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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on

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Speaker 1: iHeart Radio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George

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Speaker 1: Nori with you, Mitch Horowit's back with us. Historian of

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Speaker 1: alternative spirituality and one of today's most literate voices of

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Speaker 1: esoteric mysticism and the occult. MITCHA illuminates outside her history,

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Speaker 1: explains its relevance, and he is a giant when it

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Speaker 1: comes to the occult. We're going to talk tonight about

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Speaker 1: extrasensory perception ESP. Mitch. Welcome back, Thank you, George. Great

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Speaker 1: to be here. ESP one of my late aunt's favorite topics.

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Speaker 1: She decided to switch her entire psychiatric practice to cover

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Speaker 1: telepathy and ESP, and she wrote a book called Breakthrough

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Speaker 1: the Creativity. It was her main book and she just

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Speaker 1: was a believer. This was real. You believe it too,

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Speaker 1: don't you? Without question? George, you know, we've reached a

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Speaker 1: point in our culture today where we have the evidence.

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Speaker 1: It's so plain and it's so clear that it's time

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Speaker 1: to stop discussing is ESP real, and time to start

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Speaker 1: discussing what conditions does it occur under? And what does

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Speaker 1: it tell us about the human situation? We all participate

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Speaker 1: in some kind of extra physical intelligence, and it's very exciting.

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Speaker 1: It gives us a new conception of human nature. Let's

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Speaker 1: talk about ESP to you. What does it mean. It

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Speaker 1: means basically that we can exchange information in a way

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Speaker 1: that your aunt was describing, that in a manner that

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Speaker 1: goes beyond the five senses. We are able to communicate

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Speaker 1: with one another, to clean coordinates, to clean information, to

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Speaker 1: have emotional reactions to events before they occur in real time.

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Speaker 1: We are part of some extra physical mind that the

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Speaker 1: ancient Greeks used to call noose, that Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Speaker 1: referred to as the oversoul, that Emmanuel Swedenborg called a

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Speaker 1: divine influx, that some people call an infinite mind. And

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Speaker 1: it's real and it's actual. We are not just flesh

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Speaker 1: and blood beings. We are also beings who are possessed

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Speaker 1: of some kind of non physical, extra physical capacity. Where

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Speaker 1: does science stand on this now, Mitch? You know it's

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Speaker 1: really interesting, George. People throw around the term science all

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Speaker 1: the time today. You know, it's become kind of this

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Speaker 1: mantle of authority. Science is nothing other than methodological replication,

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Speaker 1: and since the nineteen thirties through repeatable experiments, experiments that

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Speaker 1: have been repeated many, many times over the course of

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Speaker 1: decades in this nation, in different nations and different labs,

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Speaker 1: that have been meta analyzed. We find again and again

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Speaker 1: that people have the ability of things that we would

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Speaker 1: call precognition, psychokinesis, telepathy, and ESP. The science is in

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Speaker 1: and ESP is real. I all it sure is. I've

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Speaker 1: always believed that. What do you believe, though, is the

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Speaker 1: proof that tells us it's real? You know. One of

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Speaker 1: the things that most persuaded me is the work of

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Speaker 1: a professor at Cornell University named Daryl Bem. Bem spent

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Speaker 1: about ten years studying precognition and other forms of ESP,

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Speaker 1: and he wrote a paper in twenty eleven and the

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Speaker 1: critics were all over it. I mean they attacked it

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Speaker 1: like nothing you've ever seen. And the critics always say

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Speaker 1: the same thing, none of this stuff can be repeated.

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Speaker 1: So Bem, who is a research psychologist at Cornell, said, look,

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Speaker 1: I'm going to turn over my evidence. I'm going to

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Speaker 1: turn over my software, and I'm going to turn over

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Speaker 1: an instruction guide so that anybody who wants to rerun

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Speaker 1: my experiments can do so. So a trio of critics said, well,

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Speaker 1: we reran Bem's experiments and they failed. In the period

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Speaker 1: since then, George, and this has gone on now for

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Speaker 1: several years. The most recent paper is from July of

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Speaker 1: twenty twenty. According to a meta analysis, bem's experiments have

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Speaker 1: been rerun and validated ninety times in thirty three different

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Speaker 1: labs in fourteen nations. Can you imagine the evidence in

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Speaker 1: this meta analysis ninety times thirty three fourteen nations and

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Speaker 1: different researchers working independently have found evidence of precognition. The

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Speaker 1: science is just absolutely solid on this, and at this

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Speaker 1: point denying sp is more of an ideological position than

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Speaker 1: a scientific one. It's amazing how something can work outside

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Speaker 1: of the brain. Yeah, it's just out there working and working.

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Speaker 1: It is incredible and it challenges everything that we grew

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Speaker 1: up understanding. You know, we grew up understanding that the

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Speaker 1: mind is just a product of the brain and that's it.

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Speaker 1: You know, it is as much a product of the

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Speaker 1: brain as cognition or analysis. But what we're finding and

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Speaker 1: what science has validated is that thought shapes us as

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Speaker 1: much as we shape it. We are creatures of thought

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Speaker 1: in a literal sense. And a physical sense as much

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Speaker 1: as we are affected by thought, and it upends everything

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Speaker 1: that we learned growing up and it opens up new

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Speaker 1: vistas of human possibility. Jb Ryan was a botanist. He

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Speaker 1: was born in eighteen ninety five into doing the experiments

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Speaker 1: at Duke University. Tell me why you are so enthralled

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Speaker 1: by this guy? Jb Ryan is really my intellectual hero.

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Speaker 1: He's someone I truly look up to. Jb opened up

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Speaker 1: the Parapsychology lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina,

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Speaker 1: starting in the early nineteen thirties, and he devised these

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Speaker 1: very simple card tests to test for ESP. And over

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Speaker 1: the course of literally hundreds of thousands of trials, what

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Speaker 1: jb found was that there were certain individuals who kept

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Speaker 1: getting higher than average guess rates on decks of cards.

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Speaker 1: And he just compiled these statistics with so much care,

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Speaker 1: with so much meticulousness, with such conservatism, he provided evidence

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Speaker 1: for ESP. Basically, he settled the matter going back to

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Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, nineteen forties, and George, he was just

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Speaker 1: so conservative about his data. He never extrapolated from it,

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Speaker 1: he never went beyond the facts. He structured it in

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Speaker 1: such a careful way. All JB really set out to

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Speaker 1: do was to demonstrate that we human beings participate in

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Speaker 1: some kind of existence that goes beyond the ordinary, beyond

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Speaker 1: the physical, and it opens up all kinds of doors.

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Speaker 1: If you can demonstrate that an individual has abilities of ESP,

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Speaker 1: it raises questions about the afterlife, It raises questions about

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Speaker 1: who we are before we're born, who we are outside

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Speaker 1: of these physical structures. And I just love the man

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Speaker 1: because he did what we human beings are supposed to do,

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Speaker 1: which is he asked a question and he followed it

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Speaker 1: up with great care. How did a botanist get interested

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Speaker 1: in parapsychology, Well, it's an interesting question. We don't think

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Speaker 1: of botany as one of the cutting edge fields of

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Speaker 1: our time. The truth is, when JB and his wife

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Speaker 1: Louisa Ryan, who was a collaborator with him, when they

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Speaker 1: got their pH in the nineteen twenties, botany was considered

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Speaker 1: on the cutting edge of statistical studies, so it wasn't

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Speaker 1: too great a leap for him to apply his knowledge

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Speaker 1: of statistics from botany to psychology. What did he say

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Speaker 1: about ESP? Does everybody possess the ability to do it?

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Speaker 1: Some people are better than others. What did he conclude, Well,

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Speaker 1: it highlights a kind of divide in the field. Jb

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Speaker 1: concentrated his tests on individuals who he believed had a

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Speaker 1: unique gift. You might call it the x men approach.

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Speaker 1: There were later researchers, including a very great scientist named

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Speaker 1: Charles Anerton who devised tests in the nineteen seventies and eighties,

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Speaker 1: and he believed that EST may be more generally spread

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Speaker 1: throughout the human population. So you know, there's a question

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Speaker 1: of whether ESP is the domain of gifted individuals or

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Speaker 1: whether it's more general. But one thing that jb Ryan found,

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Speaker 1: which I always like to underscore to people, is that

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Speaker 1: results in his lab would always spike when there was

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Speaker 1: an atmosphere of hopeful, expectancy and encouragement. Passion seemed to

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Speaker 1: be the key to unlocking the ESP effect when it appears,

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Speaker 1: and positiveness, I bet, and positiveness. And you know, he

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Speaker 1: was very quiet about that because he didn't want to

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Speaker 1: go too far out ahead of the research. But positivity,

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Speaker 1: hopeful expectancy, encouragement that seemed to bring out the ESP effect.

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Speaker 1: What did he conclude, Mitch about some of his experiments,

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Speaker 1: He felt that ESP could actually be detected, it was repeatable,

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Speaker 1: and that we as a human population had to decide

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Speaker 1: what we were going to do with this information that

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Speaker 1: we were really learning that human existence does not just

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Speaker 1: create itself. Matter does not just create itself. There's something

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Speaker 1: else at the back of existence. And it opened up

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Speaker 1: one of the great questions of our time. And for years,

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Speaker 1: the jb Ryan Institute flourished at Duke University. I don't

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Speaker 1: think it's there anymore, is it. That's correct. Jb lost

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Speaker 1: institutional support at Duke over time. Different people retired, different

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Speaker 1: people passed away, and institutional politics being what they are,

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Speaker 1: decided to move the lab off campus in nineteen sixty five.

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Speaker 1: But it's still there today. I've spoken there for fundraisers

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Speaker 1: and other events. Do you believe ESP is available to everybody?

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Speaker 1: I wrestle with that question, George. You know, I think

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Speaker 1: that during the hours of daily life, we are so

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Speaker 1: overwhelmed with stimuli it is difficult to tune in to

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Speaker 1: signals that go outside of the media, or that go

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Speaker 1: outside of the things that we're getting bombarded with all

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Speaker 1: the time. But it's possible. In dream states or in

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Speaker 1: deeply relaxed states, we do experience some kind of esp

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Speaker 1: or precognition. It is an amazing ability to do it though.

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Speaker 1: It's just incredible, and it's hopeful because it tells us

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Speaker 1: that we all emanate from some kind of extra physical

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Speaker 1: source that goes beyond nation, race, religion, creed. It unifies

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Speaker 1: us as human beings in a certain sense. How many

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Speaker 1: people Mitch have the abilities but they just don't act

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Speaker 1: on it. It's an interesting question. Jb Ryan felt that

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Speaker 1: over the course of his studies, about one in five

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Speaker 1: subjects seemed to have the abilities. Now he was testing

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Speaker 1: under laboratory conditions. It could be that people have these abilities,

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Speaker 1: but they come up spontaneously. They might come up in

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Speaker 1: moments of crisis, They might come up during dreams. It

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Speaker 1: could be something that's general throughout the population, but we

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Speaker 1: only feel it at times of passion. How about the men, women, kids?

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Speaker 1: Does it skew? He didn't find that it's skewed, although

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Speaker 1: he did test among kids, and he found that the

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Speaker 1: key thing is that you needed to have an atmosphere

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Speaker 1: where the individual, the test subject, felt relaxed, felt encouraged.

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Speaker 1: There was an absence of a kind of disturbing skepticism.

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Speaker 1: There was an atmosphere of enthusiasm, of positive of hopeful expectancy.

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Speaker 1: Periods of relaxation seemed to correlate with the ESP effect.

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Speaker 1: In his lab, there is a German word called gansfeld,

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Speaker 1: which means entire field, and that technique was used in

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Speaker 1: a number of parapsychology experiments where they put headsets on

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Speaker 1: people half ping pong balls on their eyes. What were

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Speaker 1: they trying to do? It's really exciting. These were experiments

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Speaker 1: that were conducted by Charles Honerton, a parapsychologist I mentioned earlier.

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Speaker 1: He pioneered these experiments in the seventies and eighties. He

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Speaker 1: found that you could spike the ESP effect or the

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Speaker 1: telepathy effect by placing the individual into conditions of relaxed

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Speaker 1: sensory deprivation. And the fact is we all find ourselves

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Speaker 1: in such conditions twice in twenty four hours every single day,

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Speaker 1: just as you're drifting to sleep at night and just

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Speaker 1: as you're waking up in the morning. It's a very

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Speaker 1: relaxed state that sleeper searchers call hypnogagiah. In that relaxed state,

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Speaker 1: you're very still, you're very relaxed. You might experience dreamlike

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Speaker 1: images or even hallucinations, but you retain control over your

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Speaker 1: cognition and Honorton in these Gunsfeld experiments found that that

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Speaker 1: is prime time for the esp effect among the general population.

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