You Were Born Telepathic, Then You Forgot. Dr. Diane Hennacy Explains The Science Behind a Savant Telepathy Test That Scored 97% Accuracy, And Why She Thinks We All Still Have It.

What if telepathy is real and neuroscience has been looking at it the wrong way all along? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Diane Hennacy, MD (neuropsychiatrist, neuroscientist, consciousness researcher known for her groundbreaking work with autistic savants and other neurodivergent individuals) shares the astonishing evidence that led her to investigate telepathy, precognition, consciousness, and the hidden capabilities of the human mind. Dr. Hennacy reveals the unbelievable things she witnessed while testing nonspeaking autistic individuals, why statistically significant psi phenomena continue to challenge mainstream scientific assumptions, and what it would actually take to prove telepathy scientifically. She explains why scientists struggle to recreate psi abilities in laboratory settings, how skeptics critique her work, and why researchers in the field believe the word "telepathy" itself may be preventing serious scientific engagement. We explore groundbreaking questions about consciousness, including whether telepathic abilities could help explain how babies acquire language so effortlessly, why Dr. Hennacy believes all humans may possess latent telepathic abilities, and how modern society may have caused many of us to lose access to them. She also explains why telepathy cannot be explained by quantum computation in the brain, even while discussing how savant abilities may reveal previously unknown computational capacities of the human mind. Dr. Hennacy teases her emerging model of how the brain actually works, shares extraordinary case studies involving verified precognitive dreams, and discusses where consciousness goes during dream states. She explains why dreams may provide a window into the unconscious, how they reveal our interconnectedness with others, which dreams deserve special attention, and why reports of precognition continue to fascinate both researchers and experiencers alike. We also dive into why psychedelic experiences so often include reports of telepathy, the shared physiological traits found among individuals who report psychic abilities, and the mystical experiences with a psychic that first sparked Dr. Hennacy's interest in studying these controversial phenomena scientifically. The conversation expands into autism research, exploring how autistic individuals process information differently, why so many nonspeaking autistic people experience synesthesia, reports of seeing auras, and what the autism community can teach the rest of humanity about cognition, perception, communication, and consciousness itself. Dr. Hennacy discusses the profound impact of The Telepathy Tapes podcast, why it resonated so deeply with autistic individuals and their families, and how it helped many people feel seen, heard, and understood for the first time. We also explore acquired savant syndrome and its most mind-blowing documented cases, potential causes behind the apparent rise in autism, and how environmental pressures may be contributing to increasing diversity in human cognitive styles. Are humans evolving toward greater cognitive specialization, or losing something we once possessed? Other topics include: - NDE-adjacent experiences from Dr. Hennacy's youth and how later discoveries in physics shaped her interpretation of those events - Brain function, consciousness, & the limits of current neuroscience - Anxiety, OCD, & emotional dysregulation in nonspeaking autistic individuals - Scientific challenges of measuring telepathy quantitatively - Why more research into the gut microbiome could revolutionize psychiatry - Implications of telepathy research for human cognitive development - Why we should operate from a higher level of consciousness when interacting with AI - How evolving environments shape cognitive diversity across humanity If consciousness is far stranger than we imagine, this conversation may completely change how you think about autism, dreams, telepathy, AI, neuroscience, and what it means to be human! 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This thing we're calling telepathy is, in all of us as infants, we have been talked out of it. Information is being transferred in some way. It could be a shared consciousness, a coherency.

• 0:13Mayim Bialik?

  Which we know exists, especially in primates.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  I wanted to prove non-locality beyond just particles. It could be precognition, telepathy, remote viewing, or clairvoyance. You have all of this physics that people don't bat an eye at. These things could be explained by evoking just one more dimension.

• 0:30Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Diane Hennessy is a neuropsychiatrist and consciousness expert, known for her groundbreaking research on telepathic and extrasensory abilities.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  I've sort of reverse engineered the brain in a way that most people don't. I thought savant abilities might show us a brain has potential for quantum computation. I've come to a whole other understanding. A lot of it is based on synchrony with other human beings. We, as a human species, need to get our act together, realizing we are part of an interconnected whole.

• 1:01Mayim Bialik?

  How do you test telepathy in a way that is quantifiable?

• 1:05Speaker 00

  What we're seeing is...

• 1:13Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:15Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:16Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. Are autistic savants able to demonstrate abilities that potentially challenge everything we know, not only about the human brain, but about consciousness? We have with us Dr. Diane Hennessy. Dr. Hennessy is the author of "The ESP Enigma." She graduated from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She taught at Harvard Medical School and was a psychotherapist for 40 years. She's worked intimately with so many in the non-speaking autism savant community. She also launched the Hennessy Institute as a hub for pioneering research and public education in neurodiversity. She's a neuropsychiatrist, neuroscientist, and a consciousness researcher who you may have heard on the telepathy tapes.

• 2:00Mayim Bialik?

  Some of her research was featured in some of the episodes of the telepathy tapes. Her work with non-speaking autistic individuals has led her to explore some of the most controversial questions in science, including, is telepathy real? What is precognition? And can the brain access information beyond conventional models of cognition?

• 2:21Jonathan Cohen?

  This episode really does stretch our understanding about what is real and what we are all capable of.

• 2:26Mayim Bialik?

  It's a pleasure to welcome Dr. Diane Hennessy to the Breakdown.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. It's a pleasure.

• 2:34Mayim Bialik?

  You get to study some of the most incredible minds, really, that we know of. Can you explain what your work is?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  I actually trained as a neuroscientist, before neuroscience was even a major, and became interested in autism back in 1986, when I was doing my residency at Johns Hopkins Medical School in neuropsychiatry. And I met Oliver Sacks. And I was really interested in behavioral neurology. And in studying neuropsychiatry, I was also studying things like cognition and just interested in neurodevelopmental disorders and neurodegenerative disorders as a way of linking brain function to behaviors and cognitions and emotions.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  So it was my way of studying what's now called consciousness in a way that was really non-invasive and actually helpful to people. So, and I wanted to understand how the brain worked.

• 3:38Mayim Bialik?

  You had a pretty traditional training. Did you believe in savant abilities and telepathy? Or were you kind of learning as you go?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Well, I believed in savant abilities. I mean, initially, as a theoretician, what I thought savant abilities might show us is that the brain has potential for quantum computation. I have a brother who's a theoretical physicist and was one of the experts on AI, helped to develop voice recognition. His son-in-law has a PhD from Princeton in physics and is in charge of a supercomputer lab. So I come from this kind of family where I'm thinking, well, quantum effects probably do have a place in biology. And this is what I was thinking back 30 years ago. So I thought, well, I'm interested in studying. And that was the model. Since then, I've come to a whole other understanding

• 4:30Speaker 00

  of what I think's going on. But it's not that I don't think that quantum effects are happening. But, so I already had this idea that, well, savant abilities is not something that we understand in science, but it's reliably reproduced. And that's where I wanted to put my effort. Now, why was it that I became interested in things like telepathy and precognition? Well, that has to do with an experience that happened to me when I was on faculty at Harvard. And this was back in 1989. And I was the attending psychiatrist for the service that did consultations

• 5:15Speaker 00

  to the medical and surgical and obstetric floors. And so I would get called in if they thought that a condition was not medical in origin, but had some kind of psychosomatic component. But I also would get called in to manage, to help them to manage psychiatric issues that arise on the floor. And so I was told about this woman who had been admitted for a suspected heart attack the night before. And she wanted to leave the hospital against medical advice. And you can't be signing yourself out if they think you're mentally ill. And so she was telling them that she was psychic and she saw ghosts and things like that.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  And I mean, in my training, that is an automatic for, you're psychotic. And a heart attack isn't something that you want to take lightly. I mean, it could be a fatal condition. And most psychiatrists would have just, within five minutes, just had a conversation and said, okay, yeah, you're right, and signed the certification paper. But I always found it interesting to talk to people who have experiences that... I mean, I just liked talking. It's part of why I went into psychiatry. It's like, talking to people that are seeing things I don't see. I just find it fascinating. And I would like to try to enter into, is there an internal logic? It's my way of studying consciousness was to kind of just do a really interesting interview

• 6:44Speaker 00

  to try to understand kind of how they saw and experienced the world as somebody who's a phenomenologist. And I also wanted to gain her cooperation. And I'm pretty good at getting people to trust me and to talk them into things and get them to... Once I understand their logic, I can talk them into the logic, work with their logic stream to try to get them to do something in their best interest. So that was my approach. Well, yeah, right away, as she tells me, she's psychic and that she knows her tests are going to come back normal and there's no reason to stay and that she's seeing all these ghosts. And I joke with her and I say, yeah, I imagine if there's ghosts anywhere, the hospital would be full of them. And then she says, and I see this aura above your head.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  It's like white light, it kind of reminds me, it's like Jesus Christ. And it makes me feel really good about you. Can I tell you what I see?

• 7:36Mayim Bialik?

  Whoa, wait, wait, hold on. Hold on one second.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  And that's all alien to me. Never heard it before. But as I said, I want to know, what do they believe? I want to know. Because the way I was trained also, I was taught that if somebody believes something because it's their religion, then it's really not a psychosis that means they need an antipsychotic. It's that people can believe some pretty crazy things based on how they were raised. I'm just wanting to know, how much of this is just your culture, right? And part of why I went to Harvard was I was interested in cross-cultural psychiatry, that you can have these people that, how they express their stress,

• 8:26Speaker 00

  looks really, really crazy. There's a number of different conditions like that. So I was interested in this.

• 8:31Mayim Bialik?

  Mayim Bialik's Breakdown is supported by Rabbit Air. I have to say, we absolutely love our Rabbit Air purifiers. I'm one of those people who didn't know that this could change my life until I got my Rabbit Air. We actually have three of them, so we can have allergen-free air wherever we're spending our time and recording. And with fall allergy season on the way, having a high-quality, effective air purifier on hand is absolutely key to tackling those fall allergens and keeping your space clean. Rabbit Air's advanced BioGS Happa filtration goes beyond standard filters by trapping over 99.99% of ultrafine particles down to 0.01 microns. It efficiently captures microscopic allergens like pollen, mold, pet dander, and more

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• 12:40Mayim Bialik?

  In many situations, you would look at a person like this and say, this is a person having some sort of psychotic, nonlinear thinking. This is someone who's hallucinating, right? Like, these are the clinical terms that we use. But it seems like your curiosity and your openness allowed you to listen kind of one step further.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's not that at that time, it wasn't that I believed that these things were like, you know, had any kind of physical explanation. I just saw this as, yeah, like you said, you know, hallucinations or, you know, maybe combined with, you know, her cultural beliefs because of her coming from a different culture. And I'm not going to impose upon her my belief system about how things work, right? You know, that's not my prerogative. My, my job is to see if she's being rational in her decision to leave. So I'm saying, yeah, sure, go ahead and give me a reading. You know, and then the next thing she says to me is, your husband's a chemist.

• 13:39Mayim Bialik?

  That's pretty specific.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, my husband, MD/PhD biochemist. Then the next thing she says to me is, and he's applying for a job in two different cities right now.

• 13:50Mayim Bialik?

  No.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  He was. That, yes. He was applying for a postdoc, you know, back at Hopkins and a postdoc at UCSD. Now she had my, you know, attention.

• 14:05Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, that's a lot of things.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  And in his heart of hearts, he wants to go to one of them and you're, you know, you're going to end up at the other one. And now I'm like, oh, this is interesting. Because I knew that in his heart of hearts, he wanted to go back to Hopkins. I'm just like, oh my God, you know, I said, well, you know, where are we going to end up? And she goes, well, name me some cities and I'll tell you which one. Well, I named off a bunch of cities, you know, at least a dozen. And then she goes, San Diego, you end up in San Diego. Like, here I am, like, again, like, oh, that's one of the cities. Anyway, she proceeded to tell me several things about myself. There was no way she could know, and she predicted my future. And as those things came true, I was like, okay.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  I have, I have a firsthand experience of these, of some, of somebody who's profoundly psychic and, and she batted a thousand. There was not a single thing she said that wasn't right. And that was when I began on my journey where I was just like, well, I know savant syndrome exists. Maybe this is just a savant skill. And so that's what really brought me to, you know, to this world.

• 15:17Jonathan Cohen?

  Forget about not letting her leave the hospital. She could start diagnosing people. She, her skills could be very helpful at the hospital.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, she said that she did not make a living as a professional psychic, that it was just something that she did, you know, for, for friends and family. She told me that I would leave psychiatry eventually to write books. And so could it be that when she was looking at me, she was like, you know, she's like seeing that whole trajectory? And then just going, okay, I'm, I'm supposed to tell this lady some stuff.

• 15:52Jonathan Cohen?

  That's a lot of information. We hear, we've spoken to psychics, we hear about people who have intuitive abilities. Sometimes they'll get one or two things. They'll get, they'll be a little vague and you form the connection. The level of specificity is striking.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, and I, you know, I mean, I, I had to take two statistics courses in college, you know? So, I mean, I totally understand probability here. And, and so I think that I was so immersed. I mean, my father was a scientist, three graduate degrees in science. He, when I was first born, you know, we, you know, we moved to Hanford right away. And he, it's his work that helped to end. He worked with plutonium and showed the detrimental effects that it had on, on wildlife and helped to end that type of testing. And then he went on to become the head of the Artificial Heart Program at Batel Memorial Institute. And we had a laboratory in our house. I grew up with science kits. I mean, my family, we're like science geeks, you know? And I went to a medical school where we were told,

• 16:55Speaker 00

  you know, 50% of what we teach you today will be obsolete by the time, you know, it's the end of your career. It's your job to find out which 50% is obsolete. So it's not like I'm just some, you know, person, you know, that, that is stumbling into this stuff. It was that I came from a family that I, and a training where I wanted to do something that was important in science. I didn't want to just do something that was going to be, you know, filling in the dots of somebody else's theory. I didn't think I'd be in a position to, you know, actually, you know, be now challenging like central dogma within neurology. Not in my wildest dreams should I think that.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  I just, I just wanted to do something that I thought was meaningful. And I saw that some, you know, I knew from reading Nancy Drew as a kid and, you know, I love detective stories and what I do as a doctor. You know, I would oftentimes, you know, diagnose people that were misdiagnosed. They thought it, they couldn't figure out what was wrong. They thought it's all in her head and then I would diagnose what it was. I mean, so, so I look at these anomalies, that's a clue to theory. I want to study that. But the problem is that people don't want to fund the anomalies.

• 18:10Mayim Bialik?

  Right. Well, I have a question. With this particular patient, you know, this being kind of your first opening into, you know, really the world of the impossible, as it were. What, what ends up being a diagnosis for someone like that? Because in the traditional Western model of medicine, that is still not a quote, "acceptable way" for people to talk and function and still be considered sane, you know, by clinical standards. So were there other kind of complicating factors? Or were you then stuck, you know, as a sort of neuropsychiatrist with like, this woman is saying things that are true, but to everyone else, it sounds like insanity? How do you then juggle that?

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's an ethical issue, right? You know, because, and I'm, and I'm a very ethical person. And so here's, here's the reality. It hadn't been for the fact that she said to me after she and I talked, she said, I really like you. I'll stay if you promise me you'll come tomorrow. So I didn't have to pull the heavy hand. And when I wrote my, when I wrote my report, I basically said she, you know, she comes from a, you know, culture in which these things are part of her world. I'm not going to force her to stay here. She's willing to stay willingly. She doesn't need medication. She's, she's, she's totally capable of, you know, being in control of her behavior.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  She's not going to be a problem for you. After I visited her the next day and her test came back normal and she laughed, you know? I mean, I regret that I had no way of getting a hold of her again, you know? Because I, but I,

• 19:55Speaker 00

  And I've never heard of a case quite as profoundly gifted as her since. I mean, like, you know, like you said, it's usually, I mean, it's still way better than, you know, what probability would suggest, but not like this.

• 20:12Mayim Bialik?

  We've had Julia Mossbridge on a few times, and, you know, one of the things that Julia talks about when she talks about dreams and precognition is, you know, there is a sort of formula by which we can say statistically speaking, this is exceptional. And, you know, even just in your brief conversation, there's, there's too many things. There's too many things for which the probability is so small. I mean, even the biochemist, you know, I mean, that's, you know, even that. Can you talk a little bit then about what, what your research has largely entailed in investigating savantism and telepathy in particular?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  One of the things that people have said to me, which is really quite true, is people, people have called me the Jane Goodall for autism. And, and, and the reason why I use that, you know, and I agreed with it, you know, the first time I heard it, I'm like, yeah, that, that really describes me because, so when I, when I was an undergraduate, I mean, I, you know, I actually, you know, I studied a lot of animal behavior. I worked with an animal psychologist. I took an ethology course, went out into the field and I, I actually won a Conrad Loranza Award for my study of animals in the wild. Studying these children, the idea is not to, you know, put on the white coat, you know,

• 21:34Speaker 00

  and get the clipboard and start, you know, writing, you know, everything down in a cold and clinical way, you know, that the way to do so is to just spend time with them. And so, you know, so a lot of the criticisms that people later, like, why weren't you doing it in Faraday cage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, because I'm not at a place like Monroe Institute or Ions, okay? That's not, you know, I'm somebody who's a field observer and somebody who realizes the, the importance of the nature of the relationship.

• 22:07Mayim Bialik?

  So many materialists and skeptics want to say, well, why can't you recreate this in my laboratory? If this kid's telepathic, drop them off in my lab and pick them up four hours later and I'm going to prove it and we'll have a double-blind, peer-reviewed study. And this piece is not just, oh, we want them to have their buddy with them so that they can cheat, right? That's not what it's about. There's a relationship, there's a relating, and there is a non-verbal communication that is occurring with all of us as primates in particular, and mammals in general, that make us feel safe, vulnerable, like all these things.

• 22:46Mayim Bialik?

  That is the place that these kind of abilities, right, seem to thrive, is when there's safety.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And, and, I mean, these autistic children have anxiety issues out the wazoo.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  You know, they, I mean, you know, obsessive compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder. And I don't know if I've ever met somebody who was, you know, is really, you know, severe autistic that didn't have OCD.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  And, you know, and a lot of them are perfectionists and, you know, and so, and they are used to a medical system that's judging them. And, and then they have issues with emotional regulation such that even when they're home, you know, in their family environment, you know, sometimes, you know, something will set them off, you know, that, because, you know, they've got a lot of, you know, I think they have issues in their brain stem, you know, that, you know, that impact things like the vagus nerve and, you know, and so on. They certainly have issues in their guts. The fact that they are letting somebody come in and they're doing something that it requires an extraordinary effort on their part, I mean, you know, that, that's what I'm honoring.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  I put cameras in the rooms, you know, from all angles, you know, timestamp things, you know, and all of this, you know, I did a lot of this before photoshopping was even a thing, you know, and I've had people witness my experiments and walk away saying, you know, this stuff is real. You know, Daryl Trefford, who's the person, expert on savant syndrome, who was at the University of Wisconsin, who, who was the consultant for Rain Man, he witnessed, you know, and, and conducted his own experiments with, with, with one of these children. And he, he publicly stated that it's real. There's several other scientists who've witnessed it, you know, and they're just, they're like,

• 24:46Speaker 00

  yeah, why, you know, why, you know, right now, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm working on a paper with, with Marjorie Wolokot from the University of Oregon and Marina Wyler at Dobbs. And they've done a retrospective and, you know, very detailed analysis of the videos of my experiments. And they're like, you know, they were ready to call it telepathy and try to get it published. And I'm like, you know, you can't, I was trying to say, you can't get it published with calling it telepathy. We need to call it something, you know, more, you know? And so, you know, we, you know, we came up with another name for it, just, you know, because the, the gatekeeping for the narrative is, is that, you know, is that harsh, you know?

• 25:31Speaker 00

  And, you know, but this is one of, I mean, example after example after example after example of, of scientific discoveries that went through the same kind of thing, you know, and it's, it's like, it's not until we go on the, you know, second or third round, you know, that we finally get the thing accepted. Because it's, you know, things get entrenched.

• 25:55Jonathan Cohen?

  What were some of the unbelievable things that you witnessed while doing some of these tests that would just strike you as, wait a second, there's something, there's something here?

• 26:05Speaker 00

  My theory's been evolving, you know, originally, you know, I was thinking, well, you know, could this be explained by, you know, thinking of quantum processing in the brain? Okay, you know, but, but you can't really explain telepathy that way, you know, it's being labeled telepathy. One of my thoughts about that was because I, you know, they, they do have this most profoundly when they're in, you know, the same room, you know? And, and I know that we have, you know, if we think of consciousness as a field, that, you know, our brain, which is, this is my thinking about it, you know, that our brain navigates consciousness rather than it being that our brain creates consciousness.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  It's our tool for navigating consciousness, just like my iPhones, my tool for navigating cloud. That, that's kind of how I see it. And, and so, so, you know, so I, I already have kind of a concept for that.

• 27:03Mayim Bialik?

  For people who may not know what these experiments are like, how do you begin to test telepathy in a way that is quantifiable?

• 27:13Speaker 00

  These kids are, you know, 95, 97% accurate. With Haley, when I first met her, she was independently typing into a talker, which is like an iPad that has an electronic voice. So she wasn't, nobody was touching her.

• 27:29Mayim Bialik?

  Not facilitated communication, which is controversial, we're putting that aside.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  The therapist would be behind her, so out of sight, you know, independent typing. And the therapist would pick up a random card, look at it, put it down and say, you know, Haley, what am I thinking? And then you'd see Haley go boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, and it'd be exactly what's on the card. And you're just like, you know, like, you know, these like flashcards. And you're just like, wow, you know? And, you know, and I told colleagues of mine about this and they're like, well, you got to have a, put a barrier between them, you know, you can't have, you know, you have, even though she's standing behind, you got to have a visual barrier between them. Well, I put a visual barrier between them and then Haley regressed and she, any, you

• 28:16Speaker 00

  know, any change to their routine, you know, makes them, you know, they, and what I mean by regress is that they like fall back to an earlier stage. As a child psychiatrist, I know, you know, some, you know, kids will regress when, you know, something's stressful, you know? You know, somebody who was potty trained might start, you know, you know, wetting their bed again. And, you know, so that's what regression means, is you just go back to an earlier stage. Well, in her case, regression meant that now she wasn't typing independently into the talker, she wanted the letterboard again. It's sort of like, it's, it's old, familiar, you know, I know I can do that kind of thing. It, it's the, the reassurance comes from that. And so I had this barrier and I've got the therapist on one side and Haley on the other.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  I've got cameras all over, front and back, up above. I'm in another room with a camera feed, watching the whole thing. So I'm not even in the same room. And I had left a big stack of pieces of paper that had randomized numbers on them, you know, generated by random.org, you know, number generator, random words, you know, including even nonsense words, cards, you know, the flashcards. My instructions to the therapist was, you know, turn them over one by one. And she's on the other side of this visual barrier, look at it and then say, Haley, what am I thinking? And then, you know, put the, she had to reach around the barrier, okay?

• 29:45Speaker 00

  And then you would see Haley beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and, and exactly communicating whatever the, the word or the, the numbers were with, with 97% accuracy.

• 30:01Mayim Bialik?

  That's, I mean.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  And she did this for six hours. And she could do it with two totally different therapists.

• 30:09Mayim Bialik?

  So what's your explanation as a scientist, as a person trained in, you know, rational clinical medicine? How do you start to wrap your head around what you're witnessing?

• 30:21Speaker 00

  It's harder to say it all in, you know, just one, you know, soundbite, right? You know? And, you know, I think, I think what it is, is it really gets back to really understanding what the physics told us from over 100 years ago now, okay, about the nature of reality. And this is not just, you know, what was theoretical based on equations, but it's also then what, all of these different things have been experimentally proven. And so when we look at Bell's theorem, he basically said, hey, if you can come up the,

• 31:03Speaker 00

  you know, a correlation that's greater than this, okay, then I have to accept that they're non-local.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Effects, okay? You have quantum entanglement. You know, experiment has also proven that, that, you know, two particles that are created at the same time, you know, are a system that is shared together, no matter how far apart they are. You can't influence one without influencing the other. And it's not that there's a signal sent from one to the other. It's that they're, they're part of the same system. That you can't separate them out, you know? And so, you know, it could be that, you know, all of what we call entanglement, these things could be explained just by evoking, you know, just one more dimension. Yeah, just one more dimension is enough to. And yet you have string theorists that say,

• 31:58Speaker 00

  oh, we might even have, you know, 11 dimensions and all this. You know, so you have all of this physics that people don't bat an eye at. You know, well, why are you having a problem with these non-local effects when it comes to human beings?

• 32:13Mayim Bialik?

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• 33:43Mayim Bialik?

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• 33:49Jonathan Cohen?

  How do you explain the pushback from this being accepted, right? Like, you have the tapes, you have experiments, and yet people who are such staunch materialists won't even entertain it.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  I decided, you know, long ago that I would try to find the most definitive proof that I could.

• 34:13Mayim Bialik?

  Definitive proof of?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Of something non-local that, you know, within the human being. Okay, it could be precognition. It could be telepathy. It could be, you know, remote viewing or clairvoyance. You know, but something that kicks us out of just thinking in this kind of, you know, limited perspective that we have. We still haven't incorporated what we had learned from physics over 100 years ago into understanding, you know, the nature of reality such that we were not looking at it. We're just not asking the right questions. What we know is that the brain is only processing a tiny, tiny fraction of all the information out there.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  You know, so why do we say that information doesn't exist? Just because our sensory organs are limited in the range of frequencies that they pick up? There's still all of this other information out there. So, so, so what I, so first of all, I wanted to find something that would prove non-locality. Okay, beyond just particles. And then what I wanted was to work on a theory for explaining it that really is multidisciplinary. I'm not going to get into it till my book comes out, which will be coming out in 2027. But I've come up with a whole different way of thinking about how the brain works. Because I've looked at it the way one would, an engineer would, you know?

• 35:41Speaker 00

  I mean, I've looked at all the different components and this and that, and, you know, I've sort of reverse engineered the brain in a way that most people don't. They're just looking at, they're not looking at it as a system. You know, they're just looking at one little component of it. And particularly the neurons. They may even just be looking at the synapse of the neurons or, you know, the cellular membrane of the neurons. They're, they're, they're, so science has become so specialized, nobody's looking at it the way a systems engineer would, you know? And, and it's a very complex. So that's what I've been working on. Because I think that if we actually have a, a theory that helps us to understand the human interface with this. Because I think that's the, you know, it's like, we know the physics exist,

• 36:26Speaker 00

  but how does the human interface, how does that work?

• 36:30Mayim Bialik?

  We've spoken to Thomas Campbell now more than once. And, you know, it's very interesting to get, you know, a physicist's perspective who is a believer in ways to explain this. And, you know, if I were to sit down with the information that you just gave us, right? Just about this one, you know, individual who, with, you know, a barrier and no visual stimulus, right? Is able to, with something like 97% accuracy. And again, this is an N of one, you know? I'm acknowledging that, but that's unbelievable. There's something going on here. The only way, and I'm going to pretend like I have no other way to explain it, because I don't really believe in magic.

• 37:15Mayim Bialik?

  Meaning like, there's, to me, there's a science magic. So the science of this magic would be that the information that is in this other person's head, inside, right? It's a thought. That's all it is. It's a, it's a visual processing, right? It's projected upside down on the back of the retina, right? That's the image that they're seeing. The only explanation for how someone could know what is in that person's head is if this information is somehow accessible outside of the mind of an individual.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. That information is being transferred in some way or shared. So, you know, it could be a shared consciousness as well. I mean, it could be, you know, that this process that, you know, the therapist and the child or the mother and the child have in which they have this bond between them. They spend a lot of time focusing on the same thing. There's a coherency there.

• 38:20Mayim Bialik?

  Which we know exists, especially in primates. And as someone who has birthed children and breastfed them and been with them 24/7, you know things.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. Well, we, we are, um, we as social beings are already designed, you know? I don't like the word design necessarily. But, but, but if you think about how the brain operates, a lot of it is based on synchrony. We synchronize with others, okay? A lot of social species synchronize with one another. Once you have synchronized, you become part of the same system. You're part of the same waveform. And, but we as humans tend to be so chaotic, you know? And, you know, we're so individualistic and, you know,

• 39:11Speaker 00

  and we, you know, we, we, we disempower ourselves because of that, because we're not, we're not, you know, not working in a way that is unified. So, so people who understand the power of doing things in synchrony with other human beings, that once, once you, once you start to realize how powerful that is and you start to actually, um, there's an intelligence of the group that is far greater than that of every individual alone, okay? And so, so this is really our, that's part of why I'm so passionate about getting this out there

• 39:55Speaker 00

  is that we as a human species need to get our act together.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  And a lot of getting our act together is realizing we are part of an interconnected whole. And if we were not working against one another, we could be, we could be living in a far better world. And so this, so this pair, they've synchronized and that creates this shared consciousness. I don't know if you're familiar with these experiments that were done with primates, where, you know, they, you know, they, they can't do the task, you know, let's say the task is, you know, for a food reward, they can't do the task

• 40:41Speaker 00

  with their own arm because their arms have been tied behind them. But they have a robotic arm that is attached by very few electrodes to their motor cortex. Okay. And just, and then each one of these monkeys was assigned a different physical dimension of the arm. They had to coordinate. They had to coordinate to get that arm to go to get the little treat in, you know, the thing for them to get rewarded. And so, and they're not doing that by, you know, going a little to the left, a little to the right, you know, any more than, you know, any more than, you know, fish or birds are doing that when they're all, you know,

• 41:25Speaker 00

  moving, you know, it's that they go into synchrony and then the task is doable. That's how our brain works. Our brain uses synchrony, synchronization for all the different modules in our brain to operate together. But I think if you, if you think that way, then you start to realize, oh, it's not supernatural at all. In fact, it's one of the most natural processes there is.

• 41:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you tell us more experiments that help us paint this picture? Because the one that you described is exceptionally powerful. And I think people listening who may be like, well, I've heard a lot about this, you know, we don't get a lot about the details of the experiments. I think it's extremely helpful to have these examples.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  I've presented my data with that girl, you know, at the Parapsychological Association Conference. I've presented at, you know, and this is like, you know, 13 years ago. You know, I presented at the Science of Consciousness Conference. And then, you know, and then I did, you know, similar work with, you know, Akil and Manisha, you know, and he was able to type onto his keyboard. And his mother would think, you know, the, the random number, the random, you know, word or whatever, sentence and whatnot.

• 42:49Mayim Bialik?

  And that was featured in the telepathy tapes in particular.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  I've done experiments with at least a dozen kids, you know, but not all of them are in the telepathy tapes because not everybody wants to be public. And, and some of the ones that are the most profound are the ones that don't want to be public. You know, I mean, one of them is like, there's a, you know, there is a boy who can actually write with a pen. Okay. So it's totally is like, you can't say that's facilitated communication. Nobody's touching him and he's literally able to write out the letters. Okay. The person who he's telepathic with is, is his adopted father. So there's not even a biological component to it, you know, that's extraordinary.

• 43:37Mayim Bialik?

  This is a, you know, a philosophical question, but I hope you have, you know, also a practical explanation. Why are we made like this? Meaning, why do we have such tremendous diversity in capability, especially in the face of so many other challenges like speech issues, cognition differences? What is it about the brain that is allowing for this kind of diversity and, you know, our ability to wonder at it?

• 44:09Speaker 00

  I'm a student of evolution. And, you know, so what happens is, is that, you know, the species has, you know, certain needs that they need to, you know, they need to fulfill. Okay. You know, and, and a species is always evolving towards the, with the environment. Okay. You know, if you, if you radically change the environment, it puts pressure on the species to evolve. Okay. And we, I mean, in the last 100 years, I mean, our, everything has changed radically. We've got a lot of things that are in our

• 44:48Speaker 00

  environment that are not natural, that are then playing a role in changing the expression of genes, if not, you know, actually affecting the genes themselves, you know. And, and on top of that, you know, we, we've got, you know, all of these changes to our, you know, gut biome, you know, and our gut biome is, you know, the major manufacturer of neurotransmitters. What we're seeing is it shift in cognitive style. Okay. So, most people traditionally have been verbal thinkers. Okay. You know, meaning that, you know, they, the way that

• 45:31Speaker 00

  they think is they use language, you know, just like AI is using, you know, it's a language based system. Right?

• 45:39Mayim Bialik?

  And even if you can't read or write, you can speak, presumably.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  One of the things about verbal thinking is, is it's very, very linear. Okay. You know, there's a, you know, the meaning is totally different depending upon the sequence of the words. Okay. And so, so you, you know, and it's kind of like how we, you know, experience time. It's got to go this direction, you know, it's got to go in one direction and we, we follow it. Well, the other thing though, about language is that the same words can have different meanings depending upon context and depending upon the inflection of your voice when you say it. And those are both right hemisphere skills, the ability to,

• 46:28Speaker 00

  you know, put the, put it into context and to also understand the inflection. Well, you know, when we started, you know, moving into, you know, communication by text, we started running into problems with miscommunication all the time because we've removed those two things.

• 46:42Mayim Bialik?

  That's what LOL is for. So people know that you're joking.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Exactly. That's why we have, you know, that's why we have these emojis and little, you know, things like LOL. Exactly. We've become more and more like, you know, caught up in miscommunication all the time because language itself has, you know, it has all of these built in imperfections unless you're engaging in it when you're in a social context in which you already, you know, have, you know, a joined understanding together. So there's another type, the other problem with language is, is that we can talk ourselves into believing all kinds of things, you know, you know, think about what politicians and attorneys do all the time. They use language to put a spin on, and, you know, to put a

• 47:26Speaker 00

  spin on something that can convince you of something that may not really be, it's, it's their spin, but it may not be, you know, representing, you know, the most accurate way of looking at things. And so these are all environmental pressures that have created a lot of the problems that we're in today. You know, that saying, you can't solve the problems of the day with the same kind of thinking that created them. And so what we need is a much more holistic way of thinking. And so, you know, one of the things we know about autistic individuals is that they're, they're, rather than being language dominant

• 48:08Speaker 00

  and left hemisphere analytical dominant, they're more right hemisphere intuitive gestalt thinking, pattern recognition, visual spatial processing, which is far more efficient and far more accurate, you know, and then it falls into much more of a perceptual understanding, which is how they report it versus, well, this is what I read and let me, you know, and then somebody else can argue with you and say, well, I read this.

• 48:42Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to hit pause here in our conversation with Dr. Hennessy. In part two, we're going to talk about her two near death adjacent experiences and how her later understanding of physics led her to believe that there was a lot more to these experiences than what met the eye.

• 49:03Jonathan Cohen?

  We're also going to talk about precognition, what dreams you should be paying attention to. And we're going to explore the fascinating topic of acquired savant syndrome. What does it mean when someone has an injury and then experiences and gains abilities that they've never had before?

• 49:21Mayim Bialik?

  All that and more in part two of our conversation with Dr. Diane Hennessy. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time.