Premonitions That Came True! Aberfan, Plane Crashes & Death Foretold | New Yorker Staff Writer Sam Knight on Seemingly Impossible Stories of Dreams and Visions Before Catastrophe

What if precognitive abilities could actually save lives? Sam Knight (New Yorker staff writer, author of the widely popular The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold) joins Mayim Bialik's Breakdown to unpack some of the strangest, most unsettling questions in human experience: Can we really be scared to death? Do premonitions give us access to other timelines? Or are they evidence of a hidden, collective consciousness? Sam takes us inside the real story behind the deadly coal mine collapse that dozens of people eerily reported before it happened: a wave of psychic warnings so compelling it led to the creation of the British Premonitions Bureau, an experimental project designed to collect premonitions and prevent future catastrophes. We explore why people in the past seemed to understand extrasensory abilities better than we do today, and how head injuries have triggered sudden psi abilities in some truly bizarre cases. Sam also breaks down the most common types of premonitions, what separates accurate warnings from noise, why there aren't premonitions about positive things, the implications of so many different families and cultures sharing these inexplicable accounts, and why it’s actually anti-scientific to dismiss reports of precognition altogether. Do people who experience premonitions have a moral responsibility to act on them? Could these uncanny glimpses be messages from alternate timelines, or something emerging from the depths of the unconscious mind? And the biggest question of all: Do we all have the ability to receive premonitions but we just don’t know how to listen? If you’ve ever felt a strange sense of déjà vu, had a dream that came true, or wondered whether the future is already whispering to you…this is the episode of MBB you can’t miss. Sam Knight’s book, The Premonitions Bureau: https://www.samknight.net/books Subscribe on Substack for Ad-Free Episodes & Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  John Barker is a psychiatrist at a mental hospital. Hencher rings him up one night and is like,

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I have a prediction.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Barker's like, OK, what is it? Is it another plane? And he's like, no, it's you.

• 0:10Mayim Bialik?

  If someone tells you you're gonna die, do you die?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  It's the concreteness of those premonitions that then lead on to the forming of the Premonitions Bureau.

• 0:18Mayim Bialik?

  Journalist Sam Knight, he's a New Yorker staff writer. He's booked The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold. Shockingly true stories about precognitive abilities and predictions of future tragedy and even death.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  I don't know how you sit down in your kitchen and write down that there's gonna be a train crash and you put it in the post on a Wednesday and it happens on a Sunday night.

• 0:43Mayim Bialik?

  How many of the things that are predicted do come true?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  October 1966, an astonishingly nightmarish thing that happened. Huge coal mining part of the UK for 100 years, huge amounts of coal taken out of the ground, and they would just pile up the waste of these things. One day, one of these piles of coal waste that had been rained on for weeks and weeks and weeks suddenly dislodged and just rushed down the mountain and buried at school and killed 116 children. John Barker rushes to the village and starts talking to people, uncovering these stories, particularly among the children who didn't want to go to school that day. Told their mom that they'd had a dream and there was something black that came over the school. You can have dreams or bad feelings about kind of various disasters, but the particular configuration of Aberfan is quite striking.

• 1:32Mayim Bialik?

  It's something that we all have the ability for and we're just not tapping into it? Is it something that's for a select few or is it somewhere in the middle?

• 1:46Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm I'm Yalek.

• 1:47Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:48Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. Have you ever had a feeling that something was gonna happen and then it did? Would you classify yourself as someone who has precognitive abilities?

• 2:00Mayim Bialik?

  It turns out, the ability to anticipate things even with great specificity is something that occurs all over the world. Why don't we talk about it? Because often, it's not right. But the times when it is can be incredibly powerful. And as our guest today is going to talk about, what if precognitive abilities have the potential to save lives? Do we listen to those messages? Do we not?

• 2:29Jonathan Cohen?

  We're going to explore the creation of a department in the UK that explored and gathered precognitive events and tried to test to see if they were real. We're also going to explore how our minds can be influenced.

• 2:47Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to be talking with journalist Sam Knight about his book, The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold. And what The Premonitions Bureau is about, and what we're going to be talking about today, is it's a true story. There was a psychiatrist named John Barker, and he investigated both the power of premonitions as well as the possibility that we can be literally scared to death. Dr. Barker worked as a psychiatrist. He worked with other psychiatrists who were fascinated in talking to patients who had been hospitalized, in many cases, for psychosis, who had startlingly accurate predictions of very large disasters that happened.

• 3:30Mayim Bialik?

  And he set out to discover what these could mean, how they connect, and if they can tell us anything about our human nature. Sam Knight is the author of the book. He's a New Yorker staff writer, and he's going to tell us how he got interested in The Premonitions Bureau, what he learned about the nature of our potential existence as precognitive beings, and what we can learn from the story of Dr. Barker, who of course, died mysteriously, as was predicted by two of his patients. Today's episode focuses on shockingly true stories about precognitive abilities and predictions of future tragedy and even death.

• 4:15Mayim Bialik?

  Sam Knight, welcome to The Breakdown.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:18Mayim Bialik?

  I am a huge fan of all things New Yorker, so I'm very excited to get to talk to you. I feel like you're a celebrity in my mind. I'm gonna hold up an uncorrected proof of The Premonitions Bureau, which, when we got this, I was so excited, not only to read it, but for the opportunity to get to speak with you. And really, really appreciate you coming and talking to us.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  It's a real pleasure.

• 4:44Mayim Bialik?

  There's one thing that I want to open with. Seeing patterns where they do not exist is something called apophenia. Finding meaning where there is none is a sign of madness. Making connections in what we see, hear, or dream is actually how we think. Finding a pattern no one ever has is genius. Your book takes us directly into the belly of this beast, between madness and not only genius, but the possibility that people may have abilities to see into time in a way that we do not understand in any materialist way.

• 5:28Mayim Bialik?

  Talk about how you found out about The Premonitions Bureau.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  I'm a magazine writer, you know, that's what I do. And this was a while ago. This was probably 10 years ago. And I'm normally kind of working on assignments that I'm, you know, I'm pretty into. But I like to have a kind of, a really sort of thorny, tricky project in the background. Do you know what I mean? That's just sort of takes longer and I kind of chip away at it. And I just finished one of those stories. And so I was kind of in the market for something new. I think I was a bit stuck. And I saw online somewhere like a call for short stories.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  And I'm a nonfiction person, but I thought maybe it would be like good for me to try and write a short story. And so I had an idea for a short story. And the idea for the short story was, this is just the idea, it would take the form of a letter and the letter would be written by someone who had had a premonition. And and it would sort of take the form of impossible knowledge, right? So the idea was that someone was going to be building like a big incinerator or some industrial thing on the edge of a town. And this person just knew that some very specific like component that they could never have known about was going to go wrong. And I kind of had this idea for this short story.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  And I think at heart, because I'm like a nonfiction person, my response to this was to go to the British Library, where I do a lot of work, and just to order up loads and loads of books about prophecy and premonitions. And so I was there in the library with this, you know, huge stack of books. Mainly from the kind of late 19th century, early 20th century, kind of spiritualism movement in sort of Victorian times and kind of first 20 years of the 20th century. In amongst them, there was a sort of later compendium of like weird stuff from the 20th century. And it had this description of the Premonitions Bureau. It wasn't much, it was just like a couple of paragraphs, but it was called, you know,

• 7:43Speaker 00

  the British Premonitions Bureau. I just immediately responded to that as an idea and a thing. And I started pulling the threads of it. It's not a known story, right? It was, it had a moment in kind of 1966, 1967, where it was sort of made the BBC News and was in the newspapers and kind of made a splash. But it's not a known story. And I just started kind of scratching and kind of unpeeling it. But it's sort of, it, I don't know whether you guys think about this, but. The process of where ideas from come from is quite mysterious to me.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  And and I sort of haven't resolved really in my mind why I had the idea or how I found it. But that's how I found it.

• 8:34Jonathan Cohen?

  And if someone is listening and they're like, premonitions, bro, maybe I kind of understand what that means just by the words being connected. Like, how do you describe it to someone who has never heard of it before?

• 8:46Speaker 00

  I describe it as an attempt to collect the dreams and forebodings of the British public on a mass scale and to try and detect patterns in those sort of dreams and warnings with the aim of somehow stopping disasters from happening.

• 9:11Mayim Bialik?

  The notion was that for 18 months, right, there was a bureau that was headed in in large by this Dr. Barker, right? And there were other psychiatrists. The notion was, what if we take seriously what we dismiss routinely as the ravings of lunacy? And in particular, people who have been hospitalized for what we now would say is paranoid schizophrenia, nervous breakdown. Most of the things that people predict do not come true. But what the premonitions bureau was trying to figure out was how many of the things that

• 9:51Mayim Bialik?

  are predicted do come true? And what does it mean really about the nature, potentially, of the human mind to be able to access things that are not in this timeline? That's what's so fascinating.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, and to do it in an open ended way. So they kind of realized that you could create all these books I was looking at in the library are these amazing creepy collections of premonitions that came true. But like, but what happens if you just do an open ended experiment? You just like, send them in and we'll, we'll, we'll kind of count them up at the end of the year, at the end of 18 months and kind of see how many of those turned out to be the case.

• 10:26Mayim Bialik?

  I, I think it was the first call. There was a coal, a coal accident, right? The Aberfan tragedy.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:35Mayim Bialik?

  Describe what the tragedy was and describe what information came out of it when these psychiatrists said, anybody think about this before it happened?

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Aberfan, uh, the disaster there in kind of October nineteen sixty six is kind of in sort of British and particularly sort of Welsh public memory is still like an astonishingly nightmarish thing that happened and people talk about it and still and it it kind of clutches at you. Wales, huge kind of coal mining part of the UK and for a hundred years, huge amounts of coal taken out of the ground and they would just pile up the waste of these things on hillsides. This kind of seems unbelievable in retrospect, but they would literally just dump the stuff

• 11:29Speaker 00

  on top of hillsides surrounding these villages where people lived and they didn't test the ground or the weather or like where would be a smart place to put these things. And one day in October nineteen sixty six, one of these piles of coal waste, which is just, you know, gigantic, you know, I think contained enough coal waste to like fill, you know, St Paul's Cathedral in London, like one and a half times over, just a huge volume of um quite fine tailings and kind of bits of like discarded coal that had been rained on for weeks and weeks and weeks, suddenly dislodged and just rushed down the mountain and buried a school and killed a hundred and sixteen children, uh as well

• 12:14Speaker 00

  as twenty, thirty people from the village.

• 12:16Mayim Bialik?

  And this is like a picture of volcano, like that I pick, when I read this, I pictured Pompeii, you know, like a a mountain essentially of coal is rushing into this village and buries a school and kills all these people.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  And it's the children of the guys who've dug out the coal and who've been piling it up on the hillside and have been saying, are we sure this is a good idea? John Barker, who's the kind of protagonist of the book, is a psychiatrist at a mental hospital about a hundred miles away, just on the border between England and Wales. And He, like everybody else in the nation, hears the kind of the news reports coming out from this. And the next morning, it happens on a Friday, uh, he rushes to the village. And starts talking to people. Um, and in his kind of notes of this encounter, he kind of knows that he's sort of

• 13:15Speaker 00

  out of place. I mean, it's a kind of, it's this awful kind of tragedy in a, in a kind of isolated. You know, this is a, this is a working class mining village. It's just had the worst day that anyone has ever had in it. And, and suddenly the nation's press, the royal family, the prime minister, everyone's showing up. Do you know what I mean? Outsiders were not welcome. And he knows that he's on uncertain ground, but he, he's a complicated character, which is obviously why he's interesting to write about. But he, he hangs around and he starts talking to people. And he starts uncovering these stories, particularly among the children who didn't want to go to school that day.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  And told their mom that they'd had a dream and there was something black that came over the school. Or they drew a picture that eerily kind of pictured the scene that happened. Uh, or that they kind of overslept for the first time in their life on that day. And we're kind of bundled out of school and, and, and sort of shoved down the street to school and then, and then promptly buried. And he started collecting these, these testimonies. And, you know, and it remains a, you know, impossible question. And one of the, you know, wonderful people that I spoke to for the book was a photographer called Chuck Rappaport, who's an American photographer for Life magazine, who

• 14:40Speaker 00

  went and kind of just lived in Aberfan for about three months after the, after the accident and took really extraordinary kind of haunting series of photographs. And he said that people in the village broadly fell into two camps. There were the people who said this was always going to happen. We said, we told the mine, this is ridiculous. I mean, this, the, the, the coal tip number seven, which was the one that slid down the mountain, was on top of a water course, like it was on the map. Do you know what I mean? It just couldn't be more. So you had the sort of half of the village that were just like, this was a disaster waiting to happen. And then you had the other half of the village, which was just like. You know, all the language that we're familiar with unprecedented, came out of a blue sky, no one could have predicted this would happen, you know, it's it's a similar

• 15:23Speaker 00

  response to kind of disasters that we hear like whenever they happen, but the the village sort of fell into these sort of these two camps and obviously, you know, and often kind of children, you know, they just see through the bullshit, they they they knew it was, you know, they've been mucking around on the tip, they knew that it slid in bad weather, do you know what I mean? You you could, there's a million reasons why you can come up with very rational uh prognostications of this disaster. Um, but Barker is intrigued by these warnings, these kind of, and he is a publicity interested person, and his work has already kind of featured in the British press for one reason or another.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  And so from Aberfan, he calls the science editor of the London Evening Standard, which is a pretty major newspaper in those days, um, you know, three quarters of a million circulation in London, and says, will you put out a story saying, did you have a premonition of the Aberfan disaster? And his thinking is that it's a pretty singular thing, you know, you can have dreams or bad feelings about kind of various disasters, but the particular configuration of Aberfan is is, you know, quite striking. So they put out this national call for for premonitions a week after the disaster. You can see this kind of clipping in sort of nineteen sixties newsprint, it's a kind of amazing reminder of how these ideas kind of come and go over time. And they get a few hundred responses.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  And it's the the concreteness and the interestingness of those of those premonitions that then lead on to the the forming of the premonitions bureau proper.

• 17:00Mayim Bialik?

  I'm gonna read just a couple of them so people have an idea. And also Barker posited the existence of what was called a pre-disaster syndrome. Keep in mind also, and I'm sure this came up in your research for the book, and also when we think about it, these are reports that we either are going to trust the veracity of, or we're not going to. But for the purpose of his research, he was taking people's reports. Two nights before the disaster, a sixty-three-year-old man

• 17:31Mayim Bialik?

  Was standing by a machine. He's trying to buy a book. It was like a machine where I guess you put it in and the book comes out. He said he looked up and he saw the word Aberfan written as if suspended in white lettering against a black background. In Plymouth, the evening before the coal slide, this woman had a vision of an avalanche of coal rushing down a mountain. This is the night before. And she said at the bottom of the mountain was a little boy looking terrified to death. A man in Kent was convinced for days before the accident that there would be a national disaster on Friday. He said, "It came to me as strongly as might come the thought that you have forgotten

• 18:14Mayim Bialik?

  that it was your wife's birthday tomorrow." And there's more. There's a woman who was bothered all week by a smell, earthy and decaying, which she recognized as the smell of death. An hour before the disaster, she said to her colleague, "Do you smell anything weird?" And he said, "No." Fifteen minutes after the school was buried, she jumped up. And he jumped up. There's something going on with these kinds of reports. And the question is, how many coincidences, right? Can you count before you say, maybe there's something else going on? My Be Alex Breakdown is supported by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again? That sweater that somehow works with everything?

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• 20:21Speaker 00

  Barker and, you know, and to be fair, kind of fairly, the journalist who he's working with at this point, both kind of leap on these, on these reports coming in. You know, obviously kind of thinking that they're only scratching the surface here.

• 20:37Mayim Bialik?

  If there were a pre-disaster syndrome, and there's, there's many, many examples of this, we're just taking the Aberfan one as the first. If there is some sort of pre-disaster syndrome, the idea, this is how you described it, is that there are people who are human seismographs. They have, in particular, not just emotional or, you know, kind of cognitive notions, but they have physical, somatic, bodily sensations ahead of important or emotional events. And you said it's not unlike twins, who say that they can feel the other's pain, even if they're 100 miles apart. This notion, and, you know, the reason that we're so fascinated with you and the Premonitions

• 21:21Mayim Bialik?

  Bureau, is we speak with people all of the time, fortunately, who have experiences where one of the things they describe after a near-death experience is the ability to cut through time in ways that we don't think about. And we've spoken to people who have specific premonitions about plane crashes, about disasters. And yes, they're not always right, but what they would say is, maybe there's another timeline that we haven't accessed yet that they are tapping into. What would you say, from your research and from your understanding, might be happening

• 22:01Mayim Bialik?

  in terms of this sort of difference in timeline that some people may be tuned into?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna like, I'm not gonna dodge it, but I do, I wanna say something that was sort of important to me in the sort of, the writing and the sort of reporting of this story was that it was really important to remember like when it was happening and who Barker was and the context in which he was working. So Barker was the deputy superintendent of a large hospital with about a thousand profoundly mentally ill people in that place. During the 19th century, asylums were built in every county in England and people were locked up. People were locked up for, you know,

• 22:53Speaker 00

  for being a mute or, you know, for, for having what we would recognize now as profound learning disabilities. People were just, just put away. And he was working in this hospital with um, 250 patients of his own, kind of outpatients across rural Shropshire and rural Wales of basically untreated, serious mental illness. Like the first antipsychotic drugs began to be uh, dispensed in Britain in 1955. So he's, he's grown up and trained as a psychiatrist where you're fairly powerless and he

• 23:34Speaker 00

  studied and qualified in a time of kind of leukotomies and just awful treatment for psychosis and serious mental illness. And he's on the cusp of a government program to shut down these mental hospitals and treat people in the community and on the cusp of pharmaceuticals and on the cusp of, of, of curing people. And he's seeing kind of amazing stuff every day. He's seeing people who haven't spoken for 40 years speak. Do you know what I mean? He's seeing people who have not been outside in a decade. Go out and interact with the world and be able to kind of talk and converse and see their families.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  So he's, he's working in a field that is full of kind of change and possibility. And I always like was trying to, when I was writing the book, picturing him like he's just done the ward rounds. They've just taken the locks off the doors. They've just taken the railings down. He's trying to get jazz bands in. They're trying to open the windows. They're trying to give everyone their own locker. They're trying to stop them wearing uniforms. You know what I mean? He's, this is the, the, the kind of the hard yards of kind of mental illness treatment that he is doing. And then he turns to his list of premonitions that have kind of come in that day or that week. And it's not the craziest thing he's heard in the last 10 minutes. Do you know what I mean?

• 24:56Speaker 00

  He's just open in a, in a, in a way that I think is, is, is, is quite hard to sort of reach back to. Do you know what I mean? That kind of atmosphere of, of sort of change and, and possibility. Um, I should also say that Barker's kind of like clinical interest in these cases to start with is the idea of whether you can be frightened to death. So if someone tells you that you're going to die, does that make it my life more likely to happen? And he was following the footsteps of a, a guy called Walter Cannon at Harvard Medical School, who was kind of studying curses and the kind of reactions of the adrenal system and, and all stuff

• 25:40Speaker 00

  that has been more or less entirely borne out by neurology and kind of modern science in terms of like the relationship of, of, of, of sort of what you were kind of thinking in your mind. And then the kind of physiological consequences of that. All of that kind of Barker, I think, was intuitively smart and on the right track.

• 25:58Mayim Bialik?

  Instead of the placebo, it's the placebo effect. And Barker's fascination with, I mean, he was a very, very strange man, but his fascination with it was if someone tells you you're going to get sick, does that make you more likely to get sick? And what ended up happening in his life, if someone tells you you're going to die, do you die?

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is, this is his kind of entry point, you know, into these, into these premonitions and into this kind of sense of, of.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Of kind of foresight and seeing things, you know, having, you know, impossible knowledge or kind of seeing things before they occur to kind of like wend epically back to your kind of um your question in the first place. I I feel like I'm torn between is this something that a small subset of people somehow have access to? Or

• 26:56Speaker 00

  is this um about a shared consciousness and kind of how groups of people are with each other? I tried to sort of

• 27:09Speaker 00

  in the book, kind of write a little kind of potted like British history of prophecy kind of thing. And just loved reading about like the Western Isles of Scotland in the 16th and 17th century, where kind of second sight and premonitions were just totally routine and just totally normal. And it was just part of living in a community that you could see what would happen on the other side of the island. If like a friend of yours got kicked by his horse, you just you'd know something would happen. You'd go and help them out. And that was just, that was just how the collective mind worked in that place. Um, and people would lose the ability when they moved away from the island and it would get it back again when they came back to the islands. In my own kind of personal kind of reckoning with these questions, um, I

• 27:52Speaker 00

  I'm sort of more drawn to those ideas than uh than sort of fully escaping time, which I find problematic.

• 28:02Mayim Bialik?

  It it is problematic. And, you know, you talk about William James, one of the founders of modern psychology. He said that the conscious mind has a specific present, like we're conscious of something and we're in this timeline. But the unconscious.

• 28:21Mayim Bialik?

  May have a different relationship to time. I mean, that is one of the kind of scientific conversations about this, right? Is there a different timeline? And if you're not bound to this physical body, right? If you're not bound to the conscious material present, is this other realm, which you know, quantum physics would describe as just a field? It's just a field, right? An undulating, moving particle wave field. You know, does that wave then have a relationship of time that is completely different than anything we would fathom? I mean, that would, in theory, explain people with near-death experiences, for example, who say that they're witnessing things or seeing things after these experiences.

• 29:06Mayim Bialik?

  You know, what is this ability? And what's the difference between that and insanity? And I think that's the other thing that, you know, you sort of tackle here. You know, Jonathan and I, we really, we live at this kind of intersection of science and spirituality. We know that they overlap. The question is where and what's the nomenclature around it? But we've spoken to people who otherwise are living a very normal, whatever, life. And one day, they start hearing voices that are directing them to send messages to humanity. They are not meeting any clinical criteria for any of the diagnoses that we know exist in that big book, right? I think we're up to six, DSM six.

• 29:49Mayim Bialik?

  They don't meet any criteria for paranoid schizophrenia. They are functional in all of their capacities. They do not qualify for anything that, in previous generations, people would be hospitalized for. So our question is, is there either some other diagnosis, right? That Barker was focusing on that we just didn't know? Or is it possible that there is a sensitivity? And in our culture, right? We name it this and we place them here. But a thousand years ago, 5,000 years ago, are these people shamans? Are they prophets? I don't know.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  So one of the sort of phrases that kind of goes off in my head when you're saying that is is the playwright, a British playwright called J B Priestley, who wrote a kind of series of plays in the nineteen thirties that that kind of play around with with time. One's called Time and the Conways, one's called Inspector Calls, and they're all questioning

• 30:53Speaker 00

  sequences and how time works. And he was obviously kind of influenced by quantum physics and all the things that you that you mentioned. And he wrote this book in the early nineteen sixties called Man and Time. And he wrote this nice phrase

• 31:09Speaker 00

  where he said that we're living in the most impoverished version of time that we've ever had. You know, just people in the past had a better intuitive grasp of of what this thing was and how varied it was. And the kind of the strict kind of materialist interpretation is so meager compared to it. He described it, he compared it to a rope. He was like, we know that it doesn't work at the kind of subatomic level, and we know that it doesn't work at the planetary level. And we're just, it's like shredding at both ends, and we're living in the middle, and you're telling me like it works here. On the question of

• 31:49Speaker 00

  people having experiences but no other sort of clinical disorders or kind of labels that you want to give it. One of the things that I really wanted to do in the book was to was to write about the Premonitions Bureau like I would write about anything else. It just struck me that kind of reporting about the occult or supernatural or experiments of this nature are just

• 32:16Speaker 00

  there's just often in their description, a kind of tacit framing of this is either bogus, or this is so real, it's the realest thing you've ever heard. Do you know what I mean? And it comes with an and it comes with an agenda. And like, you know, I'm a I'm a magazine writer, I'm a reporter. I just wanted to I just wanted to write this as a piece of kind of social history. And and as I was sort of doing that reporting.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  You know, I was often thinking about the way we write about the, you know, the major religions or kind of other kind of inexplicable kind of aspects of, of how we interact with reality or things beyond reality. And we, and we treat those like with, with a sort of dignity that, that respects the experiences of people who are undergoing those things. And that's kind of often not the case with this kind of writing and reporting. And I think that Barker, problematic and questionable as he was in lots of ways, was a good doctor.

• 33:17Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  And, and it's striking, kind of just looking in people sending in their premonitions, just glad to have someone to send them to and to have an outlet.

• 33:27Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I think that's, that's actually a really important point. And it's one that touches more on the sociological components of these conversations, which, you know, Jonathan and I are in as podcasters in the 21st century. Right? What deserves to be spoken about? What are people afraid to hear about? And especially from the materialist perspective, what feels so indescribable and impossible that we will do everything we can to ridicule it and push it away, which is the least scientific thing to do? I want to give another great example. And, and this one is really special. Alan Hensher was one of the seers of the Aberfan coal, uh, coal tragedy.

• 34:12Mayim Bialik?

  In the spring of 1967, he called Dr. Barker again. And he said, I've seen a plane crash that's going to happen over mountains. Now, what's interesting to me, Hensher's premonitions began after he suffered a head injury in a car crash in his mid twenties. So I'm very interested in a traumatic brain injury that leads to.

• 34:36Mayim Bialik?

  Paranormal experiences and sigh abilities. Not because I think it proves, oh, we're gonna find the region of the brain that makes you crazy. But more because when part of the brain is damaged, what else opens up? For all we know, what was damaged or compromised was an inhibitory component. And now the truth, whatever truth is, right, is allowed to come free. He said, "There are 123 people." I have chills right now before I even finish the sentence. "There are 123 people, possibly 124." He was telling this to Dr. Barker, who made notes on the call. It was 6:00 a.m. on March 21st.

• 35:16Mayim Bialik?

  30 days later, everyone, a passenger aircraft carrying 130 people attempted to land in Cyprus in bad weather.

• 35:29Mayim Bialik?

  124 people died.

• 35:32Mayim Bialik?

  I will say, two more people later died. I would be doing a disservice to Sam if I didn't mention that. However, this guy Henscher was experiencing something, not once, not twice, but many times, that in my opinion, does not need to even be perfect. Even if he got it wrong by 10 people. Even if he got it wrong by all the people and all he said was a play. To me, that's enough to think about. What was going on with Alan Henscher?

• 36:04Speaker 00

  No, and he's this unhappy, stressed figure in the book. Because these premonitions are accompanied by pain. They're accompanied by like very strong headaches and a feeling of stress. And he wants it to be over. And then when the event happens, this feeling lifts. And he obviously feels a mixture of kind of guilt and relief when that happens. Two minutes ago describing Barker as a good doctor, I would say that Barker was a bad doctor in his treatment of Henshaw because he's so excited about what's happening there that he kind of goads him and provokes him and lets him know that other people are

• 36:49Speaker 00

  doing good predictions too. And he's not respectful of what Henshaw is going through when he's sort of having these experiences.

• 36:59Mayim Bialik?

  Henshaw also had a severe headache an hour after a significant train crash in 1967 that he did not know had happened. And here also enters Miss Middleton, another startlingly accurate, pretty consistent predictor that was involved with Dr. Barker. Can you tell us a little bit about some of what she was like and what her experiences were?

• 37:27Speaker 00

  I'm so thrilled to have a chance to talk about Miss Middleton. So she was a music teacher in North London and she was born in the US to English parents and they moved back to the UK during the Depression, 1933. And her family on her father's side had been quite prosperous and kind of run away with his girlfriend Annie from Paris and so been disowned by the family. So they're kind of like coming down in the world into sort of

• 38:06Speaker 00

  suburban London in the 1930s. And Miss Middleton, she'd kind of been a child dancer, child performer in Boston and was forced to settle for a fairly anonymous life as a music and dance teacher in the front room of her parents' house in Edmonton in North London. But she did this with kind of great verve and great style and tried to sort of cut this glamorous figure.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  She had premonitions throughout her life. She experienced them as a child.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  She was taught by a piano teacher and was kind of convinced that he was, he wasn't well and was hassling and hassling her parents to kind of get in touch with him. And it turned out that he had, he'd committed suicide and that was how the kind of family knew. She was kind of, she described it like kind of knowing the answer in a spelling test. She would just see, see words, see numbers, see stuff before it happened. And, and she never worked as a psychic. She never kind of practiced. She never made any money out of this. She never kind of hustled. And she, like Henshaw, kind of experienced physical sensations on the morning of the, the Abba Van disaster.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  She experienced a kind of suffocating feeling that was kind of witnessed by her euphemistically described lodger.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  And, and then she became kind of one of Barker's, again, kind of eager, eager correspondence. And I kind of came across the name of Miss Middleton and I looked up her will, which you can do in the UK. And I saw who was the kind of the executor of her will. She didn't have any kids. And it was one of her pupils who used to study music with her. You sometimes get this as a, as a reporter, you ring someone up totally out of the blue. There's no way that they could know. Do you know what I mean? I ring this wonderful woman, Christine Williams, and it's literally like she's just been waiting for the phone call for 20 years. She was just like, oh yeah, hi, here we are, here we are, like.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  And so Miss Middleton died in 1999 and her house was a mess. She had like 14 cats. The place was like not in a good way. And this lovely woman Christine, who lived around the corner from her, spent a year clearing the house. And, but whenever she came across something that she thought was kind of meaningful, she'd just put it in a box and kept, and she just had this like box in the attic that just sat there for like 20 years. And, but she was just so calm. She was just like. I knew, you know, I knew someone would come like one day to write about Miss Middleton, because she was one of these people. And then when we were sort of doing the reporting, we obviously got to know each other a bit and was putting the book together, like a photo would go missing. She'd just be like, don't worry, Miss Middleton's got this, this will, it will just turn up.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  And it will like always turned up. She just had this like, this sense of like connection with Miss Middleton. Sort of, it was, it was like a very kind of, sort of rather kind of beautiful aspect of the, of the reporting. I've had this with other stories where if you're writing about a very particular dimension of a person, it's, I think it's really important to write about them in the round. Do you know what I mean? And just kind of try and give a sense of them as a person before you give a sense of them as someone who might have these levels of perception or, or whatever. I don't know.

• 41:36Mayim Bialik?

  I think that's also the way sort of Dr Barker, you know, chose to see people. Because I think that's some of the, the, the complexity here is that if you as a doctor or as a journalist are experiencing phenomenal, impossible things, how do you paint a larger picture, which I think actually provides so much more of the context for understanding this person?

• 42:01Speaker 00

  I don't know. She's just the definition of a weird cat lady, but she also wasn't a weird cat lady. Do you know what I mean? And that's how she would have been written. Anyway, this is, so, so, so, so, so that was, so that was Miss Middleton. And you, and you referred to the Charing Cross train accident, which for me, as, you know, I, maybe I've just done this to sort of protect myself, but to sort of to dodge the kind of gravity defying kind of implications of all of this. I suppose my sort of position as the writer of this story has been to try and accurately describe what it was like to be part of a group of people who really believed for a moment that they could like, that they could see the future. And, and, and, and I tried to write about the Premonitions Bureau a bit like an island

• 42:45Speaker 00

  in the western Isles of Scotland in the 17th century. This was a community of people who were like on to something. And let's just describe the circumstances of that, of, of. How that happened and kind of and and leave it there. So maybe that's just for me to sort of protect my mind from from where some of this stuff leads to. But that Charing Cross train accident for me is the is the single most inexplicable one in the book. I I don't know how you sit down in your kitchen on a Wednesday morning and write down on a piece of paper that there's going to be a train crash and it's going to involve Charing Cross and you put it in the post on a Wednesday and it happens on a Sunday night. I I I for for me, it's the it's it's the one that I

• 43:30Speaker 00

  just can't I can't square away. And with Henshaw, who's on a shift because he's a switchboard operator at the post office, the train comes off the tracks at nine fifteen and he's just like in agony at nine fifteen in the sick bay at the kind of the post office place. This this this one is is is is tough for me.

• 43:52Mayim Bialik?

  Everybody needs different levels of convincing, right? And for other people, they didn't need that one to say, I know that you can cut through time like a seven layer cake, right? For Sam, it took that. For others, that's not enough. Just like there's unity in the universe, right? There's one gravity. There's, you know, one rule for things. We don't create different realities. Whatever's happening with that accident, I believe, is potentially able to happen for any of these other examples. It's the same thing.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 44:32Mayim Bialik?

  One of the most kind of powerful visions that Miss Middleton had was specifically about Dr. Barker's death. And this is a very eerie, very spooky turn of events. And it does get

• 44:48Mayim Bialik?

  It's due in the discussion of nasibo. What is the influence of negative information? And we've spoken with Dr. Amir Raz about the power of the mind, about placebo and also nasibo. But there's more recent research from the lab of Dr. Ellen Langer. And what Ellen Langer discovered is if you tell people they have diabetes, their bodies will start behaving as if they had diabetes. And I'm not saying that's her specific research. I'm saying this is the umbrella that it falls under. If you tell people that they're old and that their bodies are going to deteriorate, their bodies get old and deteriorate.

• 45:30Mayim Bialik?

  And there's a tremendous power of the mind to be able to modulate physiological processes, immune properties, things that we previously did not think the mind would have control over like that. So when we think about something like this, and especially Dr. Barker's fascination with, can you be, can you die of fear? Or as Jonathan and I were talking about it, can you literally be scared to death? When I think about, and the example that you talk about is, as long as we have hope, we struggle to keep surviving. And there's some very famous rat experiments that you talk about that kind of prove this.

• 46:11Mayim Bialik?

  And, you know, think about any relationship you've been in that you want it to have it end. If there's any hope, you just keep it going, right? What is now unfamiliar tends to be inadmissible and is therefore not accepted, even despite overwhelming support of evidence. Thus, for generations, the earth was traditionally regarded as flat, and those who opposed this notion were bitterly attacked, right? There are all of these shifts in our paradigm that are constantly happening. I mean, Dr. Barker died, not the way Ms. Middleton said that he would die, but it was a strange death. And there were many cases that he was fascinated with of people who died of routine surgeries at the age that they were told that they would die.

• 46:56Mayim Bialik?

  What might be going on here? And what did you find?

• 47:00Speaker 00

  So as I said, kind of Barker. Was in Aberfan originally because he was interested in news reports of a boy who had escaped from the school but had died of fright, died of fear. And so Aberfan happened in 1966, but in 1963, as you referred to, there was a case reported in the British Medical Journal of a woman who was admitted for a routine gynecological operation at a small hospital in Labrador in Canada. Surgery went well, everything was fine, and then an hour afterwards, she went into, she kind of had an adrenal hemorrhage and she died.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  And, and the doctors were, you know, totally, totally, totally mystified and she'd confided in a nurse, she was 43, that she'd been told as a kid by a fortune teller that she would die when she was 43, and it was a week after her 43rd birthday, she was like, I think she was a mother of five, she was living in like a tough rural existence in Labrador at the time, physically fit, physically well, but seized by fear and died. And the doctors wrote about this in the British Medical Journal and just said like, anyone else had some reports like this, and Barker, you know, hungry, avaricious researcher that he was, caught on to this and sort of took up the case and went around kind of collecting

• 48:24Speaker 00

  reports of this and, and, and wrote a book called Scared to Death, collating these reports with the workers of Walter Cannon and kind of where the kind of state of knowledge was at the time about the sort of physiological and kind of neurological kind of basis for, for these things. Hencher rings him up in the middle of the night, one, one night, and is like, I've got a prediction, and Barker's like, okay, what is it? Let me get my piece of paper to write it down, you know, is it another plane? And he's like, no, it's you. And when he thinks of Barker, he just thinks of black, he thinks of him surrounded by kind of, by darkness, and he thinks that something's gonna, gonna happen to him. And he says, do you have, do you have gas mains at your house?

• 49:08Speaker 00

  He says, no, I don't, I live in the countryside. He's like, what colour is your car? He's like, it's a dark green car. He's like, ah, not feeling great about that. And Barker, the next morning, writes a memo.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Um, and you know, this was the sort of memo that I found in the, in the, in a like, in an envelope in the, in Cambridge University Library. And, and it says, you know, Henshaw has been right about Abavan, he's been right about the plane crash, like, is he, is he right about me? It's an extraordinary kind of document. Because if you're me, sort of researching this story, kind of fifty, sixty years after, I was, I was unsure whether he was a kind of buttoned up British mid-century intellectual, observing this all with kind of dispassion and sort of objective curiosity.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  But no, he was entirely kind of emotionally implicated in it. And, and you can sense in this document, both his, his fear and his enormous curiosity.

• 50:21Mayim Bialik?

  Well, the first thing I thought of also is, in the screenplay version of this, were they trying to kill him? Meaning, if you have this power to see certain things, and also, we don't know, really, the nature of whatever might be ailing you. If you insert this idea into anyone's head, you know, I wonder if he wasn't the doctor, would it have been someone else? Or was this meant for the person they were closest to? And I'm not saying there's anything insidious in it, you know, I'm not trying to make it a nefarious story. However, we're dealing with people who we don't really understand the full nature of what they're experiencing.

• 51:05Mayim Bialik?

  And part of me was like, were they just messing with him? And then he died.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  You know, so he lived with this warning for some time. So this kind of happens in the spring of nineteen sixty seven. And then towards the end of the year, the Charing Cross train crash happens and that gets a lot of publicity. And Barker publishes his book Scared to Death. And I should say that he's doing this kind of over the objections of everyone at his hospital and in the kind of regional health board. And everyone is telling him that he's making a terrible mistake. Everyone's telling him it's embarrassing and he's pushing ahead.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  There's just a level of kind of risk taking and and a kind of heedlessness, which is

• 52:00Mayim Bialik?

  characteristic of every great genius.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  He's pushing it and Henshaw watches him on TV. And he writes to him again, he said, I watched you on TV. There's a kind of blackness around you on the TV, like I'm not feeling good about this. And then and then Barker, because he's because we're allowed to question his judgment, you know, writes to Middleton and is like, do you think I'm gonna die? And Middleton is like, well, I kind of until you mentioned it, I hadn't really thought about it. But actually, and then she starts having these dreams about her mother. And when she says her mother visits her in a dream, this kind of normally kind of symbolizes a death. And she's on holiday with her mother and then like Barker's getting in this car with her mother and driving away. She's having these just really dark dreams about about.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  So he's getting this kind of ramping up of warnings in the in the spring of nineteen sixty eight. The thing that we that we haven't talked about is that then is then this kind of unspeakable disaster at Barker's own hospital.

• 52:55Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, should we go there now?

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Let's go, let's go there now.

• 52:58Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so this is nineteen sixty eight in the Beach Ward.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:02Mayim Bialik?

  And it was a terrible fire. And I believe twenty four people died. And here's the thing. If a bunch of people who claim to be precognitive tell you there's gonna be a fire, what do you do if you work in that hospital? And Henshaw described this when he was asked about what is it like to have this kind of information? He said, "We have to undergo the torment of knowing that whatever we say, however long we pray, that when we receive, we have the problem of deciding whether we should tell what we've received, because if we don't, and it happens, we cannot be believed, and

• 53:47Mayim Bialik?

  so suffer equally by the knowledge that we're doing something that could be of public use." But he said, "It creates even greater stress mentally to your nervous system to constantly be in this place of if I say something, they'll think I'm crazy. If I don't say something and it happens, I could have prevented it. If I say something and it doesn't happen, I'm screwed anyway." So there were people who said, "Does anyone smell smoke?" And the nurses were like, "Nope, you're just crazy." And people were saying, "There's gonna be a fire, there's gonna be a fire." And they just said, "No, there was a fire."

• 54:22Speaker 00

  You know, in a way, it kind of, it comes back to, to Abavan in, and I would argue with many kind of terrible disasters, when you kind of, when you read the inquiry, when you read the person kind of who sort of mapped it all out, it's just, it's just inevitable, right? I mean, this, this hospital where, and this was the only locked female ward, so people were kind of, people were still in Victorian cells with kind of, I mean, it's incredible, with stable doors, you know, with the top, the top that opens and the bottom that doesn't. Ironically, those were the women that survived because those doors kind of protected them

• 55:03Speaker 00

  from, from the smoke, but this was the kind of last locked corner of the hospital. They'd had a new fire alarm system, but that no one knew how to work it. There hadn't been a fire drill in four years. They had this unbelievably complicated like telephone system that you couldn't even like call the fire department. You had to like call someone else and wake them up at home and they would call the fire, you know, just, it's, it's.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  It's like horrendously sort of obvious that it's gonna happen. And as you say,

• 55:36Speaker 00

  even when it's happening, you've got patients coming down the stairs going, by the way, our room's on fire and they're being told to go back to bed. I mean, it's just sort of,

• 55:46Speaker 00

  we don't need like precognitive abilities like at this point. But I think that for Barker, this is just,

• 55:57Speaker 00

  it's just mortifying. It's mortifying on, on, on every level. He's already feeling

• 56:05Speaker 00

  that he's stepping outside of his lane with his research. He's obviously feeling like they've failed these patients. He's been spending the like the last year and a half trying to send elderly, basically manageable patients back to their families and finding it incredibly difficult to discharge people from hospital. You know, it's a, it's a kind of institutional crisis, which is sort of overlaid on his own kind of personal professional journey, which is obviously a bit of a high wire act. Plus, you know, every couple of months, someone tells him he's gonna die. It's a kind of crescendo of, of, of noise at that point in his life.

• 56:46Mayim Bialik?

  I had a strange feeling in my stomach yesterday.

• 56:50Jonathan Cohen?

  About this interview. Don't worry, Sam, you're gonna be fine.

• 56:53Mayim Bialik?

  No. I had a strange feeling in my stomach. You know, like it might have been gas, it might have been indigestion, but it was definitely a feeling I've, I've never felt before. It wasn't one that I've associated. And I didn't even tell Jonathan this. I called my mother because I had this crazy thought in the back of my head that in the same way that she was connected to her mother in ways that she sometimes physically would get senses that something was wrong with my grandmother and was accurate. I was like, what if this feeling is trying to tell me something about? My mom, or a person that I'm tethered to that way. So I didn't say that to my mom, God bless her, because she's, you know,

• 57:37Mayim Bialik?

  the age that she is, but I literally called and I was like, hi. And I half expected her to be like, I'm in the hospital. But that's not what she said. She said, oh, I just got back from a walk and I had a bagel and this, that. Oh, my friend this, and I'm gonna go see Grease on Sunday. And that was it. And so what I thought to myself, though, is either I'm crazy to be thinking that this might be an association. I'm correct in another timeline that hasn't happened.

• 58:05Jonathan Cohen?

  You had a lot of gluten in grease.

• 58:08Mayim Bialik?

  A lot of gluten in grease.

• 58:09Jonathan Cohen?

  And it hurt your stomach.

• 58:12Mayim Bialik?

  No, but, but it occurred to me also, as I was simultaneously preparing to speak about this book, that we want to know things with tremendous certainty. I want to know that every time I have an intuition, or I have a feeling that it's correct, and that's the only kind of information that many people are comfortable with. The uncomfortableness that you write about is all of these places in between. And that's actually where most of us live. That's where most of us live. Even the people who are envisioning Elizabeth Krone, who was struck by lightning, saw the Sully Sullenberger crash. She saw an airplane upside down on the water and timestamped it, right? Why? Why would you see an airplane upside down floating on the water?

• 58:58Mayim Bialik?

  It's a very specific notion. It doesn't mean that she always has to be right. It means that there's an opening in which many of us believe that there is accuracy. I'm curious what changed for you as you were working on this book in terms of what you thought you believed, and maybe what you believed when you were done with your research.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  I think two things changed for me. I think the first thing that changed for me, and I think I kind of, I knew this at a, in a sort of vague way, but not in a specific way, was...

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Just how rooted prophecy and premonitions and ideas of shared consciousness were in in the Britain that I live in, do you know what I mean? In my culture, do you know what I mean? You referred to shamans or healers or kind of, it's easy to exoticise this, do you know what I mean? And and say that it happens in in in other cultures or other ways of thinking. But it happens in in in in in my in my way of thinking and that and that kind of doing the doing the research and kind of putting together a sort of a timeline which, you know, you obviously this kind of see this speak, this peak

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  in spiritualism and sort of contact with the dead in the kind of the First World War in the nineteen twenties, kind of dramatic periods of of technological change and kind of social crisis uh in the UK. And then you kind of see it again in the sixties when the premonitions bureau is happening. It's arguable, are we in a similar period now? You know, just sort of for me, just like just doing the work gave me more kind of knowledge and and and certainty about how this is just a kind of a thread in our in our in our culture. Um, you know, there's, I write some stuff in the book about about people in the Blitz in London. You know, as many people in London during the Blitz believe in the supernatural as they did in

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Christian ideas of of heaven or death, do you know what I mean? This is just, this is in our minds. And I suppose kind of when you do this kind of reporting or and you're just sort of talking to people about what you're working on and and yes, this is sort of anecdotal, but I also think it's it's it's it's more than that. It's just how many families contain a story like this. And they are the most rooted, pragmatic.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Like unbelieving people and they live with a story like this in their family. It's like it's in my family, two generations back, you know, my grandmother, who was a kind of refugee from China and Russia, was like joined by her mother when she was dying, you know, even though they were thousands of miles apart, or telling my friend, you know, I'm writing this book about this thing. Oh yeah, I actually can't do that stuff because I was like with my dad once on the plane and his like, it was just like on a plane waiting to take off to go on holiday and his dead mother just like walked down the aisle.

• 1:02:04Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, hold on Sam.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  You know, you just like, like all of these, all of these just families just like to just hold these secrets in them. Do you know what I mean? This is not an inexplicable knot and they just go about their daily business and, and this is sort of happens over time and over time and over time.

• 1:02:22Mayim Bialik?

  So something is happening. Something is happening. We just, we don't know, unless it follows a formula and unless it has an equation that goes with it, we don't know what to do with it. So we push it away.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, so I, so I, I, I live in England, as you can tell. And when I, when I was doing the book, I did a, um, I had to do some events and podcasts and things like this. And I was moving house and one of the, and you get an email and it says, oh, like, can you do this interview? And I'm like, yeah, sure. Fine. I was like really, really busy. And it was kind of a heatwave here, um, which is unusual. And I was like unpacking boxes in the basement of our house. Um, and this was about sort of seven, seven PM UK time. And I really hadn't been concentrating at all. I'm literally surrounded by these boxes. My phone goes, I'm like, oh Christ, I forgot to this thing. And I like answer

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  the phone and it's Australia. And I say, oh, hi, hi. And they're like, yeah, you ready for the interview? And I'm like, yeah, sure. Can you just remind me like what this is again? Um, is this like a recorded thing or a live thing? And he's like, oh no, this is live. We're going on the radio. And I was like, okay, great. And what's the, is it like an interview? He's like, no, it's a call in mate. And I'm like, okay. And what, what time is it in Australia? It's like, it's four o'clock in the morning. I was like, okay, great. We're doing a live four AM Australian radio phone in. Um, and.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Fucking hell, the calls at four o'clock in the morning on Australian radio about people's family premonitions experiences, like hot damn, it was just like, it was unbelievable. And it was just, and they were, you know, they were screening the callers, but the, the, the, the, the people that were coming through with their stories, there was a woman who called, uh, and she was, worked in a small office in like a government department and had just an incredibly vivid dream that her, her boss had died in a small plane accident. And she didn't really like her boss and she was coming into work and just didn't know what to do, like a sort of HR situation. And, you know, the boss dies in like a small plane crash like three days later. Do you know what I mean? She's just lived with this ever since.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, people, obviously the most common reported one is, you know, a family member dying, you know, hundreds, thousands of miles apart. And you just, you just know, uh, incredibly kind of vivid description from a woman who going out on a date with her husband, desperate to go, really looking forward to it and just, just couldn't leave that, just pouring with tears, just couldn't leave the house and just, you know, and it was because, you know, her brother had died kind of in the Philippines or kind of, you know, somewhere hundreds of miles away at that moment, you know, these things, I spent kind of an hour on the phone with people just calling in, as I say, the witching hour of kind of, of Australia, just telling you these stories in the, the most matter of fact way you can imagine.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  And, uh, so anyway, so these are the things that have sort of, um, changed me. They're just kind of, you know, unarguable kind of information in a way.

• 1:05:25Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm curious if, you know, your perspective on people telling those stories, they're not looking for validation that they were real. It's their experience. They're really looking for acknowledgement, right? Like to share and to know that other people are also experiencing something like that to feel less alone. What is, what's your experience of them?

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Since writing the book, you know, I'll, you know, I'll get emails from people and, and often the feelings that that I feel like I'm picking up on are the kind of less intense versions of the Alan Henshaw feeling, which is this doesn't give you responsibility. Do you know what I mean? People feel very guilty and feel very kind of loaded with this information because they don't know what to do with it because it won't be believed. They feel like they, they, they feel like a duty to do something with it and yet there's nowhere to put it. And, and so I do kind of write back to people or just tell people like you are allowed to just let this go, by the way.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  Like you don't have to do anything with it because it's not on you to like solve, solve this like that's often. So when, so when you say they're looking for validation, I don't think they're looking for validation. They're looking for kind of often looking for relief or, or looking for a place to,

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  yeah, to, to, to be lightened. The way my mind goes is you then think about established religious rituals where there's, there is a place for these things to happen. You know, you're allowed to, you're allowed to sit in a box in the corner of the church and tell your weird shit to the priest and it goes away. You know, they like as humans, like these experience, like we have places for this.

• 1:07:11Mayim Bialik?

  I'll go back, forgive me, pre, pre Christianity or Catholicism. You know, the, the prophecy of the Old Testament, which when I was taught these things, no one ever included the most important piece of information about prophecy in the Old Testament. They were visions, they were dreams, meaning I was picturing like, who are these raving lunatics walking around, which you could still say they're raving lunatics. But the notion that there was a group of people who had dreams that were so powerful that someone thought to record them, right? And call them prophecy. That is very interesting to me, and it shows an historical connection that we have

• 1:07:55Mayim Bialik?

  with the things that people experience about a timeline that is not the one that we're living in, that they somehow are projecting into. And like, it was always, "Death and destruction is coming." You know, like, no big shocker, which, you know, for certain communities, it doesn't take a precognitive person to be like, "I think they're gonna try and kill you again. They're gonna come for you." Like, it's gonna happen. But, but even that notion that there was a cultural conversation around it. These are prophets who are receiving something, yes, divine, but, I don't know, who's to say what the definition of divine is, right? It's something from outside of this realm that I can access. Something that Dr.

• 1:08:36Mayim Bialik?

  Barker organized in 1965 at the Charing Cross Hotel, he got a group of people together to try and see if he could understand, from a more kind of, you know, quantitative perspective, what's going on. People who prescribe to know the future, clairvoyants, astrologers, card readers. He gathered them all together to see if he could find patterns, get information. One of the things he asked was, "Can I learn to do this?" And one of them said, "It's too late." And, you know, there are people that we've spoken to who have, definitely have access

• 1:09:16Mayim Bialik?

  to realms that I don't understand and that I can't explain, but, one of the things that many say is that we all have the ability to tap into this. And by this, you could say, "Oh, the Akashic Records is something for thousands of years that traditions have said, 'There's a field of consciousness that exists, and if you drop into this place,'" and many people get there with meditation, many people get there with other transcendental experiences, and psilocybin and things like this, "that you can tap into this information in a way that it just sort of exists out there." What is your take on these kinds of abilities? Do you think that it's something that we all have the ability for and we're just not tapping into it?

• 1:10:01Mayim Bialik?

  Is it something that's for a select few or is it somewhere in the middle?

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  Barker gets these fortune tellers together and asks them, he's doing his kind of scared to death research. And he says, and he asks, he asks them, kind of, in your sort of code of practice as a, as a palm reader, you know, do you tell someone if you think they're going to die? And they have sort of differing answers to this. And, and it was, it was precious to me because the, the audio of these interviews kind of survives. So I was kind of able to, to hear Barker kind of do his questioning. And there is this kind of very moving conversation with this Irish clairvoyant where, where Barker says, you know, what about, you know, what about me? Do I have this, do I have this gift? Can I, can I get involved?

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  And, and, and, and, and the clairvoyant says, you know, as you said, no, you're too late. I'm going to add to your sort of list of people or circumstances where people are able to sort of access a field of consciousness or, or some of these questions. I do sort of hold to the idea of, and this is kind of influenced by writing about the British spiritualist movement and the kind of turn of the 20th century, is, is the idea of a sort of a life unlived or, or a kind of a rupture in the terms of the loss of someone close to you or the loss of a child

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  or a sense of a, a kind of interrupted path being then the trigger or the gateway, or if you're a kind of ardent materialist, a kind of, a kind of an explanation for people sort of.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  Uh, reaching for something that isn't there. Um, I kind of, and, and I feel that in this conversation with Barker, you can, you can hear him, this kind of dual side of him where he, he is a serious scientist and a good doctor. And yet he wants to kind of break free of all the confines that that represents at that time. Um, and he, there is a kind of a life unlived for him. Um, and I kind of, I don't know where this kind of adds to the, to the conversation. But I do feel that where there is that kind of, as I say, a life unlived or a kind of a deep yearning, um, that, that stuff can kind of arise from that.

• 1:12:33Mayim Bialik?

  Sam, it's really such a pleasure to get to talk to you. I love this book so much and just every, every character just really came to life. So I'm sorry, I don't have the proper cover to show, but the premonitions bureau, a true account of death foretold. Um, Sam Knight, thank you so much for being with us.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:12:55Mayim Bialik?

  Some might say I had a premonition that when I read this book, that we would know much more about it now than we did when I first read it. Because when I first read it, we were just at the start of talking about psi phenomenon. It wasn't really even like a part of this podcast that way.

• 1:13:12Jonathan Cohen?

  We had to mature and evolve in order to talk about this book.

• 1:13:15Mayim Bialik?

  But the notion that he's describing things from a very particular, you know, moment in, in the late 1960s. Uh, also Ms. Middleton predicted Bobby Kennedy's assassination. And some people might be like, well, that wouldn't take a genius, blah, blah. But along with all of her other premonitions, the day before he was shot, she called the premonitions bureau three times to say, an assassination is coming. It's coming, it's coming. And then he was killed at midnight that night. We know so much more about the, also the, the neuroscience of what it means to have different timelines, right? That you're tapping into.

• 1:13:58Mayim Bialik?

  Uh, we've talked to so many people who have precognitive abilities, who have premonition. I mean, even the telepathy tapes I thought of, telepathy tapes is full of stuff about premonitions and people who know that people died and like, what is that about? Especially in non-verbal communities, like, wow.

• 1:14:15Jonathan Cohen?

  What does it mean, from a neuroscience perspective, to have different timelines?

• 1:14:18Mayim Bialik?

  I don't have a definitive, "we know that this is true because," but many, if not all, of the conversations we have had with theoretical physicists have talked about what probability means. What does it mean for our brain to be comprehending different probabilities? What does it mean for us to be calculating our reality based on what we see? And based on what we think we're experiencing in this spacetime continuum?

• 1:14:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Remember when I walked into the podcast studio before it was the podcast studio? And I met myself from another timeline, and then I got scared and I ran out?

• 1:14:54Mayim Bialik?

  Yep, a premonition led us here.

• 1:14:57Jonathan Cohen?

  There we go.

• 1:14:59Mayim Bialik?

  The stuff about two different people that he worked with predicting his death freaks me out. Freaks me out. Because it's also possible that there are people who have premonitions, who have precognitive abilities, who also suffer from other challenges mentally. That's not impossible. It's not really one or the other. This is all like a spectrum of functioning. It's a spectrum of integration with the real world and the ability to distinguish, right? What is fantasy, what is generated, and what is downloaded? The way these people describe it, this is downloaded information.

• 1:15:39Jonathan Cohen?

  The thing about premonitions versus intuition is also very hard, right? Because intuition is often in the moment, how do I navigate a certain situation?

• 1:15:48Mayim Bialik?

  And I don't think it's fact-based. It's not like 124 people will die.

• 1:15:53Jonathan Cohen?

  Not fact-based at all. Fact in that, "Oh, I shouldn't do something, or I should go some other way." It's like these nudges versus premonitions. And I think about the Alison Dubois show. Like, that was the character's name. It was with Patricia Arquette, who was a detective. And she was, well, she wasn't a detective, but she was helping detectives solve crime through her psychic ability, and I believe it was based on a real person. The problem is always like, the detectives are like, "Well, it's not accurate enough, and you're getting false positives. And if we do everything you say, then it's gonna be..." And so she's always getting it in symbols and small little doses and forms. Like, what do you do with all this information? When there are false positives?

• 1:16:37Jonathan Cohen?

  Do you shut down the bridge? Do you not go as a speaker to an event? Like, if you think that there could be assassination in the next however many days? Like, sure, if it's the next day. It becomes very inconvenient to follow all the messages. And yet, if you don't follow some of them, and you don't know which ones to follow, well, then catastrophe strikes.

• 1:17:01Mayim Bialik?

  And some people might say, "Well, if there's premonitions of all these things, why aren't there premonitions of positive things?" There actually is an answer. The notion is that when there is distress, when there is tragedy, it vibrates at a different frequency. So that people who are picking up on this are picking up on something somehow.

• 1:17:21Jonathan Cohen?

  There's a disturbance in the force.

• 1:17:23Mayim Bialik?

  There is a disturbance in the force. There is something that has a quality to it that draws attention in ways that like, "I have a premonition you're gonna order ice cream." It doesn't. Unless you're lactose intolerant, in which case, that could be a very critical situation.

• 1:17:39Jonathan Cohen?

  That could be a big disturbance in the force.

• 1:17:41Mayim Bialik?

  It could be a very big disturbance. I really, really enjoyed speaking to Sam and very... I know we are gonna get a lot of comments on this topic. I know it.

• 1:17:54Jonathan Cohen?

  If you have a story of a premonition, let us know on Substack and in the comments on this episode. I'm fascinated by how he describes that all of these stories are living in almost all of our families in some way. And you talk about it. The Hungarian grandmother.

• 1:18:14Mayim Bialik?

  That's right.

• 1:18:14Jonathan Cohen?

  The Eastern European grandmother.

• 1:18:16Mayim Bialik?

  That's right.

• 1:18:17Jonathan Cohen?

  The Nana who could heal or sense things or knew things before they happened.

• 1:18:23Mayim Bialik?

  Look, there is people far more skilled than you and I in talking about this. I think part of it is like the Renaissance, the intellectual Renaissance, brought forth a real rejection of folk wisdom and mysticism and all those things because we're now advanced. We've advanced. To a certain place, and in many cases, that was true. Like, who knew that washing hands before you put them inside someone's body to do surgery could prevent infection, right? But there are so many advances that we needed. However, what got left behind was a potential wisdom, insight, heart to our experience that is still there. It's still there. It's everywhere.

• 1:19:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, I appreciate you finding this book for us, and I'm sure everyone else does as well.

• 1:19:12Mayim Bialik?

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