Research Neuroscience: Our Brains Can Be Tricked to Improve Health or Cause Disease and Why The Telepathy Tapes Lacked Scientific Evidence
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Scientists are very, very difficult people. You know, even if you show them data, they need a lot of time, a lot of replications, a lot of studies that would do the same thing again and again until they're convinced, and for a good reason, because that's how we make progress.

Sometimes you have to wait for certain scientists to die out before you can have new people come in and introduce new paradigms and new ideas and also new kinds of thinking.

Since we have social media, we have certain intimations that we should not trust, resources that we used to previously trust. I wonder if you feel like the culture that we live in is presenting a new set of challenges for science and for belief. I mean, we're bombarded with information. It's difficult for us to decide what are credible sources, who are credible people.

It's difficult for us to even sift through the information. You know, we have to choose our sources, our avenues of information. And as a result, science is going to change. There is no question about it, particularly social science, Lance, because technology is changing at an evolutionary rate that is faster than our biology. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is the place we break down how we understand our realities.

This is the place where we break down reality itself. We are interested in exploring the intersection of science and the spiritual experience. We believe, as many of you do, that there are things that we experience that can't always be quantified by traditional methods of science or by a materialist viewpoint. Today we're going to do something very special in that we're going to speak to a neuroscientist.

His name's Amir Raz. He's the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention at the Department of Psychiatry at McGill and the SMBD Jewish General Hospital. His PhD is in Computation and Information Processing. He's a diplomat, though, of the American Board of Psychological Hypnosis. This is a neuroscientist who understands very well the relationship between attention networks and attentional planes in the brain and how we construct relationships.

The human experience. So his research spans the neural and psychological substrates of attention, of self-regulation, placebo, expectation, consciousness. The reason we wanted to talk to him is that he recently wrote a book called The Suggestible Brain.

And this interested us very much. I think it will interest you as well. He brings together aspects of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the things that we know occur in our culture with fascinating case studies of patients with disorders ranging from Tourette syndrome that he can see essentially resolved with a simple trick of the brain.

He talks about false pregnancies, people who are told that they're lactose intolerant but can tolerate dairy in an appropriate psychological study.

He shows how suggestion can cut deep into the brain and shake our fundamental knowledge of our own values and our perception of the reality. So what we decided to do was to present someone who intimately understands how our brains are shaped, how our behavior can change our experience of reality, and we have brought him here.

An example in the telepathy tapes of experiences that cannot be explained. We ask him to help us understand extrasensory abilities. We ask him to help us understand a framework of telepathy and an understanding of consciousness and time.

Dr. Raz, as you will not be surprised, adamantly defends the scientific method, believes in it deeply, and also admits that there are things that he has experienced in his research and in his personal life that he cannot explain. However, it's important for us to hear a perspective that helps us frame how we even frame these conversations. There are things we can't explain. There are things that we can't understand. We know that ancient wisdom, and as we like to call it, hippie wisdom, is not the only

has shown that there is something, that there is a class of things that we cannot explain. However, science is catching up and it really takes someone like Dr. Roz, who's pulling from neuroscience, psychiatry, and hypnosis to help us understand really the changing nature of our conscious experience of reality.

To say that Dr. Roz is skeptical of some of the claims that are being made in the telepathy tapes, some of the explanations that we've had in episodes with Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Jeffrey Kripal that have really looked at extrasensory ability and tried to make sense of what people are experiencing, I would say is an understatement. Yeah.

He is very hesitant. However, he also describes and he accepts some of our, I would say, challenges that the scientific understanding of the world has to move forward in a very specific way. And it was enlightening to hear both his curiosity and hesitance.

to accept what he calls fantastical claims without a fantastical body of evidence. So he walks us through that. A couple of caveats for today's show. We recorded this during an intense series of power outages. It was almost...

you know if i want to be metaphysical about it like the subject matter itself was so electric that it was causing the power to short out so we are recording this new introduction and we are going to jump right into the heart of the episode right after mime welcomes dr ross dr ross welcome to the breakdown break it down

We're very excited to get to talk to you specifically about the suggestible brain. There's so much overlap here with so many things that Jonathan and I find so compelling about our understanding of how to view the brain and how it impacts our physical and our mental wellness. The conversation that's sort of evolving is one about consciousness. I'll just sort of establish what the conundrum is.

The notion that consciousness exists outside of us in some sort of collective way, right? The collective unconscious or the collective consciousness, as some people call it. This is a topic that Jonathan and I, we've been doing this podcast for, we're in our fourth year here, right? This is a topic that keeps knocking at our door, right?

And, you know, people in very esoteric alternative circles talk about the Akashic Records, which have been spoken about for thousands of years. Energy workers talk about tapping into consciousness, tapping into someone else's consciousness. You know, we have people who who have exceptional abilities that I often cannot describe and

And they're all using the same vocabulary. And what they're saying is that, you know, you can slice into, you can access consciousness, you can access other people's consciousness. You can, you know, understand what's going to happen in the universe because it's in the collective consciousness. I wonder if you can kind of help us sort of get a framework for what are we talking about? Well, I mean, what you're raising now is,

is like stuff that goes into the realm of the paranormal. There's no...

really good way to address it other than through speculation. Most of when we're talking about, I mean, for example, take quantum physics. There are a lot of people in quantum physics who make all kinds of claims using words like entanglement and superposition and quantum tunneling and other things that are really extremely technical, but have some appeal with the with the lay public.

about how they could serve as a metaphor for consciousness and for even collective consciousness. And some people talk about the fact that tables have consciousness and planets have consciousness and the universe has an expanding consciousness, just like the universe is expanding in dark matter and stuff like that.

it becomes very unwieldy. I, as a cognitive neuroscientist, as somebody who does neuropsychology, works with autistic children and autistic adults, and have seen a lot of neuropsychological cases both in the lab and in the field, in real life, in ecological settings, I'm not sure I buy into this entire thing. Collective consciousness is

is often in the eye of the beholder. There are things that happen and they are very remarkable when you put people in a group. There's no question about that. I mean, there's all kinds of interesting group dynamics

There's all kinds of interesting interactions, sometimes unconscious interactions that are very interesting in a group setting. And they have to do with the fact that you put people within a situation where they're talking to one another, not talking to one another, looking at one another, expecting some reactions from one another. I think we all know or most of us know about the story about Clever Hans.

a very remarkable horse in Europe that was reportedly or purportedly conversant in math. People came and asked him some math questions and the horse would answer by stomping. The correct number of stomps would indicate. So people would say, how much is three plus two? And the horse would stomp five times. And this really puzzled a lot of people in Europe, including people who were interested in animal consciousness.

And, you know, people thought that, you know, this is a remarkably smart horse and very advanced and so on. And he was. But he was smart in other ways. He was smart in reading very subtle cues from the people who asked the question. And this was, you know, very clearly demonstrated when they got a simpleton to ask the question. Somebody who didn't know the answer, the horse didn't know the answer.

So the horse was basically stomping and looking very carefully at the person and picking up on very subtle changes, such as changes in breathing, changes in muscle tension, changes in facial expression to be able to know when to stop. And this was not a I mean, I wouldn't describe or label it under the appellation of consciousness research, but it's very interesting. It's a very interesting ability of an animal to pick up on these things without being specifically trained to do so. At the end of the day,

I'm more of a skeptical when it comes to these things. And it's also based on some personal experience, both in the lab and outside of the lab. Look, when I started listening to the telepathy tapes, I thought to myself, wow, these are definitely emotional stories and dramatic narratives.

you know, encapsulated within a certainly a well edited and smoothly sort of packaged product. I mean, the podcast is very pleasant to listen to. But as the episodes unfolded, it became clear, at least to me, that I didn't need the full seven hours.

to notice that the evidence provided there to support these, you know, I don't know what to call them, fantastic tales. The evidence was really subpar. From a scientific standpoint, extraordinary claims really require extraordinary evidence. This is a maxim statement.

attributed to the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan. You need robust evidence when you evaluate claims that go against the scientific understanding. But there are so many times in which science has expanded its understanding of what's possible. When William Sutherland, who developed craniosacral therapy before him, we believed that the skull was totally fused and none of the bones were movable.

And it was through his experimentation that we developed a whole new understanding of how the body works. When Andrew Weil in the 70s said food was important to our health and well being, the medical institution for 30, 40 years laughed at him and told him he was ridiculous.

When others like Peter Levine and Gabor Mate and others even before them said that our childhood traumas have impacts on our physiology and how our immune system functions, they were laughed out of the room and said that this is ridiculous and that the body is purely mechanistic and we should treat it the way that Western medicine treats it and everything else is nonsense. MindBalance Breakdown is supported by Spot and Tango. The only gates I keep, Maim, are in our yard.

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C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S dot com slash MBB for 20% off your first order. How do you reconcile the need for curiosity and maybe there is not a over abundantly clear scientific data to prove that something exists while understanding that, especially in the realm of consciousness and altered states of consciousness and what we know to be

possible is still being understood by science and we may not have the tools yet in science to truly prove these without a reasonable doubt. First of all, everything that you say is true, period. I mean, there's no, there's not, there's nobody can contest anything that you just said. I mean, these are just true things. Science is just a tool. People should not get, you know, too religious about it. Science is a tool. It's not a worldview.

It's a tool. It's a way to gather evidence, empirical evidence usually, but it's a way to gather evidence. It's a way to think methodologically, to create experiments, to do research, to study something systematically. That's what science is. Science does not preclude the existence of supernatural forces. There are many things that science is not very useful for.

But there are many things that science is extremely useful for. And it's our job as humans to take from science what it can help us with and realize that sometimes science is not the best way to go. When I was a graduate student, I can tell you a funny anecdote. When I was a graduate student, I used to moonlight on the side and I used to do magic shows.

This is how I made some money, and this is how I had some nice social interactions from friends to dates to you name it. And one day, we were doing rounds at the hospital where I was rotating through, and one of the patients there, an elderly woman, looked at me and said, weren't you the

Weren't you the magician that I just saw? And the doctor, the attending physician, took me aside after that and said to me, were you that magician? And I said, yes, I was. I don't remember all the people in the crowd, but it's quite possible that she was there and she saw me. And he says, I really want you to stop. And I said, why?

I was really shocked. I mean, why? He said, you can't be like a serious neuroscientist, like a neuropsychologist, somebody who studies the brain. You cannot be somebody with the cachet of a brain scientist and do magic on the side. And that really, to me, is the apotheosis. It's the prime example of how some people, not all, but some people view science. They view it through a very narrow lens, elitistic lens.

you know, something that is only reserved to a few. And if you do something else, you're contaminating the, you know, the whole profession or something like that. Not only that I don't see it like that, I actually see it the opposite way.

I think that being a musician, being a magician, being an artist enhances your scientific insights. It allows you to investigate things more. It gives you more ability to ask questions and so on. Curiosity, something that you mentioned before, is one of the key fuels of a scientist.

as it is a key ingredient in the life of an artist or a musician and so on. But without curiosity, you cannot be a good scientist. What I wonder if we can get into is there's two categories of things that we know to be true. And one of those categories involves that people can acquire knowledge

exceptional abilities after things such as a stroke, an accident. We had Elizabeth Krohn on, a woman, a very kind of normal housewife who was struck by lightning and she was synesthetic after. But in addition to becoming synesthetic, she started seeing colors around people's heads, which

energy workers call auras, and she had never heard of this before. She didn't know why she was seeing emanations of frequency around people's bodies. She also started having, they weren't dreams. She started having precognitive nocturnal events that she would record

Many of which did not come true, but some of them came true with specificity of the Sully Sullenberger plane that flew upside down. She saw it in a dream before it happened and cataloged it. And she said to her husband, why would I have a vision of a plane flying upside down? She would see images of the numbers of flights and the number of people that were killed on flights, and she cataloged it all.

Now, this was a woman with no concept of what was happening to her after she had a near-death experience, after being struck by lightning, right? And yes, that's also anecdotal. She actually wrote a book with Jeffrey Kripal, who's a professor and talks about sort of the religious authenticity of some of her spiritual revelations that came to her after being knocked out by lightning. So we know that there are people who

seem to acquire musical ability, right? We have all these fascinating one-off case studies of exceptional things that the brain will do when in a compromised or somewhat altered state. So we know that some of these things exist. And what's interesting to me about this one category is that the nomenclature that people are using is identical to the nomenclature that has been used for thousands of years

even by people who don't know of this nomenclature, meaning Elizabeth Crone had this near-death experience. She came back with... She was on the pavement for two minutes, and she came back with a download of...

of an understanding of a plane of consciousness that, yes, sounds a lot like quantum mechanics. It sounds a lot like what mystics have talked about. It talks about a spiritual understanding that for thousands of years people have talked about that this woman had no access to until she woke up from that pavement, right? So this is sort of one category. We know that exceptional, unusual things happen in the brain that facilitate a set of abilities, right?

Or information, right? I can't explain that. But this second set that is dealt with in the telepathy tapes is...

is individuals with what we might describe as an extension of savant abilities. So we know savant abilities exist, and they often exist in nonverbal populations, in populations where otherwise these are individuals who would be institutionalized. People wouldn't assume that there's someone in there, right? And we're learning more about this. And what the telepathy tapes is tapping into is what if we start to see an understanding of...

consciousness as part of an ability set that possibly is preserved in an otherwise non-verbal, you know, by all assessment, an intellectually or developmentally disabled individual. What if, in addition to other savant abilities, which we know exist, we can expand our consciousness to accept that perhaps individuals who in particular are non-verbal

have an access to intuitive abilities? Like, let's call it that. I don't have to call it telepathy. Intuitive abilities, you know, some sort of other kinds of understanding and communication. Can we include that in our understanding of the incredible things that the brain can do? When I listen to the telepathy tapes, I try to listen to it with as an open mind as possible.

But I can't because I am who I am and I bring my own set of biases into it, just like you do, just like Jonathan does, just like any person would. Even when we say, oh, I'm going to be objective, you can't be objective. I mean, you are who you are and you bring your self-grooming and your education and your life experience into it. In my world, there's no problem with the supernatural.

I have no problem with people claiming whatever they want to claim. As a matter of fact, I have some people who I know who claim that the earth is flat. And, you know, I know that it's legal in this country still to say that the earth is flat. But we have some evidence that this is not the case. Now, they're allowed to claim it. We have evidence to show that it's not, you know, the case, but they're allowed to say it.

In a similar way, people can claim, for example, unrelated to what you said before, but edging in a little bit closer, people can say that certain vaccinations or certain materials or substances in the vaccinations can cause autism and.

We can research that. We can look into that. People have, and they look into this as carefully as they can, and they look into the history of how this notion came about and so on, and they can demonstrate with evidence that is carefully collected and looked into and analyzed and so on, that there is no causation. Maybe there is some correlation sometimes, but there's no causation.

in other words, vaccines or thimerosal or whatever, is not causing autism. This would not necessarily change the way that a parent with an autistic child feels or thinks, and it would not necessarily change how they view vaccines, even if we put this information out there. And I understand it. I understand that there's an emotional tag. There's an emotional investment in this. And if I took my kid...

to be vaccinated, and a little bit later I would discover that they have autism, it would be very difficult for me not to make a connection there. It would be extremely, extremely difficult for me to be objective about it because these are events that are connected in my mind because I'm a human being. When I listen to the telepathy tapes, they're definitely making extraordinary claims, including some of the claims that you just listed.

you know, nonverbal individuals with autism are able to, through some telepathy or some other thing, do all kinds of extraordinary things. Extraordinary claims, I'm reminded, they require extraordinary evidence. What evidence is provided for this throughout the tapes? I mean, it's an idea, it's a proposal, and they're allowed to have ideas and proposals, of course. The only thing that they're not allowed to do, and this is the only beef I have with them,

They cannot say, oh, we have undeniable evidence for this, which they say. And they say it multiple times. And they say it in such a way that the lay listener or even not the lay listener would say, hey, they have undeniable evidence. Why is not people why are people not listening to them? But the evidence that they show is weak at best anecdotal.

And I'm scrupulous to the max. It's really not evidence that we consider, at least, or I consider, you know, my colleagues and I would not consider it to be evidence. But it cuts much deeper than that. It cuts much deeper than that. What you are talking about, savants, you know, people who have

Even brain scientists don't have all the answers to what the brain can and cannot do. Even the best astrophysicist cannot tell you everything about the universe, and I don't think they pretend to. Even the best musician cannot compose all the symphonies in the world and play everything, you know, with one hand behind his back tied. There's a limit to what we know. There's a limit to, you know, what we can explain.

I would like to explain it, but I would like to explain it responsibly. I would like to explain it in a dispassionate fashion. I would like to explain it in an orderly fashion, in a way that conforms to an agenda. Not an agenda as in a political agenda, but an agenda that conforms to a paradigm. And the paradigm that I choose is the scientific paradigm. Now, it's not perfect.

It's not always the right paradigm to use, but that's the paradigm I know how to use well. And that's the paradigm that has proven itself in terms of its predictive abilities. When I listen to the telepathy tapes, I hear very clearly evidence that doesn't own up.

to the scientific term, the term of art, I should say, that we refer to as evidence. And I see experiments, again, experiments, and, you know, within quotation marks that aren't really well conducted experiments. And then the third thing, I see methods that are so deeply flawed that, you know, it makes people like me cringe. I don't know if, you know, I cannot speak for other people, but I feel uncomfortable when I, you know, view these methods.

This creates a situation where they can actually say that they're doing research, which in my book is not even research. So if the word evidence is being misused and the word methodology is being misused and the word experiment, then the word research is being misused. Then we're using the same nomenclature.

But we're not talking about the same things. I have a great respect for people who have ideas and particularly when it comes to dealing with people who are

have special needs. For those of you who know a little bit about me and my family, I have a personal connection with this world. And that's why it's important for me to speak my own truth. And my own truth as a scientist

is, you know, having listened to some of these episodes, I actually see little new here, Mayim, I have to tell you. I see very new here. If you look at what was going on in the 70s, 1970s, for example, historic claims about facilitated communications, about anomalous cognition, telepathy, etc. The main difference, perhaps, as you pointed out, is that now it's updated with a dash of a consciousness babble.

Okay, but we've been through it already. Okay? We've been through it and it's been debunked. It's been debunked by so many men

magicians, scientists and other people. So I'm going to OK, so I'm going to I'm going to stop you here because also I completely agree that the problems that I had were all of the ones that you discussed, discussions of evidence and research and experiments and and even, you know, many of the the doctors that are, you know, that are part of the telepathy tapes have spoken out. Dr. Powell has said this isn't, you know, a research facility like that's not what we're doing. This wouldn't be admissible.

But I think what I'm more interested in, you know, is in some of these later episodes, what is striking to me, the notion that there could be some sort of like global fraud, that people all over the world are using the same terms and concepts to describe what this feels like, that seems odd to me.

Meaning you have teachers, facilitators, not just parents saying there's something unusual about a particular kind of communication that's occurring with nonverbal individuals. That's what's interesting to me. Not so much, you know, like I know that we can't replicate a lot of these things, but also that's partly what's interesting to me is that

If we are to believe that we're energetic beings, which we are, I mean, we are, that's just true, right? There's energy, all sorts of physical processes. And like, these are things that we know we're, we're energetic beings. So is it, is it okay to say there may be things that are not going to obey the laws of

of scientific rigor as we know it in terms of our understanding of how people communicate and what intuitive communication is even like. MindBalance Breakdown is supported by Blueland. In case you missed it, the EPA just banned two cancer-causing chemicals and there is a very good chance that they're in a ton of your cleaning products. Sorry, hate to break it to you, but don't take any chances with your family, your pets, your health.

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Like when you say that this girl, you know, can perform this, you know, kind of communication with her mother but not her father, I don't have a problem with that. To me, that doesn't make it not true. What makes it true is that there's some sort of

communication, which anyone who's a parent knows that of course that's possible. Children communicate differently with their parents. Like that's not a problem to me. So do we throw out the baby with the bathwater when we say, if I can't replicate this in a particular way, it's not worth us trying to delve into?

Well, I think we have to be very careful because I think that there's a lot of overlap and mixing of different things. And we have to be very careful about that. Just from a housekeeping perspective. Here's the thing. Yes. I mean, do we have energy? Yes, we have energy. When I say that we have energy, is it the same thing as an energy healer thing?

hears, is that what they hear when I say energy? You know, when we say energy in physics, it means something completely different. When we say work, the word work in physics means something very different. When I say statistical significance, oh, this is statistically significant. That's very different from what a layperson hears because they hear, oh, this is very, very significant. But statistical significance is a term of art. It's something that in science we use in a particular way. What is beginning to happen here is

is that there's a lot of suggestions that are being put into the Telepathy Tapes podcast, and they're slowly mounting, slowly. There's a cumulative effect of these things as you move, as you listen more and more, and it's presented well in terms of the theatrics of it. And when it comes to, for example, theatrics,

I know about that from a completely different part of my life. I know that when I was a young magician and I would go on stage, even if I would give the strongest disclaimer at the beginning of my show, the strongest disclaimer, I would say everything that you're about to see is theatrical mind reading. And it's I'm doing this for your entertainment pleasure. I don't have any special powers. I don't have any supernatural abilities. This is all done for your entertainment pleasure. It's the magical arts in action.

At the end of the show, I would have invariably a few people coming to me and consulting with me about their most intimate things. I was a teenager at the time. They will consult with me about investments, about their dying aunt, about all kinds of things. And I would say, my God, did you not hear the disclaimer that I gave at the beginning? This is a show. It's a charade. It's a theatric skit of sorts. I think that people who are listening to the telepathy tapes

are not necessarily taking from it what you are taking from it. What you're taking from it is some intellectual sparring thing with, hey, isn't that interesting? It is interesting. It's fascinating.

It's dramatic. It's emotional. It's full of unanswered questions. It's a great story. It's a great story. And is it possible to use these nonverbal people to heal humanity and to enhance spirituality? Everything is possible. The question is, what...

evidence do we have that this is even true as a scientist? And I don't want to sound like the sourpuss of, you know, I don't want to be like the, you know, the party pooper. As a scientist, it upsets me deeply to witness such sort of blatant disregard. I would even call it contempt, you know, for science, which is one of the prime achievements of our species.

So, you know, I'm not saying that with science you can solve everything, and I'm not saying that science is the right way to go, even, in this particular thing, to answer these particular questions, but you have to acknowledge that.

You have to acknowledge that a lot of research has already been done and a lot of these things have been studied and shown, dismissed, shown that they're completely irrelevant. The other side of viewers who are really being taken by this are people who, they do not need proof. They don't believe that these things obey the laws of science. They believe that...

It's true. It's a very emotional... It is a right brain experience that people are having. People are saying, I'm moved by this. It resonates with me, and therefore it's true. And that's sort of the challenge. You know, is there a way to try and help us understand or help us gain evidence for? You know, one of my favorite... I mean, one of the most powerful examples to me is...

if we are to believe this report, this boy Josiah, who communicated to his mother that he needed to speak to an author that neither of them had ever heard of or met, and he was communicating things to a person that he's never met about what this man was doing in his life, what book he was working on, the chapter he's working on. I could believe that all of these people are manufacturing an enormous fraud

It's possible that every single one of these cases could be that just everybody's lying. No, I don't think so. No, but then so that's an example of I don't have an explanation. Like a lot of the other ones, I could be like, oh, there's unconscious cues. Facilitated communication has not been legitimately used. And maybe we need to revisit that. I can explain all that away. But when we get and even the elephants, Jonathan's like, but the elephants need.

knew when the man died. And I said, no, we don't know that. That's, that's a correlation. And I don't know that elephants knew that the man who rescued them died. And that's why they all came marching. I don't know that. Right. But when I, when I have people saying, you know, like that this kid was communicating information to an author he's never met,

And when you talk about kids who don't live in the same physical space, who are sharing, somehow sharing information, this one kid dies and apparently people that he knows in this world

in this consciousness realm knew that he died before their parents were told? I don't know how to explain that. Could all of these parents be making up the same lie? It's possible. It's extremely unlikely, and I don't think that that's the way to go. But I don't think the way to go is to take a particular story and to try to explain it. In general, as a scientist, as a magician, more importantly than a scientist, as a magician, I'm privy to a lot of secret information

that the magical arts or the people who are part of the magical arts guard very, very closely. It's not only that it's their livelihood, but it's sort of a tradition that you don't share this information with other people. Part of that tradition

is how, for example, to create psychological effects. They're not psychologists. Magicians are not trained in psychology, usually. But if you're doing, for example, mentalism, which is a particular kind of magic, you learn a great deal about how to obscure certain things, how to lead people to a certain decision, and so on.

The reason I mention this is because when I was starting my way in hypnosis, I did it really by looking at my peers doing hypnosis shows on stage. And I was struck because I knew that they know zero. They know absolutely nothing about hypnosis. I knew it because they were my age and they read the same books that I read and there was nothing there about hypnosis.

It was all about their charisma, their persona, their ability to stand in front of an audience and carry out a show. One time, they were doing age regression.

without really knowing what age regression is. And they got somebody to say that they were a soldier in Napoleon's army. In other words, they're going back in time from before they were born. And suddenly this person on stage is saying, oh, I was a soldier in Napoleon's army, you know, blah, blah, blah. And suddenly he starts speaking French. He starts speaking French. And, you know, it was really a very dramatic performance. And at the end of the thing, at the end of the whole show, I went up to this individual

an older person. And I said to him, do you speak French? He said, no, I don't speak any French. And this was quite, you know, shocking to me. At the time, my knowledge of French was quite rudimentary, but I could tell, I could tell there was something wrong with the French. I could tell that the French didn't sound right to me. I was not as fluent as I am today, but it felt wrong.

I took a recording of that thing because we recorded it to a French speaking person. And he told me this is not French. This is mumbo jumbo. He's just, you know, acting. It's like Charlie Chaplin doing like, you know, the dictator speech. Yeah. So sometimes what we think is happening is not exactly what is happening. And it requires just a little bit of, you know, a tiny bit more verification. This is a great example because there is...

an episode of the telepathy tapes where they talk about a child being able to translate in Hebrew, in hieroglyphics, and no one in that home speaks or knows Hebrew or hieroglyphics. And yes, you are using facilitated communication, which if you don't want to believe in that technique, I get it like that. But if there is independent spelling going on and no one is guiding a child's hand, then

That would be a pretty powerful thing for me to not be able to explain. Here's the thing. The burden of proof is on me to explain it. Why? The burden of proof is on them to demonstrate that what they're doing is veridical and true. Why is it? Why is the burden of proof on me to explain it? The onus.

is on the person who's making the claim. The reason that the burden of proof, I feel, falls on us, people who are open-minded enough to at least listen, right, is because the people who believe this do not believe in the scientific method.

The people who believe this feel it in their kishkas and that's enough. Or, you know, the many energy where, I mean, I've, you know, I'm a person who has the kind of health profile that leads you out of Western medicine and into any realm that says they can help you, right? I've been to a lot of people. I've had people say that we're doing past life regressions with me. Like I've heard it all. Like I've entertained it, right? Right.

For that section of people, they don't believe that they have to prove it? If people decide that they don't believe in science and they want to dismiss science, that's a completely different conversation. Because...

It means that, you know, we cannot agree on the framework. We cannot agree, you know, what constitutes evidence, what constitutes good methodology, what constitutes research. And so that's when people can use these words, but they mean different things. And that's why I always emphasize to you, I say, as a scientist, as a scientist, it saddens me.

to see the promotion of pseudoscience because this is a form of pseudoscience. Okay, but as like a human, it's a little bit freaky. That's an important distinction. That's an important distinction as I would say more than a human, as a parent, as a global citizen. I also have concerns about giving people false hope

about spurious expectations, you know, seeding spurious expectations, about even misallocation of resources. However, I commiserate. I understand. I understand where it's coming from. And I empathize. They just need to understand that this is not supported

by evidence. It's very anecdotal. If they understand that and they still choose to go with that, that's already a completely different thing. Oh, I think that's the basis of alternative healers. They work outside of the paradigm. We had Neil Thiessen, who was one of my favorite people to talk to. He's a physiologist, right? And he said, we are connected, right? He was the one who said fascia is a thing, right? We're connected throughout our entire bodies. We're connected...

our microbiome connect with the people that we share a home with, right? There is a connection that many in the scientific realms are willing to engage in a further conversation about. I think it's important that a lot of people are not dismissing the scientific method or saying they don't believe in science, but they're actually saying there is something here that is happening that is just being dismissed outright by science.

And that people who are, you know, really turned off by this idea are not applying the type of curiosity that we were talking about when we got cut off. We've been having some technical difficulties in the glitch, the windstorm. And we got into this idea that there have been many times where science has caught up.

with things outside of the scientific mainstream. Neil Thies is an amazing example. You know, the holistic and alternative body workers who are doing somatic work said the body is fully connected and it has this fascia system. And Western medicine, the scientific establishment said, absolutely not. There's no evidence of that. This is total nonsense until it was proven that there was. We talked about the founder of craniosacral therapy,

adjusting and finding out that the bones of the skull are not fused together. We talk about Andrew Weil and the fact that nutrition has an impact

on someone's health that our mindset has impacts on our immune system and our physiology and the expression of our genes even in epigenetics and that inherited experiences are passed down and potentially genes are blueprints that can be activated by the mind's interpretation of their reality so i think there are two significant points here the first is that

Why it falls back to the scientific community to explore with curiosity with things that are being presented in an anecdotal fashion and are are we can agree are not adhering to the rigors to say that there is fundamental proof and it should be accepted as fully real. I think that is agreeable.

And also that there needs to be a level of curiosity into the unexplainable. So we continue to push the boundaries of what is real, what is possible, just in many other circumstances where science has caught up to reality.

call it mystics, alternative people who are sensing beyond the realms of current tools first. The second is in the exploration of what is possible in our own reality. And I'm, you know, I would be very curious to even dive deeper into your work on suggestibility and start to look at how our everyday consciousness can be altered. Now it's related to realms of energy and, and,

potentially, I don't want to say paranormal, but extrasensory ability. Science does not know everything and scientists are not gods, far from it.

Science is a tool and it's a paradigm by which you can gather data and so on. It can answer some questions well and some questions that cannot answer well and some questions that cannot answer at all. When I started doing research into hypnosis, people thought that I was deranged because hypnosis was

considered really the paranormal. I mean, at the time that I started doing this, people said, what are you dealing with? I mean, this is ridiculous. Why would a serious scientist want to look at these things? More recently, I started looking into the science of psychedelics. Again, there's a big pushback from the scientific community, and that's also changing. It's changing with time.

Psychedelics are very controversial. Hypnosis is very controversial. Sleep research used to be controversial. You know, things change. The fact that you can measure things doesn't make them important or valuable. And the fact that you cannot measure things does not make them insignificant or unimportant.

And this is something that is important to write on a big poster and put in your bedroom. I mean, just so that you understand the fact that you cannot measure something does not mean that it's not there and it doesn't mean that it's not important. However, when you make a claim,

When you make a claim about something, you have to back it up. Otherwise, everybody can make a claim about everything. But most people do not read scientific papers. Most people are not conversant with the language of science. Most people are not interested in science. Not only that they don't read, they could read if they wanted to. They're not interested.

They're not interested in the paradigm. They're not interested in the rigor. They're not interested in the robust nature of the evidence that are needed. They're not interested in replicability. They don't care about all these buzzwords and what they mean, and they're entitled to it. By the way, I have the absolute deepest compassion for these parents and for these teachers and for these caregivers.

for what they're doing, and I don't criticize them for coming up with theories or ideas that are not scientific or that they cannot provide scientific evidence for. I'm the last person who would do that. I just feel compelled to step in with my scientific expertise

and present them, based on my experience, with the truth the way I see it, the scientific truth. It might not be relevant for them, just like you pointed out, Mayim, because they don't believe in science and they dismiss it or disregard it out of hand immediately. But I have to tell them, as a scientist, unfortunately, and to the best of my knowledge and to my genuine chagrin, many of the claims of the telepathy tapes

They're just incompatible with science, with medical research, with psychological research, and with reality.

This is important to explain. Now they might say that's not my reality. - Right, I was gonna say, what is reality in that sense? - And this is where I come in. This is where I feel very comfortable talking about that. Their reality might be different from my reality. In other words, in their head, they might be seeing all kinds of things, they might be believing all kinds of things, and that's completely fine. That's completely fine. They can have their own reality, I can have my own reality. But at the end of the day,

If you're trying to offer somebody help, if you're trying to heal people, if you're trying to build factories, if you're trying to build factories and you don't know about gravity, you have a problem. If you're trying to fly planes and you don't know about the laws of physics, you have a problem. And this is why a lot of people who operate in these realms do not operate

very comfortably in, quote, normal society. I don't know if it's normal society or abnormal society. You know, in the tapes, they call it anomalous cognition, you know, anomalous cognition. When I did my research on hypnosis and sleep deprivation, I called it atypical cognition. This change of term, you know, atypical cognition,

For example, you mentioned before savants and stuff. We know very well about people who have superior memories. I mean, these are people who can remember really to some amazing extent their autobiographical memories. They remember what they ate on December 12th, 1968 with great accuracy. And it's amazing that people can do that.

We study them and we try to understand how that happens and so on. We don't always have answers. We don't always have full answers, but the fact that these people are walking around and you can actually test them and you can summon them and you can invite them to the lab and so on, it means that you can do something about it. What we have here is something that is in the twilight zone. - And also it should be noted, and there are instances of this in my family and in many families,

non-verbal, intellectually, developmentally disabled individuals, autistic, were previously assumed to not be able to participate in society. They were institutionalized and they were sent away and no one heard from them and they died languishing in facilities. That was science's best attempt at understanding these individuals. So,

The weight of this is also beyond telepathic ability.

Is there a way that we can understand that there's someone in there? And we know that there are cases of people, physicians in many cases, reporting that they heard what was going on in the room while they were brain dead, right? Presumed to be in a coma. Like, you know, the notion of sort of who's in there

is also one that's interesting to me over and above the telepathic questions. There's a difference between being brain dead in a medically induced coma and so on. But yeah, it's very interesting because we find sometimes ways to communicate with people who are in a prolonged coma using all kinds of EEG signals or EEG components that have to do with detecting certain patterns and things like that.

It's a fascinating field. It's a fascinating field. And people who are, you know, beginning to lose due to disease or due to all kinds of other reasons, they begin to lose control over their muscles. You can train them to communicate using systems that when the time comes and they cannot control their voice anymore, they'll be able to communicate with you using signals that are based, like we said before, on galvanic skin response or eye movements or all kinds of things that

These are active fields of exploration in science and neuroscience and cognitive psychology. But

It's nascent. It's very early days. What we are talking about here is something that would be fascinating to explore, intriguing and mesmerizing. I mean, really, literally mesmerizing. But we have to understand also, at the same time, that it relies, the only way that I know how to explore these things is

is using the scientific method. If somebody else has a different method that is better, they're welcome to present it and do it. We as a species have not been able to find one yet. So it's a question of alternative. Well, that's the thing. People who believe in these things, they don't need to present anything in its place. And that's the science of belief. That's the science of suggestion. So the science of suggestion is,

There's a science to it. There's a science to it. How do people, how does a suggestion work on the brain? How can you, how can I make a suggestion to you? And as a result of that, you actually hear a particular sound, a sound that doesn't exist in reality.

I mean, your book talks about unbelievable examples. I mean, one of my favorite was the Stroop effect, where you can essentially undo the Stroop effect. When I started out as a very young scientist, or at least younger than I am today, I was really interested in demonstrating the power of suggestion by taking a paradigm that is completely acceptable by the scientific community and turn it on its head.

And the reason I wanted to do that is because I always had an intuitive sense. It was never...

It was just an intuitive sense that some of the measurements that we're doing, for example, in the cognitive psychology lab could be swayed by certain parameters. And I discussed it with my professors. I discussed it with my colleagues. And they always told me, oh, you know, you're too young for this. And, you know, wait 40 years and then you can then you can do these things. But one of my mentors actually told me something different. And it was very illuminating for me. He said to me,

Show me. Do an experiment that would show me that you can do what you're claiming that you can do. Show me how with suggestion you can actually do what you claim to do. Take something that 4,000 papers have been written on and we think that we know exactly how it works and show me that you can turn it around.

And this was a nice challenge, but I also got his support in terms of resources, in terms of thinking about the paradigm, in terms of coming up with the right experimental design. And when we did it that way, I had his back. And when we had the results out, people started listening. By the way, when you put data out, scientists are not immediately convinced. Scientists are very, very difficult people.

Even if you show them data, even if you show them stuff, they need a lot of time. They need a lot of time, a lot of replications, a lot of studies that would do the same thing again and again until they're convinced and for a good reason.

Because that's how we make progress. And sometimes, and I'm sad to say it, but it's true, sometimes you have to wait for certain scientists to die out before you can have new people come in and introduce new paradigms and new ideas and also new kinds of thinking, including about evidence and how to collect things and how to analyze things and so on and so forth. And that's just the reality of the sociology of science.

I'd love to talk a little bit more about areas of your work where you began to flip a paradigm that had been previously thought to be fixed. Can I dig into a couple examples? Let's dig in. So one of the things that I love, well, about you, Dr. Roz, and about your book is you do experiments on individuals, right?

that allow us to extrapolate about how human behavior works, how belief works, how science works without you needing to replicate it with 800,000 people in a double-blind study, right? Because your lab in particular is kind of pushing the bounds of what we understand about the human experience. I'm going to ask you to talk about a couple cases. One of my favorites, which relates to Jonathan,

You did an experiment with people who were lactose intolerant. Now, this is one of those things. It feels like it should be a very cut and dry scientific thing. You know, if you eat dairy and this particular thing happens gastrointestinally, like you are lactose intolerant. I want you to talk about this study that you did where you took people who were lactose intolerant

And you, there's also a huge, a huge section in the book about ethics, about how we get around these things, what the placebo effect means, how it impacts how we approach ethics and science. Talk about this experiment with the lactose intolerant people. I had a very close friend who was extremely lactose intolerant. And one day we were walking around on the boardwalk and

And of course, I knew from a very young age that she's so lactose intolerant. When she came to my house, we had to be very careful about everything and inform her and no milk and no dairy. OK, so I knew that from the get go. And one day we're walking on the boardwalk talking about something and suddenly there's a gelato stand there. And she says to me, hey, would you like some gelato? And I thought that she was kidding. And I said, well, this, you know, aren't you? I mean, this is lactose. There's a lactose problem here now. And she said, no, this is gelato. It's not ice cream. It's gelato. I said, what?

So gelato has no... She said, no, gelato is fine. It's ice cream that is the problem. Gelato is lactose-free. I said, oh, well, in that case, I'm buying. And we had two generous portions and we were eating everything. And I said to myself, my God, is she serious? Is she like...

Is this real? Because she would usually bloat and have like all these. Right. And as a as a vegan sorbet is dairy free. Gelato can be. But generally speaking, gelato has eggs and milk. It's delicious. So I actually went back to the gelato vendor over there and I asked later. This was this that happened, you know, a little bit later. And I said, OK.

Is this gelato lactose-free? And he said, absolutely not. I make it myself. There's plenty of milk here. Yet she had absolutely no symptoms whatsoever. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, her lactose intolerance is all in her mind. I'm not saying that she's a nut job who sort of, you know, is over-psychologizing the whole thing. There's a biological basis for it. There's an enzyme missing. The whole thing is very clearly understood, but there's also...

A top down component. In addition to the bottom up component, there's also a top down component. And when she was under the impression that this gelato was safe, it became safe. I want to underline this before you go into the study. There was something going on in her in her mind that was impacting her physiology. Right. That's right.

And because this was anecdotal and because this was my friend and because I felt that this is worth exploration, I came upon the following weird design. At the time, I was in Montreal. I was at McGill University. And you have to get, first of all, IRB approval. In Canada, they call it REB. It's a slightly different acronym, but it's the same thing. The same misery of writing and submitting millions of copies. And I did a study where I invited people in.

to a study where they were actually drinking milk that was lactose-free. In other words, I gave them lactose-free milk, but I packaged it in bottles that said that it was a regular milk. And I basically asked them, you know, how much would you be willing to take

before you would show symptoms. So some people said, "Oh, I'm not gonna even touch it." And that's fair, that's fair enough. And some people said, "I'm so sensitive that even if you give me, if you take a teaspoon and you empty it, just the film that clings to the concavity of the spoon, if I just lick that, that's enough for me to have a full one." I said, "Well, would you mind if we tried?" And that's what we did. So we took milk that they were under the impression was lactose containing,

and was actually lactose-free unbeknownst to them. And they would sort of take a spoonful, empty it, and then use the sort of just the film that clings to the spoon, you know, take it in. And some of them, lo and behold, they would have like a full, you know, blast, you know, kind of...

I mean, including belching and including, you know, all kinds of unpleasant things. And that clearly came not from the lactose. It came from the fact that they thought that they were exposed to lactose. And not everyone. Not everyone. Not everyone. But since these people came as preselected, they were preselected as lactose intolerant based both on their self-report and based on biological measures. Right.

which showed that they were lactose intolerant. We required them to have a genetics test and also a stool sample and some kind of a breathing test that they had to pass. We had a lot of biological data that they actually are lactose intolerant. We also did the opposite. We created a situation where we invited people to participate in a study and we informed them that some of them will be in the placebo arm of the study.

In other words, the placebo arm of the study, in other words, the arm that doesn't get chemically active ingredients and we're using them as a control. And we just did it in such a way that the people who came were some of them were lactose intolerant. And then when they took this particular drug,

pill, which was the placebo. We gave them the pill thinking, you know, or they were thinking that it's a placebo, which it was. What they didn't know is the placebo was actually a lactose pill because or contained lactose, because often the manufacturing of those we give some sugar, you know, we give some milk sugar or we give a sugar pill. That's why a placebo is a sugar pill in the minds of many people. So they didn't have any reaction.

Until they heard that it was a lactose-containing pill. When they heard that it was a lactose-containing pill, some people, you know, basically broke out with some symptoms. This shows us

And it shows many clinicians, and I think many clinicians knew this from a long time ago, that yes, lactose intolerance is biological. Yes, there is a whole biology to it that we understand quite well, or we think that we understand a little bit. But there's also a whole psychological component to it that has to do with expectations. This begs the question...

And I'm going to go there. I mean, you have so many other amazing experiments, like the Tourette's one and the asthma one. Also, Jonathan's also asthmatic. Jonathan's your perfect patient. The asthma one blew my mind in a nutshell. Before I ask you the question, I want to ask you in a nutshell with the asthma one, you were able to induce asthmatic attacks from a non-irritant simply by saying this is an irritant.

Full-on asthma attacks you were able to induce. So this begs the question, what's the number one thing every woman wants to talk about besides perimenopause, including me? Autoimmune conditions.

And if you go on any social media and you type in autoimmune conditions, there is an entire universe. And in particular, women are being diagnosed with autoimmune conditions in alarming numbers. And we had Gabor Mate talk about, you know, the increase in these and the trauma and all the things. And I believe in autoimmune conditions. I have two.

My first one I got when I was 23. My second I got when I was 46. I'm 23 years apart, which is also the number of chromosomes in human DNA. I think there's something going on. In any event, what I know is that for certain autoimmune conditions, I cannot help but wonder when I read your book, how much of what is going on physiologically with me, I'll just take me, is being influenced by...

what I think, what I've been told, what certain specialists tell you. One of the components of the autoimmune challenges I have is I have a histaminergic reaction that is outrageous. Outrageous. And when I was my sickest, everything led to a histamine reaction, right? So your book started me thinking, if I think I'm going to have a histamine reaction because everything's giving me a histamine reaction, how am I going to have a histamine reaction?

How will I ever know when I'm not having a histamine reaction? And there's about six different medications that I was put on to block all of the different pathways of histamine because it could be this enzyme, it could be this, and you know, very expensive functional medicine doctors who know every single pathway and they're showing me the catalytic conversion and they're showing me the receptor protein and all the conversions that need to happen for this receptor. And they're blocking it at all these different ways, right? And I started thinking, gosh,

And this is not to say it's in your head, but how much can our mind influence our physiology in ways that are possibly changing the way we're tackling medicine? We know that some mind-body techniques that have to do with relaxation, with hypnosis, with guided imagery, with things like that are as effective, sometimes more effective. For warts? For warts, for example, for certain kinds of warts, yeah.

And this is very important. Now, I'm not saying that we should dismiss dermatology here and just go and do some guided imagery for our problems. But I am saying that there is a mental component, there's a psychological top-down effect here that we often ignore. And then I think that in their heart of hearts, most clinicians know about quite well because they encounter it in the trenches.

And when you say mind-body techniques, these are things like? Practice. So I'm supposed to meditate on my wart? You're supposed to get some help from a professional who knows about things like hypnosis and meditation and yoga and things of that nature. So those are all lowering, those are lowering the body's immune response in general. So all these things you're talking about, right? These are trying to

lower the agitation level. Not necessarily. I mean, you don't necessarily lower your immune response, but you can often lower your anxiety.

Which is linked to your immune response. Well, sometimes you can lower your anxiety. Sometimes you can increase your blood flow. Sometimes you can change your temperature. You can do all kinds of things. Sometimes just changing your blood flow would change the acidity of your skin. It would change the kind of bacteria that can grow. These are changes that can happen very rapidly and they can happen very slowly. And again, the scientific literature says

documents quite a number of striking experiments that I found throughout my career that most dermatologists are not even aware of because they're not necessarily published in dermatological journals. They're published often in journals that have to do with hypnosis or with the psychology and so on. These silos are beginning to break down. Also, science has become more interdisciplinary, but we still have this resistance.

But I think it's inevitable that we're going to break it down eventually. Bruce Lipton, before Joe Dispenza, started talking about a notion of the environment being more significant, right, in most cases, rather than just focusing on gene programming. And the way that he extrapolates that out is not dissimilar from what you talk about here. When you talk about placebo, when you talk about the power of the mind over the body,

It's not dissimilar from saying the unconscious experience is having an impact on what we previously thought was the dominant conscious experience. So when I say placebo or when I say something that is nonspecific, you know, somebody else might say, oh, this is unconscious or this is, you know, coming from, you know, without your awareness or something like that. I would say this is a response expectancy. They will say this is your unconscious mind speaking.

I have no problem with that. That, that to me, this kind of a semantic, you know, this kind of semantic boundary to me, that's a no, that's a non-issue. We can, we can sort of clarify what we're talking about and so on. What I'm most interested in is the end, the outcome, the end result, and whether I can actually help you with your warts, whether I can actually help you with the eczema, whether I can actually relieve you of, of the,

symptoms that you're trying to so, you know, so desperately to to heal from. There's an example in your book about a young child with Tourette's syndrome, which we know a lot about. We know what Tourette's is. We know what it looks like. We know in some cases, you know, what works, what doesn't work. Can you talk about the incredibly creative way that you were able to I don't want to say cure Tourette's. That's not what you're doing. You're showing the

the complexity surrounding symptom presentation. - Correct, so Tourette's is a very interesting example because most people with Tourette's, by the time they hit the age of 18 or so, the vast majority, or a good number of people will just spontaneously remit and they're gonna be better. And as a result, because of that,

A lot of child neurologists, child psychiatrists, you know, pediatricians, sometimes they just say, tough it out, you know, tough it out until you're 18 and everything's going to be fine. And they give all kinds of medications that sometimes the medication is not only that they're not helpful, but sometimes the side effects are really debilitating. You know, sometimes they can be tardive dyskinesia, cognitive dulling, gaining weight, all kinds of things that are not, you know, we're not happy about or the patient shouldn't be, you know, happy about usually. So,

I was looking for a way to help these people and I discovered that when these kids were, for example, playing computer games or something like that, they would not tick, they would not curse, they would not be in a situation where most of their symptoms are out. And I saw that there's a certain element of attention that plays a big role here and their mindset, their mindset is very important to them. So I created this machine

that basically does nothing from all kinds of scrap that I found in the basement of the hospital. And I called it a tick detector. It

It was basically a bunch of defunct medical devices that I put together with wires and stuff like that. And it looked like a formidable construction of some sorts. It definitely looked like a medical device, but you couldn't tell what it was doing. And I called it a tick detector. And I took one kid who had very difficult Tourette's and tried everything under the sun, everything from psychological to pharmaceutical to this to that, and saw a million, a string of...

clinicians and was really in bad shape. And I tried to engage him with this tick detector by telling him, look, this is a tick detector and it can beep. Every time it detects a beep coming from you, it's going to beep.

Unbeknownst to the child, of course, this machine would beep just randomly. Every few seconds, it would just beep. And the child was sitting there, and the machine would beep. And I would say to him, did you hear that? He said, yes. I said, can you feel a tick coming? If he would say yes, I said, you see, it works. If he would say no, I would say, oh, this is a very sensitive machine.

Sometimes it detects the ticks even before you do. Just wait a few seconds and you'll feel it. And sure enough, a few seconds later, he would have a tick because that's what you have when you have Tourette's. I mean, you can't get around it. So it's a win-win situation. If he says yes, I win. If he says no, I win. So you can't do this with an adult, right?

Or it's more difficult to do this with a child. You know, this is doable. And after a while, he was convinced that this machine can actually predict his tics and he would come and play with this machine. And then I took him to another room where there was even a bigger machine.

Again, from scrap, the whole thing, but it looked very different with Christmas lights that I disguised and all kinds of things, you know, all kinds of buttons and things like that. And I told him, do you want to turn it on? He says, what does it do? I said, this is the tick deflector. The tick deflector actually melts all the ticks away. It connects with the tick detector in the other room. And together, the tick detector tells the tick deflector and then the tick deflector deflects, melts the ticks, and then you don't have to take them out.

And I brought two cables together and I told him, do you want to connect these two machines together? Because the second you connect them together, the tick detector is going to speak to the tick deflector. And then, you know, and he connected them together. He sat on the chair. He heard the beeps from the tick detector. He heard the bops from the tick deflector. And he was sitting there without, you know, ticking. He was sitting there just, you know, looking at, you know, at the world. And I remember bringing in the mother.

who looked at him and she said to me, what did you give him? What did you give him? And I had to say, you know, I just gave him some scrap medical devices and some suggestions. I mean, that's it.

And this is not something that would hold up, you know, when he leaves the hospital, he would go home and the ticks would, you know, slowly come back in. But it does show you something, perhaps about the mechanism, perhaps about how we could think about these things, about the mental component, about the mindset, about how some of the physiology as we know it.

could be regulated, orchestrated, even I would say governed by some psychological top-down processes. We could do a whole episode on what would it take to take that change and implement it in the rest of his life.

That's right. And we have been trying to, together with my students, together with my colleagues, we've been trying to find ways to take these observations about lactose intolerance, about asthma, about other things that I describe in the book, and how to transport them, how to transfer them so that they are relevant to other fields of life outside of the lab and in the ecological world.

And there's a little bit of a leap there, but I think it's doable. And we are basically making some baby steps in that direction. The point is the mind is very powerful. The mind is very complex. And there's a very interesting interaction between our mindset, our, I would say, expectations, our symbolic thinking, our cultural expectations.

you know, dogmas, our personal aspirations and our physiology, our neurophysiology, our physiology, the way that our body, our corporal body responds to these signals and to these, I would say, processes. Dr. Oz, it's really so great to get to talk to you. The book, The Science and Magic of How We Make Up Our Minds, The Suggestible Brain, I highly recommend it. I suggest you get it. And it was really such a pleasure to get to talk to you and we hope to talk to you more.

Thank you so much. And this is, I hope, the first episode of many because I find these discussions not just very stimulating, but also very important. I wish more people will actually ask these questions and probe these issues because I think that a lot of people outside of the scientific community and a lot of people who don't know anything about mental health and so on need to know and want to know there's a there's a

a serious thirst out there for this kind of information. And I don't think that people who are in the know, people like me and like you are making, you know, we need to put our best foot forward in order to provide this information. So thank you for doing what you're doing.

So one of the things that, because of our recording, got cut out, but I did want to mention, is that Dr. Roz was very close friends with my very first mentor in college who passed away recently, Dr. Aran Zaidal. And so Dr. Roz has been interested in exploring certain aspects of how do we make science more popular today?

more palatable, more able to be part of a larger conversation. And this was something that Dr. Zeidel, bless his memory, was also interested in. And Dr. Zeidel was particularly fascinated with the fact that I had come off of his television screen and was in his undergraduate class on, you know,

This is like kind of an unbelievable meeting of so many different aspects of my life to get to talk to Dr. Roz like this. And what I think is really important is that there are so many scientists who will not even engage to talk about it. And while we may not agree with Dr. Roz's analysis of something like the telepathy tapes, or we want to believe that there are other ways to measure things and understand them, what I think is so valuable about this episode is that he is willing to explain the

Some of the reasons that the methodology doesn't work for him, he's able to explain the limitations that he has while also acknowledging that that creates its own limitation in understanding the fantastical nature of human experience. I know a lot of non-materialists who would hear his research with asthma, with Tourette ticks, and...

Quickly explain it in their worldview, meaning that, oh, if you can think your way out of it, if you can imagine a version of yourself that doesn't have this because the tick is actually you anticipating, it's an anxiety bind that actually is just manifesting in these ticks and there's not a fundamental neurological imbalance or structural issue.

And what he says is that he doesn't disagree and he sees that there are fantastical changes, but when they go back into their environment and the non-materialist would say, well, when they go back into their environment, what's happening is that they are being placed in the same stressors that are causing this adaptation and these almost reflexive actions to happen. So the question then, what I really appreciate is,

How do you carry it forward? How do you build these skills for these people to take themselves out of those experiences and live a life free from those conditions? And so I do believe that science and the non-materialist view are coming together to communicate.

It's not always quick and people are slow to change their perspectives, but it's happening and hopefully we can be a part of that transition. And if you are interested in understanding this, I highly recommend The Suggestible Brain. He's written a lot of academic books. This is his first sort of like book for lay people. And first of all, the experiments are so fascinating, but it really does demonstrate

the complex web of consciousness and how we construct our own reality. - If you like this episode, if you like these topics, do us a favor, post in the comments on YouTube

Tell us what side of the fence you're on. Are you a believer in the telepathy tapes? Are you a believer in extrasensory abilities? Have you had those experiences yourself? Or are you skeptical? Are you hesitant for science to quickly adopt these new phenomenon? Also, check out our episode with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman. Take a lesson to our episode with Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, and do us a really, really big favor, subscribe to the channel.

to the YouTube channel, click the little bell notifications to get notified of new episodes and subscribe anywhere you get podcasts. It absolutely helps us make more. From our suggestible brains and breakdowns, the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.