The Telepathy Tapes - Ep 6: Scientific Evidence for ESP that Shatters the Materialist Paradigm

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

In this highly anticipated science episode, we explore the rich history of telepathy research in both humans and animals, uncovering groundbreaking studies that challenge the materialist worldview. Leading scientists suggest that consciousness, not matter, may be the fundamental building block of the universe—offering a powerful explanation for telepathy and other unexplained phenomena.We hear from Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell, whose work on telepathy in non-speakers has spanned over a decade, and from Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge biologist whose career was transformed after learning about a blind boy who could seemingly “see” through his mother’s eyes. This discovery led Dr. Sheldrake to study telepathy, particularly in animals, revealing the profound bonds between pets and their owners. Dr. Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Science, guides us through the history of telepathy research, including the pivotal Ganzfeld studies, which provided strong evidence for the existence of telepathy over the past several decades.The episode introduces groundbreaking ideas about a new scientific paradigm, where consciousness is viewed as the most fundamental building block of the universe. This shift in thinking could explain many psi phenomena, like telepathy, that the materialist worldview has struggled to account for. By exploring quantum physics, we learn that particles can be connected over great distances, influencing each other instantly—an idea that echoes the potential for human minds to be similarly entangled across space and time. Dr. Marjorie Woolacott, the President of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences, also shares how her research supports the idea that consciousness may not be confined to the brain, but rather a pervasive force in the universe.We also revisit Dr. Sheldrake’s research on telepathic connections between animals and their human companions, including an that demonstrated extraordinary telepathic abilities. These examples push the boundaries of conventional science and open the door to a deeper understanding of consciousness and its role in shaping our reality.As the episode draws to a close, we discuss the limitations of the materialist paradigm and explore alternative theories of consciousness, setting the stage for the next episode, which promises to dive deeper into the remarkable abilities of non-speaking individuals.Please remember you can view the film trailer and some of our telepathy tapes at the website: TheTelepathyTapes.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, what's up, everyone? This is Kai Dickens, and you're listening to the Telepathy Tapes podcast. My son said to me, I can hear thoughts. What is this phenomenon happening? Why are his mind and my mind completely connected? Telepathy is the tip of the iceberg with their spiritual gifts. People don't understand that they can do this. They don't even have to be in the same room, the same zip code.

have to be in the same room, the same zip code. For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms. And nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on Telepathy Tapes. We're more than halfway through our season, and so far you've met incredible teachers and parents who have all stated something extraordinary. Telepathy is happening amongst non-speaking individuals. And many of you are still asking, how on earth can this be true? And that's to be expected because you and I are both products of the materialist paradigm that has influenced skeptical scientific thinking for decades today we'll look at why and how that's been so pervasive and we'll also look at research on ESP that's been dismissed buried or conveniently ignored dr. Diane Hennessey Powell who has been studying non speakers

with telepathy for over a decade is not the only reputable scientist who left a promising academic track to pursue riveting questions about consciousness. Last week, you met Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. He's a Cambridge biologist who's authored more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals and written nine books. He reached out to Dr. Powell when he first read about her research, and the story that inspired their meeting is fascinating. Rupert Sheldrake is well known for his research on animal telepathy and not just animal telepathy, but telepathy between people and their pets who are like family members. Dr. Sheldrake, just like every scientist I met, never set out to study telepathy. But early in his academic career, he was sitting in the tea room at Cambridge University when he learned about a disabled child who could see through his mother's eyes.

We had a tea room in the laboratory where we had breaks. And once the subject of telepathy came up and I just dismissed it as rubbish and superstition and so on. He had a professor whom he really respected tell him about an experiment that was done with a blind boy. This professor, who forever changed Rupert's life, was named Sir Rudolf Peters, a biochemist with such an incredible contribution to academia that he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Sir Rudolf Peters told me about an investigation he'd done with a severely disabled child. It's impossible to

know what the boy's diagnosis would have been today, but at the time, which would have been the 1950s, he was deemed severely mentally disabled and he was almost completely blind. And the boy's ophthalmologist was shocked during a checkup because this boy who could not see was reading the eye chart from across the room. He did phenomenally well on those eye charts, the ophthalmologist. He just couldn't believe what was happening. So then he thought maybe the mother had something to do with it. So he sent her out of the room and this young man couldn't do it. This boy was able to read the eye chart only when his mother was in the room

looking at the eye chart as well and couldn't if she'd left. Sound familiar? So nearly 60 years ago, Sir Rudolf Peters looked at this and came to a very similar conclusion that Dr. Powell did when she was studying children with severe autism who seemed to be able to read through their mother's eyes. He came to the conclusion that somehow the mother was communicating telepathically to her son. So Sir Rudolf Peters crafted an experiment to see if mind reading was occurring between the blind boy and his mother.

They got the mother in one laboratory, sitting by the telephone, and they had the boy in another laboratory about five miles away. And they recorded the whole thing on a tape recorder. They showed the mother a series of cards with letters or numbers on them. And the boy then said what it was, a number or a letter. And the results were staggeringly higher than the chance level. And when Sir Rudolf Peters told Rupert Sheldrake about this research in the tea room at Cambridge, it changed the course of Rupert's life. It made me think that at least some people can develop an astonishing ability. I think it's probably more common in animals than people to develop this ability

because animals, after all, can't communicate through normal speech. Dr. Sheldrake has done remarkable research around telepathy in the animal kingdom, and one of my favorite studies looks at the telepathic bond between pets and their owners. About 50% of dogs and about 30% of cats know when their owners are coming home. His study on this led to his book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Definitely check that out if you want to know more. But here's a small recap of what he did. We set up cameras to film the place the dog waited.

And then we had the owner go at least five miles away and come home at a randomly chosen time they didn't know in advance. And this wasn't just one dog, we did it with several dogs. And it was replicated by a skeptic. To his surprise, he got just the same results we did. Dr. Sheldrick's team would ping the dog owner with a pager when it was time to go home.

And to rule out familiar car sounds, we had them come home in a different taxi every time. And what we saw over and over and over again was the dog started anticipating the arrival of the owner when they received the call to start going home, when their mind turned homewards. So they tested this with multiple dog owners and their animals. And what they found is right when the dog owner started thinking about home is when their animal would go to the window or door to wait. And sometimes something unexpected happened after the page had come through. For instance, there's once a flat tire or someone's boss would call and say, you've got to come back into the office. On quite a few occasions, people set off to come home,

and then they were interrupted. What happened is the dog started by waiting by the door as if she was coming home, which she was. But then when she stopped coming home, it lost interest and drifted away. So I think this shows that what was going on was a telepathic connection with the owner. Dr. Sheldrake notes that animals beyond dogs and cats can create profound telepathic bonds with their owner.

And one of the most remarkable cases he ever came across was the incredible bond between a woman named Amy and her parent, Nikesi. Amy Morgana got in touch with me after my book, Dogs That Know When Their Owns Are Coming Home, came out. And she told me that she'd been training her African grey parrot to learn language in a meaningful way. And at that time, it had a vocabulary of hundreds of words. It's now well over 1,500 words, the highest vocabulary of any parrot ever reported. Nikesi can speak in full sentences, use verb tense properly, and he'll invent new terms for things he doesn't know by combining other words together.

At one point, Jane Goodall actually met this incredible parrot, and she marveled at the fact that Nikesi, this grey parrot, seemed to crack a joke. Here's the story from Jane Goodall herself. And as I walked into the room, I said, oh, hello, you must be Nikesi. I've heard a lot about you. And he said, that's Jane, got a chimp.

Now, he'd seen all the pictures of me in the books, and I think he'd seen a video. He had never said chimp before. So it's clear why biologists and scientists were very interested in studying Nkisi. Chimps go like that. Chimps go like that. Very good. Amy explains that Nikisi will talk about his future and even reflect on the past. Things that were extremely exciting, he might even talk about for

months. For instance, his first car ride had a huge impact on him. And here's Jane Goodall again, recounting the unbelievable intellect of this bird. If you see somebody who's once taken him in a car, he will immediately start, want to go in the car, want a car. And if Amy says, I haven't got a car, he says, get a car. Phone for a car. So Amy reached out to Dr. Sheldrake after learning about the research he'd done around telepathic bonds between pets and their owners. She found that this parrot became extremely telepathic with her, so much so that it slept in her bedroom.

And when she was dreaming in the night, the parrot would wake her up by commenting noisily on her dreams. And she also found that if she was sitting at one side of the room looking at pictures in a magazine, the parrot would comment on the pictures. So Dr. Sheldrake flew to New York to meet Amy and Nikesi and get a better sense of their bond. This parrot was totally remarkable, utterly astonishing. And we then set up a series of controlled experiments to see if the parrot really could pick up her thoughts telepathically. So Dr. Sheldrake orchestrates an incredible study between Amy and her parrot Nikesi. And the study is very similar to the first telepathy test Dr. Diane conducted with Haley that you heard about in episode one. Amy was in one room and the parrot was on a different floor in a different room.

He had a neutral and random third party pick out a variety of pictures. Corresponding to words the parrot knew, sealed in brown paper envelopes. The envelopes were shuffled, and again, neither Dr. Sheldrake or Amy knew what pictures were in the envelope. And she then opened an envelope and looked at the picture, which she hadn't seen before. And what happened was mind-blowing. Looking at the old visuals of the test, it's remarkably similar, almost identical to some of the telepathy tests we were doing with the non-speakers. Say if she's looking at a picture of flowers, then the parrot said, it's a flower.

From now on, all the words you hear are the parrot. Yeah, you're probably going to get the picture of the flower. You're going to get the picture of the flower. You're going to go to camp and put the flowers on that. Amy and Nikesi were about 55 feet apart, on different floors and in different rooms. They were both filmed continuously throughout the test with two separate video cameras with synchronized time code. And that's where this audio from the parrot is coming from. And she picked her, looking into a picture of a couple hugging and says, it's a hug.

Oh, can I get a hug? Can I give you a hug? It was astonishing. All this is on film. And here's a clip of a younger Dr. Sheldrake, almost two decades ago, presenting this research to a large room of people. The results are fantastically above chance. I mean, the odds against chance are thousands, even millions or billions, depending on the method you use, to one. It's staggeringly significant telepathy results. The parrot didn't get it right every time. Sometimes it didn't say millions or billions, depending on the method you use, to one. It's staggeringly significant telepathy results. The parrot didn't get it right every time. Sometimes it didn't say anything. Sometimes it spent the whole time of the test shouting to Amy to call her back. It said, come back, come back. Why are you growly with me? But in the others, in many of the others,

it did say exactly what she was looking at. In a way, the test reminds me of the image generator that we did with Akil. It feels more than just telepathy, because the parrot has to interpret what Amy was looking at. For example, at one point, Amy was given a random envelope containing an image, and there's a lot going on in this picture. There's a yellow taxi cab and a man standing on the curb as if to get in, or maybe he's hailing it. And the taxi driver has his head out the window as if to talk to that man or wave to someone else. Nakisi says, careful if you're going to put your head out. There's a guy's head out of the cab window. And that's what Amy was actually looking at when the parrot said, you put your head out. Or at one point, the image showed to Amy was a man talking on a phone. And again, this was years ago. So it's one of those

big clunky phones with an answering machine. Amy again is in a different room on a different floor. And the Kisi, her parrot starts to say, what are you doing on the phone and making answering machine This is all published in a peer-reviewed journal called Testing a Language Using Parrot for Telepathy. You cannot ask for a better way to test for telepathy you cannot ask for a better way to test animal telepathy than finding an animal that speaks our own language this story and the evidence that Amy and the Kesey have given us the telepathy does exist and can exist between animals of different species is absolutely amazing I'm compelled to share kiss? Okay. I love you. I love you too. I'm compelled to share these examples of animal telepathy

because of my dad. He's the most informed, well-read person that I know. And every step of this journey, I've had my dad in mind because he's a proud, hard-nosed skeptic. He's brilliant and logical and prone to dismiss something like telepathy immediately offhand.

But there's a story about elephants that profoundly impacted him. So I want to share a snippet of a conversation between him and I. You have been, I would say, a materialist for most of your life. Would you agree with that? I've always thought this kind of stuff was goofy and explainable by other things, mistakes, coincidence, whatever. So I never had much faith in religion or these things that we can't see. I've been a materialist for sure. But there's one story that stopped him in his tracks and made his skeptical materialist heart open to something more. What I'm thinking about right now is a story about Lawrence Anthony, who was living in South Africa with his wife. And at some point, they decided to buy a game refuge. And they did. And then later on, Lawrence found out about a group of nine elephants that were

going to be killed because they were in some sense terrorizing a populated area people would try to you know chase them away and they would come back so these huge elephants are causing problems and the only solution was to kill them lawrence anthony found out about that and went into the bush to live with these elephants to gain their trust so he could bring them to his game preserve apparently he was almost trampled while he's living with them. But over time, they trust him. He moves them to the game preserve. At some later point, Lawrence Anthony died.

He died due to a heart attack. Two days after he died, there was a commotion outside and a herd of 21 elephants, all of the elephants now on the preserve, walked two days to get there. They're making distress noises. And here's a clip from a news story about this. Upon the passing of Lawrence, these majestic beasts walked 12 hours from Zululand Bush to their friend's home to pay their respects. They stood vigil for two days outside of Lawrence's house before returning to their

regular lives in the bush. They had not visited the house for a year and a half. What's even more amazing is that no one told both herds about Lawrence's death. It's like they just knew about it. It leaves you with the question, how on earth did these elephants two days away know that Lawrence Anthony died? His wife said that there's some things that cannot be explained by reason, cannot be seen, deep roots that connect all living things, humans and animals. It wasn't until that night, two days after Lawrence died, that I truly understood. To me it's an amazing story. But there's even more because every March 4th, for at least three or four years afterwards, that whole herd would show up at the compound

celebrating the anniversary of his death. Oh, Dad, you're crying, aren't you? He couldn't finish his sentence because he started to cry. But the beautiful end to the story is that for years after Lawrence Anthony died, the elephants would come back and gather outside of his house on the anniversary of his death. They walked for miles, sometimes days to do this. And nobody knows how they can remember the date of his death, let alone how they knew he died in the first place. It's that deep connection, inexplicable, that, you know, we don't see it, don't necessarily feel it, but somehow we're connected. So I find it a powerful story. It is a powerful story, just like the other stories you've heard in the past five episodes.

And it points to this idea that a telepathic connection is most likely to be formed amongst animals and people who are deeply loved, needed, or valued by one another. There have been numerous credible studies done on animal telepathy, but even more so on human telepathy. And one of the most influential and leading scientists in that space is Dr. Dean Radin. He's the chief scientist at the Institute for Noetic Sciences, which was started by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell. While returning to Earth from his Apollo 14 mission, Mitchell experienced what's now called the overview effect, a profound sense of unity with all things as he gazed at Earth from space. Seeing our fragile blue planet teeming with life in the vast loneliness of space gave him a deep and profound understanding of our interconnectedness this transformative

experience inspired him to start the Institute of noetic sciences which explores consciousness and beyond leading the Institute for noetic sciences Dean Radin is also the author of many seminal books including the conscious universe and entangled minds and his commitment to the scientific method and rigorous statistical analysis has bolstered the legitimacy of telepathy worldwide. His background in electrical engineering helps him to understand the very physical aspect of things, and yet he also has a background in psychology. I asked Dean about the volumes of peer-reviewed, tightly controlled telepathy studies done over the years, and if the results prove that this stuff is real. In science, we don't have proof. We only have proof in alcohol and logic. So what we can say is, with high

confidence, telepathy is essentially demonstrated to an extent where we don't really need to do more proof-oriented research. People who just get into the field or don't believe that such a thing is possible, they will do proof-oriented research because they need to see it firsthand. The experiment that has been done the most over the past 50 years or so is called the Gansfeld telepathy method. This telepathy test requires a sender and a receiver. The Gansfeld technique for investigating extrasensory perception isolates a subject, the receiver, in a darkened room. All she sees is reddish light. All she hears is white noise. If you're in that condition for about 15 minutes and you don't fall asleep, it pretty quickly puts you into the state like just before you fall

asleep, the hypnagogic state. And so it's like a dreamlike reverie state. Then the sender, who is far away in a different room, looks at randomly selected photographs and tries to send the image telepathically to the receiver in the different room. So after close now to 4,000 such sessions run by at least a couple dozen laboratories around the world over five decades, the overall hit rate, as we call it, the number of times that the receiver correctly chose the right target is 30 to 31 percent. The likelihood of guessing at about a 30 percent rate is a gazillion to one, odds against chance. I mean, the number is so big, I don't even know what to call it. So the science, the data, it's legitimate, but misconceptions abound. Many psychic phenomena are still thought of in terms of the way that we see it in entertainment

and in the movies. Very powerful stuff shown as magical phenomena or as superpowers and that sort of thing. And so when scientists are then asked about this, and they don't actually know the evidence, they'll say it's fun for entertainment, but of course it's fantasy. It doesn't exist. For those who do know the evidence, you'll find very quickly that in peer-reviewed academic journals, these kinds of phenomena have been discussed now for many decades. And when you're doing research on something that society deems so unbelievable, the researchers take great pains to make sure there's nothing that could be contaminating the results.

Dean says if you look at the history of these type of tests, you'll notice how careful are parapsychological tests as compared to in what we consider mainstream disciplines. The use of things like double-blind methods or placebo controls. So by the time you get to something like the Gonsfeld telepathy experiment, it's about as close to a loophole-free experiment as we know how to make. Being that Dean knows about the vast amount of research held in this space, he felt like the perfect person to ask about some of the explanations myself and the parents have pondered regarding how this could be happening. Over the last few episodes, we've

wondered, could telepathy operate like sound waves or energy fields? The non-speakers themselves say that the mind-to-mind communication is effortless, almost like tuning into a CB radio. Is this just a good metaphor for explaining how this is happening? The first thing that most scientists will jump to is an electromagnetic effect, because we're used to radios and cell phones that are working at a distance and communication is happening. And so that idea has been tested for many, many years to see whether or not one person's brain might be picking up electromagnetic signals from another person's brain. And the scientists that conducted this research were thorough. In many of these experiments, the receiving party

is placed inside an electromagnetically shielded chamber. The chamber that we have used is 2,000 pounds and the walls are double walled solid steel and then the whole thing is grounded. There are other kinds which also have magnetic shielding. So anything in the realm of radio, television, cell phones and so on. All of those types of waves are completely gone, cannot pass through that. However, telepathic messages could get through. They've even tested this in a submarine far beneath the ocean where we know electromagnetic and radio waves cannot penetrate.

So whatever is happening with these incredible abilities of our mind, they can pass through things that most waves that we're familiar with cannot. So that means we're dealing with something that's much more radical than what we currently understand. What appears to be happening is so much more complex and mysterious than simply the transfer of radio waves or electromagnetic waves. Those ways of thinking about it fall into the category of classical physics, where we know about fields and forces and so on. So the only opening that we can think of at this point

that doesn't violate what we know about physics would be quantum physics, because in quantum physics, we have the notion of non-local connections. The word quantum simply refers to the tiniest little particles that make up you, me, and everything around us. And quantum physicists, the people studying these particles, have discovered that two particles can be linked or connected in a way where what happens to one instantly affects what happens to the other, no matter how far apart they are. They could be across the room or even across the universe.

You start encountering the possibility that information can be transferred instantaneously from here to there. So the obvious next question is, can humans become entangled? We don't know yet if that's possible, but maybe there is a form of entanglement between either people who are emotionally close or maybe they have to be physically close. Not all particles are entangled. In fact, specific conditions have to be met for particles to become entangled, usually something that involves a close interaction. And once that close interaction occurs, they remain connected even at a distance. All of this reminds me of Dr. Sheldrake's theory of the mental fields

and how closely connected animals can stay in touch telepathically over a distance. And this would explain something like the elephants knowing when their friend, Lawrence Anthony, had died. Or harking back to episode two, how Akil knows exactly where his mom is, what she's thinking and feeling, even when they're not together. All of this stuff might be natural and normal, not supernatural or paranormal. But the reason we feel and think that is because of the materialist paradigm that surrounds us.

When we talk about a paradigm in science, it's really like your worldview, that everything has to fit within. We're not taught that there's a philosophy of science, but of course there is. The materialist paradigm believes that consciousness is created by our little gray noodley brain and dies with our brain. We assume that the world is made out of matter and energy, and that's the end of the story. Experiences like telepathy suggest that it may be more than that. I think that these phenomena tell us that the materialist view of the mind is wrong. And that's what we're talking about right now, is the materialist view of the mind. Materialism works really well for certain kinds of physical things, but it is not the whole story. One way of thinking about the scientific model of reality

is in the form of a pyramid. So most scientists would say that the bottom of the pyramid, the thing on which everything rests, is physics. And the next level up is chemistry. And the next thing up from that is biology. And the next thing up from that is maybe psychology. And somewhere near the tippy top of this pyramid is awareness. Where the awareness comes from is a big mystery, but nevertheless, that's generally the way that many scientists will think about the nature of reality. The thinking here is that physics, biology, all the material aspects of the world led to consciousness. But the major problem with this model is that it can't explain how or why consciousness exists.

How does three pounds of tissue in your head give rise to internal experience? We don't know where consciousness comes from. It's called the heart problem. It does not seem to arise out of the brain. If consciousness doesn't originate in the brain, then where might it come from? I asked Dr. Diane Powell if she had any thoughts on this. Why does consciousness have to be something that's created? Why isn't consciousness something that can be accessed and tapped into? I think of the brain as being more like our smartphone, that it's got different apps and some of us have apps that others of us don't.

And it's a way of surfing the cloud. When you look at some of these savants, it's like they get a download from the cloud, not just informational download. Sometimes it's almost like they get an application download, you know. So obviously there's something that they're tapping into outside of themselves. The thing I wanted to know is if materialism has it wrong about our brain and consciousness, does it have everything else wrong too? Materialism as a concept, as a way of thinking about reality is not wrong because from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology, all of that works really good.

We're not going to throw away the textbooks, but because it doesn't account very well for experience, we need something that's a little bit broader. There are a lot more scientists today saying, wait, we need to rethink materialism. And yet the scientific journals and academic institutions and the funders of grants are still need to rethink materialism. And yet the scientific journals and academic institutions and the funders of grants are still clinging to materialism. They have an undue influence through the universities and through the media.

And their main influence is through trying to make people who disagree with them look stupid. They try and discredit their opponents. They don't look at the evidence. They just discredit them by saying they're pseudoscientists or charlatans or frauds. There is not an inch of me that's a conspiracy theorist. I just want to put that out there because when I say this, it's not because I have that bent to my personality. But it is true that these scientists are being censored at every turn. People go on Wikipedia and completely change and thwart the evidence around things like the Gansfeld study.

Medical boards take licenses away. What the medical board did to me really set me back financially and it traumatized me because I had no idea that they could do that. As you may recall from episode four, when Dr. Diane Powell published her book, The ESP Enigma, the medical board fined her and revoked her license without even reading it. The mere mention of ESP was so taboo. And I didn't do anything wrong. She paid the price before anyone considered the science behind her work. Only after they reviewed her research was her license reinstated. But the damage was done. It's totally about control and shredding you up.

And so it's one of the things that keeps doctors silent. And Rupert Sheldrake, the biologist who studies telepathy in animals, he gave a TED Talk called The Science Delusion. And this TED Talk was one of the few TED Talks ever to be banned. Here's a snippet that really sums up the thesis of his TED Talk. But there's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of inquiry based on reason, evidence, hypothesis, and collective investigation, and science as a belief system or a worldview. And unfortunately, the worldview aspect of science

has come to inhibit and constrict the free inquiry, which is the very lifeblood of the scientific endeavor. You can find this TED Talk on YouTube, and you should. It's thoughtful, endeavor. You can find this TED Talk on YouTube, and you should. It's thoughtful, rational, intelligent, just like Dr. Sheldrake. And so yes, the materialistic paradigm does have a grip and control over science and scientists, what they do and what they say. One reason that materialists remain so committed to their worldview is that for many, it's become a kind of belief system. So for materialists, indeed, it's become a kind of fundamentalist religion. Some refer to this dogmatic and stubborn brand of science as scientism. Scientism, the belief that science can explain everything

and has all the answers, at least in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. There's a tremendous arrogance associated with this worldview. Hasn't it occurred to them that their own beliefs might be false? Ten years ago, there was a conference in which several hundred scientists from around the world got together and said, we are going to sign and create a manifesto for post-materialist science because we believe that there is sufficient evidence for us to say that materialism is dead. It was basically like nailing the, was it 95 Theses by Martin

Luther saying, we are declaring this incorrect and we're not waiting anymore. Diane connected me with a woman named Marjorie Wolcott, and she is the president of the group that became the outgrowth of this manifesto. Marjorie Wolcott is the president of the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences. I find it a wonderful role to be in because I'm able to interact with scientists all over the globe, including people like Dean Radin, learning more about the phenomena like telepathy and the fundamental nature of consciousness. And just like every scientist that you've met in the series thus far, Dr. Wolcott had an impressive career and started as a materialist. I am a member of the Institute

of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon and a emeritus professor in the Department of Physiology at the university, having worked there as a professor for 35 years. I was a strongly materialistically oriented scientist. I was very, very skeptical. I thought that everyone around me that had a spiritual inclination was weak-minded. But after her sister introduced her to meditation and she started to meditate regularly, her materialist worldview started to crack and she started to think more deeply about consciousness. In 2015, I decided to retire because I wanted to go into broader areas of research. Marjorie wanted to understand more the origins of consciousness. And in doing so, it became clear to her that our mind

is not just a physical thing locked in our skull. As a quick sidebar, you're going to start to hear the term psi phenomenon, P-S-I, psi phenomenon. And this is a broad term for abilities or experiences that go beyond the laws of physics. So things like telepathy or clairvoyance, precognition, or even retrocognition. I never thought to look to see if there was research on near-death experiences or on psi phenomena such as telepathy or on after-death communication, I simply quote-unquote knew they weren't true. And it wasn't until I wrote my book, Infinite Awareness, The Awakening of a Scientific Mind, that I found out, my goodness, there's all this research that's already out there. And it's done by credible people. These are peer-reviewed articles in highly ranked journals. So Dr. Walcott began to rethink

the materialist paradigm because here's the thing if research is telling us the telepathy and these other psi phenomena exist then we have to account for it. Burying your head in the sand is not sound science. So Dr. Walcott began to think of the world in the same way that Dr. Powell and Dr. Dean Radin did after counting for the evidence. Consciousness might not be the result of all the building blocks of our material world maybe it's the foundation of it enter the idea of consciousness being the most fundamental element of the universe so from that perspective consciousness is the base of the pyramid consciousness as fundamental is saying

the pyramid is pretty pretty close to, except that it's not consciousness at the top. It's at the bottom. It's actually below physics. In that case, the pyramid of reality is resting upon awareness. So if that were true, it suggests that ultimately everything is mental. From this perspective, your awareness is actually distributed throughout all space and time and the entire universe. So if that is true, it would mean that it's not surprising at all that occasionally your thoughts, your mind are overlapping with somebody else's thoughts and mind because they're all coming out of the same place to begin with.

So that would explain telepathy. And then the question is, well, how come we're not telepathic all the time? It wouldn't be very good for survival on Earth if you're constantly aware of the thoughts and feelings and placement of everyone around you. You're not going to make it in the jungle or New York. Conscious awareness is usually the worst condition for somebody to be in in order to receive these kinds of telepathic connections. This is why many successful telepathy studies like the Gansfeld experiment put people into a state of sensory deprivation. Because when our brains are fully alert,

taking in everything, firing on all cylinders, they aren't as open to telepathy or other psi-type abilities. A person's brain is constantly rejecting that kind of information. Meaning our brains may have developed to help us block out more psychic and telepathic states. So if we now look at people who are neurodivergent, perhaps they're already in that

state. Meaning maybe some neurodiverse people are missing the shield, so to speak. The shield that keeps out everyone's thoughts and feelings and all the information floating out there. A science-y way to talk about this shield is called a dissociative boundary. I have a boundary that says I'm Kai and Diane is Diane and you're you. But we might call my dissociative boundary, meaning my feeling of separation from someone else, looking at them as other. But if the basis of the entire world is consciousness, then we aren't really separate at all. It helps us to survive in the world to believe that we are, to keep our bodies functioning. But that separateness, it might be an illusion.

In order to have experiences, we have to create the illusion of separation. As you talked about with children with autism, they don't have that dissociative boundary. And if the non-speakers that we've met don't have the same dissociative boundary that the rest of us do, then they may be tapped into every aspect of consciousness. All the psi phenomenon that evidence shows us exists. They might be the gateway to validating that this new way of thinking about the world, the paradigm that says consciousness is the base of everything, is correct. I asked Dr. Wolikot if there's anything from her research that might show that telepathy is a basic underlying form of communication that our little physical dissociative boundaries might choose to ignore. maybe an hour or something like that, where they have not been present in this reality, but they come back with special new skills, including this ability to sense what other people are thinking. And I should say that it drives a lot of these people crazy because they

didn't want it and they don't know how to deal with it because suddenly they have what you might call too porous a boundary between them and other people? And it can get in their way of living a normal life. I'm not totally sure what to make of this, but if your body flatlines and your consciousness is less tied to the physical body and brain, maybe it's allowed to access the broader sea of awareness and come back with a bit more of that awareness, like telepathy. So is all-psi phenomena tapping into the same thing, this underlying fabric of consciousness? We have a label of telepathy for mind-to-mind communication. We'll have a label of precognition for perception of something in the future, or retrocognition for something in the past,

or clairvoyance for just perception in general through space and time, psychokinetic effects for mind-matter interaction. There are ways that phenomena appear, and the ways that we create labels to explain how they manifest, but it's really one thing. That's why the jargon in the field is psi. It's all psi, but it's all coming out of the same underlying phenomena. And that underlying phenomena would be the base of the pyramid, the foundation of consciousness, which is at the root of everything. Some people might call this the quantum field or collective consciousness. Other people might call it God.

Some might call it the universe or energy or the Akashic record. Whatever it is, it seems to be describing this one powerful unifying foundational force. And each of us experience this consciousness individually with a unique personhood while we're here on Earth. The power of this force feels both personal and unifying. It's beyond each of us, but also somehow a part of us. So, bringing this back to the non-speakers. If the materialist paradigm is wrong, if this ocean of consciousness is real, and the non-speakers can tap into it effortlessly, making things like telepathy

easy breezy. It stands to reason, based on their past comments about accessing information and knowing things that they haven't been taught, that their abilities may transcend the physical boundaries that limit most of us. Can non-speakers harness more of this psi phenomenon and tap into consciousness more readily? And if so, do they hold the key to ushering in a new scientific paradigm and unlocking human potential that we can only begin to imagine? Next, we're heading to Wisconsin to meet a 10-year-old girl named Amelia. Her mom, Maura, has been desperately trying to make sense of the mysterious connections and abilities Amelia has shared with her, and they check off every single psi skill mentioned in this episode. I don't think telepathy is the only gift that these kids have.

Amelia seems to have a bunch of them, for sure, the telepathy, but then also, you know, the spirits and precognition kinds of things. She for sure is seeing people that aren't there, and she's also talking to God or spirits or someone at night and getting directions and insight. They are all connected somehow through this idea of collective consciousness. Please note, there will be a longer two-week wait for this episode, but I promise it will be worth it.

A very special thanks to my incredible collaborator and producer, Jen Merza, who created all music and sound effects for this episode of The Telepathy Tapes. Remember that you can review some of the tests and see some of the film recordings on our website, Merza, who created all music and sound effects for this episode of The Telepathy Tapes. Remember that you can review some of the tests and see some of the film recordings on our website, thetelepathytapes.com. Thank you so much for tuning in and join us in two weeks as this world expands and deepens. Thank you.