S2E5: PREVIEW: Ask Me Anything with Dr. Jeremy Chapman

We’re sharing a special preview of an exclusive Backstage Pass AMA with Dr. Jeremy Chapman, child and adolescent psychiatrist and Medical Director of the SSM Health Treffert Center. In this conversation, he dives into your most thought-provoking questions — from how savants might collaborate with leading scientists, to what actually happens in the brain when “the veil” lifts and new forms of perception appear. To hear the full episode, and access all upcoming AMAs with Ky and our Season Two guests, subscribe to The Telepathy Tapes Backstage Pass. You’ll get ad-free episodes, bonus content, and access to our private Discord community. Visit www.thetelepathytapes.com http://www.thetelepathytapes.com to sign up. 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

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• 0:30Ky Dickens?

  Hello, Backstage Pass listeners. Thank you so much for all the amazing feedback we've received from episode four of the season, Savants, When Brilliance Drops In. We're thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Jeremy Chapman, director from the SSM Health Treford Center, who will be answering the questions you submitted that were inspired by the episode. Your questions were so thoughtful and engaging that Jeremy had a great time digging in. And now here's Jeremy.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, everybody, for having me. My name is Dr. Jeremy Chapman, child and adolescent psychiatrist, medical director at the Treford Center. It was a joy to be on the show and to get to share some of the work that we do and some of my thoughts and my team's thoughts. And I really appreciate the questions that people sent us in. So let's dive right in and do our best to answer these things. Here's question number one. Dr. Chapman, has the Treford Center explored ways to connect the brilliant savants with PhDs or researchers in the fields that they naturally excel and in order to help them translate their insights into formal scientific language and perhaps make some additional breakthroughs that way? For example, linking Jason Paget with MIT's Dr. Max Tegmark

• 1:36Speaker 02

  to co-investigate their shared understandings of the foundation of our existence and what the universal consciousness is. All right, great, great question. And I'll start with Jason, actually. So he has frequently implored us to help him get connected with the academic community. As you would imagine, having a background as a futon salesman, not any formal or secondary education, stuff like that, he does not have an in. And frankly, he faces a huge uphill battle in terms of credibility and getting people's attention. You know, who's this guy to come along and make all these claims? And, you know, these wild things. It's really, it's really hard to break in. I have my own pedigree. I have my own training as to do the other members of our Treford research team.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  And absolutely, that is part of the greater

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Dedication we have to supporting the savants in any way we can. And that's not just the acquired ones, but a lot of the congenital savants, the autistic folks who have special gifts, who reach out to us from around the world. We want to use any platform we have to support them. That might mean helping advertise their social media channels, connecting them with amazing podcasts. We'll have an opportunity to reach a wide audience. Of course, bringing them together as we do with our newly annual gathering that we're going to have again this summer. So Jason's big thing that he needs is someone to kind of ratify or build upon what he says. Now, there are other savants who we have spoken with, who we featured at our events. We had Gianni, who folks can look into, of course.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  I'm happy to share more about him. He connected with some astrophysicists. He was more like their muse because as you'd imagine, folks like Jason, they don't have the traditional training. They don't have the traditional language per se. They don't speak to you like a textbook would, but they see things in a different way. It's more of a pattern recognition, connecting dots and viewing things from a perspective that maybe someone who came through traditional academia never considered it that way. Really what it is, is if you perceive the universe, if you perceive reality in a different way, you might bring a very useful, fresh look at stuff. And so, yes, they can work together in a way that the one person never viewed it that way and the other person never was able to explain it that way.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  That's something that we're definitely committed to. Now, the person who submitted this question mentioned MIT's Dr. Max Tugmark. I'm not personally familiar with that doctor. So it's great to have another lead there. And by all means, you know, if folks know people who might want to collaborate or be open. So you have to be open minded as the expert to, you know, entertaining the opinion of someone who does not have your background. It can be very insular, you know, scholarly community, the research and academic community can be very, I hate to say it, but kind of closed minded, maybe a little bit elitist because hey, we had the formal training, we read the same textbooks and took the same tests. And so it's hard for people to kind of open their mind up to someone who does not necessarily have that stuff. So I appreciate you asking about that.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Very much open to connections on their behalf if folks have them. Next, I was wondering if, once you or a person breaches this veil of reality, if all other psi-gifts can unravel, PSI, psi-gifts. And if so, how do these neurotypical individuals handle the changes psychologically speaking? So how do neurotypical individuals handle the changes psychologically? What does it do to their concept of consciousness? Okay. It's hard to say. We talk about loosening filters in the brain. And there's definitely brain changes that take place when someone becomes an acquired savant. Sometimes it's more obvious than other times.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  If you got bonked in the head with a baseball bat and there's clearly imaging proof that there was a brain bleed or a fracture of the skull or some sort of other contusion or injury to the brain, it's easy to see how that would have changed a person's experience. I don't know of direct cases of psi-abilities or supernatural senses being unlocked. But what I'll say is that the people talk about a change in their perception and the way that they experience the world, that they have a different sense of pattern recognition. They see connections in ways that they didn't before. Again, to talk about Jason, you know, he talks about, he turned on the faucet and he saw the water coming out of the faucet, but it was more of a comic strip where he would see different individual frames.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  It's like the frame rate of his visual perception changed, which it's certainly possible. And you think about like a housefly, it's hard to swat them because I think they perceive the world at a different frame rate than we do. So us swinging our hand at them very quickly, they would look at it and be like, seeing it in slow motion, they're like, yeah, bro, you're not gonna catch me. I'm gonna fly away way before you get to me. And so it would follow that there is some aspect of the brain that carries that frames-per-second aspect of visual perception. And so I can see things like that changing. A lot of people, but it's really jarring to them too. You go, what, why is this happening? What, this is weird to me. I don't like this.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  And if they don't instantly see any of the positive aspects of it or the new strengths they got, it can be very disorienting and people talk about getting very reclusive. Some of them never really make it out of that too. So people can get very stressed out by it. Again, part of why we are trying to bring them together when possible and when safe, so that they have a community of others who can relate to them.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Let's go to the next question here. Are some of the Savans telepathic?

• 7:16Ky Dickens?

  To hear the rest of the AMA and to get Ask Me Anything episodes through the rest of the season from me and other special guests from season two, subscribe to our Backstage Pass. You can find it on our website, thetelepathytapes.com.