Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
—LEONARDO DA VINCI
“Something bad is going to happen!”
Suzanne had always had premonitions. From an early age, she knew when something bad would happen. A tingling feeling would start in her chest, then spread to her arms, down her torso to her legs until her whole body tingled with anxious anticipation. Along with it came a premonition of some fearful thing about to happen to someone she knew: a car accident, an unexpected death, a disaster of some kind. The tingling wouldn’t relent until she got word that her fears were confirmed—usually within twenty-four hours.
“I don’t want to know when something bad is going to happen!” she told me when she sought therapy for this unusual symptom. “I just want to live my life like everybody else!” Suzanne believed she had inherited this “psychic” gift from her mother, who always magically knew when something was wrong with one of her four children. When Suzanne got into a car accident in college, her mom had an intense chest pain that signaled to her something was wrong with Suzanne. Before Suzanne could even reach her mom and tell her what happened, Mom was on a plane to visit Suzanne. Suzanne’s grandmother and great-grandmother both had the same “premonitions.”
Some psychiatrists may view Suzanne’s premonitions as repressed fears, inner conflicts, or unconscious wishes or fantasies. They may argue that Suzanne constructed her premonitions after something bad happened as she retrospectively searched her mind for any possible “omen” that could have foreshadowed the event. Dr. Lenore Terr, a psychiatrist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder, has shown repeatedly that in times of crisis and calamity, human beings are excellent at recalling omens, premonitions, and signs foreshadowing the event. She believes we recall these “predictors” only after the fact in an effort to give us some control and power at times when we feel out of control and powerless.1 Thus, premonitions may be just retrospective rationalizations.
While Suzanne and I explored these possibilities together, we both believed there was more going on here. Perhaps Suzanne and the women of her family had a particularly gifted sense of intuition? What if this intuitive sense that Suzanne had come to know as a burden could have a positive side she had not yet discovered or acknowledged?
As I got to know Suzanne, I learned that her disturbing premonitions—which was the original reason she had come to see me—were just the tip of the iceberg. Suzanne’s heightened intuition and enhanced perception manifested in all aspects of her life. She would often know things about other people that they never told her and she had no way of knowing, like what they did for a living, or the name of their child, or where they were born. She didn’t know how she knew this—she just knew. She frequently knew how the people close to her were feeling, to the point where if somebody was distressed or in physical pain, she would feel the same feeling or sensation.
Whenever she was around somebody who was angry, she would feel drained and need to leave the room. She found crowds and big parties intolerable and shopping malls overstimulating, often having to depart soon after she arrived because she felt panic, anxiety, or pain in some part of her body. She could not be around bright lights or loud sounds for long periods of time. Suzanne was like a sponge, absorbing information and energy from other people and her surroundings at all times and processing this information more deeply and thoroughly than your average person.
Dr. Judith Orloff, a highly intuitive psychiatrist and author, calls people like Suzanne intuitive empaths.2 Intuitive empathy is the ability to sense what’s going on in others both physically and emotionally as if it were happening to oneself. It involves energetically merging with others and, for the moment, seeing and experiencing life (both positive and negative) through their eyes and sensing the world through their feelings.
For intuitive empaths, the idea of boundaries is particularly important, because it can be difficult for empaths to know where their experience ends and another’s experience begins. Is the sadness they’re feeling theirs or their mother’s? Is the pain in their chest theirs or their sister’s? Tania Singer, director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, uses the term “emotional contagion” to describe shared empathy where the distinction between self and other becomes blurred.3
The effect of empathy and sensitivity on quality of life has been a topic of great interest among physicians, therapists, parents, and academics alike. In their 2005 paper in the journal Development and Psychopathology, researchers Ellis and Boyce classified children as either “dandelions” or “orchids.” Dandelions make up about 80 percent of children; they are generally resilient and have the capacity to survive, even thrive, in whatever circumstances they encounter, provided their environment isn’t excessively harsh. In contrast, orchids make up the remaining 20 percent of children and are highly sensitive to their environment, especially the quality of parenting they receive growing up. In difficult environments, orchids do poorly, while in supportive environments, they actually fare better than dandelions, with the potential to become “a flower of unusual delicacy and beauty.”4
Another term for the “orchids,” coined by psychologist Elaine Aron, PhD, is “highly sensitive person” (HSP). In addition to the traits discussed above, HSPs are aware of subtleties in their environment, are highly affected by others’ moods, and have a rich and complex inner life. In brain imaging studies, they show stronger activation of brain regions associated with attention, awareness, and empathy.5
My patient Suzanne was very much an orchid. In difficult, overstimulating, energy-draining environments, Suzanne floundered. In supportive environments, she flourished, as evidenced by her excelling in school and having an exceptionally successful writing career.
In my work with Suzanne, I first helped her to become aware of how other people and her environment affect her. Having always had a strong people-pleasing side, Suzanne would often endure difficult people and environments to the point where she felt completely drained. She was especially sensitive to interactions with “energy vampires,” or people who feed off others’ energy to compensate for a lack of their own.
It was key for Suzanne to learn to stand up for herself, set boundaries, and walk away from energy vampires and energy-draining environments whenever possible. She also learned how to create a protective energy shield around herself—by visualizing either an enveloping white light or an astronaut suit around her entire body—whenever she felt her energy starting to wane. You create this energy shield with your intention by saying to yourself: “I create an energy shield with the following properties: it will block out negativity, drain out any negativity I hold inside, and filter in all positivity.” This simple energetic practice, adaptations of which are used by many healers, proved invaluable to Suzanne; she started doing it several times per day and became better able to distinguish her own feelings and sensation from those of the people around her.
Over time Suzanne learned to acknowledge but separate herself from unwanted premonitions and intuitive “hunches.” This protected Suzanne from feeling that her premonitions were controlling her rather than vice versa. She shared what she learned with her mother, who was grateful to finally have an explanation for what she had been experiencing her whole life. Then Suzanne learned to enhance her intuitive abilities and use her gift—once a source of great fear and anxiety—in the service of herself. She harnessed her natural-born intuitive capacity in her writing, really bringing her characters to life in a way few authors can. In her social life and personal life, she learned to check in with herself regularly and become more attuned to how she felt in her environment. Whenever she encountered an “energy vampire” or other energy-draining situation, she immediately put up her energetic protective shield and limited the amount of time spent there. She ended up feeling less exhausted, more productive, and overall happier and more balanced.
For this stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, set your stopwatch to five minutes and write without stopping on the topic Identifying Energy Vampires in Your Life. The Questions for Reflection are included as mere guideposts. As with life, let your writing take you where it may.
1. What kinds of qualities in other people do you find emotionally draining or exhausting? What kinds of people do you find it difficult to be around?
2. Are there currently any such people in your life with whom you don’t feel you have set appropriate boundaries?
3. What would setting firmer boundaries with these people look like? What would be the benefit of setting such boundaries?
4. What keeps you from doing this?
As an action step to follow this journaling exercise, this week set firmer boundaries with one energy vampire in your life. This may mean saying no when you would ordinarily say yes. It may mean limiting the time you spend with them or the mental energy you give them in your mind when you are not with them. It may mean visualizing an energetic protective shield around you, as Suzanne did, when you are in the presence of this person.
As effective as it may be to set firmer boundaries with the people you find emotionally draining, an even more powerful way to restore yourself emotionally is to fill your heart with love.
This exercise is designed to help you connect with your heart and amplify your capacity to love yourself and others. From this space, you can send core heart feelings to people you love and, better yet, people you find difficult or draining in any way. When people send love and care to somebody with whom they are having problems, the relationship often improves. This may be due to an attitude shift in the sender, a heart opening in the receiver, a combination of both, or something else entirely. Whatever the mechanism, sending core heart feelings to others puts you more into alignment with the other person, yourself, and your capacity for love, compassion, and healing.
When you are ready, sit in a comfortable position and begin.
1. Find a quiet place, close your eyes, and begin to relax by slowly focusing on your breath. Take several slow deep breaths:
• Inhale through your nose for the count of two.
• Hold your breath for the count of four.
• Exhale through your nose for the count of eight.
• Repeat for five breath cycles.
2. Now pretend that you are breathing slowly through your heart. With each inhalation, imagine your heart expanding as it fills with love and white light. With each exhalation, imagine your heart contracting as it releases negative energy and darkness.
3. Now remember the feeling of love, care, or appreciation you have for someone whom it’s easy for you to love. This can be a person dear to you, a pet, or even a spiritual source (e.g., God).
4. Place this person, pet, or entity in your heart center and feel what it is like to love, care for, and appreciate them. Send them love. Feel the love they have for you. Try to stay with these feelings for at least five minutes. If five minutes is easy for you, try to increase this to ten minutes, and eventually fifteen minutes. The longer you can sustain this state, the better you will feel.
5. As thoughts enter your mind, bring your focus gently back to the area around your heart.
6. If the energy feels too intense or even blocked, repeat breathing through your heart (Step 2) five more times.
7. From a state of heart-centered awareness, begin to send and receive love to and from people whom you love. On your inhalation, say or think, “I receive love from people I love.” On your exhalation, say or think, “I give love to people I love.” Do this while you breathe for at least two minutes.
8. Next, begin to send love to the people in your life with whom you are having difficulties, including the energy vampire you identified in the above exercise. This could be a boss, friend, spouse, partner, or neighbor. Imagine the person on the other end receiving the love you send. On your inhalation, say or think as you breathe, “I receive love from everybody in my life.” On your exhalation, say or think as you breathe, “I give love to everybody in my life.” Do this for at least two minutes.
As you connect to your heart, you may also feel more connected to your intuition and a deep sense of inner knowing. If you receive any such messages or guidance during this exercise, write them down so you can review them later. After you complete this exercise, you may want to journal about what emerged for you.
Suzanne’s heightened sensitivity and capacity for empathy were so powerful, sometimes even overwhelming, that she often felt like she had telepathy with the people close to her. She knew what others were thinking without knowing how or why she knew this. Suzanne was deeply intuitive. Some may even call her psychic. Although I certainly do not have many patients in my practice who present with psychic or telepathic capabilities like Suzanne, I have had multiple patients consult psychics before or during the course of our work together.
Whenever my patients consult psychics, I always greet their experiences with curiosity and an open mind—though I was a bit startled when one patient asked a psychic whether she should take the medication I prescribed to her! (To my relief, the psychic said she should.) A psychic once told another patient to reduce the dose of the Prozac I’d prescribed to her. She sensed that her current dose was too much for the patient. The patient and I discussed the psychic’s recommendation and decided to try reducing the dosage. Over the next month, my patient’s condition improved. I asked her to thank the psychic on my behalf for the medical consultation!
When psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell was working on the psychiatric consult service at Harvard Medical Center, a statuesque woman of African-American and Native American descent named Cheyenne came in with a suspected heart attack. After examining her, the medical staff thought she might be psychotic, so they called in Dr. Hennacy Powell for a psychiatric consultation.
“I see ghosts here,” Cheyenne told Dr. Hennacy Powell. “It’s really freaking me out and I want to leave.”
Rather than concluding that she was mentally ill and signing her into the locked ward, Dr. Hennacy Powell sat down and talked to her. Cheyenne claimed to be psychic. “I’m getting a reading about you,” she said. “Do you mind if I share the information?”
“No. Go ahead,” Dr. Hennacy Powell replied.
“Your husband’s a chemist.” This was true. “And he’s applying for a job right now in two cities.” That very week he was interviewing for one position at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and another one in San Diego.
Dr. Hennacy Powell was astounded by the accuracy of her remarks, and pressed her further by saying, “Which cities?” Cheyenne asked Dr. Hennacy Powell to name some cities. Dr. Hennacy Powell started listing cities, to which Cheyenne responded, “San Diego and Baltimore.” Cheyenne told Dr. Hennacy Powell that, in his heart, her husband wanted to go to one, but they’d end up in the other one. That made sense to Dr. Hennacy Powell. Her husband had been born in Johns Hopkins and was the thirteenth generation in his family to live in Baltimore. That was where he belonged, in his heart of hearts. But when the better academic opportunity arose in San Diego, that’s where they went.
During the time they talked, the woman made many predictions about Dr. Hennacy Powell’s life that, years later, came true. She said she’d have only one child, a daughter, and she did. She said that, eventually, Dr. Hennacy Powell would give up psychiatry to write books, and she did.
Was this woman at the hospital indeed psychic? Or did her predictions perhaps subtly influence Dr. Hennacy Powell’s later decisions to have one child and write books? Or was this just a function of Dr. Hennacy Powell selectively remembering the things this woman predicted correctly and forgetting her incorrect predictions?
The patient agreed to get her medical bloodwork done while she was there, but she said the results would come back normal, and they did.
The encounter left Dr. Hennacy Powell’s sense of reality shaken. What could explain this woman’s insight into a stranger’s life that day? It was as if this woman had read Dr. Hennacy Powell’s mind and forecasted her future! If this woman was truly psychic, how in the world did she know what she knew? Through this experience, Dr. Hennacy Powell realized that things are not always what we’ve come to believe.6
The word “telepathy” derives from the Greek prefix tele, meaning “distant” and patheia, meaning “feeling or perception.” It is defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “the communication between people of thoughts, feelings, desires… through mechanisms that cannot be understood in terms of known scientific laws.”7
Many psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and therapists have written about these sorts of “telepathic” experiences. Even Sigmund Freud, who was skeptical of the supernatural, believed there to be a “kernel of truth” in the experience of telepathy, which he called “thought transference.”8 In his book Dreams and Occultism, he described it as an event where “mental processes in one person—ideas, emotional states, impulses—can be transferred to another person through empty space without employing the familiar methods of communication by means of words and signs.”9
Even when we are not deliberately trying to cultivate telepathic capabilities, it’s a familiar occurrence to be thinking about someone just before they call or e-mail. My father and I experience this on a regular basis. A song may enter your mind and, moments later, a loved one begins humming the same tune without any communication between you. My father and stepmother experience this occurrence with regularity. Or you may recall an old friend from high school you have not thought about in years and bump into them later on the street. Psychiatrist Berthold Schwarz kept a diary about coincidences like this in his family and later published them in a book entitled Parent-Child Telepathy.10 Hans Berger, a German psychiatrist who invented the electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brain waves to diagnose conditions like seizures, was inspired to create this machine after an extraordinary telepathic experience with his sister. She sent him a telegraph saying that she was very concerned that something bad had happened to him on the same day he had almost been killed while riding a horse!11 Coincidences like this may bewilder us and stand out in our mind as significant. Yet a skeptic would point out all the other times we have thought about somebody and they did not call or when we may have had a premonition and been wrong.
A number of psychoanalytic thinkers have developed methods for tuning in to the nonverbal unconscious material of another person. The psychoanalytic approach developed by Freud deliberately encourages access to this level of consciousness. By having the patient lie down without looking at the analyst and encouraging free-association (i.e., “tell me anything that comes into your mind when you think about that red elephant in your dream”), Freud believed the patient would be able to access the depth of their unconscious mind. Another method Freud frequently employed was dream analysis. He believed dreams to be the “royal road to the unconscious” by providing key insights into the inner conflicts a patient was working to resolve. Helping patients to become conscious of the content of their unconscious mind is one tool of traditional psychotherapy. As patients become more aware of their unconscious struggles, they gain the freedom to make different choices in resolving these conflicts. Freud was also one of the first to realize that a powerful force at work in the bond between a patient and therapist is emotional attachment, at the conscious and unconscious level. By developing and employing all these psychoanalytic methods, Freud was taking full advantage of our inherent interconnectedness. His friend and colleague Sándor Ferenczi called this the “dialogue of the unconsciouses.”12
Neurobiologists continue to search for explanations for these fascinating, unusual experiences. Some say telepathy occurs because of a conversation between two people’s limbic systems,13 or two people’s right amygdalas,14 and/or some activity in people’s mirror neurons.15 A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when we act and when we observe the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of the other, as though the observer were him or herself acting. In this way, mirror neurons are believed to be involved in our capacity for empathy or knowing the mind of another,16 perhaps even telepathy. Despite existing hypotheses, the scientific mechanism for experiences like telepathy remains a mystery.
Since opening myself up to ideas of spirituality ten years ago, my awareness of telepathy and other expressions of our interconnectedness has increased exponentially in my life. On a regular basis, I have a fleeting thought about a patient I have not heard from in months and within twenty-four hours that patient contacts me. It has occurred with such regularity that when it happens now, I will sometimes even pull the patient’s chart in preparation for their call.
Recently, I had an interesting experience with Carlie, a patient I’d been treating for five years. Prior to one of our appointments, I recall receiving a text from Carlie saying that her mother and sister would be joining her in the session that day. So I set up the room for three patients instead of one and went into my waiting room to invite them in.
I was quite surprised to see that Carlie was alone. “Where are your mother and sister?”
Carlie looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“I got your text. Weren’t your mother and sister going to join you?”
“They were. But how did you know that? I never texted you.” Carlie looked stunned. She told me that they had planned to come to the session but at the last minute had decided not to.
To my surprise, when I double-checked my cell phone, there were no texts from Carlie!
As a therapist, I become very close with my patients and embedded in the nuances of their inner worlds. It is therefore not surprising to me that my patients’ inner worlds sometimes inadvertently bleed into mine, and vice versa. But the scientist in me wants to know exactly how and why this happens. How was I able to receive this seemingly telepathic communication from Carlie outside our usual channels of communication?
Psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell once unexpectedly said to her patient Rolanda, “I think you may be stuck in this pattern because of what happened with your father when you were four years old.” Rolanda was startled by Dr. Hennacy Powell’s statement. “I’ve been working up the courage to tell you that,” she said. Wondering if Rolanda had simply forgotten sharing this emotionally charged material at one of their previous sessions, Dr. Hennacy Powell checked her notes. She confirmed that Rolanda had never mentioned it. The expression of this unconscious bond deepened Rolanda’s trust of Dr. Hennacy Powell and made their work progress.17
Telepathy manifested in a slightly different way—as a “slip of the tongue”—with an Eastern-Orthodox priest named Mark with whom I have been working for the last three years. About six months into treatment, Mark shared how difficult it was for him to come to therapy and explore parts of himself that he did not want to confront.
My response surprised me. I said something like, “Mark, you may want therapy to always feel like a massage, where you leave feeling relaxed and calm, but what is often most helpful is to discuss precisely those things that are most distressing and unsettling to you.”
Relating therapy to a massage was a strange remark to make to a priest. As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I felt confused. Why had I said that? Not that there was anything wrong with the comment; it’s just not a comment I would ordinarily make.
Mark looked at me in shock. In that session, he confessed to me that the real reason he had come to therapy was because he had been going to massage parlors for the last several years and felt extremely guilty about it.
My conscious mind was completely unaware of what Mark wasn’t saying, but apparently, something had been communicated unconsciously that made me say what I said without even knowing why. Whatever the reason, the experience was quite powerful for both Mark and myself. This synchronicity was a turning point in our work together and enabled Mark to be honest with me about something he had never been honest about with anybody else.
Numerous psychiatrists have reported experiences of this nature in their work with patients. New York psychoanalyst Janine de Peyer published a paper in Psychoanalytic Dialogues entitled “Uncanny Communication and the Porous Mind.” She describes a very similar “slip of the tongue” with one of her patients, Jordan.18
Jordan was anticipating having separation anxiety from her boyfriend, George, when she went on a retreat to New Mexico. Dr. de Peyer was asking Jordan about the possibility of Skyping with George while she was away. She meant to say “You could be in Timbuktu and still talk to him.” Instead, she said “You could be in Tuckahoe and still talk to him.” It seemed innocuous. Perhaps Dr. de Peyer had heard the name Tuckahoe on TV that morning and mixed it up with Timbuktu. But Jordan knew the difference. She had been talking to Dr. de Peyer about Tuckahoe, a place her family used to visit together when Jordan was a child, for the last thirty minutes in therapy without ever mentioning the name of the town! The emotional meaning of Dr. de Peyer’s slip of the tongue was incredibly powerful for Jordan and, similar to my own experience, led to a significant breakthrough in their therapy. Dr. de Peyer’s paper cites twenty-two similar cases published in the academic literature by psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts since the days of Freud until the present.
Numerous doctors and therapists have also reported powerful, insight-generating dreams about patients,19 yet sometimes the one with the insight is the patient! On two separate occasions, my patient Hans, the young violinist about whom I wrote in my introduction, had dreams about things in my personal life that he had no way of knowing about. In the first dream, which occurred about three years into our treatment, Hans saw the two of us together in my office during a session. Although I had short hair at the time, in Hans’s dream I had flowing brown locks that went down to the floor. In his dream, I sat in an elevated chair while the tendrils flew all around the room, as if taking on a life of their own. Hans described the dream as having a grainy appearance, which he experienced when a dream was particularly meaningful to him. As we explored the dream, we realized that my long hair in the dream equated me in Hans’s mind with a safe, kind yet complicated character in a novel he was writing who also had flowing brown locks. For me, however, the dream turned out to be unexpectedly literal.
I had long hair up until the age of twenty-five, when I cut it short while doing a research project in Thailand one summer during medical school. Long hair and the sweltering Thai heat did not mix. Curiously enough, I had started thinking about letting my hair grow out again about a week before Hans’s dream. One of my friends suggested that I try some temporary hair extensions, and the day before I saw Hans, I had tried on flowing brown locks. I liked them and committed to growing out my own hair again. Then I took off the hair extensions, all in the comfort of my own home. The next day Hans told me his dream.
Had Hans unconsciously picked up my musings about my hair in our prior session? He could not have seen me with longer hair, since I had only tried the extensions on in my apartment. About a year after this occurrence, Hans dreamed that I had moved into a new apartment in Manhattan. His dream occurred the week I moved into a new apartment! These occurrences suggest that we are connected to each other on a deeper level than we realize. Our connections can run so deep that even mundane aspects of our daily experiences can overlap into each other’s inner worlds. Predictive dreams, like those experienced by Hans, are not uncommon. Three days prior to his assassination, Abraham Lincoln had a dream about his own death.20
The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, published findings from 149 cases of predictive dreams or “dream telepathy” in the historic work Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore. In most cases, the dreamer and the subject were either related or acquainted. Most of the dreams involved death or some sort of crisis. None of the dreamers had a history of psychic abilities or telepathy; nor were they prone to nightmares, which made these particular dreams stand out.21 If such experiences are relatively common, could telepathic abilities be something we all possess? How can subjective and personal experiences of this nature be studied scientifically?
While the above stories offer ample anecdotal evidence of telepathy and other forms of mental interconnectedness, anecdotes alone do not constitute scientific proof. Perhaps the oldest well-known scientific experiment of telepathy is the Ganzfeld, which in German means “whole field.” In the original Ganzfeld experiment, subjects are put into a state of relative sensory deprivation: they sit in a comfortable reclining chair in a soundproof room with halved Ping-Pong balls over their eyes. They wear headphones playing continuous quiet static and are told to speak for twenty minutes about any impressions that pop into their mind. This person is the “receiver.”
At the same time, a “sender” observes a randomly chosen symbol (like a circle, square, or squiggly line) and tries to mentally transmit this symbol to the receiver. For thirty minutes, the receiver says out loud any image that comes into his or her mind. This is recorded by the experimenter (who does not know the symbol being transmitted). The receiver is then taken out of the Ganzfeld state and given a set of four possible symbols, from which they are asked to select the one which most resembles the images they witnessed. Most commonly there are three decoys along with the target, giving an expected “hit” rate of 25 percent.22
To overcome methodologic limitations in the study design, numerous refinements were made to the original Ganzfeld protocol. In its more recent incarnation, titled “digital autoganzfeld,” an automated computer system is used to randomly select and display the symbols.23 In 2010, researchers Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di Risio analyzed twenty-nine Ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008, which contained a total of 1,498 analyzed trials. These trials produced 483 “hits,” corresponding to a hit rate of 32.2 percent, which is significantly higher than the expect 25 percent hit rate.24 These results were statistically significant, suggesting that there was indeed some telepathy at play among the study subjects.25 As with any scientific discovery that challenges our existing paradigm, these results have been met with a healthy dose of skepticism and scrutiny.26 The overall effect size is modest and difficult to replicate on demand, perhaps because “natural” telepathy occurs more frequently under circumstances when the “sender” is experiencing heightened physical, psychological, or emotional distress, which is hard to replicate in a laboratory setting.27
In a related experiment at University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Charles Tart gave himself electrical shocks while attempting to convey his pain telepathically to a person hooked up to machines in a nearby room (i.e., the receiver). The receiver was monitored for physiological changes, such as heart rate and blood volume. In contrast to the Ganzfeld experiment, which studied changes in the receiver’s conscious mind, this experiment bypassed the conscious mind and focused only on changes at the autonomic (unconscious) level. The experiment was repeated with multiple receivers. While none of them reported any conscious awareness of Tart’s pain, their bodies seemed to register some physiological changes quite clearly. While Tart was being shocked, the receivers’ hearts beat faster. It was as if, unconsciously, they knew and empathized.28
The capacity to empathize unconsciously with another human being is something we all possess to different degrees, so the results of this experiment may not seem shocking. As a therapist, I will often pick up what my patient is feeling by being in the room with them. When a patient comes in sad or depressed, I can sometimes begin to feel depressed myself. When somebody comes in angry, I may start to feel angry. When appropriate, I will share what I am feeling in the moment with my patient. Psychiatrist Leston Havens writes, “How do we know what to tell the patient? We have to experience them, like water falling on Helen Keller’s hand. Then we can begin to recognize them.”29 The way in which a therapist feels while in the room with a patient is an important tool for understanding what is going on with the patient and in the therapy.
What is it that differentiates people who are a little more telepathic than others? This question has been asked by Ganzfeld researchers, therapists, and laymen alike. Parapsychologist Charles Honorton, together with social psychologist and Cornell professor Daryl Bem investigated personality traits that enhanced one’s capacity for telepathy.30 They found that these traits included a belief that telepathy was real (as opposed to a skeptical attitude toward it),31 considering oneself to be an artistic or creative person,32 having had a history of telepathic experiences,33 practicing a mental discipline like meditation,34 and emotional closeness to people with whom you are having the telepathic exchange.35 In essence, more telepathic individuals are generally artistic, creative, likely to meditate, open to the unknown, and emotionally receptive. In summary, these are individuals who are more “right-brained.” Some preliminary brain imaging studies have confirmed the association between telepathy and right-brain activation.36,
For the past fifty years, it was believed that the seat of intuition lay in the right hemisphere of our brain, whereas logic and language resided in the left hemisphere. In her book Stroke of Insight, Harvard-trained brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, describes what happened to her at the age of thirty-seven when she experienced a massive stroke that essentially inactivated the left hemisphere of her brain.37 In the eight years of recovery following her stroke, Dr. Taylor oscillated between two psychological states: her present-focused, intuitive state (the one conducive to telepathy) and her logical, verbal state (the one that can, at times, block telepathy). Dr. Taylor describes her right mind as follows:
My right mind character is adventurous, celebrative of abundance, and socially adept. It is sensitive to nonverbal communication, empathic, and accurately decodes emotion. The right mind is open to the eternal flow whereby I exist as one with the Universe. It is the seat of my divine mind, the knower, the wise woman, and the observer. It is my intuition and higher consciousness. My right mind is ever present and gets lost in time.
Being right-brained has been shown by researchers to also make one more telepathic.38
When we are born, we are predominantly right-brained or intuitive/instinctual. There is even data suggesting that babies are capable of reading minds.39 Some say this state renders us connected to the universal consciousness, where we know everything but are not aware of it and do not know how to access or express it. As we get older and begin to learn, the right brain begins to take a backseat to the left brain, with intuitive/instinctual behavior replaced by learned behavior. As we continue to evolve, we become more left-brained, relying more on our technology and learned knowledge and less on right-brain instincts/intuition and collective consciousness. Science is very much a left-brained activity, whereas spirituality is largely a right-brained activity. Creating a healthy balance between the two enables us to have the cognitive flexibility to welcome change, access intuition, and be creative while remaining concrete and organized enough to meet our responsibilities and stay grounded in reality. For any well-balanced and functioning human being, both sides of the brain must be functioning in coordination with each other at all times.
The right brain is associated not just with telepathy, but also with creativity, intuition, altered states of consciousness, and universal consciousness. Activities like meditation, mindfulness, and certain forms of creativity can quiet the left brain and bring us into a more right-brained state of mind.40 Another way of neutralizing the left brain and setting your right-brain potential free is through the use of sound, which is frequently used in healing. Certain sounds, including music and chanting, are important in religious and meditative traditions to help achieve deep, transcendental states of consciousness. After Harvard neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, MD, had a deeply spiritual near-death experience (NDE), he was able to use sound frequencies and harmonics found in the natural world to re-create the altered state of consciousness he experienced and revisit the extraordinary spiritual realms.41 While the left brain is largely responsible for our feeling of individuality, the right brain helps us feel more interconnected with each other and the world.
This idea of our interconnectedness has profound implications for our lives and our relationship to others. When others suffer, we feel their pain. When we experience joy, it radiates out into the Universe. While the experience of oneness can never be fully and accurately put into words, it has been written about by poets, and frequently experienced by mystics and yogis, and to some degree by each of us in peak experiences.
For centuries, deep meditation has made practitioners aware of the oneness in all of life. Others have reported feeling a sense of interconnectedness while listening to great music, seeing an inspiring film, or experiencing creative breakthroughs. Parents feel these moments in their unconditional love for their child. Lovers may feel it during a sexual experience where the sense of separateness from their lover disappears. Learning to access this flow state within oneself and connect to this feeling of oneness is a powerful vehicle for growth, healing, transformation, and ultimately, fulfillment.42
In her pioneering book Extraordinary Knowing, psychoanalyst Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer writes about telepathy and other experiences of deep connectedness between human beings:
They reflect capacities to which we can’t gain access in the customary ways. They’re peculiar capacities in that they’re least likely to become available when we deliberately try to access them. We cannot reach these new sources of information simply by “tuning in” to something new; paradoxically, we must also “tune out” much of the ordinary information that continually bombards our senses. While some people appear born with an innate gift for doing that, it may be possible for the rest of us to learn to develop precisely the same quality of awareness, an awareness that might result in a subjectively felt state of profound connectedness to other human beings and to every aspect of the material world around us. If that state exists and we can achieve it, we may also develop distinct perceptual capacities, including an intuitive intelligence whose development and training our culture has largely overlooked. Refining and educating such intelligence has huge implications for how we see the world because it changes what we’re able to see, changing what we’re able to know as a result. It may render the intuitive knowing we call extraordinary and anomalous not only possible but downright ordinary.43