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As you’ll no doubt be able to gather, I had a lot of fun talking to Dean Radin. Dean is a scientist, an associate distinguished professor, the author of many academic articles and studies, and the author of several books, including Real Magic, and his latest, The Science of Magic. Dean researches things like quantum mechanics, the mind-body connection, and telepathy.
Today, we talk about what he’s discovered, and attempted to discover, in a lab. And what the far-reaching implications of his work are.
We talk about what Dean has learned and believes about consciousness and psychic information. Dean talks about the time he spent studying psychic espionage back in the 80s as part of the Stargate program. He has a really beautiful and optimistic outlook about what our world could look like in the future if we harnessed this psychic power, which I’ll let Dean say in his own words.
We also talk about bending spoons, and Dean’s theory about why it’s possible for a human to bend a spoon through seemingly magic.
And, at the very end, we talk about time, and experiments that are showing that the present is influenced by both the past AND the future. It’s kinda insane, and very cool.
MORE FROM DEAN RADIN, PHD:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
I just want to start by saying I can’t believe I haven’t had the opportunity to interview yet. This is very exciting for me. Thank you for all of your work in nailing down the scientific corner of one of obviously I think the most interesting question that have today, right? Which is what is consciousness and what’s fundamental and how can we expand our paradigm to more accurately describe our world, which seems to be what your work is all about. And I know you’ve been at many times running uphill. Even yesterday I was doing a pop culture sort of news podcast. I was a guest and they’d mentioned headlines and they brought up a piece about essentially the gut feelings and the ability to, this idea that you write about in the book that we sometimes have a premonition about something that’s going to happen. And the host was like, I mean, it’s all pseudoscience. I was like, it’s not pseudoscience. Guys, can we start there? Actually, the headwinds that this work encounters every day, why is it so hard for people despite everyone having their own experiences in this space? Why is it so hard for people to grapple with the ideas that you raise in your book?
DEAN:
There is a kind of a paradox here in that it’s true that the majority of people, large majority of people, have had experiences that would fall into a category which is best described as psychic or mystical. And the number of experiences are probably increasing largely because of the mainstreaming of meditation and psychedelics because that pushes you into the right kinds of states. So then the question is, well, why is it when you talk to some people, not everyone, but some people will start saying, no, that’s nonsense. These things don’t really exist. Or there’s one of a long list of possible conventional explanations. There’s also, in the academic world, it is taboo to talk about these things. And so if you’re asked as an expert, you’re going to stay with the status quo. So a lot of it has to do with status quo. And the other big element in this is culture.
So I’ve given talks in India and in Southeast Asia, there’s no question it’s not an issue. Of course, these things exist. So it’s mostly the us, also Europe to some degree, somewhat less so in other countries and certainly not in China, in Malaysia and India and so on. This kind of automatic knee jerk rejection you can see then is actually pushed by culture or culture doesn’t like to talk about this stuff even though people have the same experiences everywhere because all humans have had these experiences and probably animals too. So where does the resistance come from? You can make a case that there has been suppression of these kinds of phenomena, both from science, I’ll say western science, even though there really isn’t a western and eastern science. But western science ish has been against these kinds of ideas because up until a hundred years ago, there was no way to understand from a scientific perspective how these could even exist.
And so you find academics today who are still saying like telepathy is literally impossible. It violates the laws of science. That’s the phrase that you see. It violates the laws of science. Well, what do they mean by that? When you start unpacking what they’re talking about, they’re talking about science as it was understood in the 17th century, and somehow they forgot that science marches on. And so science today, quantum mechanics, relativity and so on. And even beyond that, it’s perfectly compatible with the laws of science as we currently understand it. And those laws change every couple of years. So what I like to point out then is that if somebody, it doesn’t know anything about physics and about the modern physical understanding of reality, which again is changing the direction from the 17th century to the 21st, the arrow of what we’re beginning to learn is more and more and more compatible with people having these kinds of experiences. And so if you look at the direction that we’re going, eventually I have high confidence many of my colleagues do as well, that we will have a satisfactory, rational, scientific explanation as to why people are having these experiences.
ELISE:
Well, your work will be formative. Your book was so fun. Essentially an encyclopedia of lab studies into so many of these effects I didn’t realize. I knew about double blind studies to assess the accuracy of mediums and so on and so forth. But the length to which you have, I love seeing Masaru Emoto’s name in the book, and I had written about his work years ago and just gotten thrashed. I don’t have to tell you all of the feedback. This is Emoto who talked about how essentially sentiment positive or negative sentiment can charge water, which affects, I think the ones I was writing about were the rice ones. You did ice molecules, is that what you did?
DEAN:
Nice crystals, yeah,
ELISE:
Frozen some ice crystals. But this idea that the vibration of the energy love that you’re giving to the rice or the hate or the water, I guess has an impact. So I loved seeing that. Actually there’s another level and layer of research.
DEAN:
So let me make a comment here because one of the reasons why some scientists get hot over this is because you use words like frequency and energy and love. And I have no problem with any of that except that. And I put on my engineering or physics hat, I’m thinking, well, we know pretty well what frequency and energy are kind of from that perspective, and that’s not what we’re talking about. And so there’s a language clash, and that’s one of the reasons why there’s heat developed. So when we talk about a feeling of vibrations and frequencies and energy and so on, what we mean is felt energy felt vibrations. It’s almost a metaphor. It’s what it feels like on the inside, which is not what an engineer or a physicist looks at from the outside. And that split is actually the core of what we’re talking about, right?
We’re talking about the objective world, which is what science is really good at looking at from the outside. But these phenomena are coming from the inside, the subjective world of consciousness. And science doesn’t know what to do with this yet, right up until recently, meaning maybe a couple of decades ago in the academic world, nobody was studying consciousness because it had been taboo for a very long time to even talk about it. Now it’s becoming dead center mainstream because people are beginning to recognize that this is a major unsolved problem in science. How does three pounds of tissue in your head give rise to the internal feelings that we all have or sense of awareness? Nobody knows. And so the last review of theories of consciousness was a long paper over a hundred pages in a journal listing something like 250 different theories of consciousness that tells us that finally people are beginning to recognize outside of philosophy, which has been interested in this for a long time. But within science now, huge number of theories, which means we don’t have any idea about what’s going on, but it’s something we can talk about now and that’s new and exciting.
ELISE:
And previously, some of the scientists that we revere the most, Einstein, Niels Bohr, these guys were interested. This was core to their work, right? This wasn’t so taboo, is that because we didn’t have as many scientific laws at that point. They were creating them.
DEAN:
No, I don’t know how to express this without sounding elitist or something, but when you look generally at the most accomplished and smartest scientists, they also tend to be the most open-minded.
And so the people, the founders of quantum mechanics were philosophical idealist. They’re also pretty smart. They developed modern methods of physics. When you start going down further, and this is why I don’t even like to talk about it in these terms, but I don’t know else to mention it, that when you go down to people who become less accomplished, they become more and more concerned about being with the status quo. So the status quo forever has been suppressed by both religion and science. It’s simply something you don’t talk about. For people who have more of a multidisciplinary background, they’re not just deep in one silo, but they are interested in, they spend time learning about other silos. They are way more open to these kinds of ideas, and they’re not locked in to the status quo as much. If you are following the status quo for realistic reasons and the academic world, if you stray too far from your silo, you won’t get tenure.
And so you lose your job. You spend 20 years learning enough to be able to get a job as a professor somewhere, you’re not going to put that at risk. And so that’s where a lot of this comes from. It’s that it’s safe to go with groupthink even though we supposedly have academic freedom. But that’s always been a myth too. So it’s completely reasonable and understandable why there’s continuing resistance, because people, they didn’t want to fit in. The people who are the true mavericks, who are the ones who end up with Nobel Prizes, they’re the ones who usually somewhere earlier in their life, they come up with some kind of radical idea and then they push it for 40 years. And if they’re really lucky, they’re still alive when they get the Nobel Prize. So that’s simply par for the course. And it makes a lot of sense from the way that science works as a human enterprise, that it’s very concerned about allowing ideas to come into the mainstream that aren’t thoroughly vetted in some way. And so the farther away the idea is from the mainstream, the longer it takes, the more evidence it takes, and the more people who are holding the status quo need to die because they’re the ones who hold the status quo. So I’m not saying anything new here, but I think that’s the picture that I see.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. You look at what’s happening culturally right now too, and sort of the war on science and rampant conspiracy theories and watching so many bedrocks of public health get dismantled and taken apart. And it feels like one, maybe it’s not a substantial part, but it does feel important here, is that when scientists or status quo science or people who are practicing maybe are dismissive of essentially everything that you would in some ways classify as intuitive, subtle felt, it starts to erode faith in the institution. So I think part of what has to happen as we try and reassemble these pillars of our collective health is, okay, how do we not ground down in this is our world and you’re all wrong, but how do we expand this paradigm to start to answer some of these questions rather than dismissing or labeling everything as pseudoscience? And yes, there’s so much pseudoscience. It’s a really difficult conversation, right, unfortunately. But it’s definitely being asked. It’s asking us, all of us to contend with it right now.
DEAN:
Yes, I agree. And so I think a lot of the distrust happens. It’s not only science, it’s with basically every kind of institution. Because again, this is, I think mostly it’s not just the United States, but it’s the way the politics runs and is overlapping with things like profit, it’s business, the business profit, motive in health and food and virtually everything. It contaminates science because it’s so influential in terms of who gets funded and who becomes a consultant and all those kinds of issues that when things are learned decades later, sometimes maybe cigarettes aren’t so good for you after all, they said they was, but now it isn’t. And same thing with all kinds of other things, including lots of foods. Well, science is interested in understanding the way things are that can easily become distorted by the way that business then uses the science. So I remember working, I worked at Bell Labs years ago, and we would be asked to make technical decisions about what’s the best way of doing this particular thing.
So we’d spend some time and come out saying, well, this is it. This is going to be the best way. And then almost never were those suggestions actually followed. And we said, well, why not? We evaluated all of this. It becomes a business decision. So somebody is making a decision that has nothing to do with what experts in the area are saying. And this is true across the board. You find this in pharma, you find this in the food industry everywhere. So because part of what my interest now is I co-funded a biotech company, and I know much more about pharma than I used to. The people, the scientists working in pharma are doing the best they possibly can to develop methods which are treating all kinds of disorders and diseases. What happens to the science can easily become distorted. And the same is true across the board.
And so I completely understand the distrust. I know why people become like anti-vaxxers, partially because they don’t really understand the nature of the science underneath it, but also because we hear that a company has made 10 billion in one year because they were forced to make some kind of a vaccine or something quickly because of a pandemic. And the pandemic is really real. It’s a real thing. So I don’t have a good solution to that. Somehow some of the human vices, like greed and profit, almost always override what can amount to common sense. And so labels like pseudoscience, labels like fake news, fake this and fake that. They’re very easy to say and it degrades everything. So again, I don’t know how to get out of that. That’s why as a scientist, I think about things like politics a lot and the way that influences what we do, but I am more comfortable focusing on my research because as an individual, I don’t feel like I can do very much about all the rest of it. So I keep plugging away and pushing, keep poking largely at the academic world. And it’s been working, it’s working like gangbusters over the last three decades. But you need somebody who lives 300 years in order to be able to see it all the way through. But I’m playing the part that I can.
ELISE:
Well, one thing that I think is quite lovely about, and maybe this isn’t true, but I felt like this was reflected in your book, and from what I know about the space is that there are no financial interests really in this work. It’s not going to be a pill. And if anything, it means funding is hard and scarce and makes the whole endeavor more difficult, but in some ways also protects you from market interests or that type of distortion, as does. I loved the story. Can you tell the story about how one of your peers, he was put on a peer review panel to assess a study that you had done. You guys knew each other a little bit from he’s not in your space, different type of science, and that he saw it and was like, this is bullshit, and then couldn’t dismiss it.
DEAN:
Yeah, that’s a professor I knew who was passed away unfortunately. But yeah, very prominent person involved in psychiatry and brain sciences who was asked to review an article I wrote, which was a study where we were seeing whether a Buddhist monk and a Mongolian shaman who were trying to bless chocolate in that case, that if we’d ran a doubleblind trial with people that we recruited where they didn’t know what kind of chocolate they were getting, the blessed or the blessed chocolate, would it in fact enhance their mood because that’s the blessing that we asked the monk and the shaman to bless it with. So they did the study, it came out significant, and he was asked to review it, and so he reviewed it and it troubled him a lot, but he eventually concluded that the methods that we used are standard. The statistics were correct, the results were what they were.
And so what do you do with it then? And yeah, I put that in the book because he struggled with, how does he then reconcile with the way you think the world works versus, well, what does that mean that you can bless chocolate and then suddenly people have a better mood? That sounds ridiculous. Nevertheless, he was a good enough. So he finally said, well, basically, I don’t know what’s going on here, but there’s nothing wrong with the science. And so the reason I put that in the book is because that sort of echoes throughout the whole discipline that the people studying psychic phenomena from the beginning, like 140 to 150 years in a scientific manner, have always been forced to be ahead of the pack in terms of experimental rigor and statistics and so on, because we know that it attracts a huge amount of skepticism. And there’s nothing wrong with the skepticism simply other people saying, I don’t know if I believe that. Convince me that’s how the discipline has advanced. And so the best work in parapsychology today is as good as the best work in any other field, and it’s kind of always been at that level.
ELISE:
What I thought, and it was a great education for me as someone who has had my own experiences completely. I know you write about Jeffrey Kripal, I love Jeffrey Kripal, but I’ve had my own sort of flip experience where it wasn’t a perturbing question for me, but suddenly I was like, holy, what? This is everything I thought I understood
Is limited, not wrong necessarily, but there’s something else happening here. But I had always, when people would ask me or challenge me, I also was like, I think these things are incredibly hard to study. So what’s really fun about this book is that so many of the, it happens at maybe a quantum level, these are small effects. You’re not generating massive poltergeist, which might also just be from people’s emotions, but you are studying all of these things. It’s really fun to know actually all these things are being brought into a lab in a way that’s extremely fascinating.
DEAN:
And I do talk about Poltergeist. I have the episode in there. So most of the time in the laboratory, what we’re doing is we’re trying to create a way of taking what people report as experience and squish it into something that will work in a laboratory.
And so sometimes we’re lucky and we kind of get close to the nature of the phenomenon, but it’s always you operationalize, you figure out how are we going to do this protocol to figure out some result at the end? And sometimes it matches and sometimes it doesn’t match so well. And so all the time we would get requests from people, you got to study me because I have these amazing things happening. And we tend not to do that very often, and we’re doing it less and less often because they may in fact be the next Messiah in terms of their psychic ability. But to squish it into one of the existing experimental designs that we have is really, really difficult. It takes a long time, a lot of resources to do that. And we still may not get there because maybe what they’re really good at is they can tell if they’re about to be shoved off a cliff, right?
They have a really good precognitive sense. Well, we can’t do that in the laboratory, so we do the best we can. And the consequence is that the big things that happen in people’s lives, which are often spontaneous, we’re not either ethically allowed or even able to reproduce that in a lab. We can only do it as a kind of a simulation, a weak simulation. And so the results that we get are weak, take statistics to see the results. For those of us who are comfortable with statistics, it’s no problem. We know something can be very tiny, but also very real. And so there’s kind of a conflation between magnitude of the effect and the statistical likelihood of the effect. People don’t get that unless they spend time thinking about it. And so of course, all of us want to see the UFO landing on the White House lawn. Sometimes it happens in 1952, there are a whole bunch of them flying over the White House, but it doesn’t happen very often. So we work with the data that we have.
ELISE:
Yeah, what I also appreciated about the book, I’m quite spiritual. I have no idea if you are, it’s not evident in the pages, and there’s no faith that is necessarily interacting even the way that you write about. And Laura Lynn Jackson is a dear friend. I know Lord Day. I know a lot of incredible living psychic mediums quite well at this point, and they’ve both been studied in various ways just to understand what’s happening with their brains, and I want to talk about that. But even with mediumship, when they’re put into these studies where it’s double blind, I think most people probably understand the way that they test mediums where they’re reading for someone, but that person’s not present. There’s someone else present and then they do two readings, and then they have to assess the accuracy of the reading, et cetera. But even in that context, there’s a lot of explanations for where the information might be coming from. We don’t have a way of knowing it is definitely someone dead on the other side who was passing this information, who knows, right? But all to say you don’t even have to believe that consciousness survives past death, although that also feels so fundamental to me. It’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t. So let’s talk about what’s your favorite theory of consciousness?
DEAN:
The way I put it is every alternate Tuesday, I’m a full-blown idealist. So all there is consciousness and Thursdays that start with an odd number, I’m more like a dual aspect, and then occasionally on a Saturday I might be a materialist for a couple of minutes. But if you think of this as a spectrum from very hardcore materialist where everything is just matter and energy, that’s the end of the story to full blown idealist, I’m on a spectrum leaning towards idealism. I would say that I am mildly spiritual but not religious, which for me is probably always the case. I just didn’t have words to put on it. And when people ask, well, what do I believe about these things? I say, I believe basically what I’ve seen in the laboratory, I’m driven by experience just like anybody else, except my experience is experiment. So I’m naturally skeptical about basically everything, but I’m less skeptical when something happens to me because that’s what are you going to do with that?
That’s your raw experience. If you deny all of your raw experience, you have to go into an institution because then they’re no longer grounded very well. So my understanding of consciousness is driven largely not only by the experimental work in parapsychology, but also all of the near death experience and out of body experience and terminal lucidity and people who have hardly any brain left and are still working perfectly fine. All of those things together suggests that our materialistic model, which is still pretty much the way that neuroscience sees us, like you are your brain, there’s something missing from there, and the direction of something missing is pretty strong. And the direction of what people call spiritual, there’s something more. And so what do we know about something more? I would say that a lot of what we know comes from mystics. And of course the strange thing about mysticism is somebody will have that experience and they’ll immediately say, it’s ineffable, but what was it?
It’s ineffable. And then they’ll write millions of words about it to try to explain what do they mean. And of course, I work in an institute that was founded by a mystical experience from an astronaut Edgar Mitchell returning from the moon back to the earth. He had a mystical experience and it was so thrilling and awesome that he started our institute to try to figure out, well, what is that? Well, we still don’t have a very good explanation as to what it is other than saying that something about our understanding of consciousness. We are still very far away from understanding it.
ELISE:
And it seems like we are structured in some ways to get it and bits and little tiny, a little trickle. And because to live in a world where time is not fundamental and where our emotions, our sort of daggers into each other would be an impossible world to live in on the daily, right? How would you move forward if you understood every conceivable possibility? We need essentially to filter out most si material in order to live in these bodies and exist on this planet.
DEAN:
So the way I see it is that from an evolutionary perspective, we are shaped by the environment and we’re also shaped to survive. And so if you’re able to pay attention just as easily to the moons that are currently around Pluto a million years ago because we’re all connected through space and time, well then you may not be paying attention to the tiger who’s directly in front of you and about to jump on you. So you can see that as an organism, the whole system is devised so that we pay attention to here and now because otherwise you won’t survive. And then that branch of the human tree disappears. Well, we’re here because our part of the tree did not disappear. And so we have been shaped by evolution and training and culture and everything else to identify with the embodiment. So yeah, we are filtering out through huge number of both probably brain processes and psychological factors and so on to not pay attention to what’s going on, at least in our ordinary state of awareness, but in non-ordinary states of awareness, dreaming and dancing and drugs and all of the rest of it, and even spontaneously.
That’s when that additional information leaks through. And so we can tell from our own experiments that it’s always there in your unconscious. It’s always bubbling there. We can see it physiologically, but only rarely will rise up to conscious awareness except in people that we call psychic, because somehow they’re just built slightly differently and they have a closer connection to that unconscious source, and that’s where the information is flowing.
ELISE:
Laura Day essentially says that she thinks her psychic ability as a function of trauma or just brain damage, essentially what is seen in the brain in psychic mediums who are truly telepathic or clairvoyant. Is it too technical? No,
DEAN:
It’s not too technical. We don’t know enough yet. So we can see the neural correlates of consciousness. We can’t tell specifics about, well, what is it about somebody’s brain who’s psychic versus not psychic? And there’s some little tidbits and hints that are here and there. How coherent is the brain and what is the dominant frequency and how long do they spend in the default mode network and all those kinds of terms. But we’re at the very earliest stages because there’s only so much you can tell. Even through looking at MRIs and other things, you can’t tell that much about what’s going on. What we can tell a little bit is starting to see differences in morphology of the brain, the way that it’s structured together and the shape of it, and also in genetics. So whenever you’re thinking about talent, you have somebody who is talented in anything.
They have a different set of genes and virtually across the board, music, sports, whatever, and psychic ability, there’s a different genetic makeup. In this case, it’s not a gene, there isn’t a psychic gene. It’s a polygenetic trait, which probably involves hundreds, like a constellation of genes that just happen to push you into a different state. Some evidence that people who tend to be right brain dominant spend a lot more time in right brain like artists and so on. They tend to have more experiences and tend to do better on experiments as well. So a scientist would be the worst possible person to study this kind of stuff because we tend to be left brained to do analytical work. So these are cartoon versions of what someday we’ll understand in much greater detail that there’ll be genetics, there’ll be brain shape differences, different psychology, different personality, and so on.
So I was on the Stargate program back in the middle 1980s, and that program was all about using psychic espionage. So talented psychics were doing military operations. So part of the mandate for the research side was what makes these highly talented people different than the average person on the street? We want to find more of them. Everything was tried. We looked at every kind of psychological test and physiological test and everything we could think of, and there’s no difference. Well, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference because they obviously were different in terms of their performance. It meant that the tools that we had, the instruments that were being used were not sufficiently sensitive for that kind of a thing. And I mean, this should not be surprising because in medicine, tools are constantly advancing to get better and better neuroimaging techniques and better body diagnostics and so on.
So if you’re using a magnifying glass, you are looking at a psychic really close with a magnifying glass, that’s a pretty good tool, but it’s probably not even the right tool to use. So this is kind of where we are that we don’t even know yet what kind of a tool is the right one to use. If for example, we wanted to assess and train people to become better psychic healers, some of the psychic healers are really good at what they do. We don’t know. We don’t have anything to measure it at this point. We can do secondary measures like some physiological effects, but we want a tool like in Ghostbusters that will act differently when the spirit is around or something like that. And we don’t have that yet, and I think we can get there, but as you already had mentioned that funding for this kind of research is basically we can do experiments involving a little bits of string and gum. That’s about as far as we get because we have tiny bits of funding, but the interest is there. If funding was available, many, many more scientists would be involved in this because everybody’s fascinated with it.
ELISE:
You touch on this lightly, you write about Stargate and also just the dissolution of that program, but I guess the assumption that it exists under different form that the government that obviously we must still be studying this if not publicizing it in the government. No, I mean, I have friends, again, psychic mediums who are in touch with police departments all over the country, and they get called on cases. So there’s some sort of tacit, there’s some network. Do you know if the government is pursuing any of this or is it all classified?
DEAN:
I don’t know. I’ve long been out of that world and don’t have clearances anymore. If I did know, I couldn’t
ELISE:
Say. I know, I know.
DEAN:
No, but the truth is I don’t know. I hope that there are programs that are underway. The concern about that is whenever you have a program that’s in the deep black and very few people know about its existence, all it does is create conspiracies and rumors and what else could they possibly know that we don’t already know that we’re publishing constantly. That means that if there are programs, it’s probably still in the direction of using talents to solve problems that otherwise would be difficult to solve. So we have billion dollar spy satellites that are incredibly good, but they can’t see inside buildings very well. A psychic can do that, and more importantly, we can look at a building and say, well, what’s going to happen to that building in nine months from now? Well, there’s no technology available yet that can do that, but psychics can do that too.
Or you can go backwards in time. What was this 20 years ago? Those kinds of things. So is there value in taking the talents to do such things? Probably. I hope so. And so the reason why I felt okay working on a classified program and intelligence was that you can make a case that conflicts and wars start because you don’t know what the adversary is up to. And so if you imagine a world where there are no secrets, everybody kind of knows you’re not going to have wars at that point because everybody’s going to know what’s actually going on. That will also have to change politics and business and everything else. And the status quo there doesn’t want it either. So you can see suppression from the status quo to not allow things like telepathy to become much better. Understood. It is dangerous. So anything that is dangerous to the status quo is suppressed.
ELISE:
That’s such an optimistic, I love that too, because you think about so many conflict, how much sabre rattling there is and fear real or outsized that drive so many of these conflicts that it’s actually very beautiful and optimistic to think that so many things could be averted if we knew actually no, there are no weapons of mass destruction. No, there’s no intention to build a nuclear armament, et cetera.
DEAN:
Well, this say nothing of our justice system. The justice system works as well as it possibly can, but if you knew, the entire jury knew, everybody knew this guy’s lying. I mean, some people lie and they don’t know that they’re lying. I mean, give them the benefit of the doubt, but everybody else would know. Well, I mean all of our main structures, the way the civilization has evolved, almost all of it would change quickly and it would evolve in a direction of hive mind. Well, hive mind is portrayed in science. Fiction is usually not a place you want to go. It’s like the Borg in Star Trek. It’s a horrific thing. I think we actually have it completely backwards that we as embodied creatures with our egos. We think of ourselves as sovereign. Realistically, we’re not. I mean, all you need to do is look at the advertising business and their whole job is to pull people in a direction, and I’m just as susceptible to that as anybody else. I’ll see an ad and say, oh, I need that thing. I don’t even know why I need it. But they do such a good job in pulling that. There is a hive mind already. Well imagine how a hive mind where it’s truly interconnected. That’s a very different kind of civilization. I think one actually in many ways, much more mature than where we currently are.
ELISE:
It’s interesting to think in light of where we are and culturally as we’re watching so many things, it feels like we’re watching things being pulled apart and dismantled and sort of a slow rolling and now quite fast moving disorder that how will we reorder? What do we build next? How do we not just recover? How are we going to recreate these systems maybe in different ways that are broader? I don’t know. I mean, that’s one of the things I’m trying to hold on to my optimism where I’m like, maybe something’s happening that will in retrospect be to our benefit, will look and we’ll say that all needed to come down as painful as it was in order for something else to emerge. I don’t know. We’ll see. Right?
DEAN:
Yeah, no, oftentimes to build something new, you have to destroy the old one. The question is what will be reconstructed afterwards? And we don’t know yet. But yeah, it could bifurcate into this is a wonderful world or this is not such a wonderful world. It’s just two examples of probably a near infinite number of possibilities. Yeah.
ELISE:
I want to ask you about bending spoons. I’ve never been to spoon, but you write about spoon bending. This feels like the most exciting physical manifestation. Are you looking for?
DEAN:
Yeah, there’s my spoon.
ELISE:
Okay.
DEAN:
Yeah.
ELISE:
And what’s happening?
DEAN:
I don’t know. I know what it felt like and I know what the experience was like, but I have no idea how that happened. I mean, I guess is my guess is that because the spoon was always cool to, the touch wasn’t hot, and my intention was that I want this particular bend that you think of this on a micro scale, that if you go really deep into the structure of metal, that there are little grains in it, and so the grains become soft. It becomes malleable. That’s what happens when you heat it up. But in this case, there was no heat. So maybe something happened at the grain level at a very microscopic fashion that just allowed it just momentarily to become soft. So I was able to pinch it and the bowl folded over.
ELISE:
It’s wild. I love that you took it back to your lab and were like, what is this? I mean, of course you took it back to your lab to make sure it was a real spoon.
DEAN:
Yeah. You can buy spoons if you’re doing magician tricks that will bend when they have either heat or cold applied to it and it looks like holy smoke, this is happening in real time. You could see it happen, but I’m well aware of those tricks, and so I tested this. Is that one of the tricks? The answer is no. I put it into boiling water. I put it into ice. It does not move anymore. That’s its new shape.
ELISE:
And
DEAN:
The reason why I always have it at arm’s length is to remind me that I don’t really understand very much. I mean, I understand little tiny bits from many years of looking at this stuff, but not these macroscopic effects because it’s an outlier. Even in the world that I live in,
ELISE:
I know I’m dying to go to the, I think they do at the Rhine Institute. You can go and you can bend spoons or Laura Lynne Jackson said she would do it with me, but I’m dying to do it. I know we’re almost at time, just what are the implications? This isn’t in the book, but I’m curious for your thoughts of AI and consciousness, what’s happening there? Do you think AI will be able to access absent filters? Do you think it’s able to access consciousness in a way that humans can’t or won’t be able to?
DEAN:
Well, current AI is basically a computer program. It’s deterministic. It simulates awareness kind of. I mean, people think that they’re talking to a sentient creature and ChatGPT or whatever. It isn’t. It’s a simulation. Well, so what’s the difference? If you take a purely materialistic perspective, there are some models that say that if you have a sufficiently complex system with recursion in it and lots of fancy interconnections that eventually somehow spontaneously consciousness arises. I don’t buy that theory at all. That doesn’t make any sense. And the way one of my colleagues put it was, you mean if I get tin cans and I connect them by strings, and it’s complex enough that thing’s going to become aware? I mean, that’s the essence of the theory. That doesn’t make any sense to me. But maybe quantum mechanics, the strangeness of quantum mechanics, its interconnectivity and non locality and all the rest of it.
Maybe a quantum computer AI might actually begin to show signs of sentience because there might be something about quantum mechanics, and it’s not like today’s quantum mechanics. It’s quantum mechanics 20 years from now, because the quantum mechanics as it has evolved, is a linear system. Nothing in nature is linear. And now there are nonlinear models of quantum mechanics that are way more complex than among other things would allow for things like superluminal communication, which current quantum mechanics. So we’re left with these strange things like quantum entanglement where we know that things are connected in some way if our distances, but it’s not super luminal, at least it’s disallowed to be super luminal by the mathematics, but maybe it is super luminal, like transcending faster than space through space and faster than time and all that. So what’s super luminal means? So nonlinear forms of quantum mechanics and more advanced forms which people are working on. I think we’ll get closer and closer again, thinking of this as an arrow of under understanding of the physical world. So from the 17th century, oh, there is objects, there’s clunks of matter and stuff. We know it’s way more complicated than that now. It’ll become more and more complicated. And most of my physics oriented research for the last 20 years almost has been looking at interpretations of quantum mechanics that require consciousness to be part of the mix
In there. It’s been in there from the very beginning. Very few people have been studying it experimentally, not because you can’t, but because they just, because up until recently, the idea that consciousness and physics are related to each other was taboo, not part of the discipline? Well, it’s still pretty much taboo in the academic world, but there are a lot of people interested in it, and that’s the area that I’ve been pushing.
ELISE:
Okay. Final thing, because mentioned it, but this idea that time is not fundamental, that actually we have some ability to interact. Obviously we impact the future, but that we can also go back in time. You talked just a little bit about the implications of that. This is the pre-cognition, the feeling like something’s about to happen. It breaks the idea that time is fundamental and it marches on in a very straightforward and linear way.
DEAN:
Well, we already know that time is not fundamental in the sense that it is relative with space. So the term space time, so it’s flexible. The question is, does it flow in one direction? And the answer is from, again, a quantum perspective. Actually, even classical equations in physics, they’re time symmetric. There is no movement of time in most of the equations. And so some experiments in quantum mechanics, mainstream physics, basically say that the present is influenced by the past and the future. So we’re kind of at a scintillation point where we’re getting influences from both past and future. There are experiments as I talk about in the book, which I think has a lot to do with the nature of magic, which is why my book is talking about magic. That suggests that retro causality is a real phenomenon. If you can look at this in things like the delayed choice experiment in quantum mechanics, so that’s mainstream physics.
But here we’re talking about in terms of human experience, can we influence something that happened in the past? And so the answer is yes, except that the word influence is not quite right because the implication of that is that we can change the past. And so far there’s no evidence that that is possible. But if there is evidence that we can influence the past event as it was unfolding in its own time, that means among other things that what is happening right now might be influenced by something that’ll happen in the future. These have important consequences. It’s not only scientifically interesting, but for example in health that if somebody has a disease and the disease has certain courses of action that are known to go into the future, but there’s a lot of probabilities that go on, you could become more ill, you could become better. Well, if you start thinking about that from the future, you can influence the direction of the course of a disease now
In a positive direction. And so you can do this even further backwards. If you’re currently not doing that well, you can intentionally push backwards in time to make the, you are in your current state. It is what it is, but the direction that you’re going to go from now can be influenced by changing the probabilities in the past. So it all sounds like mathematically makes your brain hurt. Except we’ve done experiments like that in the lab, not with health, although there have been some that have used health too. And we do see that effect. You can influence probabilistic events in the past so that the present turns out to be different than it would otherwise have been.
ELISE:
That is amazing. And so brain breaking, but so promising. I mean, as you said, we’re at the beginning and it’s fun to think that the coming decades and centuries, our entire paradigm might be different and we will look back and say, remember when people were so fussed about this?
DEAN:
Yeah, just look throughout the entire history of science. It’s always been that way.
ELISE:
That was so fun. And the book is really fun because it is these short entries mostly about different phenomenon and the experiments that they’ve run to understand the implications. And just going to this idea of the retro causality, I’ll link this episode in the show notes. Dean Radin talks a bit about Jeffrey Kripal in his book, but I had Jeffrey on relatively recently. He’s a comparative religion professor at Rice who has the archive of the Impossible, and he’s very interested philosophically in the way that religion and philosophy and science are describing the same phenomena using different language. And in his book, he tells this story of one of his students, which I included in the episode with Jeffrey Kripal about his student having this being in the basement of his, I think he was a college student, and seeing some legs up appear in a window and just having this feeling like you were going to get through this and it will be okay.
And then the feet retreated and the student’s life he ended up having, going through a lot of stuff and maybe a debilitating depression, but this feeling of like, you’re going to get through this and you’re going to be okay. That was sort of blasted to him, keeps recurring in the back of his mind. And then however many years later, he’s running in, he’s out for a run and he sees a lit window where he used to live, and he goes to it and realizes, I think he even sees his old self sitting on the couch that he had visited himself from the future and had blasted that message to himself across time. Anyway, have full-bodied chills. It’s such a beautiful story. So listen to that next if you haven’t heard it. Alright, friends, that was fun. I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.