Blue Apron is a new product program where they send you the food every week with detailed photographic directions. It s like eating out at an interesting restaurant and you get to do it yourself so you get a cool sense of satisfaction after it s done. For $9.99 per meal, they ll send the right ingredients in the exact right proportions with simple recipe instructions right to your door. Meals are between 500 and 700 calories per serving, although you wouldn t guess it because they re very delicious! You would think that you re cheating, but you would be wrong because you re not. It's fast, it's fresh, and it's affordable. That's Blue Apron's secret sauce. And if you're into something like that, you should try it out. Go to blueapron.com/recipe and enter the code JRogan and you will get your first two meals for free! That's J.R.Rogan. And when you get that digital scale, you simply get your digital scale and up to $55 worth of free postage. You ll save up to 80% compared to a standard U.S. postage meter. That s 80% cheaper than a regular meter. And you ll save 80% on your postage bill too! You can't ask for much more! Stamps.com is more powerful than a postage meter, and you'll save up 80% to a fraction of the cost of a standard meter. You'll have a better chance of saving 80% of the time you spend at the post office. You can print your stuff from your computer or your hard drive. You don't have to weigh it and weigh it in a digital scale. You won t have to wait in line. You're not going to have to go to an actual post office, you'll have it weighed up to a $110! You'll save 80%. That's true, you can do it in your home. You can save up a lot of time, you're not gonna believe it. It's 80% faster than you'll be getting a $55 digital scale to weigh your stuff measured out to 80 grams. and you won't have a deal that comes up to the postman. . And you won t even have to do that in a box, you ll get a $100 worth of postage to make it in less than a third of the amount you spend in a day. That's a deal!
00:00:00.000This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Blue Apron.
00:00:03.000Blue Apron is a really interesting new podcast sponsor that I really enjoy because I like cooking, but I've always been pretty caveman-like in my cooking.
00:00:24.000But I never really set out and cooked meals under very specific or rigid instructions, you know, buying a certain amount of recipe ingredients and measuring it out.
00:00:39.000I've never done that before Blue Apron.
00:00:41.000And Blue Apron is a really unique product.
00:00:45.000Program where they send you the food every week with detailed photographic directions.
00:00:54.000It's really easy to follow and it's delicious food.
00:00:57.000It's like eating out at an interesting restaurant and you get to do it yourself so you get this cool sense of satisfaction after it's done.
00:01:06.000For $9.99 per meal, they'll send you the right ingredients in the exact right proportions with simple recipe instructions right to your door.
00:01:15.000Meals are between 500 and 700 calories per serving, although you really wouldn't guess it because they're very delicious.
00:03:31.000Brian Redband uses it to send all of his stuff from deskquad.tv.
00:03:36.000A lot of our friends use Stamps.com because it's a really easy way to send packages.
00:03:41.000Going to the post office can be a tremendous pain in the ass and with Stamps.com You can avoid that and you can print official U.S. postage directly from your computer, either in your home or your office.
00:03:53.000They provide you with a digital scale.
00:03:55.000If you go to stamps.com and click on the microphone in the upper right hand corner and enter in the code word JRE, you will get a free digital scale and up to $55 worth of free postage.
00:04:09.000And when you get that digital scale, you simply weigh your packages, print up official US postage with any normal computer printer, slap that sucker right on the box, and boom!
00:04:21.000Hand it to the postman, and you're done.
00:04:22.000You don't have to deal with any of the nonsense that comes with going to an actual post office, waiting in line, getting stuff measured out.
00:04:29.000Stamps.com is more powerful than a postage meter and just a fraction of the cost of it.
00:04:35.000You will save up to 80% compared to a postage meter.
00:04:38.000I'll say that again because you're not going to believe it.
00:04:40.000You can save up to 80% compared to a postage meter.
00:04:44.000And you'll avoid all the time-consuming trips to the post office.
00:04:49.000We use Stamps.com and Stamps.com is an excellent choice if you have any sort of a home business or an office where you send things out of.
00:04:57.000It's way easier than going to the post office.
00:05:00.000Now when you go to Stamps.com, before you do anything, click on the microphone in the top of the home page and type in JRE. That's Stamps.com and enter the code word JRE for your $110 bonus offer, which again includes up to $55 in free postage and A free digital scale that you're not supposed to use for mushrooms or weed.
00:06:12.000I am a huge fan of working out with kettlebells.
00:06:15.000It is the main method that I use for strength and conditioning training, and it's benefited me tremendously.
00:06:22.000What they are is they're essentially these giant balls of iron with these huge metal handles, these iron handles, and you swing them around.
00:06:32.000And in doing so, it promotes what they call functional strength.
00:06:36.000We have several workout DVDs that are also for sale at Onnit.com and not just DVDs for kettlebells, but also DVDs for sandbag workouts, DVDs for steel mace workouts,
00:06:52.000DVDs for Just all sorts of different body weight training exercises as well.
00:06:59.000We have a huge selection now, including my favorite, which is the Extreme Kettlebell Cardio Workout DVD, the Extreme Kettlebell Cardio 2, Extreme 2 Kettlebell Cardio Workout DVD, which is the latest and greatest by Keith Weber, who will be on the show next month.
00:07:16.000We also have a wide variety of supplements and foods, foods including hemp force protein, earth-grown nutrients, which is an excellent supplement to add to your morning shake to ensure you're getting your daily amount of greens, really super healthy stuff with antioxidants.
00:07:35.000Powerful greens from both land and the sea, wheat grass, barley grass, oak grass, kale, kelp, all sorts of different stuff, spirulina, alfalfa.
00:07:43.000Just the idea behind it, just getting as many nutrients into your body as you can, especially earth-grown nutrients, really healthy, natural, easy for your body to digest, with five major components, all of it listed at Onnit.com.
00:07:57.000And the other things along the food lines are the Warrior Bar, which is another big favorite of mine, which is Natural, organic buffalo meat, no antibiotics, no added hormones.
00:08:08.000It's buffalo meat pressed in an ancient Lakota recipe with no added preservatives.
00:08:14.000The way it's done is the same way they used to do it probably more than a thousand years ago.
00:08:20.000It has only 140 calories, but with 14 grams of protein and 4 grams of fat for every 2-ounce serving.
00:08:28.000Very healthy, and it doesn't feel You know, you can satisfy your cravings and your hunger and you don't feel like a dummy for doing so.
00:08:35.000Go to Onnit.com, O-N-N-I-T, and use the code word ROGAN and you will save 10% off any and all supplements.
00:08:42.000We are a human optimization website and even if you don't go to Onnit and purchase things, there's just a...
00:08:50.000A huge source of interesting stuff at the Onnit Academy.
00:08:54.000Lots of fantastic workouts that you can check out and a lot of inspirational stuff, great articles.
00:09:01.000The Onnit Academy is one of the newest and expanding forums at Onnit.
00:09:07.000Not expanding forums, but forums at Onnit, pages at Onnit.
00:09:11.000Lots of really cool stuff there that you have that you could go there and just get it for free.
00:09:16.000But if you want to buy anything, Use the code word ROGAN and you'll save 10% off any and all supplements.
00:09:37.000Rupert Sheldrake, ladies and gentlemen.
00:09:39.000I came to know of you through the trialogues that you did with Terence McKenna, who I'm a huge fan of, and Ralph Abraham.
00:09:47.000And I thought they were some really fascinating conversations.
00:09:52.000You know, all of Terence's MP3s are very thought-inspiring and made you really look at things from a very different and peculiar angle that he had.
00:10:03.000He had a very unique way of looking at the world.
00:10:05.000But I came to know of you from that, and I came to know of your ideas of morphic resonance, which I found to be really fascinating.
00:10:15.000And if you don't mind, just explain to folks at home listening what the concept of morphic resonance is.
00:10:22.000It's the idea of memory and nature, the idea that the whole universe has a kind of memory.
00:10:28.000The so-called laws of nature are more like habits.
00:10:32.000Each individual in a species draws on a collective memory and contributes to it.
00:10:41.000Any pattern of activity that's similar to a later pattern of activity in a self-organizing system influences it across space and time.
00:10:51.000So what it means in effect is that if you train rats to learn a new trick in Los Angeles, then rats in New York and Sydney and London will learn the same thing quicker straight away.
00:11:03.000There's actually evidence that this surprising effect happens.
00:11:07.000If you crystallize a new chemical that's never existed before, then after you've made it in one place, it should get easier to crystallize all over the world.
00:11:18.000So it's really a theory of habit and memory, and it enables new patterns of learning to spread quicker than they might otherwise do.
00:11:28.000And it means that it should get easier to learn things that other people have already learned.
00:11:32.000So this has been proven, this concept of rats being able to learn one thing in New York quicker because they learned it already in San Francisco?
00:12:04.000If they went out the wrong exit, they got an electric shock.
00:12:07.000And if they went out the right exit, which the wrong one was lit up with a light, the other one was dim.
00:12:13.000If they went out the right exit, they just escaped from the maze.
00:12:17.000And he tested them to see how many trials they made before they learned always go out of the dim exit.
00:12:24.000And the first generation took about 250 trials before they cottoned on to what was happening.
00:12:30.000The next generation, it was about 180 trials.
00:12:34.000The next generation, about 150. They got better and better.
00:12:38.000And he thought at first this was because there was something being passed on to the children, maybe through modifying the genes or something like that, an inheritance of acquired characters.
00:12:51.000That was a kind of taboo in 20th century science.
00:12:56.000And so people questioned his work, but because he was at Harvard and because he was a famous professor, they couldn't just dismiss it.
00:13:07.000So people tried repeating his work in the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and Melbourne, Australia.
00:13:14.000And they found that their rats started more or less where the Harvard rats had left off.
00:13:19.000And in Melbourne they did an experiment that was particularly interesting.
00:13:24.000They went on getting better, the ones that were descended from the trained parents in each generation, but they found that all rats of that breed, even if their parents had never been trained, were getting better too.
00:13:36.000So whatever it was, it wasn't something to do with modifying the genes or what people would now call epigenetics.
00:13:43.000There was something else much more mysterious going on.
00:13:46.000And since no one knew what it was, it was just ignored and forgotten.
00:13:53.000So that would kind of make sense that if somehow or another...
00:14:00.000The genes or whatever that is in the rat is able to communicate with other of the same species of the similar genetics of whatever it is that they're doing, whatever undefined thing that they're doing, connecting with them even across continents,
00:14:54.000So in the 1920s, they had cardboard tops on these bottles.
00:14:59.000And someone noticed in Southampton that the cream at the top of their bottle had disappeared.
00:15:04.000The top had been torn open and the cream had disappeared.
00:15:07.000And when they watched, they saw that every morning these blue tits in Southampton had figured out they could tear off this cardboard strip and get free cream every morning.
00:15:18.000Everyone was sort of interested in this.
00:15:20.000Then it turned up many, many miles away in another part of Britain.
00:15:31.000So scientists got interested and they set up a network all over Britain of people to observe this habit and they got reports.
00:15:39.000It was coordinated from Cambridge University.
00:15:42.000And they mapped the spread of the habit, and it became clear that it was spreading faster and faster, and it was being independently invented in other parts of Britain.
00:15:53.000So much so that the professor of biology at Oxford, Sir Alastair Hardy, suggested it must be happening by telepathy, that it was spreading too quickly.
00:16:03.000The most interesting records are from Holland because this started happening in Holland as well.
00:16:09.000And during the war, Holland was occupied by the Germans and milk deliveries stopped.
00:16:15.000They didn't start again until about 1948, about seven or eight years after they stopped.
00:16:21.000Blue tits only lived three or four years, so there would have been no blue tits after the war that remembered the golden age of free cream.
00:16:29.000So when the milk deliveries began again in Holland, they started drinking the cream almost straight away all over Holland.
00:16:38.000So I would say this is a kind of collective memory that spread by morphic resonance and was remembered by morphic resonance.
00:16:46.000And that's another example of this going on in the real world.
00:16:51.000Incidentally, they've now stopped doing it.
00:16:54.000They used to steal our cream in London until about 10 years ago when we switched to semi-skimmed milk.
00:17:00.000There isn't any cream in bottles of semi-skimmed milk and blue tits have more or less given up in Britain now because so many people have switched to semi-skimmed milk they don't get any cream.
00:17:16.000The idea that human beings start off as a blank slate has really been questioned quite a bit over the last generation.
00:17:27.000And genetics in particular, they're starting to understand That there's certain particular traits and memories that you can actually learn from your parents.
00:17:36.000Like there was one study they did with mice where they had taken mice and they had given them an electric shock and coincided that electric shock with the smell of citrus.
00:17:46.000Like there was electric shock in their feet.
00:18:06.000I mean, I think I might have, but please do.
00:18:08.000Well, what they did was they used a chemical, a synthetic chemical called acetophenone that smells sort of vaguely fruity, but it's something that mice would never have encountered in nature because it's a synthetic chemical.
00:18:21.000And they took male mice and exposed them to the smell of acetophenone and they gave them a mild electric shock on their paw when they smelt this stuff.
00:18:33.000And the result is classical Pavlovian conditioning, you know, a few times of that happening and as soon as they smelt acetophenone they were terrified.
00:18:43.000It's perfectly standard stuff in science.
00:18:47.000What wasn't standard was they then bred from these mice, and they did some of the experiments using artificial insemination so that the mothers never even met the fathers of the next generation.
00:18:59.000And then they tested their children and their grandchildren, and whenever they smelt aceto for known, they were just paralyzed with fear.
00:19:06.000So they inherited the fear of this chemical in a single generation in a way that regular science simply can't explain.
00:19:18.000And this went far beyond anything anyone would have expected.
00:19:22.000There's evidence from the details of the experiments that it involves some changes in the sperm, some change in the genes or the epigenetics, which is the packaging of the genes.
00:19:33.000But no one can conceive how a mouse learning to avoid this smell and being frightened by it, no one knows how all that information could be transferred into genes in the sperm.
00:19:47.000So I think at least part of the explanation of this is morphic resonance, that if you make some animals averse to something, then other animals of the same kind will be frightened of it.
00:20:03.000I did a very similar experiment actually years ago with a skeptical scientist in Britain called Stephen Rose.
00:20:11.000We had a controversy in the Guardian newspaper.
00:20:15.000I used to write a column in the Guardian and I wrote a thing about the nature of memory and how morphic resonance helps to explain it.
00:20:23.000We could discuss that later if you like.
00:20:28.000He'd spent his whole career working on memory, saying it must be inside the brain, and he worked with day-old chicks.
00:20:36.000And in The Guardian, he wrote a response to my article and challenged me to do an experiment in his laboratory under his supervision to test what he called the seemingly absurd hypothesis.
00:20:49.000Well, the experiment we did, we had day old chicks, and day old chicks peck at anything bright.
00:20:59.000So we had them peck at a silvery bead.
00:21:03.000And after the silver bead, they were injected with saline solution.
00:21:12.000We also had them peck at a yellow light-emitting diode.
00:21:18.000And after they'd pecked at that, the chicks that had pecked at the yellow light-emitting diode were injected with something that made them feel sick.
00:21:42.000So these chicks, when you tested them a day or two later, they would avoid yellow lights, but they'd peck at the chrome bead, the silver bead, which hadn't made them sick.
00:21:58.000But what I predicted was that if we did the experiment over and over again, every day we get a new batch of fresh chicks and test them with the yellow light-emitting diode and the chrome bead.
00:22:11.000I predicted that they'd start avoiding the yellow light-emitting diode, but not the chrome bead, because of the influence by morphic resonance from previous chicks.
00:22:23.000They'd start avoiding it even before they'd been made averse to it.
00:22:26.000For the first time they were exposed to it, they wouldn't go for it.
00:22:33.000And that's exactly what happened in this experiment.
00:22:39.000This is actually something that's well known in the rat poison industry.
00:22:43.000I mean, most people haven't spent much time looking into the rat poison industry and how it works, but one thing that happens to people who try to poison rats for a living Is that if you try some new kind of bait with a particular flavor,
00:22:59.000rats eat it and they get sick and they die.
00:23:07.000But after a while, rats start avoiding it.
00:23:09.000They become what's called in the trade bait shy.
00:23:13.000And not just in one place, but the bait stops working, you know, miles and miles away.
00:23:18.000So they have to keep inventing new baits.
00:23:22.000That's why most rat poison now is based on warfarin, which causes bleeding, thins the blood and causes bleeding, and it doesn't usually affect the rats for days after they've eaten it.
00:23:36.000They don't associate it with any particular flavor because it's slow, slow acting.
00:23:41.000That's why people have had to switch to warfarin as the main rat poison, because this aversion to things that poisoned them became so strong.
00:23:51.000And there's something that actually some people who are listening to us might know about, which I heard about from a guy in America who fishes for bass.
00:24:00.000And he was telling me there's a constant development of new lures for bass fishing.
00:24:10.000Well, apparently people are always inventing new lures that work very well for a while and apparently they stop working.
00:24:19.000Not just in one place, but elsewhere, so there's a constant development of new lures.
00:24:24.000Now, if that could be documented, that might be another very interesting case of morphic resonance.
00:24:31.000If bass keep getting caught and they're in pain when they're caught by being fished with a particular kind of lure, then other bass later, even in different rivers or lakes, when they see that lure, would be more averse to biting it,
00:24:59.000I came up with this in 1973, a long time ago.
00:25:03.000I was doing research at Cambridge University on plant development, how plants grow, and I became convinced for a variety of reasons that the attempt to explain the whole thing just in terms of genes and molecules and proteins It wouldn't work.
00:25:22.000I was at the very leading edge of this.
00:25:25.000I mean, the main plant hormone is called auxin, A-U-X-I-N. And I figured out how it's made, and then I figured out how it's transported around the plant.
00:25:37.000And this was a massive advance, and this is kind of textbook stuff now in university textbooks, the mechanism of polar auxin transport.
00:25:50.000Having figured all that out, I then realized this wasn't enough to explain plants, because all plants have the same hormone, and it's moved in the same way in every plant, and it's moved the same way in petals and leaves and stems and roots, and it's moved the same way in palms and cabbages and roses,
00:26:55.000And I was wrestling with this idea in Cambridge.
00:26:59.000And then the idea of morphic resonance came to me.
00:27:01.000If you have a resonance across time between similar things, you could explain this inheritance of form and of instincts in animals in a non-genetic way, which would give a completely new way of understanding biology and inheritance.
00:27:16.000I then realized that this would apply to learning and memory and many aspects of human behavior.
00:27:22.000So I wrote this up in a book called A New Science of Life, which was published in 1981. It took me years to think this through.
00:27:30.000I realized that it would be controversial.
00:27:33.000So I had to be very sure of myself before I could write about it.
00:27:38.000Then I wrote another book called The Presence of the Past, which puts the theory forward in its fullest form, and that's my main theoretical book.
00:27:48.000And since then I've really been trying to develop these ideas, test them, do experiments and so on.
00:27:53.000Anyway, it was my idea in the first place and since then it's become widely discussed in many areas.
00:27:59.000Now when you say that you had to be sure of it, what did you do that made you sure of it?
00:28:06.000I mean, what kind of testing have you done to sort of hammer out this concept of morphic resonance?
00:28:15.000Well, there were two aspects to being sure about it.
00:28:18.000The main objection that I got from my colleagues in the scientific world, especially in biology, was not what's the evidence.
00:28:59.000Basically, everything's fine the way it is.
00:29:02.000And that's what led in the 1980s to people formulating the Human Genome Project, which culminated in the year 2000 with the publication of the Human Genome Project.
00:29:14.000So they thought that that was adequate to explain.
00:29:16.000Once they got into the human genome, once they mapped it out, they were going to be able to explain pretty much everything about human beings.
00:29:50.000But I was convinced that genes were grossly overrated, that they couldn't do most of these things that people thought they could.
00:29:58.000Because what genes do is code for the sequence of amino acids in proteins, protein molecules which make up our muscles and, you know, the blood cells and the enzymes and so on, a major part of life.
00:30:16.000But there's a huge difference between making the right proteins and the shape of your nose, for example, or the instincts of a spider to spin a web.
00:30:24.000I mean, it's like saying you could explain the structure of a building by knowing the chemistry of the bricks.
00:30:31.000I mean, you have to have bricks and you have to have cement and timber and stuff to make a building.
00:30:36.000And if you have defective bricks, you get a defective building.
00:30:39.000But it doesn't explain the plan of the building, the shape of the building.
00:30:43.000So I was convinced that these things would never be explained by genes, that we needed something like morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance to explain them.
00:30:54.000So part of thinking about this was thinking hard about what regular science could and could not achieve.
00:31:01.000And incidentally, I'll come to the evidence in a minute, but the...
00:31:07.000One of my predictions is that this biotechnology thing would be a disaster.
00:31:12.000It would mean people would lose huge amounts of money.
00:31:16.000I advised my friends, if they were investors, just don't bother.
00:31:19.000You know, the only way you make money in this is by getting in on the bubble and selling out in time because it's not really going to lead to that many useful products.
00:31:42.000It's interesting, you see, that the Human Genome Project, they expected they'd have about 100,000 genes.
00:31:48.000It turned out when they finally announced it that there were only about 20,000 genes.
00:31:54.000We have less genes than the sea urchin and about half as many as a rice plant.
00:32:00.000That was a huge surprise to people and it soon became clear that it wasn't going to deliver on most of these promises.
00:32:08.000Craig Venter, who had the private genome project, which was a rival of the publicly funded one, he's a very, very competitive guy, he got there first.
00:32:22.000He saw it as a race and he was going to win, and he did.
00:32:28.000Even though he was technically very successful and the publicly funded genome project was technically successful, once they'd done it, it became immediately apparent this information was almost useless.
00:32:41.000And Craig Venter's, his company, Celera Genomics, the shares collapsed In a few days, from about $60 a share to about 12 cents a share.
00:32:52.000And when he was interviewed after that, he said he's got a great sense of humor.
00:32:55.000He said, I'm a guy who's made a million the hard way by working my way down from a billion.
00:33:08.000And around four or five years ago, there was a development in science that most people haven't heard of yet, outside science, but it's really big within the scientific journals, called the Missing Heritability Problem.
00:33:22.000What they did is they took the genomes of 30,000 different people, because it's quite cheap now to sequence genomes, sequenced about 30,000 genomes, and to figure out what genes do what.
00:33:36.000You know, they looked at the people, 30,000 people, they knew everything about them, their height, their diseases, history, and so forth.
00:33:45.000They started with height, because height's easy to measure.
00:34:17.000So they then ran all these correlations and statistics to figure out which genes were involved in height.
00:34:23.000They found about 50 genes were involved in controlling height.
00:34:27.000Then they found some were more important than others, so they made their best models, weighting some more than others, and coming out with predictions.
00:34:36.000And then they picked some people at random, the genomes.
00:34:39.000They did all their sums, they'd identified the genes, they ran the computer simulations, and they predicted these people's height on the base of their genome.
00:34:47.000And then they looked up the height to see how good this method was.
00:34:51.000It turned out they could predict height with an accuracy of 5%.
00:34:54.000Now you can do it with an accuracy of 80% just by using tape measures in a way that's billions of dollars cheaper.
00:35:02.000So the gap between the 5% and the 80%, the 75% that's not explained by the genes, is called the missing heritability problem.
00:35:16.000And it turned out that the same was true of most diseases.
00:35:20.000There's a few diseases where a defective gene gives a defective protein and you get a clear predictive value.
00:35:26.000Cystic fibrosis is one of them, sickle cell anemia is another.
00:35:29.000So there's a few rare genetic diseases where this method works very well.
00:35:34.000But for most diseases, breast cancer, cardiac problems, the predictive value of the genome turned out to be only 5 to 10%.
00:35:43.000And all these companies sprang up that would offer to sequence people's genomes and predict their diseases.
00:35:51.000And the last one, 23andMe, was put out of business by the FDA just a few months ago because their advertising was misleading.
00:36:04.000With more than about 10% accuracy, the likelihood that you'll get a particular disease on the basis of the genome, except for these rare genetic disorders.
00:36:15.000So this company, their entire business model was predicting people's vulnerability to certain diseases?
00:36:21.000I think that was their main business model.
00:36:23.000I mean, there are certain things where genome sequencing is still valuable and used.
00:36:28.000You know, if you want to find out what your racial background is, you know, where did your ancestors come from?
00:36:38.000I'm saying it has limited uses, but nothing like the bonanza of profits that people were expecting.
00:36:45.000I mean, there was a report by the Harvard Business School on this a few years ago On the biotech business, and they said no one had ever invented such a massive money-losing scheme in the history of humanity.
00:36:58.000So I think that's because it was based on a false assumption of what genes do, you see.
00:37:14.000What's the conventional explanation for this memory being passed down into these animals that have never experienced that before through breeding?
00:37:23.000Well, there isn't really one, you see, because the It's something that people are rightly surprised about because the idea that you could actually give off the brain or the nose or could actually give off influences that travel through the blood And selectively modify sperm,
00:37:44.000changing genes or the packaging of genes.
00:37:47.000Nothing like that had been contemplated before.
00:37:51.000And this suggests something is going on that regular science doesn't know about.
00:37:56.000And that's fine from the point of view of science.
00:37:58.000I mean, if you discover something new, then you have to try and figure out how it works.
00:38:15.000I mean, no one knows how smelling something could affect genes or the packaging of genes.
00:38:25.000And even if they could, even if you could say there would be a modification of the sperm to make people, the offspring, the mice that descend from those sperm, more sensitive to acetophenone, That doesn't necessarily explain why they'd be afraid of it.
00:38:40.000I mean, if they'd trained them in a different way, acetophenone, they could have licked their lips and thought, oh, this means food.
00:38:47.000So you've got quite a lot of explaining to do, and how these genes or the packaging of them could influence the brain is way beyond anything we can understand at present.
00:39:00.000I think most people would say we just haven't figured it out yet.
00:39:03.000And this is a fairly recent experiment, too.
00:39:05.000Oh, this was only a few months ago, yes.
00:39:07.000Yes, it was published a few months ago.
00:39:09.000How long did they work on this for, though?
00:39:11.000Well, I suppose they must have been working on it for several years before they published it.
00:39:15.000But what's exciting in biology at the moment is that the standard off-the-shelf explanations that people used to have, it's all genetically programmed and that kind of thing.
00:39:28.000Until the year 2000, there was a huge taboo in biology against the The inheritance of acquired characteristics, which means, say, a father builds up his muscles and becomes stronger or learns particular skills, the idea that the children could inherit that was considered impossible.
00:39:48.000They said, no, all inheritance is just genetic.
00:39:51.000Of course, you get environmental influences.
00:39:53.000If a dad takes his boys to weightlifting classes and stuff, then obviously they'll become more muscular.
00:40:00.000But the idea that anything could be passed through the genes that had been learned or acquired It was absolutely taboo.
00:40:10.000It was a heresy in 20th century biology in the West.
00:40:14.000Interestingly, in the Soviet Union, they went the other way.
00:40:17.000Stalin liked the idea that if people got better at things, their kids would be better at them automatically.
00:40:24.000And geneticists in the Soviet Union were persecuted, and people who did research on the inheritance of acquired characteristics were well-funded and prestigious.
00:40:36.000There was a kind of cold war in biology as well as in everything else.
00:40:41.000But around the year 2000, it became clear that there really is an inheritance of acquired characteristics and has been rebranded epigenetic inheritance.
00:40:52.000And it's now a really hot topic in biology and these mice inheriting the fear of their father's experiments are part of this new wave of research on epigenetics.
00:41:04.000And it turns out that a lot of things these Soviet biologists were claiming are actually true.
00:41:10.000One of the things I think ought to happen is that somebody who knows Russian, preferably someone who's in Russia, It goes back through these archives of Soviet biology from the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s when tens of thousands of biologists in the Soviet Union were working on what we now call epigenetic inheritance.
00:41:31.000And it's a gold mine of information that could be dusted off and could be really helpful to science.
00:41:39.000But nobody's done that yet because it's usually assumed the whole of that's been discredited and even Russians don't want to talk about it.
00:42:45.000I was like, she knows what she's doing.
00:42:47.000I don't think she knows why she knows what she's doing, but she assumed a position that I've done countless times, thousands of times in my life.
00:42:55.000It automatically came to her, and I'm like...
00:42:58.000That has to be somehow or another in her code.
00:43:01.000Somehow or another it's gone from my body into her.
00:43:06.000Well, that's a really, really interesting case.
00:43:08.000And you see, I would call that morphic resonance, that she's resonating with you.
00:43:11.000She's got your genes, she's got your proteins and those of her mother as well, of course.
00:43:17.000But this similarity to you means she'd be in a particularly strong resonance with you and would pick up things that you've acquired.
00:43:26.000I think it's interesting you see in many traditional societies children would follow in the footsteps of their parents.
00:43:32.000You know, blacksmiths' sons have become blacksmiths.
00:43:35.000And in India, the caste system, you know, if someone's a potter, their kids have become potters.
00:43:39.000And if they're a weaver, their kids have become weavers.
00:43:43.000And I think this is partly because people would have a special aptitude for doing things their parents had done, for skills their parents had acquired, not through the genes, but by a kind of resonance.
00:43:56.000Obviously, training and growing up in a household where people know these things plays an important part.
00:44:02.000But even before the regular training begins, you'd expect them to show these tendencies.
00:44:06.000And so that's a particularly interesting example because you're able to observe these positions.
00:44:43.000And it's not an instinctive move for most kids.
00:44:46.000And I try to be objective when I watch it, like how much of this is just natural human movement and how much of this is her actually having some information.
00:44:55.000And there's clear blips where I go, look at that.
00:44:59.000That is normal, like in jujitsu class, but it's not normal for kids.
00:45:03.000There are things that they've learned.
00:45:06.000And then there's also, like, when I've taught them stuff, they pick things up like they already knew it.
00:45:11.000It's like, I used to teach martial arts, so I've taught quite a few people.
00:45:15.000And I know children are a little easier to teach than other folks, but there's children of people who are martial artists, and then there's children of people who have never studied martial arts, and the children of people who are martial artists were almost universally easier to teach.
00:45:33.000I mean, one could even do experiments on this.
00:45:36.000You know, actually, one could quantify it.
00:45:40.000My own approach to science is that you have to start from what people have noticed, like your observations with kids of martial arts people, including your own.
00:45:49.000And then, if you want to take it further, you could do more rigorous observations.
00:45:53.000And the standard explanation people say, oh, well, they've seen their parents do it, or they've seen videos or pictures of it around the house, and that sort of thing.
00:46:01.000That might play some part in it, but I think there's likely to be much more than that to this, and one would obviously have to do special experiments to check it out.
00:46:12.000But I imagine, I think in many areas, it should be easier to teach kids whose parents have done something.
00:46:21.000Like my own kids, my two sons are extremely musical, brilliantly musical.
00:46:46.000Her father was a pianist and a singer.
00:46:48.000And right from the age of four, they wanted to play the piano.
00:46:53.000They wanted to learn music and they showed a tremendous amount of ability to assimilate it.
00:46:58.000There are sometimes people who are very musical who come from non-musical families, but some of the greatest musical geniuses come out of musical dynasties like Bach.
00:47:07.000I mean, he came from a dynasty of musicians.
00:47:10.000And so I think that these things are probably easier to learn if parents have learned them.
00:47:17.000It's so fascinating, just the concept of learning things and learning things from some really unknown source.
00:47:27.000One of the things that you brought up in the trilogues I thought was particularly interesting and really resonated with me was you were talking about how children in New York City are afraid of monsters.
00:47:39.000It's a natural inclination for children to be afraid of things in the dark with large teeth that are going to eat you.
00:47:46.000And that this goes back to the time where we were, you know, regularly predators took babies, like big cats or monsters, as it were, in the night would steal people, would eat people,
00:48:11.000I mean, the standard sort of picture of the human prehistoric past is man the hunter striding out onto the savannas of Africa and stuff.
00:48:20.000But it was much more, I think, the case of man the hunted.
00:48:25.000I mean, humans are particularly defenseless against big predators.
00:48:30.000Until recent times were very vulnerable to them, like tigers.
00:48:35.000In India, under the British rule, even as late as the 1940s, there were thousands of people a year killed by man-eating tigers.
00:48:47.000They usually go for the most vulnerable.
00:48:49.000I mean, when predators are working in Africa, when lions are attacking herds of antelope or something, they go for the old and the sick, or they go for the young, because they're the ones that are the most vulnerable.
00:49:00.000So, probably over huge amounts of human history, young children had indeed been eaten by predators.
00:49:12.000And still were, and probably today in some parts of the world maybe still are.
00:49:17.000These were the most realistic fears for huge periods of human history.
00:49:21.000And so I think it's fascinating that young children...
00:49:29.000This study in New York looked at the nightmares of young children.
00:49:32.000Nearly all of them were about being chased by monsters or scary animals.
00:49:38.000And of course, we feed this imagination in children through fairy tales.
00:49:42.000Think of Grimm's fairy tales, you know, like Little Red Riding Hood, where there's the big bad wolf, you know, that is going to eat up Little Red Riding Hood.
00:49:53.000There's so many stories in fairy tales of wolves that could eat children, and although nowadays the image of wolves has been sanitized, and we're told they're basically fairy-loving creatures, etc., they are predators, and if they get the chance in the past,
00:50:10.000I think they did eat children sometimes.
00:50:12.000Well, not just in the past, it's in the present, if they have the right numbers.
00:50:48.000We eradicated them to very low numbers, and then when the numbers start to build up again, they start getting more and more dangerous again.
00:52:17.000But if there hadn't been a pushback from the people on the island, they would have got increasingly bold.
00:52:24.000Yeah, there's an issue that's going on right now where people are resisting the idea of hunting wolves because they've reintroduced wolves to a lot of the western United States.
00:52:32.000And in some places they've reached very large numbers, thousands of wolves, in Idaho and a couple of these areas where they've decimated elk and moose populations, or elk and deer populations, rather.
00:52:44.000And there's a lot of people that are animal rights folks that aren't there.
00:53:20.000Well, given all this background, I think that's so fascinating that for young children, especially urban young children who've actually never seen, they would never see a wolf in their life or any other scary animal.
00:53:31.000These are the things that haunt their nightmares, and I think this is part of a kind of collective memory.
00:53:37.000I mean, the more realistic dangers for young children are being run over by cars.
00:53:45.000But that's not what their dreams are about.
00:53:47.000It may be what their parents' nightmares are about, but not the children themselves.
00:53:51.000There was a television show in America that I hosted called Fear Factor, and it was a game show.
00:53:57.000They had to do these stunts, and different stunts had different things they had to do.
00:54:01.000One of the things that I found incredibly fascinating was some people had irrational fears about certain animals, whether it's spiders, snakes, arachnophobia, aphidiophobia.
00:54:37.000When I would talk to them, there would be nothing that it would indicate in any way that they were psychologically deranged or there was something missing in their, you know, whatever developmental period That they'd gone through something that got screwed up and they were just missing a giant chunk of what makes a person a normal person.
00:56:03.000Whereas if you pull across something that looks like a silhouette of a pigeon or a red-winged blackbird or something, they don't.
00:56:13.000So they have an inherited fear of things that could, in fact, be dangerous.
00:56:19.000And it's perfectly, in terms of evolution, it makes perfect sense to see why that would work.
00:56:24.000These baby ducklings don't have time to learn which birds are harmful and which are not, but an instinctive response of fear to something that is actually scary It may sometimes lead them to respond to something that isn't, like a cardboard cutout.
00:56:38.000But I think these things make complete sense biologically.
00:56:43.000Yeah, it does make sense if you stop and think about it.
00:56:46.000If you really take into consideration all the things you have to learn to survive as any animal.
00:56:54.000Just this idea that these mice would learn somehow or another through their parents to avoid that certain smell, because that smell was associated with electrical shock.
00:57:06.000It only makes sense that somehow or another biological life would transmit information in as many ways as possible.
00:57:13.000Your idea is so fascinating because you're not even talking about biological life transferring information through genetics.
00:57:20.000You're talking about it through some unseen force that has yet to be defined.
00:57:26.000And that's when things get really squirrely.
00:57:28.000And that must be when you experience the most resistance to these ideas.
00:57:34.000Because the resistance to these ideas, I'm sure before they proposed this idea that genetics or that these mice would somehow or another inherit the fear of this smell from their parents, that was probably not very well received before it was proven.
00:57:50.000But then it was proven, so now it sort of has to be accepted and has to be taken into consideration.
00:58:02.000The interesting thing is, you see, the response I get to this from some scientists is actually extremely emotional and irrational.
00:58:11.000When my first book, A New Science of Life, came out, there was a very famous editorial in Nature, the leading science magazine, a few months after the book appeared.
00:58:25.000But then a lot of people got interested.
00:58:27.000I was doing programs on the radio in Britain.
00:58:30.000There was an article editorial in The Guardian saying what an interesting idea.
00:58:35.000And there's a lot of serious discussion going on.
00:58:37.000New Scientist magazine launched a competition for the best ideas for experiments to test morphic resonance.
00:58:45.000And it was beginning to be widely discussed.
00:58:48.000The editor of Nature, who was a reactionary figure in science, old style, materialist, mechanistic, hardcore scientist, wrote a famous editorial called A Book for Burning on the front page of Nature,
00:59:04.000comparing my book unfavorably with Mein Kampf.
00:59:08.000Hitler's book saying that this was a profoundly dangerous book.
00:59:12.000And he said this is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.
00:59:16.000And it was completely irrational, this attack on my book.
00:59:20.000It was emotional, irrational, polemical.
00:59:27.000And this of course produced a backlash because quite a few scientists thought this was the wrong way to respond to a scientific hypothesis.
00:59:36.000So a lot of letters in Nature for months afterwards were backing me up and saying, you know, this is something that should be seriously discussed, not simply denounced.
00:59:46.000But the fact is that this started a kind of controversy which has been going on ever since.
00:59:55.000But until the year 2000, most biologists thought genes did everything.
01:00:01.000Now, the epigenetic thing has taken over and the missing heritability problem.
01:00:07.000There's much more openness than there was because it's clear we haven't figured it all out.
01:00:13.000Interestingly, Charles Darwin was not a neo-Darwinian.
01:00:20.000Neo-Darwinian evolution theory says it's all done by the genes.
01:00:24.000Evolution is just about random mutation and natural selection of gene frequencies.
01:00:29.000This is the basis of Richard Dawkins' work, for example.
01:00:32.000His book, The Selfish Gene, is based on that model.
01:00:36.000Darwin actually believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
01:00:40.000He thought that animals could inherit the fears of their fathers and that most of adaptation could actually be passed on to animals and plants descended from parents.
01:00:53.000He thought that was how evolution worked.
01:00:56.000He even proposed that when something had been learned, there could be movement of something through the bloodstream that could affect the sperm and the eggs.
01:01:05.000Exactly the kind of things that's now being considered in this fear of the father's case.
01:01:13.000So if you learn something, like say if you touch something, it's an electric fence and it shocks you, there's movement through the bloodstream that teaches your spermness?
01:01:24.000He wrote a book called The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication.
01:01:29.000It's less well known than his most famous book, The Origin of Species.
01:01:35.000But in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, he was so convinced That plants and animals could inherit what their parents had learned.
01:01:44.000He tried to figure out how it might work, and the last chapter is called The Hypothesis of Pangenesis.
01:01:50.000It's the name he gave to his theory that somehow little bits were detached from the brain and went through the blood and affected the sperm.
01:01:58.000Now, that's more or less what people are saying, trying to explain the mice inheriting the fear of their fathers.
01:02:04.000That aspect of Darwin's work has been airbrushed out of scientific history.
01:02:10.000Darwin also wrote a paper in Nature about a dog that he came across, that whenever this dog got near to a butcher's shop, the dog was completely terrified of butchers.
01:02:23.000And Darwin figured out that one of its parents had been kicked or badly mistreated by a butcher, and this dog had inherited a phobia of butchers.
01:02:36.000It shows you how very different Darwin's ideas on evolution were from his 20th century successors, and the reason that modern evolutionary theories called Neo-Darwinism is to distinguish it from Darwinism, which included the inheritance of habits.
01:02:55.000What I'm saying in terms of the inheritance of habits through morphic resonance is actually really close to what Darwin himself said.
01:03:03.000But it's not what neo-Darwinians say, because they've tried to say all inheritances in genes and you can't have these other things.
01:03:10.000But now they have to change their tune because, as I say, in the last few years epigenetic inheritance, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, is back in fashion.
01:03:20.000Well, there's many people that haven't studied Darwin's ideas at all that aren't familiar with the amount of resistance that Darwin received when he was proposing these ideas.
01:03:29.000Like, these weren't accepted ideas at all.
01:03:31.000In fact, the majority of scientists at the time, they were more of a Christian faith, weren't they?
01:03:39.000Yes, but the response to Darwin was particularly interesting, you see, because many Many Christians in England, after being surprised by his ideas, actually said,
01:04:38.000The Church of England is It's sort of halfway between Protestant and Catholic.
01:04:45.000What happened in England under King Henry VIII in the 16th century was that he nationalized the church and he said, okay, the Pope's not head of the church anymore.
01:05:46.000I've just been doing a workshop last weekend at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, which I was co-leading with the Bishop of California, whose cathedral is Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a very beautiful cathedral on Nob Hill.
01:06:01.000We were discussing the kinds of things you and I are discussing.
01:06:07.000It was absolutely no problem discussing this with An Anglican and Episcopalian Bishop.
01:06:15.000It's a very far cry from what many people's image of Christians is, opposing evolution.
01:06:20.000The general view that many Christians have, and I'm one, is that the evolution of nature, if there's a creative power in nature, It may be God-given in the first place, but what God did was to endow nature with the power to create new forms of life,
01:06:38.000that there's a kind of intelligent creativity in nature.
01:06:41.000You don't have to have a kind of intelligent designing engineer outside nature tinkering with the machinery and manipulating genes, as the intelligent design people think.
01:06:54.000And you don't have to deny evolution altogether to say God's involved in nature in some way.
01:07:00.000It's perfectly possible to have a view where God is in nature and works through nature and there's a creativity in nature which doesn't require the universe to have been created in 6,000 or 6,000 years ago that completely accept the evolutionary history of the universe in cosmology and in evolution.
01:07:21.000And just say, well, if there's a God, then that's the way that God works through this evolutionary process and through the creativity of evolution.
01:07:29.000So the fundamentalist Christians and the New Earth Christians, that's a uniquely American thing, you think?
01:10:45.000There were no abolitionists in the Bible.
01:10:47.000So if you base your faith on the Bible, you can make a much stronger case for slavery than you can for abolitionism.
01:10:56.000But you have to take the Bible as literally true.
01:10:59.000And that gave a strong incentive for people in the South to make the Bible literally true, because you could justify slavery much better than if you interpret it in a liberal way, saying, well, actually, the spirit of Jesus was to liberate people from bondage.
01:11:14.000Jesus doesn't say anything about liberating slaves.
01:11:19.000So fundamentalism gave a kind of impetus to this and it was very, very fascinating to see how that played out because on both sides in the Civil War they were both invoking the Bible.
01:11:33.000Both sides had ministers preaching to inspire the troops and get them to fight.
01:11:38.000And after the Civil War, the way in which this tradition of fundamentalism that had developed in the American South to justify slavery gave a kind of ready-made way to use biblical texts to argue against all sorts of other things,
01:11:58.000Whereas in Europe, in the traditional Catholic and in the more liberal Protestant churches, People hadn't taken the view of the Bible as the literal truth.
01:12:08.000They'd taken the view that the Bible's a guide to what might happen, that a lot of its meaning is allegorical or symbolic.
01:12:14.000But the kind of so-called liberal interpretation of the Bible goes back to, you know, the second century AD or something.
01:12:21.000It's been the mainstream view for a long time.
01:12:34.000I mean, when I was educated as a scientist, part of the package deal is atheism.
01:12:38.000You know, I grew up with all the standard.
01:12:40.000By the time I was 14, I was at a religious boarding school, a Christian boarding school.
01:12:47.000I was the only boy in my year who refused to get confirmed because even at 14, I identified as an atheist.
01:12:54.000And I thought science means science and reason, religion and superstition of things of the past, scientists are the vanguard of human progress, all that kind of thing.
01:13:38.000And so I sort of really got into science as a child.
01:13:43.000And when I started studying science at school and university, the first thing we did with living organisms was to kill them and grind them up and then look at the enzymes in their liver or whatever.
01:13:57.000It became clear to me we were not really studying life, we were studying death.
01:14:02.000And when I was a child I kept homing pigeons.
01:14:05.000I was fascinated with how do they find their home.
01:14:30.000And I thought we're never going to understand this by just grinding up their livers or looking at their genes.
01:14:36.000So I began to doubt the mechanistic worldview.
01:14:42.000Then I encountered psychedelics, and that was a huge change.
01:14:48.000I mean, nothing in my scientific education had prepared me for the kind of mind-opening effects of LSD. This was in the 70s, early 70s.
01:15:02.000I'd studied nerve impulses and hormones and that kind of thing which is what we got in our science course at Cambridge about the brain.
01:15:10.000I knew about the anatomy of the brain and nerve impulses but These visionary experiences that psychedelics opened up showed me there was far more to the mind and indeed far more to reality than this very, very limited model.
01:15:24.000Then I got interested in meditation because I thought, well, it'd be good to be able to explore the mind without drugs.
01:15:30.000I mean, I'm not anti-psychedelic at all, but I think it'd be good to have different methods, not just drugs.
01:15:38.000Then I took up transcendental meditation and yoga.
01:15:47.000And when I was in India I was really into yoga and meditation and at first I thought this is just changing my brain physiology.
01:15:55.000You don't need to believe there's God out there or anything mysterious out there, it's just inside the body.
01:16:01.000The chemicals affect the brain, the yoga and meditation affect blood flow etc.
01:16:07.000So I saw it in a rather materialistic way.
01:16:11.000But then I got more and more interest in Hindu philosophy and Hindu ideas and the idea that there's a greater consciousness within which our consciousness is embedded through some psychedelic experiences.
01:16:23.000We contact other realms of consciousness that aren't just inside our brains through meditation and through prayer that one can actually contact other forms of consciousness bigger than our own.
01:16:36.000I did all that within a kind of Hindu context, and then I had a Sufi teacher in India as well, and so I did a sort of Islamic mysticism for a while.
01:16:45.000But after doing this for several years, I found that actually some of it didn't make sense to me.
01:16:52.000The part that didn't make sense to me Well, the Islamic part, to be a Sufi in India, basically you had to be a Muslim and I didn't really want to get into being a Muslim and sort of fasting in Ramadan and all that.
01:17:07.000And Hindus, their basic worldview was and for most of them still is the idea that we're just trapped in a world where things go on and on rebirth and cycles of life and death and we're trapped in this world of suffering and delusion and the way out is through a kind of spiritual vertical takeoff which you do individually through meditation you can liberate yourself from reincarnation and delusion
01:17:37.000and so forth into absorption in the one the absolute But it's an individual vertical takeoff.
01:17:44.000And I was working in an agricultural institute, the main international institute in India, for trying to improve crops for poor farmers.
01:17:54.000And sometimes my Indian colleagues would say to me after work, they'd say, why do you do this?
01:18:00.000I'd say, because I want to help these poor people.
01:18:04.000You know, they haven't got enough to eat.
01:18:06.000It'd be great if they had better farming methods and improved varieties, and science can help.
01:18:11.000And I believe in trying to apply my knowledge to help these people.
01:18:14.000And he said, it is none of your business.
01:18:16.000If they are poor, if they are suffering, it is their karma.
01:18:21.000It is their problem, not your problem.
01:18:23.000Your problem is to liberate yourself from this world of illusion.
01:18:28.000So then I realized, actually, they have a completely different view, that the poor are suffering because, in a sense, they deserve to suffer because of what they've done in past lives.
01:18:51.000It affects community and how can other people be helped.
01:18:55.000And as I argued with my Hindu friends, I realized the reason I was saying this is because I'm so deeply embedded in the Christian tradition.
01:19:03.000Even secular humanism is a kind of secularized Christianity because it's about helping others.
01:19:09.000That actually I was much more Christian than I actually had ever admitted.
01:19:14.000So I was confirmed in the Church of South India, and I then found a fantastic ashram where I lived for two years, Father Bede Griffiths, who was an English Benedictine who had a Christian ashram in South India.
01:19:45.000And when I first went there, we started the Mass with the Gayatri Mantra, which is a Hindu mantra asking the sun to bless our meditation, the divine splendor of the sun to illuminate our meditation.
01:19:58.000So I said to Father Bede when I first went there, you know, how can you have the Gayatri mantra at the beginning of a Catholic service?
01:20:07.000And he said, precisely because it's Catholic.
01:20:22.000So, I found a way of being Christian, which didn't deny yoga, meditation, Buddhism.
01:20:33.000My wife is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist.
01:20:36.000She follows a Zogchen tradition in Tibetan Buddhism.
01:20:41.000So I found a way of reconnecting with the Christian tradition, which didn't violate my sense of reason.
01:20:48.000It didn't conflict with the kind of science that I'm interested in.
01:20:52.000But I found it liberating to reconnect.
01:20:54.000So when I went back to England from India, I was able to go to those great cathedrals that we have in England, built in the Middle Ages, those fantastic buildings, stained glass, wonderful music, organs playing, amazing choirs singing the most beautiful music,
01:21:11.000and feel that this is not just beautiful but meaningful and is a path to God, which I had not seen before.
01:23:15.000If you're at the bottom of the pile, you've not got anything to lose and you've got a lot to gain by becoming a Christian.
01:23:21.000So, Hindu reformers felt that they had to counteract this, and so things like the Ramakrishna Mission, and Sri Aurobindo, and various Hindu philosophers, and Gandhi himself, who was a big influence in India, assimilated many of these ideas from Christianity,
01:23:38.000and said, Look, we've got to reform Hinduism.
01:23:40.000And they created a new kind of Hindu attitude, much influenced by Christianity.
01:23:45.000And so there are now Indian movements to try and help the poor and, you know, provide health care for the sick and that kind of thing.
01:23:52.000But that's not been part of their traditional way of doing things.
01:23:56.000And it came about under Western influence.
01:23:59.000So, your desire to sort of help these people, help them grow more food, and help them live better lives, is what led you to become a Christian.
01:24:09.000You realized that these are Christian ideas?
01:24:19.000Usually atheists who believe in a philosophy of equal rights, equal opportunities, helping the poor and the sick, education for everyone, and uplifting people who are suffering, helping third world countries have running water and all that kind of thing.
01:24:38.000Well, these are things that Christian missionaries have done as well, but you don't have to be a Christian to believe in those things.
01:24:44.000But the fact that they're so deeply embedded in our culture, In our secular culture is because of the historical influence of Christianity.
01:24:53.000So secular humanists are basically people who still have Christian ethics, but without a belief in God.
01:25:01.000But that ethical system doesn't just come about automatically.
01:25:05.000A much more default mode is to say, you know, the strong might is right.
01:25:10.000You know, the strongest guy gets the girls and, you know, runs a kind of harem and then conquer people and have slaves.
01:25:18.000That's how humanity has worked for much of human history.
01:25:23.000So, it sounds like you found a very cool sect of Christianity while you were in India.
01:25:30.000I mean, that sounds very unique, that you were doing yoga and meditation and then these Indian chants, along with this concept of Christianity being like the generosity and the Helping your brothers and sisters.
01:25:46.000That seems to be, like, that must have been very convenient to find that sect of Christianity while you were sort of exploring these ideas.
01:26:16.000It was the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s said that what people should do in the Catholic Church is put the Christian faith into the terms of that culture.
01:26:27.000So, in India, Catholics who've been converted by Catholic missionaries from Ireland and places, bought pairs of shoes so they could put them on to go to church on Sundays because the missionaries dressed up in Western clothes and wore shoes in church.
01:26:42.000These Indians would never wear shoes in a temple or a mask or even in their house, but they wore shoes in church because that's what the Catholic missionaries wore.
01:26:53.000And so at the simplest level, the inculturation movement, we say, well, it's the tradition of India to take your shoes off in homes and in temples and in mocks, so take them off in churches too.
01:27:04.000And it was the tradition of holy men and women in India to be vegetarian, whereas Catholics and Protestants there were all eating lots of beef and stuff because that's what American and British missionaries are at.
01:27:18.000And so he said, no, it's much more natural to be vegetarian.
01:27:21.000You don't have to be, but it's more natural.
01:27:25.000So this idea of yoga as a way of learning how to breathe and to chant and to be more healthy, why shouldn't Indian Christians do yoga?
01:27:36.000Father Bede was part of a wider movement.
01:27:38.000The last two popes have been rather reactionary and have tried to roll back that movement, but there are still people in India and South America and so on who are following this Second Vatican Council reform movement.
01:27:51.000The new pope is fairly unique, isn't he?
01:27:53.000He seems to be a much less polarizing figure.
01:27:58.000He seems to be much more generous, much more open-minded to the idea of homosexuality, to a lot of the things that have been criticized in the past.
01:28:09.000He's eschewing the ideas of monetary wealth.
01:28:12.000He doesn't have that crazy throne anymore.
01:28:18.000I think it's partly because he comes from South America, you see, and this kind of radical Catholic movement, the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, which was about the church should be there not to serve the rich but to help the poor.
01:28:31.000And this became a huge movement in South America.
01:28:35.000But the previous pope, John Paul II, was against it because they were teaming up with communists and people who were also trying to help the poor for secular reasons and political reasons, not for Christian reasons.
01:28:49.000So he said this is wrong because it's communistic.
01:28:52.000But actually that movement, this radical Catholic movement, had a huge influence in South America.
01:28:58.000And I think the present Pope is somebody who's come out of that world, who's been very much influenced by it.
01:29:05.000It's so problematic, though, the suppressing of sexuality.
01:29:08.000The number one thing that people associate Catholicism with is sexual assault, is sexually molesting children.
01:31:43.000It may have been quite a big minority in Ireland and in some countries.
01:31:47.000But I think some people are called to a celibate life, and I think that's fine for people to go become monks or nuns if that's what they're called to.
01:31:55.000But for regular priests, I think it's a serious mistake.
01:31:59.000And in the Church of England, ever since 1540 or something, and in the Protestant churches in Europe, priests have been able to marry, and rabbis marry in Judaism, and I think it's much, much healthier.
01:32:13.000To have priests as regular guys with love lives and kids and things.
01:32:18.000So I think that side of Catholicism is a serious mistake and I think they should, sooner or later, it'll have to be reformed because repression of sexuality leads to all these extremely unhealthy I agree with you about it.
01:32:36.000But, you know, there are reform movements within Catholicism, and in America, there are breakaway Catholic churches with women priests.
01:32:45.000For example, there's one in Santa Barbara.
01:32:59.000But, you see, I think that Some people reject the entire world of religion because of personal bad experiences with one particular brand.
01:33:09.000I think it's rather like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
01:33:12.000It would be like saying, I'm against science because it gave us gas that Hitler used to kill people and it gave us the atomic bomb that killed people in Hiroshima.
01:33:23.000I mean, science, everything human, there are really bad things that have been done by humans in the name of almost anything you care to mention.
01:33:36.000So when you decided to join this particular group of Christians and become a Christian officially, like to identify, was there resistance from your colleagues?
01:33:49.000Was there resistance from other scientists?
01:34:23.000Being a practicing Christian when I came from a Christian family in a Christian country seemed totally normal.
01:34:28.000No one thought that was at all weird or strange.
01:34:31.000When I got back to England, among many of my scientific friends, they thought this was completely weird and just couldn't understand it because they assumed that any Christian believes the world's made in 6,000 years ago and that God intervenes through suspending the laws of nature and miracles that are totally incredible.
01:34:53.000I mean, they don't believe in the kind of God I don't believe in.
01:34:57.000But they never actually, very few ever asked, what do you actually think or believe?
01:35:03.000They just sort of treated it at best as some kind of personal eccentricity or A lot of my friends are atheists or agnostics,
01:35:19.000but the problem I have with atheists and materialists is that most of them are much more dogmatic than the people I know within the religious world.
01:35:28.000Well, I have a problem with anybody that's sure.
01:36:17.000Because everybody I've ever met that has a breakthrough psychedelic experience, like a DMT trip, they have to step back and go, okay, I didn't even know that was possible.
01:36:25.000I've lived my whole life with this one worldview that, well, I see these people that are religious, and it seems to me that they're following this ridiculous ideology that is based on some ancient information that people...
01:37:13.000And it occupies a very small space, but yet it's infinite.
01:37:18.000And it's filled with conscious beings that can see through you, recognize all your bullshit, recognize all your insecurities and all your incorrect thinking and ego.
01:37:27.000And then you shut the door and you go back to regular life.
01:37:31.000And you're like, what the fuck is that room?
01:37:42.000Based on, we sort of calculate our worldview based on the experiences that we've accumulated, what we've learned from these experiences, and what we've learned from other people's experiences.
01:37:53.000What we've read, what we've seen in documentaries and films, but when you have a really intense psychedelic experience particularly, and then for some people yoga and meditation, some people are able to achieve some pretty deep states, but The psychedelic experience in particular is shocking because it's so easy to get to.
01:38:49.000Yeah, and what they're doing is they're attaching a bunch of moral and ethical values to religion, essentially creating almost like another religion.
01:39:04.000A lot of it is based on the idea of...
01:39:08.000Avoiding harassment, avoiding sexual harassment, avoiding that their ethics are to completely define what's acceptable behavior, like no racism, no sexual harassment,
01:39:25.000no undeniable acceptance of women's rights, undeniable acceptance of, you know.
01:39:33.000Then, of course, once you define that, then you have aggressive members of that group that are attacking people that disagree with any of their propositions or anyone that supports men's rights, of course, now hates women and you get a lot of weirdness in that area because… There can only be feminism.
01:39:53.000Men's rights are toxic, whereas women's rights, once they have achieved total equality, then there's no need for men's rights, because once feminism has been established, which is a pretty illogical assumption, especially when you consider divorce laws.
01:40:44.000But for me it corresponded in many ways with what people talk about near-death experiences because I went out through light into a realm of great bliss and beauty and Then I came back and it was like coming back from a million miles away and just coming back into my body and,
01:41:06.000So it was very much like a death and rebirth experience for me and was very, very transformative.
01:41:16.000Incidentally, I think, you know, I've been trying to understand this American phenomenon of Southern Baptists, and one of the things that I think is the key to this is that I think when they talk about being born again, originally baptism was just that.
01:41:31.000I mean, now you can get this through DMT in five minutes, but at the time of John the Baptist, you could get it in five minutes through being drowned.
01:41:39.000People were lining up on the bank of the Jordan.
01:41:43.000If he held them under just long enough, you could actually induce a near-death experience, you know, life review, the drowning man sees his life pass before him, you know, hold them under just long enough, and they'd have a near-death experience, almost guaranteed.
01:41:58.000I mean, occasionally he might have done it too long, but that was before litigation.
01:42:05.000LAUGHTER Yeah, that's a good theory, actually.
01:42:10.000And then you see, they come back and they say, I've died, I've seen the light, I've been born again, I'm no longer afraid of death, my life has been transformed, in five minutes.
01:42:21.000And the Baptists were the people who revived baptism by total immersion in the 16th century.
01:42:27.000And probably now in America, we don't hold them under that long, because this is post-litigation now.
01:42:34.000You know, when the Baptist first got going, this idea of holding people under long enough, all their language, is the language that relates to near-death experiences.
01:42:44.000And I don't think that, to start with, baptism by total immersion was just symbolic.
01:43:10.000And even in some cultures they use ant venom.
01:43:12.000Like those bullet ants, they use that for these ritualistic coming-of-age rituals.
01:43:19.000These coming-of-age rituals where you take people through these intensely painful moments where they almost want to be dead just to end the suffering.
01:43:28.000And then when they come through on the other side, they're a better person because of it.
01:44:01.000And actually I think that why the Baptists became so powerful and why for them the conversion experience was so real and why they talk about it so much is that because for many of them it was real.
01:44:13.000It wasn't signing up to some set of beliefs.
01:44:16.000And I think that at the core of all religions is this direct experience of the divine.
01:44:22.000And, you know, I think that's what they all come from.
01:44:24.000They come from experience, not theories.
01:44:26.000Well, it's quite shocking, too, that Jerusalem scholars, like mainstream scholars now, are considering that Moses was probably under the influence of DMT. They believe that the burning bush, you know, the guys who are not psychedelically based at all,
01:44:42.000was quite probably the acacia bush, which was a very rich and DMT plant.
01:44:48.000And that's the whole idea of the burning bush.
01:45:15.000Well, I mean, why not be experiencing God?
01:45:19.000I mean, it seems an uneconomical theory to say that there's divine bliss as experienced by mystics, that part of the nature of God's mind is bliss.
01:45:28.000I mean, the Hindu name, one of the names, Satchitananda, being, knowledge, bliss, as the fall in the nature of God.
01:45:36.000If God's consciousness is a kind of bliss consciousness, Then, if you have this experience that seems like God and is blissful, why have a hypothesis that there's some other bliss consciousness that isn't divine, that's some kind of duplicate?
01:46:01.000I've always wondered if that, and many other people have speculated as well, if that's the reason why Hindus don't participate in eating cows, too, because of the psilocybin mushrooms growing on cows on a regular basis, and that being, for a lot of people, believe the basis of soma.
01:46:59.000What do you think was the source of cattle worship, like Choctal Hiok and all these ancient civilizations that worshiped cattle and this connection that McKenna made with those people worshiping the cattle because the cattle didn't just provide life and food because they had milk and meat,
01:47:16.000but also that there was this connection with psychedelic mushrooms?
01:47:53.000I think with the ones that are wild, basically wild, like elephants and rats and monkeys, this probably comes out of kind of shamanic roots.
01:48:02.000But I think when people started domesticating animals, then, you know, how do you relate to domesticated animals?
01:49:48.000What happened if it was such an amazing thing?
01:49:51.000I mean, you read the descriptions of Soma, how fantastic it is and how huge a part of it was in their culture and their connection to the Divine.
01:50:05.000And it's similar in Greece, the Eleusinian mysteries, this cave where they went in for these psychedelic rites of passage that Plato and people did.
01:50:14.000It was a big part of life in ancient Greece.
01:50:17.000And the most common theories are ones where people see it as Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric.
01:50:24.000I've never found those particularly plausible because whenever I've taken fly agaric only once or twice, all it did was give me a headache.
01:50:37.000I've only spoken to people online that have.
01:50:41.000I've only had it once, and I felt the same way.
01:50:45.000I don't know if it enhanced, but I did it, and then we did it for a couple hours, and it didn't seem to have any effect, and then we took psilocybin after that.
01:51:04.000But that was another thing that McKenna speculated about, whether it was variable genetically, variable seasonally, variable as far as geographically.
01:51:13.000And whether it's transformed, like reindeer, and you're transformed by the reindeer, and then where they drink the urine of reindeer after the reindeer have eaten it and stuff.
01:51:25.000Well, it's also all the different connections to the Siberian shamans and the whole Christmas thing, the whole connection to Christmas and the Amanita muscaria mushroom.
01:51:37.000It's very, very bizarre that elves are connected with this particular mushroom, which is connected with Christmas and gifts and symbiotic relationship to carniferous trees, like the whole deal.
01:51:50.000But I've never found that area of speculation particularly satisfying.
01:51:54.000I mean, if the evidence pointed towards Stropharia cubensis or Psilocybes semilancelata, you know, the Liberty Cap or our native psychedelic mushroom in England...
01:52:10.000I mean, the fact is we don't know and it's really a matter of speculation.
01:52:14.000Yeah, I wonder if it's like, you know, like heirloom tomatoes.
01:52:17.000You know, you eat an heirloom tomato, they're so delicious, they're fantastic, they're sweet, they're so rich and dark.
01:52:24.000Or you can get one of these creepy tomatoes that they grow that last like a month on a shelf and they're pale and they're hard and they just taste like shit.
01:52:35.000They look different, they taste different.
01:52:37.000I wonder if that somehow or another happened to the Amanita where it lost its psychedelic properties.
01:52:44.000Unlikely because it's never been cultivated and you know it grows in the wild.
01:52:48.000Could it be maybe just the temperature variations like that maybe you have to have it in that incredibly cold environment of Siberia for it to be that it's geographically genetically variable?
01:52:58.000Or what you said makes the most sense to me that it was mixed with something else.
01:53:02.000It's like in ayahuasca, if you just took one of the components of the brew, if the historical data pointed towards this being there, you'd say, okay, this is what it was.
01:53:11.000But actually, neither of the components would work on their own.
01:53:15.000So it may well have been that it was part of a mixture.
01:53:18.000That does kind of make sense for Soma, right?
01:53:20.000Because wasn't Soma actually, it was described as some sort of a mixture.
01:53:24.000Yeah, and so was the Eleusinian Mysteries.
01:53:27.000You just don't know what the Eleusinian Mysteries are, huh?
01:53:29.000Is there any speculation as to what that was?
01:53:31.000Well, Graham Hancock has speculations, of course, but I don't know.
01:53:35.000The ones I've seen would include opium and cannabis as part of the mix.
01:53:42.000I mean cannabis was widely known in the ancient world and after all hemp ropes were used for thousands of years.
01:53:50.000Opium has been known for an awfully long time.
01:53:54.000So what else might have been in there we don't know.
01:53:59.000Well that's the other thing too, the consumption, the eating of cannabis, eating of hash has produced incredible psychedelic experiences for people.
01:54:09.000They've eaten large enough quantities where it's been very mushroom-like.
01:54:14.000Much more psychedelic when eaten, yes.
01:54:17.000And it's traditional to take it by mouth in India as well as to smoke it.
01:54:22.000I mean, it's a normal thing that the festival of Holi, H-O-L-I, it's a major Hindu festival.
01:54:29.000When I was living in India, I was renting a wing of a crumbling palace in Hyderabad from a family of impoverished Rajas.
01:54:38.000And they were very respectable, although impoverished.
01:54:42.000And on Holi, this festival day, the Rajah's wife, the Rani, came to me and she said, Dr. Sahib, you must take our special drink.
01:54:52.000She said, this is our special drink for Holi and stuff.
01:56:08.000One thing that's just occurred to me, well, there's two things I'd like to ask you.
01:56:12.000Well, one thing, let me ask you something.
01:56:14.000You know I've done a lot of research on the sense of being stared at.
01:56:18.000I think that this feeling that almost everyone's experienced of feeling you're being looked at, you turn around and someone's staring at you, or you can stare at someone and make them turn around.
01:56:30.000This is something which is very widespread in the population.
01:56:35.000There's been a kind of scientific taboo for years about it because it ought not to happen.
01:56:39.000If your mind is nothing but your brain, looking at someone shouldn't affect them because everything is all inside your head.
01:56:44.000Whereas if when you look at somebody, the image that you're seeing is projected out, as I suggest it is, when I look at you now, I don't think my image of you in three dimensions and full colour is inside my head.
01:57:11.000The official theory is it's all inside the head.
01:57:15.000And because the official theory says this is just a superstition, people can't really tell when they're being looked at, there'd been almost no scientific investigation till I took it up in the 1980s.
01:57:26.000And now quite a number of people have done this research on the sense of being stared at to find out if people really can tell when they're being stared at from behind.
01:57:35.000I've done lots of experiments in schools.
01:57:37.000Kids are particularly sensitive to this, more so than grown-ups.
01:57:42.000And I then, to find out about it, I thought, well, look, I've done the experiments, but who are the professionals?
01:57:47.000So I and my research assistant interviewed security guards, store detectives, the drug squad at Heathrow, police, and private detectives.
01:57:58.000You know, have you ever had this experience?
01:58:01.000Do people know when they're being watched?
01:58:03.000Almost everyone who watches others for a living says, sure, of course they do.
01:58:06.000And, you know, if you're being trained to be a private detective, trained how to follow somebody, you don't stare at their back because they're likely to turn around and catch your eye.
01:58:16.000So, anyway, I wrote about this in my book, The Sense of Being Stared At, about this research and about its implications for the nature of our minds.
01:58:24.000But I had recently somebody came to me from a British defence research laboratory, and he said to me, they've got very interest in this.
01:58:35.000In the army, because some generals are worried that British troops in Afghanistan are now so laden down with kit, you know, GPS systems.
01:58:44.000I mean, their whole body is covered with electronic kit, and they've found that when they're so top-heavy carrying all this kit, they have to look down at the ground all the time to avoid stumbling, because it's harder to walk with all this stuff.
01:58:57.000And they can easily be picked off by guerrilla fighters behind rocks with rifles.
01:59:02.000And so what they said is, do you think we could train people in threat awareness so they could actually become more sensitive?
01:59:10.000Now in the martial arts, I know some martial arts do have threat awareness training so that people, when blindfolded, have to become more aware of when somebody's looking at them or going to attack them from behind.
01:59:23.000So my question to you, since this is your world, not mine, is how easy do you think it would be to train people in threat awareness to become more sensitive to knowing when they're being looked at?
01:59:35.000I have never been a part of any martial art that teaches people threat awareness.
01:59:41.000The martial arts that I've been involved in have all been about acquiring very specific skills, For hand to hand combat against other trained adversaries.
01:59:52.000There's a bunch of different types of martial arts that emphasize what you call self-defense type martial arts.
01:59:58.000My issue with those guys and the practices of self-defense type martial arts is that almost everything that they're teaching would only work against a non-trained opponent.
02:00:11.000They have all these ideas like if a guy comes at you and throws a punch, you grab his wrist, you do this, you do that.
02:00:17.000All that stuff only works on someone who doesn't know how to fight.
02:00:20.000And my thinking is always learn what works on trained killers.
02:00:26.000Learn things that are undeniable against the most skilled martial artists.
02:00:30.000Those are the things you want to learn.
02:00:31.000And through this practice of very, very difficult to pull off techniques, very difficult training, pushing yourself, expanding the boundaries of your willingness to push your body and your mind, that's how you truly learn about yourself.
02:00:49.000And Miyamoto Musashi had this expression.
02:00:53.000That he wrote in the Book of Five Rings, that once you understand the way broadly, you will see it in all things.
02:01:00.000And that way being in his world was the way of sword fighting.
02:01:04.000And that you would understand this in this most incredible and intense way.
02:01:08.000And you would see the same sort of path of the true path in calligraphy, in carpentry, in all sorts of expressive art forms.
02:01:22.000In my opinion, what is the great benefit of martial arts, it's the developing of your human potential through this incredibly difficult endeavor.
02:01:30.000And I've always found that these guys who blindfold and look out for it, it's all bullshit.
02:01:36.000There's a tremendous amount of bullshit in martial arts.
02:01:40.000Yeah, much less so now because of the new movement from 1993 on has been the movement of mixed martial arts and that's because of these things called Ultimate Fighting Championship and mixed martial arts competitions and what mixed martial arts competitions have done is there was always these ideas that different people had like death touches and this guy could just he could hit you in a certain place and use his chi and knock you back All those guys failed miserably in competition.
02:02:10.000Not a single one was successful, not one.
02:02:12.000Every single one was beaten down and it just showed there's no mysticism when it comes to martial arts.
02:02:18.000The true mysticism is the conquering of your fears, the ability to understand how to remain calm during these incredibly stressful moments of competition.
02:02:27.000And through repetition and intelligent development of technique.
02:02:33.000That's what real martial arts training teaches people.
02:02:37.000And that any divine feeling you get from a true master, you would get from a pianist as well.
02:02:43.000You would get from a true, a brilliant painter.
02:02:57.000You know you're in the presence of a very unique person.
02:03:01.000And I have experienced that same feeling when I've been around martial artists and that same feeling when I've been around just great minds, great thinkers.
02:03:10.000What you do is you're recognizing greatness.
02:03:18.000And I don't believe in a lot of these ideas of self-defense training.
02:03:25.000You know, I think there's certain techniques that are very effective for soldiers, like disarmament techniques, like how to take someone's pistol away, how to defend against a knife attack, where it's very technique-oriented.
02:03:40.000Krav Maga incorporates a lot of those, which is an Israeli martial art that takes a lot of the best aspects of many different martial arts and they train that.
02:03:48.000There are definitely real techniques involved that have been taught to soldiers and by soldiers when it comes to disarmament, when it comes to how to deal with hand-to-hand combat in certain situations.
02:04:00.000But I think overall, a lot of the quote-unquote self-defense styles are bullshit.
02:04:07.000And a lot of the, you know, we're going to blindfold you and people are going to kick you.
02:04:11.000If I blindfold you, you're going to get fucked up.
02:04:13.000If I blindfold you, there's not a person alive that's going to stop me from punching them in the face if I blindfold them.
02:04:18.000You're not going to know what's coming.
02:04:20.000The only thing that you can help is if you have control of a body.
02:04:23.000If you're blindfolded, you can grapple very well.
02:04:27.000I've grappled with my eyes closed before, but the reason being is that If I am holding on to your waist, if I have a hold of you, I know where everything else is.
02:05:00.000Well, I think the threat awareness stuff was not so much that you could fight blindfolded, but training people to feel from which direction someone was looking at them from behind.
02:05:11.000Now, it seems to me plausible that you could train that.
02:05:50.000Walk through each floor of this building and then they'd have to say which one they were being watched in.
02:05:55.000And one out of five, if they got it right, you know, lots of times, there's a one in five chance of getting it right just by guessing.
02:06:03.000But if you find results above chance, you could then say, well, these people are actually detecting potential threats.
02:06:11.000And you might be able to train people to get better at it.
02:06:15.000What you did, your study, correct me if I'm wrong, you had people sit down and then they hit a button when they felt someone looking at them?
02:08:33.000Well, there is a slight difference in those who've experienced this.
02:08:36.000More women than men have experienced being stared at when you do savvies, and more men than women have experienced turning at others and looking at others and making them turn around.
02:09:55.000Yes, when Merlin was four years old, I did this experiment with him, you know, blindfold him, he's sitting there.
02:10:01.000I said, look, I'm going to look at you some of the time, the rest of the time not, and each time you hear this click, you have to say if you think you're being looked at.
02:10:43.000Sort of doubt entered his mind and after that when I tested him, it was still fairly high, 75%, but he never got 100% again after the first two times.
02:11:47.000The problem with these kinds of experiments is that you have to set them up so that people can be right or wrong, and very few people are right all the time, but as soon as doubt creeps in, the mind interferes.
02:12:00.000People think, Oh, maybe I guessed one way last time, it's statistical, it should be the other way this time.
02:12:07.000And they start, as soon as that kind of thing goes on, people lose it.
02:12:11.000Boy, that is life in a nutshell, isn't it?
02:12:14.000Like, as soon as you have doubt, your whole world is just a mess.
02:12:18.000And unfortunately, these experiments that I do introduce doubt because I have to do statistical experiments that will be credible to skeptics.
02:12:27.000So there's a kind of skepticism built into the experiments.
02:12:31.000I haven't yet found a way of doing these.
02:12:34.000The holy grail would be to find ways of doing these tests where people don't realize that they're being tested and that there's doubt.
02:12:44.000Well I'm thinking of one kind of test that would be incorporated in a video game where say you have to choose between going through one door or another door and one door you go through it's absolutely awful and the other door you escape and you're on to sort of next stage.
02:13:02.000You could have it where when people choose It hasn't been decided.
02:13:08.000You'd have a random event thing that would determine which door you go through after you've made the choice to go through it.
02:13:15.000This is then called presentiment or precognition.
02:14:04.000And some people believe in it and some people don't.
02:14:06.000Some people believe that you make good choices like, you know, you'll hear people that are successful that are confident and like, hey, I've always been lucky.
02:14:17.000There's something to trusting certain folks and not trusting certain folks based on just immediately the feeling that you get when you meet them.
02:16:05.000Well, that's a good reason for not having one.
02:16:08.000I don't want to be interrupted all the time, and if I go for a walk or if I'm working or something, I find it really annoying if the phone rings.
02:16:18.000Anyway, the pocket watch means I can know the time when I need to know.
02:16:22.000I'm going to have to go fairly soon, but not quite yet.
02:16:37.000Daryl Bem's experiments are very simple, and it's called feeling the future.
02:16:44.000And there's this phenomenon that Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences has done a lot of research on, where it turns out that we can respond a few seconds before an emotionally arousing event.
02:16:55.000Our body starts preparing for it before it happens.
02:16:59.000This would be very relevant to fast sports, ping pong, tennis, cricket, downhill skiing, and probably martial arts as well.
02:17:07.000And this research seems to me pretty convincing.
02:17:11.000I've been a subject in some of these experiments myself.
02:17:15.000And the Dean Radin version of it is this.
02:17:19.000You sit there in front of a computer screen.
02:17:22.000You're wearing electrodes that measure emotional arousal.
02:17:26.000You know, adrenaline causes sweating and emotional arousal, like a lie detector.
02:17:30.000So it's a standard way of measuring emotional arousal.
02:17:34.000When you're ready, you press a button, and ten seconds later, a picture appears on the screen.
02:17:38.000Most of the pictures are neutral, you know, landscapes, you know, bowl of flowers or something like that, vaguely pleasant.
02:17:46.000Some of them are scenes that are emotionally arousing, hardcore pornography, or scenes of extreme violence.
02:17:53.000Now, almost everybody, when they see hardcore pornography or scenes of violence, is emotionally aroused.
02:17:59.000Even if they don't want to be, they are.
02:18:01.000And the lie detector thing shows a huge emotional arousal.
02:18:05.000The interesting thing in these experiments is the emotional arousal begins about five seconds before the picture appears on the screen.
02:18:27.000And so the heart keeps beating faster, the fight-or-flight response, you know, the adrenaline kind of response kicks in.
02:18:35.000So when the stimulus occurs, the body's already sort of revved up with this emotional response.
02:18:41.000Now, this is work that Dean Radin's done.
02:18:46.000He's repeated it, and it's been replicated elsewhere.
02:18:48.000It's called pre-sentiment, feeling in advance.
02:18:53.000And the decision as to which picture appears on the screen is made by the computer a millisecond before it actually appears.
02:19:00.000There's no one in the world knows what picture is going to appear.
02:19:03.000Now, this is really interesting, you see, because it shows there's a kind of feeding back of emotion.
02:19:09.000Now, Daryl Bem at Cornell, who is a very respected professor of psychology, has been doing a different kind of experiment which doesn't involve the lie detector.
02:19:20.000His experiments, you sit in front of a computer screen and there's two curtains there.
02:19:25.000Behind one of those curtains, there's a blank wall.
02:20:31.000So most people don't know that they're doing a pre-sentiment test.
02:20:36.000So what happens is in these experiments, about 53 or 54% of the time, people get the pornographic image, whereas by pure chance, it would be 50%.
02:20:48.000And if instead of a pornographic image, you have a sort of mildly pleasant landscape or something that's not emotionally arousing, it's down to 50%.
02:21:12.000For the eye to take in the angle of the ball, to process it in the brain through clunky brain processing, to send messages along nerves to muscles to get the whole body ready, or in a penalty shootout, the goalie has to, in a football soccer match, they have to react very quickly.
02:21:30.000And in ping-pong you have to react quickly.
02:21:33.000In cricket, Australian fast bowlers bowl at 100 miles an hour in cricket.
02:21:46.000So I think that part of the way we're reacting, and I think this comes out most in sports, and it would also come out driving a car.
02:21:55.000If you got the five-second in advance warning, some accident's about to happen, you could concentrate and perhaps avoid it better.
02:22:02.000This is a fascinating field of research, which It's not yet been picked up by sports psychologists or by...
02:22:11.000I've told several people in the military about it because I think it would be really interesting.
02:22:17.000I don't think it's going to do any harm if they know this.
02:22:20.000But say for example you had your physiology being monitored.
02:22:24.000You're in a flight simulator or a driving simulator.
02:22:28.000And say you had it so that when you got an otherwise inexplicable emotional arousal going on, you'd be unconscious of it to start with.
02:22:36.000Say it was wired up so a red light went on in the cockpit of the flight simulator.
02:22:42.000It might sometimes be a false alarm, but every time that light went on, The message would be concentrate on how something bad might happen.
02:22:51.000This could be a useful technological gadget.
02:22:54.000And so I think this is, you know, there's a lot of potential in this kind of research which is only just being begun to be explored.
02:23:05.000And the reason I've encouraged people in the British Defence Research Establishment to do this is because they're more likely to take it up than people in universities, because in universities, you know, there's this kind of dogmatic skepticism that means people say, oh, it's rubbish, it's woo, it's pseudoscience,
02:23:33.000Do you think that these things, like this precognition ability or this instincts or the ability to recognize these patterns, do you think this is possibly some emerging thing in human beings, emerging aspect of the development of humans?
02:23:50.000I mean, obviously, if you believe in evolution, we were one thing, now we are this.
02:23:56.000We are what we are now, which is radically different from the Pre-human hominids of two million-plus years ago.
02:24:05.000If you just extrapolate, a million years from now, we're going to be very different from what we are now.
02:24:10.000Do you think that this aspect of human beings, of human life, is a developing thing?
02:24:17.000This precognition ability, this ability to communicate with each other, do you think maybe that's what's manifesting itself when you think about someone and all of a sudden the phone rings and it's them, like instantaneously?
02:24:28.000Well, I think that it's something in traditional societies that's actually better developed than in modern ones, where people don't talk about it on the whole, there's no training for it and stuff.
02:24:37.000In traditional societies, people take these things for granted and they rely on them.
02:24:42.000Now, the phone is an interesting case because this is a modern technology.
02:24:47.000But I think that telepathy is a means of communication between people who know each other well.
02:26:57.000So you think that much like what you were talking about with your son, who was able to recognize 100% of the time when someone was staring at him, that dogs, because they don't have like a cultural context, they don't have all this doubt in their head.
02:29:00.000I think telephone telepathy is real, and I think what's happening is that when you want to call someone, if I wanted to call you, I'd form the intention to call you, I've got a motive to call you, I'd be thinking about Joe, and then I'd get my phone out, I'd dial the number or press the memory thing for you,
02:29:19.000When I form the intention to call you, I think you could in some cases pick up that intention.
02:29:24.000You might start thinking about me for no apparent reason, and then the call comes through, and you say, it's funny, I was just thinking about you.
02:29:33.000So I think this is a genuinely telepathic phenomenon in many cases.
02:29:37.000Sometimes it can be coincidence, but on average it seems to be a real effect.
02:29:43.000And I think this is an example of where telepathy really is evolving along with technology.
02:29:49.000It happens with emails and text messages as well.
02:29:52.000Until recently, the only way you could get in touch with someone at a distance was telepathically, if you wanted a quick response.
02:30:03.000I've also done research on what I think is one of the basic biological forms of this, which is mothers and babies.
02:30:09.000Many nursing mothers find that when they're away from their baby, for no apparent reason, their milk lets down, their breasts start squeezing out milk.
02:30:20.000Normally that happens when the baby cries and they feel their breasts tinkle.
02:30:25.000Say there was a nursing mother here now, and there was no baby crying here, and she felt her milk let down.
02:30:31.000Most nursing mothers think, my baby needs me.
02:30:34.000And until recently, they just went home to the baby.
02:30:50.000They were responding when their baby needed them.
02:30:53.000And before telephones were invented, any mother that could pick up when her baby needed her and went to the baby would have a baby that survived better than a mother that didn't pick it up.
02:31:05.000So I think telephones, in a way, give us a technological way of doing something that in the past happened more unreliably by telepathy.
02:31:13.000So do you think that these telephones connecting to telepathy is somehow or another related to this morphic field that is seemingly undefined?
02:31:23.000We know, or rather you believe, that this is a real phenomenon, that it exists, but we don't know exactly what the mechanism is.
02:31:32.000Yeah, I think what happens with social groups, any social group, is that the group as a whole has a field.
02:31:39.000Like a magnetic field will arrange iron filings which are within its field of influence.
02:31:44.000If you have a flock of birds, like starlings that are flying together, there's a kind of field that coordinates their movements so they can change direction rapidly without bumping into each other.
02:31:55.000If you have a school of fish, you've got the same kind of thing.
02:31:58.000If you have a pack of wolves and they leave the young, the cubs are left behind in the den with a babysitter while the adults go out hunting to bring food back for the young, the field that links them isn't broken, it stretches like an invisible elastic band.
02:32:13.000I think that's the basis of telepathy.
02:32:15.000I think it's to do with social bonds through social fields.
02:32:18.000And a mother and the baby are very closely linked and it's as if there's this invisible elastic band between them.
02:32:25.000And so, when you look at telephone telepathy, it typically only happens with people you know well.
02:32:31.000It happens between mothers and children, husbands and wives, lovers, partners, therapists and clients if there's a kind of emotional charge, best friends.
02:32:43.000It doesn't happen with insurance salesmen and people to whom you're not emotionally connected.