Research Neuroscience: Our Brains Can Be Tricked to Improve Health or Cause Disease and Why The Telepathy Tapes Lacked Scientific Evidence

Neuropsychology researcher Dr. Amir Raz (author of The Suggestible Brain) gives us his skeptic’s take on chart-topping podcast, The Telepathy Tapes. With Dr. Raz’s understanding of the neuroscience of belief systems, he breaks down how effective The Telepathy Tapes really are in scientifically proving extra-sensory abilities and debunks the scientific validity of the podcast’s experiments and paranormal brainwave program. Understand why science is unable to provide real proof of telepathy and how the scientific method can fall short when addressing questions of our consciousness. Plus, stay tuned for his research surrounding the placebo effect and how he was able to temporarily cure a teenager’s Tourette’s syndrome! You don’t want to miss this in-depth review of extra-sensory abilities and how our brains are more in control of our bodies than we realize! Dr. Amir Raz's Books: https://www.amirraz.com/Books BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:07Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 0:08Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:09Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our Breakdown.

• 0:11Jonathan Cohen?

  This is the place we break down how we understand our realities.

• 0:17Mayim Bialik?

  This is the place where we break down reality itself. We are interested in exploring the intersection of science and the spiritual experience. We believe, as many of you do, that there are things that we experience that can't always be quantified by traditional methods of science or by a materialist viewpoint. Today, we're going to do something very special in that we're going to speak to a neuroscientist. His name's Amir Raz. He's the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention at the Department of Psychiatry at McGill and the SMBD Jewish General Hospital. His PhD is in Computation and Information Processing. He's a diplomat, though, of the American Board of Psychological Hypnosis.

• 1:02Mayim Bialik?

  This is a neuroscientist who understands very well the relationship between attention networks and attentional planes in the brain and how we construct the human experience. So his research spans the neural and psychological substrates of attention, of self-regulation, placebo, expectation, consciousness. The reason we wanted to talk to him is that he recently wrote a book called The Suggestible Brain, and this interested us very much. I think it will interest you as well. He brings together aspects of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the things that

• 1:43Mayim Bialik?

  we know occur in our culture with fascinating case studies of patients with disorders ranging from Tourette's Syndrome. That he can see essentially resolved with a simple trick of the brain. He talks about false pregnancies, people who are told that they're lactose intolerant, but can tolerate dairy in an appropriate psychological study. He shows how suggestion can cut deep into the brain and shake our fundamental knowledge of our own values and our perception of the reality. So what we decided to do was to present someone who intimately understands how our

• 2:25Mayim Bialik?

  brains are shaped, how our behavior can change our experience of reality, and we have brought him an example in the telepathy tapes of experiences that cannot be explained. We ask him to help us understand extrasensory abilities. We ask him to help us understand a framework of telepathy and an understanding of consciousness and time. Dr. Raz, as you will not be surprised, adamantly defends the scientific method, believes in it deeply, and also admits that there are things that he has experienced in his research and in his personal life that he cannot explain.

• 3:04Mayim Bialik?

  However, it's important for us to hear a perspective that helps us frame how we even frame these conversations. There are things we can't explain. There are things that we can't understand. We know that ancient wisdom, and as we like to call it hippie wisdom, has shown that there is something, that there is a class of things that we cannot explain. However, science is catching up, and it really takes someone like Dr. Raz, who's pulling from neuroscience, psychiatry, and hypnosis, to help us understand really the changing nature of our conscious experience of reality.

• 3:42Jonathan Cohen?

  To say that Dr. Raz is skeptical of some of the claims that are being made in the telepathy tapes, some of the explanations that we've had in episodes with Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Jeffrey Kreipel, that have really looked at extrasensory ability and tried to make sense of what people are experiencing, I would say is an understatement.

• 4:07Jonathan Cohen?

  He is very hesitant. However, he also describes, and he accepts some of our, I would say, challenges, that the scientific understanding of the world has to move forward in a very specific way. And it was enlightening to hear both his curiosity and hesitance to accept what he calls fantastical claims without a fantastical body of evidence. So he walks us through that. A couple of caveats for today's show. We recorded this during an intense series of power outages. It was almost, you know, if I want to be metaphysical about it, like the subject matter itself was so electric that it was causing the power to

• 4:48Jonathan Cohen?

  short out. So we are recording this new introduction and we are going to jump right into the heart of the episode, right after Mime welcomes Dr. Roz.

• 4:58Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Roz, welcome to the Breakdown. Break it down. We're very excited to get to talk to you specifically about the suggestible brain. There's so much overlap here with so many things that Jonathan and I, you know, find so compelling about our understanding of how to view the brain and how it impacts, you know, our physical and our, and our mental wellness. The conversation that's sort of evolving is one about consciousness. I'll just sort of establish what, what the conundrum is. The, the notion that consciousness exists outside of us in some sort of collective

• 5:40Mayim Bialik?

  way, right? The collective unconscious, or the collective consciousness, as some people call it. This is a topic that Jonathan and I, we've been doing this podcast for, we're in our fourth year here, right? This is a topic that keeps knocking at our door. And, you know, people in very esoteric, alternative circles, talk about the Akashic records, which have been spoken about for thousands of years.

• 6:13Mayim Bialik?

  Energy workers talk about tapping into consciousness, tapping into someone else's consciousness. You know, we have people who who have exceptional abilities that I often cannot describe. And they're all using the same vocabulary. And what they're saying is that, you know, you can slice into, you can access consciousness, you can access other people's consciousness. You can, you know, understand what's going to happen in the universe because it's in the collective consciousness. I wonder if you can kind of help us sort of get a framework for what are we talking about?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, what you're what you're raising now is like stuff that goes into the realm of the paranormal. There's no really good way to address it other than through speculation. Most of when when we're talking about, I mean, for example, take quantum physics. There are a lot of people in quantum physics who make all kinds of claims using words like entanglement and superposition and quantum tunneling and other things that are really extremely technical, but have some appeal with the with the lay public about how they could serve as a metaphor for for consciousness and for even collective consciousness. And some people talk about the fact

• 7:36Speaker 02

  that tables have consciousness and planets have consciousness and the universe has an expanding consciousness, just like the universe is expanding and dark matter and stuff like that. It becomes very unwieldy. I, as a cognitive neuroscientist, as somebody who does neuropsychology, works with autistic children and autistic adults and have seen a lot of neuropsychological cases, both in the lab and in the field, in real life, in ecological settings. I'm not sure I buy into this entire thing. Collective consciousness is often in the eye of the beholder. There are things that happen,

• 8:21Speaker 02

  and they are very remarkable. Remarkable when you put people in a group. There's no question about that. I mean, there's all kinds of interesting group dynamics. There's all kinds of uh interesting interactions, sometimes unconscious interactions that are uh very interesting in a group setting and they have to do with the fact that you put people uh within a situation where they're talking to one another, not talking to one another, looking at one another, expecting some reactions from one one another. I think we all know or most of us know about the story about clever Hans. Uh a very remarkable horse uh in Europe that was reportedly or purportedly uh conversant in math. People came and asked them some math questions and the the the horse would answer by stomping.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Uh the correct number of stomps would indicate. So people would say, how much is three plus two? And the the horse would stomp five times. And um this really puzzled uh a lot of people in Europe, including people who were interested in animal consciousness. Uh and uh you know, people thought that, you know, this is a remarkably uh smart horse and and very advanced and so on. And he was uh but uh but he was smart in other ways. He was smart in reading uh very subtle cues uh from the people who asked the question. And this was, you know, very clearly demonstrated when they got a simpleton to ask the question, somebody who didn't know the answer, uh the horse didn't know the answer. So the horse was basically stomping and looking very carefully at the person and picking up on very subtle changes such as changes in breathing,

• 9:50Speaker 02

  changes in muscle tension, changes in facial expression um to be able to know when to stop. And this was not a, I mean, I wouldn't describe or label it under the appellation of consciousness research. But it's very interesting. It's a it's a very interesting ability of an animal to pick up on these things without being specifically trained to do so. Um at the end of the day. I'm more of a skeptical when it comes to these things and it's also based on some personal experience, both in the lab and outside of the lab.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Look, when I started listening to the telepathy tapes, I thought to myself, wow, these are definitely emotional stories and dramatic narratives, you know, encapsulated within a certainly a well-edited and smoothly sort of packaged product. I mean, the podcast is very pleasant to listen to, but as the episodes unfolded, it became clear, at least to me, that I didn't need the full seven hours to notice that the evidence provided there to support these, you know, I don't know what to call them, fantastic tales. The evidence was really subpar. From a scientific standpoint,

• 11:09Speaker 02

  extraordinary claims really require extraordinary evidence. This is a maxim attributed to the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan. You need robust evidence when you evaluate claims that go against the scientific understanding.

• 11:26Jonathan Cohen?

  But there are so many times in which science has expanded its understanding of what's possible. When William Sutherland, who developed cranial sacral therapy, before him, we believed that the skull was totally fused and none of the bones were movable. And it was through his experimentation that we developed a whole new understanding of how that body works. When Andrew Weil in the seventies said food was important to our health and well-being, the medical institution for thirty, forty years laughed at him and told him he was ridiculous. When others like Peter Levine and Gabor Maté and others even before them said that our childhood traumas have impacts on our physiology

• 12:09Jonathan Cohen?

  and how our immune system functions, they were laughed out of the room and said that this is ridiculous and that the body is purely mechanistic and we should treat it the way that Western medicine treats it and everything else is nonsense. How do you reconcile the need for curiosity? And maybe there is not a over abundantly clear scientific data to prove that something exists while understanding that, especially in the realm of consciousness and altered states of consciousness and what we know to be

• 12:39Jonathan Cohen?

  Possible is still being understood by science and we may not have the tools yet in science to truly prove these without a reasonable doubt.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  First of all, everything that you say is true, period. I mean, there's no, there's not, there's, nobody can contest anything that you just said. I mean, these are just true things. Um, science is just a tool. People should not get, you know, uh, too religious about it. Science is a tool. It's not a worldview. It's a tool. It's a way to gather evidence, empirical evidence, uh, usually, but it's a way to gather evidence. It's a way to, uh, you know, to think methodologically, to create experiments, to do research, to study something systematically. That's what science is. Um, science does not preclude,

• 13:28Speaker 02

  uh, the existence of supernatural forces. There are many things that science is not very useful for, but there are many things that science is extremely useful for. And, uh, it's our job as humans to, uh, take from science what it can help us with and realize that sometimes science is not the best way to go. When I was a graduate student, I can tell you, uh, a funny anecdote. Uh, when I was a graduate student, I used to, uh, uh, moonlight on the side and I used to do, uh, magic shows. Uh, this is how I made some money and this is how I had some, uh, uh, social, nice social interactions from friends

• 14:08Speaker 02

  to dates to you name it. And, um, one day, uh, we were doing rounds at the hospital where I was, uh, rotating through and, uh, one of the patients there, an elderly woman, looked at me and said, "Weren't you the, weren't you the magician that I just saw?" You know, and, uh, the doctor, the attending physician, you know, uh, took me aside after that and said to me, "Were you that magician?" And I said, "Yes, I was. I was, uh, yeah, I was." I don't remember all the people in the crowd, but it's quite possible that she was there and she saw me. And he says, I really want you to stop. And I said, why? What's I was really shocked. I mean, why? He said, you can't be like a serious neuroscientist, like a neuropsychologist, somebody who studies the brain.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Like you cannot be somebody with the cachet of a brain scientist and do magic on the side. And that really, to me, is the apotheosis. It's the prime example of how some people, not all, but some people view science. They they view it through a very narrow lens, elitistic. You know, something that is only reserved to a few. And if you do something else, you're contaminating the, you know, the whole profession or something like that. I not only that I don't see it like that. I actually see it the opposite way. I think, you know, I was, I think that being a musician, being a magician, being an artist enhances your scientific insights. It it it allows you to investigate things more.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  It gives you more ability to ask questions and so on. Curiosity, something that you mentioned before, is one of the key fuels of a scientist. As it is, you know, a key ingredient in the life of an artist or or, you know, a musician and so on. But without curiosity, you cannot be a good scientist.

• 15:58Jonathan Cohen?

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• 16:00Mayim Bialik?

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• 18:58Mayim Bialik?

  What I wonder if we can get into is, there's two categories of things that we know to be true. And one of those categories involves that people can acquire...

• 19:13Mayim Bialik?

  Exceptional abilities after things such as a stroke, an accident. We had Elizabeth Krone on, a woman, a very kind of normal housewife who was struck by lightning. And she was synesthetic after, but in addition to becoming synesthetic, she started seeing colors around people's heads, which energy workers call auras, and she had never heard of this before. She didn't know why she was seeing emanations of frequency around people's bodies. She also started having, they weren't dreams. She started having precognitive nocturnal events that she would record, many of which did not come true, but some of them came true with specificity

• 19:58Mayim Bialik?

  of the Sully Sullenberger plane that flew upside down. She saw it in a dream before it happened and cataloged it. And she said to her husband, why would I have a vision of a plane flying upside down? She would see images of the numbers of flights and the number of people that were killed on flights, and she cataloged it all. Now, this was a woman with no concept of what was happening to her after she had a near-death experience, after being struck by lightning, right? And yes, that's also anecdotal. She actually wrote a book with Jeffrey Kreipel, who's a professor, and you know, talks about sort of the religious authenticity of some of her spiritual revelations that came to her after being knocked out, you know, by lightning.

• 20:41Mayim Bialik?

  So we know that there are people who seem to acquire musical ability, right? We have all these, you know, fascinating one-off case studies of exceptional things that the brain will do when in a compromised or somewhat altered state. So we know that some of these things exist. And what's interesting to me about this one category. Is that the nomenclature that people are using is identical to the nomenclature that has been used for thousands of years, even by people who don't know of this nomenclature. Meaning Elizabeth Krone had this near-death experience. She came back with, she was on the pavement for two minutes and she came back with a

• 21:26Mayim Bialik?

  download of an understanding of a plane of consciousness that yes, sounds a lot like quantum mechanics. It sounds a lot like what mystics have talked about. It talks, it talks about a spiritual understanding that for thousands of years, people have talked about that this woman had no access to until she woke up from that pavement. Right? So this is sort of one category. We know that exceptional unusual things happen in the brain that facilitate a set of abilities or information. Right? I can't explain that. But this second set that is dealt with in the telepathy tapes is, is individuals with what we might describe as an extension of savant abilities.

• 22:10Mayim Bialik?

  So we know savant abilities exist and they often exist in non-verbal populations, in populations where otherwise, these are individuals who would be institutionalized. People wouldn't assume that, that there's someone in there. Right? And, and we're learning more about this. And what the telepathy tapes is tapping into is what if we start to see an understanding of consciousness as part of an ability set that possibly is preserved in an otherwise non-verbal, you know, by all, by all assessment, an intellectually or developmentally disabled individual?

• 22:52Mayim Bialik?

  What if in addition to other savant abilities, which we know exist, we can expand our consciousness to accept that perhaps individuals who in particular are non-verbal have an access to intuitive abilities? Like, let's call it that. I don't have to call it telepathy. Intuitive abilities, you know, some sort of other kinds of understanding and communication? Can we include that in our understanding of the incredible things that the brain can do?

• 23:24Speaker 02

  When I listen to the telepathy tapes,

• 23:29Speaker 02

  I try to listen to it with as an open mind as possible.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  But I can't, because I am who I am. And I bring my own set of biases into it, just like you do, just like Jonathan does, just like any person would. Even when we say, "Oh, I'm going to be objective," you can't be objective. Right. I mean, you are who you are, and you bring your self-grooming and your education and your life experience into it. In my world, there's no problem with the supernatural. I have no problem with people claiming whatever they want to claim. As a matter of fact, I have some people who I know who claim that the earth is flat. And you know, I know that it's legal in this country still to say that the earth is flat. But we have some evidence that this is not the case.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Now, they're allowed to claim it. We have evidence to show that it's not, you know, the case, but they're allowed to say it. In a similar way, people can claim, for example, unrelated to what you said before, but edging in a little bit closer. People can say that certain vaccinations or certain materials or substances in the vaccinations can cause autism. And we can research that, we can look into that. People have, and they look into this as carefully as they can. And they look into the history of how this notion came about and so on. And they can demonstrate with evidence that is carefully collected and looked into and analyzed and so on, that there is no causation. Maybe there is some correlation sometimes, but there's no causation.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  In other words, vaccines or thimerosal or whatever is not causing autism. This would not necessarily change the way that a parent with an autistic child feels or thinks. And it would not necessarily change how they view vaccines, even if we put this information out there. And I understand it. I understand that there's an emotional tag, there's an emotional investment in this. And if I took my kid to be vaccinated and a little bit later I would discover that they have autism, it would be very difficult for me not to make a connection there. It would be extremely, extremely difficult for me to be objective about it.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Because these are, you know, events that are connected in my mind, because I'm a human being. When I listen to the telepathy tapes, they're definitely making extraordinary claims, including some of the claims that you just listed. You know, nonverbal individuals with autism are able to, through some telepathy or some other thing, do all kinds of extraordinary things. Extraordinary claims, I'm reminded, they require extraordinary evidence. What evidence is provided for this throughout the tapes? I mean, it's an idea, it's a proposal, and they're allowed to have ideas and proposals, of course. The only thing that they're not allowed to do, and this is the only beef I have with them,

• 26:26Speaker 02

  they cannot say, "Oh, we have undeniable evidence for this," which they say, and they say it multiple times, and they say it in such a way that the lay listener, or even not the lay listener, would say, "Hey, they have undeniable evidence. Why are people not listening to them?" But the evidence that they show is weak, at best, anecdotal, and unscrupulous to the max. It's really not evidence that we consider, at least, or I consider, you know, my colleagues and I would not consider to be evidence, but it cuts much deeper than that. It cuts much deeper than that. What you are talking about, savants, you know, people who have...

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Even brain scientists don't have all the answers to what the brain can and cannot do. Even the best astrophysicist cannot tell you everything about the universe, and I don't think they pretend to. Even the best musician cannot compose all the symphonies in the world and play everything, you know, with one hand behind his back tied. There is a limit to what we know. There is a limit to, you know, what we can explain. I would like to explain it, but I would like to explain it responsibly. I would like to explain it in a dispassionate fashion. I would like to explain it in an orderly fashion, in a way that conforms to an agenda. Not an agenda as in a political agenda,

• 27:52Speaker 02

  but an agenda that conforms to a paradigm. And the paradigm that I choose is the scientific paradigm. Now, it's not perfect. It's not always the right paradigm to use, but that's the paradigm I know how to use well. And that's the paradigm that has proven itself in terms of its predictive abilities. When I listen to the telepathy tapes, I hear very clearly evidence that doesn't own up to the scientific term, the term of art, I should say, that we refer to as evidence. And I see experiments, again, experiments, and you know, within quotation marks, that aren't really well-conducted experiments.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  And then the third thing, I see methods that are so deeply flawed that, you know, it makes people like me cringe. I don't know if, you know, I cannot speak for other people, but I feel uncomfortable when, when, when I, you know, view these, these methods. This creates a situation where they can actually say that they're doing research, which in my book is not even research. So if the word evidence is being misused, then the word methodology is being misused, and the word experiment is, then the word research is being misused. Then we're using the same nomenclature, but we're not talking about the same things. I have a great respect for people who have ideas

• 29:18Speaker 02

  and particularly when it comes to dealing with people who are, have special needs. For those of you who know a little bit about me and my family, I have a person, I have a personal connection with this world. And, and that's why it's important for me to speak my own truth. And my own truth as a scientist is, you know, having listened to, to, to some of these episodes, I actually see little new here, Mayim, I have to tell you. I see very new here. If you look at what was going on in the seventies, 1970s, for example, historic claims about facilitated communications, about anomalous cognition, telepathy, et cetera.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  The main difference perhaps, as you pointed out, is that now it's updated with a dash of a consciousness babble. Okay, but it's, it's, we've been through it already. Okay, uh, we've been through it and it's been debunked. It's been debunked by so many magicians, scientists and other people.

• 30:22Mayim Bialik?

  So wait, okay, so I'm gonna, okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop you here because also I, I completely agree. The, the problems that I had were all of the ones that you discussed. Discussions of evidence and research and experiments and, and even, you know, many of the, the doctors that are, you know, that are part of the telepathy tapes have spoken out. Dr. Powell has said, this isn't, you know, a research facility. Like, that's not what we're doing. This wouldn't be admissible. But I think what I'm more interested in, you know, is in some of these later episodes. What, what is striking to me? The notion that there, that there could be some sort of like global fraud?

• 31:02Mayim Bialik?

  That people all over the world are using the same terms and concepts to describe what, what this feels like? That seems odd to me. Meaning you have teachers, facilitators, not just parents, saying, there's something unusual about a particular kind of communication that's occurring with non-verbal individuals. That's what's interesting to me. Not so much, you know, like, I, I know that we can't replicate a lot of these things. But also that, that's partly what's interesting to me is that if we are to believe that we're energetic beings, which we are, I mean, we are, that's just true, right?

• 31:47Mayim Bialik?

  There's energy, all sorts of physical processes and like, these are things that we know. We're, we're energetic beings. So is it, is it okay to say there may be things that are not going to obey the laws of scientific rigor as we know it in terms of our understanding of how people communicate? And what intuitive communication is even like?

• 32:13Jonathan Cohen?

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• 33:27Jonathan Cohen?

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• 33:32Mayim Bialik?

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• 34:15Mayim Bialik?

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• 35:00Mayim Bialik?

  Starting my day with this easy, health-focused task reminds me to continue to make healthy choices the rest of the day. For a limited time, visit drinkag1.com/breakdown and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 plus K2 with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/breakdown. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that MyobioX Breakdown sent you. Like, when you say that this girl, you know, can perform this, you know, kind of communication with her mother but not her father, I don't have a problem with that. To me, that doesn't make it not true. What makes it true is that there's some sort of communication, which anyone who's a parent knows that, of course, that's possible.

• 35:44Mayim Bialik?

  Children communicate differently with their parents. Like, that's not a problem to me. So do we throw out the baby with the bathwater when we say, if I can't replicate this in a particular way, it's not worth us trying to delve into?

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Well, I think we have to be very careful because I think that there's a, there's a lot of overlap and mixing of different things, and, and we have to be very careful about that. Just, just from a, a housekeeping perspective.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Here's the thing. Yes, I mean, do we have energy? Yes, we have energy. Is it the same, when I say that we have energy, is it the same thing as an energy healer hears? Is that what they hear when I say energy? You know, when we say energy in physics, it means something completely different. When we say work, the word work in physics means something very different. When I say statistical significance, oh, this is statistically significant. That's very different from what a layperson hears, because they hear, oh, this is very, very significant. But statistical significance is a term of art. It's something that in science we use in a particular way. What hap- what is beginning to happen here is that there's a lot of suggestions that

• 36:55Speaker 02

  are being put into the Telepathy Tapes podcast, and they're slowly mounting, slowly, there's an, there's a cumulative effect of these things as you move, as you listen more and more, and it's presented well in terms of its, the theatrics of it. And when it comes to, for example, theatrics, I know about that from a completely different part of my life. I know that when I was a young magician and I would go on stage, even if I would give the strongest disclaimer at the beginning of my show, the strongest disclaimer, I would say, "Everything that you're about to see is theatrical mind-reading, and it's, I'm doing this for your entertainment pleasure. I don't have any special powers. I don't have any supernatural abilities. This is all done for your entertainment pleasure. It's the magical arts in action."

• 37:41Speaker 02

  At the end of the show, I would have invariably a few people coming to me and consulting with me about their most intimate things. I was a teenager at the time. They will consult with me about investments, about their dying aunt, about all kinds of things. And I would say, "My God, did you not hear the disclaimer that I, that I gave at the beginning? This is a show. It's a charade. It's, it's a, it's a theatric, you know, skit of sorts." I think that people who are listening... To the telepathy tapes are not necessarily taking from it what you are taking from it. What you're taking from it is some intellectual sparring thing with, hey, isn't that interesting?

• 38:24Speaker 02

  It is interesting. It's fascinating. It's dramatic. It's emotional. It's full of unanswered questions. It's a great story. It's a great story. And is it possible to use these nonverbal people to heal humanity and to enhance spirituality? Everything is possible. The question is, what evidence do we have that this is even true? As a scientist, and I don't want to sound like the sourpuss of, you know, I don't want to be like the, you know, the party pooper. As a scientist, it upsets me deeply to witness such sort of blatant disregard.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  I would even call it contempt, you know, for science, which is one of the prime achievements of our species. So, you know, I'm not saying that with science you can solve everything. And I'm not saying that science is the right way to go even in this particular thing. To answer these particular questions, but you have to acknowledge. You have to acknowledge that a lot of research has already been done and a lot of these things have been studied and shown dismissed. Shown that they're, you know, completely irrelevant.

• 39:35Mayim Bialik?

  The other side of viewers who are really being taken by this are people who, they do not need proof. They don't believe that these things obey the laws of science. They believe that it's true. It's a very emotional, it is a right brain experience that people are having. People are saying, I'm moved by this. It resonates with me and therefore it's true. And that's sort of the challenge, you know, is there a way to try and help us understand? Or help us gain evidence for, you know, my, one of my favorite, I mean, one of the most powerful examples to me is,

• 40:19Mayim Bialik?

  if we are to believe this report, this boy Josiah, who communicated to his mother that he needed to speak to an author that neither of them had ever heard of or met. And he was communicating things.

• 40:34Mayim Bialik?

  To a person that he's never met about what this man was doing in his life, what book he was working on, the chapter he's working on. I could believe that all of these people are manufacturing an enormous fraud. It's possible that every single one of these cases could be a... That just everybody's lying.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so.

• 40:56Mayim Bialik?

  No, but then, so that's an example of, I don't have an explanation. Like, a lot of the other ones, I could be like, oh, there's unconscious cues. Facilitated communication has not been legitimately used and maybe we need to revisit that. I can explain all that away. But when we get, and even the elephants, Jonathan's like, but the elephants knew when the man died. And I said, no, we don't know that. That's, that's a correlation. I don't know that elephants knew that the man who rescued them died and that's why they all came marching. I don't know that, right? But when I, when I have people saying, you know, like, that this kid was communicating information to an author he's never met.

• 41:39Mayim Bialik?

  And when you talk about kids who don't live in the same physical space, who are sharing, somehow sharing information. This one kid dies and apparently, people that he knows in this, in this consciousness realm, knew that he died before their parents were told. I don't know how to explain that. Could all of these parents be making up the same lie?

• 42:06Speaker 02

  It's possible. It's extremely unlikely and I don't think that that's the way to go. But I don't think the way to go is to take a particular story and to try to explain it in general. As a scientist, as a magician, more importantly than a scientist, as a magician, I'm privy to a lot of secret information that the magical arts or the people who are part of the magical arts, guard very, very closely. It's not only that it's their livelihood, but it's sort of a tradition that you don't share this information with other people. Part of that tradition... Is how, for example, to create psychological effects. They're not psychologists. Magicians are not psycho. They're not trained in psychology usually.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  But if you're doing, for example, mentalism, which is a particular kind of magic, you learn a great deal about how to obscure certain things, how to lead people to a certain decision and so on. The reason I mention this is because, you know, when I was starting my way in hypnosis, I did it as really by looking at my peers doing hypnosis shows on stage. And I was struck because I knew that they know zero. They know absolutely nothing about hypnosis. I knew it because they were my age and they read the same books that I read and there was nothing there about hypnosis. So it was all about their charisma, their persona, you know, their ability to stand in front of an audience

• 43:34Speaker 02

  and carry out a show. One time, one time,

• 43:42Speaker 02

  they were doing age regression without really knowing what age regression is. And they got somebody to say that they were a soldier in Napoleon's army. In other words, they're going back in time from before they were born. And suddenly, this person on stage is saying, oh, I was a soldier in Napoleon's army, you know, blah, blah, blah. And suddenly, he starts speaking French. He starts speaking French. And, you know, it was really a very dramatic performance. And at the end of the thing, at the end of the whole show, I went up to this individual, an older person, and I said to him, do you speak French? He said, no, I don't speak any French. And this was quite, you know, shocking to me. At the time, my knowledge of French was quite rudimentary,

• 44:26Speaker 02

  but I could tell, I could tell there was something wrong with the French. I could tell that the French didn't sound right to me. I was not as fluent as I am today, but it felt wrong. I took a recording of that thing because we recorded it to a French-speaking person. And he told me, this is not French. This is mumbo jumbo. He's just, you know, acting. What? It's like Charlie Chaplin doing like, you know, the dictator speech. Yeah. So sometimes, sometimes what we think is happening is not exactly what is happening. And it requires just a little bit of, you know, a tiny bit more verification.

• 45:03Mayim Bialik?

  This is, this is a great example because there is an episode of the telepathy tapes where they talk about A child being able to translate in Hebrew, in hieroglyphics, and no one in that home speaks or knows Hebrew or hieroglyphics. And yes, you are using facilitated communication, which if you don't want to believe in that technique, I get it, like that, but, but if there is independent spelling going on, and no one is guiding a child's hand, that would be a pretty powerful thing for me to not be able to explain.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, the burden of proof is on me to explain it?

• 45:44Mayim Bialik?

  Yes.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Why? The burden of proof is on them to demonstrate that what they're doing is veridical and true. Why is it, why is the burden of proof on me to explain it? The onus is on the person who's making the claim.

• 45:57Mayim Bialik?

  The reason that the burden of proof, I feel, falls on us, people who are open-minded enough to at least listen, right? Is because the people who believe this do not believe in the scientific method. The people who believe this feel it in their kishkas, and that's enough. Or, you know, the, the, the many energy where, I mean, I've, you know, I'm a person who has the kind of health profile that leads you out of Western medicine and into any realm that says they can help you, right? I've been to a lot of people. I've had people say that we're doing past life regressions with me. Like, I've heard it all. Like, I've entertained it, right?

• 46:39Mayim Bialik?

  For that, for that section of people, they don't believe that they have to prove it?

• 46:45Speaker 02

  If people, if people decide that they don't believe in science and they want to dismiss science, that's a completely different conversation because it means that, you know, we cannot agree on, on, on the, on the framework. We cannot agree, you know, what constitutes evidence, what constitutes good methodology, what constitutes research. And so that's when people can use these words, but they mean different things. And that's why I, that's why I always emphasize to you, I say, as a scientist, as a scientist, it saddens me profoundly, you know, to see the promotion of pseudoscience, because this is a form of pseudoscience.

• 47:23Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, but as, as like a human, it's a little bit freaky.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  And that's, that's an important distinction. That's an important distinction. As a, I would say more than a human, as a parent, you know, as a, as a global citizen. I also have concerns about giving people, you know, false hope, about spurious expectations, you know, seeding spurious expectations, about even misallocation of resources. However,

• 47:51Speaker 02

  I commiserate. I understand. I understand where it's coming from and I empathize. They just need to understand that this is not supported by evidence. It's very anecdotal. If they understand that and they still choose to go with that, that's already a completely different thing.

• 48:11Mayim Bialik?

  I think that's the basis of alternative healers. They work outside of the paradigm. We had Neil Thiess on, who was one of like my favorite people to talk to. He's a physiologist, right? And he said, we are connected, right? He was the one who said fascia is a thing, right? We're connected throughout our entire bodies. We're connected. Our microbiome connects with the people that we share a home with, right? There is a connection that many in the scientific realms are willing to engage in a further conversation about.

• 48:42Jonathan Cohen?

  I think it's important that a lot of people are not dismissing the scientific method or saying they don't believe in science, but they're actually saying there is something here that is happening that is just being dismissed outright by science. And that people who are, you know, really turned off by this idea are not applying the type of curiosity that we were talking about when we got cut off. We've been having some technical difficulties in the glitch, the windstorm. And we got into this idea that there have been many times where science has caught up with things outside of the scientific mainstream. Neil Thiess is an amazing example. You know, the holistic and alternative body workers

• 49:27Jonathan Cohen?

  who are doing somatic work said the body is fully connected and it has this fascia system and Western medicine. The scientific establishment said, absolutely not. There's no evidence of that. This is total nonsense. Until it was proven that there was. We talked about the founder of cranial sacral therapy.

• 49:47Jonathan Cohen?

  Adjusting and finding out that the bones of the skull are not fused together. We talk about Andrew Weil and the fact that nutrition has an impact on someone's health, that our mindset has impacts on our immune system and our physiology and the expression of our genes even in epigenetics and that inherited experiences are passed down and potentially genes are blueprints that can be activated by the mind's interpretation of their reality. So I think there are two significant points here. The first is that why it falls back to the scientific community to explore with curiosity with things that are being presented in an anecdotal fashion and are, we can agree,

• 50:32Jonathan Cohen?

  are not adhering to the rigors to say that there is fundamental proof and it should be accepted as, you know, fully real. I think that is agreeable and also that there needs to be a level of curiosity into the unexplainable. So we continue to push the boundaries of what is real, what is possible, just in many other circumstances where science has caught up to, call it mystics, alternative people who are sensing beyond the realms of current tools first. The second is in the exploration of what is possible in our own reality. And I'm, you know, I'm, would be very curious to even dive deeper into your work on suggestibility

• 51:16Jonathan Cohen?

  and start to look at how our everyday consciousness can be altered. Now, it's related to realms of energy and, and potentially, I don't want to say paranormal, but extrasensory ability.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Science does not know everything and scientists are not gods, far from it. Science is a tool and it's a, it's a, it's a paradigm by which you can gather data and so on. It can answer some questions well and some questions it cannot answer well and some questions it cannot answer at all. When I started doing research into hypnosis, people thought that I was deranged because hypnosis was.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Considered, uh, really the paranormal. I mean, at the time that I started doing this, people said, "What are you, what are you dealing with?" I mean, this is, this is ridiculous. Why would a serious scientist want to look at the, at these things? Uh, more recently, I started looking into the science of psychedelics. Again, there's a big, you know, pushback from the scientific community, and that's also changing, you know, it's, it's changing with time. Um, psychedelics are very controversial. Hypnosis is very controversial. Sleep research used to be controversial. You know, things change. The fact that you can measure things doesn't make them important or valuable, and the fact that you cannot measure things does not make them insignificant

• 52:42Speaker 02

  or unimportant. And this is something that is important to write on a big poster and put in your bedroom. I mean, just so that you understand. The fact that you cannot measure something does not mean that it's not there, and it doesn't mean that it's not important. However, when you make a claim, when you make a claim about something, you have to back it up. Otherwise, everybody can make a claim about everything. But most people do not read scientific papers. Most people are not conversant with the language of science. Most people are not interested in science. They're not only that they don't read, they could read if they wanted to, they're not interested. Uh, they're not interested in the paradigm, they're not interested in the rigor, they're not interested in the robust nature of the evidence that are needed, they're not interested in replicability,

• 53:27Speaker 02

  they don't care about all these buzzwords and what they mean, and they're entitled to it. By the way, I have the absolute deepest compassion for these parents, and for these teachers, and for their, these caregivers, for what they're doing, and I don't criticize them for coming up with theories or ideas that are not scientific, or that they, they cannot provide scientific evidence for. I'm the last person who would do that. I just feel compelled to, um, step in with my scientific expertise and present them, based on my experience,

• 54:09Speaker 02

  with the truth, the way I see it, the scientific truth. It might not be relevant for them, just like you pointed out mine, because they don't believe in science, and they dismiss it or disregard it out of hand immediately, but I have to tell them, as a scientist, unfortunately, and to the, the best of my knowledge, and to my genuine chagrin.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  Many of the claims of the telepathy tapes, they're just incompatible with science, with medical research, with psychological research, and with reality. This is important to explain. Now, they might say, "That's not my reality."

• 54:48Mayim Bialik?

  Right, I was gonna say, what is reality in that sense?

• 54:51Speaker 02

  And this is where I come in. This is where I feel very comfortable talking about that. Their reality might be different from my reality. In other words, in their head, they might be seeing all kinds of things, they might be believing all kinds of things, and that's completely fine. That's completely fine. They can have their own reality. I can have my own reality. But at the end of the day, if you're trying to offer somebody help, if you're trying to heal people, if you're trying to build factories, if you're trying to build factories and you don't know about gravity, you have a problem. If you're trying to fly planes and you don't know about the laws of physics, you have a problem.

• 55:31Mayim Bialik?

  And this is why a lot of people who operate in these realms do not operate very comfortably in, quote, "normal society."

• 55:42Speaker 02

  I don't know if it's "normal society" or "abnormal society." You know, in the tapes, they call it anomalous cognition. You know, anomalous cognition. When I did my research on hypnosis and sleep deprivation, I called it atypical cognition. This change of term, you know, atypical, anomalous. For example, you mentioned before savants and stuff. We know very well about people who have superior memories. I mean, these are people who can remember, really, to some amazing extent, their autobiographical memories. They remember what they ate on December 12, 1968, with great accuracy. And it's amazing that people can do that. We study them, and we try to understand how that happens, and so on.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  We don't always have answers. We don't always have, you know, full answers. But the fact that these people are walking around, and you can actually test them, and you can summon them, and you can invite them to the lab, and so on, it means that you can do something about it. What we have here is something that is in the twilight zone.

• 56:46Mayim Bialik?

  And also, it should be noted, and, you know, there are instances of this in my family and in many families. Non-verbal intellectually developmentally disabled individuals autistic were previously assumed to not be able to participate in society. They were institutionalized and they were sent away and no one heard from them and they died languishing in facilities. That was science's best attempt at understanding these individuals.

• 57:23Mayim Bialik?

  So the the weight, you know, of this is also, you know, beyond telepathic ability. Is there a way that we can understand that there's someone in there? And and we know that there are cases of people, physicians in many cases, reporting that they heard what was going on in the room while they were brain dead, right? Presumed to be in a coma. Like, you know, the the notion of sort of who's in there is is also one that's interesting to me.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Well, these are fascinating questions. There's a there's a difference between being, you know, brain dead in a medically induced coma and so on. But but but, um, um, yeah, it's it's very interesting because we find sometimes ways to communicate with people who are in a prolonged coma using all kinds of EEG signals or EEG components that have to do with detecting certain patterns and things like that. It's a fascinating field. It's a fascinating field and people who are, you know, beginning to lose due to disease or due to all kinds of other reasons, they begin to lose control over their muscles. You can train them to communicate using systems that when the time comes and they cannot

• 58:41Speaker 02

  control their voice anymore, they'll be able to communicate with you using signals that are based, like we said before, on galvanic skin response or eye movements or all kinds of things that these are active fields of exploration in in science, in neuroscience, in cognitive psychology. But.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  It's nascent, it's very early days. What we are talking about here is um um something that would be fascinating to explore, uh intriguing and mesmerizing, I mean really with with with literally mesmerizing. But we have to understand also at the same time that it relies, the only way that I know how to explore these things is using the scientific method. If somebody else has a different method that is better, they're welcome to present it and and and do it. We as a species have not been able to find one yet, so it's a question of alternative.

• 59:36Mayim Bialik?

  Well, that's the thing. People who believe in these things, they they don't need to present anything in its place.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  And that's the science of belief. That's the science of suggestion. So the science of suggestion, there's a science to it. There's a science to it. How do people, how how does a suggestion work on the brain? How can you, how can I make a suggestion to you and as a result of that you actually hear a particular sound, a sound that doesn't exist in reality?

• 1:00:03Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, your book talks about unbelievable examples. I mean, one of my favorite was the the Stroop effect, where you can you can essentially undo the Stroop effect.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  When I started out as a very young scientist, uh or at least younger than I am today, I was really interested in demonstrating the power of suggestion by taking a paradigm that is completely acceptable by the scientific community and turn it on its head. And the reason I wanted to do that is because I always had an intuitive sense. It was never solidified. It was just an intuitive sense that some of the measurements that we're doing, for example, in the, you know, cognitive psychology lab, could be swayed by certain parameters. And I discussed it with my professors, I discussed it with my colleagues, and they always told me, oh, you know, you're too young for this and, you know, wait forty years and then you can, uh, then you can do these things.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  But um, one of my mentors actually told me uh something different, and it was very illuminating for me. He said to me, "Show me." Do an experiment that would show me that you can do what you're claiming that you can do. Show me how with suggestion you can actually um do what you claim to do. Take something that 4,000 papers have been written on and and and we think that we know exactly how it works. And show me that you can turn it around. And this was a nice challenge, but I also got his support. In terms of resources, in terms of thinking about the paradigm, in terms of coming up with the right experimental design. And when we did it that way, I had his back.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  And when we had the results out, people started listening. By the way, when you put data out, scientists are not immediately convinced. Scientists are very, very difficult people. You know, even if you show them data, even if you show them stuff, they need a lot of time. They need a lot of time, a lot of replications, a lot of studies that would do the same thing again and again until they're convinced. And for a good reason, because that's how we make progress. And sometimes, and I I I I'm sad to say it, but it's true. Sometimes you'll have to wait for certain scientists to die out before you can have new people come in and introduce new paradigms and new ideas and also new kinds of thinking,

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  including about evidence and how to collect things and how to analyze things and so on and so forth. And that's just the reality of the sociology of science.

• 1:02:36Jonathan Cohen?

  I'd love to talk a little bit more about areas of your work

• 1:02:42Jonathan Cohen?

  where you began to flip a paradigm that had been previously thought to be fixed.

• 1:02:47Mayim Bialik?

  Can I can I dig into a couple of examples?

• 1:02:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's dig in.

• 1:02:51Mayim Bialik?

  So one of the things that I love, well, about you, Dr. Raz, and about your book, is you do experiments on individuals that allow us to extrapolate about how human behavior works, how belief works, how science works, without you needing to replicate it with 800,000 people in a double-blind study, right? Because your lab in particular is kind of pushing the bounds of what we understand about the human experience. I'm going to ask you to talk about a couple of cases. One of my favorites, which relates to Jonathan. You did an experiment with people who were lactose intolerant.

• 1:03:33Mayim Bialik?

  Now, this is one of those things, it feels like it should be a very cut and dry scientific thing. You know, if you eat dairy and this particular thing happens gastrointestinally, like you are lactose intolerant. I want you to talk about this study that you did. Where you, you took people who were lactose intolerant and you, there's also a huge, a huge section in the book about ethics, about how we get around these things, what the placebo effect means, how it impacts how we approach ethics and science. Talk about this experiment with the lactose intolerant people.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  I had a very close friend who was extremely lactose intolerant. And one day we were walking around on the boardwalk and of course, I knew from a very young age that she's so lactose intolerant. When she came to my house, we had to be very careful about everything and inform her and no milk and no dairy. Okay, so I knew that from the get go. And one day we're walking on the boardwalk, talking about something and suddenly there's a gelato stand there. And she says to me, hey, would you like some gelato? And I thought that she was kidding and I said, well, this, you know, aren't you, I mean, this is lacto, there's a lactose problem here now. And she said, no, this is gelato. It's not ice cream, it's gelato. I said, what, what, so gelato has no, she said, no, gelato is fine. It's, it's ice cream that is the problem. Gelato is lactose free.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  I said, oh, well, in that case, I'm buying. And we had, you know, two generous portions and we were eating everything. And I said to myself, my God, is she, is she serious? Is she like, is this real? Because she would usually bloat and have like all these.

• 1:05:09Mayim Bialik?

  Right, and as a, as a vegan, sorbet is dairy free. Gelato can be, but generally speaking, gelato has eggs and milk. It's delicious apparently.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  So I actually went back to the gelato vendor over there and I asked later, this was, this happened, you know, a little bit later. And I said, is this gelato lactose free? And he said, absolutely not, I make it myself. There's, there's plenty of milk here. Yet she had absolutely no symptoms. Symptoms whatsoever. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, her lactose intolerance is all in her mind. I'm not saying that she's a nut job who who sort of, you know, is over psychologizing the whole thing. There's a biological basis for it. There's an enzyme missing. There's the whole thing is very clearly understood. But but there's also a top down component. In addition to the bottom up component, there's also a top down component.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  And when she was under the impression that this gelato was safe, it became safe.

• 1:06:07Mayim Bialik?

  I want to underline this before you go into the study. There was something going on in her in her mind that was impacting her physiology, right?

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  That's right. And because this was anecdotal and because this was my friend and because I felt that this is this is worth, you know, exploration. I came upon the following weird design. I can't at the time I was in Montreal, I was at McGill University and I you have to get first. First of all, IRB approval in Canada, they call it REB. It's a slightly different acronym, but it's the same thing.

• 1:06:39Mayim Bialik?

  The same misery of writing, writing and submitting millions of copies.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Study and I did a study where I invited people in to a study where they were actually drinking

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  milk that was lactose free. In other words, I gave them lactose free milk, but I packaged it in bottles that said that it's it was a regular milk. And I basically asked them, you know, how much would you be willing to take before, you know, you would show symptoms? So some people said, oh, I, you know, I'm not gonna even touch it. And that's fair, you know, that's fair enough. And some people said, you know, I'm so sensitive that even if you give me, you know, if you take a teaspoon and you empty it, just the film that clings to the concavity of the spoon. If if I just, you know, lick that, that's enough for me to have a full one. I said, well, would you mind, you know, would you mind if we tried? I mean, and that's what we did. So we took milk that they were under the impression was lactose containing

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  and was actually lactose free unbeknownst to them. And they would sort of take a spoonful, empty it and then use the sort of just the film that clings to the to the spoon. You know, take it in and some of them, lo and behold, they would they would have like. A full, you know, blast, you know, kind of uh uh reaction and including belching and including, you know, you know, all kinds of, you know, unpleasant things. And that clearly came not from the lactose. It came from the fact that they thought that they were exposed to lactose in their very.

• 1:08:05Mayim Bialik?

  And not everyone, not everyone.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  Not everyone, but since these people came as pre-selected, they they were pre-selected as lactose intolerant based both on their self-report and based on biological measures. Um, which showed that they were lactose intolerant. We required them to have a genetics test and also a stool sample and and some kind of a breathing test that they had to pass. We had a lot of uh biological data that they actually are uh lactose intolerant. We also did the opposite. We created a situation where uh we gave, we invited people to participate in a study and we informed them that um some of them will be in the placebo arm of the study. In other words, the placebo arm of the study, in other words, the the the arm that doesn't get chemically

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  active uh uh ingredients and we're using them as a control. And uh we just uh did it in such a way that the people who came uh were, some of them were lactose intolerant. And then when they took uh this particular uh pill, which was the placebo, we gave them the pill thinking, you know, or they were thinking that it's a placebo, which it was. What they didn't know is the placebo was actually a lactose pill because or contained lactose. Because often what we do when we give placebos is we we we give some sugar, you know, we we give some milk sugar or we give a sugar pill. That's why a placebo is a sugar pill in the minds of many people.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  So they didn't have any reaction until they heard that it was a lactose containing pill. When they heard that it was a lactose containing pill, some people, you know, uh basically broke out with with with some symptoms. This shows us, and it shows many clinicians, and I think many clinicians knew this from a long time ago, that yes, lactose intolerance is biological. Yes, there is a whole biology to it that we understand quite well, or we think that we understand a little bit, but there's also a whole psychological component to it that has to do with expectations.

• 1:10:03Mayim Bialik?

  This begs the question, and I'm gonna go there. I mean, you have so many other amazing experiments, like the Tourette's one and the asthma one also. Jonathan's also asthmatic. Jonathan's your perfect patient. The asthma one blew my mind. In a nutshell, before I ask you the question, I want to ask you. In a nutshell, with the asthma one, you were able to induce asthmatic attacks from a non-irritant, simply by saying, "This is an irritant." Full-on asthma attacks you were able to induce. So this begs the question, what's the number one thing every woman wants to talk about besides perimenopause, including me? Autoimmune

• 1:10:46Mayim Bialik?

  conditions. And if you go on any social media and you type in autoimmune conditions, there is an entire universe. And in particular, women are being diagnosed with autoimmune conditions in alarming numbers. And we had Gabor Maté talk about, you know, the increase in these and the trauma and all the things. And I believe in autoimmune conditions. I have two. My first one I got when I was 23. My second I got when I was 46. I'm 23 years apart. Also, the number of chromosomes in human DNA. I think there's something going on. In any event, what I know is that for certain autoimmune conditions, I cannot help

• 1:11:25Mayim Bialik?

  but wonder, when I read your book, how much of what is going on physiologically with me, I'll just take me? Is being influenced by what I think, what I've been told, what certain specialists tell you. One of the components of the autoimmune challenges I have is I have a histaminergic reaction that is outrageous. Outrageous. And when I was my sickest, everything led to a histamine reaction, right? So your book started me thinking, if I think I'm gonna have a histamine reaction because everything's giving me a histamine reaction, how will I ever know when I'm not having a histamine reaction?

• 1:12:10Mayim Bialik?

  And there's about six different medications that I was put on to block all of the different pathways of histamine. Because it could be this enzyme, it could be this, and you know, very expensive functional medicine doctors who know every single pathway and they're showing me the catalytic conversion and they're showing me the receptor protein and, and you know, all the conversions that need to happen for this receptor. And they're blocking it all these different ways, right? And I started thinking, gosh, how mu... And this is not to say it's in your head, but how much can our mind influence our physiology in ways that are possibly changing the way we are tackling medicine?

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  We know that, uh, you know, some mind-body techniques that have to do with relaxation, with hypnosis, with guided imagery, with things like that, are as effective, sometimes more effective.

• 1:12:59Mayim Bialik?

  For warts?

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  And this is for warts, for example, for some, for certain kinds of warts, yeah. Uh, and this is, and this is very important. Now, I'm not saying that we should dismiss dermatology here and just go, you know, and, and do some, you know, guided imagery for, for our problems. But I am saying that there is a mental component, there's a psychological top-down effect here that we often ignore and that I think that in their heart of hearts, most clinicians know about quite well because they encounter it in the, in the trenches.

• 1:13:28Mayim Bialik?

  And when you say mind-body techniques, these are things like?

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Practice.

• 1:13:34Mayim Bialik?

  So I'm supposed to meditate on my wart?

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  You're supposed to get some help from a professional who knows about things like hypnosis and meditation and yoga and things of that nature.

• 1:13:48Mayim Bialik?

  So those are lowering the body's immune response in general. So all these things you're talking about, right? These are trying to lower the agitation level.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  Not necessarily. I mean, you don't necessarily lower your immune response, but you can often lower your anxiety.

• 1:14:02Mayim Bialik?

  Which just links to your immune response.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Well, sometimes you can lower your anxiety. Sometimes you can increase your blood flow. Sometimes you can change your temperature. You can do all kinds of things. Sometimes just changing your blood flow would change the acidity of your skin. It would change the kind of bacteria that can grow. These are changes that can happen very rapidly and they can happen very slowly. And again, the scientific literature documents quite a number of striking experiments that I found throughout my career that most dermatologists are not even aware of because they're not necessarily published in dermatological journals. They're published often in journals that have to do with hypnosis or with the psychology and so on.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  These silos are beginning to break down. Also, science has become more interdisciplinary. But we still have this resistance. But I think it's inevitable that we're going to break it down eventually.

• 1:14:59Mayim Bialik?

  Bruce Lipton, before Joe Dispenza, started talking about a notion of the environment being more significant, right? In most cases, rather than just focusing on gene programming. And the way that he extrapolates that out is not dissimilar from what you talk about here. When you talk about placebo, when you talk about the power of the mind over the body, it's not dissimilar from saying the unconscious experience is having an impact on what we previously thought was the dominant conscious experience.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  So when I say placebo, or when I say something that is nonspecific, you know, somebody else might say, oh, this is unconscious, or this is, you know, coming from, you know, without your awareness, or something like that. I would say this is a response expectancy. They will say this is your unconscious mind speaking. I have no problem with that. That, to me, this kind of a semantic, you know, this kind of semantic boundary, to me, that's a non-issue. We can, we can sort of clarify what we're talking about and so on. What I'm most interested in is the end, the outcome, the end result. And whether I can actually help you with your warts, whether I can actually help you with the eczema, whether I can actually relieve you of the symptoms that you're trying to, so, you know, so desperately to heal from.

• 1:16:19Mayim Bialik?

  There's an example in your book about a young child with Tourette's syndrome, which we know a lot about. We know what Tourette's is. We know what it looks like. We know, in some cases, you know, what works, what doesn't work. Can you talk about the incredibly creative way that you were able to, I don't want to say cure Tourette's. That's not what you're doing. You're showing the, the complexity surrounding symptom presentation.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Correct. So, so Tourette's is a very interesting example because most people with Tourette's, by the time they hit the age of 18 or so, the vast majority, or, you know, a good number of people will just spontaneously remit, and they're going to be better. And as a result, because of that, a lot of child neurologists, child psychiatrists, you know, pediatricians, sometimes they just say tough it out. You know, tough it out until you're 18, and everything's going to be fine. And then they give all kinds of medications that sometimes the medication is not as, not only that they're not helpful, but sometimes the side effects are really debilitating. Some, you know, sometimes they can be tardive dyskinesia, cognitive dulling, gaining weight, all kinds of things that are not, you know, we're not happy about, or the patient shouldn't be, you know, happy about usually.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  So I was looking for a way to help these people, and I discovered that when these kids were, for example, playing computer games or something like that, they would not tick. They would not curse. They would not be in a, in a situation where most of their symptoms are out. And I saw that there's a certain element of attention that is, that is, you know, that plays a big role here, and their mindset. Their mindset is very important to them. So I created this machine.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  That basically does nothing from all kinds of scrap that I found in the basement of the hospital. And I called it a tick detector. It was basically a bunch of, you know, defunct medical devices that I put together with wires and stuff like that. And it looked like a formidable construction of some sorts. It definitely looked like a medical device, but you couldn't tell what it was doing. And I called it a tick detector. And I took one kid who had very difficult Tourette's and tried everything under the sun, everything from psychological to pharmaceutical to this to that, and saw a million a string of clinicians and was really in bad shape. And I tried to engage him with this tick detector by telling him, look, this is a tick detector,

• 1:18:37Speaker 02

  and it can beep. Every time it detects a beep coming from you, it's going to beep. Unbeknownst to the child, of course, this machine would beep just randomly. Every few seconds, it would just beep. And the child was sitting there, and the machine would beep. And I would say to him, did you hear that? He said, yes. I said, can you feel a tick coming? If he would say yes, I said, you see, it works. If he would say no, I would say, oh, this is a very sensitive machine. Sometimes it detects the ticks even before you do. Just wait a few seconds and you'll feel it. And sure enough, you know, a few seconds later, he would, you know, have a tick, because that's what you have when you have Tourette's. I mean, you can't get around it. So it's a win-win situation. If he says yes, I win. If he says no, I win.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  So you can't do this with an adult, or it's more difficult to do this with an adult. But with a child, you know, this is doable. And after a while, he was convinced that this machine can actually predict his ticks, and he would come and play with this machine. And then I took him to another room, where there was even a bigger machine, again, from scrap, the whole thing. But it looked very different with Christmas lights that I disguised and all kinds of things, you know, all kinds of buttons and things like that. And I told him, do you want to turn it on? He says, what does it do? I said, this is the tick deflector. The tick deflector actually melts all the ticks away. It connects with the tick detector in the other room.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  And together, the tick detector tells the tick deflector and then the tick deflector deflects, melts the ticks, and then you don't have to take them out. And I brought two cables together and I told him, do you want to connect these two machines together? Because the second you connect them together, the tick detector is going to speak to the tick deflector and then, you know, and he connected them together. He sat on the chair, he heard the beeps from the tick detector, he heard the bops from the tick deflector, and he was sitting there without, you know, ticking. He was sitting there just, you know, looking at, you know, at the world. And I remember bringing in the mother who looked at him and she said to me, what did you give him? What did you give him?

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  And I had to say, you know, I just gave him some scrap medical devices and some suggestions. I mean, that's it. And this is not something that would hold up, you know, when he leaves the hospital, he would go home and the ticks would, you know, slowly come back in. But it does show you something, perhaps about the mechanism, perhaps about how we could think about these things, about the mental component, about the mindset, about how some of the physiology as we know it could be regulated, orchestrated, even I would say governed by some psychological top-down processes.

• 1:21:23Jonathan Cohen?

  We could do a whole episode on what would it take to take that change and implement it in the rest of his life?

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  That's right. And, and we have been trying to, together with my students, together with my colleagues, we've been trying to find ways to take these observations about lactose intolerance, about asthma, about other things that I describe in the book, and how to transport them, how to transfer them, so that they are relevant to other fields of life outside of the lab and in the ecological world. And there's a, there's a little bit of a leap there, but I think it's doable and we are, you know, basically making some baby steps in that direction. The point is, the mind is very powerful. The mind is very complex. And there is a very interesting interaction between our mindset,

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  our, I would say, expectations, our symbolic thinking, our cultural, you know, dogmas, our personal aspirations, and our physiology, our neurophysiology, our physiology, the way that our body, our corporal body, responds to these signals and to these, I would say, processes.

• 1:22:34Mayim Bialik?

  Dr. Roz, it's really so great to get to talk to you. The book, "The Science and Magic of How We Make Up Our Minds: The Suggestible Brain," I highly recommend it. I suggest you get it. And it was really such a pleasure to get to talk to you, and we hope to talk to you more.

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. And this is, I hope, the first episode of many, because I find these discussions not just very stimulating, but also very important. I wish more people will actually ask these questions and probe these issues, because I think that a lot of people outside of the scientific community, and a lot of people who don't know anything about mental health and so on, need to know and want to know. There's a serious thirst out there for this kind of information. And I don't think that people who are in the know, people like me and like you, are making, you know, we need to put our best foot forward in order to provide this information. So thank you for doing what you're doing.

• 1:23:29Mayim Bialik?

  So one of the things that, because of our recording, got cut out, but I did want to mention, is that Dr. Roz was very close friends with my very first mentor in college, who passed away recently, Dr. Iran Zaidel. And so Dr. Roz has been interested in exploring certain aspects of, how do we make science more popular, more palatable, more able to be part of a larger conversation? And this was something that Dr. Zaidel, bless his memory, was also interested in. And Dr. Zaidel was particularly fascinated with the fact that I had come off of his television screen and was in his undergraduate class on, you know, psychobiology, and then ended up working in his lab for several years. So... This is like, kind of an unbelievable

• 1:24:14Mayim Bialik?

  meeting of so many different aspects of my life to get to talk to Dr. Roz like this. And what I think is really important is that there are so many scientists who will not even engage to talk about it. And while we may not agree with Dr. Roz's analysis of something like the telepathy tapes, or we want to believe that there are other ways to measure things and understand them. What I think is so valuable about this episode is that he is willing to explain some of the reasons that the methodology doesn't work for him. He's able to explain the limitations that he has, while also acknowledging that that creates its own limitation in understanding the fantastical nature of human experience.

• 1:24:53Jonathan Cohen?

  I know a lot of non-materialists who would hear his research with asthma, with Tourette's tics, and quickly explain it in their worldview. Meaning that, oh, if you can think your way out of it, if you can imagine a version of yourself that doesn't have this, because the tic is actually you anticipating. It's an anxiety bind that actually is just manifesting in these tics. And there's not a fundamental neurological imbalance or structural issue. And what he says is that he doesn't disagree, and he sees that there are fantastical changes. But when they go back into their environment, and the non-materialists would say, "Well, when they go back into their environment, what's happening is that they are being placed in the same stressors"

• 1:25:38Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 1:25:39Jonathan Cohen?

  "that are causing this adaptation" and these, you know, almost reflexive actions to happen. So the question, then, what I really appreciate is, how do you carry it forward? How do you build these skills for these people to take themselves out of those experiences and live a life free from those conditions? And so I do believe that science and the non-materialist view are coming together to communicate. It's not always quick, and people are slow to change their perspectives, but it's happening, and hopefully, we can be a part of that transition.

• 1:26:11Mayim Bialik?

  And if you are interested in understanding this, I highly recommend The Suggestible Brain. He's written a lot of academic books. This is his first, sort of like, book for laypeople. And first of all, the experiments are so fascinating, but it really does demonstrate the complex web of consciousness and how we construct our own reality.

• 1:26:32Jonathan Cohen?

  If you liked this episode, if you liked these topics, do us a favor, post in the comments on YouTube. Tell us what side of the fence you're on. Are you a believer in the telepathy tapes? Are you a believer in extrasensory abilities? Have you had those experiences yourself? Or are you skeptical? Are you hesitant for science to quickly adopt these new phenomenon? Also, check out our episode with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman. Take a lesson to our episode with Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Jeffrey Kreipel. And do us a really, really big favor. Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Click the little bell notifications to get notified of new episodes and subscribe anywhere you get podcasts. It absolutely helps us make more.

• 1:27:15Mayim Bialik?

  From our suggestible brains and breakdowns, the one we hope we never have. We'll see you next time.