What are These Telepathic Messages Trying to Tell Us? (Diane Hennacy Powell, MD)

Listen now (52 mins) | "And so I thought, well, if this is true that somebody can access information that is not part of their usual sensory way of obtaining information, then..."

You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Diane Hennacy Powell is a neuroscientist who trained at Ohio State University and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she received her MD and psychiatric training. She has been on faculty at Harvard Medical School. And she is a leading expert on autism and savant syndrome. Her research focuses on autistic children who appear to have ESP as a savant skill. In other words, children who seem to perceive information that is beyond our known senses.

Diane is a leading figure in the mega-popular podcast that came out this fall, The Telepathy Tapes, created by Ky Dickens. If you haven’t listened yet, it truly is such a fascinating, and deeply beautiful series. I had no idea about the profound abilities of so many non-speakers of autism. Beyond being able to read their parents’ minds, which is pretty wild—they are bringing forth such loving and timely messages. And Diane’s work with them really expands our understanding of the human mind, and how perception and consciousness might actually work.

It kind of breaks my brain, but in a good way.

I’m so glad Diane said yes to this conversation. Her personal story, which she shares today, is quite remarkable.

MORE FROM DIANE HENNACY POWELL, M.D.:

Diane Hennacy Powell’s Website

The ESP Enigma

The Telepathy Tapes

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

You obviously play a very formative role in the telepathy tapes would not exist without your work, so congrats. It was so exciting to see it just pop onto the top of the charts quite maybe it's not surprising to you.

DIANE:

Well, it isn't it, I mean, it's really interesting because I've been doing this research for, well, depending upon how you count it, I mean I've been actually doing experiments with these children whose parents report them as being telepathic for 13 years, and I've presented it at scientific conferences and written about it, and so it's been there for a while. But that saying it takes a long time to become an overnight success. It kind of has that quality to it. What I've seen is that there really has been a shift in basically, I think in the public's perspective on these things. I think that there's much more of a readiness and an openness to a new model for thinking about what we're capable of.

ELISE:

What do you credit that to?

DIANE:

Well, to some extent, I mean, one of the things that's so interesting to me is that the people that have been the most excited about my research, and Kai falls into this category as well, are people that are in their thirties, people who grew up with Harry Potter.

ELISE:

Interesting.

DIANE:

And so just the people who are my brother who worked on AI and robotics, he's a physicist and he was basically fascinated by Star Trek. And back then when I was a kid, that was all just sci-fi and far reality. And now we have these devices that are not that far off from the kinds of devices we saw on Star Trek that we thought, oh wow, wouldn't that be amazing hundreds of years from now kind of thing. And so really what happens is that you have generational influences that really spark an imagination about what's possible that really then help to create the foundation for us to even consider those things as possible.

ELISE:

And then you're not budding against someone's paradigm, which might be very entrenched based on what they've learned or the basis of their own work to take a paradigm and get much bigger and say, okay, not to negate all of my own experience of life or science or practicing medicine, but now we have some new information and we need to figure out how to include this. We're not good at that, right? As humans, if anything, it's, I would like to take everything I don't understand off the table more or less as an outsider insider, that's been my perspective. It's just much easier to say, this doesn't not abide, therefore I don't really need to look at it.

DIANE:

Right. And people don't like to be made a fool out of. And yet at the same time, I mean to some extent, we are all fools. And so it's that process of discovering that really drives me as a scientist. And so I'm willing to go into these areas that would be considered, have always been considered highly controversial, but at the same time as a scientist, what I'm wanting to do is I'm just wanting to test the boundaries.

ELISE:

Yeah, yeah. No, I very much respect it. I want to talk to you about your story and sort of the origins of this research as well. But I will say too, as someone who has, I know a lot of psychic mediums, I've done a lot of work over my career in this space in terms of just interviewing people, in talking to people. And I do credit to all of you because people have obviously seen sort of the entree into conversations about consciousness through psychic mediums. And that's part of my flip story. That's the mechanism that made me think, oh wait, I need to reframe my understanding of what's happening here. And I think it becomes so easy to dismiss because there's just so much in the culture. So your work as a way into this much bigger conversation about consciousness was brilliant because there is something about, I had no awareness that these telepathic, non-speaking autistic savants existed for me. My father's a physician, he listened to the whole thing. My husband listened to the whole thing, people who I can't normally get to engage with me about these conversations. It was a brilliant way I think, of cracking open maybe the biggest conversation of them all. Who knows? I think it is.

DIANE:

Yeah. Well, I think it's definitely a really important conversation for all of us to be having

ELISE:

And a beautiful conversation. I mean, that is a beautiful series and so beautiful, so loving and so inspiring. All right, so let's talk about your story in the context of this conversation because as you said, it's been, well kind of not controversial, but it has been perceived as controversial. Can you tell us about how that first experience that you had that changed your understanding of ESP phenomena?

DIANE:

Well, I'd say that the first experience really happened when I was on faculty at Harvard and I was the chief psychiatrist to go to the medical and surgical and obstetrical wards at a teaching hospital, Cambridge Hospital to assess individuals who were thought to have some kind of psychiatric component to their illness. So for example, if somebody was admitted and the doctors couldn't find anything physically wrong with them, they would sometimes think, oh, well, I think that this person's psychosomatic. They're just imagining that they have these issues and will you evaluate them for that? So that was a common consult. But another common consult was to evaluate somebody who has a management problem. And in this case, it was a woman who wanted to sign out of the hospital against medical advice because you're not allowed to leave the hospital if the doctors think that you're at risk to yourself, and you have to be mentally competent to make that decision.

And she was making claims such as, I see ghosts here, or I can read the future, and those are the reasons why she wanted to leave the hospital. So naturally they called me in as a psychiatrist, and this was back, boy, this was back in 89, so 1989 that long ago. And I go to see this woman and within five minutes she says, oh, I'm psychic. I don't make a living at it. It's just a gift that I had. And I was born with a call over my face and people with calls over their face have been found to be psychic. And I'm like, oh, okay. I've never heard any of this. Right? And then she says, oh, and I'm seeing ghosts here and it's really freaking me out. I want to leave. And then she sat down and I also can see the future, and I know my tests will come back normal, so you can just let me go.

And most psychiatrists at that point would've said, okay, I've heard enough to know this woman is mentally ill, and they would've basically signed the paperwork and made her stay, but I don't like to use my authority over people like that. I like to gain their cooperation. So I said, well, can we just sit down and talk? I just want to make sure you understand what's going on here. And then she looks at me and she goes, oh, I'm getting this reading about you. You have this amazing aura and there's all this information in it. I said, oh, really? I'd never heard of auras at this point. She didn't use the word aura. She said, you've got this amazing light around you. And I said, oh, well, that's very interesting. She said, what I'm being shown is that your husband's a chemist, and my husband was a biochemist.

And then she said, oh, and he's applying for a job in two other cities. He's not applying for a job right now in Boston. He's trying to go to one of two other cities. And that very week he was applying for post doctorates in biochemistry in San Diego and back at Johns Hopkins where we met, and now she has my attention. I said, oh, really? She said, oh yeah, in his heart of hearts, he wants to go to one city, but you'll end up in the other city. And I knew in his heart of hearts he wanted to go back to Johns Hopkins because he was 13th generation and had family back there. And I said, oh, well that's interesting. And she said, but you'll all end up in the other city. And I said, well, what city is that? And she said, well, I'll name a bunch of cities and I'll tell you which one.

And so I named at least 10 cities. And then she said, oh, San Diego, you'll end up in San Diego. You'll be very successful. Well, there, you'll have a daughter. You'll leave psychiatry to write books. I mean, she just started naming off all of these different things, and over time, they all came true. And I just thought, wow. The reason why I thought it was important to study, it was really multifold. One of the things is that I went into medicine wanting to understand human consciousness, and initially I was going to become a neurosurgeon, but then I realized when doing my rotations that really the work that I was most excited about was psychiatry because I'd sit down with patients and get to explore what their world was like. And I found that fascinating and neuroimaging was starting to come about, and I thought, oh, and we can even look at how is their brain different from other people's brains?

So I found all of that exciting and so chose to go into psychiatry. And so I thought, well, if this is true that somebody can access information that is not part of their usual sensory way of obtaining information, then we need to understand that there's some way in which the brain is functioning that we just don't even consider. And so that was one of the main reasons. But another reason was that as a psychiatrist, we pathologize people who say they can do these things. As I said, I would be willing to bet a lot of money that any other psychiatrist that had gone in there would've said, okay, you need to stay and put them on a medication how we're trained. And so I thought, how many other people are there out there who say that they have these abilities, but they get put on medication? Instead, how many people are out there who are afraid to say they have these abilities because they know that that's how they'll be regarded? So I really felt it as my obligation as both a neuroscientist and as a clinician to try to sort it out

ELISE:

It's interesting thinking about being a neurosurgeon psychiatrist too, because in some ways, one is the study of the brain as this organ, and theoretically does it manufacture consciousness? And then one is the study of the mind. I understand why the mind would be so much more compelling. So you decide to pursue this and then you run sort of a foul of medicine, right? Not for long, but enough to be somewhat debilitating.

DIANE:

Yes. So what happened was is that after that experience at Harvard about oh another, well, so that happened in 89 and in 2003, 2004, I decided to start devoting my time to looking at the literature and seeing has anybody else studied these things? And I started to discover that there's lots of studies that have been conducted over the last 100 plus years where people have said that there's something there. And in fact, that a number of these individuals were people who we have in high regard. Carl Young himself gave it some credence and so did Albert Einstein. And so I thought, why is it that we're dismissing these abilities and saying, well, they're impossible and not saying, well, wait a minute, people all over the world throughout time have reported these. How can we dismiss them when we don't even have a model in neuroscience that explains even the basics?

It just was to me, science being performed in a backward fashion that really if we have data that challenges our theory, we should then challenge our theory and explore the data as opposed to just dismiss the new data entirely. And it's not even new data. I mean, as I said, people have been reporting this and studying this for a long time. So I did that research and then I wrote a book, the ESP Enigma, a Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena in which I really say what I've just said. I lay out how the model in neuroscience is incomplete. I also lay out how modern physics, which is also over a hundred years old, tells us that our perception of reality is incorrect. We know that it's zillions of times more information out there than our brain, than we actually process. We know that our sense of time is an illusion, and we know that from quantum mechanics that there's this interaction between consciousness and what we think of as the physical world.

In other words, if I measure light coming through the double slit, it's a famous experiment, the double slit. If I measure that, then I will see particles, but if I don't measure it, then it'll act more like a wave. So all of that is the type of discourse that's in my book. In addition to listing some of the most compelling evidence that I thought was out there about each of the reported types of psychic phenomena such as precognition, telepathy, and clairvoyance, remote viewing, and my book was actually reviewed very favorably. There are university libraries that have it in addition to just general libraries. It was reviewed even favorably by my alma mater, Johns Hopkins Medical School. What happened though is that while I'm on book tour, my medical board found out that I had written it, and a psychiatrist said to the medical board that, well, somebody who wrote a book on ESP obviously is engaging in magical thinking, and that means that she may have a mental illness and so she needs to be evaluated.

And then it ended up with them taking my license away temporarily because they thought until I jumped through all the hoops of being evaluated that it was too risky for patients to be seeing me. What if I'm seeing all these psychotic, what they call psychotic people and not putting them on drugs? So anyway, I passed the psychological testing without any problems. I don't have a history of mental illness, and I got my license back. And it was at that point that I realized two things. I realized that I really needed to see if I could find compelling evidence, find somebody who could demonstrate just like that woman I encountered at Harvard demonstrate this to a convincing ability. And I was aware of Savant syndrome, which is more common in autistics than in other individuals. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that people who are autistic would be that the individuals that you would think might be most capable of demonstrating this because what these savant skills demonstrate is this ability to know things that they've never been taught, knowing languages or mathematics or music without being taught. I mean, that suggests to me that they're already, that they're accessing non-local information. And so naturally it seemed to me that they might have these abilities. And so I put that out as a hypothesis and then started receiving emails from people all over the world telling me that I was right, that they had a child that fit that description. And so I've been doing controlled experiments with them for the past 13 years.

ELISE:

It's an amazing story, and I'm sorry that happened. I also think it's a formative part of this process, and I also want to acknowledge your reverence, and you hear this within the telepathy tapes, your reverence or your willingness to abide by this scientific paradigm as it is right now in pursuing your research. So it seems like deep respect and reverence for testing these hypothesis and following sort of the proper processes and procedurals, even though it would be so easy to sort of lash out at science, which we see happening all over our culture today, you're pushing the paradigm from within the paradigm. I appreciate that a lot.

DIANE:

Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, some of my colleagues who are parapsychologists, which is the field where you look at these kinds of phenomena, they've kind of given up on mainstream size, they just criticize it and they totally have given up on it. And I'm in partial agreement from the standpoint that I'm one of the early signers of this manifesto for post materialist science, meaning that I'm willing to sign on the dotted line and say, I believe that the materialist model is incorrect. But my goal isn't just to convince the general public because the reality is that the general public is sort of known that these things are real. They just don't experience them in the dramatic way that these children do. And surveys have shown that two thirds of the population really believe in these things. And so my goal isn't really just to convince the general populace, it's to actually change mainstream science to make a difference there.

And in order to make a difference there, you have to work within the system. You have to think outside of the system, but you have to work within it. And what I've found is that there are quite a few mainstream scientists who have really high regard for me in my work, and it's not an impossible task. It might be an impossible task if your credentials are only that of a parapsychologists, but my background gives me the ability to discuss these things in a way that fits their model. I'm trying to bridge this gap, which I feel is easier for me to bridge than a lot of other people because I had to bridge it for myself. I mean, I was working in laboratories as a neuroscientist, as an undergraduate, and even worked in neuroscience lab when I was at Johns Hopkins. And I think like that. So I pose these questions in a way that scientists can relate to and bring up physics. And once again, that resonated with them. What's happening now is that I'm seeing as a result of my work and some other people, that there's a shift that's starting to occur in mainstream science. They're really starting to think about these things differently. It's still got a ways to go. When I was in medical school, I mean you didn't even talk about meditation. You couldn't even talk about consciousness.

ELISE:

I agree. I feel like we're moving. But it's interesting to watch the telepathy tapes emerge and sort of top Joe Rogan in the podcast charts, and then to have the resurgence of this idea that autism is like the interference of a vaccine agent in then a deeply materialist way with a child. And to have, this is not your words, but are these angels, are they vibrating at such a high level that they can't actually get into their bodies? I can't remember exactly which episode it is, but one of the boys is talking about, so vibration, how difficult it is, how physically hard it is for him to be embodied and why telepathy is so much easier for him. And then you have this other paradigm that suggests it's not that at all. I don't know how you feel about that, but those two things conflict and the culture is really fascinating to me, and they feel diametrically opposed and still also about this conversation of science.

DIANE:

Yeah, well, they are. I mean, there's a lot of extremism that's out there, and I think that the truth is more nuanced and more interesting actually. And that's what I'm trying to sort out. So the way that I think about it is what physics tells us is that everything is really a combination of electromagnetism. So you have all these charge particles that are moving and they're moving at different frequencies and only a small amount of it is within the visible spectrum. So we know that our visual system is only seeing some of that, but that there's all of these different frequencies of energy. So you have the ultraviolet light, let's say, which is actually a light that we now know from research on bio photons that we generate bio photons, we emit bio photons. It's just that they are at a density that's below the threshold for us to be able to see them.

So the way I think of it is that there is evidence that we are light beings and there are different frequencies. And so it does make you wonder whether or not some of us have higher frequencies than others. Certainly we have differences in our ability to perceive frequencies, but it may be that we also different in terms of our frequency, I think of the body as being the densest because it's probably vibrating at the lowest frequency if you think of it that way. So we have electromagnetism and then we have vibration sound and light, and that information can be encoded in both light and in sound. That's how we have media. It's information being encoded in those violence is showing us that we live in an informational field, so to say, and that all this information is out there. It's just that it's not within the visible or auditory range for us.

But for these children who very common complaint that they have super, super, super hearing or that their vision that they say they see auras and they see all of these different things and they're sensitive to light and they're sensitive to touch, so they've got hypersensitivity of their sensory systems. And so I'm just wondering if they're just seeing outside of a range that most of us just assume doesn't exist, something that doesn't exist because we don't perceive it. And so then you really start to think of that what I think of as the physical world is really also just an informational field. And that's why, for example, we can take information and do 3D printing. I could print out all kinds of things today with a printer. So then it's like, oh, okay, well that's information combined that's organizing matter.

ELISE:

For our listeners, I'm going to play a clip from the Telepathy Tapes podcast here that further explains how one of the autistic children, Asher described frequency and consciousness.

THE TELEPATHY TAPES:

One of the things he tried to explain to me about consciousness was the experts have got that a bit wrong. He says they think that when you go into the delta stage, you go into deep sleep or you're unconscious sedated, and so nothing's going on in your brain. And he said, well, nothing is going on in your brain because your consciousness has moved beyond the brain, and that's when your consciousness is it's most expanded. That's when you are out of this altered state and you've got access to everything brain states, they have different hurts, and at the delta state, your frequency in the brain is very, very low because you're not in the body very much. Then when you get down in the beta state, which is normal waking consciousness for neurotypical people, then most of the consciousness is in the body. And when you get to the gamma state, which is the busiest one of all, he said, that's like fight or flight or extreme aroused.

So he said the ideal state for every neurotypical people and neurodivergent people would be the alpha state, which is complete balance between the two. You're still grounded, but you've got that greater link into consciousness and you are aware of all the little nudges you get, the little I and things, they just sort of keep coming. And he said for people on the spectrum, people with autism and so forth, to get down to the alpha state for them is a real effort to force their frequencies that low. Whereas for neurotypical people, it's often quite difficult to get them that high and to actually tune into higher self.

ELISE:

It breaks my brain. But there is something about this idea of energy trying to get into an embodied state or into denser matter and struggling for me was a bit of an unlock and makes so much sense. And of course it makes sense. I mean, we know this throughout the animal kingdom that different species can hear different things. We can't all perceive the same information. And so to that end, when you think about kids with autism, and one, I have a question about kids who are verbal and autistic, do they tend to have, are they telepathic as well, or is that not as known or not as common?

DIANE:

Some of them are. Some of them are. I did pretty extensive work with a boy named Ramseys who was an amazing kid. I mean, at the age of two, he already knew eight different languages, things like Hebrew and Hindi and Japanese and Russian Spanish. So he was clearly a savant and he could read a college level book at the age of five and took an undergraduate physics course at the age of nine. So he's an example of Savant syndrome, but he also could read his mother's mind, and I did testing with him, and it was actually a film crew from Germany came out and filmed experiment that just wanted me to do right there in front of them so that they could witness it from beginning to end. And that went viral with over 9 million views. That was well over a decade ago. So some of the children who can speak can definitely do the telepathy. I think that one of the differences between the non-speakers and the speakers is that the non-speakers have their ability to communicate disrupted in early development, such that they didn't get seduced into the use of language as a form of communication. So they're getting information from those around them based on this ability to access their thoughts somehow. But they also, oftentimes what the parents report is that the kid expects them to be able to do it in return is expecting it to be a two-way street and 99% of the time it isn't.

ELISE:

Right. No, I would imagine that would be devastating. This is a friend of mine, I was talking to her about talking to you, and she actually was an undergrad neuroscientist and she was a psychic medium and she hadn't listened yet, and she was like, I need to listen. You're the fourth time person. And to mention this to me. And she was like, I was diagnosed, people thought I was autistic. I was nonverbal until I was four. And then she was electrocuted, not intentionally, obviously nobody was trying to electrocute her. And then she could speak, I don't know what that's about, but maybe I'll need to connect you two. She has an interesting character. What do you think that, obviously this phenomenon that you're studying and observing tells us a lot about non-local consciousness and these fields that we potentially could have access to or maybe had access to, or I don't know, are you interested in the root, the reason that autism happens or is that less compelling to you, or do you think that that's just something we'll never really understand?

DIANE:

Oh, I'm very interested in why we're seeing such a big increase in autism. I mean, when I first started studying autism back in 1987, it was only one in 10,000 children, and now it's one in 30. It's probably even higher than that because the way that the CDC does the numbers is that they look at how many children at the age of eight for any given year are diagnosed with autistic. So you have children that are now just three or four and getting diagnosed as autistic that aren't even in those numbers yet. So the reporting's always a little bit behind, and it's not just a greater recognition of it. There is more of it. And well, I've trained in child psychiatry and adult psychiatry, and this has been my area of interest. So I would be somebody who'd know if it was just being recognized more.

But what I would see in the child psychiatry literature is that increasing numbers of child pss we're saying, I'm seeing kids that I've never seen kids like this before. I mean, I don't know what this is. A lot of things in child psychiatry that are common now are very rare in children. It was extremely rare to have a children, for example, have hallucinations, extremely rare. It's like, oh, you may only see one kid like this in your entire career. And now it's not that rare of an event anymore. Not common, but it's not rare. It used to be extremely rare to have a child who was actually suicidal. And I'm about a child who's under the age of 10 now. We're seeing that on a really frequent basis where you have children that are talking about wanting to be dead at really young ages. So what's happened is that people with psychiatric conditions in childhood used to be a very small percentage, and the whole thing has grown. So it's not just the incidents of autism. So it's not like, oh, well, we used to call it this and now we call it autism. No, if you go back to 1987, 1 in 30 children weren't seeing psychiatrists or someone who needed to. So that's part of it. I think what's happening is that the conditions under which children are living are during the formative years of brain development are so different.

ELISE:

Do you think it's a cultural thing or a biological thing, or is it a spiritual thing?

DIANE:

It's all of the above. I think it's all of the above. And then yeah, there is also a spiritual component to it as well, because I think humanity is at a crisis point and we're at a fork in the road

ELISE:

In what's in terms of our imminent potential devastation, like what we're doing to our environment and whether we'll be able to survive.

DIANE:

Well, I think that there's so much and even other destructive, and that is if there is a God, then there need to be emissaries to help humanity, to save humanity from itself.

And so then what form are they going to take? They're going to take the form of individuals being born here because most of us can't see things that are behind the veil, if you will, to just use that colloquial. So they would need to be embodied and they would need to do something to grab our attention. And the thing about these non speakers is that they grab the attention of the family. I mean, they're still so dependent upon the parents for everything that usually one of the parents has to, if they're both employed, one of the parents has to quit their job, or if they both have to work, then the child is enrolled in some kind of special services such that there's some other individual there who's spending a lot of time with them. And so sometimes it's the parent who's there spending the time with the kid who contacts me and says, oh my gosh, this kid can read my mind. Or sometimes it's the speech therapist or the teacher or the psychologist who's spending enough time with the child trying to understand their world and what they're going through.

ELISE:

I was so struck by these kids and hearing from them and their messages from the hill and from elsewhere and how beautiful they were, and consistently loving and warning, it's hard to not listen to them and not feel like it is sourced from somewhere much greater. However you want to imagine that energy and it feels very consistent. And too, I think with many people's theology, without getting it all specific about events or God, it's just very, very loving.

ELISE:

It’s really beautiful and you must hear that all the time.

DIANE:

Yeah, when I use the word God, I mean, I didn't grow up with any religion, so when I use the word God, I think of a beautiful, loving energy. And not all of these children, I mean many of them, well say they see Jesus or angels or speak to God or whatever, but that isn't the case for all of them. But what they do all talk about is love and there being loving energy. And so I do think that just like there's hate and self-destruction, there's also love and nurturing. And what's happening is that things have gotten so shifted out of balance such that so many of us, we can go a long time without having that experience of, oh, I feel loved, I feel nurtured. So I think that humanity is crying out without having to evoke any specific entity necessarily. I mean, you have a lot of people praying to God, but you also have people that are in a way that's not even so contextualized, just praying for relief.

And as a result, perhaps that's calling it in, and it's calling it in the form of individuals who are so pure in their intentions and their words, that they have the credibility that they're the only ones who could have that kind of credibility. Because people have become so suspicious of everybody and people are suspicious of the media now. They're like, oh, well, how do I know that's not disinformation? Or it wasn't Photoshopped or AI generated or blah, blah, blah. Well, you have one of these kids as an individual embodied, partially embodied in front of you, it's harder to just dismiss it. And I think that's one of the things about doing the podcast was that it put it in the voices of the kinds of individuals who this is their daily existence is witnessing these children. It's put in their voices. Because I found that my public presenting at scientific conferences and my writing papers about it wasn't getting the message out in a way that I was hearing it because I'm actually spending time with these kids and I'm actually hearing what the parents are saying. So it's a way to invite people into that world.

ELISE:

And you mentioned the extreme lack of self-interest. These kids aren't monetizing themselves. They're not chasing influence on TikTok, they're not selling courses. It's hard to imagine a pure vessel for this type of experience or deepening this understanding. And I think the success of the podcast is response to that, oh, this is just a beautiful gift dropped into my feed without any ulterior motive of trying to make me scared or make me take action. They're such an incredible vessel, I think, for this message and this phenomenon and this work at a time when we really need it, really need it. Are you getting more interest from other scientists or other institutions, or are people starting to pay more attention to what you're discovering?

DIANE:

I'm getting so much more attention now. I mean, it was interesting. I did a number of things a decade ago, and it's just like, hmm, okay, okay. Yeah. And then nothing happened kind of thing. And so what I've seen happen is that I saw it happen with my theoretical work, and I've seen it happen now with my experimental work where the conversation started shifting scientific conferences and there started to be more of an attempt to bring together science with parapsychology. It was like the two were just kind of at odds with one another. And building that bridge has really been happening. And there are a number of scientists at mainstream universities who want to collaborate with me that are thrilled about the work I'm doing. And so that's good. I have lots of people that are contacting me saying, thank you for doing this work. You're dead on. So just validating it and saying, yes, I've known this for a long time, but it's a relief to see that the conversation's finally happening.

ELISE:

Yeah, it's really interesting, and I've seen this phenomenon throughout my career where suddenly someone is speaking so much sense and then suddenly the energy hits and there's an explosion into awareness and into the mainstream. And I feel like we're at this moment now too, where enough people are like, something's happening. Something's happening here that I can't quite understand, but I understand enough to know we have a limited understanding of what's happening and we need to expand the frame and widen the aperture. So thank you for leading the charge, and it's thrilling. It's so beautiful for anyone. I'm assuming most people who are in this conversation with us have listened to the telepathy tapes, but I'm sure they'll listen after.

So you can get a copy of Diane Hennessy Powell's book, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena on her website. You can also find it on Audible, but you can go to her website to order a copy of the book. She has some left. It's out of print, but hopefully it'll be coming back into print. And obviously if you haven't listened to the telepathy tapes, it is groundbreaking auditory experience that is so beautiful. And if you have skeptics in your life, I would highly encourage you to encourage them to listen with you. It's one of those events for me at least within my circle of friends where we were all sort of live texting as we listened to these beautiful stories unfold. And the first few episodes Diane features prominently is she's setting up these experiments for Kai to Kai's, the producer director of the podcast.

He's also, I believe, making a documentary film about this. But so you hear her setting up these experiments and sort of that what needs to happen in order to establish something that would be credible to the scientific establishment. And as mentioned, I really respect that Diane respects science because there's a lot to love about the system by which we come to understand our world. And as a paradigm, it needs to expand. And science can become scientism, which is its own type of religion in terms of the strict adherence to beliefs and an unwillingness to move or stretch or expand or take into consideration that which doesn't fit the model. Can't just take these things off the table. We need to find ways to incorporate a bigger, deeper understanding of what's present. Obviously, longtime listeners of the podcast know that I love Laura Lynne Jackson. I love Carissa Schumacher.

Many of my dear friends are psychic mediums, intuitives or who work somewhat in the space. Jungian therapists, as she mentioned, Carl Young, definitely believed in this phenomena, talks a lot about synchronicities and so on and so forth, and a more sacred paradigm for science. And I do think we're inching that way. I hope we don't tear down science in the process. I hope we simply renovate it where needed in order to make it a big enough attempt. Another person who's just popping into my mind, and I've interviewed him on the show as well, is Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, who's at Harvard as well, McLean psychiatrist. He wrote a book called Cured, which is about spontaneous healings, and it's very different than Diane Hennessy Powell's work, but they're aligned in the sense of these things happen. And as physicians, we should want to understand the underlying mechanism rather than just throwing them away because they don't fit.

But we should try to understand spontaneous healings because maybe there's something replicable and obviously there must be something that we can learn and apply to other people. If you like today's episode, please, please rate and review it and share with a friend.