S2E18: When a Near-Death Experience Unlocks Hidden Genius Part Two | Talk Tracks

In part two of this two-part episode series of the Talk Tracks, we continue the exploration of near-death experiences with Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon whose life changed after surviving a lightning strike in 1994. Tony describes leaving his physical body, witnessing his own resuscitation, and entering a realm of profound peace, unity, and unconditional love that felt more real than ordinary waking life. When he returned, he began experiencing an unexpected and overwhelming connection to music, with fully formed melodies arriving in his mind despite having no musical background. He shares how this sudden creative awakening emerged directly from his near-death experience and went on to reshape his identity, purpose, and understanding of consciousness. Together, the conversation explores how near-death experiences can radically alter perception, unlock latent abilities, and challenge what we believe about creativity, consciousness, and life beyond the body. Join The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass to get ad-free episodes, never-before-heard interviews, behind-the-scenes documentary footage, and access to our private Discord community. This is your invitation to come closer. To help shape what’s next. To be more than a listener… to be a co-creator of this paradigm shift. So if you’ve felt moved, if you’ve felt seen, if you’ve felt the call—subscribe today and join us: thetelepathytapes.supercast.com. http://thetelepathytapes.supercast.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ky Dickens?

  Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the TalkTrax. In this series, we'll dive deeper into the revelations, challenges, and unexpected truths from the telepathy tapes. The goal is to explore all the threads that weave together our understanding of reality: science, spirituality, and yes, even unexplained things like psi abilities. If you haven't yet listened to the telepathy tapes, I encourage you to start there. It lays the foundation for everything we'll be exploring in this journey. We'll feature conversations with groundbreaking researchers, thinkers, non-speakers, and experiencers who illuminate the extraordinary connections that may defy explanation today, but won't for long.

• 1:12Ky Dickens?

  In our last episode, we heard from David Ditchfield, who shared how his near-death experience led to a sudden ability to paint intricate canvases. Today, we're continuing that thread with Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon whose life changed after surviving a lightning strike and near-death experience in 1994, an event that sparked what's known as acquired Savant syndrome. Tony developed an inexplicable pull toward classical piano, despite having no musical background, along with melodies that began arriving fully formed in his mind. In this conversation, Tony shares what happened beyond his body, how music entered his life, and how the experience reshaped his understanding of consciousness and who we truly are.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Hi, my name is Tony Cicoria. I'm an orthopedic surgeon and have been for a long time. I've had an interesting life, to say the least. I had what people commonly call a near-death experience, and it changed everything and has given me a tremendous amount of information. My wife's family had four or five people that have birthdays in the month of August. So in 1994, we decided to rent a pavilion next to a lake in Athens, New York. The party's up on the second floor, and I was given the job of running the barbecue, so I'm on the ground. And about mid-morning, I thought, geez, you know, I haven't talked

• 2:34Speaker 01

  to my mom yet today, so I thought I better go call her. I walk around to the front of the building, and there's a payphone right next to the stairs that go up to the second floor. I go to the payphone, and I call her number, and I let it ring five, six, seven times, and she didn't pick up, so I thought, well, I'll just call her later. And I've got the phone, I'm gonna hang it up, and I saw this big flash of light come out of the phone, and it hit me in the face, and just threw me like a rag doll backwards. And as I'm going backwards, all of a sudden, I have this strange sensation of going forward.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  And I remember standing there, and as I'm standing, I'm right at the bottom of the stairs, and I look at the wall, and the phone is dangling. I'm not making any sense of this. I saw this big, huge flash of light, and there was a huge crack right after that. I mean, there's not many things that sound like that. It was a lightning bolt. All of a sudden, I hear my mother-in-law, she's at the top of the stairs, and she's screaming. She starts running down the stairs right at me, and I'm thinking, this can't be good. Something bad's happened. And I'm noticing that she's not looking at me, she's looking off to her left. As she got down right in front of me, it was like I didn't even exist.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  And I thought, well, hell, I'm gonna follow her. So I hurried up and just started walking in the direction she was going. And I took about three big steps, and all of a sudden, I was confronted with myself on the ground. And I was like, oh, shit, I'm dead. You know, it was a shock, no pun intended. But I always expected that, you know, when you died, you'd know something happened. And here I was, completely oblivious to the fact that I was dead. So now I'm looking at this body on the ground and my mind is racing. And I'm trying to make sense of this. And all of a sudden I realized, wait a minute, I'm thinking just like I normally would.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  And I came to the realization that whoever I am right now, I always am. This thing that's on the ground is nothing more than a change of clothes. I've realized that my spirit is eternal. My mind is part of that, and this is who I really am. There was a lady who was standing behind me, waiting to use the phone. And it turns out she was a nurse. So this place is in the middle of nowhere. And all of a sudden, I've got somebody there that's gonna save my life. So she gets down, she starts doing CPR. And at this point, I'm looking around at people running all over the place and screaming. And I thought, oh, baby, this is getting interesting now.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go check on my family, who were up on the second floor. So I walk over to the stairs. And by the time I got to the top of the first landing, I become nothing but a ball of energy. And I have lost all form. And the stairs go off to the left. And I just went through the wall. And when I came out on the other side of it, I came out right over where my wife was sitting. She was painting children's faces. And I memorized who the kids were, what order they were in, how the furniture was arranged. I don't know why I memorized it, but it was an important thing that was gonna turn up later. Because about a month later, I had drawn pictures of all this stuff.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  She was like, oh, my God, this is exactly the way it was. And I think that was the first time that she ever really believed what I was saying. So anyway, continuing the story. So I pass over her head, I make note of all these things, and I pass through the roof. And that's when things really changed. Suddenly, I was immersed in this river of pure positive energy. And if you could imagine, absolute love and absolute peace, there was nothing but that feeling in this energy. And as I'm standing there looking at this, I see the rays are composed of energy that almost looks like a sine wave. So it's a lower frequency energy. And I looked at

• 6:51Speaker 01

  it and I'm following it and I'm seeing that this energy flows through everything. I'm looking at the trees and the water and the grounds. And I see that I can actually see the energy lines passing through it. And I suddenly came to the realization, oh my God, this is the God energy. This is what makes everything. This is the greatest thing that anyone could ever experience, to know that this exists. And I was just amazed. I was ecstatic. And this river of pure positive energy was taking me someplace. I didn't know where it was going, but I didn't care either. And I came across a wall and it was

• 7:35Speaker 01

  like a collage of my life. There was picture frames. And in each one, there was high points, low points of my life. And if I stood there and looked at it, it would start to play. But I didn't have time to do that. And there was nothing that I really got to research in depth. It was just, oh, this is your life and it's all sitting here if you want to look at it. But I was more interested in going where this was taking me. I was just so excited. And then all of a sudden, it was like somebody flipped a switch, boom, and it was back in my body. And I was like, no, please don't make me do this. I don't want to go back. And tough took us, buddy. It's not your time. You know, there was nobody

• 8:19Speaker 01

  telling me this. It just kind of understood. And all of a sudden, I'm back in this body, but I'm still unconscious. The place where the lightning hit me in the face and where it went out my foot were like somebody stuck a hot poker in the skin. And I was like, Jesus, this really hurts. But I can't move. I'm still unconscious. I was aware that the person who had been doing CPR had stopped. And she's just kind of kneeling next to me. And it seemed like it took a number of minutes before I could open my eyes. And when I finally opened my eyes, I looked at her. I wanted to say thank you for saving my life, but the only thing that came out was something stupid. I said, it's okay. I'm a doctor.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  And she goes, well, you weren't a minute ago.

• 9:10Ky Dickens?

  Sometimes you have an idea you really believe in, but figuring out how to bring it into the world is what stops you. You know what you want to create, but building a website, setting up payments and actually getting it into other people's hands can feel like a whole nother job. That's why I love Shopify. We use it for the Telepathy Tapes merch store, where every cent we make supports nonprofits who are serving non-speakers. It makes it easy for our listeners to support our community, and I believe that doing good should be as simple as possible. For anyone getting started, Shopify's pre-built themes and AI site builder help you create a professional-looking store without touching a line of code. And its mobile app lets you manage inventory, customer support and payments from anywhere. That kind of flexibility matters when your business is one of several things you're pouring your energy into. With Black Friday approaching, launching now means you can take advantage of the extra online traffic.

• 9:55Ky Dickens?

  Give yourself time to get comfortable with your store before the holiday rush. Give that idea that you've been carrying around a place where people can find it. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/tapes to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/tapes. Go to Shopify.com/tapes today to hear your first...

• 10:16Ky Dickens?

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• 11:01Ky Dickens?

  I wear it with everything. It can be dressed up, it can be dressed down, it can be layered with other necklaces. I love it. And you'll see it in a lot of our video podcasts. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the Telepathy Tapes. It's the best way to support our show.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  My wife said that the whole thing took about 15 minutes, but there was no concept of time. You know, it was just whatever time it was, completely irrelevant. It really turned everything upside down for me. So at that point, ambulance came and I refused to go anywhere. I said, "I'm just gonna go home and see my doctors. I'm not gonna go sit in an emergency room for four hours for you to tell me I'm alive." And so I saw my cardiologist and my neurologist friends, and they said, "You're lucky you're alive. Take it easy for a few days and see how you're doing." I took the week off and I went back to work. Everything was okay, except that in within that first two weeks,

• 12:15Speaker 01

  I started to have this insatiable desire to hear classical piano music. And that was a big departure for me. I was a kid of the 60s, there was rock and roll, and it wasn't classical piano music. My mom had made me take piano lessons when I was seven years old for a year, and I didn't want anything to do with it. I wanted to go fishing, I wanted to play baseball, and I wanted to have fun. So piano died a quiet death pretty quickly, and I never went back. So this was really a strange phenomenon for me. But it wouldn't stop, and it was haunting me. I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna go to a music store and get a classical CD."

• 12:58Speaker 01

  And when I went in the door, it seemed like there was a CD that literally leaped off the shelf into my hands. And it was Vladimir Oshkinnazzy playing his favorite Shokin. He was a famous Russian pianist, and still is. And I got that CD and I listened to it all day long. I made my family listen to it, I made the people at work listen to it, and everybody thought I was getting a screw loose. But I could not stop. And within a very short period of time, another couple of weeks, I realized that it's not gonna be enough for me to listen to this music. I need to be able to play it. And that was problem. I didn't know how to play and I didn't have a piano.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  But the next day, one of our babysitters came by and said, "Hey, I'm gonna have to move." And I had this old upright piano that I love. It was my father's. "I don't want to lose it. Could I store it at your house for a year?" And I thought, "Whoa, this is really getting kind of crazy." So I go buy a book on how to teach yourself piano, and I start trying to teach myself. And within a couple of weeks, I have this dream. And the dream was like an out-of-body experience. And I remember I'm walking out onto the stage, and I'm giving a piano concert. I don't know where it was, but the theater that I was in was so realistic.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  And I'm literally standing behind myself on the stage, and I'm listening to this music. And suddenly I get this intuition that this is not somebody else's music. This is mine. And I thought, "What the hell?" And at the end, it has this loud, crashing ending, and it wakes me up out of a sound sleep. And I remember sitting up on the edge of the bed, and I look at the time. It's 3:15. And I'm thinking, "Oh, this is crazy." And I get up and I walk out to the piano, and I think, "Let me see if I can plunk out some sounds that I heard." And I realize that I don't have any idea what I'm doing. At that point, I say, "The hell with this," when I'm going back to bed.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, the music from the dream starts playing in my head, and it won't stop. And it just continues. If I tried to ignore it, it would become more insistent. So I learned very quickly that I had to pay attention to the music. As I was trying to teach myself how to play, I would hear the music from the dream, and it would start playing. And I would try to plunk out notes. And I would scribble little phrases of notes on pieces of paper and put it in a drawer, thinking, "Someday I'll..." Come back to this. I had no idea where that was going. I ordered all of the sheet music on the CD in addition to my teaching books, and I was determined to learn how

• 15:58Speaker 01

  to play some of these pieces of music. And I had been struggling at this for a couple of years. One day I was practicing and my daughter's best friend Jackie was over at the house. And her mom was an accomplished and classically trained violinist. And she heard me banging on the piano. And I was trying to learn a piece of music called the Fantasy Impromptu. It's a Chopin favorite. And I could not understand why the music was written so that the hands don't line up. And she came into the room and she says, What are you doing? And I said, Well, I don't understand this music that I can't get the hands to line up. And she looked at me and she said, They're not supposed to. It's what's called

• 16:42Speaker 01

  a polyrhythm. And I said, What the hell is that? And she said, I'm not even going to try to explain this to you. You need a teacher. So she gave me the name of Sandy McCain, who was the head of the Department of Music in Oneonta, New York, which is where we lived. So this is 1998 that I started taking lessons. We started two hours a week, five o'clock in the morning. She started me right at the basics, fingering, scales. And then in 2002, I started going to a piano camp for adults. And the owner's sister, Erica Vanderlin Fiedner, brought in five Beauxendour for pianos for people to to play

• 17:25Speaker 01

  on. And we got talking about the dream and the music that was playing in my head. And she asked me what I was going to play. And I was going to play a Chopin Scherzo, which is, you know, 20 something pages long. But she remarked to me, she said, You know, you have not been playing for that many years to be playing a piece of music like this. She said, I'm really amazed that you can play this at this level with your experience. Something must have happened with the lightning that has given you Some superpowers. And she said, you know, this story is amazing. There's only one person that can tell this story. And I said, who's that? And she said, Oliver Sacks.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  I didn't know who Oliver was at that time, other than the fact that he wrote the book Awakenings and he was famous for finding the cure for Parkinson's. I thought, okay, that's nice. We went our separate ways and about a month later, I get a phone call from Oliver Sacks. And he looks at me and he says, I have a group of people that I would like to include you with, so I'd like you to come to New York and consider being one of my patients. And I thought, wow. So August of 2006 comes along and I go to Oliver's place in New York City. We meet at his apartment. We talked about all the stuff and he felt like the lightning had done something to

• 18:54Speaker 01

  my brain and somehow given me access to parts of the brain that I was not supposed to have at this point in time. At the end of the day, I'm saying goodbye to him at the door and he looks at me and he says, you know, the music from the dream went through an awful lot of trouble to get here. The least you can do is write it. And I was so taken with that, it's all I could think about on the way home. And the next day when I got up, first thing I did was I went to a computer store that would have music writing programs. And I bought a program called Sebelius, which is like writing music for dummies.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  As I went along, I would play it into the computer and it would give me the sheet music. The music was always exactly the same in my head. So when I would hit the play button, it was either right or it was wrong. And if it was wrong, it was because I did something, you know, in the notation of the music that was incorrect. So that was the way I was able to go in and make the music exactly the way the dream was. I spent every waking hour that I wasn't at work doing this. I finished. And that afternoon, I get a phone call from Oliver. And he says, hey, wanna use your story in my book? And I said, I don't have anything to hide, you know?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  You can use it. He said, good, cuz you're chapter one and it's coming out in the New Yorker magazine, July 23rd. And sure enough, the magazine comes out and all hell breaks loose. And the phone is ringing off the hook. One of the first calls I get is from Carlton Clay, who was the head of the Department of Music at the State University of New York. Carlton says, hey, I just got my copy of the New Yorker magazine. I just can't believe this story. Would you consider teaching a class to my students? And I thought, that would be kinda cool. I'll do that. And he calls back a week later and he says, you would not believe the number of people that are calling me about this.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  About a month later, he calls back and says, would you consider doing a concert at the Performing Arts Center? And I said, no, no way. I have never done anything like that. I wouldn't know how to do it. I haven't even memorized all the music. Somehow he talks me into it. And I'm like, oh, God, what have I done?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Three weeks before the concert, Carlton calls me again. He says hello and I say, no. He said, what do you mean, no? Yeah, he said, I mean, I asked you the question. I said, it doesn't matter. The answer is no. And he said, look, I got three television crews that wanna be there for this event. The BBC One, Grenada Media Television, and German Television. I'm like, I can't do this in front of cameras? My God, I'm having a hard enough time doing it in front of myself. And he says, well, you've come too far now. You can't just back out of this. So sure enough, the 29th comes along. And I remember saying my prayers and I said to God, God, you've gone through a lot of

• 22:13Speaker 01

  trouble to get me here. Please don't leave me out there by myself. And embarrass us both. And with that, I thought, okay, let's go. And I played three pieces of music that were the music from the dream, a piece of music that I also received as a download when one of my closest friends died unexpectedly. And the trauma of that event made this music come to me in a flash. And then there was a third piece that came in a similar way. The music really kind of took on a life of its own. After the concert, I had joined an organization called the International Association of Near Death Studies,

• 22:54Speaker 01

  because I was so intent on trying to understand what had happened and what it meant. And there were a lot of chapters, if you will, around the country. I had been asked to be a keynote speaker at the big IANS meeting. And I played the music and somebody in the audience was taking pictures. And they came up to me afterwards and said, you have to see this picture. She brought it up on her digital camera. And I'm standing at giving my talk and over my head, maybe 10 feet or so, is a blue orb. I thought, well, that's pretty weird. Is there something wrong with your camera? And she said, no, wait till you see the next picture. And she showed me the next picture and it's me at the piano.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  And that blue orb, not being over my head, is sitting on the keyboard at the very bottom. And it's actually giving off blue light on the keys. I've often wondered what that was or who it was. But obviously, I wasn't alone. Somebody was there with me to make sure that I didn't screw it up. You know, I had been brought up Catholic and I went to Catholic school. And nothing that the Catholic Church prepared me for this. In fact, the Catholic Church was disavowing any of it. And so I really became less religious and much more spiritual and have continued.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  I find it difficult to, to go to church because I know that they don't believe what I believe. I feel like I know the truth because I did it. I went through it. And now things are coming out that the Catholic Church has denied for centuries that, well, yeah, maybe these things actually do happen. And maybe what you were taught is not entirely true. There's essentially two spiritual pathways that we can go on. One is what's called service to self, where you're more concerned with yourself than anyone else. And the other pathway is service to others.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  And the only real way to spiritual growth is the service to others pathway. And if your goal is to be able to join with the source of all, then you have to evolve enough along that pathway to be acceptable to go back. That's one of the things that I want to share. The one thing that is clear to me is that our consciousness is eternal. And when we leave here, we go to a place to look at what we've done and see the things that we need to improve on. And so we construct a new life, a new story,

• 25:43Speaker 01

  that when we're ready, we're going to go back and reincarnate into a new role to learn new things. And the hope is that you do this enough that you learn the lessons you need to learn and you don't have to go through it anymore. The music has continued. I'm actually writing a book about the whole incident and what it means about life after life. And I've been very fortunate in that the hospitals that I have worked at have asked me to talk to people who are dying and to make them feel more comfortable with what they're going through and what's going to happen. It's been very rewarding for me to do that.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  I continue to do concerts. I've done them in Australia, in China, in Japan, and all over the place. And "The Song From the Dream", I played it at Mozart's home in Vienna. One of the specialists in savants, Dr. Treford, had asked me to be one of his patients because he had a collection of savants that have all had weird things happen to them. They either had surgery, they had a head injury, they had all kinds of different things. But they all had an ability that they didn't have before as a result of it. And so if it can happen randomly, it can happen purposefully.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  And the problem is, is we don't know how to turn it on and off. And sooner or later, somebody's going to figure it out. And based on the fact that it happened to not just me, but it happened to, you know, 20 other people that I even know about, and I'm sure there's more than that, then it means that this is something that we can do for ourselves. And we just don't know how.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Essentially, it was given to me

• 27:40Speaker 02

  from the other side.

• 29:00Ky Dickens?

  Thank you to my amazing collaborators, our executive producer Jill Pachaznik, our producer Catherine Ellis, and associate producer Selena Kennedy. Original music by Rachel Cantu. Opening and closing music by Elizabeth P. W. Original logo and cover art by Ben Kandora Design. The audio mix and finishing by Sarah Ma. And I'm Kai Dickens, your writer, creator, and host. Thank you again for joining us.