Where Is My Mind? - Ep. 2: Blindfolded

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

"How can you have a normal functioning person with almost no brain?" Featuring host Mark Gober’s interviews with Dr. Eben Alexander, Dr. Dean Radin, Dr. Bruce Greyson, Dr. Larry Dossey, Dr. Diane Powell, Dr. Brian Josephson, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, Dr. Jeff Mishlove, Dr. Jan Holden, Dr. Alan Hugenot, Barbara Bartolome, Dr. Cassandra Vieten, Helané Wahbeh, Dr. Stephen Braude, and Brenda Dunne. Listen to all of Mark’s interviews here: https://markgober.com/podcast/ Check out Mark's book, "An End to Upside Down Thinking": https://www.amazon.com/End-Upside-Down-Thinking-Consciousness/dp/1947637851 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In episode 1, we talked about an open secret. Scientists have no clue how a brain could create consciousness. Again, when I say consciousness, I mean that sense of awareness and experiencing that we all have at this very instant. Larry Dassey, MD, a well-known author and consciousness researcher, summarized what's known as the hard problem of consciousness in one sentence. Currently, there is no known hypothesis that can explain how a brain could, in fact, make consciousness. Bingo. But we know that the brain has some relationship with consciousness. The field of neuroscience has taught us that when you change the brain, your conscious experience changes with it. But remember,

just because two things are related doesn't necessarily mean that one causes the other. That's the key point. Today, we're going one step further than that. The brain is a paradox. It's obviously playing a role in how we experience the world around us. Most of neuroscience argues that the brain is creating a consciousness. But on the show, what we're saying instead is that the brain is a vehicle that processes or interprets consciousness from outside the body. The brain is not producing consciousness. Throughout this series, you'll hear us use a bunch of different analogies to explain the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Some are more precise than others, and we aren't claiming that any are perfect, but they are starting points. They all have one key

commonality. They help us view consciousness as something that's beyond the brain, and that's the critical point. Let's start with a really basic analogy. Imagine that your brain is an iPhone. You want to access a music file that's not stored on your phone, but rather it's stored on the cloud. Your phone is able to access it. It doesn't access other people's music. Instead, it accesses yours. What if that's what our brain is doing with our consciousness?

Interesting. So the brain is accessing and receiving information from outside of ourselves. Remember, that's my producer, Matt. So you're right. You need your cell phone to access the cloud, but the cloud exists even if your cell phone dies. Okay. The point is, we aren't accessing the entire cloud of consciousness

because our mental cell phones, our brains, only take in a little bit. Your access to the cloud depends on how your cell phone is configured. Our brain is showing us only a limited sliver of the cloud, so to speak. Let's get back to the key point. This idea matters to us all. If our consciousness isn't coming from our brains, then what does that mean about who and what we are as human beings? That's a topic for another time. For now, let's look at some remarkable cases that at least begin to question the mainstream view of neuroscience.

These are cases which beg the question, what happens if your cell phone is wired differently? Could you have different access to the cloud? That's what we're going to start with today. Cases like this. Here's Dr. Diane Powell, Johns Hopkins trained MD, former Harvard Med School faculty member, and practicing neuropsychiatrist. He could recite word for word, forwards and backwards, over 12,000 books by the time he died in his 50s.

Is that real? Yes. Dr. Powell is an expert in these kinds of exceptional people, and they're called savants. Matt, here she's talking about the real person who inspired the movie Rain Man, Kim Peek. Okay, now what do I have left? Two jacks, one eight, one king, one six. Two aces, one ten, one nine, one five. One five. You are beautiful, man. While this case sounds a little sensational, and obviously Kim Peek is a rare case,

if we go back to my metaphor earlier, his brain is wired differently than yours or mine, so he gets different information off the cloud, so to speak, a different type of conscious experience. In this episode, we'll lay out examples that challenge the mainstream view of the brain and consciousness. The three examples we'll discuss on this episode are, number one, savants like Kim Peek, number two, near-death experiences, and number three, psychedelics. Sounds controversial. It is, and we'll get into that too.

Welcome to Where Is My Mind? I'm Mark Gober. I often compare your arguments to a court case. So who's the first witness you're calling to the stand today, Mark? Let's go back to savants like Kim Peek. First, let's define a savant. Here's Dr. Powell. Again, she's a Johns Hopkins trained MD.

The name comes from the Latin for knowing. And a savant is somebody who knows things and you really don't know how they know it. Savants are miracles. No one knows how they are able to do such amazing things and they've stumped doctors and psychologists for ages. Here's Dr. Daryl Treffert from the University of Wisconsin who has spent decades studying savants. For the record, he tends to have a mainstream view

on the brain and consciousness and yet his studies on savants are opening his record, he tends to have a mainstream view on the brain and consciousness, and yet his studies on savants are opening his mind to new possibilities. That's one of the reasons I want you to hear from him. One of the things that I've noted in savants is that these people know things they never learned. I'm not entirely closed to the possibility that there is some link to a universal knowledge. It's almost as if they tapped into a collective unconscious or whatever. He's basically saying, maybe savants, whose brains are wired differently than most other brains, are tapping into the cloud in unusual ways.

How would that work? Remember from the last episode, all of reality is like a stream of water where water represents consciousness. Each of us is like a whirlpool. We have our own localized, personalized experience, so we don't see the full stream. Our brain only shows us our own little world, and we are filtering out the rest of the stream. So that's why each of us feels like we're living in our own unique movie. Matt, your and my brains are different, but they're wired roughly the same. A savant's brain might not have the same wiring. Their whirlpool might have a different structure. As a result, they access parts of the stream

that you and I cannot access. Let's go back to Dr. Powell. These two autistic twins who lived in an institution, they played this game with one another in which one of them would give a six-digit prime number and the other twin would say the six-digit prime number that would come immediately after that. I'm going to jump in for context here. This is a six-digit prime number, 101,723. Okay, the next is 101,737. To me, especially pre-Google in the 1960s, it seems hard to fake that. Here's the kicker.

These men couldn't do simple math, but they could recite six-digit prime numbers in order. How is that possible? They were presumably never taught those numbers, and they certainly weren't taught these. They were able to do this up to 20-digit prime numbers. I have no idea how this is possible. It's remarkable, and that's what's interesting here. There is no current explanation for this other than, we don't know yet. I've heard some people say, well, it must be something about their genetics, but I haven't seen concrete evidence for that.

So in other words, no one has an answer for how savants are able to do this. Not that I've seen. I think it's much simpler to go along with what Dr. Trefort said, that savants must be tapping into something that you and I can't. And I argue it's because their brain picks up consciousness from the cloud in a different way. They have an ability to access different parts of the stream. Let's go back to Kim Peek, Rain Man. You know how he could recite 12,000 books word for word, forwards and backwards? Matt, would you guess that his brain is different than ours? Yeah, I'd guess it was probably more developed in some area, maybe. You won't believe this. Here's Dr. Powell again.

Actually, what Kim Peek had was he was born with hydrocephalus. His left and his right hemisphere are not connected at all, and he has a big hole in the center of his brain. And yet, he could read two pages of a book simultaneously, one with each eye. He could also read two books simultaneously, one with each eye. Somehow, his consciousness experience can be divided up so that he can experience two things simultaneously. This is remarkable. How is this possible? His brain should not have worked well, but it did. And it worked in a way that cannot be explained

by mainstream science. What Dr. Powell is saying is this guy had superpowers, maybe because his brain didn't function quote unquote properly. Traditional science can't explain this, but the idea that consciousness is outside our bodies and that our brains are only receivers or filters that could explain it. All right. I know this is a loaded term, but let's just say that these savants are anomalies and we just don't have a good explanation for them yet. If we accept that, don't savants just prove that a different kind of brain leads to a different kind of consciousness?

Isn't that exactly what mainstream science is already arguing? I guess what's the counter to the idea that you still need a brain to be conscious? Here's Dr. Bruce Grayson, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. There was a British child psychiatrist, and he described one case in very great detail. This is a graduate student in mathematics at Cambridge University who had a high IQ. He was married.

He had a normal life, and he came to see the doctors because he had some hormonal problem. And as part of the workup, they did a brain scan and found he had almost no brain at all. His entire head was filled up with fluid. There's a very, very thin layer of brain cells on the outside of his skull. And there was no explanation for this. How can you have a normal functioning person, in this case a high functioning person, with almost no brain? Okay, so this guy has no brain essentially,

but he is fully functional. How does that work? There are other cases of people who had been born without one half of the brain, or who had one or more lobes of the brain surgically removed for one reason or another, and yet they continue to function perfectly normally. I'm not really sure what to make of that, Mark,

but I will take our next witness. Okay, let's move on and discuss other quote-unquote anomalies right after this. So we established that savants are examples of people with functional brains, even though they have different filters or different cloud access than you or me. But now we'll look at something a little different. What if someone's brain isn't even powered on and that person still has a conscious experience?

What do you mean? This happens during the near-death experience. This is the first time I'm going to talk about the near-death experience on this podcast, but it won't be the last. We have two episodes about them coming up later in the season, and it's one of my absolute favorite topics. What is a near death experience? It's when a person has a severe physical trauma. For example, the person could be clinically dead, like in a deep coma or cardiac arrest, or even under general anesthesia. But when the person is resuscitated, he or she has memories of what happened during that time. In some cases, the heart stops, the brain shuts off,

yet people still have memories. Not just memories, highly lucid memories, logical thinking, and also clear consciousness during a time when their brain is very much impaired or potentially even off. Here's Dr. Bruce Grayson again. He uses the acronym NDE which just means near-death experience. There are a number of people who do have cardiac arrests or under deep anesthesia where their brains clearly are not functioning and yet in their NDEs their thoughts are faster and clearer than ever before. They are seeing and hearing things that they had never heard before. They have intense emotions, feelings of peace and joy. And none of this should be possible with a brain that isn't functioning well. So we're left with this paradox that at a time when the brain isn't

functioning, the mind is functioning better than ever. Another paradox. That seems to be a theme in this episode. Mark, how are we sure that the brain's off? Couldn't this all be a chemical reaction that takes place when you die that causes like a hallucination or something like that? Good question. But in order to hallucinate, you need a functioning brain. So short answer, no. Long answer, we'll discuss this in detail in episode five. Here's an analogy. It's like their blindfold or filter of consciousness has been lifted. They can see the fuller picture. They can access the full cloud. Here's the thing. We're talking about brains that are off, and yet the person experiences and remembers very vivid things. What do you mean vivid things?

Hear it from people who have had near-death experiences themselves. Most near-death experiences, the majority, 75-80%, remember leaving the body and seeing it laying on the table there in the operating room or wherever they are. They remember that very clearly. I don't remember that at all. But very few remember coming back into the body. And I remember that very viscerally. I remember the feeling of it. I slammed back into this solid denseness that we call the physical. And it was a lot of pain, suddenly all this pain.

And it wasn't the pain from my injuries. It was the lot of pain, suddenly all this pain. And it wasn't the pain from my injuries. It was the pain of living. She was on the phone calling for the defib unit the whole time, but it didn't come in. And that man brought in the heart monitor, and I watched it flatlining. And then she brought in the oxygen card and put the oxygen mask on my face, and I literally can see the whole thing from up on the ceiling. It's the most vivid memory that I have in my entire life. Those are people who came back to life?

Yeah. That was Barbara Bartolome and Dr. Alan Huguenot, both of whom survived near-death experiences. We'll hear from them again in episode five. For now, here's the key point to remember. University of Virginia researchers found that 45% of near-death experiencers, people like Barbara Bartolome and Alan Huguenot, stated that their experiences were, quote, clearer than usual, and 29% said they were, quote,

more logical than usual. Clearer than usual and more logical than usual with a brain that's off? clearer than usual, and more logical than usual with a brain that's off? So again, why are we talking about this? It's more evidence that the brain isn't producing consciousness. It's getting in the way of consciousness, just like a blindfold. By the way, listeners, if this topic intrigues you, please check out my interviews with Barbara Bartolome and Dr. Alan Hugono and others at markgober.com slash podcast. Our next paradox is what happens when people take psychedelics right after this. First of all, I want to start by reminding the audience. Psychedelic drugs are currently illegal in the United States. We're not condoning the use of any drugs here, period.

That's right. By the way, you don't need drugs. This podcast, it's plenty trippy enough. The reason that we're looking at these substances is that they give us amazing insights into consciousness. What happens to the brain when someone takes a psychedelic? Mark, I got to interrupt you. Is it a little self-indulgent to call studying psychedelics science?

To me, it sounds like a guy did mushrooms and claimed it was research. All right, Matt. Calm down. We'll be talking about real science here. I should note that studies on psychedelics were banned for years, but now people are getting intrigued. Under the influence of psychedelics, people often report ultra real experiences

while they're tripping. Matt, would you assume that a person's brain activity would be heightened or reduced during a psychedelic trip? Heightened, I guess. That's the mainstream guess. But in some preliminary studies, like research done at Imperial College London and at the University of Oregon,

we find the opposite. Reductions in brain activity. Why does this matter? Despite less brain activity, people report enriched experiences, and the experiences often have lasting impacts. Sometimes people's entire lives change. Get this. In a Johns Hopkins study, researchers gave cancer patients psilocybin, and that's the compound in magic mushrooms. Two-thirds of those participants said it was one of the top five most meaningful experiences in their lives. The point here is, psychedelics might be unlocking something that our brain is blocking or normally filtering out. It's always been there, but the brain has been blocking it. Here's how Dr. Grayson from the University of Virginia explains it.

With psychedelic drugs, what the effects of the drugs is, is to knock out the filter that allows you to access this other world. Almost as if it's knocked out of the way and you can access your mind again. This is why Aldous Huxley famously called the brain a reducing valve. I want to give another example, and this is from the Headspace meditation app. Imagine that your consciousness is a blue sky. Your thoughts, the various activity that happens in your brain, those are all clouds and they block out the blue sky. In a near-death experience, your brain goes away. Pure blue sky, no clouds. The savants, their clouds are maybe in a different area. Blue sky. With psychedelics, maybe we're seeing

something similar. Clouds removed in certain areas so we can see parts of the sky we normally don't. moved in certain areas so we can see parts of the sky we normally don't. Let's recap. We have evidence that psychedelics unlock some kind of clearer consciousness. That doesn't mean everyone should go try mushrooms, but it does mean it's worth proper scientific and medical study. What if psychedelics help remove the blindfold that is normally veiling our experience? What more could we learn about the nature of reality? normally veiling our experience? What more could we learn about the nature of reality? So, if I were a scientist and I told my boss that I wanted to study magic mushrooms instead of, say, trying to cure a major disease, I think I would get laughed at. Interestingly, I'm seeing a lot of openness these days to studying psychedelics.

By the way, since we started producing this episode, certain psychedelics were decriminalized in some major U.S. cities. So maybe people are opening up to them. But some of the other topics that we'll talk about, like near-death experiences or psychic abilities like telepathy, yeah, you get laughed out of an academic's room for studying those things. This brings us to the second half of the episode, the question I get all the time, which is, Mark, if all this stuff is true, if the brain doesn't really create consciousness, why haven't I heard about it? The answer, right after this. In this episode, we're setting a context. You've heard about some amazing research so far,

and the rest of the season has a ton more. I remember my reaction when I first learned of the research. I'd say to myself, why haven't I heard about this? The short answer, much of the scientific community has a bias against it. The research goes against tightly held mainstream assumptions. Here's former Harvard neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, to explain. The science has a lot of screaming heads out there that go berserk when you mention this kind of stuff. And yet, as they start looking at the information, the data, they realize you cannot just reject it. They don't care about the data. They don't care about rational argument. You know, those people, who knows when they'll come around.

I'll tell you what, two episodes into this podcast and after writing a whole book about this topic, Dr. Alexander is right. There are screaming heads out podcast and after writing a whole book about this topic, Dr. Alexander is right. There are screaming heads out there and they do go berserk about this. So I have a hard time with this point because I believe ambition always wins out. If I were an aspiring scientist, I might argue that consciousness is exactly what I'd want to be studying if it were legit. Who wouldn't want to uncover something so transformative and be remembered by history? How is it possible that all the ambitious scientists out there aren't studying this, or have they? And they've just been disproven. That's a great question, Matt. This is the thing.

Scientists face losing their jobs just for talking about these topics, let alone spending someone else's money to research them. Professors often want tenure, and typically you don't get tenure if you rock the boat too much. Here's Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a former Cambridge biochemist, who you'll hear from a lot in the next episode. The so-called skeptics don't want to believe it because if the mind's just inside the brain, then this kind of a phenomenon should not happen. Therefore, from their point of view, it's impossible. Therefore, all the evidence for it must be rejected as flawed or fraudulent. So, one's dealing again

with a kind of pig-headed dogmatism, which I find very, very unscientific. I'm going to intentionally pile on the examples here, because this is important. I often tell people that mainstream science rejects real evidence in this field, but they don't fully believe me. And I don't necessarily blame them. I was skeptical at first. So don't take it from me. Take it from the people who have been pushed aside, even demeaned, humiliated, and insulted. You're going to hear from a few people. First, Institute of Noetic Sciences researcher, Dr. Cassandra Vieten. Then, longtime consciousness researcher, Dr. Jeff Mishlove.

And then, Helene Wabe, also from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. And then, back to Dr. Mishlove. Well, it can be very dangerous for a young scientist to study some of the more extraordinary aspects. Their mentors and their teachers will often say, you know, you're committing career suicide. You know, you're not going to be taken seriously by your peers. And we will often get reviews back from peer reviewers that will say something along the lines of this is a very well done study, and unfortunately what you're studying is impossible, so that disqualifies you from our journal. Oh, of course, I've been viciously attacked. I was libeled. I fought a libel suit and prevailed

in that libel suit. It took six very painful years. And we've had more blatantly biased experiences from people saying, no, we will not accept this because it's not scientifically possible. Therefore, it's not good research because you shouldn't have even asked the question. It's really fascinating. There's kind of a taboo. Any scientist who ventures into the paranormal is at great risk of being laughed at, ridiculed, losing their funding. Professors, especially young professors who don't already have tenure, are really vulnerable to that kind of criticism because they won't get tenure. They won't get research grants. What we're talking about is more than just academics. Right. Because I did a quick Wikipedia search on a few of the people that you talked to when

we were starting up, and the message across all their Wikipedia pages is usually the same. Basically, they say, this person's a pseudoscientist, or even worse, in some occasions, this person is an outright fraud. Of course you looked on Wikipedia. I looked on Wikipedia. I'm sure our audience is doing the same thing. What I've uncovered here is a bit disturbing, but basically there are editing wars on Wikipedia, apparently. I didn't even know this was possible, but let's hear it from one of the leading researchers in the field of psychic abilities, and he's the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Dr. Dean Radin. The case both in my biography on Wikipedia and on most of my other colleagues' biographies,

they all are written in one-sided ways. Wikipedia, in some respects, is a way of reflecting what the quote mainstream believes about various topics. Who defines who the mainstream is is a big problem because there is no mainstream. There's a gazillion different mainstreams. Every scientific discipline has their own mainstream ideas. I know editing wars sound a little petty, but this really does matter. People's careers are being hurt by resistance to these ideas. Take it from Dr. Stephen Browdy, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

I asked why most professors don't cover alternative consciousness research. Well, you could easily lose your job. I think next to raping a sheep in front of my students is probably the worst thing I could have done. That is extreme. Wow. I think that sums it up well, though. You get interested in these topics,

people run away from you, no matter how credible you are. Here's the best example of that. They're just basically ignored. And people sort of know there's nothing to it and there must be something wrong. That's Nobel Prize winning physicist Brian Josephson. He tells a story about how he was once invited to speak at a scientific conference. And of course he was.

He's a Nobel Prize winning physicist. But then he was uninvited when people found out that he had an interest in the quote-unquote paranormal. Here's the thing. At this conference, he wasn't even going to talk about it. Here's what Dr. Josephson wrote. It was feared that my very presence at the meeting might damage the career prospects of students who attended, even if I didn't touch on the paranormal in my talk. More seriously, my interest in such matters seems to have led to the harassment

of students working with me, even in regard to projects not related to the paranormal. This is a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Yeah, but still there's this business that certain kinds of knowledge are forbidden. There's this hard dividing line. I mean, if people aren't listening to him, they're not going to listen to anyone. We have to ask ourselves, what if the gatekeepers of modern science are wrong?

Did they learn nothing from Galileo versus the clergy? Dr. Jan Holden from the University of North Texas says no. You and I were talking earlier about the clerics who would not look through Galileo's telescope because it simply was not acceptable to them to consider another reality than the religious perspective that they had. And so they are not interested in looking at any evidence that might contradict that worldview. You heard this in episode one,

but I think it's worth repeating. This is Brenda Dunn, who co-ran the Engineering Anomalies Research Lab at Princeton University, along with Princeton's former Dean of Engineering. I've had on more than one occasion, a conversation with somebody who might say in a disturbed kind of way, you know, don't you realize that if what you're doing is right,

then everything I've done in my career is wrong? And I'd say, no, it's not wrong. It's just perhaps it's just incomplete. And they'd get very upset and say, no, you don't understand. I'd be wrong. Well, if you're a scientist and you can't accept the possibility of being wrong, then you're not a very good scientist. That's it. That's the fear. What if we're all wrong? Mark, you've spent so much time researching all of this.

Does all of the resistance to these ideas get overwhelming or perhaps even a little depressing? At times, yes. People need to know about it though. Now our listeners are aware. I think we've succeeded. But let's not get too down. There is reason for optimism and we'll hear it from Dr. Dean Radin. It's the same as any kind of taboo. So 20 years ago, the idea of same-sex marriage being the law of the land would have been considered laughable, or that marijuana would become legal in all states and so on. These at one time were extremely strong taboos.

You simply could not even talk about it without being labeled a heretic. But things change. Things are going to change. They always do. We know what we're talking about here has rattled many cages, but the evidence points to a simple idea. Our brain doesn't produce consciousness.

It might actually limit or block it. The brain is accessing the broader stream. The brain isn't producing the water in the stream. And remember in the first episode how I mentioned things like telepathy and psychic abilities? Now you understand how they are possible, because our brains aren't the full answer. Getting beyond our brains, that's the answer. Consciousness exists non-locally, or outside of, the body. That's where we'll be showing more evidence.

So my next question, what happens when your consciousness interacts with someone else's? Our next episode, telepathy. Telepathy is the experience of mentally connecting with somebody else. We're probably all innately telepathic. So I started looking at telepathy in animals. And then she said, are you reading my mind? And then she said, what's the name of my landlord?

And then Haley typed out the name of her landlord. She's like, oh my gosh. Join us next time on Where's My Mind. Thank you for listening to Where is my mind? The show was written by me, Mark Gober, and the show was produced at Blue Duck Media by Matt Ford and Gabe Goodwin, with help from Antonio Enriquez,

Zuri Irvin, and Ben Redmond. Special thanks to Cadence 13, particularly John McDermott and Patrick Antonetti. Also thanks to Bill Gladstone and Waterside Publishing. Thanks to the Provocative Enlightenment Show for the clip from Dr. Daryl Treffert. All of my full length interviews are available at markgover.com slash podcast.

We'd like to thank our sponsors and if you'd like to support the show, please consider supporting them on our behalf. Please rate and review the podcast on iTunes and if you'd like, tell a friend to subscribe and spread the word. See you next time.