least a year. But when I started going for them, they were so incredibly painful that it actually put me off

until I found this woman who does body realignment therapy where the massage would be so painful. It would make me cry from the pain. But I realised I had to do that to get the grief out of my system. But by understanding that, I also then realize that intuition isn't only a mental faculty. Through the same mechanisms that we can hold trauma in the body, there's hidden wisdom in the body that can be released through fascia work and other types of work.

And the hypothesis for that, which is really interesting and exciting, is the serotonin hypothesis. So people think that serotonin is to do with mood, but that's actually one of its smallest functions. And up to 95% of serotonin is produced outside of the central nervous system and cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. So that serotonin does, you know, plenty of other functions in the body. But the word serotonin actually comes from serum and tone.

So serum is blood, plasma, you know, all the liquid products. And tone is how that hormone affects the capillary constriction or dilation. which then affects how much oxygen and nutrients go into tissues and you know how those tissues um sort of you know constrict or expand and so basically that's what drives what i call hidden wisdom and trauma into the tissues of the body um and so you know i've always been big on intuition and journaling but it takes it to the next level if you understand that physicality is a really big part of unleashing that. Can you define intuition, especially in terms of it not being this thing that's floating out here,

but something that viscerally is in your body? So prior to this latest amount of research, I would have explained intuition as it's life lessons that you've picked up, but you can't remember consciously everything that you've experienced in life, but these patterns get embedded deeper and deeper into your brain into the limbic system. So through a process called Hebbian learning, named after Donald Hebb, the neuroscientist, which simply is described as neurons

that fire together wire together, things that you experience repeatedly get pushed from, you know, you have your working memory in the outer cortex. This is an analogy, the things you need to remember every day. Deeper in the limbic system are these patterns, you know,

and wisdom that you've picked up in life. And then, you know, that can go deeper, through the brainstem and spinal cord and in the gut neurons. And that's why, I mean, it's been called gut instinct for longer than we've understood all this, which also tells you

somebody must have known something about how intuition is stored in the gut. But that limits it to the neurons, right? It takes it as far as the gut, but stops it there. But the serotonin hypothesis adds in the fact that the rest of the tissues of your body can also be holding trauma

or hidden wisdom. So I would say intuition is, its hidden wisdom. So basically any place in your body that can hold trauma is also a potential for holding wisdom. It also brings up the idea that if people have restrictions from traumatic experiences in their body, it can impact their ability to access intuition. Is there like a trade-off? Like you can only have one or the other functioning at a time?

And I think that's a really, I love the way you've put that. And I think in the similar way that we have loss aversion or this gearing in the, the brain to avoid loss more than seek reward, I agree with you. I think that if there's a lot of trauma held in the body, it's going to trump the intuition. And, you know, the condition of your gut-brain axis also contributes to whether you've got brain fog or you can access your intuition really well. I'm also thinking of immune responses, right? And if you have in any way a compromised immune system, if you've experienced, I mean, as Dr. Aiman talks about, right, any concussive events, if you've had any, you know, physical traumas, which again also has variability,

that that's, you know, potentially interacting. I'm also thinking Jonathan has a replaced hip. He was born with special hips. And so what was interesting is when his hip was replaced, you know, for at least a decade, he had had extremely limited motion and, you know, and flexibility. And literally the day after they replaced this hip, he was able to move his body in ways that it had in a decade. And I instantly, because I was thinking this way, I was instantly thinking about what is going on in his brain, right? You haven't been receiving information. And I was thinking of that emotionally, right? if we've been shut off from an experience, how much are we not having access to?

And some of this trauma work then is opening up, either somatically or emotionally, it's opening up an entire range of experience that we previously didn't have. I mean, that's kind of what healing is, right? And another way to think about it, how it's impacting people, is that, like, we used to think that we're walking around, our heads are just doing, processing information, but really what's happening is we're processing the world viscerally. when we're sitting down with people, we're not just processing what they're saying, we're feeling what they're feeling, we're feeling the emotions that are happening, and we're

then accessing that. And you have an amazing moment where your body knew something before your brain did, which I think is a wild explanation that there's so much more happening in any given moment than we can realize. And often our brain is logically trying to catch up to this. can you tell people what happened on October 4th on the anniversary and what your body was telling you? Yeah. So I heard one of my friends who's a psychologist had sent me a paper about pathological grief. And that said that six months is the low point.

Usually getting close to the first anniversary, people are doing better, but then the anniversary is really hard and challenging. And I remember at five months post-Robin Dying, speaking with my friend who he does trauma therapy in hypnosis and saying I'm so, so low I cannot go, I won't be able to, I don't know how to cope

with feeling lower than this in the next month and thank goodness he said to me you've done so much work, maybe you're already there and you're going to start feeling better soon and that turned out thankfully to be correct but then at the 10 month point I thought, okay, I am doing better than I have so far, but I'm also very aware that this anniversary is coming up on October 26 and I want to prepare myself for that mentally. Make sure I've got people around, you know, just be very conscious that it's approaching. But from October the 4th, for about six or seven weeks, I was in intense pain all over my body and my mood stayed low consistently for six or seven weeks, which made me question am I in clinical depression? And the only answer that made me rule that out was that I could still enjoy some things in life.

But otherwise I was pretty high on the scale for depression. And I mean, this pain was intense. And I'm quite self-aware in that I do get psychosomatic symptoms sometimes. And I'm quite good at working out what they mean. But this was like, I couldn't understand it. And I eventually looked back through my phone calendar and saw that October 4th was the day that I took Robin home from hospital, basically given two weeks to live.

It was such a stressful day because he was absolutely adamant that he wanted to get out of the hospital. And there'd been a couple of false starts where I'd thought maybe he could come to the house in London for the weekend. But then the matron said it was too dangerous. Because we have like a townhouse in London and, I mean, he couldn't, he was bedridden. So the arrangements were made for an ambulance to take him to our house in the countryside. Oxygen had to be in place by the time we got there. And the hospital bed wasn't ready. There was just a lot going on and it was really stressful day.

And I just thought, my God, my body has remembered that. I didn't remember that date. I didn't think of that date as significant. So that was kind of shocking. But I also have a hip story that I'd like to share with you. Because I mentioned that we went to the orthopedic surgeon. And at that time, a hip replacement was booked in for Robin. I had planned to have six weeks off work to nurse him.

And he had paid for my best friend who's a nurse in Australia to fly to England to help me. And then he told me the story about feeling abandoned by his father. And it's the only thing. time I've ever seen him cry. And it was his right hip. And if you believe in the, you know, sort of spiritual things, then your hips hold a lot of emotions and the right side represents the father. So for a week or two, every time we went to bed and he was falling asleep or fell asleep, I would whisper into his ear, you've got to let go of the emotions that you're holding for your father. He had no idea that I did this because I waited until he was asleep.

And honestly, two weeks later, he said to me, I'm canceling my surgery. What? And I was like, no, you can't. What are you talking about? Like, I've taken six weeks off work. Georgina's coming over. And he just looked at me and he said, I'm not in pain. And I was like, okay, well, obviously I'm not going to make sense. Can you come lay next to him and whisper it?

Is there when he falls asleep? Can you regrow my hip? But when I told my psychologist friend, she said, that's profound. It's not just that he's not in physical pain. He's, you know, he's freed from that emotional pain. And he never had to have the hip surgery. The notion of kind of trauma being stored in the body is something that we talk about a lot, especially because there's so many different kinds of therapy, right? And most of us think that processing trauma is something you need to sit with a therapist and talk about. And I would argue that in many cases that component is important in terms of

kind of mining information and framing it and giving it context. But where is the place where someone might be getting messages that the way they've been processing trauma might not be sufficient and it might be time to turn to the body? Basically, the PTSD circuits in the brain are around the hippocampus and amygdala, as I mentioned before, the memory and the emotion centers. But with this serotonin hypothesis that I described, we do believe that, you know, that's just a small part of the circuit and whether it's neurons, muscles, fascia, or even skin. I mean, we were talking earlier about visceral reactions to things. So I think, you know, in modern society, we've moved away from that a lot, but do you ever get a shiver down your spine or butterflies in your

stomach? You know, I think starting to tap into that more is a good place for people to start. You know, what's your body telling you? And yeah, so actually Bessel van der Kolk's more recent research shows lots and lots of graphs comparing talking therapy, antidepressants, different types of psychedelics, yoga, and rapid eye movement therapy as well.

EMDR. Yeah. Just showing how the EMDR, the yoga, and the psychedelics are way more effective than antidepressants or talking therapy. But at some point in the evolution of psychology, talking therapy became the kind of accepted thing, even though

there was a lot of evidence showing that it's not as good as physical therapy. And I agree with you, there's definitely a place for it. I had the most amazing therapy during my grief, talking therapy. And I feel that, you know, once I started moving into the craniosacral therapy and the body realignment, it just added on top of that. So, yeah, it just really made me think about this idea that intuition, that physicality could add on top of that, you know, too, to the mental side of it. what that also sort of leads to is a conversation around, you know, how far back can we go? Because I'm also wondering, you know, you had this very acute, very painful, you know, loss, and also one that was extremely concentrated in that it was during this time when you were isolated together.

But I'm wondering when people think about childhood trauma and, you know, all these things, how long and how far, right, into our nervous systems is this trauma? being stored. Yeah, well, I mean, I think if you look at things like the psychosocial stages of development in children and into adulthood, particularly Erickson's work, and Freud's, what it kind of says is the longer that something's been there, the more deeply embedded it is. And what a lot of people with PTSD say is that I'm speechless or I don't have words or I'm dumbfounded.

And that's because of that shutting off of the Brockers area of the, of the problem. brain. So when something's that distant in time, it's deeply embedded in terms of like, it's almost, my colleague Deborah Ancona at MIT has done some research on ghosts in the executive suite. And she talks about those values and secrets and boundaries that were like embedded into your psyche as a child, that you're not conscious of the fact that they're still running your life today. So I do feel really strongly that all the research points me to the direction that stuff from that long ago that you're no longer conscious of, there's no amount of talking therapy or writing therapy that's going to get to that. So I think all of the physical things that I've suggested. Like for example, there's this charity called Ashes to Art where firefighters that go into really traumatic scenes, as soon as they exit the scene, they paint what they saw.

and it reduces, you know, they don't get PTSD. Yeah. What do you think is happening there? It's emotional processing, but it's also got a physical element to it. Because, you know, PTSD often brings up images of what you've seen that you can't get rid of. So I think drawing it out and seeing it and having, like, you know, physically created it yourself is stopping that suppression that keeps bringing this image back up, you know, because you haven't processed it. It's also making yourself kind of the author of your story as opposed to being, you know, the subject of your story.

I've also heard you describe doing art, dancing, music. In our ancestral history, we wouldn't have been safe to do that if we were not safe. So it kind of re-signals us to be like, oh, if I have the time to, engage in these activities, then I must be safe in some way. Are we sort of wired that way in our minds to get that unconscious message? Well, I think there's two parts to it. I think that in, you know, paleolithic times, we wouldn't have wasted resources on that if it wasn't crucial to our survival or somehow to our human spirit, you know, making totems, giving offerings to ancestors, increase that sense of connection so that you had connection in your tribe, but your tribe

wasn't only people that were alive. And then, yeah, I mean, these are like higher functions. So again, you would be relatively privileged to be able to indulge in these activities. It's also parasympathetic nervous system activating, right? Even the notion of being able to exhale, right? The reason that we're, that we try and at least, I say to my kids, if there's one thing I can teach you, it's about breath. Like if there's one thing I wish I knew, right? If your exhale is longer than your inhale, it indicates, that you are not actively running, you know, from a predator. So I think also these activities are engaging different parts of the nervous system that indicate you're okay to do this, you're okay to have, you know, for polyvagal theory,

you're okay to have social interactions, you're okay to engage that way. Yeah, and like one of the things I really like about this field of neuroaesthetics is that how good you are at the art doesn't matter. The benefits are the same. So it's kind of that whole thing about, you know, dance like nobody's looking. kind of thing. Just, you know, sketch, paint, dance, sing in the shower. You know, I just try to bring those things more into my life in little ways.

But the biggest one for me is appreciating beauty. It's really changed my life. It's like gratitude next level. Because I talked about loss of sense of self, loss of relationships, loss of connection to something greater. Noticing beauty, it just kind of like enriches that tapestry of life. and it makes you feel connected to something greater. And nature is one of the easiest ways to do that, as it were.

Even if you don't, I always say, like even if you live in a city, there's always weeds making their way through the pavement. There's always a sky. There's always clouds, hopefully. If you can get where there's stars like that, inspires that kind of set of, that sense of wonder. You know, one of the things that we keep kind of circling back to when people talk about consciousness is the ability to transcend.

this plane of consciousness. And we've spoken to theoretical physicists about it, and we've spoken to mystics about it, and we've spoken to all sorts of people about this notion of what does it look like and feel like to transcend that. And one of the ways that so many people are talking about is with the use of psychedelics. And we also talk to people who talk about deep meditation and, you know, ways that you can access it. But one of the things that we keep coming back to is this notion of filtering, right? And when we're in a transcendental state, are we filtering less? Are we filtering more? You know, is it the shutting down of the default mode network that's sort of always telling you the things that are wrong? And you actually talk about the ascending reticular activating system,

or A-R-A-S. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about this aspect of filtration. Is that filtering out, you know, aspect that would interfere with us being in touch with something greater? What is that system for? Yeah, so that system is for the processes of selective filtering, selective attention and value tagging. So because we're bombarded with so much data, the brain helps us by filtering out things that we don't need to be aware of all the time. For example, you're not aware of your clothes on your body all day, even though. they are touching your skin receptors constantly, because that's just wasted information that you don't need. So in terms of basic survival, the brain has its own idea about, you know, what you

need and what you don't need, and it will, you know, if not directed by you, it will filter out what it deems unnecessary, pay attention to what it thinks is necessary, and then tag those things in order of importance. And people with attentional challenges or people who are on the spectrum sometimes have challenges in this arena of knowing what to pay attention to and for how long, or if you've ever had a child with sensitivity to clothing, you know that sometimes they will tell you

all day that they are sensing their clothing. So these are places where there are challenges. Go on, sorry. Thank you for pointing that out. And so, yeah, if there aren't challenges then that's happening naturally all the time and so you notice things that are important and you move towards opportunities

that are, you know, crucial for you, you can direct this system a bit. So there's a logical and an emotional element to it. So the logical one is more kind of like, this is basically what we need to survive. The emotional one is things that you want, things you desire, things that would make you thrive. And, you know, whether it's through like the action boards

that I described in my last book or whether it's by making a list or just being, you know, visualising things, you can direct the action boards. that process a little bit. But actually what Dr. Bruce Grayson said to me is that the brain is probably filtering down what the mind is capable of so that we can exist on this material plane. And things like psychedelics or ecstatic dancing or conscious connected breathwork

can alter our state of consciousness and perhaps expand that ability, whether it's the suite of senses, whether it's our intuition, whether it's communication with other realms. And so there's also a really interesting piece of research called shared trait vulnerability, which is about the connection between creativity and psychopathology. So creativity is obviously a positive personality trait, but there is a genetic connection to a higher likelihood of mental illness,

such as depression, schizophrenia or addiction. And in shared trait vulnerability, there's like an area of overlap that's really positive, but there are factors that can mean that you're in psychological crisis rather than you're mentally healthy and you can be really creative. So basically, they're to do with hyper connectivity throughout the brain. So making associations that not everybody does. Low latent inhibition, which is to do with the filtering system. filtering system being looser so that more stuff gets in and then it's also to do with like your working memory and your cognitive flexibility so if you've got a good working memory a high IQ you can think flexibly and differently then you can get all the benefits of creativity to expanding

your consciousness but if you have a low IQ if you tend to perseverate which is go over the same thought process over and over again without being able to think flexibly and you've got a poor working memory, then you're more likely to go down the path of experiencing psychopathology. It's like your genetics have a formula, right? For how able they are to be flexible and creative emotionally. So, you know, creativity, therefore, is potentially a conduit to mental well-being, to accessing your intuition. Because it's basically noticing more stuff, making associations.

that, you know, previously maybe you didn't make or other people don't, and thinking outside the box. So, you know, to me, that's related to this idea of expanding your consciousness. When we speak to intuitives, people who either claim to be able to channel or who just have a deep intuitive sense, they do talk about their link, especially in early childhood, to creativity. Do they? And they talk about how there is an element of making it up,

which can feel really unstable to some people, because they're like, what's intuition? What am I making up? And what I think is interesting from your story is, as you were asking for signs and bringing a scientific lens to intuition and communicating with other realms, you were trying to put parameters around it, right, to make it real.

Can you talk a little bit about sort of the gray zone there where maybe you thought initially, how could this be real, what am I sensing and then trying to make it as tangible as possible. So do you remember I told you about those tabs that I had open on my phone? Yes. So that had started during the pandemic and I didn't want to write another book. So it definitely wasn't to write another book.

It was really for personal interest. But I'm very fortunate in that my life and my work tend to really weave into each other. so I'm not quite sure what I was going to do with it but I was going to look into it and then sadly when Robin was receiving treatment we'd have to go in three times a week for blood products, transfusions

medication and I remember one day sitting in the waiting room of the day unit and just thinking I'm not going to have time to read this stuff and I just closed all the tabs and it was quite a moment And of course it was then a moment where I felt like I wanted to open those tabs again, metaphorically speaking. So it's something I'd been interested in before, Ancient Wisdom.

I think I'm going to say the wild works in curious ways. My friend Drew Pura-Hitt, who's here in L.A., recommended Dr. Bruce Grayson to me for my podcast. But at the time, he didn't know that I'd lost my husband. So I don't know why he ever did that. In fact, I'm having dinner with him tomorrow night, so I'll ask him. So my interest in those things researched. Obviously, my interest in life and death was a new one. For myself, it's not like I needed to prove it,

but I just became very fascinated by it. I want to understand things. You know, that is the nature of my work and my career. So I remember when I spoke to Dr. Alexander Bathiani, who writes about terminal lucidity. He's written a book called Threshold. And terminal lucidity is when people towards the end of their life, when they've got, as far as we understand it, irreversible brain damage, suddenly become completely lucid after years of not remembering their children's names and things like that. And so what it boils down to here is this argument between materialism and due. And so materialism says that all thoughts and emotions and processes arise from, you know, physical neurons and chemical processes.

And dualism asserts that these things can be independent of each other. So what Professor Bathiani says is that at the border of life and death, when the brain is under duress, perhaps we're going to, we see something that we don't see during normal life, which is that these two can exist independently of each other. Because based on what we think we know currently, a brain of someone who's had dementia for years should not be able to function normally at all. We can't explain how that's happening. The only explanation is dualism. So Alexander Bathiani said that even his close friends and family have said to him, come on, you can tell us what you really think about, you know, what happens at the border of life and death and whether the mind can exist

separately. And he says, you know, I've got lots of case studies, but there's, he's very strict about saying, this cannot be proven. And so I, I pushed him. He said, no one's ever pushed me so hard to say, you know, whether I think this is true or not. And at the time, I hadn't shared, apart from with my inner circle, I'd lost Robin, but I was desperate to know if this was, you know, possible. And so I let him speak and then I said, okay, well, I'm not going to ask you to say it or put words in your mouth, but from what I've heard, you are definitely saying that the mind can exist separately from the body. And he sort of giggled and said, no one's like, you know, pushed me that far. But I really wanted to know if that was true. And because that has to be

true for you to be able to communicate with someone that's passed on. You have to be able to believe that their mind or psyche or soul or whatever it is can still exist when it's not part of a body. Yes. You have to believe that it's somewhere out there that we can learn to tap into so that we can have access to it. Exactly. And in cases of the terminal lucidity, just to flesh it out for people who may not have heard about this, it's people who have had prolonged an extensive dementia or decline who have not been aware or with it for however long coming back? There was a documentary alive inside, and it was literally one man's mission to see if he could bring music to people who had been basically in, you know, some sort of state of dementia or

lack of communication. And what he found was that if he chose songs that were literally the most popular when they were teenagers, playing this music to them could bring them out of a catatonic state. And there are some unbelievable cases. And the notion being that there is a part of you, right, that you can still access that can pierce through a lot of the blunting, a lot of the numbing, a lot of the shutting down that the rest of you is doing. I think I want to agree with Jonathan, though, that what you've just said is true, but it's different. Yeah. So, and even you using the word decline, That's too small a word.

So in terminal lucidity, it's either physical or chemical brain damage that is currently agreed to be irreversible. There's another... One of my favourite films that actually inspired me to do my PhD is Awakenings with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. That was, I think, encephalitis, some type of encephalitis. Yeah. And these people literally were trapped.

And that's based on real cases, yeah, yeah. But with terminal lucidity, it's usually dementia, but it could be like brain tumours or abscesses or something that's irreversibly damaged the brain. These people are not themselves in terms of levels of consciousness and cognitive ability. And then suddenly, for no explainable reason, they completely become lucid on themselves again, briefly.

And it's usually a sign that they will pass away within 1 to 24 hours. And I mean, we understand a little bit about the surge of neurochemicals that can happen in people, let's say, with brain tumors just before they die. But we still can't explain how if the neurons or parts of the brain are actually irreversibly damaged, how this could be possible. So, you know, it does open up some very interesting questions. So I want to ask more.

directly in terms of your experience. I want you to state kind of as simply and cohesively, you know, as you can. What is your belief about your ability to communicate with your deceased husband? I believe that whatever is the essence of a person, and there's many words that we could use for that, mind, soul, spirit, psyche, basically doesn't go away. I don't know where it goes. And again, I think there are different words that we can use, like collective consciousness, Godhead, the source, universe.

Towards the end of writing the book, I kind of was using the phrase cosmic soup or cosmic force. Someone that's messaged me since, you know, I've been speaking about this has called it plasma. So, yeah, I believe the essence of the human I think probably goes to another plane or another dimension. That's as far as I can say. I don't know definitively.

And I think that if we choose to or feel we have the ability to, we can stay connected to people that we've had close bonds with in life. If we tie this back to terminal lucidity, then in some way that consciousness spirit of that person is re-emerging in their body for a moment so that they can say goodbye and wrap up their affairs. Is that how you understand it? Yeah, that's usually how it is. So usually people, they don't actually say goodbye, but there's like a conclusive element to the conversation. Sometimes, you know, they make, they like practice forgiveness or make amends with people. They kind of give very, like, it's sort of,

whether it's maternal or paternal, there's like a sort of element of advice and reassurance. And Alexander Bathiani says it's a moment of, you know, beauty and dignity and hope. Obviously not hope that the person's actually going to like return and stay that way. But, you know, I always think that dementia is actually one of the cruelest ways to lose a loved one because they're still physically there, but they're not themselves.

So I think if there is a glimmer of they wear themselves for a moment, and I did get that moment back. Because, you know, I think a lot of people who've lost someone would say they would give anything to have one minute with that person again. And I guess this is a version of that. What can people take if they start to understand that the mind can exist separately from the body in terms of navigating their practical lives? So there's lots of elements to this.

Because if we dig deeper, which I do a little bit in the book, but I'm not an expert on this at all. but under dualism are other things like pan-psychism and animism and polytheism and stuff. And so they basically, you know, vary between things like everything, including like everything in nature like rocks, have some kind of soul or consciousness. And, you know, a lot of dualist belief is about like the connection of consciousness. And Carl Jung certainly did a lot of, you know, research into this. But basically, if you believe that the spirit can exist separately from the body, then I think the biggest, like, takeaway from that is what happens after we die.

And that would mean that it's possible that that spirit still exists somewhere. And that would mean that if you wanted to or you tried to and they also did, because in my feeling it's a two-way thing. Like if Robin had, you know, passed away and then not wanted to, like, be back in touch with me. I don't think I could have forced that to happen. If I didn't believe in life after death and I never tried to communicate with him,

I probably would have ignored the signs that I saw. And these are, you know, there are so many, I can't even remember all of them, but they take my breath away every time. I mean, some days I'll open my front door and they'll just be a perfect white feather on the door mat. and like two pairs of lions is a sign for me and I like I tend to see that in the most strange places

and obviously I see a lot of robins there are other birds sometimes that I see and I feel like it's like he's come to kind of show me it's unbelievable I mean I think also it it does make people feel so you know hopeful right like it allows you to have hope that yeah that this is not the end of our kind of conscious experience.

And also, and this is what's really neat in the book, there are many practical ways to kind of get in touch with these other parts of you that in many cases we've been told to set aside unless we're way out there, right? Yeah. And the idea is to try and bring these two worlds together more. Yeah. Would you agree that it can have a calming effect

on the nervous system if we're trying to think about the tangible benefits? You know, for me, when I, feel like I don't have to solve every problem by myself, that there are a guiding force in the universe that will reveal itself. If I am in connection with it, it makes me feel less alone. Yeah, totally. And I'll be really honest with you. I have to remind myself of this quite frequently. You know, like anyone, I can go down a negative spiral with life. And it's like almost each time I have to remember and I want to get quicker at remembering that if I allow it, you know, there's a lot of

guidance and protection. And when I stress over things and try to like make things happen how I want it to, it actually goes against, you know, the positive outcome. So yeah, I'm still on a learning journey with that. And it's actually really good to hear you say it because I think sometimes you just get into the daily grind of things, don't you? And you forget. And then the next time I have a challenge, it will take me longer to remember that. But I want to live like that all a time. It is like a muscle memory, right? Like we go from being, I face an obstacle and I have to figure it all out by myself and we can start to panic and we're like, I don't know how to figure this out right away because this email needs a response or this person is expecting something

and we can forget easily to say, let's sit back in ourselves, let's reorient, let's look for signs, let's ask for guidance. If you extrapolate a little bit, and I know this is not scientific and you are a scientist and it's hard to prove, right? Do you believe that everyone has the capability to connect with either a deceased loved one, some call it guides? Maybe you don't know someone that has died, but there are other non-physical realms that are available to communicate and give guidance? Yeah, I mean, I would like to say that I think it should be possible that everyone can do it. I don't really understand why it would only be a few people. But I guess it comes back to this thing about the senses

and some people have, you know, stronger senses in some areas. But if we think about even really basic neuroplasticity, like, you know, people who are born blind, their occipital lobes where vision occurs, get rewired for a stronger sense of hearing or taste or whatever. Yeah, I mean, I sort of, I would like to think that everybody can. And I have received the most incredible messages from people since I first shared this. And one guy actually sent a voice note and said, I was listening to your podcast.

I heard you talk about this elastic band in the figure of age or the infinity symbol that you felt was a sign from your husband. And he said, to be honest, I kind of shrugged because I'm quite skeptical. And he said, I was walking on the beach. And I kid you not. Written in the sand was I am and then the infinity symbol. he said, I walked past it, and then I thought, no, I've got to go and take a photo of this. So I turned around and he said, it was just a few meters behind me, so like a few seconds. And the I AM had gone and all that was left, clear as day was the infinity symbol.

What I think is really fascinating about this is that I think five years ago, 10 years ago, you may not have been the person to sit here in front of us with your background and credentials to bring these ideas. forward. And even in our podcast, which started talking to people about what their experience of anxiety was or differentiating between panic attacks and anxiety attacks and explaining depression as a scale of human experience and that grief can mimic that, but we don't need to medicate grief. We need to actually go through it and process it. And we were just trying to normalize the human condition. And throughout the process, we've spoken to more and more people who fundamentally explain that a spiritual connection tapping into something greater than our five senses,

even six senses, are core to the human experience, and this is a birthright for all of us. And these are people from all walks of life. And more and more people from the medical community bringing this information forward. I'm wondering if this is this spiritual revolution that we thought was coming and has been brewing for a long time. But more and more, these conversations are mainstream. I think so. You know, I was actually really impressed to hear, like, the range of people that you've had on this podcast speaking about topics like this.

And for instance, a few months ago, I was asked to go on British, British, breakfast television in Britain. And so I have certain angel numbers with Robin as well. So 1111 is like for twin flame or soulmate. so we've always had that. But since he's passed away, I see a lot of fours as well. And when I didn't know what that meant, so when I looked it up, it said you're being guided

and protected by your, like, guardian angels. And so that was quite specific to what I was experiencing. So on the way to and the way back, but on a different house, I saw the numbers 44 going to breakfast television and coming home. Later that day, my book, The Sword, which was by then five years old, had gone from book number 2,500 and something on Amazon to book number four on Amazon.

And then two days later, there was a guy on the same breakfast show who'd written a book called Angels Are With You Now and was talking about white feathers being the angelic business card and seeing his mother's name on a car registration plate after she'd just passed away. And his book went to number one.

And I actually messaged him. he's called Kyle Gray's a very nice guy and said I was on the same program two days before my book went to number four but I am actually really happy that yours went to number one because I think this is so important what you're talking about and then we like met up and had lunch and he's given me his book and everything and there are some other books coming out shortly

you know around around similar time to mine and mine ended up taking longer to write than it was meant to because there was some debate about the extent to which I've gone out there with my theories. And at one point it was suggested that maybe it should come out in March 2026. And my intuition was 100% no. And, you know, I basically don't care if I have to write night and day now to get this done, but it's got to come out at the time that we'd already agreed. What do you hope people will take away if there's a singular message in this for people?

Well, it's not singular, sorry. Life is just so beautiful but so fragile. We are so amazing and capable of way more than we realize. And that, you know, embracing something that's spiritual or mystical or unexplainable isn't going to harm you and could really enrich your life. It's beautiful. Thank you so much for being here. We really so glad we got to connect with you in person in particular.

Thank you. Thank you. I really enjoyed this conversation. Awesome. I really like this notion that even though some of us may naturally be more likely to, let's say, have access to these things, right? Whatever gene might have been passed down. But I love this notion that there are things that you can do to be more in touch with this. And we've talked to Suzanne

Geisman about this. We talked to Lee Harris about this. I mean, every person who has ever come on and we've said, what can people practically do to be more in touch with themselves, process their trauma more? These are the kinds of things that everybody says, learning to drop into your body, be more in touch with your body. If you're a person who's like, oh, I don't know what I'm feeling where. You can learn how to feel those things. And it can open up this whole other world. Mysticism doesn't have to be abstract. There's this idea that talking about

non-physical reality is this way out there thing that is left for Ouija boards, but what we're seeing now is that it's being integrated into our understanding of what it means to be well. I loved her conversation

about the immune system, how those things can benefit from this kind of being in touchness. If you want more about practical ways to access, This information, check us out on Substack. My Ambialx Breakdown on Substack. We release content there that you can't hear anywhere else.

We've also got some really fun additional content from this very episode that's going to be available on Substack. So make sure you're over there and subscribed. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's My Ambialyx Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two.

One fiction. And now she's going to break down.