CIA Mind Control, MKUltra & Energy Weapons Are Real: Why A Pentagon Advisor Won’t Rule Out Telepathy

What if the next battlefield isn't physical, but your brain? In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. James Giordano (Professor Emeritus of Neurology and Biochemistry, Chair Emeritus of the Neuroethics Studies Program at Georgetown University Medical Center, served as the consulting neuroscientist on research into the original cases of Havana Syndrome) explores the rapidly evolving world of neuroscience, cognitive warfare, biowarfare, electromagnetic technologies, consciousness, and the ethical questions shaping the future of humanity. Dr. Giordano examines why he believes the threat of biowarfare deserves far more public attention, revealing examples of biological technologies that could potentially be used to target individuals and discussing how they may influence brain function, physiology, and perception. He also unpacks the history of covert CIA programs like MKUltra and Operation Artichoke, whose objectives included investigating whether people could be involuntarily controlled, hypnotized, or coerced into acting against their own will - including carrying out assassinations. We dive into the science behind electromagnetic frequencies, explaining how electromagnetic energy interacts with neurological systems, how these technologies have become dramatically smaller, more precise, and more portable, and their potential military applications, from disrupting drones and aircraft to crowd-control technologies. Dr. Giordano also explains how sound waves can disorient the nervous system, why symptoms such as headaches and dizziness may vary so widely between individuals, the controversial discussion surrounding microplastics and electrical conductivity, whether visual stimuli can disrupt neurological function, and how Faraday cages may protect against certain electromagnetic energies. Beyond emerging technologies, the discussion explores one of today's biggest questions: Is cognitive warfare already happening through social media algorithms? Dr. Giordano examines how information environments can shape perception, influence decision-making, and potentially become tools of modern conflict. The conversation expands into the frontiers of neuroscience and consciousness, asking whether some individuals possess neurological architectures that enable extraordinary cognitive abilities, how life experiences, trauma, and brain structure influence perception, why entheogens may facilitate profound spiritual experiences, whether neurophysiology can help explain reports of telepathy or remote viewing, and whether quantum processes could play a role in brain function and what those implications might be if they do. Finally, Dr. Giordano tackles the ethics of modern warfare itself: What is truly permissible in war conducted in the name of defense, freedom, or God? How do societies determine who the real enemies are? And why does he believe that when scientists lose their curiosity, they stop being scientists? Whether you're interested in neuroscience, military technology, psychology, consciousness, philosophy, national security, or the future of humanity, this conversation will challenge your assumptions and leave you questioning far more than you expected! For a limited time, get $250 off Cove Pure water filtration at http://www.covepure.com/breakdown Every self-made person started somewhere. Yours starts free at https://www.shopify.com/breakdown. Go to https://helixsleep.com/breakdown to receive up to 30% off your Helix mattress. Visithttps://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN http://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN and get a FREE AG1 Flavor Sampler and a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3 + K2 in your Welcome Kit with your first AG1 subscription order. Dr. James Giordano's book, Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense: Practical Considerations, Neuroethical Concerns: https://a.co/d/02ohTd4o 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.

• 0:00Mayim Bialik?

  Explain how telepathy, remote viewing could be seen as natural phenomenon.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  The brain could be a receiver, like an antenna. What's it capturing? Is it capturing something fundamental? Is it truly telepathic or individuals picking up on a variety of different information? Subtle cues that others may not.

• 0:19Mayim Bialik?

  Neuroscientist Dr. James Giordano is an expert in covert and neurochemical warfare. How serious is the threat of bio warfare?

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Very. Drugs, bugs, toxins. The last domain is devices. Something as subtle as changing the flicker index of the screen that you're looking at can be used to change neurological functions.

• 0:42Mayim Bialik?

  This could be literally on an unconscious level.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Directed energy devices can be used in ways that people don't even know.

• 0:49Mayim Bialik?

  I could be walking about and from 30, 40 or 50 meters away, someone could be directing electromagnetic frequency into my brain.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  We already know these types of devices exist.

• 0:58Mayim Bialik?

  We don't know this exists. You're acting like everybody knows.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  There have been news reports of crowd control in a number of different European cities that have used various forms of sonic energy to disrupt the crowd. We've seen that before. It happened in the Soviet Union.

• 1:13Mayim Bialik?

  I'm supposed to ever leave this room again?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Something like AI can be targeted utilizing information, social media. In some ways, that's the old school propaganda cognitive warfare. Increases vulnerability, volatility, and perhaps even prompts violence.

• 1:28Mayim Bialik?

  How worried should I be?

• 1:36Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:38Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:39Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown. Today, we're going to be talking with someone who has a foot in two very different and very important worlds. One is a field close to my heart, neuroscience, neurology, neuroethics even. The other foot that he has in the game is working with the government, with CIA, with NATO, with DARPA, and with the Pentagon. He's the guy the government goes to to find out what is going on with cognitive and neurochemical warfare? How do we stop it? How do we prevent it? And what does it mean for our safety? Dr. Giordano is the professor emeritus of neurology and biochemistry and chair emeritus

• 2:21Mayim Bialik?

  of the neuroethics studies program at Georgetown University Medical Center. He's also the chair emeritus of the neurotechnology and ethics project of the IEE brain initiative. And he served as a senior scientific advisor to the National Academies for Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Dr. Giordano is going to cover everything from CIA mind control research, Project Artichoke, which we had never heard of, to the possibility for electromagnetic frequency weapons being used, sonic weapons, sonar weapons. In addition, what is the future battlefield? And where does the brain fall into that?

• 2:58Jonathan Cohen?

  We also discuss telepathy, remote viewing, quantum consciousness, and what the brain actually does.

• 3:06Mayim Bialik?

  And Dr. Giordano is a fantastic person to ask about the feasibility of telepathy, remote viewing, people who see angels, people who say they've been abducted by aliens. Where does this fit into our understanding of reality? How we interface with a consciousness field? It's a very, very candid and really enjoyable conversation that we're so excited to bring to you.

• 3:29Jonathan Cohen?

  Also, right near the end, he answers some very practical questions about Wi-Fi and 5G. Is it impacting us? What should we consider? And how do we protect our homes?

• 3:40Mayim Bialik?

  It's a pleasure to welcome to the Breakdown Dr. James Giordano.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Break it down. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 3:48Mayim Bialik?

  For people who may not know who you are, explain to us both your work as an academic and then sort of what your current role encompasses.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  I've spent about the past 35 to 40 years of my life in academia as a researcher. I was trained as a neuroscientist, both a molecular neuroscientist and cognitive neuroscientist. And then when I did postdoctoral training in neuro pharmacology, neuropathology, and neurotoxicology. And so the focus of my academic career was as a professor, as a scientist. And that focus was deeply in mechanisms of how the brain operates in terms of cognition, emotion, behavior, with specific emphasis on how the brain processes both pain and pleasure, and then how pain and pleasure could be operative in moral decision making and action. But as a consequence of doing a lot of my work, I'm also prior military service of

• 4:38Speaker 01

  the Navy and Marine Corps, became very involved with the use of neuroscience and biosciences and biotechnologies in various ways that could be weaponized, specifically in terms of what we would need to do for biosafety, biosecurity, bio defense. So since 1995, when I was out of the military, I've served as a senior scientific advisor to the Pentagon, NATO, to the World Health Organization, and most recently to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. My current position is that I serve as the director of a center at the National Defense University, and that center is focused on strategic deterrence of bio warfare and how biological agents and technologies can be used as weapons of mass destruction and disruption.

• 5:22Mayim Bialik?

  Even as someone who studied neuroscience, like bio warfare was always like in the periphery of my consciousness. I wasn't one of those people who was actively thinking about biological warfare or the brain as the battlefield. And there are certain countries that we have heard about. We might be one of them, but other countries that many of us have heard about that during some of the wars that we have fought, that the United States has fought, that there was evidence and cases of this. How serious is the threat of bio warfare? Like, how worried should I be?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Very, very worried. And to your earlier point, actually, no, the United States has not been engaged in bio warfare. We were one of the primary signatories of the Biological Toxins and Weapons Convention and Chemical Weapons Convention, and also aspects of both declarations of Helsinki and Geneva Convention, the United States has both ratified and adhered to. And so we do not have biological agents or weapons, both defensive or offensive program. But you're absolutely right. I mean, in terms of those countries that have signed and ratified those treaties, there are plenty of others that haven't. And there are plenty of those who actually have signed the treaties. But the problem with a lot of this biological and biotechnological research is that it's what we call duly usable.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  I mean, the same stuff that we can use for neurology, psychiatry, precision medicine can be flipped on its head and can be used to make precision pathologies. And of course, the newer and emerging technologies, synthetic biology, gene editing, particularly a lot of the more nascent gene editing tools like CRISPR methods that are added to the already sort of usable toolkit. Well, this just takes it one step further. And if we go into the brain sciences specifically, during the 1980s, I mean, the advances in neuroimaging that then rapidly progressed into the 90s, that then allow us to not only assess the brain, but to then access the brain, which is really a fancy way of saying targeting certain things.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  And those targets range from the cellular and synaptic all the way up to the systemic. And ultimately, manifestation of that is individuals can interact with others sort of the social level. So what's really happened is there, this is something we really do need to be not only aware of, but I would argue afraid of.

• 7:44Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan loves something to be afraid of.

• 7:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Sign me up. I love a thing to be afraid of. But the reason is that I think most people are underestimating how advanced technology can be harnessed. And what we're saying here is that the brain has a way of being targeted, accessed, and influenced, and there's a whole host of technology that we're not aware of. Can you start to break that apart for a layperson to be like, what might be in a lab right now that could be used and to target somebody?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  I think the easiest way to think about it is be very simple. Drugs, a variety of pharmacological agents. Bugs, variety of microbes, bacteria, viruses, derivatives inclusive of things like fungi, which really scare me. Toxins, and of course, we're seeing some of that now in the news. For example, the assassination of Mr. Navalny in Russia utilizing tree frog toxin that obviously was not literally milked from a tree frog, but that was synthetically biologically engineered in a laboratory to be then used locally. So a variety of organic and inorganic toxins, some of these again being found in nature, but many others now that are being able to be made in laboratories.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And those laboratories are not necessarily university laboratories, but the ease of those techniques and technologies essentially create do it yourself. So the idea of democratized science into a backyard science doesn't take a lot. And then, of course, the last domain is devices. So now we're talking about things like directed energy devices, for example, that can be used in a variety of different ways, locally, regionally, some of them being used in ways that people don't even know because they can be very covert. And then we'll go one step further when we take a look at something like AI. So the ability to understand how brains work, what areas of the brain are involved

• 9:45Speaker 01

  that individual or collective thought, feelings, decisions, and actions can then be targeted utilizing information, social media, various memes, tropes, narratives. And yeah, I mean, in some ways, that's the old school propaganda or psychological operation. But it goes beyond that because now we really understand what brain areas are involved and how we can manipulate not only psychology, but perhaps even environments, information, the way things are presented that changes how people perceive certain things, increases their vulnerability, their volatility, and perhaps even prompts them to violence or submission. And that whole area now is being referred to as cognitive warfare.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  So the idea of being able to engage the biological, the psychological, the social as part of this larger neurocognitive domain. That's real. That's not science fiction. That's science fact.

• 10:38Mayim Bialik?

  It sounds like you're describing like an episode of Scooby Doo is the best way I can explain it where there's like some like pew pew. You know, there's some like force field ghost kind of like it just, it sounds made up. I know that it's not, but if we just want to like, you know, kind of zoom in on these categories you've described, with all due respect, you've referred to every single thing that exists, meaning viruses, bacteria, like there's not a way that you have indicated that you can't try and hijack the brain.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. I mean, if you think of it, the brain is your master organ. It's the controller. It's the conduit between what happens outside of you and what happens inside of you. So if I can change any one of those processes, anywhere along that neurological axis from your fingertip all the way up to your cortex, well, then I can essentially change the way you're processing reality, what you feel, how you react. And I can get more and more sharp shot versus buckshot, given the sophistication and precision of the tools we have. And these are the tools of medicine. I mean, these are not inherently weaponized tools. So we just take the same tools that we're able to use for precision medicine and just flip them to now make more precise weapons that can target you and

• 11:53Speaker 01

  or me, but not necessarily anyone else, because we also have the availability and access to a whole host, to myriad data of individuals, medical records, their social media records.

• 12:04Mayim Bialik?

  I've given it all away. Everybody knows it's on every portal. Mindy Alex 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

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• 14:44Mayim Bialik?

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• 16:17Mayim Bialik?

  I think a lot of us didn't think about this, at least I didn't think about this really until COVID. When I thought about a virus in some lab somewhere, right? Which I always was convinced it was from a lab. And I worked in a lab where we had diseases that we plated. I literally worked in a genetics lab. I was scraping bacteria and incubating them all day. That's what we did, right? I never thought, and I guess, again, you know, that's naivete. I never thought, gosh, someone could really harness these, you know, but we also never thought people would use an airplane as a weapon, right? Until that happened. When COVID happened, I started thinking like, there's a thing in a lab and then like hashtag

• 17:00Mayim Bialik?

  the government, you know, started making me think, oh, was this planned? Was it harvested? That's, it's the stuff of movies. It's outbreak. Like, we lived a version of outbreak.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  It's outbreak. It's Andromeda strain. Take any one of the books that Michael Crichton has written and just sort of re-ground that to the factuality. You know, the great part about Mike Crichton's books is you take a look at the back and he says, look, scientist, this is based upon science, but it can literary liberty. I mean, it's what the ancient Greeks used to call idola. In other words, you take the essence of fact and you spin a tail from that so as to be able to get your audience's response, get them thinking about it. He was a master at it. But any one of those books, the books about nanotechnology and nanoscience, about genetic engineering, certainly about, about viruses, whether those viruses were manufactured in ways that are truly malign, or they just got out of the lab. And

• 17:56Speaker 01

  that's, that's, that's of course what happened with COVID. So you're absolutely right. I mean, the tools we have at our capability that are leverageable for good. The next question you have to ask is really, well, who's good? I mean, my definition may be one thing, but if you're my opponent, my definition of good might be to sort of bend you to my will, which is the impetus for warfare and conflict since time immemorial.

• 18:21Mayim Bialik?

  It's also the impetus and motivation for psychological manipulation. And, you know, some of the things that, that Jonathan and I are interested in is sort of this fine line, right? Between what the government is controlling in terms of information and what is actually going on for people. We have this very famous case of a gentleman, a Vietnam vet, I believe. And he showed up at the VA and he said, they implanted things in my brain and it's making me act violent and crazy. And they said, well, you're schizophrenic. That's what we call it. And we're going to lock you up and we're going to sedate you because that was the tools at the time. It turned out, he was actually operated on by the government with one of these like deep brain stimulation things to try and see what it would be like to manipulate his personality and make him aggressive and violent, right?

• 19:04Mayim Bialik?

  And obviously, that is not the case for every person who says the government's experimenting on me. But the fact that we have this ability to manipulate the human brain gets really, really complicated also.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  We do look back at our own history. We can take a look at a variety of projects. The one that's probably best known is MKUltra, Operation Bluebird, Operation Artichoke. You know, all of these were essentially projects that were generated because we had incipient knowledge and it sort of got into what might be called dark programs. Now, the lesson learned from that is that you need to be incredibly ethically stringent. And again, very often hindsight's 2020. But I think the takeaway from those studies is twofold. Number one, what can be done? And the palette of what can be done is expanding as a consequence

• 19:57Speaker 01

  of the scientific, methodologic, and technologic capability. And number two, who could do it? And this is where it gets really sticky because again, not all countries not only have been signatory to these, these weapons conventions and treaties, but they practice different philosophies based upon different cultures and from them come different ethics. And in some cases, those are more permissive and, and those are cultural differences. So I think appreciating what's happening on the global stage as a consequence of these technologies being so potent and so capable, really.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Prompts the need to dial up the level of scrutiny, oversight, governance and control.

• 20:40Jonathan Cohen?

  I want to get to who's doing what to make sure that we're aware of the adversaries and the potential tactics that are being deployed, because there is active cognitive warfare happening, and we need to unpack that a little bit in this episode. But before that, you mentioned Bluebird and Project Artichoke. I think a lot of people are familiar with MKUltra, but can you walk us through Bluebird and Artichoke?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a generally, those are precursor studies. The idea there was what do we know about physiology and what do we know about the brain and what kind of things might be targetable? Artichoke had originally begun as a US military project. That was a Department of Defense project, and then those were taken over by the intelligence community. So those were primarily done by CIA. The issue there was that there was some handoff early on, and we're talking about late 1940s, 1950s into the 60s. And then, of course, as you get through MKUltra, that gets even further along. So, you know, many of these, these experimental protocols were actually developed and designed from certain concepts, and in some cases, really incipient studies and interventions that happened during Hitler's Germany time.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  The idea of being able to access the brain and therefore affect the mind through a variety of drugs, through environmental deprivation and so forth. Well, a lot of those were taken from that. So even the idea of something like MKUltra, it was a play on words, where the MK was mind control. And then the Ultra was let's go one step beyond some of those early ideas that were pioneered during the 40s, during the Hitler's Germany time, and then ultimately into the early 1950s. But let's back out of that for a moment, because the other thing that's really important to appreciate is that the impetus for those studies was that there had been some intelligence that our Cold War peer competitors and adversaries were deeply involved with projects that were

• 22:33Speaker 01

  even further along than those.

• 22:35Mayim Bialik?

  Like what?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  If we look at some of the former work that was done in the Soviet Union, utilizing things like environmental or circumstantial isolation, the ability to develop certain drugs, the ability to utilize electromagnetic frequencies or sound to be able to corrupt neural node network activity. And then, of course, certainly some of the work that had gone on, at least tentatively in North Korea, the whole idea of the quote Manchurian candidate, was it real or was it not? Was it suspected? Was there real evidence of that? And of course, this was primarily holding prisoners in isolation, sensory deprivation, housing them under really deprived conditions to be able to not only break their will, but to change their cognition and make them more vulnerable to a whole host of different influences.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  So the idea that these things could be done, for example, the prisoners of war, then became part of the mindset to say, well, what do we need to do to counter that? And if we need to understand how to counter that, well, how do these things work? So they sort of went in that kind of sort of lateral direction as to what works, what doesn't. But the other issue that kept coming up over and over again is that our international peer competitors, as we're moving through the 70s, 80s, beyond the Cold War, the wall has come down, now we have access to what was formerly Soviet science, and we understand that there was scientific and technological exchange, for example, between the former Soviet Union and China.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Well, these countries not only had great access to science and technology based upon their desire to become technologically capable in the global market, but they too recognized that, well, these could be governmentalized, and as a consequence, could be used for military and intelligence purposes. So this is where you're really seeing that dual usability come to the fore.

• 24:26Mayim Bialik?

  It's a little bit complicated when we talk about, you know, you mentioned different philosophies, different cultures. Like, it's very hard, especially for those of us in like the Western world, right? To imagine that there might be governments who spend a tremendous amount of time devising ways to control their own people. You know, how do we have a democratic conversation about what's acceptable in terms of warfare? Because there's plenty of horrible and disgusting things that every government does, right? In the name of defense, in the name of protection, in the name of freedom even, right? In the name of God.

• 25:05Mayim Bialik?

  And yet we have this entire class of warfare that, you know, in many cases, can feel a little bit arbitrary as to who gets to decide who the real enemy is.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  If you take a look at the, what I would consider to be the commonly accepted guardrails on warfare, I mean, on one hand, you've got things that are longstanding. So for example, the idea of just war principles, Augustinian just war principles. What represents valid representation or justification to engage in war? What then represents validity of conduct during the scope of war? And then you also have some derivative principles. One of the ones that's very often overlooked is what is justifiable so as to avoid warfare? The idea of what's called us contra bellum. Then, of course, you actually have rules of engagement within the conduct of warfare by international signatory conventions and treaties. What is allowable within the scope of warfare?

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Well, you know, if that's sort of the framework, if those are the cornerstones, then, you know, what you have to realize is those provide relative duties and rules. But very often, in the heat of the engagement, in the heat of conduct, you also have to take a look at individuals' moral compass and what happens under, if you will, the strain of fire or whatever that may entail and obtain. And then you got to go one step further, and you say, what would then represent things that would be defensible in defense of one's cannon kiff? So here too, I think what one needs to do is to have a really granular lens to be able to say, all right, what are the moral precepts that these group of individuals are using?

• 26:45Speaker 01

  And then how are there ethical systems that instantiate that and put that into practical use? And then how governed, how stringent are those ethics being maintained in those circumstances and situations that are the real world, so to speak?

• 27:01Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that you mentioned was, I think about electromagnetic frequency. Now, this is something that obviously is spoken about in certain realms of science. And then there's this huge gap, and then people talk about it in terms of like, I can't concentrate, there's too many EMFs in this city. Can you, can you explain to us what electromagnetic frequency is? And, you know, there are certain things that we can't talk to you about, but I think it's worth mentioning that when people talk about Havana syndrome, this is one of the things people talk about. Is it possible that there's some sort of frequency that's being like, again, like pew, pew, you know, zapped into people's brains and nervous systems?

• 27:43Mayim Bialik?

  You know, I'm asking you, because I really like, I'm not asking for a friend, like, what is going on with electromagnetic frequency? And how do you literally harness that? And how is it even administered?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  In general, I mean, as a neuroscientist, what you realize is the brain is an electrochemical organ. And, you know, when I went to school a gazillion years ago, we used to think that one nerve cell produces one and only one neurotransmitter that it releases from its terminal branch. Well, that's, that's old, that was called Dale's principle. And we learned that as sacrosanct. Advances in the technologies that allow us to assess the brain and intervene in the brain have done away with that concept. And the brain, as you know, works far more like Wi-Fi than it does sort of like a single toe bone, foot bone, leg bone set of connections. So you're getting multidirectional connectivity within even a single group of neurons that then aggregate together and form clicks.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  And the way these neurons work is through graded electrochemical gradients, electrochemical sort of currents. But we also know that the electromagnetic capability of the brain also has weak magnetic fields that are sensitive to weak magnetic fields. And now there's budding information that has grown off of some older theories that has now been justified by virtue of some very sophisticated technological work to even suggest that there may be what appear to be quantum processes, at least at a very small level, that are some way translated into more mechanical, physical properties within the actual structures and functions of a brain. So that's a lot of energy existing in that communicative system.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  It's also, as you know, as a brain scientist, delicately sensitive. I mean, what I would tell my students is if you actually take a look at even a single nerve cell, what you're looking at is an elephant riding a unicycle balancing on the head of a pin. So that delicate nature of that can leave it very, very vulnerable. Now, the way brains basically work is they shut out a lot of noise. Neurological systems are really noisy, a lot of stuff going on all the time. So the elegance of a neurological system is to sort of filter things out, kind of the way a stereo system would. I mean, when you dial in your favorite channel, you're not dialing the channel in, what you're really doing is you're band passing everything else out. That's exactly what neurological systems do.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  So if you were to hit a neurological system with electromagnetic current frequencies across a various range of intensities, you might be able to get some resonance within the network and disrupt that network. And we've known that for a long time. We know exposure to various electrical currents. I mean, clearly, the idea that you can electrocute someone and short circuit their nervous system.

• 30:33Mayim Bialik?

  Getting struck by lightning?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  I mean, there are also far greater sensitivities, and those sensitivities exist at very, very small levels of different types of electromagnetic energy. And as you know, we're tuned, as individuals, we're tuned. You know, we have this old phrase in the brain science, C1 brain, C1 brain. And for some individuals, the architecture of that brain and the physiology of their nervous system, coupled with a variety of whole host of other things, developmental things, environmental things, render them far more sensitive to electromagnetic frequencies and amplitudes than others. And that can have pretty profound health effects, health effects on the way the energy production occurs, not only in nerve cells, but in almost any conducting cells, including, for example, cardiac muscle.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  They can affect the autonomic system. And as a consequence, exposure to a variety of frequencies to which somebody may be sensitive could really make them rather ill. Now, let's take that one step further. Now just pump up the volume. So now if we're able to say that we know that there are particular frequencies that appear to be very, very sensitive and therefore to which people might be very, very susceptible to. Or if I go back to what we were talking about earlier, where I can actually get some information about you that I can fine tune that. Well, it's not really a ray gun, per se, or is it? Because what we're really doing is we're generating electromagnetic frequencies

• 32:00Speaker 01

  that we can then direct perhaps as far as 30, 40, 50 meters with relative precision.

• 32:07Mayim Bialik?

  How am I not picturing, like, I don't know, name a science fiction? I'm picturing, you know, Battlestar Galactica or something, you know? Like, how am I, did you say 30, 40, 50 meters?

• 32:21Speaker 01

  I did.

• 32:21Mayim Bialik?

  I could be walking about and from 30, 40 or 50 meters away, someone could be directing electromagnetic frequency into my brain to disrupt my nervous system? I'm supposed to ever leave this room again?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Well, tinfoil.

• 32:38Mayim Bialik?

  Did you just say tinfoil?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  The truth of the issue is that, you know, for a long time, to be able to do that sort of thing, you needed a whopping large device.

• 32:50Mayim Bialik?

  Right, right.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  That absolutely no one is going to miss. They're not going to go, oh, I thought that was an amusement park ride. No. However, the scalability of these things has now gotten to the point where, in fact, they can be used more clandestinely or covertly. So now we're talking about something that could easily fit in a car or a van. And so, you know, the, the, the field of vulnerability and volatility changes as a consequence of the sophistication of the technology.

• 33:20Mayim Bialik?

  Is it possible that when we are sending our soldiers out into the world, that they are susceptible to this kind of attack?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Not just our soldiers.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  The idea of utilizing electromagnetic or directable energies to knock down things like drones or disrupt aircraft or machine systems? Well, certainly.

• 33:44Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Let's back this up just a little bit. The, the ability to target individuals who have some relatively high value, for whatever reason, I mean, they may be high profile or it may just be sort of social disruption of targeting this person or that person. Well, this brings, if you will, the battlefront of the brain to the backyard.

• 34:08Mayim Bialik?

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• 34:53Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:38Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:44Jonathan Cohen?

  How much targeting can there be so that there's not collateral damage? Can, you know, if you're talking about 30, 50 meters away, you know, you could be a lot of people in between the directed target and, and the device?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Please understand, I mean, first of all, everything that I'm telling you here represents my views and my views only and did not represent the views of the United States government, the Department of Defense or the National Defense University. That said, I mean, and that's an important caveat because I'm talking to you as an individual and I'm specifically talking to you as, as professor of neurology who's been working in this area for the past 30 years. It really depends on the device. So you want to think of the, these devices being able to do one of two things. Disperse the wave. So for example, something like crowd disruption, crowd control. And we already know these types of devices exist. Sonic devices, devices that are able to create an electromagnetic field

• 36:40Speaker 01

  that's able to disrupt a broad range of not only electronic devices, sensors, arrays.

• 36:46Mayim Bialik?

  We don't know this exists. You're acting like everybody knows, like, no, I've seen it in the movies. I've never seen this in real life.

• 36:53Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, the wave goes across the city, all the glass breaks and then no one is the same again.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  So we can do two things with the waveform. We can open it up this way. We can close it in this way. So here what you're getting is more of a generalized effect to be able to, let's say, affect a collective of things. Machines, drones, sensor systems, communication systems. It's a relatively broad array. We could bring it in far more this way to be able to have much more of a specific or precise effect. Think of this as buckshot. Think of this as sharpshot. Well, what's happened over the past 10 years, 15 years, is the ability to really create relative precision in those types of devices and the way those types of devices could be fielded,

• 37:43Speaker 01

  scaled and used operationally. And, and to your earlier point, I mean, there, there have been news reports of crowd control, for example, in, in a number of different European cities that have used various forms of sonic energy to disrupt the crowd. We've seen that before. It happened in the Soviet Union when the Soviet Union was still Soviet Union. It happened subsequently in Russia. And to be honest, I mean, if you were to look online and just Google sonic disruptors for house protection, you could buy this stuff.

• 38:16Jonathan Cohen?

  What happens when it's used in a crowd? What is the impact on the crowd? Do people get headaches? Do their ears hurt? Do they just feel nauseous? Do they have lasting impact or does it pass? Like, and I know it depends on how intense the, the wave is, but in the, in the times where it has been used for crowd control, as you described, do we know what the effects on the people have been?

• 38:42Speaker 01

  All of the above. I mean, it really depends on four factors. Number one, the, the dose. In other words, how much of this, what is the intensity by which it's being delivered? Number two is the dose by virtue of proximity. How close to you is this thing? So if you're, let's say, in the front row of a crowd, it's going to affect you far more than if you're way in the back. Distance, absorption, diffusion, fraction. Okay. Number three, it depends on individual variation. So individuals are differentially susceptible and they also express different signs and symptoms based upon how this is affecting them and then how they also respond to that effect. And last but not least is, well, what else is going on? So again, two people may be standing side by side. One may be relatively healthy and robust, the other not so.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  And it may very well be that they're going to have differential effects on those two people and the predictability may be different. It may very well be that the person who was more robust and healthy is going to at least subjectively experience what may be a decrement in their capability and function. I used to feel really good all the time. Nothing ever bothered me. Now I don't feel so good. Whereas the other person may have felt, well, you know, I feel crappy all the time. Now I feel a little crappier. So again, one of the, the issues that comes up is the individuality and the specificity of these effects based upon a host of variables, which is really why, when weaponized, these can be used clandestinely and covertly and it can be very, very difficult to detect and to attribute.

• 40:10Mayim Bialik?

  What you're describing is true of the human brain and nervous system in particular. Right? Which can also generalize because I was just thinking, I was like, maybe they're trying to take out all the women over 45 because that's sure what it feels like, whatever the F is happening with thyroid autoimmune function and hormones. But I was like, we used to be very useful. We were loved for our wisdom. Now I got no wisdom to give. I can't remember my name, you know? But I was thinking that kind of variability, right? This is sort of what gets blown wide open. But some of the symptoms that, you know, you're talking about, if we have longer term damage to the nervous system, right? You're going to see stuff that's hard to pin down.

• 40:54Mayim Bialik?

  It's going to be like chronic. It might feel a little progressive and like, oh, if I'm stressed, it's worse. Right? How many times do we notice that an immune system that is already activated? Right? Is less able to navigate other changes? Or again, how many women over 45 or 50s, you know, who are like, I used to be able to have a whole day. Now I got a nap if something good happened because like my nervous system. But what I was thinking about is even in the short term. You know, we see all these horrible images of war, right, around the world, which, you know, we have the internet and social media to show us those images as many times as you'd like, you know, in a day. But the notion that even sound can be used as a weapon, that when things get really

• 41:39Mayim Bialik?

  loud, it actually disrupts your ability to think. And if anyone's ever had a migraine, right, you've experienced how pain can make it hard to think. I'm a person who gets migraines with aura and it's like a whole dance. It's hard to explain to someone that the pain is so great, the throbbing is so intense, I'm not able to form words. So when you think about even how sound is used that way, you get disoriented. When speakers are blaring at sonic levels, right, even loud sounds, people become disoriented, right? Like, that's, that's the system that we're hacking, is a system that already is designed to be taking in information.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. So, I mean, and the auditory portal is just one. And, you know, you've sort of taken that to the extreme. Loud noises that are noxious for most people. Well, it doesn't even have to be something loud. It has to just be tuned to a particular resonant frequency. High, low, humans are very exquisitely sensitive to what's called infrasound.

• 42:43Mayim Bialik?

  We've talked about this, there's a lot of overlap, well, obviously because you're a neurologist, there's a lot of overlap with neurodivergent populations that hypersensitivity, right? We talked about there are some people who literally can hear airplane sound that other people would not. And it's not just like, oh, you have ADHD or whatever. Every nervous system is tuned differently and, just, you know, for kicks, throw in the genetically modified meals we've been eating, throw in all the chemicals that we eat, all of our, I always point out, like, our nails and our hair, right? Like, all the things that we're taking in, those change the ability of a system to tune.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Micro and nanoplastics, I mean, all of those things are conduits and conductors. Brains are plastic throughout the lifespan, to greater or lesser extent. And the plasticity is mediated by three factors. Number one, what is the genetic sort of blueprint, if you will? Number two, what types of things have been happening during development to turn that genetic blueprint on and off? And then more than that, what is the effects of those things that are then structured to function? So in other words, you sort of have this kind of rolling iterative effect. And let's face it, I mean, we're all born, but sometimes referred to as parasynesthetic. In other words, our senses kind of overlap a little bit. You know, in some individuals, as you know, they're truly synesthetes, they can hear colors and sort of taste sounds and so forth.

• 44:04Mayim Bialik?

  There's like 60 different kinds, 75 kinds of synesthesia, yeah.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  There's at least five dozen types of what's called ambient synesthesia. So what it really illustrates is two of the points you very well made. Number one is that every brain is different, a variety of different reasons. And number two, that difference in brain and neurological structure and function tune us differently to things, change our susceptibility, our biases, and even our dispositions for how we function. So something like sound, as you say, on the, on the subsonic level can be very disruptive for some people, other people find it comforting. Same is true at the high end and a whole bunch of things in between. Also with visual stimuli, something as apparently cryptic, as subtle, as changing the pixelation

• 44:52Speaker 01

  index, the flicker index of the screen that you're looking at, and we're all married to screens on some level or another, can be used to change neurological functions that are viable for cognition, concentration, vigilance, awareness, and even capability and function. Could they be weaponized? Sure. But take a look at the screen, you're looking at me right now. I apologize because I have a great face for radio, but you forced me to look at me. So one of the things that we know can be done is to actually change the flicker fusion ratio, or the flicker ratio of the various pixels that make up the image on this screen.

• 45:28Mayim Bialik?

  Okay.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  And we've known this for a while, the idea of subliminal imaging, for example.

• 45:33Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Okay, they flash popcorn, everybody wants popcorn. Now, if you really, really back that up, because now what we can do is work at a much more precise and much more granular level of timeframe, you can then to begin to impregnate literally the pixels on the screen with disruptive visual cues that are going to change the way an individual's both retina, the receptive area of the eye, and then the way the optic nerve processes all the way from the eyeball through those intermediate nuclei of the thalamus up into the cortex. So you're changing not only the way the information is being delivered, but the way it's being sensed, and the way the perception is based upon those sensations.

• 46:16Mayim Bialik?

  And this could be literally on an unconscious level.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  It's wholly subliminal, that, that's the elegance of it.

• 46:22Mayim Bialik?

  Right. Like, I wouldn't notice anything is up. I always want popcorn, so that wouldn't work for me, but yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too. So, you know, the thing I think that becomes really important to understand is that when we're talking about this kind of stuff, and we're talking about weaponizing this, we're really not talking about weapons of mass destruction, per se. I mean, that's not to say that, you know, some rogue group or some nation-state couldn't produce a pandemic virus in a laboratory and let it loose on the world, or bacteria, or fungus, or create some drug that could be aerosolized and delivered by drones. Sure, they could. But the real nuance of these types of things lies in the very same nuance that makes them so useful in precision medicine, is that they have individual effects on very specific targets.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  And so the way these things are being developed and used is not as weapons of mass destruction, per se, that we would use like a nuke or an explosive, but rather weapons of maximum disruption, where the disruption can occur within an individual's systems, or disrupt the way individuals interact, relate, engage, and function.

• 47:33Mayim Bialik?

  It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is basically what we're talking about.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of, on a neurological level, yeah.

• 47:39Jonathan Cohen?

  People who are listening may just have practical questions like, is 5G impacting me negatively? Should I move my Wi-Fi router away from being next to my head while I'm sleeping? How bad is it that I'm carrying my cellphone around with me all the time? Is it changing my, my function in some way? So just, you know, we went from high-impact weapons, but just to give people something that's very specific, you know, what's your perspective on those questions?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  We live in a very electromagnetically rich environment. I mean, we're essentially living in a noise floor. It's a very noisy electromagnetic environment. And our new technologies are contributing to that a lot, and we're surrounding ourselves with it, in our cars, in our homes. So the idea of, of being prudent, I mean, that's the best way I could sort of, you know, the idea of perhaps using the speaker on your phone rather than putting the phone right up next to your head, the idea, as you say, of not necessarily sleeping on top of your 5G router or your Wi-Fi system and putting a little bit of distance between you, the idea of not being sort of screen-wedded all day, married to your screen all day, recognizing

• 48:52Speaker 01

  that even something is benign, as the spectral frequency of light can disrupt your light-dark cycles and disrupt the way your body produces a neurohormone that's very useful for sleep, which is called melatonin. So, understanding that we are very, very sensitive and susceptible to these forms of electromagnetic energies that we're surrounding ourselves with, I think just would command a little bit of prudence in terms of how often we use these things, how close we are to when we use these things, and just how cautious we are in the way we use them. You know, so, so the rule of thumb, literally the rule of thumb, is about a hand width away from an active plug. Because, characteristically, if you're working with household current, I mean, you're not

• 49:36Speaker 01

  like sleeping in a generator station, but about a hand width away is enough to sort of diffuse that type of thing from a socket or an active plug.

• 49:45Mayim Bialik?

  But what if I'm tuned special? I'm a special brain. You don't know what kid you've got. I got one kid who sees dead people and the other one doesn't. They slip the same distance from a plug.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  I'll give you a very personalized example. I mean, so you've been very overt about some of your experiences with peptides, like GLP, right?

• 50:03Jonathan Cohen?

  He read the article.

• 50:04Mayim Bialik?

  Just one, he read my article.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so for some people, they, they work really well. They're profoundly anti-inflammatory, they help not only bring down weight cravings and food noise.

• 50:15Mayim Bialik?

  They can cure you of every autoimmune disease you've ever had, was the promise I was given, yes.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  For some people, that's true. And for other people, it's a disaster, case in point. So the issue there is, you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, if I want to, it's sort of Monty Python-esque. Every brain is special. And what we mean by that is every nervous system is differentially tuned. So part of it is, if, you know, you kind of find yourself feeling a little off and like, well, what happened here? And you realize, well, I got this new bed. And oh, by the way, my head is like three inches away from the plug.

• 50:50Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  You might want to begin to think about this. And like anything else, you know, I, as you could tell from my speech impediment, although it's probably gone away. I grew up in New York City. When I was a kid, there was a store, I think it's still there, which is called Sims. It was a clothing store.

• 51:05Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Right. And they used to have a commercial where the guy who owned it, Si Sims, had his daughter, whose name was Marcy. And they would come on and they would say, at Sims, an educated consumer is our best customer. That's the maxim I really want to give to your audience. In this very, very rich electronically enhanced, engaged magnetic environment that we have created for ourselves, an educated consumer is probably the safest public health advocate for your own health and wellbeing. So again, I mean, you know, thanks to the broadcast like this, we're talking about this. Increasing awareness helps people just to perhaps read the labels a little bit better. And if nothing else, be a little bit more aware that not everything that's supposed

• 51:49Speaker 01

  to be out there to help you and make your life easy is going to be a panacea and things affect people differently.

• 51:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Traditional, very, very mainstream people will say, there's no evidence to suggest there should be any impact. And yet that takes away the variability of sensitivity amongst the population set. So the people who are like, wait a second, I just feel totally overwhelmed all the time. Well, the reality is it may not be causing cancer, but it may be a stress, an underlying stress to you that you're around all of this electromagnetic, uh, these fields. And like you go out into the nature and things feel quieter, slower, like you can feel the difference.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  For sure. And you know, I mean, let's face it, I'm talking to two scientifically minded people. And I know that your audience is also engaged with people who are intellectually curious. And you know, as well as I do, that we were taught in science that measures of central tendency, mean, median mode, well, that's essentially what we're using for our experimental data and ultimately where we're getting our results from. Are these things statistically significant? What you're doing is you're measuring things that are experimentally valuable and valid.

• 52:53Mayim Bialik?

  This goes to everything we've spoken about. Statistics are super important. They're very, very important and they're, they're critically significant for the kind of things we're talking about. And also, one person's experience is still their experience. And we talk about this also when we talk to people, you know, about UAPs and we talk about aliens, like I don't know how to tell someone, yes, your experience is real or not, but for each individual, that is their experience. You know what I mean? Like for, for me, my EMF situation, yeah, most doctors you go to are not going to go to that, but every hippie practitioner I've been to is like, how many towers are in your neighborhood? Maybe go somewhere where there's less towers, you know?

• 53:37Mayim Bialik?

  And they're like, yeah, that's the wisdom, right?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  There's a phrase or a term that I think has gotten horribly beat up and abused in sort of the mainstream verbiage, which is holistic approaches. But I think that's really important because you can't extricate the individual from their environment. And you have to recognize

• 53:54Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  that we've grown up in an environment and that the effects are sort of reciprocal and complimentary. My environment affects me. I mean, literally from, from the time I was conceived in the womb till the time I hit the grave, and I'm affecting that environment. So like anything else, it becomes really important to have that level of awareness. What am I surrounded with? Is my environment a healthy environment? Are the things in my environment that may be, as you say, stressful, that may be even more than stressful, that may be harmful, risky? And then what can I even mitigate that?

• 54:26Mayim Bialik?

  I always joke, the smells of my childhood were mothballs and roach spray. Like that's how I grew up. See, this guy gets it. That was like the smells of my childhood. Like that feels like home to me. And like this guy's from Toronto and he's like, what is going on? Like I was raised with mothballs and roach spray. Who knows what else happened to my nervous system?

• 54:47Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I, I remember when I was a kid, it was, it was raid, right? If I went to my, went to my great aunt's, it was mothballs in her closet, cigarette smoke and Lysol. Like, ah, childhood. So you're absolutely right.

• 55:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Is there any evidence that the people who are building their silver towers, you know, like they have their protective electro fields to sleep under, that like are canopy above your bed or ways of grounding your house actually provide any, um, defense or, or quieting of this stuff?

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Simple answer, yeah. I mean, we recognize the benefit of Faraday-like cages and Faraday structures against certain spectral frequencies with electromagnetic energies. One of the things that becomes incumbent on our own responsibility is that as we sort of surge forward with these scientific and technological developments to recognize that there, there's no free lunch, that these things may impose really important effects that add to our flourishing or our survivability. But the knife has two sides and it may be dosimetry, dose dependency, how an individual's exposed, their susceptibility. So to be able to understand that, yeah, one side of that blade may be very useful,

• 56:04Speaker 01

  but the other side of that blade could be very risky at least, and perhaps even threatening and harmful. I, I think that's just responsibility for what science and technology is doing in the public sphere.

• 56:15Mayim Bialik?

  I think about also psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, like how do we understand also how to treat an individual, right? There's so many of these other factors that are going into an entire system. And obviously, I mean, I just spoke to someone who was on, I won't name the drug, on a, I'd say an atypical medication that's given largely to women at, um, my stage of life for psychiatric issues. And all of a sudden her estrogen dipped and it stopped working, but she didn't know that. The medication that she had been on for over a decade, all of a sudden she was feeling violent, aggressive, and it turned out it was an estrogen dip and that medication is no longer the medication, right?

• 56:58Mayim Bialik?

  But in isolation, that could have landed her in a mental health facility.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. I'll, I'll harken you back to your own dissertation work. I mean, so looking at the fact that the neuroendocrine system, that the hypothalamic pituitary and then gonadal axis that controls estrogenic release is, is intimately sensitive to variations in neurotransmitter and neuromodulation capabilities, functions and effects. So even just taking a look at like the hypothalamus as the master structure above the pituitary, that sucker is innovated like crazy with a variety of different neurological inputs that are neurochemically diverse. And then it's also outside of the blood-brain barrier. So it's also being exposed to a variety of things that the brain ordinarily would not

• 57:46Speaker 01

  necessarily be susceptible to, because parts of the hypothalamus are more sort of diffusible to those things, microplastics, environmental stuff that enters the bloodstream. So you're absolutely right. If you have something that is a drug, a neuropsychiatric drug, well, that's a neuropharmacological agent. And it's changing this individual's neurochemical control of their hypothalamus, which is then coupled to the fact that there's also doses of this circulating in the bloodstream that may not have reached the neurological compartment that can also affect hypothalamic nuclei. And downrange of this, well, that's pituitary, downrange of that are ovarian as well as adrenal estrogenic mechanisms. So you bet, I mean, again, the susceptibility is these systems don't exist in isolation.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  And to develop that more holistic systems approach, I think is the key to precision individualized medicine. And you're right, for a long time, as we said earlier, to reiterate our point, we tend to base findings and evidence off measures of central tendency, means, medians and modes. And in so doing, it diffuses out the individual effect, which has to be appreciated in real world clinical contexts.

• 58:56Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of people who listen to our podcast, a lot of people who share particular episodes tend to focus on exceptional abilities that people have. And whether that person has exceptional abilities from birth and they just seem to be that way, or whether they've had a near death experience or some other, you know, significant, you know, medical issue. And in some cases, people have experimented with psychedelics in ways that expand consciousness and, right? Can you talk a little bit about what your understanding is of this tuning system in that we're finally having science kind of catching up to conversations about, you know, people who otherwise might be put, you know, for lack of a better, you know, phrase, into

• 59:41Mayim Bialik?

  an institution, right? We had Lorna Byrne is who I'm thinking of. We had a woman on, um, from Ireland and she said, you know, as a little girl, she was very dreamy and always like head in the clouds, but it got to a point where people were concerned about her cognitive development, like what's going on in there? And as she got older, she was able to articulate that she was having what she describes as like spiritual experiences all the time with what she believed were entities that communicated. Now, you would normally say, okay, by Western psychiatric standards, these are delusions, this is hallucinations, right? There are many people though, who are not fitting criteria for these things.

• 1:00:21Mayim Bialik?

  And it turned out, it's not that she was developmentally challenged, she was, she functions in another plane of tuned frequency, right? And she ended up getting married and, you know, kind of having an understanding of the world, but you know, she, she wrote a book that, you know, millions of people have read to understand what is it to have tuning that is that different? What do you feel might be the evolutionary advantage of that? Is this a window into a spiritual mind that, you know, science is just starting to articulate? Did this happen all the time in biblical times? And now that we have technology and computers, these people are fewer and farther between? What's your understanding of people with these kinds of experiences who otherwise

• 1:01:04Mayim Bialik?

  don't fit, you know, diagnostic criteria for psychiatric or psychotic disorders?

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  That's an incredibly good question. I mean, I think that the first way to begin to approach the question is to understand what's called the normal distribution or the normal, the bell curve. Whole thing is normal. I mean, realistically, that represents some numerical frequency or distribution within a particular population. We're the ones who define where we're going to make the thresholds for what is acceptably normal, given a set of functions, parameters, engagements, et cetera. So we're the ones who are defining those thresholds and tolerances. That's number one. So it really represents how well is this individual functioning in X? Can they function? Number one, is it viable for them? And number two, is it also viable for whatever's going to be the context in which their engagement occurs, right?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  And in some levels, that represents one of the base psychiatric criteria. Is the individual quote, "suffering"? Are they functionally capable? And/or is the individual capable of interacting in those ways that allow them to be socially engaged, productive, whether it's vocationally, avocationally, whatever?

• 1:02:09Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Let's put that up on a shelf because the reality of it is, is that in truth, we all change, perceive what is our reality? I mean, the idea of what's quote, "out there" and what we see to be real is a function of a whole host of things, inclusive of our sensory organs and their structure, the way our nervous system processes that information, what's happening physiologically, and even cognitive processes that sort of bias our observations to dictate what we orient to and how we define what those observations mean.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  So the idea of a purely objective reality, with the Germans we refer to as "der Ding an sich," the thing that is really out there, well, that's really not accessible to us because our bodies are filters and our subjective and phenomenological reality is a consequence of that filtration. That's number one. Number two, the tuning of that, the neurological tuning of that, is based upon, I'll not say myriad factors, but many, many, many factors that influence how that brain is developed, its architecture and its function, how function then affects architecture, from the point

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  that the brain forms a primordial nervous system in the womb throughout the lifespan. Injury, engagement, pleasure, pain, experience, all of those things cannot just functionally change what nodes and networks of the brain are differentially interactive, but can change the structure or architecture on a brain of a variety of levels, from simple proteins that exist in the connecting spaces between nerve cells and glia, called synapses, as you know, to very large-scale arrangements of the way that whole groups of nerve cells and glial cells will aggregate to form communities of function called cliques, which then defines nodes and networks. Well, if what we've said, the simple premise is that each one of us engages the world

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  differently as a consequence of our structure and our function, well, then there's no reason to believe that each and every individual's precept, cognitive milieu, experience is going to be identical. And the other issue is, of course, that given that tuning, that neurological tuning, there are some individuals who can process things cognitively differently, sensorily differently, and may be far more perceptive to a variety of internal cues from their own body, as well as external cues from the environment, that give them what appear to be exceptional cognitive capabilities.

• 1:04:54Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, also emotional and spiritual capabilities. When I was an undergrad and, you know, studying Demacio and studying all these like high-level conversations, right, about consciousness, about soul, about God in the brain, you know, this was kind of on the fringes of what we were allowed to talk about as mainstream science, but I think that's such an important change that's occurred. These are people who are not only having cognitive, you know, abilities, I hate to bring God into the equation, but they're having spiritual experiences, right, which are tangible.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  I've been very fortunate to have worked with some great people in the area. I mean, Andy Newberg, as you know, who's sort of a prototypic figure, one of his earlier books, Why God Won't Go Away, talking about what neurological and cognitive processes might be involved, not just in religious experiences, but in spiritual experiences, even those that may be, for example, secular, right? And then I've worked with some other wonderful colleagues, Dr. Joan Angerbretzen and my longstanding colleague, Dr. Niko Kohl's in Germany, and really looking at what those mechanisms are and how they may be able to be entrained, induced to various practices, rituals, or simply engagements with various forms of environments. And are they inducible? Now we start getting into the idea of not only what might be a psychedelic, but what

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  might be an entheogen. In other words, what types of things may induce this level of cognitive processing, awareness, perception, that the individual perceives and engages, appreciates as deeply spiritual as connecting with something greater than themselves.

• 1:06:28Mayim Bialik?

  What was the word you used?

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Enthogen.

• 1:06:30Mayim Bialik?

  New word today.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  If something is entheogenic, it induces what is some type of a theological experience, literally, where they're having a rational accounting of being engaged with some type of deity, whether that deity is a naturalistic deity or not, I mean, whether one is sort of quote, praying to Spinoza's god or praying to a more Abrahamic figure. The idea is they're connected. And that gets into a lot of the work that, again, I'm doing with my colleague and longstanding buddy Niko Kohl's in Germany, which is, it's not so much a question of approaching Chalmers' proverbial hard question of consciousness and what consciousness is. I mean, I think we're pretty limited in our capability to understand that by virtue of the toolkit we have.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  So we're coming at it from a slightly different angle. We're saying, what is the brain? What does the brain do? What is it doing? I mean, obviously, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but what is that whole?

• 1:07:27Mayim Bialik?

  This is part of what our interest is in the paranormal and in these exceptional experiences, because obviously, you know, if you hear hoofprints, it's usually horses, not zebras, right? And I think the same is true, not just in clinical diagnosis, but in understanding other people's experience. But I think that's something that we're so interested in, right, is that there are people who have a completely different framework from which they're operating, which in many cases, you know, echoes thousands of years of wisdom, right? But yet, here we are.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  This is important because it also, I think, speaks very strongly about culture with a little c. In other words, where is one encircled? Let's face it, if I grew up in sub-Saharan Africa and I hear footprints, I'm probably not thinking horse, because my experience and my reality is zebra, gazelle, antelope, which is far different than somebody who grew up in Montana, who hears hoofprints and isn't thinking to themselves, "That's a zebra." So part of it is that embeddedness, you know, what we like to talk about is that brains certainly exist in a body. We like to talk about the brain, but the brain isn't just out there.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  We have in-brained individuals, that brain is embodied, and that body is deeply embedded within its environment, its ecology, and that creates particular cultural, environmental susceptibilities and sensitivities. So yeah, for somebody who's living in sub-Saharan Africa, those footprints, what's going to be sort of cognitively resonant is zebra. Somebody who's living in Montana, it's complete cognitive dissonance that it would be a zebra. But I think your earlier point hits it right on the head. We're talking about things that may be paranormal, where they all exist as some form of the

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  normality of what the system can do, but they exist on the edges of that normality, either by virtue of their statistical occurrence in the number of people, or their statistical occurrence in a person or group of people, or literally the rarity of the phenomenon due to the uniquity and individuality of that person's brain and its architecture and functions. So I love the word paranormal versus something like supernatural, because I think what paranormal does is it grounds us to the fact that we as humans can only appreciate, I mean, know the natural world. We only have the tools to be able to do that. Anything that goes beyond that is a belief system, and that's fine.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  But the things that we can approach with our tools, our tools of observation, our tools of manipulation, experimentation, empiricism, that's the natural world. All these things you're talking about, the possibility of remote viewing, exceptional cognition, the idea of perhaps telepathy, deep intuition, well, these things are natural phenomenon, and the question really is, how is that happening? What's the mechanism?

• 1:10:35Mayim Bialik?

  I'm into it, right? Like, you're our new best friend. Explain how telepathy, remote viewing, explain how those things could be seen as natural phenomenon from like a neurophysiological perspective.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Okay. So let's, let's think at a big level for a second, and I have to get you back to some of the stuff that I'm doing with my, with my colleague Niko Kohl's, my buddy Niko. I'm going to ask you a question. You're a neuroscientist. What's the brain? I mean, really, if I said to you, "Dr. Bialik, this is Dr. Giordano, we're having a Socratic discussion, what's the brain?" You and I were probably taught through our neuroscientific education that the brain is a generator of those mechanisms of cognition, emotion, and ultimately behavior.

• 1:11:20Mayim Bialik?

  It's a transmitter, it's a transducer, it's, you know.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  It's still generative, though.

• 1:11:27Mayim Bialik?

  Jonathan says no. The neuroscientist in the room says no.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  All right, Jonathan, what is the brain? What are you thinking?

• 1:11:34Jonathan Cohen?

  It's receiver, processor.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Oh, see, perfect. Brilliant. So in one, we'll say that the brain could be a receiver, like an antenna, like any antenna. I just can't stick my finger up in the air and pop in Wi-Fi and be able to watch my favorite television show. I have to say this. Big Bang Theory. I had to. I had to do it. I'm sorry I had to do it. So I was gonna say, I was, I was gonna say pumpkin head, but I thought maybe not.

• 1:11:59Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, that's a deep cut.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  No, no, I loved it. So I have to still build the antenna. It has to have a specific structure, right? I mean, it just can't be something you stick up in the air. Despite the fact that when I was a kid, you know, my, my parents used to put antenna to be able to get the TV. Fine.

• 1:12:16Mayim Bialik?

  It's called a coat hanger.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a coat hanger and you had to hook it up the right way and train the rabbit ears. I know. But even then, it had to have the right orientation. So you're absolutely right. It could be an antenna. But what is being antennized into it? What's it capturing? Is it capturing something universal? Is it capturing something fundamental? Is it taking it to my, my earlier point where it's transducing? It's taking one kind of energy and making it into something else, perhaps? Or maybe it's a box. Maybe it's even far more simple than it is. It's just a receptacle that has to have a particular form. Obviously, a box has to have sides and a bottom and maybe even a top to hold stuff.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  And then, once it's in the box, whatever in the box takes the form of the box. And then there's that interaction between what's in the box and the box itself. Could be. Or it could be an antenna that captures something and then brings it into the box. Or could it be that there's an antenna that captures, it holds it in the box, and then once it's in the box, it's a substrate for the generator? It could be all of the above.

• 1:13:22Jonathan Cohen?

  I like the last two.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, I gotta tell you, I've been a neuroscientist since 1982. If somebody held a gun to my head and said, tell me exactly what the brain is doing across all those constructs of cognitions, emotions, and behavior that brains do, you'd be like, pull the trigger. I don't know. It's not, it's not Chalmers' hard question of consciousness. It's a far more fundamental question of what is the whole doing as a function of its myriad parts? Fancy talk. Where we tend to devolve to something called the meriallogical fallacy. This was Bennett and Hacker's approach as a philosophy of brain science, which is we like to take a look at things in parts and then describe the entire function by virtue of what the parts do. No, no.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  We really need to be far more holistic in appreciating that the brain is a system of systems that tends to function as a whole network of component networks. Now, let's just pause here for a second. Vector and adjust. Then you have to say, well, what is the environment in which that brain is functioning? And it's functioning in the natural universe, which means there could be a lot of things in that universe that a particular brain may be even able to capture as an antenna, sequester as a box, and generate. So now we have to go into, well, what forces in the universe might be able to be perceived?

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  And then you have to get into things like neuronal processing speed. And there may be some people who can process things exceedingly quickly versus others, perhaps more quickly. And they may be attuned to that level. They may be far more attuned, for example, to somatic sensations that we sometimes call gut feelings. And only now, we've come to recognize that the gut-brain sort of interlinkage, relationality, is very neural, is very biochemical, is certainly due to other, quote, "humors," and that they have gases neurotransmitters that are capable of diffusing very, very fast across the relatively great distances of the nervous system from gut to brain and back and forth. And that these things are codable. They're codable through environments. How is it not viable, possible?

• 1:15:36Mayim Bialik?

  And it's also, that's clair-sensions, right? The, the knowing, and I didn't even know that was a thing. Like, I've heard the word clairvoyant, but there's clair-sensions, and Jonathan will describe this. He'll say, like, I feel, it's like something drops into my body and I feel it. I don't have this sense, so I don't know what it's like. But that sounds insane, but it's a thing.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Oh, it is a thing. It's absolutely a thing. And I think each and all of us possess it to a greater or lesser extent. It's simply a question of, A, are we attuned to it? In other words, are we, are we perceptive of our own states of being in those situations? Or in those situations where it's going to be meaningful, valid, and valuable? So I'll give you an example from, from both my prior life, my career. I, I used to fly airplanes. Now I ride motorcycles.

• 1:16:21Mayim Bialik?

  No one's shocked. The fact that you just said, "I used to fly planes, now I ride motorcycles." No one was like, "Really?"

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. I mean, so, but, so, you know, in both of those situations, you're attuned to very different nuances of, number one, the machine, and number two, the environment in the machine, right? So I used to fly some aerobatic stuff. And you, you understand, well, I know when the plane is gonna sort of aerodynamically stall and start to tumble. Same is true on a motorcycle. So you understand not only, well, how much lean can I put into this, how much brake? But you also get very, very aware to the sensorium around you. And in some ways, that's almost intuitive. It's almost clairvoyant that you know, you know, something is going to happen because it just doesn't, quote, "feel right." Part of it is experience. Part of it is training. Part of it is repetition.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  And it's very somatic. It's very, "I feel that." I'm not special. I mean, I'm not more special than anyone else. People do this all the time. But I think what tends to happen is in the colloquialism of our daily lives, we disattune to some of those things that are far more fundamental, and, and if I may, primal, that may have had at one point in our evolution, or even at one point in our development and our lifespan, significant value for our survival, for our flourishing, for our happiness, for our discomfort, or its avoidance. And we've tended to filter that out by superseding it with other things that take on far more pedestrian value to us.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  So, again, some of these techniques where individuals become sensory deprived, deep focus, they use various forms of mindfulness and meditation, various devices, for example, that can change vagal nerve stimulation and viability, or transcranial electrical and magnetic stimulation. Individuals who had brain injuries that may change node network architectures and functions of their brain. And of course, we mentioned earlier, individuals who are taking a variety of pharmacologic substances, not just psychedelics, but perhaps other types that are able to change that in some way, tweak it, and as a consequence, make them, if not more capable, perhaps more aware of their extant capabilities.

• 1:18:42Mayim Bialik?

  We speak to a handful of materialists here who are like, "This is all poppycock," meaning the stuff that we talk about, right? There's no such thing as the spiritual. This is just something you're generating. Like, we're not in a virtual reality world. It's not a simulation, you know? And I appreciate the things that we can, you know, touch and measure. It's extremely important and it's the foundation of science. But you also can't ignore that for thousands of years, across a variety, you know, of traditions and modalities and histories, people have experienced things that are outside of this realm of the conscious experience. And in many cases, it's very important.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  There are three interactive variables. Number one is, do they have the vocabulary to describe it? And the answer may be no. I mean, like so many other things, we tend to be limited by the tools we have of observation and also of description. But there's also folk empiricism. In other words, these things didn't go away. It wasn't as if these phenomena and these experiences went away as a consequence of iterative technologic sophistication across the millennia. They're preservative. And number three, they're preservative even given the fact that we have very sophisticated techniques and technologies now that now allow us to do something different. Not just name it and frame it, but identify what may be the operative mechanisms and as a consequence, make particular

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  claims about what it involves. And it, it doesn't in any way dispel or diminish the phenomenological value of this for individuals. It's not a question of, well, am I generating this on my own and there's nothing out there? The question is still, what am I generating? Even if someone says, well, no, no, no, these things are just aspects of our, of our, of our cognition. They exist at the pre or subcognitive level that they may bubble up through these levels of cognition because they represent sort of these deeper levels of second or third order consciousness. Fine. Let's take it down one step further. What is cognition? How is the brain doing that? What is the brain tuning to? Is there some capability of this thing as a brain, as an electrochemical organ, and

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  perhaps an electromagnetic, and maybe even, on some level, basically quantum, although probably not fully quantum? Are quantum operations sustainable, for example, in tryptophan tubules? And what does that then mean when we translate things that are very, very small scale, subnanoscale, to things that are scalar and more mechanical? There has to be a transfer of whatever that process is into something that is then translatable into the mechanical operations of an electrochemical physiological system. So I think what tends to happen and we're seeing is that, yeah, the language, the verbiage was absent. The tools were absent. And now, as the tools are coming more into play and getting ever more granular, sophisticated, and capable, we need to develop a language that corresponds to that.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  And in some cases, I think, where, where it comes to be problematic is that some of these older terms. What is considered to be spiritual versus religious? What is consciousness and what is not? What do these things represent in terms of the arc of paranormality? And what represents, if we talk about things that are telepathic? Is it truly telepathic or individuals picking up on a variety of different information? Perhaps about subtle cues that others may not have access to? There's an experimental and investigative prompt that needs to go there. And I think anyone, and I'll go out on a limb again. I'm a 70-year-old guy and I figure, okay, I can say this. I've had a pretty rich career and I can be pretty ballsy about it.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  I think anyone who dispels certain things that have persistent empirical evidence that have stood the test of time in terms of their reports and their viability in literature, either whether folk literature or scientific literature, if they dispelled it out of hand, if they lose that curiosity, they're not a scientist anymore. Now you're a dogmatist.

• 1:22:34Mayim Bialik?

  People who are so fanatical about the possibility of even engaging in a conversation about what does telepathic communication look like? I say to Jonathan, they seem more religious than I am, that it doesn't exist than I am that it does. I had a very interesting off-camera interaction with a non-speaking autistic young man. And there was a lot of things that, as a scientist, I cannot explain, you know, about what I was experiencing in active real time. And I know he's not the only one. There's something, you know, kind of going on. And I think especially, and you know, maybe we could kind of transition into a conversation about consciousness, right? The notion that I've kind of been able to wrap my head around, and a lot of the telepathy

• 1:23:19Mayim Bialik?

  tapes, you know, especially the first season that really excited a lot of people, it was missing, you know, a certain level of scientific inquiry and analysis, which they're trying to sort of, you know, remedy with season two. But, you know, how many different fields, whether it's physics, quantum mechanics, philosophy, religious studies, and now certain individuals who do not speak with their words, right? How many fields do I get to look at that are telling the same story, which is that information exists and there is a way for us to tap into that? And some people may do it in ways that are, you know, not able to be understood.

• 1:24:04Mayim Bialik?

  Some people can be taught to have access to that. You know, I have a little bit of a problem saying like, consciousness exists in an information field and you just reach into it and pull out information. And if I want to think about Jonathan, right? Like, I can't, if I want to think about Jonathan, I'm actually impacting the spin of an electron that's paired to his electron? Like, that's a little hard for me. But the notion that information exists possibly on a non kind of quantitative level, that's fascinating to me. And I'd like to believe there are ways that we can look at this.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  I get the impression that you, like me, would define yourself as a non-reductive physicalist. In other words, you're not going to deny the fact that there's a physical structure and architecture to a nervous system.

• 1:24:47Mayim Bialik?

  Sure.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Okay. You know, you can touch it, it's there. I mean, it is, it is the extensible thing that you can do. But you also have to understand that, and I'm not, I'm not going to devolve to the whole idea of emergence, because that's sort of like Santa trying to explain the Easter Bunny. No, no. But as a function of properties and as a function of capabilities, the intersection between what the structure is doing and what the properties that that structure evoke, again, it's not like magic. It's a question of do we understand all the steps that exist between alpha and zed? And very often, we don't. We think we do. We may engage in fancy, what's called sort of exhumantibus reasoning.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  In other words, I know how one thing works, I know how this other thing works, and therefore I understand how they work together. Maybe not. Maybe not. And that very often is the hubris of the capability we have at hand. I think that the tools I have are great until they're not anymore. And I either get some eureka moment where I discover something where the tools are like, where the hell did this come from? Or I recognize the limit of the tools and as I develop some new tool, I then have to develop some new theoretical importance or some new theoretical sort of insights. And I think this happens repeatedly. And this sort of goes into these larger discussions of sort of, you know, Cunian versus Paparian science, is science stepwise or is it quantum? Yes, it's both.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  And I think that there are certain things that occur in science and technology that are evolutionary. And then also certain things are certain to be become revolutionary, where you just can't go back to the way you used to think about certain things. When it comes to some of this brain stuff, I think that one of the things we have to appreciate, and I'll even just take the example that you raised, there you are talking to Jonathan, you're saying, well, do I really think for a moment that my atoms are entangled with his and they're sort of quantum process? Wait a minute, stop. The reality of it is that you interact with each other often in a variety of different contexts and circumstances. So there's going to be a relative neurocognitive neural motor entrainment that occurs, where

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  parts of his nervous system are literally tuning to parts of yours.

• 1:27:00Mayim Bialik?

  I'm gonna wear a tinfoil hat. I don't want him getting in there anymore.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  But it happens. It happens. And what tends to happen is we sense those patterns of similarity whereby the biases that we engage through repetition, through circumstance, through proximity, through even various likenesses of the way we will react in a circumstance or situation, then will dispose the way we observe things, the way we orient, the way we decide and act. So that would be loop, loop, right? Is that entanglement in the quantum sense? No. Is that some form of engaged interaction based upon similarities or equivalences in the way nervous systems have been entrained?

• 1:27:45Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  You betcha. Could we even take a look at certain structural and architectural changes that have occurred as a consequence of your getting this relationship going? Maybe. I mean, I'd like to think that as a consequence of us getting together here on this podcast, that I've changed some of the synaptic activities in both of your brains.

• 1:28:02Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, I'll be visiting you telepathically this evening.

• 1:28:04Jonathan Cohen?

  Is there cognitive warfare being deployed on normal people now? How much of the algorithms do you view as a form of cognitive warfare? And how should we be aware of that if we're going back to the educated consumer?

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  There's still a bit of discourse. I would like to think it's dialectical. I mean, where it's sort of different viewpoints coming together and they're all aggregating in the middle. You got to break some of it down to build it together. But if someone were to sort of back me up against the wall and say, is there such a thing as cognitive warfare? Yeah. I mean, I think in some cases it represents sophisticated forms of psychological operations. But I think that the granularity of contemporary cognitive warfare engagements is really a consequence, a function of the neurosciences, number one, and what we know about brains, both individual and group brains. Number two, what we can do with them, utilizing drugs, utilizing information, utilizing various

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  forms of stimulation, some of them a little more aggressive than others. For example, information, computational programs, noise, electromagnetics. But then I think also the idea that AI plays a very, very strong role in this. Because what we can use AI for is not only to develop algorithms that are able to interpret individual and collective patterns of cognition that can then be targeted for influence, but can actually then develop the means to do that through various computational programs whereby now individuals may be doubting what is real and what is not. And as a consequence, there may be that even momentary gap in, is this veritable or is this not?

• 1:29:51Speaker 01

  And then how do those things affect individuals' attitudes, values, emotions, decisions and actions? So the long answer to your question is, yeah, I think cognitive warfare, or at least cognitive engagement in the bio-psycho-social dimensionality is a real thing. It's real enough that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its constituent nations, and certainly now the United States government, as well as other governments that are peer competitor governments and militaries, are deeply engaged in understanding that and articulating it to operational means. So it's a thing. As to what can be done, I think like anything else, awareness is a really important start point.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  Number two, not just awareness on the part of individuals in the public, but also public programs to be able to make people more aware of the fact that these technologies that are information technologies can be hijacked and can be used or misused in those ways that could be problematic.

• 1:30:52Mayim Bialik?

  Have you had any experiences that have been special, unusual, unique, that make you more open to thinking about these things?

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  I think anyone who hasn't had one of those experiences is either insensate to it or they're denying it. I mean, I think we've all had certain experiences where we go, ooh, what was that? And they can be exceedingly benign, but their profundity is there. I mean,

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I can tell you, I've had, I mean, I don't want to sound expansive. But you know, I've had certain experiences, for example, in an airplane. I mean, and just what I call profound experiences, where you look out and it's a sunset or a sunrise. And you look out over the wing of this airplane, you think, yeah, I understand all the physics of flight. I know how the engine works, I know lift and all the aerodynamic stuff. This is just amazing. This is incredibly beautiful. Being out in nature, I mean, I don't mean to sound like a tree hugger. Not that there's anything wrong with a tree hugger, but I grew up in New York City. My idea of a tree hugger was like the one tree that was available on the street corner, right? But I mean, being in nature, I think can be exceedingly grounding, because what it does

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  is it literally brings us back to the natural, to those things that are very fundamental in our sort of primal and primordial environments. And we tend to detach from that quite a bit, and we realize that. The idea that being involved with the brain sciences for almost five decades, and seeing the way that that particular science is evolving, the level of specifics, the level of granularity of what we know, and what that then means, and at the same time, still scratching our head and going, you know, we really, we're getting this great understanding of the minutia of the parts. Man, we just can't put the whole thing together.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  I mean, for me, that's very humbling in a spiritual way. Because I think that there is a grandeur to that, that goes along with sort of the fabric of the universe writ large. And if you look at certain things, whether it's mathematically or physically, I think that there's a reproducibility and a consistency in certain patterns that we need to appreciate that, again, like Carl Sagan has said, we are the stuff of the stars. I buy that. I mean, on some level, from the exceedingly small to the magnanimously large. And I find that amazing.

• 1:33:20Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you, Dr. Giorgiano. What a pleasure to speak to you. We really appreciate your time.

• 1:33:25Speaker 01

  Thank you. I mean, I'm really, it was a privilege and a real honor.

• 1:33:29Mayim Bialik?

  One thing I didn't want to correct him on, because he's so very charming. I find this kind of neuroscientist very charming. A lot of times, people will ask me, how did you go from being a neuroscientist to being a TV star? It's a great narrative that people tell, but what's missing is that I was on a TV show already. I actually went from a normal human to an actor, to a neuroscientist, to back to acting. But that didn't want to mess-

• 1:33:58Jonathan Cohen?

  And you're trying to go back to a normal person, and it's not working.

• 1:34:00Mayim Bialik?

  I will never be a normal person. From the time I was-

• 1:34:03Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't think you were ever really a normal person.

• 1:34:04Mayim Bialik?

  I was. I mean, I was inhaling mothballs and roach spray, about as normal as you can be. Do you even know what mothballs smell like?

• 1:34:11Jonathan Cohen?

  Of course I do. What are you talking about?

• 1:34:13Mayim Bialik?

  Delicious.

• 1:34:14Jonathan Cohen?

  I think it was really interesting, the idea of variability and that, you know, a lot of the, this doesn't bother anyone, conclusions that get presented, don't take into account that variability. And it could be very much that someone who is more sensitive is going to have more of an issue. And I also think there's a frog in boiling water, where we get to have a new normal, and therefore, we just assume nothing is bothering us.

• 1:34:41Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I really love this notion, and I'm actually very eager to hear what people think about this, especially in our Breaker community, and the community over on Substack, because, you know, he's basically, he said, nothing new is happening in the last several thousand years. It's not like, oh, all of a sudden. I mean, yes, some people would argue aliens are coming, but as Dr. Pasulka talked about, as Jeffrey Kreipel also talks about, it may not be that there's anything new under the sun, it's just we keep trying to explain it different, and we keep trying to have a narrative that makes sense, but what if it's all the same thing? And I love this idea that he opened up the possibility of like, yeah, once you give people grace to be able to say, what if you're different?

• 1:35:24Mayim Bialik?

  And that's not as unusual as we used to think it is. Because of course, people are ashamed to say this. That's the age of disclosure we're living in. People are no longer afraid to say, I experienced something that I don't know how to explain. And it used to just be like, take a drink, go to bed. And then 50 years later, someone would be like, can you believe? And you're that old person being like, oh, yeah, I saw a ghost. I was abducted by aliens. They took my brain out, through my nostrils, and I had a baby. It's an alien.

• 1:35:55Jonathan Cohen?

  I was just listening to an anecdote, a little story the other day. Goldie Hawn is talking about, oh, yeah, she saw a ghost in her house, and it's happened multiple times, and that's just fact now.

• 1:36:05Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things I was thinking about is like, how did this guy, and you know, I always want to know how people got where they are, how did this guy get-

• 1:36:12Jonathan Cohen?

  New podcast. How did you get to be who you are?

• 1:36:15Mayim Bialik?

  There's nothing more interesting to me. And I'm just thinking like, who's this guy that, you know, ended up working for the government? Like, he's the one you ask about Havana syndrome. How did he become that? And then some people might say, how did you become who you are? The place to kind of go into more of this is absolutely over on Substack, so please join us over there. If you don't know what Substack is, find out. Go to biologicbreakdown.substack.com. There's content there that is only available there. That is sort of the place that our lives live, these deeper discussions about episodes, bonus content. So please head over there, and from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.