Where Is My Mind? - Ep 4: CIA Psychic Spying & Knowing the Future

Episode Date: August 29, 2019

"Our satellite cameras can't see through the jungle. Do you think your psychics could help us?" "This breaks all the laws of physics."  Featuring Mark Gober’s interviews with: Russell Targ, Uri Ge...ller, Dr. Dean Radin, Dr. Daryl Bem, Dr. Julia Mossbridge, Dr. Larry Dossey, Dr. Jeff Mishlove, Stephan Schwartz, Brenda Dunne, John Vivanco, Catherine Yunt, Dr. Raymond Moody, Dr. Alan Hugenot, and Barbara Bartolome. Listen to all of Mark’s interviews here: https://markgober.com/podcast/ Declassified CIA documents: "Remote viewing is a real phenomenon": https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00789R002100220001-4.pdf Uri Geller Experiments:  https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79-00999A000300030027-0.pdf Hella Hamid Experiments: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00787R000200070002-3.pdf Precognition Studies Dr. Daryl Bem et al. (2015): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4706048/ Dr. Julia Mossbridge et al. (2014): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3971164/ Check out Mark's book, "An End to Upside Down Thinking": https://www.amazon.com/End-Upside-Down-Thinking-Consciousness/dp/1947637851 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 The evidence of the reality of ESP is we were supported for 20 years at about $25 million doing psychic tasks for the CIA. We really were the X-Files. ESP means extrasensory perception, like psychic abilities. All the intelligence agencies in America, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, NASA, Navy, Army Intelligence. So the chances of ESP not being real, there's no chance of that. That was Russell Targ. He's a laser physicist who ran the U.S. government's psychic spying program out of the Stanford Research Institute. The program started
Starting point is 00:00:45 during the Cold War and lasted for over 20 years. Mark, I gotta ask, how is it possible I've never heard of a psychic spying program funded by the U.S. government? I want you to read this quote from a 2005 interview with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Okay, this is what Carter said. We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic, and we couldn't find it. So the director of the CIA came, and he told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. She went into a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and there was the plane. There was the plane. How is that possible?
Starting point is 00:01:25 In this episode, we'll be talking about remote viewing. That's what Jimmy Carter was explaining with the woman who found a lost plane using her mind alone. Remote viewing is when someone perceives something far away using the mind, not ever seeing it with their eyes. All right, so for the listener, the only way I can understand anything is through pop culture references. So if you've seen Stranger Things, remote viewing is basically what Eleven does when she puts the blindfold on and is able to see stuff using her mind. Or if you've seen the movie The Man Who Stared at Goats, they're basically doing remote viewing in that. Here's how this episode is going to go. I'll lay out what remote viewing is and how it's been studied by the US government and
Starting point is 00:02:07 used by law enforcement. But I'll just say this, remote viewing is the tip of the iceberg. It goes much further than military intelligence. Remote viewing is used to find missing people, to solve crimes, and wait for it to make predictions about the future. You obviously don't have to trust me on this. I wasn't there in the 1970s and 80s. But you'll have a harder time dismissing the evidence
Starting point is 00:02:29 presented by Russell Targ and people I interviewed who did remote viewing for the US government. This is Where Is My Mind. I'm Mark Gober. In the last episode, we talked about telepathy, two people's minds connecting from far away. In this episode, we talked about telepathy, two people's minds connecting from far away. In this episode, we're going a step further to remote viewing, which happened in that story President Carter told. Okay, so I obviously have a few follow-ups here, Mark.
Starting point is 00:02:54 First of all, explain within our theory of consciousness how this remote viewing thing is even possible. Let's go back to Dr. Bernardo Kastrup's whirlpool analogy. Let's go back to Dr. Bernardo Kastrup's whirlpool analogy. It's like you're a whirlpool in the stream of consciousness, and you simply access water in another part of the stream. And you can do that because everything is just water. In this case, everything is just consciousness. And you're connected to it.
Starting point is 00:03:18 You're entangled with it. This is way more intense than guessing who's texting you. You're talking about seeing something happening on the other side of the world. Let's hear your case, Mark. Don't take it from me. Take it from Russell Targ, who you heard from earlier. Reminder, he's a laser physicist who ran the U.S. government's psychic spying program out of the Stanford Research Institute. The most interesting thing I know about this non-local connection of ESP is that it's no harder to describe something in Soviet Siberia from Palo Alto than it is to describe something across the street. Increasing the distance between the viewer and the target does not degrade the accuracy or the reliability.
Starting point is 00:04:05 Before I even ask more questions about this, I'm so stuck on the US government thing. How are we just talking about this now? Like, why don't people know about this? Yes, it's wild that the US government was studying remote viewing for decades. But according to Russell Targ, so were other governments. The CIA was already interested in psychic ability because the Soviets had been pursuing it for more than a decade. And the CIA had done a lot of intelligence work to find out that that activity was really going on in Russia. So the Russians were doing this too? We were just trying to keep up? If remote viewing really worked, then yeah, it makes complete sense that multiple governments would be using it, and it would make sense that it's been secretive. Let's go back to the Jimmy Carter airplane story.
Starting point is 00:04:49 This time, you'll hear it from Targ, who was there when it happened. By the way, you'll find in this episode that Russell Targ is central to another amazing story in U.S. history. The CIA came to us and said, this bomber crashed in Northern Africa, so it's going to be full of code books and reconnaissance equipment. And we can't find it with satellite photography because it's in the jungle. And our cameras, satellite cameras, can't see through the jungles. Do you think your psychics could help us? The CIA not only knew about this program, but they were convinced it would actually have a chance at working.
Starting point is 00:05:29 It was in their workflow to say, we can't figure this out. Let's call the psychic guys. Like, that's crazy to me. No, there actually is something even crazier about this. There was no person who knew where the plane was. So it's not like they were testing against an answer they already knew. This was the only way they could find the plane was to use
Starting point is 00:05:50 remote viewing. I mean, listen to what TARG said. They tried to use traditional satellites and they didn't work. So they needed something else. Here's more from Russell TARG. We're able to get a map of Northern Africa and Dale's psychic was able to say, I see this river between the river and the mountains of the village and she drew a little circle and said, that's where your plane is. And our guy gave a similar sort of ground level description of why the, how the plane is just sticking out of the river. And those two things had enough ground truth so the CIA would take off in a helicopter and without anyone's permission, drop that helicopter into the jungle. And shortly after
Starting point is 00:06:41 they landed the helicopter, some natives came along dragging pieces of the downed airplane. We have a testimonial with Carter saying, yes, the psychic in California found the airplane where nobody else could find it. I want to say here, to me, this is the strongest evidence we have. It is convincing for two reasons. One, how can this be possible if consciousness is stuck in our heads? And two, if it wasn't working, why did the US government throw millions of dollars at it for two decades? By the way, my full length interview with Russell Targ is fascinating. It's over an hour of stuff like that. Check it out at markgober.com slash podcast.
Starting point is 00:07:23 an hour of stuff like that. Check it out at markgober.com slash podcast. Okay, so we just heard that we can find airplanes that are multiple continents away. My question is, how does this actually work? How does it happen? It's sort of like what we talked about in episode two. When we get the brain out of the way, people sometimes experience enriched consciousness, savants, psychedelics, near-death experiences, less brain activity, more consciousness. So remote viewers often talk about going into a meditative or trance-like state to quiet their mind
Starting point is 00:07:57 so they can access more of the stream. I spoke with one of the world-leading experts of psychic studies, Dr. Dean Radin, who is the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. When a person who is trying to perceive at a distance, somehow the entire universe is inside your head. And the task then is to narrow your attention only to the thing that you're interested in. So it's not like you're going anywhere. It's like you're going inside where all the information already is. While that sounds really interesting, it doesn't really help me understand. We're all whirlpools in this big stream, right? We don't have to leave the whirlpool to get to the stream. We're already in the stream. So it's all there for us. If we can just get our thinking
Starting point is 00:08:38 brains out of the way. I know this is abstract. So I asked an actual remote viewer how it works. Here's John Vivanco. He's been involved in some fascinating remote viewing projects. You know, we were working with FBI doing counterterror. We were working with agencies like DIA, corporations, like household name corporations. Fascinating. Sounds like everyone's been using remote viewing. Here's how Vivanco describes the process of remote viewing.
Starting point is 00:09:09 Well, it's actually really boring to watch. You know, your eyes don't roll into the back of your head and nobody sees the whites of your eyes. You don't convulse on the floor. It's not like the precogs in Minority Report. They are, you know, closing their eyes, looking for imagery, looking for imagery, searching, waiting, moving quickly through sensations, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, writing it all down, stuff that's coming to them internally. You don't know the direction this is going. You're trying not to jump it all into this sort of conceptual framework and instead just going for low-level descriptive information adjectives. Here's where I get stuck, Mark. I Google search Russell Targ and Project Stargate,
Starting point is 00:09:58 which is what he was working on at the Stanford Research Institute. Some people say the remote viewing project was, quote, never useful in any intelligence operation. And it is a fact that the program was shut down after two plus decades. So what do I do with all that? Think about how controversial this is. Psychics can see something on the other side of the planet? Today in 2019, that sounds crazy.
Starting point is 00:10:23 University of Oregon, Professor Emeritus Ray Hyman said, proof of remote viewing would overturn almost everything we know in science. That scares people. What did we learn from Galileo? Of course, many scientists don't want to be wrong and change their worldview. Okay, that could be one reason, but that can't be the only reason it shut down, right? I asked Targ this exact question. The first reason, he said, is some of their biggest CIA advocates retired. The second reason? Another problem is that the religious fundamentalists at the CIA were literally arguing that we were in league with the devils.
Starting point is 00:11:01 We were in league somehow with the forces of the Antichrist. So clearly there were forces inside the CIA that opposed the remote viewing program on philosophical or religious grounds. But to those who still say it's all fraudulent, I think it's important to look at a 1995 report commissioned by U.S. Congress and the CIA. by US Congress and the CIA. It's a report by a UC Irvine statistics professor named Dr. Jessica Utz, who in 2016 was the president of the American Statistics Association. So you're saying she's the real deal. Dr. Utz was asked to look at the statistical evidence
Starting point is 00:11:37 for psychic phenomena like remote viewing. In her publicly available report from 1995, this is what she said, a direct quote. You ready for this? Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. How do you counter that? I don't know. I mean, that quote totally blew me away.
Starting point is 00:12:02 It still blows me away. This is in a report that a prominent statistician did for Congress and the CIA. That was her conclusion. And it was back in 1995. So we talked earlier in the season about witnesses that we would put on the stand. This would be my key witness. Another key piece of evidence, a recently declassified CIA document, which is now publicly available. Here are some direct quotes from it, and you can check out the document itself in the show notes. Quote, remote viewing is a real phenomenon and is not degraded by distance or shielding. Potential threat to U.S. national security exists from foreign sources.
Starting point is 00:12:47 Implications are revolutionary. Merits continued funding in the national interest. Evidence too impressive to dismiss as mere coincidence. Pretty mind-blowing. So we've got Jimmy Carter, we've got the CIA's documents, we've got Dr. Jessica Utz. I don't know how to shoot all those things down. What sort of things have been found through remote viewing besides the airplane in Africa? We'll look into that right after this.
Starting point is 00:13:30 Hey Matt, have you ever heard of Uri Geller? Yeah, he's an Israeli psychic from the 70s who has proven to be a fraud, right? I had heard that too, but Russell Targ tested Geller at the U.S. government and tells a very different story. In Nature magazine, we said that we're confident that Geller has some sort of paranormal ability. Nature magazine is a big deal. Most people know about Geller for his alleged spoon bending abilities. That's another story. And we're not going there because the U.S. government apparently didn't test him for that. But they did test him for other psychic abilities and guess what matt geller was nice enough to talk with me the cia said yes we'd like to test him i was taken in 1972
Starting point is 00:14:14 out of israel straight to palo alto and i've conducted there and you researched it, a series of tests, also with Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the CIA. And I was basically proven real, definitely in telepathy. I'm inclined to believe Mr. Geller here, but are we just supposed to take his word for it? I'm handing Matt a recently declassified CIA document. You can check it out yourself in the show notes, along with the other declassified document I mentioned earlier. The title of this is Experiments, Uri Geller at SRI, August 4th through 11th, 1973.
Starting point is 00:14:57 As a result of Geller's success in this experimental period, we consider that he has demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner. I swear to God, that's what it says. Wow. Targ told me the tests were done double blind, which is how traditional science experiments are done.
Starting point is 00:15:15 And the declassified CIA document even says, quote, in these experiments, Geller was separated from the target material. And target material just means the thing he was trying to remote view. The document goes into the details, and so did Geller when we spoke. When the CIA tested me, they put me under control, conditions mark. You know, they locked me in shielded rooms. Drawings were done away from the shielded room. In Langley, Virginia, Kid Green was holding something in his hand.
Starting point is 00:15:46 I drew what he was holding. I also said that I feel the word architectural coming in strongly. And that's exactly the word he wrote on inside the book with a marker because he was preparing for a lecture. Then I was taken to labs where they build nuclear weapons.
Starting point is 00:16:07 They basically wanted to see if my mind can trigger an atomic bomb. I would say that what the CIA released so far about me is the tip of the iceberg. I mean, that's truly one of the most terrifying things I've ever heard, honestly. If that's possible or if that's even something they were testing, that's freaky. I hear you, but I think it's important for us to keep in mind that remote viewers were actually useful to the US government. You know, years ago, Mark, the satellites weren't as sophisticated as the satellites today. Today, satellites can see through clouds.
Starting point is 00:16:53 In the 70s, they couldn't. So they have to use people like me and remote viewers. So now we do have satellites that can see through clouds. I assume we can still use remote viewers for things. Would it be possible to use remote viewing to find a missing person? I talked to consciousness researcher Dr. Jeff Mishlove about whether remote viewing is used for law enforcement purposes. Check this out.
Starting point is 00:17:21 I work closely with a psychic in California, now deceased, Kathleen Ray, who had, if you were to visit her little office, she has badges from about 75 different police departments who she has helped at no charge of her own. Most of the psychics who work for police do it for free because they just want to offer a human service and besides which the police can't risk paying a psychic why they'd be laughed at for doing such a thing. How common is it for a police department to reach out to a psychic? Is this widespread across departments all over the country or is it localized to just a few? I would say it's never done officially. There's one or two people in the
Starting point is 00:18:06 department who are open-minded and curious and willing to do it. So if law enforcement actually found remote viewing to be useful, they'd have to use it, right? Another interview I had, Matt, was with a talented psychic. And I was able to ask her this very question. Her name is Catherine Yount, and she is so talented with her abilities. She has been able to find missing people using only her mind. It's been mostly frustrating because typically law enforcement uses psychics or mediums as what I would call a last resort. And with missing people, it's essential to try to get information in the first 48 hours. I was living in Phoenix at the time. There was a woman missing on Mount Lemmon down
Starting point is 00:18:53 here in Tucson. And she knew the mountain well because she had grown up there. And I kept seeing that she was in a ravine and that she was injured. And I saw a blue porta potty and I smelled blueberry pies. Now, smell isn't naturally one of my scents. I'm much more clairvoyant where I see things. But this smell of blueberry pies was strong. So I called the rescue. You know, they don't know me from Adam. And I said, I see a blue porta potty
Starting point is 00:19:24 and I smell blueberry pies and she's in a ravine and she's injured. She's still alive. And there's something about a backpack. I said, I don't know. And he said, well, lady, we had a fire on the mountain and there's blue port-a-potties everywhere. But he said, but there is a pie shop. So you might want to call the pie shop. So I called the pie shop, explained the whole thing. And she said, I just took two blueberry pies out of the oven minutes ago before you called. I said, well, the fact I could smell blueberry pies tells me she's close enough that she could smell that. And there's some blue port-a-potty, although I see that's not an identifying marker. Rescuers who are out looking for missing hikers or whatever are a little more receptive.
Starting point is 00:20:05 They found her, and what had happened is when she was hiking, a low limb on a tree had snagged her backpack and thrust her down in this ravine, and she'd injured her leg so she couldn't get out. But they found her alive. So I guess the skeptic would say she's lying, but I find myself only able to say, holy shit. Look, I don't know the exact case Catherine Yunt was referring to there, but I definitely had heard about the next one. At the center of maybe the most famous missing persons case in American history was, you guessed it, Russell Targ. We were called in by the Berkeley police to help with the Patricia Hearst kidnapping. She was an heiress of San Francisco who was kidnapped from her dorm room at Berkeley by terrorists. And our psychic policeman, Pat Price, was able to go through a mug book and pull out by name the leader of the kidnap group he
Starting point is 00:21:06 was able to go through hundreds of names and say was Donald DeVries who did it and you'll find that he's not interested in money this is a political thing which is all true and if you want the car I see the car by the road about 50 miles north of here on the left side across from my diner, and we found the car. So that's what it's like to live as a psychic person. Remote viewing isn't just an intelligence or law enforcement tool. There's so many applications for it. How about financial forecasting? In fact, people have used remote viewing to make money. forecasting. In fact, people have used remote viewing to make money. Russell Targ's group, Delphi Associates, used remote viewing in the 1980s to successfully predict changes in the price of silver nine times in nine weeks. They made $120,000, but he's not the only one to look
Starting point is 00:22:00 at financial applications. Check out what Dr. Mishlove told me. There are people who use remote viewing today to forecast the outcome of sporting events and financial instruments. Usually they place wagers. If the wagers typically have a 50% probability of being correct, probability of being correct. They've been doing this for over a decade, and their track record is about a 60% accuracy rate on actual wagers placed, hundreds and hundreds of individual trials. It wouldn't surprise me if some investors were using remote viewers. I work in the financial field, and hedge funds constantly are looking for an edge. There are lots of smart investors, and people need ways to differentiate. Here's my question, though.
Starting point is 00:22:49 If remote viewing is used to make an investment, is that insider trading? How can it be insider trading if you're looking into the future? It hasn't happened yet. Matt, you nailed it. You've introduced exactly where I wanted to go next, the topic of time. We tend to think of time as going from past to present to future, but I'm not so sure about that anymore.
Starting point is 00:23:12 As Russell Targ explained to me, remote viewing can be done on things not only far away in distance, but also in time. In remote viewing, a person learns to quiet their mind so they can visualize and experience what's happening at a distant place or a future time. Do you think Russell Targ could maybe remote view like who's going to win the Super Bowl for the next 10 years? Matt, let's just stick to the script here. We've talked about the idea that consciousness is the basis of all reality.
Starting point is 00:23:44 But what we're seeing here is the basis of all reality. But what we're seeing here is another facet to that. Consciousness is furthermore beyond all space and time. It's as if consciousness can almost reach forward in what we perceive to be time because it's beyond time. Look, man, I'm trying here, but this is making my head spin. Can you give me some kind of example here? This is what Russell Targ told me about one of his most talented remote viewers named Hela Hamid.
Starting point is 00:24:16 She was remote viewing the future location of Hal Puthoff and Hal co-ran the U.S. government program with Targ. First of all, we did remote viewings into the future, where Hella would have to describe right now where Hal would be three hours from now, where he hasn't chosen his place until an hour later. And it turned out her experiments, which we published in the Engineering Society, describing where she would be in the future, that series was perfect. She got them all first place matches. Just to recap here, she was describing in the present moment
Starting point is 00:24:53 where put off would be in several hours. I mean, I still have some questions, Mark. Like, is it possible there was luck involved here? Like, did she guess Hal was going to like go home or go to the bathroom? Again, don't take it from me. Take it from another declassified CIA document,
Starting point is 00:25:08 which says, quote, there can be no question that Hella can repeatedly, although not reliably, produce information not available through normal means, end quote.
Starting point is 00:25:18 Sounds like she was good, but not 100% of the time, and that matches everything we've seen about not having perfect performance. I guess I'm getting there, Mark, but this whole, like, seeing the future thing
Starting point is 00:25:29 feels a little dicey to me. Okay, Matt, let's go back to Dr. Jessica Utz and her 1995 report for Congress and the CIA. She also mentioned precognition, and that's a fancy name for what we're talking about, seeing the future. I'll read you another quote from Dr. Utz's report. Precognition, in which the answer is known to no one until a future time, appears to work quite
Starting point is 00:25:51 well. So wait a second. Someone testified to Congress that precognition is real. I'm just reading what she wrote. We've talked a lot about remote viewing, but we haven't even mentioned one of the legendary pioneers in this field field who I also interviewed. His name is Stephen Schwartz. He's been running remote viewing projects since the 1960s. He's used remote viewing to locate archaeological sites and much more. My interview with him was nearly three hours long, available at markgober.com slash podcast. And part of our conversation was about remote viewing the future. And beginning in 1978, I began to ask people a standardized set of questions to look at the year, the same date of the year 2050. And I kept at it till 1996, about 4000 people took part.
Starting point is 00:26:44 And basically, I would say, well, I want you to go forward in time to the year 2050, the same date as today. Starting in the 1970s, Schwartz had people remote view the year 2050. Here were some of his findings. What came out of this was amazing, and not at all what I thought. First of all, the remote viewers said there was no nuclear war. And I said, oh, well, then the world must be much safer. What has been done to make it safer? They said, oh, no, it's not safer at all. It's much more dangerous. I said, why? Because of terrorism. Terrorism? Can you describe that for me? And they would go on to describe these religious terrorists and political terrorists. They said to me, the Soviet Union will disappear. I said, what do you
Starting point is 00:27:32 mean the Soviet Union will disappear? They said, well, I don't know, but in 2050, it doesn't exist. I could not imagine that. My whole training was we had this superpower, we were opposed, it was going to go on forever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't exist. By the way, Schwartz said in another interview that his remote viewers saw no massive apocalyptic event by 2050. I don't know if that's comforting to hear, but it kind of was for me. I mean, I guess it's comforting, but it defies everything I understand to hear that people can remote view the future. But what am I supposed to say here? That everyone's lying? He's been doing this since the 1960s. Do you think all those decades of work have been based
Starting point is 00:28:14 on fraudulent projects? Oh man. So I have a question. It seems kind of like if you're able to remote view the future, then everything's already predetermined, right? Like, I don't know if I agree with that. It doesn't seem like it's quite fixed. It seems like it's based on probability. This is what Schwartz said. The thing that is important about remote viewers that you really, this is a lot of people don't get this.
Starting point is 00:28:37 Remote viewers are reading probabilities. They're not reading predestination. Things are not fixed. What happens is when you ask a remote viewer, and they hold that intention, they're going to give you a reading of the highest probability that exists at that moment. If I had had better business sense back when I was doing it, I would have known to invest in certain technologies like computers. I did. I mean, I did. I funded my lab out of
Starting point is 00:29:05 Microsoft. We mentioned Princeton's Engineering Anomalies Research Lab earlier in the season. It was run by Princeton's former Dean of Engineering, Dr. Robert John, and it was co-run by Brenda Dunn. They studied remote viewing at Princeton. I had no idea about this when I was there as an undergrad. But not only did they study remote viewing, they looked at it before and after an event. I spoke with Brenda about the remote viewing experiments conducted at Princeton. The remote perception experiments seem to be independent of space or time. It didn't matter if the two participants in the remote perception were half a mile distant or halfway around the world. And it didn't matter if they were thinking about the process at the time it was going on
Starting point is 00:29:50 or many hours before or many hours or even days afterwards. The effects were the same. Clearly, we were looking at something that was temporally and spatially independent. Now, this breaks all the laws of physics. So, since this is breaking all the laws of physics, it's perhaps not surprising that precognition is considered extremely controversial. I'll briefly mention here the design of some studies on this, studies that look at small statistical effects.
Starting point is 00:30:21 Here's the basic design. All right, it's time for the unthreatening science music here. I'll simplify this as much as I can, I promise. Okay, so you have a person sitting in front of a computer screen. The screen starts randomly showing images. Sometimes the images are neutral, like a peaceful landscape,
Starting point is 00:30:38 and other times the images are arousing, like an erotic picture. We know from traditional psychology experiments that after an arousing picture is shown, people's bodies have a slight response where it's so subtle, the person doesn't even realize it's happening. For example, the pupils might dilate slightly
Starting point is 00:30:54 or your heart, brain, and even skin can respond. But in the precognition studies, experimenters were looking at what happens to the person's body before the picture is shown. They are testing if the body is naturally sensing the future without the person making a conscious effort to do so. And this is the key. No one knows what the future will be because the computer is randomly generating the pictures. The results? Well, the experiments show that a person's body responds seconds before
Starting point is 00:31:23 the picture is shown, consistent with the eventual picture shown. In other words, the body is predicting the future before it happens, and it's a tiny statistical effect, but an effect nonetheless. The most well-known example of this study was by former Cornell professor Dr. Darrell Bem in 2011, so I'll let him explain it. Precognition is the easiest kind of experiment to do. You only need one person. And all you need is a way of setting up some future situation, which is randomly selected. And so precognition is the one that got me excited most. It's the one that says the most radical things about consciousness.
Starting point is 00:32:06 most. It's the one that says the most radical things about consciousness. It says we really are not bounded, not only not by space, but also not by time. The study got mainstream attention. The New York Times picked it up, and even Stephen Colbert did a segment on it. By the way, there's some other studies that have gotten less mainstream attention, but reached the same incredible conclusion. Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Julia Mossbridge and her colleagues have written super important papers on this. And if you want more on these studies, check out my full-length interviews with Daryl Bem, Julia Mossbridge, Dean Radin, and Edsel Cardenya, which are available at markgober.com slash podcast.
Starting point is 00:32:39 So what if you could predict something more interesting than what picture would come up on a computer? Can precognition work for doctors? I asked Larry Dossey, MD. A patient of mine, a long-term patient who was a hotshot attorney in Dallas, banged on my door and she said, I saw in my dream three little white spots on my right ovary and I know it's cancer, so I need your help. She was terribly distraught. Her pelvic examination was normal. I suggested that we do a sonogram of her ovaries and sent her to the department to have that done. In about 30 minutes, the radiologist was back in my office, and
Starting point is 00:33:20 he looked sort of shaken up. He said, well, for one thing, that's the only time in my career I've done a sonogram on account of somebody's dreams. And I thought she was crazy. The sonogram showed exactly what she saw in her dream. She has three little white spots on her right ovary. But I'm happy to tell you that this is not cancer. These are just benign ovarian cysts. This is an amazing thing. What is the difference between a precognition and a premonition?
Starting point is 00:33:52 A premonition is a heads-up that something is going to happen in the future, like an intuition. Precognition is that same ability to know the future before it happens. They're related terms. Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Julia Mossbridge told me about a premonition that probably all of us would like to have. their related terms. Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Julia Mossbridge told me about a premonition that probably all of us would like to have. Recently, there was a guy in Virginia who had a dream of five numbers, and he was a computer scientist. Numbers were so clear, and the dream was so obvious and stark that he just decided, well, I'm going to enter the lottery, and I'm going to
Starting point is 00:34:19 enter it four times using these numbers. Those were the winning numbers and he won $100,000 each time. So he won $400,000. A lot of people, when I tell them about this stuff, they always ask me to ask you about dreams. Why dreams for the avenue where these premonitions would come to fruition? The answer I'll give is speculative. As we talked about in episode two, when we get the brain out of the way, sometimes we access more consciousness. This episode has been jam-packed. Can you give me and the listener a recap? We've talked about phenomena suggesting consciousness exists beyond the body and also beyond space and time. The evidence comes from Russell Targ, declassified CIA documents,
Starting point is 00:35:03 Jimmy Carter, Dr. Jessica Utz, studies from Cornell and Princeton researchers, and that's not even touching on the anecdotal evidence from John Vivanco, Uri Geller, Stephen Schwartz, and so many others. I mention this abundance of evidence for a reason, because no matter how much evidence is out there, people are still refusing to look in the telescope. For example, a prominent physicist named Lawrence Krauss has made statements like this. It's not controversial at all. There's no scientific evidence for extrasensory perception. Other brilliant people have made similar statements. Caltech physicist Sean Carroll has written, quote,
Starting point is 00:35:40 psychic powers don't exist. We can say that with confidence, end quote. And Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker agrees, stating Carroll, quote, shows how current physics is so solid that it rules out ESP forever. I mean, this is really hard, Mark. These guys are world-renowned thinkers. It's bold of you to just say,
Starting point is 00:36:03 they're wrong, I'm right. Why should our listeners believe you instead of believe them? As I said in episode one, we have to keep in mind, not every smart person is right about everything. Remember, I'm not the one saying remote viewing and precognition are real. The U.S. government is. Princeton research is. Russell Targ is. Dr. Jessica Utz's statistical analysis is. Russell Targ is. Dr. Jessica Utz's statistical analysis is. Hopefully this show will encourage
Starting point is 00:36:27 the brilliant scientists of our time to start looking at the evidence, even if it forces them to admit their worldview is incomplete. The broader point here is, we have tons of evidence in independent areas suggesting that consciousness isn't stuck in our skulls. I simply can't shoot down every piece of evidence. And remember, if any of this is real, even one thing, we need to rethink reality big time. So let's say our listeners are on board that we need to rethink reality, even if they're still parsing through the evidence or they're not fully sure where they stand yet. I'll ask the question that they're probably thinking. How does this remote viewing and precognition stuff impact regular people? That's the right question. Perhaps more important than is it real is if it is real,
Starting point is 00:37:15 then what does it mean for our lives? That's where we're headed starting in the next episode on the near-death experience. I do think that near-death experiences are like a portal into another dimension of reality, into a hyper-reality. I was in a motorcycle accident, and just about the time I hit the car, I don't remember after that. And the next thing I know,
Starting point is 00:37:39 I wake up on the other side with the light, with this being of light. I was up on the ceiling. I could see and hear everything. This has been Where Is My Mind. Thank you for listening to Where Is My Mind. The show was written by me, Mark Gober, and the show was produced at Blue Duck Media
Starting point is 00:38:02 by Matt Ford and Gabe Goodwin, with help from Antonio Enriquez, Zuri Irvin, and Ben Redmond. The show is edited by Andy Jaskiewicz. Special thanks to Cadence 13, particularly John McDermott and Patrick Antonetti. Also thanks to Bill Gladstone and Waterside Publishing. All of my full-length interviews are available at markgober.com slash podcast. We'd like to thank our sponsors, and if you'd like to support the show, please consider supporting them on our behalf. Please rate and review the podcast on iTunes.
Starting point is 00:38:29 And if you'd like, tell a friend to subscribe and spread the word. See you next time.

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