Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, neuropsychiatrist and author of "The ESP Enigma," joins me for a mind-bending exploration of consciousness, savant abilities, and the limitations of materialist science.
We dive deep into why the scientific establishment reacts so emotionally to consciousness research, her fascinating work with autistic savants who demonstrate telepathic abilities, and why she believes the brain functions as a navigation tool for consciousness rather than its creator.
This was a very enlightening conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
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Highlights
The Curious Case of Savants
“…when I met Oliver Sacks, who was a hero of mine, I loved his work. And I met him in 1986 and read his book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." And in that book he had this description of these twins who had been institutionalized, who were autistic. And they couldn't do basic things. I mean, they couldn't take care of themselves. They couldn't even do basic arithmetic. And yet at the same time, they could generate prime numbers in six digits…And Oliver Sacks went and found a prime number table and came back with an eight-digit prime number and said that to them. And they just, within like a minute or so, they started giving eight-digit prime numbers that were consecutive. And then they did it with 12 digits, and they even did it with 20 digits. But the computers at the time, in the 60s, could only calculate it to 12 digits. And so here they were exceeding computer capacity at the time, generating prime numbers. Only they said they weren't deriving them, they just saw them just as a pure perceptual experience. And I thought, "Wow, okay, I really want to understand this." And so that's what got me interested in savants.”
Different types of Meditation
“…there's different types of meditation. Some people do Kundalini yoga and they develop these abilities through that. So yeah, I wouldn't say that there's a single route there. I think that people have to play around with it. The first thing is for people to believe it's possible. And then the second thing is to learn how to shift your awareness to gain mastery over where you put your awareness. And so there's a lot of techniques in which people learn. It's like when you go in for like a relaxation course, sometimes they're like, "Well, focus on your toes, focus on different parts of your body." And what you're doing is you're shifting your awareness to different parts of your body. And then you want to start shifting your awareness to some space just slightly outside of your body. And so it's a trainable exercise.”
What is Consciousness?
“We don't have a consensus of [consciousness]. I mean, people use the word to refer to different things. The hard problem of consciousness is really described as we don't understand how the brain creates consciousness. And what I argue is that, well, if you drop the assumption that the brain creates consciousness, then the hard problem goes away. And it's like, why create a problem for yourself, especially a hard one?
[And so] I inverted the question and I said, "Well, what if consciousness is primary and fundamental and not derivative of the brain? And what if the brain is just our navigational tool for consciousness?"”
Meditating on Impossible Things
“And I also really, I think of us, I like the idea of us living in a block universe in which there's space-time and we're navigating space-time, but it's not a static block universe. It's dynamic. And so when you have a dynamic system like that, then you can have things like retrocausation. And this goes along with the idea that the universe is evolving. You can't have a static block universe and then still think that evolution occurs. And so to me, I think that as hard as it can be to wrap our minds around some of these concepts, there's good theoretical basis for it. And I think that it's actually good exercises for us to do. I mean, some of these traditions, like the Japanese would give you these koans that are sort of nonsensical, but the act of meditating on some of these things that are so impossible to meditate on actually can help to liberate us from this very rigid linear way that we tend to approach information and gives us a more expanded view of it.”
Reading List
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; by Oliver Sacks
The ESP Enigma; by Diane Hennacy Powell
What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell; by Erwin Schrödinger
Mind Over Back Pain; by Dr. John Sarno
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Intro: Hello, everybody it's Jim O' Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today's guest is Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell. She has an incredible CV, which includes studying biophysics and neuroscience on full scholarship at Ohio State University, publishing a paper while still an undergraduate at Ohio State on neurochemistry, getting her MD From Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, doing postdoc work there in medicine, neurology, psychiatry, training at the Institute of Psychiatry in London with a renowned expert on autism, Sir Michael Rutter. She joined the Harvard Medical School faculty teaching neuropsychiatry and worked as the chief psychiatrist at Brockton Multisyll Service Center ER before moving on to study molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego campus during the Human Genome Project. Wow.
And yet most of us only know of her because of her involvement in the popular telepathy tapes program, which has caused raised eyebrows among traditional members of the scientific community. Today we're going to discuss all of her work, not just the work on telepathy, and I hope you enjoy this episode. Please help me welcome Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So many of my listeners and viewers might be unfamiliar with autistic savants, for example. So what I'd really like you to do is take us through your journey because as we mentioned earlier, while you are featured prominently in the Telepathy Tapes, you've been doing research on various phenomena for decades. And I'd really like to hear about that journey, not just exclusively, although we'll talk about that as well, about the autistic savants and the research on ESP and other psychic abilities.
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: So my interest in science really comes from the fact that my father was a scientist with graduate degrees in three different branches of science. And so I grew up with this brilliant father who bought me science kits when I was even four years old, playing with science kits and making crystal radios and soldering together electronic parts and playing with chemistry kits. And what interested me the most, though, were living systems. And my father was a physiologist and he'd take me out in nature and I would get tadpoles and see them turn into frogs and that kind of thing.
So I was a bit of a tomboy and I gravitated towards science as my way of organizing information and making sense of the world. And I loved mathematics. That was another thing that really came easily to me. And I enjoyed having that way of everything just working out. I mean, there was sort of a beauty in that when you're doing math and you solve a problem and then you can see how you can apply that mathematics to some system, it just, for me, it was intuitively rewarding. And so what happened is that I wanted to study behavior because I found that to be what was the most interesting.
And when I discovered that there actually was a field where people were studying that, when I discovered physiological psychology and saw that if you had certain brain lesions in an animal or you removed a certain section of their brain, that they would have a behavioral syndrome as a result. And I thought, "Oh, well, this is really interesting. I really want to map out the brain, understand how it relates to behavior." And so I put together my own curriculum as an undergraduate in neuroscience, because back then it wasn't even a major. And I got jobs doing research as an assistant in various laboratories.
And I was working in, for example, a laboratory where I was doing recordings, making microelectrodes and putting them into the axon of a crayfish and recording the action potential, the electrical activity that was going on. And then seeing what happened if I altered the solution and put in some known pharmaceutical, for example, that would have an effect on, say, calcium channels. That was really interesting work to me. But I didn't really want to continue doing experiments on animals. The thought of doing experiments on cats or anything like that—I could do it on crayfish, but I really couldn't see myself doing it on animals that I regarded as pets. And so I realized that what I was most interested in was human consciousness.
And I had several professors say to me, "Well, Diane, funding in science is really challenging anyway. And you really have the kind of grades and everything that you could get into medical school. You really should go into medical school instead." I thought, "Well, that makes sense." I knew that there were neurosurgeons that were mapping the brain and doing so while the patient would be awake, and the brain itself doesn't have any pain receptors. Before excising a piece of tissue from the brain, they would be doing recordings, stimulations and recordings to see what that area of the brain was involved in. And so I saw it as a way of doing the research I was interested in while being able to help people.
And so when I initially matriculated at Johns Hopkins Medical School, my plan was to become a neurosurgeon. But what I discovered was that how neurosurgeons spent their time was relatively boring compared to what neuropsychiatrists did. And I thought I would be able to, by going into neuropsychiatry, spend more of my time talking with the patient and finding and exploring their consciousness—what their reality is through interviews. And then I saw that brain imaging technologies were just starting to come on board, and I thought that would be the approach. And I just really love talking with people whose reality was just so different from mine. I just thought that was a wonderful thing to explore.
And I was really interested in these syndromes that were mysterious, that really had no explanation for them at all. And when I met Oliver Sacks, who was a hero of mine, I loved his work. And I met him in 1986 and read his book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." And in that book he had this description of these twins who had been institutionalized, who were autistic. And they couldn't do basic things. I mean, they couldn't take care of themselves. They couldn't even do basic arithmetic. And yet at the same time, they could generate prime numbers in six digits. And they would, as a game, go back and forth, saying the consecutive prime numbers to one another. And there's no real good algorithm for prime numbers.
And Oliver Sacks went and found a prime number table and came back with an eight-digit prime number and said that to them. And they just, within like a minute or so, they started giving eight-digit prime numbers that were consecutive. And then they did it with 12 digits, and they even did it with 20 digits. But the computers at the time, in the 60s, could only calculate it to 12 digits. And so here they were exceeding computer capacity at the time, generating prime numbers. Only they said they weren't deriving them, they just saw them just as a pure perceptual experience. And I thought, "Wow, okay, I really want to understand this." And so that's what got me interested in savants.
And there are these case reports of savants throughout—going back hundreds of years actually—where you'll have a child who, for example, never went to school and suddenly they're able to solve complex mathematical problems, or they might know a language they never studied, or they might be able to play a musical instrument without ever having trained. And I thought, "Wow, that is so similar to what people who say that they have psychic abilities"—that's so similar, it's another example of somehow accessing information that you don't think that this person should have access to that information. I mean, they weren't exposed to it. So how could they know that? And so it made me really interested in what savant syndrome can tell us about the brain and consciousness.
And I thought if I could figure out what was going on in their brains, then that would be kind of like the Rosetta Stone for understanding the brain and consciousness in general.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely fascinating. And tell me a little bit about how neuropsychiatry differs from traditional schools of psychiatry. Obviously the ancient ones of Freud and Jung and then cognitive behavioral therapy and all of the various schools that have emerged since then. Specifically, neuropsychiatry uses what type of methodology to help the patient?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, so first of all, let me say that the chairman of my department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins was a neurologist before he became a psychiatrist. So the way that he taught us psychiatry was actually from a neurologist's perspective. And so what does that mean? Well, at the time that I trained in psychiatry, most of the departments in the country were still fairly psychoanalytic in their orientation, whereas Paul McHugh was teaching us about these syndromes that he knew as a neurologist that most psychiatrists never even hear about. So to give you an example, there's a syndrome called Charles Bonnet syndrome. And Charles Bonnet syndrome is where you have somebody who is losing their eyesight, and because they're losing their eyesight, they actually start to hallucinate. And they hallucinate in a way that is really interesting.
I had this patient who came in to see me who had been calling her landlord, complaining on a daily basis because she saw all these people walking around in her apartment, and she thought her landlord was subletting her apartment without her permission. And it was just that she was hallucinating people. Then she'd see somebody sitting over there on her sofa, and it was as real to her as a person—you had a person that all of us would say, "Yes, there's somebody sitting on your sofa." And to her, there was definitely somebody sitting there. And the reason why that's important is that typically, if you think somebody is hallucinating, you put them on antipsychotics and the hallucination goes away.
But if they have Charles Bonnet syndrome, their hallucinations are not a result of something that would be corrected by putting them on a drug that blocks dopamine. Their hallucinations are a result of their going blind. And so what you try to do is you try to see if there's any way in which you can improve their vision. So that's what I mean by neuropsychiatry—there are all of these quirky syndromes that, when you hear about them, they give you a sense of how the brain is our interface and give you an idea of just how it all works. Whereas most psychiatrists at that time were looking more at psychological explanations for things.
And you would have people that would do psychotherapy for schizophrenia, for example. People would be institutionalized for a whole year for psychotherapy for schizophrenia. And so that was such an opposite way of thinking about things. And that's how a neuropsychiatrist does it. And so that was really what I was most interested in.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it seems to me there's a theory that I find interesting about schizophrenia where essentially they assert that it might be a form of filter failure. In other words, if all of the perceptions that are hitting neurotypical sensory organs, we cancel out or negate out like 99.9% of them, right? And the brain attempts to build a cohesive, understandable view of what's out there. And that if that fails and you get all of the perceptions coming at you at once, you get all those people walking through your apartment that you think that your landlord is subletting. But it also leads to this idea which seems to be the flashpoint, if you will, between traditional scientists or traditional materialistic schools of thought and what you think and others like, in varying degrees, Rupert Sheldrake, Professor Penrose, etc.
That consciousness maybe doesn't exist within the brain, right? In other words, Nikola Tesla, very famous inventor, who wrote an entire book about how he didn't come up with any of his ideas. He just, as he put it, grabbed them out of the ether or saw them in the ether, which would be very consistent with what you're saying about the savants that are able to just look up and see the numbers. Am I correct in that? Is that kind of the main point of disagreement here—that the traditional scientific view that most memories, most of consciousness is stored materially in our brain, in the neurology and neural circuits of our brain, and then there are other theories that it is stored externally? And the view seems to really cause quite a bit of heat. And I don't know how much light—maybe help me with that.
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, there's several things I want to comment on. One is something that I find really interesting is that there has never been somebody who is blind who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I did not know that. That's really interesting.
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Yeah. And so these are all data points for me that I lay out there to try to understand—oh, that's a clue. And that's a clue. And so what I've come to conclude is that we have two basic systems, two basic modes of operation by which we use the brain. And one mode is that we have these sensory organs, specialized sensory organs like the eyes and the ears that provide information. And you have parts of the brain that are dedicated to analyzing the information that comes in the form of light or in the form of vibration, for example. And that sensory information is the information that really is orienting us into the here and now. And that's what, during our waking consciousness, that's what we're all consumed with.
Then when we're in dreaming sleep, the brain is actually quieter—the frontal lobes are less active, the left hemisphere less active, and the right hemisphere is predominant, which is the opposite of what it is when we're in our waking time. And so in dreaming sleep, there's this reality that we're living in that doesn't operate by the same rules. We can experience impossible things in that dreaming reality. And we don't even question it. And it's because that system that would question it is shut down.
And we're getting visual imagery in our dreams, and yet our eyes are closed. So where is that visual imagery coming from? And the visual cortex, which is what processes our visual imagery when we've got our eyes open, is still very active. So it's playing a role in processing information. But the idea is, where is that information coming from? And what I think happens with somebody who gets labeled schizophrenic is that those two modalities are bleeding into one another. Like in a lucid dream, you can have a person be dreaming, and then suddenly they realize, "Oh, this is a dream. And I can actually change how this dream goes. I can actually take control and play around with reality within the dream world." Well, so that's what a lucid dream is.
And what can happen with somebody who doesn't have what you're calling the filters is that some of that dream reality can start to be superimposed on what we think of as reality. Another example of that—a good example of that is sleep paralysis. And so sleep paralysis is an instance where you have this sort of superimposition of the dream reality onto your waking life. And when we are in dreaming sleep, our body is paralyzed, and that's so that we don't act out our dreams. And sometimes when we're in a dream, we unconsciously know we're paralyzed, and that's why we're trying to run away, but we can't run away.
And sometimes you can have somebody who wakes up, but that system is a little bit out of phase. And so their body is still paralyzed. And maybe the only thing they can do is maybe blink their eyes. It can last anywhere from less than a minute to several minutes, and then it eventually goes away. But during that period of sleep paralysis, people oftentimes hallucinate. And typically the hallucinations have what's called a diminutive push and little people form—kind of almost like little cartoons or whatever. That's a common way that it can express itself. So what I see is that with people who get labeled as being schizophrenic, it's that they have this blending together, but their bodies aren't paralyzed. They're walking and talking and everything else. So when somebody's blind, they only have the reality that's not generated by the visual from their eyes. So they're not getting two different realities. They're just getting one.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I've actually had that experience once in my life with the paralysis when having a lucid dream. It really freaked me out. And as you said, it totally dissipated after actually probably just a few minutes. But I remember waking up and being kind of like, "Oh, I can't move. Did I have a stroke? Did something go vastly wrong?" And then of course, it went away pretty quickly. So with all of these anomalies and what the Telepathy Tapes, which is the very popular podcast on autistic savants and their ability to communicate seemingly with random number generators, etc., why the brouhaha? Why the Sturm und Drang?
And what we were chatting about earlier seems like almost religious fervor on the school of what I call the citadel of science, which is still ruled pretty much by the materialist worldview that everything is material and that there is no "out there" in terms of things like communication, etc. Why is that happening? Why on this particular issue? Well, they'll leave the quantum theorists alone to sort of like David Deutsch, I love, basically says, "Hey, if it doesn't violate the rules of physics, it's true." Now that's a pretty bold statement, but they kind of leave him alone over there. They leave—well, they didn't leave Rupert Sheldrake alone, but you get my point. And you made a very interesting observation that I'd like you to share again with our viewers and listeners.
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: So when it comes to physics, when you look at Einsteinian physics and quantum physics, they describe such a bizarre world that a lot of physicists themselves say that they don't really fully understand, and yet there's this mathematics behind it that really—people say, "Well, we know it's true because, look, the mathematics all leads us there." And the vast majority of people don't really feel like they really have any expertise to even comment on that. And so they don't. And so there's this permission that physicists have to really think outside of the box. And a lot of their theories are just so different from the reality that most of us ever interface with that it's sort of like it's not infringing upon what we consider to be something that we can even comment on.
Whereas most people have their own theories of human behavior and of what is possible. And most people, there's sort of this amateur psychologist or sociologist, and they realize that people can be fooled, that they can be duped. And people really hate to feel like they've been made a fool of. They would rather—if they've been lied to and they bought the lie—they'd rather attack the person that tells them they bought the lie than to discard the lie. And so the more often something is repeated to you and the earlier it starts being told to you, the more it becomes just one of those truths that you can't attack.
And so when you're going through your training in school in the sciences, and you start talking about the brain, it's like the idea that the brain is what creates consciousness is just—it's such an assumption that is treated as though it's a hard fact. And it's just like, "Don't even go there." I mean, that's kind of the reaction that you get. It's like the whole field of neuroscience is built upon the premise that the brain is what creates consciousness. And so it's like, how can you undermine the very foundation of an entire field that everybody has built? Their own particular research is all predicated on these basic fundamental beliefs that, as I said, are treated like facts.
And so I think that's why it gets so vehemently attacked.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So the planted axiom of something that isn't true just being assumed to be true bedevils the efforts to go closer to the frontier of what actually might be happening. I understand the whole idea about people not wanting to be fooled. Everyone knows the story of Clever Hans, the horse in the early 20th century in Germany, I believe, where its trainer was unconsciously—so not intentionally—doing signaling to the horse, but they later believed that it was his signaling when the horse would do math and it would pound its hoof and then he would do a subtle movement that the horse—horses being very intuitive. Like if he was doing it with a mule, it probably wouldn't have worked.
But horses being more intuitive, so they see that and they're like, "Oh, that's just a trick." I mentioned to you earlier I used to do—I was a professional magician and I did a lot of psychic, what we call effects, and actually stopped doing them because there was a certain group of people who were absolutely convinced that I was a psychic. And I would sit with them and I would say, "No, no, this is an effect and here's how it works." And they would sort of argue with me that, "No, no, you don't understand, Jim. You really are a psychic." And so because I felt like I was misleading them, I actually stopped doing that. And yet then you also look at things like Semmelweis, who did the experiment with handwashing in Vienna. Dr.—male doctors, it was seen as unmanly to wash your hands.
And so Semmelweis noted that all of the women giving birth that were attended by male physicians were dying at a much higher rate of childbed fever than those that were attended by a female midwife. And so he listened to all the theories why this might be true. One was that it was because the priest was ringing the death bell. And so they died by association. And so Semmelweis said, "Well, that's easy to test." He had the priest stop ringing the bell, and the women attended by the men continued to die at much higher rates. But then he instituted a handwashing procedure, and suddenly all of the women's death rates went right down or very close to those that were being attended by the females.
But the tragedy here was that Semmelweis was arrested for a political demonstration that he was taking part in. He lost his position and his replacement, even looking at the data, right, that showed male doctors start washing hands, mothers' death rate declines precipitously. Right? And it was not just a small N equals 1. It was a pretty big number. Basically said, "This is nonsense."
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Why?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: "Why should we be washing our hands?" And they stopped, and women went back to dying at the much higher rate for something like 70 years. And so you're confronted with these sort of two conflicting problems, right? Where on the one hand, people really don't want to be fooled, but on the other hand, you let social mores and things like the male attitude during Semmelweis's era dictate actual people's lives are being lost because of social mores. How does that affect this type of research?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, let me just say that one of the reasons why you have scientists reject what is really obvious data, which is what you're talking about, is that it doesn't fit their theoretical framework. We needed germ theory. Once we had germ theory and people had microscopes and you could actually see that there were these organisms that we can't see them with the naked eye, but that we were still able to validate them with an instrument that aids the eye, then it's like, "Oh, okay." Suddenly it's like, "Oh, okay. Well, yeah, you wash your hands and you have fewer germs, and so, okay, that must be related."
And so how this relates to my work is that I first discovered that these children were being reported as being capable of reading minds over a dozen years ago. I tested this girl, extensive testing with this girl named Haley, who was able to type into an iPad-like device on her tabletop, okay. And just type directly into it. And so when people see the experiments that are done with the letterboards that Kai Dickens has included behind her paywall on the Telepathy Tapes, and they say, "Oh, well, this looks like Clever Hans with the letterboard. How do we know that the letterboard's position isn't giving some kind of unconscious cueing?"
What I say is that if that was the only way in which I had seen these reports, if that was the only circumstance under which people say mind reading is occurring, then I'd say, "Yeah, well, you have a point there. We would need to really analyze this, maybe use AI to analyze the board position or something to see if there's any kind of pattern there." The pattern would have to be far more complicated than Clever Hans in the first place, because counting, all you need to do is just inadvertently send a signal to stop counting when it's the right number of strikes.
Whereas with going from one letter to another or one number to another, where the person is just going beep, beep, beep, like this, and the letterboard isn't moving anywhere near—like the letterboard isn't moving like this. And so it makes it less likely. But I've seen these children, I've seen them type independently into an iPad. I've seen that some children are even able to write it. It's just that not all of these parents and children want to be part of a documentary. And the other thing is that for a lot of these parents and teachers that report this phenomena, they didn't discover it through the letterboard. How they discovered it was something else. They might have had a thought about something and the child responded to that thought.
Like, for example, this one father said that he was in the laundry room wondering what happened to his blue shirt. And then his son came in with the blue shirt to him—examples like that. Or a child who was basically after a parent comes home, a child types onto their letterboard something like, "Gee, you almost got in an accident," and asks them about that, and they're like, "Gee, how did you know? I was in an accident." And it's not them trying to get the child to do a telepathy test. It just comes out where they're like, "Well, wait a minute. Are you reading my mind?" Or the kid goes, "Yeah, I'm reading your mind." And then they start testing them to see, "Well, let me test." And then they're like, "Oh, my gosh." And it didn't fit their worldview. And so they contact me because they are in shock, and they go on the Internet, they do a search. They see that someone with my credentials has actually been investigating these reports for a long time, and they contact me.
And so, using Occam's Razor, you want the simplest theory to explain things. And if what you're saying is the Clever Hans thing, that is not the simplest theory because it doesn't explain all these other cases and examples.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So on that, there seems to be, in my research before having this discussion with you, there seems to be a great deal of nitpicking on the specific sort of, like you said, the letterboard or a variety of things. How could you design a method using the scientific method that would be able to avoid those kinds of what I would view as pretty easy criticisms? "Oh, well, it's because of the board or it's because of that." How can you take the anecdotal data of "Here's your blue shirt"—like, that's very powerful when you hear that. But then how do you—that's N equals 1, right. And how do you do it in a more consistent manner that others can reproduce?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, so let me say first of all, what people want to see is separation between the individual who knows the answer and the individual who's supposed to be typing it. And so in many of these cases, the child is so—they're so attached in a psychological, emotional way to the person who they're dependent upon for practically everything—their parent. And you bring in strangers and they don't—the last thing they want is to be in a separate room from this person with all these cameras on them, if it's for a documentary. And all of these people, like, "Okay, perform." And then you're supposed to also take away the person that is their source of comfort. That just doesn't fly.
And so what I'm doing is I'm looking for cases, and I have some that I'm working with in which you have more than one person who can be a communication partner with them. And so—but they have to have a bond with anybody who's a communication partner. It's interesting. And they need someone—if they're using the letterboard, they need someone to be holding the letterboard. They will not allow you to put the letterboard in a stand. They really want someone to be there holding it for them for whatever reason. But you could have one person who is a communication partner with them doing that and another person that knows the answer and get the separation that way.
And then the other type of experiment that I'm doing, since these children report, and so do their parents and teachers report that they are able to read each other's minds, what I'm doing is I'm separating them. And they each have the person that they're really comfortable with as a communication partner helping them to demonstrate what it is that they're communicating back and forth between them. I think that's the way to do it is when we have these individuals in which we can allow them to have their communication partner right there. It doesn't matter if they're using a board or not, as long as the person holding the board isn't the one who knows the answer.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And why would this not be a universal thing? Why would neurotypical people be unable to do this, whereas you see the phenomenon much more profoundly and explicitly in savants?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, I've given that a lot of thought. I've thought about what is it that is—because it's not just autistic individuals who have some of these experiences. It's just that they're the ones that I think can demonstrate it to the extraordinary degree that people want to see. There's a lot of research that has been around for over 100 years on telepathy and it still hasn't changed the paradigm. And a lot of it is because it's statistically significant, but it's not as compelling as seeing just this kind of 97 to 100% accuracy that you see with these kids.
And so I started thinking, though, about what is the common denominator, common theme among all these people who have these abilities. And it appears to be that they're able to experience their consciousness as outside of the embodied perspective. And in other words, they are either able to have an out-of-body experience at will, which is what people call astral projection. I mean there's various places that teach that. Some of the people who were remote viewers for Stanford Research Institute, like Ingo Swann, did astral projection. You have people who were traumatized starting in early childhood, two, three years old. And that's an age at which if you're severely traumatized, you dissociate very easily as a way of escaping the pain. And those people seem to have more of these abilities as well. And I think it's because they have the ability to dissociate their consciousness from that embodied experience.
People who've had a near-death experience or an out-of-body experience spontaneously because of using dissociatives like ketamine or nitrous oxide. They also, once they've had that, it's like it breaks the psychological barrier that makes you just think of yourself from the embodied perspective. And these autistic children, when I thought—they can't, their bodies are so problematic for them to control on a sensory motor issue. And a lot of them have proprioception issues. And I thought, I wonder if they spend a lot of time outside of their body. And when I asked one of them that, he lit up and he's just like, "Someone finally gets it." He was just—he started typing about it.
And then since then I've had several of them spontaneously say that. And so I really think that's what it is—that they never really bought into this idea that all we are is our body and that the only way to access information is through our direct sensory means.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The other one that I would add to that list would be psychedelics. Probably a lot of people have those types of experience while under psychedelic influence. Which also leads me to the question—as you were talking about them and their bond with the caregiver. Let me do a full disclosure here. I'm a quantum science geek, but strictly layman, I'm just an aficionado. And I was thinking, well, maybe that's because they're quantumly entangled with the caregiver. And that is a whole different thing in theory of physics. But it could port over here, I think, with people actually minds being quantumly entangled with one another, right?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Oh yeah. I mean, well, yeah, I have a brother who's a theoretical physicist with expertise in AI and quantum physics. And he and I had this discussion just yesterday about how now we're all entangled. That's the nature of—that's what modern physics tells us is we're all entangled. So really the question really becomes more of, given that we're all entangled with one another, how is it that you can selectively choose the individual that you're—that individual out of this whole network, how do you pick that individual that you can access just that information? And so that's really more the question.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So if you were going to present this as a hypothesis that you would ask other people to share or experiment with, how does this fit into the paradigm of the classic, take no one's word for it, the classic scientific method, or is some sort of adjustment needed to have—like, for example, would it be great if like there were a hundred people doing this research and everyone was contributing that way? Is there an underlying protocol that could be widely shared that would add much more to the research? Or am I just being naive there?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, when you say—I mean, I'm not sure what you mean by a widely used protocol. I mean, there's—yeah, I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I guess I mean like—is there a way, is there any art to the investigation? In other words, could you hand me a protocol and then me give it to a different PhD in neuroscience and have him or her just using that particular protocol duplicate what you've been finding in others like you?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, one of the things that—let me just say this, one of the things that's fascinating about this research is that there's something called the sheep-goat effect within parapsychology. And what that describes is the fact that if somebody is a diehard skeptic that walks into a room and just says "This is impossible. Show me. I dare you. There's just no way"—it seems to shut this, their consciousness seems to actually impact the experiment. I mean it's—there's this issue of the observer effect and it can work for or against you. And it's one of the biases within science. It's that you can have somebody that expects things to go well and they go well and then you have someone else comes in and they expect things to go poorly and they go poorly.
And to me, that's a statement about consciousness itself and belief and that somehow there's interaction there. And when you think about the work of John Wheeler, who is a physicist who talked about how the way to think about it is that we co-create our reality. And so the act of measurement—when you have like the double-slit experiment where you have a photon or an electron that can either act as a wave and interfere with itself and go through both slits simultaneously, or it can act like a particle when you are measuring it and forcing it to go through one or the other slit.
And so it's like if you're not observing it acts like a wave and just goes through both. And if you're observing it acts like a particle. And so I think it's a similar sort of phenomenon that's occurring with the sheep-goat effect where it's that if you have somebody who comes in there and they're just like, "There's no way this thing's going to happen." They're part of the measuring system and they're forcing it to go the way that they expected. So you have to have people who are engaged in the research who are open to the possibility. They don't have to believe in it, they don't have to believe in it, but they just have to be open to the possibility.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Are you aware of the work of Dr. John Sarno on the mind-body?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: No.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So he was a doctor here in New York who was practicing rehabilitative medicine at NYU and he was really disturbed by the fact that he really wasn't helping his patients using the protocols of the era. And I think this is in the 1950s and 1960s. And so he got the idea that a lot of the physical problems that he was seeing, the most common were back problems, were not the result of a physical disease or problem, but were in fact the problem of suppressed emotions. And he called this tension myositis syndrome because he noticed in his experimentation that the area of the body the patient was complaining about when investigated seemed to have less oxygenation to it than a typical other part of the body that wasn't hurt. But as part of—he was amazingly successful. He's written several books about it.
His cure rate was very difficult to argue with. I myself read his stuff and had some of those issues. And just reading his books actually cured a neck that was frozen. And literally I had gone the complete conventional route. They put me in traction, they gave me the cortisone shot. They did all of that. None of that worked. Reading his "Mind Over Back Pain" after seven times, the first time I read it, I was like, "This is the biggest pile of horseshit I've ever seen." And threw the book across the room and then decided, "Well, maybe I should give it another go." So in other words, I was open to the possibility. But then Dr.
Sarno himself said that one of the things that he found was by excluding people who were that person who comes into the room and says, "I don't care what you show me, I don't believe it," he would use that as a filter. His initial diagnosis of the patients, if they literally said to him, "There is no way possible that this could be in my mind," he found the same as you were just commenting on—those patients didn't matter. Literally, he could be of no assistance to them.
And so I kind of thought about that as also adjacent, at least to the placebo effect, right? I'm fascinated by placebos and it seems that one of the best ways for a placebo to have the highest amount of efficacy is for it to be a shot given by a person wearing a white coat that after their name says MD and in a hospital-like environment or a clinical-like environment. So I think that there's a tremendous amount of evidence that we are in fact co-creating things as we go along. And so, I mean, we discussed earlier the Penrose-Hameroff theory of orchestrated objective reduction, which is microtubules in the brain are doing quantum processes. Consciousness is out here. But the next question I want to ask is I talk to a lot of neuroscientists and I ask, "Define consciousness for me."
And usually they laugh before giving me their answer. But almost all of them say, "You're bringing up the hard problem." So it seems to me that we don't right now even have a generally accepted working hypothesis of consciousness. Am I correct in that assessment?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: We don't have a consensus of it. I mean, people use the word to refer to different things. The hard problem of consciousness is really described as we don't understand how the brain creates consciousness. And what I argue is that, well, if you drop the assumption that the brain creates consciousness, then the hard problem goes away. And it's like, why create a problem for yourself, especially a hard one?
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So what you're—at least I'm inferring—it's a bit like astronomy during the times of Ptolemy. It was useful, right? Like it was completely wrong, Ptolemy's theory was completely wrong, but was very useful in helping navigate, etc. And then they kept drawing these ellipses around to correct for the problem until Copernicus and others came along and said, "Hey, I could solve your problem really easily. Let's just move the Earth here and the sun here and all of the ellipses and everything disappear."
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Exactly. And that's what happened to me when I inverted the question and I said, "Well, what if consciousness is primary and fundamental and not derivative of the brain? And what if the brain is just our navigational tool for consciousness?"
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that's actually been a—if you are a history buff like myself, that's not been a terribly controversial point of view. If you look at the history of thought, like Greeks, for example, had been speculating about that thousands of years ago. What is it about our view of the scientific method today? Because the way I look at the world is the truth ought to be predictive, right? In other words, look for use. Don't get hung up on your theory or your structure of doing—if it doesn't follow this particular path, then we're just going to reject it, right? Who right now, what other people, researchers, etc. are doing sort of cutting-edge work on this that is similar to your own?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, I mean, there are quite a few doctors, scientists who've come to the same conclusion that I have. There's a growing movement of people that are post-materialists. And so for example, I mean, there's this scientific academy now that I was one of the people that helped to found it, titled the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materialist Sciences. And you can consider yourself to be post-materialist and have various different theories. You don't have to all agree on the same post-materialist model. I mean, if you believe that quantum physics is key to understanding consciousness and brain function, you're already a post-materialist. Okay, so that's kind of the entry level.
And so once you enter into that, then you start to find that—oh, then you start exploring. Because that's how I was originally approaching the whole savant thing. I was thinking, "Okay, it's obvious that these savants, what they're doing in solving some of these prime numbers or generation or whatever it is they're solving, it's as though they're considering all possible answers at once and then just collapsing it down to one." Kind of like how an advanced quantum computer would, where you, as opposed to a digital computer. And so that's how I was originally thinking about it. But then I started looking at things like telepathy. And you can't explain it by just looking at quantum physics as applied to the brain.
I mean it's harder to model it that way. And so it was when I started really thinking about consciousness as primary and fundamental and that the brain is a navigational tool. And so what do I mean by it's a navigational tool? Let's just break it down into things that we know about brain function. So and these are things that some of this I talk about in my book "The ESP Enigma," which really provides a user-friendly description of things like quantum physics and string theory and chaos theory and whatnot. That really is using what is accepted scientific theory but saying, "Okay, let's apply this to really thinking about consciousness." So if we look at the brain, one of the oldest areas of the brain is the hippocampus.
The hippocampus is our—it contains our GPS system. Okay, you have cells in there that start to respond to our location in space, our location in place. But they also have a grid of our environment. And so like big cats will—those grid cells will start—they'll start being activated if there's an animal within their territory. So they have a sense of their territory that's mapped out in their hippocampus. The hippocampus plays a role in that mapping. And then when in what you think of as the external reality when there's an animal in that territory they get a signal. Okay. And then there's also these cells that take into account what your head position is as well. Well, so these are—so this is the internal GPS.
Well, there's also another function of the hippocampus and that is for mapping out memory, which is—so we also have a temporal map for our life that the hippocampus plays a huge role in. So then I think of the frontal lobes as being more like our steering mechanism where we put our focus, where we put our attention. If you think about the brain that way, that we have this space-time that we're trying to navigate. Okay. And some of these abilities that we call psi that are really just about navigating space-time that's non-local. I think it involves these systems and one of the things that meditation—people talk about, "Oh, meditation is a tool for developing your psi abilities."
Well, when you're doing meditation, it's not just about quieting your mind, although that plays a role because a lot of our thoughts are just noise. It's just us playing a recurrent tape of useless nonsense. And if you can quiet that down. And then the second component of meditation is focus and really have more and more of a laser focus, then you can hone in on that which you're wanting to connect with. And so then that's what, when I was saying earlier about how we're all entangled. We're all entangled with one another. And I mean, we're in the sea of entanglement.
The question is, what is different about those individuals who seem to be able to navigate that sea of entanglement and zone in right there—the remote viewers who could use geophysical coordinates and go, "Oh, boom. Okay, I see what's—I see that secret Soviet facility or I see that downed plane in the jungle, and I could tell you exactly where it is." They're using that laser focus ability to navigate space-time to get through all. So it's using entanglement. But you also need the ability to navigate that entangled universe.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that is what fascinates me. Again, look for use not meaning as much. What other ways exist right now for people who are interested and open to this? Like, are there methods—you mentioned meditation? I think I love sensory deprivation tanks, Lilly tanks. They're pretty amazing because I have tried and tried traditional meditation and not as great at it as I could be, but Lilly tanks, they're pretty cool. Are there other methods that people could improve these types of abilities?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, I think that training, I think so much of it is training and developing your focus. And there's different types of meditation. Some people do Kundalini yoga and they develop these abilities through that. So yeah, I wouldn't say that there's a single route there. I think that people have to play around with it. The first thing is for people to believe it's possible that this. And then the second thing is to learn how to shift your awareness to gain mastery over where you put your awareness. And so there's a lot of techniques in which people learn.
It's like when you go in for like a relaxation course, sometimes they're like, "Well, focus on your toes, focus on different parts of your body." And what you're doing is you're shifting your awareness to different parts of your body. And then you want to start shifting your awareness to some space just slightly outside of your body. And so it's a trainable exercise. I mean, it's something—I'm thinking about teaching a course on it on how to develop these abilities, because I think that they're innate in all of us just to—people have just developed them to different degrees.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And that's the part that makes me so interested in it. And like, if we could train some of these abilities now, that would obviously be pretty impactful for a variety of things, which is why, no doubt, the governments of the United States and Soviet Union during that period when it was the USSR and communist did decades of research on these type of abilities. And as I was doing my homework for my chat with you, I'd forgotten about this, but Hans Berger, the EEG in 1924, he was called every name in the book by the then prevailing authorities on the idea. And they said it was impossible, that it was absolutely crazy. And then like 20, 30 years, it's kind of like the germ theory informed with Semmelweis. Right. Other theories came online that were like, "No, Hans is actually absolutely right."
And now, of course, the EEG is part of any annual—at least my annual physical. Is something like that needed here or what do you think?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, I mean, yeah, so the story behind the EEG development is really interesting because Hans Berger had this telepathic experience with, I believe it was his sister. And that's why he developed the EEG, because he thought that might be a way of proving that, and that might be part of why he got so much flak. But to this day, the EEG is better correlated with levels of consciousness or states of consciousness than any other tool we have.
And I'm going to be using quantified EEGs in my research moving forward because I think that they can be a powerful tool, but the way that I'm going to use them is doing simultaneous recordings of both the members of the telepathic pair to really see what's going on between the two of them, as opposed to just putting it on the child and looking at their brain pattern.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Now, you've also done work with twins. Tell us a little bit about that. And do fraternal twins differ materially from identical twins?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Yeah, yeah. The identical twins are—I mean, they have the same exact genetics, whereas fraternal twins have nothing more in common than just a brother and two brothers or two sisters or a brother and a sister. There's—so they only share a percentage of their genetics. And the identical twins seem to have more in common with one another depending upon at what point they were separated from one another. So during embryological development, if they haven't separated by a certain day, I forget which day it is. It might be day 10 or whatever, but within—pretty early on, then they become Siamese twins and they're conjoined.
And so it's like if the later on in that process before you would become conjoined, that you have that separation, it seems like the more they have in common with one another. And the twins that I find the most fascinating are the identical twins who are raised apart.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I was fascinated when I was a young guy, I grew up in Minnesota, and there was a popular researcher there who did some amazing work on identical twins separated at birth and finding that right down to their favorite beverage, their favorite brand of tobacco. That was back when everybody smoked. Even though they had been separated physically, they had many of the exact same mannerisms, likes, dislikes, etc. You mentioned that you're going to be using a new technique. What's the future for you and your research? What are you working on now that is different than either in methodology or in what you're trying to discover or uncover than your past work?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, as I mentioned, doing the QEEGs, and I'm doing that in collaboration with some scientists from the University of Arizona as part of it, and combining that with some questionnaires to really try to understand the phenomenon itself. So what I mean by that is, for example, if the person who's sending the stimulus over to the other one, if they're doing it by saying silently to themselves, whatever the number or the word is, is the child receiving it as something that they hear or are they seeing it or is it that they just know it—what is their experience? Can—for say, an article? Another thing would be, does it make a difference if they just silently say the word to themselves?
Or do they have to spell out each—in their mind, spell out each letter as they're trying to transmit it to the child? So just really trying to break it down into exactly what is happening there from their experience, and then what shows up on the EEGs as happening? And because so many of these high percentage, if not all of them have synesthesia, you can't assume that if it's being transmitted verbally from one end that it's being received verbally from the other. I mean, so many of these children have these crosses in their senses. I was talking with this child the other day who hears sounds associated with color. It's more common to have synesthesia where you hear a sound and then see a color associated with that sound.
But this is seeing the color and then hearing a sound associated with it. You have over 100 different types of synesthesia. So I'm really wanting to explore the different types that these children have. And to see how that plays a role in some of their extraordinary abilities. I mean, we know, for example, from Daniel Tammet, who is a famous autistic savant who can recite pi to over 25,000 digits effortlessly because he just sees the answers as this sort of ticker tape parade of different colored shapes. Because he has a different colored shape associated with each number. His extraordinary memory is definitely tied in with his synesthesia. I'm interested in understanding to what degree does synesthesia play a role in these children's abilities.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Fascinating. I know several people with synesthesia and it is wild when you are interacting with them in terms of what they're seeing and hearing. And I find it absolutely fascinating. I'm also really just keeping it in my mind, your comment about theory preventing them seeing it because theory won't accommodate it. I'm really fascinated by that idea. What other aspects of post-materialism would make up that theory? Just asking you to speculate because I do find, I'm really taken with that idea that if your theory is—you're adhering to a theory that negates something over here and says, no, X, Y and Z are impossible, therefore we're not going to even look at them. You got to improve theory. Right. And so what other things would you associate with a post-materialist, maybe new paradigm for scientific inquiry?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, I think that there's various theories that fall into that post-materialist camp, and so one of them is this idea that consciousness is primary. And you have a number of people who think about consciousness that are what are called idealists, kind of like Plato's forms. And they really believe that everything is consciousness, everything is mind. And so that is sort of the other extreme from materialism. And I think that there's some evidence for that view that everything is kind of consciousness. It's interesting to sort of do thought experiments with that in mind.
We were talking about lucid dreaming earlier where once you realize that you are in a dream and you can start to play around with what happens next. Well, what if what we think of as reality is just another type of dream and we can manipulate reality? And so one of the ways that I play this game is I'll play solitaire. And when I'm playing solitaire, I'll see the cards laid out in front of me. And I'll think, "Okay, if I—what is there a single card that if I drew that card next that I would be able to uncover a lot of different cards."
Because if I just got that card, then I'd be able to take this card and I'd be able to—if you get the idea, and so I'll do that. And it's pretty uncanny how often if I can think of a card that would accomplish that, that card shows up. And so I'm not doing anything that defies the laws of probability from the standpoint of I'm not pulling an extra eight after I already have four eights out there. I'm not pulling a fifth one out. I'm not violating any kind of laws by which we understand. But I am doing something that is beyond what you would think is just pure chance.
And so then it makes me think about, is there an influence there that we can have an influence within this realm of possibility. And it's a fun thing to play with. But to me it goes along with this idea that even what we think of as reality itself is an illusion. And then it's an illusion of the mind.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What fascinates me is Schrödinger wrote the book "What is Life?" and is famous for saying that when the final analysis is done, the number of minds in the universe is one. And of course, he of very famous cat fame. Schrödinger's cat was a thought experiment where the cat was in a superposition state before the observer opened the box, making the cat both dead and alive. And if you think about that for too long, it can be—it can either get you really speculating or you can, it can get you in the "I'm going to put that in the too hard problem." But I also think maybe one of the things that I find fascinating that I've learned from you is I've always been fascinated by quantum physics and mechanics.
And it is almost eerie that I'm also really fascinated by the Tao and by Eastern philosophy because they seem to be merging in terms of what the quantum folks—I mean, right now the quantum folks are doing the mind-boggling, mind-boggling tests of retrocausality which we don't have time to really get into. But essentially it means that doing something in the future can actually erase quantum information from the past. And the problem is the experiments are actually proving that to be correct and trying to get your mind around that is, at least for me, pretty crazy. I'm sure you're familiar with that research. What do you think about retrocausation?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: I think that our sense of time, I agree with Einstein that our sense of time is an illusion.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: And I also really, I think of us, I like the idea of us living in a block universe in which there's space-time and we're navigating space-time, but it's not a static block universe. It's dynamic. And so when you have a dynamic system like that, then you can have things like retrocausation. And this goes along with the idea that the universe is evolving. You can't have a static block universe and then still think that evolution occurs. And so to me, I think that as hard as it can be to wrap our minds around some of these concepts, there's good theoretical basis for it. And I think that it's actually good exercises for us to do.
I mean, some of these traditions, like the Japanese would give you these koans that are sort of nonsensical, but the act of meditating on some of these things that are so impossible to meditate on actually can help to liberate us from this very rigid linear way that we tend to approach information and gives us a more expanded view of it. And I think that's one of the reasons why those things exist in the first place—it's trying to expand us so that we can actually imagine something. And once you are able to imagine it, then you're a step closer to realizing it. The trick is can you imagine it? And it seems like once we're able to imagine something, somebody will find a way of manifesting it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, that was a famous quote from Picasso that if you could imagine it, you could make it real. And that the first step in making it real was the ability to imagine it. This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation for me. I am—sometimes I, when I go deep on this stuff, it's just like—my wife can always tell she's like, when she sees me at the end of the day, she's like, "You've been really going down a bunch of rabbit holes, haven't you?" Because it does, it's very difficult to understand that we are all conditioned, we are all socially conditioned vastly more than we are even aware and that when you feel uncomfortable, it's that conditioning pushing back.
I think at least that's a little theory of mine and that you've got to continually press against it if you want to learn anything new. Because I think I agree with you in terms of the world is not as commonly perceived. I'm not smart enough to be able to figure out the way it really is. But at least I do understand the idea of consensus reality and social conditioning and all of that and all the implications for it. And I really love your phrasing it as if you can't—if you don't have a theory for it, you will literally be blind to it until you have that theory. And I like the reference to the microscopic world. We weren't tuned into the microscopic world because we had no theory of it. Because we couldn't look into it.
We couldn't see until the microscope came along. And then suddenly we got to tune in and germ theory and all of that proceeded apace. What's next for you in terms of a project? I know the one you've already described to me, but are you planning a book? Are you planning classes? What's next?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Yeah, so I am working on a book that is going to talk about—the title of it, the working title of it right now is "Misunderstood." And it's about a lot of misunderstandings. One misunderstanding is just how I was misunderstood as a scientist trying to explore these sort of taboo areas. Another is how these autistic children have been misunderstood. And then another section of it is about how a lot of science has been misunderstood. How we think the brain works, I believe is full of misunderstandings and then talking about how we misunderstand ourselves and put unnecessary limits on us. So that's one of the things I'm working on and working on the documentary with Ky about my research and this research, as I mentioned with the QEEGs.
I'm also posting on X and my handle there is @DrHennacy H-E-N-N-A-C-Y and it's 41125. And if people want a copy of my book, I'm the only one who has physical copies of it so they can reach me through my website and learn some of the scientific foundation for why I even think this stuff might be possible.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, I think it is absolutely fascinating and thank you for giving us so much time to discuss it. At the end of this podcast, we always ask all of our guests the same thing. Well, we don't ask you. We actually are going to make you the empress of the world. You can't kill anyone and you can't put anyone in a re-education camp, but what we are going to do is hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that is going to incept the entire population of the Earth, the sentient population. And maybe that's more than humans, but you're going to incept them.
They're going to wake up whenever their morning is the next day, and they're going to say, "You know, unlike all the other times when I woke up with a great idea and never ever acted on it, I'm actually going to act on these two things starting today." What are you going to incept in the world's population?
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Well, what would I tell them to start doing right away? I think the biggest message is for people to develop a relationship with themselves that is—that's a deep connection and a belief in themselves that can really help them to access their full potential. And a lot of it is about really taking a look at what your conditioning has been, okay. And treating that conditioning—those little voices that say these limiting things to us, "Oh, you can't do that," and take that conditioning and treat it like it is the chrysalis that you are going to break out of and become the butterfly and test out your new wings.
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Beautiful inception. I love Bucky Fuller's remark that there is nothing about a caterpillar that suggests a butterfly. And we often sometimes limit ourselves in thinking about ourselves to, "I'm just a caterpillar and I'm always going to be a caterpillar." So I love those inceptions. Thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for being on Infinite Loops.
Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
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