Where Is My Mind? - Ep. 3: Telepathy

Episode Date: August 22, 2019

"I think we're all innately telepathic." Featuring host Mark Gober’s interviews with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, Dr. Dean Radin, Dr. Eztel Cardeña, Dr. Larry Dossey, Dr. Diane Powell, and Russell Targ. Listen to all of Mark’s interviews here: https://markgober.com/podcast/ Dr. Cardeña's paper on psychic effects (American Psychologist journal, 2018): https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2018-24699-001 Video of telepathic dog experiment by Dr. Sheldrake: https://www.sheldrake.org/videos/jaytee-a-dog-who-knew-when-his-owner-was-coming-home-the-orf-experiment 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

So Matt, have you ever had something happen where you think of a person that you haven't thought of in a really long time and then you like get a text from that person? I mean, yeah, that just sounds like a coincidence to me. So many people have reported that. It's happened to me too. What we're going to talk about today is the evidence that maybe sometimes when that happens, it's not just a coincidence. I've subsequently developed a whole series of

experiments for telephone telepathy, the phenomenon whereby you think of somebody who then calls and you say, that's funny, I was just thinking about you. Then the question is, is it chance coincidence and you only remember when you're right, forget the millions of times you're wrong, or is there more to it? That was former Cambridge biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. More from him later. Mark, you're saying that guessing who's texting you is telepathic. Come on, man, that seems like a stretch. The theory of this podcast is that consciousness isn't confined to our brains. And if that's true, as we've said, psychic abilities like telepathy should be real. This episode is all about telepathy. Telepathy? Like, hold on, like real telepathy?

Yeah. It happens all the time. It's just very subtle. This goes back to our whirlpool analogy again from Dr. Bernardo Kastrup. Let's hear the water. Each of us is like a whirlpool in this stream of consciousness. And what if water from one whirlpool flows into another whirlpool in the stream? That would be like one person's consciousness flowing into another's. And maybe that's like telepathy. It's communicating without words, communicating with the mind or our consciousness alone.

So if we adopt the view that consciousness is really everything, then telepathy actually makes a lot of sense. And it's not this weird thing. It's actually what we would predict and expect. thing. It's actually what we would predict and expect. It's only paranormal if we think consciousness is produced by and confined to our skulls. And remember, the whole point of this podcast is that our consciousness is not stuck in our heads. So here we're talking about a new normal and we have evidence to actually support it. First, what is this thing that we're calling telepathy? Here's Dr. Dean Radin from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Dr. Radin has

held appointments at Princeton, the U.S. government, and AT&T Bell Labs. So telepathy is the experience of mentally connecting with somebody else. Mind-to-mind communication has been reported throughout history, even to contemporary times. Here's how this episode is laid out. First, a few examples of subtle telepathy, things that you may have experienced but don't realize. Then, we move to how telepathy might work through entanglement and why some of us are more entangled than others, like twins or savants and even animals. It's gonna be a big leap for people. So you're really saying that telepathy is possible,

and if so, then why aren't people out doing it on the street? I'm not the one saying it's possible. I'm just saying that there's real scientific evidence suggesting that this is actually real. So let's take a closer look together. Welcome back to Where Is My Mind? I'm Mark Gober. Okay, so let's go back to the thing we talked about at the top of the episode,

where you think about someone and then you get a text from them, or maybe you get an email, or you were just thinking about that person and then they communicate with you. Is that random chance or is it sometimes some kind of a telepathic thing where people are mentally communicating without really realizing it? You're making a really good case here, but it's just a little hard for me to believe. It's sort of like going back to the whirlpool analogy.

Like the person is putting out an intention to call you and water from that person's whirlpool enters your whirlpool. And that's why you think of them. Their consciousness enters your consciousness. The connection is part of the same stream. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is a former Cambridge University biochemist.

And you heard from him at the top of the show. He has studied this exact issue of telephone telepathy, and he's put it to the test in formal scientific studies. In the experiments, the subject sits at home with a landline phone, gives us the names of four people they know well. We pick one of the four at random and ask them to call. They call. And when the phone rings, they have to guess which of these four people it is. And they say to camera, I think it's John, for example. By chance, they'd be right one time in four or 25%.

And in fact, they're right about 45% of the time in our tests. In fact, they're right about 45% of the time in our tests. Okay, so if I got something right 45% of the time, I'm not sure I'd be calling that some huge breakthrough. Okay, well, I hear that reaction a lot, and it sounds like it's small, but actually it's huge. Of course, no one is correctly guessing 100% of the time who's calling them, but the fact that people are doing 20% better than chance would predict is a potentially huge deal, statistically speaking.

Scientists would call this a statistically significant effect. We find that something here is not random, and that's what's used in all areas of science. Okay, think about it this way, Matt. You're a sports guy, right? Yeah. In baseball, the average professional player gets a hit roughly one out of four times.

25% in their career. Right. Pretty good. But if you're a baseball player who hits one out of three times in your career, 33%, then you're maybe in the Hall of Fame. I mean, the difference between an average player and a Hall of Fame player then is in the range of 8%.

This is a massively statistically significant effect. And that's what Dr. Sheldrake's studies show. I guess it's possible that because it's kind of hard to understand this, maybe that's why it's flying under the radar. Look, it's easier to dismiss information that's subtle or requires an understanding of statistical context. So maybe that's why these studies don't often make headlines. But I mean, it doesn't end at telephone telepathy.

I just chose that to start with because many people have experienced it, and that's why Dr. Sheldrake decided to study it. Dr. Sheldrake also wrote a book on the sensation of knowing or sensing when someone's staring at you has that ever happened to you matt where you just feel like someone's looking at you and you don't see their eyes i have always kind of wondered how this happens how is it possible that you can tell when someone's looking at you let's think about it under the idea of consciousness that we're discussing on the show. How is the sensation possible if our consciousnesses aren't somehow intertwined?

It's the best way to explain it if there's some kind of connection going on. And Dr. Sheldrake has done a ton of experiments on this. Here's maybe the craziest one. How do you prove that people can sense when they're being stared at? You put two people far away and test it. I'll give you an example. Matt is in a room alone on camera. My other producer, Gabe, is in another room.

Once in a while, Gabe is told to stare at Matt through the camera. Here's the thing. Matt can tell when Gabe is staring at him, even from far away, but it's not all the time. Only statistically speaking is there an effect? So is it possible then that it is coincidence or just chance? Sorry, Matt. Dr. Dean Radin says the odds of this being due to chance is 202 octodecillion to one. That's two times 10 to the 59th power. So no way it's chance. Okay, moving on. But here's the thing.

The sense of being watched or the sense of being stared at is so prevalent that it's even being taught to be exploited in certain fields. Here's Dr. Sheldrake again. If you talk to people who watch others for a living in the surveillance or security industries, most of them just take this for granted. It's just part of the way they understand the world based on years of experience. And in the martial arts, you can be trained in many martial arts to become more sensitive to the feeling of being looked at from behind because it's a useful skill. If somebody is creeping up behind you to attack you,

you can sense they're looking at you. You're more likely to escape than if you can't. We've all had this feeling. I wouldn't have guessed it was possibly an example of telepathy. One more telepathy study. It's called the Gonsfeld experiment. This is the basic design. You have one person in a room.

We'll call him Bob. Another person is in another room. We'll call her Jane. And Jane is shown an image by the experimenters. The experimenters ask her to try to mentally send the image that she's looking at to Bob in the other room. Bob doesn't know what she's looking at though. And Jane doesn't claim to have any special telepathic abilities. So after a while, Bob is shown four pictures and the experimenters say,

Bob, which of the four pictures was Jane trying to mentally send to you while she was in the other room? If it were just a chance thing, we would guess that Bob would be correct one out of four times or 25%. However, the person in Bob's room guesses correctly closer to 32% of the time. room guesses correctly closer to 32% of the time. I spoke to Dr. Edsel Cardenya from Lund University about the significance of the results. Participants should not guess better than about 25% of the time. And typically, people end up answering on average about 33% of the time correct, which when you do this hundreds, thousands of times is very significant.

Of course, we're not walking around reading everyone's minds all day. The experimental results are actually matching our everyday personal experience. Dr. Cardenya explained to me why this statistical effect is just so significant.

It is an effect that you also may find in medications, medications that will not help everyone, but will make some people feel somewhat better. More context from Dr. Dean Radin. So what this tells us is when you do the statistics on getting 32 percent rather than 25 percent, it's basically trillions to one against chance. It's extremely strong evidence that somehow they're getting information from the other person. Most of the people involved in these experiments are not selected because they have claims of telepathy. Most of them are college sophomores who are doing it because they get credit for doing that sort of thing in their psychology courses. So does that imply that we're all telepathic? It implies at least that college sophomores are telepathic.

Mark, do you know what my only talent was as a college sophomore? Not getting hangovers. Matt. Is this thing on? Matt, please focus. One last thing on a more serious note. There was a big breakthrough in 2018. Dr. Cardenya wrote a paper summarizing the best statistical results for telepathic and other psychic abilities. In the past, mainstream journals have rejected these kinds of studies on principle alone, but the experiments and statistics that you just heard were so solid that the paper was published in the mainstream journal, American Psychologist. This is the official, peer-reviewed journal of the American Psychological Association. In the world of science, trust me, this is a major breakthrough. How is this all possible? We'll explore after this. The most frustrating feeling is when you're trying to sleep,

but you can't get your brain to quiet down and let you drift off. This happens to me all the time, especially the nights a new episode of my podcast comes out. And if it happens to you, you're not alone. One in three American adults don't get enough sleep. This isn't just some minor thing. If you're not sleeping enough, it can affect your cognitive functions during the day,

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and even painter Bob Ross. So if you want to seize the day, sleep the night with the help of Calm. Right now, Where Is My Mind listeners get 25% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com slash mind. That's an amazing deal for such a great app. That's C-A-L-M.com slash M-I-N-D. 40 million people have downloaded Calm. Find out why at calm.com slash mind. Okay, so maybe you're with me and accept that there's evidence that telepathy exists. Your next question might be, how? Well, the answer is we don't really know yet, but there are some theories, like quantum physics. All right, hold on.

I know it sounds daunting. I'm freaked out too. Anytime we get into any intimidating, heavy science like quantum physics, I'm going to play this music. We're going to get through this together. Just hang in there through the music. So this is the phenomenon in quantum physics. It's called entanglement.

Okay, you have one particle that's here and you have another one that's really, really far away. If you affect one, the other one that's far away is affected at the same exact instant, but they're far away from each other, and there's no connection that we can see with our eyes. You affect one, the other one is immediately and instantaneously affected,

even though we can't see a connection with our eyes. Does that make sense? Yeah, sort of. Keep going. I mean, it doesn't like make sense because it's outrageous based on our common sense. And Albert Einstein saw this. He didn't understand how this could be possible. He called it spooky action at a distance.

So Einstein studied this? Einstein not only studied it, but he tried to disprove it because Einstein's whole thing was that the fastest that anything could travel is the speed of light, which is really fast, but it's not instantaneous. And here with entanglement, we see two particles that are physically separate and there is a simultaneous reaction going on faster than the speed of light. But this is the thing. When he tried to disprove it, he ended up only further proving that it's a real thing. So in today's day and age, quantum entanglement is shown to be real. And it suggests that there is some kind of a hidden

interconnectedness that we cannot see with our eyes. So you are saying this might be the case with consciousness? I mean, with psychic abilities like telepathy, it's almost as if there's an invisible connection between two people at the level of consciousness. It's this exact idea that we have quantum entanglement. We have weird stuff like telepathy. Maybe there's a connection. And get this. Remember Brian Josephson, the Nobel Prize winning physicist we heard from in the last episode, he has even said, direct quote, yes, I think telepathy exists, and I think quantum physics will help us understand its basic properties. This is why Dr. Dean Radin wrote a book called Entangled Minds, attempting to link quantum physics to consciousness. Okay, we made it through the quantum physics part. Nicely done. Okay, so we've established that physics

might be able to help us understand telepathy because we might all be entangled at the quantum level but is it possible for some people to be more entangled than others anecdotally people have long said that twins can like read each other's minds or know what's happening to the other one even if they're far apart i mean mean, what's the explanation for that? Can twins tell what the other is feeling based on their genetics alone? Or are their minds entangled? Are they part of the same stream of consciousness, which explains it? Here's Dr. Larry Dassey, who we've heard from a few times. He's a former chief of staff at Medical City Dallas Hospital. He's looked at this at length, probably because he himself is an identical twin.

My identical twin brother and I have had experiences like this for most of our life. When we were growing up, we didn't even think there was anything special about this. We didn't know that this was not supposed to happen. We just called it twin stuff. Let's take this one step further. What if entanglement isn't just mental? It's also physical. There are cases where one twin physically feels something happening to the other twin from a distance.

Here's Dr. Larry Dossey again. One case that I talk about is four-year-old little twin girls. Here's Dr. Larry Dossey again. little girl didn't want to go she stayed home to help her mother with household shores well in so doing she touched a red hot iron and immediately erupted in a big fat second degree blister the second degree burn on her hand the other little twin girl uh erupted at the same moment in an identical burn on the same hand, the same part of the hand, the same pattern. This was investigated by a doctor and a research team from the University of Madrid who got hold of this story. And these sorts of things just happen between twins.

Not all identicals have this. Only about 20 or 30 percent of them describe this. The fact is that a lot of identical twins don't enjoy being identical. Wow. Okay, Mark, this one is a little bit harder for me to understand. I'm with you in the telephone telepathy. I'm with you with Bob and Jane. I get all that, but this just, it feels impossible to me, to be honest. I can understand that, actually. By the way, this is a phenomenon known as a telesomatic event. And as you heard from Dr. Dasi, these events are reported in 20 to 30% of identical twins. I can't personally claim to validate any individual anecdote, but there are two reasons

why I'm open to this. Number one, it seems to be reported a lot. And number two, it fits with our overarching theory about consciousness and entanglement. When people are emotionally close, the effect is stronger. A lot of people can be emotionally close and aren't twins, such as lovers and parents and plain old friends. And so these are the people who describe these things. They are quite sensational. I don't know any way to ascribe these events to chance. To me, that's just going too far. I think that there's something about emotional bonding that sets the

stage for these events across great distances that can hardly be explained in any other way. When we put all this information together, it kind of seems like maybe there is a non-local entangled effect happening. So we've talked about increasingly extreme demonstrations of telepathy, and now we're going to talk about the most extreme. Hey Matt, remember in the last episode, we talked about savants? Yeah. For example, like Rain Man, who could remember entire books and he didn't even have like a

full brain. Right. So if we're thinking of their brains as like filtering mechanisms, it's as if their filter is just set up differently. So they're allowing in information that most of the population can't. Here's Dr. Diane Powell, who you heard from in the previous episode. And as a reminder, this is a Johns Hopkins MD and a former Harvard Medical School faculty member. I've had so many parents contact me and say to me that I'm onto something, that they discovered that their child was telepathic a

long time ago. In fact, this one child who was referred to me named Haley, who's the child that I did the most experiments with, because she was not someone who did simple math, but she could solve these complex mathematical problems. The therapist who was doing this homework with her, it wasn't until her calculator that she was using to figure out what the answers were to these things, it wasn't until it changed the notation and that she got an answer that was in a different notation

and then Haley typed it out in a different notation. And so she was like, what? How did you know? 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 was like, oh, my gosh. This is an example of straight up telepathy. Not 32 percent, 100 percent. There are other examples of this.

I mean, I mentioned in the last episode, Dr. Daryl Trefford, who's a pretty mainstream scientist, and he has studied savants for his whole life. In a recent interview, he talked about how he has seen similar telepathic abilities in savants. I'm working presently with several savants who have telepathic abilities. And that's not something I would have originally when I met these individuals. I was very skeptical of that. This whole journey has taken me into areas I would never have even ventured into. So what's the yeah, but here? We know that savants have incredible abilities elsewhere, where it's almost like they're pulling information from outside of themselves. But given that they have these extraordinary abilities in one way, it's not inconceivable that they would also have extraordinary abilities in this sense as well. I think at this

point, Matt, we can't say this is definitely a real thing, but we have to look at it. And by the way, here's some more great stuff from Dr. Powell. And if you're interested in listening to this interview, as well as every other interview I did, you can listen to the full-length interviews at markgober.com slash podcast. So there's something about someone being blind that increases their ability to receive psychic information. And these blind savants, I mean, are typically the kind of skills that they have are musical. These musicians are blind, but they are amazing at the keyboard, like Ray Charles. There was this blind boy who could only read the eye chart when his mother was in the room.

the eye chart when his mother was in the room. And if she wasn't seeing the eye chart, he couldn't read it. And so the ophthalmologist figured out that this blind boy was somehow telepathic. We're probably all innately telepathic. That's probably what makes acquiring language so easy, because we're tapping into what somebody else is able to think at the same time they're saying a bunch of sounds that don't make much sense to us. We're actually able to tap into what they're thinking. I'll ask the question I'm sure every parent is thinking. Are babies telepathic then? All the evidence says humans are telepathic, so babies should be too, right? One step further, maybe telepathy can explain how animals are able to understand humans, or each other.

Here's the last example of telepathy in this episode. Telepathy in animals. I get this question all the time from people. They think their pets seem to know something about them. Back to Dr. Sheldrake. His name has come up a lot in this podcast and really his studies challenge everything that the mainstream scientists have been saying. And we've been very fortunate that he was willing to interview with us. But anyway, I asked him about his studies on animal telepathy. So I started looking at telepathy in animals because I thought if it exists,

it must be biological, not just human. And I found indeed it seems quite common. Many people have dogs or cats that pick up their thoughts or intentions. For example, many people say that their dog or cat knows when they're coming home and goes and waits at the door or window. People at home know when the absent person's on their way because of the animal's behavior. Okay, let's think about this. Animals have brains just like humans have brains.

They might be different brains. Maybe they have different filters, effectively. But, I mean, who's to say they couldn't be telepathic if we think humans are telepathic based on the evidence we've seen? So what Dr. Sheldrake did was he ran tests where he was trying to tell if pets could telepathically sense when their owner was coming home. And what he found is that, in some cases, they could.

Of course, the skeptics said, well, that's just routine, or it's just a matter of hearing a familiar car approaching or smelling someone coming from a distance. So to test that, I did a whole series of experiments, hundreds of them, where we videotaped the place the dog or cat waited. We had people come at random times that they didn't know in advance. We picked the random times. And they came in unfamiliar vehicles, so there were no familiar sounds or smells.

And these animals still knew. By the way, Dr. Sheldrake caught some of these trials on tape. You can go to his website and see that the dog was able to tell when the owner was coming home, even if it was at a completely random time in a completely unfamiliar vehicle. And I work with animals that usually do it more than 10 minutes in advance. If it's only a minute or two, it could obviously be hearing footsteps in the street or the crunch of car wheels on the gravel or something. But what I do in my experiments, I have people go at least five miles from home and I have them come at random times so it can't be a sense of routine in the animal.

The idea that a dog could hear them coming home in an unfamiliar vehicle, a taxi for example, that the person's never been in before is pretty implausible. How would the dog know they were in that car, even if they could hear a car? So, I mean, what's kind of weird about this is I kind of feel like this is almost more likely than people being telepathic. Like, I've lived with dogs my whole life,

and sometimes you're just amazed by what they seem to be able to know and figure out. According to Dr. Sheldrake, you're not alone in thinking that. My book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, was a bestseller in the United States. It sold nearly half a million copies. And for most pet owners, the reaction I get is, not this is outrageous, but, you know, why do you spend your time proving the obvious? This is something that

millions of people already know. Okay, well, I'm glad I'm not alone. I should note that Dr. Sheldrake's studies were so unbelievable to people that skeptics actually tried to replicate them in order to debunk them. The skeptics did four trials. Sheldrake did hundreds. The skeptics claimed they got different results, so people said Sheldrake was a fraud. The skeptics claimed they got different results, so people said Sheldrake was a fraud. His reputation took a serious hit. But years later, the skeptics actually admitted that they got similar results. According to Dr. Dean Radin, he said,

the dog indeed did anticipate the owners coming home in ways that could not be described by ordinary means. That's so sad. Yeah, I agree with you, Matt. It's really sad, but I'm glad we're putting this information out because hopefully more people will start studying it. Okay. Let's recap this, Matt. We've looked at the possibility that our dogs and cats might have telepathic abilities, that twins and savants have them, that people can sense things from far away, that you can tell when your phone is ringing and who's calling beyond chance, and it all points to one thing. Maybe our minds are actually entangled, just like the rest of the universe. Remember, even Einstein couldn't disprove that. It's not crazy or impossible if consciousness isn't just in our bodies.

If consciousness is everywhere, if it's primary, and we're connected as part of the same stream of consciousness, then this is possible. But most importantly, this is really critical. It suggests that you, you the listener, have telepathic abilities. Let's remember, even though our science has come a long way, we have to keep in mind that there's so much our society still does not yet know or understand. The benefit is, if we have this ability then how could we enhance

our lives? We haven't even been thinking about it for the most part. We have to be open to the possibility of major, massive breakthroughs. This consciousness stuff, it might be one of those major breakthroughs. Here's my question for you. What if it's way bigger than subtle telepathy? What if you can see something far away, both in space and time? It's something called remote viewing.

And what if I told you the U.S. government showed remote viewing is real, so much so that they used it for military intelligence? You're going to be hearing it from a laser physicist who spent years doing this for the CIA. So the chances of ESP not being real, there's no chance of that. We were supported for 20 years at about $25 million. All the intelligence agencies in America, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, NASA, Navy, Army Intelligence. We really were the X-Files. We're still only at the tip of the iceberg.

Join me next time on Where Is 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 Ervin, and Ben Redmond. The show is edited by Andy Jaskiewicz. Special thanks to Cadence 13, particularly John McDermott and Patrick Redmond. The show is edited by Andy Jaskiewicz. 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 markgober.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 and if you'd like tell a friend to subscribe and spread the word. See you next time