Welcome to the leaders room. I'm Reepa Rashid of the Iklif Center for Leadership and Governance. Today I'm delighted to welcome to the studio Dr. Dean Raiden. Dr. Raiden is a world-renowned expert in the field of consciousness research. Over the last 30 years, Dr. Raiden has led a series of breakthrough experiments into the phenomenon of the advanced capacities of the human mind. He has most recently authored a book entitled Supernormal and prior to that, books entitled with fascinating names such as The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds. Dr. Raiden, welcome to the leaders room. Thank you very much. Well, let's start at the beginning. What led you to the field of consciousness research? Well, I think as a child I read too many fairy tales and a little bit too much science fiction. As we know years ago in the Harry Potter series became a worldwide phenomenon that children in particular but also adults became enthralled with the idea of the stories. And of course the stories are talking about magic and magical thinking is a part of, seems to be hardwired into the human psyche. So I read the equivalent at the time when I was a child and naturally became curious about whether those stories had any truth in them at all. And even as a child of course you recognize that these are fantasies but there's something compelling about certain kinds of stories, parables, mythology that it seems like it's more than just a story. It's a symbolic teaching about something else, something bigger. So either I never grew up and I'm still a child at heart and I still have the same underlying curiosity about these things or as a result of being a scientist and looking into them and finding that some of the stories actually do seem to have an underlying truth to them, I've stuck with it. So that's the area of consciousness research that attracted my attention long ago and still does today. Well, you started off as a professional violinist. Then you got a degree in engineering so you're clearly a polymath. But was there a turning point? Was there one particular experience that led you to this field? No. No? No. I ask this question often because I'm working in a field that is considered controversial. I study primarily psychic phenomena in the laboratory and not very many people are doing this. So the natural assumption is that I come from a family that reports lots of psychic experiences or I've had my own experiences and that's actually not the case at all. When I grew up I don't remember anyone ever talking about these kinds of phenomena. The closest we probably got to it is that my mother was practicing yoga as I recall when I was a young child and so there were books around the house about the masters of the Far East and stories that to me were very similar to the fairy tales I was reading as a child. So I didn't know if it was true or not but it was very foreign in terms of not being part of my experience. What caught my attention though was you have the stories. I was also always interested in science and engineering besides playing music. What caught my attention was as a probably a 10 or 11 years old I discovered that there was a branch of science that was really looking carefully at these kinds of phenomena not so much to look at it from a magical point of view because magic is magic. It's beyond science but more that these are ordinary human experiences that are reported all around the world and have been throughout history and could it be studied using the tools of science and I discovered that the answer was yes. That's what caught my attention and so I decided that that would look really interesting and I started dabbling in it and decided at some point probably around college that if it was possible to have a career where you're using the tools of science and applying it to that particular area of human capacity that's what I wanted to do. And today you're the chief scientist of the Institute of Noetic Sciences IONS, great acronym but tell us what does noetic science mean? What does the word noetic mean? Noetic comes from the Greek root word nus, N-O-U-S which doesn't have an exact translation into many languages but about the closest we can come to in English is deep intuitive knowing and this is in contrast to rational or analytical knowing so at least in the western scientific model we figure things out analytically, we break them down we use reason and mathematics to understand how things work and that is definitely a way to know but there are other ways of knowing so intuition is a way of knowing a mystical insight is a way of knowing dreams are a way of knowing there's a much larger universe of ways of knowing than we normally think about or even teach in school and so our institute is devoted to using all ways of knowing to study knowing itself especially intuitive ways of knowing Well one of the terms that has come into the public through your work is this concept of mass consciousness or collective consciousness what does that mean? Tell us a little more about some phenomenon around mass consciousness Well actually the idea of a collective consciousness either collective consciousness or collective unconsciousness is traced back to the people like the Jesuit scholar Tillhard de Chardin who spoke about this many years ago Carl Jung of course talked about the archetypal elements and the collective unconscious so it's not a new idea what is new is that we have tools now that allow us to test whether there is such a thing I mean there is in the sense that years are always taking advantage of moving the mass mind to that we buy this potato chip rather than that potato chip what we're talking about here though is more like is there some unusual capacity for people's minds to meld and when people wonder well what do I want to talk about anybody who's been involved in a sports team or a chorus group or an orchestra something involving a team work where the team has to work together in order for it to succeed at whatever it's doing occasionally the team gets into a kind of a zone where individuality melds into the collective and it feels very different when that happens there's some energetic feeling or flow or something that everybody knows and no one knows what it is so there's a state of flow and a few psychologists have studied this in an internal state it feels really good when it happens the capacity of the group is much much better than it is without that feeling of flow so a big part of teaching teams on how to work as a team is to get people into this level of coherence where the flow occurs so we wondered does this strange sense of internal energy that happens is that a real thing or what? so we've started a number of experiments mostly started by a colleague at Princeton University and I've continued that and we have now colleagues around the world who are studying is there an actual physical change in the environment that can be measured as a result of a group that gets into a flow state and to make a long story short the answer is yes we can see that there are physically measurable changes that occur when a group is working together coherently the other piece I found fascinating about some of your work is when global catastrophe happens such as the earthquake in Japan you've done some fascinating work in that area of responses in the collective consciousness can you tell us a little bit about that? for about 14 years now we've had a program called the Global Consciousness Project this was started by Roger Nelson at Princeton he's now retired but the program is continuing it consists of probably 100 colleagues around the world each of whom has a little electronic device called a random number generator these devices are designed so that each random bit that it produces is completely independent of every random other bit so it's a true random sequence and all these devices do is just spit out random bits all the time the project is asking the question as to whether or not there is a global shift in attention as a result of large scale events so earthquakes, acts of terror, things of that sort that the world media shifts and so in some respect a large proportion of the world's attention also shifts and it shifts more or less in proportion to how big the event is or the import of the event so what we do is we either wait for an event to happen that was unpredicted or in some cases are predicted events like New Year's Eve celebrations and other big celebrations and we specify beforehand that this event before we look at the data this event looks like it'll be a two hour event or a four hour event or sometimes one day event and since we have random data coming from these devices coming in from all around the world from major cities we're able to get what amounts to a network of randomness we use randomness because the hypothesis here is that mind and matter are not really that different and so if you have a very sudden change of attention in the mental world around the world you get this unusual period of large coherent moments that maybe that mental movement will be reflected by a matter movement so the matter in this case is the output of these physical devices the random number generators we use randomness because it's very easy to detect order when it arises in randomness it also turns out to be very compatible with digital technology and using the internet to collect the data and all the rest of it so we have events a large scale event we define the length of the event and then we look in the random data for all of these generators around the world to see if the randomness goes away and there's a number of different ways we can look for that the one that's most interesting is let's say we have 50 random generators going at any given time an event occurs, a big earthquake it attracts a lot of attention we then say okay we'll look at the 4 hour piece of data when the earthquake struck and that's when people learn about it do the random generators around the world become coherent between themselves you have 50 generators and lots of pairs of correlations so you can look at they shouldn't be correlated every bit is independent of every other random bit but if they do become correlated that would suggest something like a tsunami in the sense of a huge wave is arising in the physical environment the wave we're talking about here is one that is the opposite of entropy it's the opposite of randomness it's order we call that negentropy there's a rise of negentropy that's a hypothesis you can see that in the data so as of 2013 we're in November now we have about 450 events that we've looked at over the past 14 years and the odds against chance for what we're seeing here are many many trillions to one against chance that we're seeing order arising so we know that the order that we're seeing is not a chance event it really is a big change that's occurring I'll take that back it's not big in terms of magnitude but in terms of the statistic certainty of what's going on with extremely high certainty that there is a change in randomness that is correlated to these large scale events so the probability is extremely low for what you're seeing for those who are scientists or statisticians we're talking about a 7 sigma result well what causes the shift in the random numbers what causes those patterns we don't know so here's an example of when science begins often times by a hypothesis and you test it and you get data and so we can show that the hypothesis is correct in the sense that there is a correlation we're seeing some correlation that people have written about in philosophical terms when it comes to an explanation we have to then think well what kind of an explanation would be satisfactory usually what we mean by an explanation is a reductionistic explanation that this thing caused that and that caused that and mechanistic reductionism that's how we think about explanations that may not be possible in this case because we're talking about a truly holistic phenomenon it seems to span the entire world it involves mind and matter interacting in some way we have no idea how that could happen it is not the case however that there are no theories there are some theories about how these things work but the level of precision and the level of testability of these series is yet not well developed so I can give you some speculations as to what I think is happening but they're not at the level where everybody would say oh yes that seems like a viable theory of speculation so how much of an overlap is there between what you're doing and the traditional field of neuroscience well when we do studies that involve the tools of neuroscience there's no difference at all when we do studies that involve other kinds of instrumentation then it's not like neuroscience it becomes more like physics or becomes more like statistics or more like cognitive psychology so we use many different techniques for studying if we're looking at issues about how does the brain respond given different kinds of capacities that people have then we're using exactly the same tools as the neurosciences use well your work over the years has attracted so much attention both positive and negative you've had a lot of skeptics coming to you do you find certain parts of the world relative to this type of research than elsewhere I'll put it this way that the nature of the taboo exists everywhere and we call it sometimes the woowoo taboo the woowoo taboo is a term that is sometimes used to describe the spooky paranormal things and there's a taboo in the classic sense of a taboo that there are certain things you don't talk about in public so in western science it's very strong you don't talk about this that doesn't mean that people privately won't talk about it in fact I have yet to find anybody I mean literally anyone that I have spoken to including people who are extremely skeptical who won't when they get comfortable with you in private begin to admit that some strange things have happened to them and they don't know how to explain it and maybe it's psychic and maybe it's something else but then they will not talk about it in public the taboo prevents the public discussion and yet everywhere in the world people to have these experiences some cultures it's more open about it to talk about it I would say the taboo even in cultures that are more open to these things within the scientific subcultures it becomes more difficult to talk about so I'll give you an example from when I talk about this to audiences in the United States technical or scientific audiences most of the time it's standing room only so we're talking about people whose jobs is to be professionals in whatever area of science they're in they're all fascinated by it why? even though none of them are actually doing any research on it they're fascinated because they're humans and these experiences happen to humans a lot in other cultures like in India when I speak again I'm going with interest from scientists and non-scientists and I asked the scientists the culture here is much more open to these kinds of phenomena why aren't you studying it and the response is that the nature of scientific disciplines is so fractured at this point because science has expanded so much that you can only specialize in a very tiny slice so there is a slice there's a discipline of science that studies this but it is very very very small in terms of the number of people there are approximately 17,000 institutions of higher learning around the world of which approximately 40 have one or more faculty members who has publicly expressed an interest in this topic so 40 individuals out of 17,000 institutions means there's not a lot of action going on above board meaning people aren't talking about it there's much much more interest and some action as well truly a nascent science from what you say is there more interest outside of academic spheres for instance coming from traditionally places like the US government tell us a little bit about I know you've been involved with some of the work the government has done I believe is the project can you tell us a little bit whatever's not classified well I've worked in that program a long time ago most of it is now declassified I'm not involved in that anymore so if there is classified work I wouldn't know about it so I don't know I'll answer your question but I'll broaden it a little bit so outside of the academic world the academic world already as compared to everyday life is already a very strange place to begin with so it lives on ideology all of science lives on ideas not ideology in a negative sense but simply it's all about ideas so if you bring in an idea that challenges other ideas of course it's looked at a scant at minimum but among the general public this has always been a topic of very high interest around the world and we see that very clearly by the way that it's reflected in the entertainment business so every entertainment type of business whether it's television or movies or books is saturated with these topics unfortunately most of it is saturated in the sense of being a horror genre which I think is unfortunate because it doesn't have to be that but that's simply the way that it's expressed so that would only be there if there is public interest and we know that's there we know that scientists are human we know that people in government are kind of human and so the human element is always going to be interested in this it's expressed in different ways in the government and now we're talking about 20 years ago in the United States there was some interest in seeing if some of these capacities could be used for espionage and so I mean it fits nicely it's ESP, extrasensory perception but in this case it's ESP espionage and so very talented clairvoyance were used to mostly spy on the Russians this was during the Cold War and every means that was possible was being used to see if you can get intelligence about what was going on usually in places where other means of intelligence was not working so if you had a spy satellite and you could look down and see a strange looking building and there was no human intelligence in the vicinity then they would go to this program and say tell us what's in that building and actually they didn't even go that far in order to keep it completely blind what was developed was here is a number might be a 10-digit number tell us about the 10-digit number and of course the number is an association to a target that they know about but all that the clairvoyant would know when they're called remote viewers was the number is linked to something meaningful so this sounds like an impossible task but the fact is that in this mental space that the clairvoyant can get the number and know that it somehow is linked to this meaningful other thing so their job is to sketch or to speak or to somehow convey information about what is inside the particular building that was successful enough to keep that program going at a top secret level for over 20 years and it was used by virtually every branch of the intelligence services most in military services most of the other government services in the United States because it worked so there you go on the other hand it was always classified and one of the reasons I think in hindsight that it was valuable to be classified is because then as is now there's a very high skepticism among actually people in the government and also among scientists that it even exists so if you think about this that the strategic value of a method is strongly linked to whether other people think it exists that's the whole power of a secret so you have a secret method that works that's giving information not 100% no information source is 100% but it was usable information and it was valuable because basically nobody else thought it was even possible really a case of truth being stranger than fiction yes yes Dean you've written extensively about phenomenon such as telekinesis clairvoyance tell us are there certain types of people that are better at this that have certain innate skills at these abilities than others yes the way to think about it is you could have asked the same question about musical talent or about sports talent and there is a talent in this realm some people are much better at it than others but again similarly to music or sports talent everyone has the capacity to do something so with practice with a couple of tips and tricks there are ways for people to improve their ability a related question though maybe since this is an inherent human ability it has something to do with sentience alone it's not even necessarily human ability it's something about the fabric of reality and sentience mixed together this is why this works and it's not magic I mean we might think of it as magic because we don't have an explanation yet but eventually we will and it's no longer in the realm of magic it's something about sentience it's something about recursion something about the native fabric of reality and the entanglement of all things some people are just tuned into that to a much greater degree what happens when people do have that ability do they know it? some do and some don't so the ones typically who are very successful in whatever field they happen to be in it might be business it might be a movie producer it might be a scientist they tend to be much much better objectively when tested at things like precognition and clairvoyance and people who are not so successful this shouldn't be surprising because the whole point of many of these kinds of phenomena is that somehow you're able to gain information that is not coming through the ordinary channels it's not coming through the ordinary senses it's not something you learn you're somehow pulling it out of the atmosphere obviously if you're an inventor that's a good thing to have if you're a business executive and have to make decisions without sufficient information it's very important to be able to somehow out guess the future so there is a study that was done in the mid-1970s among business executives to measure their precognition using a standard precognition test where they simply had to guess a course that would later be selected randomly by a computer and that would then form a precognition objective measure for them and then that was correlated against the profit of their businesses and the hypothesis was maybe the reason why some executives are much more successful is because they actually have a little bit of talent in this area and the correlation should be positive and indeed there is a significant positive correlation between the degree to which you can objectively measure precognition in somebody who's making important business decisions and their profit so that's just in business in other realms like in a movie producer as a good example they're making huge money decisions usually on a gut feeling like this movie seems good somehow the producers that are very successful at that will privately admit that they rely very heavily on their intuition because that's all they have to rely on after some point and the ones who are systematically making the right choices time after time they also then privately will talk about their whole range of other kinds of psychic experiences but again in business and in the movies and science people don't tend to talk about this in public but privately there's I think more people than we would suspect who know that they rely on their intuition and they know that that is linked in some way to getting insight and information in ways that don't make any conventional sense that make a lot of sense when we think about psychic or mystical experience the word intuition is an interesting one because I think there is a little more comfort with that term than many of the other terms that we've spoken here today such as precognition clairvoyance or telepathy tell me have you done some studies in the animal realm? I haven't but I've had colleagues who have looked at certainly dogs, Rupert Sheldrake is probably best known for doing experiments on whether dogs can sense when their owners are coming home and his studies show quite clearly that they can do that but there are other studies using birds typically parrots but not exclusively parrots some cats some animals like ferrets all the way down to earthworms have been used in experiments so in each case depending on how the experiment is crafted you can show that it seems to be even a talent among animals some animals are better at it than others so some natural capacity that expresses in humans as talent and then animals as different capacities or different levels of capacity not all dogs can correctly sense when their owners are coming home but some of them are superstars at it so as I said before this has something to do with entities that are sentient that are complex enough like us and like animals and the reason why I think all of this works we use terms like precognition and telepathy we use those terms as ideas or descriptions of the way that the phenomena is manifesting but that doesn't mean that telepathy is a separate thing it really isn't I think it's simply a way that a phenomenon manifests the nature of the phenomena we're talking about has to do with the way that information is connected through space and time ultimately it's really a physics question once the information gets into the organism it's processed by probably by psychology and neuroscience and all the rest the mystery is how did information which seems to be beyond the ordinary reach of space-time how did they get in there in the first place that's a question for physics and when you start looking at the deep physics here you immediately bounce into flexible space-time through relativity through non-local connections and quantum mechanics and if you simply thought well if we know that the physical reality has strange connections that span through space-time then why should we be so surprised that people report experiences like that and the reason we're surprised is because we somehow think of the deep physical structure as not being where we live you know that this seems like hard stuff that doesn't seem quantum at all but ultimately we know that all physicality is quantum in nature and quantum phenomena among other things have a non-local property it ultimately go down deep enough into a physical structure it is actually not in space-time space-time is something that we construct mentally so I think what we're seeing then in all of these phenomena we're talking about all psychic phenomena some aspects of intuition some aspects of mystical experience and maybe even religious epiphanies this whole spectrum is an experience of a deep structure of the physical world which is actually before space-time arises and since our language we don't live there very much in our consciousness our language fails and that's why it seems so spooky but that in fact is where we're living and that's where I think these phenomena come from in closing I want to ask you about your legacy one of the in-depth pieces about you in the New York Times had a title they laughed at Galileo too it's hard to be a pioneer okay fast forward 100 even 500 years what will be your Dean Redden's legacy to humankind how do you want to be remembered I see myself as standing on the shoulders of giants and so in the future I'll be one other person that somebody else is standing on I hope so in terms of a legacy what I hope is that people see each of us and I'm talking about maybe 100 or 200 people going back hundreds of years now who have had an interest and did something in a scientific way to try to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps to learn what are these phenomena how do we understand them I hope that I'm seen basically as another little notch a little advancement in knowledge which involves development of new techniques maybe ways of expressing it and that sort of thing and also pulling it out of this silly taboo that has prevented people from doing no more than simply discussing this in scientific forums in a serious way so if anything I hope that people would look back and say oh he's the guy who stands more tolerant of the discussion that'd be good enough that certainly would thank you Dean for joining us here today in the Eclipse Leaders Room Dean Raiden has certainly given us a great deal to think about today about the links between reality and the mind thank you for joining us in today's session of the Leaders Room I'm Rupa Rashid of the Eclipse Center for Leadership and Governance