Part Two: 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! Learn more about The Hennacy Institute: https://hennacyinstitute.org/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See 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.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:07Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. Today, we're speaking with Dr. Diane Hennessy. This is part two of our conversation. She's a neuropsychiatrist and consciousness researcher. You might know her from the research she did on the telepathy tapes. She graduated from Johns Hopkins, taught at Harvard. She brings a scientific rigor to the study of anomalous phenomena. We're going to be speaking to her today about the near-death adjacent experiences that she had when she was a young woman. Where does consciousness go in the dream state? What dreams should we be paying attention to? And what are some shared traits found among individuals who report psychic abilities that might reveal more about what the brain is actually capable of?

• 0:47Jonathan Cohen?

  We're also going to be talking about acquired savant syndrome and the extraordinary abilities that can emerge after neurological changes, as well as the role of the gut microbiome in autism.

• 0:59Mayim Bialik?

  Enjoy part two of our conversation with Dr. Diane Hennessy.

• 1:02Speaker 02

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• 1:34Mayim Bialik?

  I got to meet one of the non-speaking individuals. He's 18 and got to spend some time with him here socially, not in an interview setting. And I noticed that there was a poetic nature to his communication. He was typing on his own. And what I was thinking is like, is this what kind of all of our inner voices sound like, right? It's thinking more in imagery and emotion. And I think also, speaking evolutionarily, this is very recent, like desks and computers and phones and things like that.

• 2:17Mayim Bialik?

  For most of human history, this is not how we lived, right? We lived close to nature. We had, yes, a lot of rituals and folktales and religious beliefs that many people don't hold to. But the structure of the development of humans as we know it, of our species, was one that was very tied to things that do not need to be written down or understood in a linear fashion. Time itself, the fabric of reality, for thousands of years, traditions have talked about, this is a projection, right? This is a shadow on the cave. Plato, the only way you live is by dying.

• 2:58Mayim Bialik?

  All these notions, that's actually our state of nature. And we then place this on it, and we meet these individuals with exceptional abilities that honestly are very in tune with the way a lot of our human history was relating.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  100%. Yeah, I would say that really, a lot of what they're doing is helping us to remember what we all used to be capable of and that we have been talked out of it. We've been educated out of it. While the brain is still plastic and developing, instead of working on these kinds of abilities, we've been, in fact, telling children, oh, no, that's impossible. Or, that's just your imagination, or whatever. And everybody wants to fit in, right?

• 3:59Speaker 03

  I mean, most people want to fit in. And socially, you want to fit in, and you're subject to peer pressure. And so you don't want people to think you're stupid or crazy, or this, or that. And so that stuff all goes underground, and it doesn't get reinforced. Our educational system became all about memorizing stuff that was totally irrelevant. Kids have been bored out the wazoo. And now with AI coming out, it's just like, well, why should I even do my homework? And it's like, you better not cheat just for the principle of it. Let's just face the facts. AI can process language extremely well.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  What we need to be doing is educating ourselves as a society to be operating out of a higher level of consciousness because the output of AI depends upon the user using it. AI will respond to the intelligence of the user. And so the more sophisticated your questions are, the better answers you get from AI. And so we need to be working on getting back to being, developing our intuition, developing our more holistic processing skills, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  And AI can handle the stuff that we've been traditionally been focusing on in schools. Let kids play again. Let them experience the arts. Let them experience the real world in a way in which they're not being told what to think. They're discovering what is.

• 5:47Jonathan Cohen?

  What do you think the existence of telepathy in the people that you study means for the rest of us? Is it that we have all just moved away from this ability? Is it re-accessible to the masses? What's your perspective on this as a potential signal for everyone else to recognize that it may be possible for them?

• 6:10Speaker 03

  I really, fully believe that this thing we're calling telepathy is there in all of us as infants, and it's how we acquire language so easily.

• 6:23Jonathan Cohen?

  We're downloading language.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, think about how rapidly a small child picks up language. And we historically have not been sitting there with a picture book, pairing the sounds coming out of my mouth with the picture and saying it over and over and over and over again. And now we move on to the next picture, and I say it over and over and over again. Instead, the kid just hangs around all these people that are just talking and interacting in the world, and they're figuring out the context. They're figuring out what all this language means without that being told, without having a dictionary. And so I think that it's because of the shared consciousness

• 7:09Speaker 03

  and the synchronization that the information about what it's about is paired with the sounds themselves, which then, without having to study the rules of grammar or the analysis of language, they just acquire it.

• 7:28Jonathan Cohen?

  It kind of makes me think, like, why don't we have more cases of people who all of a sudden know languages that they shouldn't know or haven't been exposed to? The incidence of savant abilities that you've experienced, in some ways, you would almost expect there to be more of those if the mechanism works by the information exists all around us and we're simply tapping into it.

• 7:53Mayim Bialik?

  Well, sometimes, from injury, or from stroke, or from very interesting neurosurgical procedures, things get revealed. But I'll let Dr. Hennessy speak to that.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, so we have something called acquired savant syndrome, where somebody is like, example of that is Jason Paget. He was beat up on his way home from a karaoke bar. And he went from being a salesman with no interest in mathematics to a mathematician who sees fractals all over the place. And there are people who develop frontotemporal dementia, in which they're actually losing brain tissue in their frontotemporal lobes, who start developing these musical and artistic talents. There's a doctor who was struck by lightning, who all of a sudden became this amazing composer

• 8:48Speaker 03

  and became obsessed with music. And so acquired savant syndrome does exist, which suggests there's this latent potential. And then you have to ask him, well, what's happening there? And so something's happening that's basically disrupting the filters. So you have our sensory system that is only picking up a certain bandwidth. And then you have the brain, which is through the thalamus and the frontal lobe, it's excluding a lot. It's just like, no, no, no, too much, too much, too much. And so what it's doing is it's locking us down into

• 9:31Speaker 03

  that which is relevant to the here and now and survival. Because if you were accessing all of the kinds of information that these individuals like I work with access because they don't have good filters. Then you're not, you're not real functional. What we need is the ability to know how to, you know, turn the filters, you know, like a dim switch. You know, turn it up and turn it down.

• 10:03Mayim Bialik?

  Right, like all of the things that, that we think of that make it possible to sit here and have this conversation without me freaking out that there's clothing on my body. Right? We've talked about this before. Or like, if you tune in, which, you know, any good somatic therapist will make you do this, like feel your, your seat in your chair. Right? There's a whole set of sensory information that is constantly being received. Right? Like all of these things. And when you see, or if you have a special needs child, or know anybody who is special needs, that is one of the things that you notice is that there's a distract ability. There's often a lot of fidgeting. There's a lot of, you know, self stimulation that is required. Those are things to try and regulate this lack of filtration.

• 10:47Mayim Bialik?

  And for those of us who have ADHD, right? That inability to stop scanning. Right? That inability, I mean, I have this, right? Like if there is a distract, I can usually come back, but I will pick up on every single thing. That's a difference in filtration. So imagine that on this kind of scale. But when that is released, look at all that's available. And for anyone who's had, you know, psychedelic experiences, transcendental experiences, when you lift that veil, right? When that ego is allowed to lift up, we get a taste of what that's like to be open to a different experience of consciousness.

• 11:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, and it doesn't make any sense to me that someone whose filter starts to reduce doesn't just get overwhelmed by the clothes on their body.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  I mean, these autistic children, they can't stand the tags on the clothes. They, you know, they're super, some of them run around naked, you know, because they, they can't turn off that sensation. And, you know, they don't sleep well because they even can't do it at sleep, you know? So it's, you know, it's called censor gating, you know, that ability.

• 11:56Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:05Jonathan Cohen?

  But the savant syndrome, the people who have had the acquired savant syndrome, the fact that they can all of a sudden have an injury of some kind that reduces the filter, and then get a very specific skillset, like all of a sudden you see fractals. That to me is like a little boggling because it's like, it's not that their filter had a tiny hole and magically fractals went into the hole. It's like, there was some major damage to an entire region. And instead of them, you know, having the code of reality pulled back and now seeing, you know, random letters like people do in DMT where they, you know, the laser experiment

• 16:46Jonathan Cohen?

  where now I'm like staring at the wall and I'm seeing the fabric of reality and I'm totally overwhelmed and non-functional. Like, I would think if you get a blunt force trauma to your filtering system, it's not just going to give you one magical ability. It's gonna, like, it's just, it's hard for me to understand the mechanistic things that's happening.

• 17:07Mayim Bialik?

  You know, what we're dealing with is like a really elaborate, super highway network of information that goes in a lot of different directions. And while there's not a lot of variability, meaning most of us have very similar brains, there are going to be individual differences. But we're not talking, and they've done these experiments, they're like, if you remove the thalamus, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about other systems, and there's, you know, Dr. Hennessy obviously can speak to this better than I can in terms of linguistic centers in particular. But, you know, there's a lot of mystery here, but we're not talking about like what happens if you remove the filtration system? It's not that.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say, yeah, I would just say that the filtering system is reduced. And, you know, and I think that, you know, it probably relates to, it's so similar to what people report who do psychedelics like ayahuasca and psilocybin. People who do those psychedelics, they report synesthesia. All of these kids have synesthesia. Okay, you know, they're pairing, you know, colors with, you know, with letters or numbers or, you know, you know, seeing auras around animals or people. There's over 60 forms of it. And so, so they have, you know, one or more forms of synesthesia. That's, you see that with psychedelics. They experience, they're, they have something called time blindness, where, you know, where

• 18:28Speaker 03

  they, the past, present, and the future all seem like they coexist. That's another thing that people say. They, their sense of where they are in their body, you know, or even their body's integrity and where they begin, or that, you know, you know, where, you know, where their boundaries are, you know, between them and, you know, what's out here. That gets really blurred. They, and telepathy is something that people report on psychedelics, you know, a shared consciousness. And so, it's like, there's, and if you look at where do psychedelics work? You know, where do they operate?

• 19:06Speaker 03

  They work on the 5-HT2A receptors in the thalamus, which are, and in the frontal cortex, that's the filtering gating system. And, and, and so, you're, so, so these kids, I believe, and I've got, I'm, I'm, I've got a new nonprofit institute, Hennessy Institute, and one of the things I'm doing is I'm really looking at, you know, this from a scientific standpoint to understand, you know, what's different about, I believe, the issues in their gut. You know, I think the gut biome is actually affecting their tryptophan metabolism and causing them to have, you know, compounds that are acting on these, you know, receptors

• 19:51Speaker 03

  that psychedelics do. But, you know, it's not, you know, it basically what it's doing, you know, and reducing their filters. You know, but, you know, the question to me, what is an interesting question, which is what you raised, Jonathan, is, you know, why is it that somebody gets a specific savant skill? You know, it's easier for me to understand when it's just like there's no, very little filters and it's like you're seeing all of this stuff, you know? But, but, but, but why, you know, why certain specific ones? And I don't really have the immediate answer for that, but I'm really, really interested.

• 20:27Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you tell us more about what you think is happening in the gut? What is causing, you know, someone who is autistic like that to, to have that, to have that expression? Or what do we, what are you researching in the gut specifically? I think that's a whole area because some people will claim that, you know? They've seen massive improvements with fecal transplants or other gut repair. Do you think that is a path forward for research?

• 20:53Mayim Bialik?

  There's a lot you can do before fecal transplant, though. Like, a good probiotic for kids on the spectrum can work wonders.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, they also have capsules that poop capsules, you know, that some people, you know, I mean, that sounds gross, so, you know.

• 21:07Mayim Bialik?

  Not to us. Not to us.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  When you think about how the gut biome has changed, you know, how you go in, you know, you go into some indigenous culture and, you know, they've got, you know, easily, you know, 10, 15 times the number of organisms that we do. I mean, if not more. And you think about all of the chemicals in our food that are killing off bacteria. And so you're getting this, what we call dysbiosis, when you have like overgrowth of some and, you know, an undergrowth, you know, representation of others. You've got issues with the gut leaking, you know, because you've got all this inflammation in the gut. And so, so these kids are really, you know,

• 21:53Speaker 03

  plagued with all of these gut issues.

• 21:56Mayim Bialik?

  Also, huge serotonin receptor distribution in the gut as well.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. There's, I mean, there's serotonin receptors on our, you know, platelets, there, you know, serotonin receptors, you know, in a lot of places. It's not, not just the brain. And then these kids tend to eat very restricted diets. They're, they're so sensitive to taste and smell and this and that. It's just like, you know, so you can imagine their gut biome is even more reduced. The body's gonna make, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna continue to metabolize. It works with what it has. Okay, you know, and it works with what it has. And but unfortunately, the brain's not really getting, you know, the neurotransmitters that it needs. And then it's getting, you know, it's getting, you know,

• 22:41Speaker 03

  chemicals that might look like tryptophan. Okay. But it actually, it looks like tryptophan, but it actually is something like bufatenin, which has, you know, psychedelic properties because it's, it's more potent than DMT. And so, you know, but it's, you know, it's so, so what I want to do, though, you know, this is a hypothesis. What I want to do is, you know, to study the gut biome in these children. Okay, you know, and you can do that by looking at the RNA of the species, you know, just a stool sample. Look at what the, you know, look for any overexpression there. And then also look at their genetics, because it's also the way

• 23:25Speaker 03

  that you break down these, you know, and, you know, so the genetics of neurotransmitter, you know, metabolism or, you know, creation. And then also look at, you know, their metabolites and see, is there, you know, can we look at it as a system? Okay, is it that? And look at behaviors. And if you see that, oh, they've got over an expression of these organisms, yes, you do see too much of this and not enough of that. And we link it with this behavior. So it's, it's actually, you know, it would revolutionize psychiatry to approach it that way. But it's a lot of work to do all of that analysis.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  But what it would do is it would bring psychiatry into the rest of the field of medicine, where we're not just looking at something and saying, oh, that's a syndrome. We're gonna lump all those kids together, you know, because we know there's something, you know, they regress, their behavior's abnormal. And, you know, we're just gonna put them on these drugs that affect a lot of things and don't really get to the root problem. I'm like, no, let's get to the root problem. Because, because there's some kids who, you know, they had, they had parents who really aggressively worked on trying to heal their gut. And the kid was then able to live, you know, you know, a life where they were able to actually go to college and get a job. And, you know.

• 24:52Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, this is something that is very important to me and Jonathan. We definitely talk about this a lot. And, you know, there was a lot of, you know, I don't want to get into sort of like the intricate politics of these conversations. However, when there were doctors, this is pre Make America Healthy Again. You know, this is, my kids are 20 and 17. So when my first was born and when my second were born, this was a lot of the conversation about what are we feeding our kids? And why are we seeing this rise in attachment disorders, in sensory processing disorders? Why is everyone being diagnosed autistic? Right? All of this stuff was happening. And we talk about this a lot. People often don't want to hear that there are behavioral

• 25:36Mayim Bialik?

  features, not just in children, but in adults as well, that can be significantly altered by the foods that you eat and removing foods that you ought not eat. Right? And we were raised, you know, so many of us on the standard American diet, the SAD diet, right? That's actually the acronym, right? It's the SAD diet. And, you know, people are like, oh, if you're autistic, there's nothing you can do. And then people started being accused of, you know, curing autism. And the idea is, first of all, to remove a lot of these boxes and to understand that there's a really elaborate system that can change a variety of behaviors. And, you know, all those hippie parents who were like, we don't eat food dyes. And everybody laughed at them, like, you're ridiculous. You're absurd.

• 26:20Mayim Bialik?

  All of a sudden, there's now a conversation about should we be ingesting, right? These poisonous dyes? Why has Europe banned them for dozens of years in some cases? And we're still just like eating genetically modified DNA, like in our breakfast cereal? Different story. But there was one thing that I wanted to ask you. There is a population of individuals who really love this research. And when the telepathy tapes came out, which featured some of the work, the incredible work that you do, a lot of people lost their ever-loving minds because they finally felt, heard, and understood. And these were not necessarily people who would fit the autism

• 27:00Mayim Bialik?

  diagnoses that we're talking about, but a huge swath of people who would be diagnosed as neurodivergent, or hippies, or out there, or people who believed in spirits and ghosts and angels and, you know, all these things. Many of those people felt so seen by the telepathy tapes. Can you explain the larger impact of the work that you do? Because it's fascinating to learn about the brain and all the incredible things it does. But can you explain this larger impact that you have been part of that has changed the way a lot of people understand consciousness and how we function?

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you for that question. Because I don't want people to get the impression that what I'm saying is that these are the only kids that can do this. Okay, I mean, I get, I get emails, you know, and, you know, have people come up to me when I speak at a conference all the time, of people thanking me, saying, boy, your work is really, you know, validating, you know, what my experience has been. But I've had to be silent. They're not silent because they don't have the ability to speak. They've been silenced because they, we live in a society that pathologizes these experiences. And, you know, or, you know, pathologizes them either psychiatrically or demonizes them out of religion. You know, oh, you must be possessed by demons. Right?

• 28:24Speaker 03

  And, and so, so whatever it is, you know, the dogma is, you know, that, that makes somebody feel like they're gonna be a pariah, they, they stay silent. And so, so the reason why I focused on the autistic individuals is not because I thought that they were the only ones. It was because of that statement in science that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And we already have, you know, well over 120 years of the type of experiments, looking at people that have these kinds of abilities and showing that, yeah, it's statistically significant, you know? And, and this is, you know, commonly reported, you know?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  And, and it's part of many cultural traditions and yada, yada, yada, yada. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm just like, well, who is it that can do it? Who can come forward and provide the extraordinary evidence? If anybody could do it, it would be one of these individuals. That's where I'm coming from.

• 29:30Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you tell us about your personal supernatural experiences? You had, I guess, what would be called a near-death adjacent? Or a death-adjacent experience at 13?

• 29:43Speaker 03

  I have an older brother who, you know, one of his favorite things to do growing up was to, you know, you know, do things to antagonize a little cis, right? So one of the things he did was he took me, he and his friend took me out in a canoe on the river, without life jackets or any of that. And I had never been taught how to swim. And, and I was screaming, I can't swim, I can't swim. And my brother, he thought it was funny, and his friend thought it was funny, they tipped the canoe. And I went down and I was drowning. And I had my life, a life review. I mean, at the time, I didn't know what to call it. But it was just like my life just kind of flashed before my eyes.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  And yet, I, and I also had this peaceful kind of acceptance that, oh, I'm dying, you know, and I know my mother will be upset. But, you know, it's, you know, ah, you know, I'm, you know, I just won't come home for dinner. And then the next thing I know, you know, somebody who had witnessed it, went in, who had worked as a lifeguard and just happened to be down at the river that afternoon, he, he went in, found me and rescued me and saved my life. And it wasn't until years later that I heard the saying, you know, life review and near-death experience. And I was like, oh, so that's what that was.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  And so then I, I go to, I go to this conference where some, you know, Phyllis PMH Atwater is talking about her research on near-death experiences. And she's studied thousands of people, including children. And I'm listening to her lecture. And she puts up this list of characteristics of people who have had a near-death experience. And I'm, you know, I'm looking at that list. And these are, some of them are psychological and some of them are actually physical in nature. And I'm looking at this list and it's like, I don't know, about 16 things or so.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  I'm looking at it, I'm going, damn, I have, I have practically every one of those. And so, so I spoke with her afterwards. And, but what's interesting is that I didn't develop all of those until I had my second experience.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  And but that was not one in which I would, you know, it was dying, you know, or died and, you know, was brought back to life. And that one, it was that it was while I was applying to medical school and I was crossing the street and somebody, you know, and, you know, came, came, um, came down the one-way street, um, the wrong way and, you know, and the last thing I remember is stepping off the curb. And the next thing I remember is coming to a hospital on a neurosurgery floor with a severe concussion. And I'd been unconscious for several hours. And I had no idea, I have no recall of what

• 32:57Speaker 03

  happened during those several hours. But I felt somehow profoundly different. And that profound difference that I felt, I was like, I was just like scratching my head. I was just like, what? What is this? I feel, I don't know, you know, I don't even know what to label this thing. And then I was like, oh, my God, like, I believe in God. And I was like, well, wait a minute, how can I believe in God, you know, because I was raised an atheist. I was raised with no religion at all. I'm like, how can I believe in God, you know? And then I remembered that the night before, when I was in this advanced math class, this, this woman sitting next to me said, oh, where are you going

• 33:41Speaker 03

  to graduate school in math? And I said, I'm not going to graduate school in math. She said, oh, but you're so talented. You're really gifted in math. How could you throw away your gift that God gave you? And I said, oh, you believe in God? I said, you got this far in math and you believe in God? She said, you've got this far in math and you don't believe in God? And we got into this discussion. And I ended up saying, oh, I wish I believed in God, but it'll never happen. And then it's the next morning that I get, um, knocked unconscious. And then I have this feeling, but I had nothing to connect it with. But it was after that experience that I saw that there were a lot of similarities with, uh, you know, with, with the sequelae of, um, of near-death experiences.

• 34:25Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:46Mayim Bialik?

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• 36:00Jonathan Cohen?

  So when you come back, it's just this feeling that shifts? You don't have any, you know, memories that surface after the fact of being there?

• 36:09Speaker 03

  I had no memories at all. And so, you know, after I finished my medical training, then I spent time studying all of these different spiritual traditions to see if there was anything that could, could, you know, some kind of framework that would, would fit. And, um, and, you know, I was looking for universals, you know, are there, you know, are there any things that all religions believe in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, it's really, you know, it brought me into, um, you know, things like Buddhism and, um, and the Vedantas and, and looking basically at Eastern traditions. There were people

• 36:53Speaker 03

  from those traditions that physicists from the early 1900s were meeting with on a regular basis because they saw that they were describing the same reality. And I, so, so because of my background in mathematics and, you know, and doing, you know, biophysics and my brother being a physicist and all of that, it, it made sense to me that they came from, you know, these different, you know, um, totally different backgrounds. But, you know, one of them, you know, hard science, mathematics, you know, physics, you know, and then the other one, you know, the, the ultimate, you know, intuitive mystic path, and they're

• 37:34Speaker 03

  describing reality the same way. And, which is the same way that these autistic individuals I work with describe reality. So, so that's kind of what I've done with it in a nutshell.

• 37:44Jonathan Cohen?

  Can we talk a little bit about dreams and precognition? Have you done any research into either the symbols and meanings of dreams, or people being able to access the larger field of information through dreams, and/or people who have, or seemingly have precognitive experiences, either in dreams or otherwise?

• 38:08Speaker 03

  I've been interested in dreams for a long time. You know, and dreams are a window to the, you know, unconscious. And, you know, and, and so, and analyzing dreams, that's something that I do. I, you know, I was practicing psychotherapist for 40 years. Um, and I'm, you know, very much into, you know, Jungian, you know, uh, psychology and understanding archetypes. When I was like writing my book, The ESP Enigma, you know, one of the things that I asked myself, you know, it's kind of as a thought experiment, was, you know, what, you know, what is, what would be the, you know, the shared physiology

• 38:48Speaker 03

  that, you know, that basically seems to be, you know, um, common to those who report psychic abilities the most? Yeah. And, and, and so, you know, I ran into the, you know, this literature that talked about how, um, that it's during, um, dreaming sleep that lots of individuals, countless individuals have had precognitive experiences, even though they wouldn't call themselves psychic ordinarily. But in the dreaming state, you know, they had these abilities. And then I found out about the dream research that had been done, you know, by parapsychologists. And, um, I was like, well, what is the, you know, what

• 39:32Speaker 03

  is the functional, you know, brain imaging, you know, tell us about the dream state? And I looked at it, and what I saw was that the left hemisphere, which is, you know, the language, you know, logical-based hemisphere during dreaming sleep, it's, it's not, it's not dominant the way it is in waking life. You know, the, the activity there is reduced, and it's the right hemisphere that's dominant, which is the intuitive, um, stall processing side. And then the other thing is during dreaming sleep, the frontal lobes, which, you know, you know, play a role in our expectations, uh, the frontal lobes are also reduced. You

• 40:12Speaker 03

  know, they're, you know, they're, the frontal lobes are reduced in ADD, you know, um, and, um, and in small children. And, you know, in terms of their activity, that, you know, they're not totally hooked up to the rest of the brain in, in children. And so I was just like, oh, and children report these abilities, you know, and some people outgrow them. And then I thought about, oh, well, Savant syndrome, you know, oh, that's like, you know, increased pattern recognition, you know, right hemisphere, and, you know, visual spatial, you know, visual, you know, right hemisphere. Where are their deficits? Oh, in language, you know? And it's, I just kept seeing this pattern over and over again. And I presented it at the Science of Consciousness Conference back in 2005, you know, that

• 40:54Speaker 03

  basically, you know, what you're seeing with, um, with these savants, you know, and, you know, and with psychic abilities, is the reversal of the usual waking state, uh, brain dominance, you know, or, you know, which areas are the most active. And so then when I thought, you know, well, who is it that then, you know, would be most likely to, in a waking state, express that kind of reverse dominance? And I thought, oh, it would be autistic children and other things about them, like, you know, you find perfect pitch in them more frequently. So you've got a high fidelity of, you know, so even though you've got reduced filtering

• 41:35Speaker 03

  of signal, yeah, I mean, reduced filtering of, you know, um, information, you have higher fidelity of signal.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  And you have this ability for them to become oftentimes, you know, really just kind of hyper-focused on one thing. So just all of these different characteristics that I knew would make them the most likely candidates.

• 42:00Mayim Bialik?

  I have a very strong passion for The Premonitions Bureau, which was a book by Sam Knight about, you know, this entire field of study largely based out of the UK that was trying to figure out why certain people, most of whom were in mental health facilities, right? And had been locked up and deemed unable to function in the real world. The Premonitions Bureau was two psychiatrists in particular who were collecting information to try and figure out why certain people had premonitions about all sorts of things. Many of them did not happen, but some of them did with such specificity. And this is something that Elizabeth Krone, when she was struck by lightning as a young mother

• 42:44Mayim Bialik?

  just on her merry way in Texas in the late 80s, when she returned from her near-death experience, this was one of the things that started happening. And she was a non-believer in things like auras, the next life, after-death communication. And she started getting images. She said they were not nightmares and they were not dreams. But when she was in that kind of theta state, she was receiving very specific information, which she started timestamping. A lot of things that she saw did not come true, but some of the things came true with a specificity that can only be described as that information was out there, right? And she was able to pull it. That's what is so interesting.

• 43:26Mayim Bialik?

  And, you know, your research and all of the work that you've done, you know, has been such an important focus and cornerstone for opening this conversation, not just in autism, but in the larger understanding of how the brain works and what happens when it doesn't work the way we think it should.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, thank you.

• 43:45Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah. She walked so we could run, Jonathan.

• 43:48Jonathan Cohen?

  She walked so well. I think maybe the most common experience people have is like dreaming of someone. And then that person will be like, either you call or you email. You haven't messaged in a long time. And you're like, oh, I can't believe I'm talking to you. Oh, I kind of even forgot I had this dream about you a couple of weeks ago. And I think people wonder, like, is that a form of telepathic communication? Where we've left our waking consciousness and then we're wandering around this other world in some way and communicating?

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Rather than thinking of it, because when you start, you know, when you label things like that as telepathy, then people want to know, well, what's the mechanism? You know, how's that, you know, la, la, la, la. And people get all caught up in that kind of thing. The way that I would say is that I really believe that we are all part of a greater whole. Okay? And, you know, and so that, you know, there is this interconnectedness that that kind of experience reminds us that we, you know, that there is that kind of interconnectedness. It doesn't have to be a signal going from one to the other.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  It's more that we're part of the same, you know, like tribe or social security. Yeah, network, yeah, yeah. We're part of the same thing.

• 45:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you think there are any dreams that are maybe more poignant to pay attention to? Like, they signify a pattern of like, hey, be aware of this, or this may indicate more prophetic intention? What should people be aware of?

• 45:29Speaker 03

  When you have a dream that has a certain quality to it, there's a, when the dream is, when the dream has a certain, like, leaves you with like a strong, you know, like, feeling, okay? I think it's important to pay attention to that and try to, you know, remember. You have to think about your dream immediately. I mean, you know, because it'll slip into the ether if you don't. And, and, because when it leaves that profound of an impression on you, there's information in that dream. Now, the information in that dream, you have to unpack it because some of it could be purely symbolic

• 46:14Speaker 03

  and, you know, and not be, you know, a representation of something precise, literally, that's going to happen in the future. Sometimes it is a representation of things that literally happen in the future. I mean, there are a number of people that have these dreams that then later on, they're in the circumstances that that dream was about, and they are able to handle the situation better. Like, there's this famous guy who, you know, kept having this recurrent dream of, you know, being in a laboratory where somebody's, you know, had a chemical accident where like, you know, this chemical landed in their eyes. And you've got to act back, you know, to prevent, you know, yourself from losing your sight, you know?

• 46:58Speaker 03

  And it was one of those things where he had that dream enough times that he was able to act, you know, immediately.

• 47:03Mayim Bialik?

  It was practice, right? His brain was practicing.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Because what we practice in our dreams, we can implement it. It, you know, it builds whatever that is the same way that doing it in, you know, in real life can do it. And so, so I think that if a dream is recurrent or it leaves some kind of impression on you, you really need to analyze it, record it, and start to learn more about your specific dreaming pattern. You know, because some people, their dreams tend to be more symbolic, you know? And, and learn more about, you know, the symbolism. There's a certain amount of symbolism that, you know, we all share. But there's a certain amount of symbolism that's a bit idiosyncratic. So you have to figure out, you know, what the symbols mean for you.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  So it's, it's a real art. It's one of my favorite things to do as a psychoanalyst.

• 47:55Mayim Bialik?

  You began studying autism, you know, in the 1980s. I think the prevalence of autism was 1 in 10,000. You know, setting over-diagnosis aside, setting this gigantic umbrella aside, right? Where a lot of people who, you know, we used to, we're not, we don't call it high-functioning anymore, but, you know, in terms of the different kinds, right, of individuals and different kinds of challenges and abilities that we see, you know, the estimate is more like 1 in 30. And as you said, it used to be a very unusual thing to encounter, in particular, non-speaking individuals. And now, you know, this is not just because of over-diagnosis and some of the rise, you know, and you've talked about this,

• 48:40Mayim Bialik?

  increased C-section rates, ultrasound during pregnancy, dietary changes, which you've talked about that affect the microbiome, even, you know, Wi-Fi, electromagnetic field, widespread chemical exposure, also the ingestion, right? Of all of these chemicals and genetically modified fragments. I wonder if you can kind of close out here by contrasting, right? All of the things that we may be doing that are contributing to this increase and also, conversely, this incredible opening we have because of these things to understand different ways of processing information. It's giving us such a window, right, into consciousness.

• 49:23Mayim Bialik?

  Can you talk a little bit about that complexity of how we may be, you know, in some cases, creating an environment that is, you know, really making all of these challenges present, but it's also an opening to try and understand better how we get here?

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there's so many ways in which these, these individuals, these autistic individuals are really a gift to humanity. And, and one of the reasons why I say that is because they, you can look at, you know, what are they teaching us, okay? They're teaching us about, you know, they're showing us evidence for innate human abilities that we've forgotten or, and that have been literally suppressed, okay? So, you know, that's just a real, you know, plus for humanity, right? They're, they're showing us, you know, other ways in which we can, you know, process information.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  And a lot of them, you know, want to contribute to science. And they have, you know, this ability to have insights into things that, you know, that, you know, that have helped scientists already. And so, you know, yet at the same time, they're very medically ill, most of the ones, the ones with severe autism. I mean, you know, they have a lot of physical pain. They, you know, a lot of gut issues, headaches, you know, just, you know, they get overstimulated easily, you know? So there's a, there's a real downside for them and their experience.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  And I truly believe that the two don't have to go together, okay? And so when people talk, they put down parents who want to see, you know, their children get better. They, they, they get upset, you know? They're like, oh, you know, you're talking about curing autism. And they put them down. And it's not, the way I would say it is, it's not the autism from the standpoint of neurodivergency that needs to be cured. In fact, we need it, okay? I welcome it. It's their medical comorbidities that needs to get addressed

• 51:51Speaker 03

  so that they can be having more of the kinds of lives that, you know, so they can be freed from that and have the life that they want to live.

• 52:00Mayim Bialik?

  We're so grateful, you know, to get to talk to you and to get to learn more about your work and your path and all of the incredible research, you know, that has obviously been brought to so many people's attention because of the telepathy tapes. But your body of work is obviously so much more vast and diverse. And we're just so grateful we got to speak with you.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

• 52:24Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you, Dr. Hennessy.

• 52:29Mayim Bialik?

  Do you need me to explain a little bit about the brain? Do you want a brain lesson? I think you're picturing the brain as this sort of like...

• 52:39Jonathan Cohen?

  There's a dam?

• 52:39Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Jonathan Cohen?

  And then that's how the filter stays out? And then you hit it? And then a whole gush of water comes through? But sometimes only the fractals.

• 52:48Mayim Bialik?

  I'm glad that my answer was the same as a real, you know, practicing person who does these things. Because we don't really know.

• 52:56Jonathan Cohen?

  It's always the answer.

• 52:57Mayim Bialik?

  No, but one of the challenges is when we don't know something in science, what we do is we figure out how to test it. And we come up with a hypothesis. And we either prove the hypothesis or we disprove the hypothesis. So there is no reliable way to see if we can... And, you know,

• 53:16Mayim Bialik?

  decades, if not centuries, of really, really horrible animal research have elucidated a lot of things that we know about the brain, the nervous system, all these things. But it is near impossible and unethical to inflict injuries on humans to see what happens. However, as is true for the entire history of neuroscience in particular, war, war and disease often produce a tremendous amount of information that you would not get otherwise. And some of these incredible insights into how the brain works would come from very specific injuries, from explosions. Many of the incredible advances that we've seen

• 54:00Mayim Bialik?

  in understanding what region of the brain does what have come. I mean, the mapping of the understanding of the occipital lobe, it came from bullets piercing through regions of the brain in ways that people were able to be kept alive and report things. Just like the fact that the brain has no pain receptors, right? You can do open brain surgery and poke around and see what happens if we touch this? What happens if we touch that? And you have individual... I mean, there's incredible studies of violinists being asked to play while their brain is exposed to see, right? Also, I was gonna tell my dad's favorite joke.

• 54:41Jonathan Cohen?

  What's that?

• 54:41Mayim Bialik?

  A guy's going in for brain surgery and he says to the doctor, "Will I be able to play the piano after this?" And the doctor says, "Of course you will, don't worry." And the guy says, "That's good, I couldn't play before."

• 54:52Jonathan Cohen?

  So here's a question. And I know the research is not possible to do on human beings. But if all the information is available and some sort of crazy injury could create a savant...

• 55:06Mayim Bialik?

  What do you mean, "all the information's available"? In the universe?

• 55:08Jonathan Cohen?

  In the universe.

• 55:09Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 55:10Jonathan Cohen?

  Like, that's potentially a presupposition to the fact that you get an injury and now you can know a language or an amazing mathematician or somehow. Like, it would not be so crazy to think that you stick a Neuralink chip in your brain

• 55:28Mayim Bialik?

  Or a stimulation device, yeah.

• 55:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Or some sort of stimulation and control, turn up and down

• 55:32Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so...

• 55:33Jonathan Cohen?

  Some form of activity. And now, all of a sudden, I'm able to do Kung-Fu.

• 55:37Mayim Bialik?

  So one of the...

• 55:39Mayim Bialik?

  That only happens in The Matrix. He literally wants to learn Kung-Fu.

• 55:43Jonathan Cohen?

  Because he got his brain tickled. And now he knows the language and you're able to do things.

• 55:47Mayim Bialik?

  I think that even... So one of the examples we have of this, and I'm sure that there are better ones, but I'm not a current practicing neuroscience student or neurologist. But there's something called DBS, deep brain stimulation.

• 55:59Jonathan Cohen?

  Yep.

• 55:59Mayim Bialik?

  And it's like a... This was when I was in college. This is already many years ago. And it was like an electrode that was dropped in. I think it was for Parkinson's. And turning it on, right, would eliminate... I think it was tremors, something like that. But many regions of the brain, I think this is what's important for us all to sort of think about. Many regions of the brain, they're not just on-off switches. Stimulation, right? If we think about electrical stimulation, because the entire brain is coated by electrical stimulation, right? Meaning, the release of neurotransmitter comes from electrical stimulation being propagated down axons and all these things. So the notion that stimulation would produce one thing is simply not true. Because you have all these inhibitory circuits.

• 56:43Mayim Bialik?

  So it could be that stimulation actually shuts things down and everything is connected. It's like the biggest freeway interchange that you can imagine, like trillions of times. So it's not always that we know, "Oh, if we touch this..." And sure, there are amygdala studies where it's like, "When we press this, the monkey is scared." Absolutely. But for many of these systems, they are systems, especially when it's anything emotional, that kind of processing and it's linked to hippocampal memory. There's so much variability. Just like an animal that's traumatized will behave differently from an animal that's not traumatized. And to what, or even humans, right? If you're a person with post-traumatic stress disorder, right? When a fire engine goes by, it's a very different experience than if you don't have post-traumatic stress disorder

• 57:28Mayim Bialik?

  and a fire engine goes by. It's that kind of thing. The same stimulus is not necessarily going to be replicable from individual to individual. And same with damage. And I think that's... I'm really glad that she talked about this sort of intricacy because there's many unnatural things that we think have led to the rise in autism presentation, especially the kind that she's talking about. And at the same time, it has produced this conversation and this opening for us to understand the brain in ways that we hadn't before. And I'm not gonna say that it's... That all the damage we've done to the environment and to the placental environment, all these things, is in any way positive.

• 58:12Mayim Bialik?

  But it is fascinating that it's opened up an entire field that is giving us more insight into how the brain and the nervous system work. But also, like a window into the nature of consciousness and reality.

• 58:26Jonathan Cohen?

  So much to unpack in this episode. It will be a lively conversation over on Substack. If you're interested in checking out the community and connecting with us and the larger Breaker audience, come by MindBee Alex Breakdown on Substack.

• 58:39Mayim Bialik?

  From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.