00:00:00
If what you're saying is true, then I mean this is a revelation. Yeah. And I I couldn't speak about it
00:00:05
until now that it's possible to communicate with someone that's passed away. And I'm saying it from the point
00:00:11
of view of being a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist. And it's taboo because we are afraid that people will think we're
00:00:18
going insane. I mean, I've been part of teams that have locked people up and had them injected with stuff against their
00:00:23
will because of things they were saying that's not that dissimilar to things I've experienced. I wanted to find out
00:00:28
as much science as I could to try to back it up. And do you think you found the answer? Yeah. How sure are you?
00:00:33
100%. And the things I found out are going to shock you. The floor is yours.
00:00:38
Okay. So, I'm Dr. Tara Wart. I'm a neuroscientist and a medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry. And I lost my
00:00:46
beloved husband to leukemia almost 4 years ago, 2 days before our fourth wedding anniversary. And that everything
00:00:52
I believed in had gone wrong. I was just totally lost and broken. But
00:00:59
then I started getting signs from my husband. And in my desperation, I did consult a couple of mediums. But not
00:01:06
being impressed by them, I ended up thinking if it's possible to communicate with someone that's passed away. And I
00:01:12
am all about optimizing my brain, then I should be able to do it myself. So I went down a rabbit hole. And what I've
00:01:18
uncovered in this research is going to have a really beneficial effect on a lot of people. Why? because it means that we are
00:01:24
capable of so much more than what we think the human mind is capable of. So listen, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try and ask the questions
00:01:29
and challenge you in ways that I think the viewer might challenge you. I want you to ask me those questions.
00:01:38
I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe. So, if you
00:01:43
could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing
00:01:50
that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show in the trajectory it's on. So, please do
00:01:56
double check if you've subscribed and uh thank you so much because in a strange way you are you're part of our history
00:02:02
and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So, yeah, thank you
00:02:09
Dr. Tara Swart. Good to see you again. You too. Thank you for coming back. You were our
00:02:15
most viewed guest on the show of all time. Our last conversation did just over 20 million views and downloads,
00:02:23
which is pretty staggering. But you're back to talk about something entirely different this time, which is this idea of science, which
00:02:29
kind of intertwines with all of your work on neuroscience that you've done throughout your career. My first
00:02:34
question to you is, what is it that you think you know that the vast majority of people don't quite understand,
00:02:41
comprehend, or have accepted yet? and take me right back to the sort of first principles of that thinking.
00:02:48
I believe that we are capable of so much more than what we think the human mind is capable of now. And I believe that
00:02:54
the brain actually filters down the capability of the mind so that we can exist on this material plane. And
00:03:02
things that I found out doing research for the signs is going to shock you. The abilities that we have that we're not
00:03:08
aware of are way beyond what you might even imagine right now. In what departments and facets of my
00:03:15
life? Let's just start with something really simple. How many senses do you think we have? Five. I can smell. I can touch. Um I can
00:03:23
hear. I can see. Um is it five that? Yeah, five. Is it five?
00:03:28
Have you heard of a six sense? Being able to see ghosts and stuff. Okay. So I think most people would agree
00:03:34
that we have five senses and some people would say isn't there something like a six sense and I don't think it's agreed
00:03:40
what that might be. So I actually did a literature review of several pieces of
00:03:45
research about how many senses humans have and we actually have 34 as we
00:03:50
currently understand it. 34. And so what does this mean? Like what is
00:03:56
the because you're making an assertion here. What is the assertion that you're making and what does that mean for the
00:04:02
material sort of consequences of my life? I'm making a hypothesis based on both
00:04:07
the analogy of the observable universe and the fact that we have this expanded suite of senses to challenge you to
00:04:15
understand that you are capable of much more than you think you are. And you know, you're a really good case in point
00:04:20
for me because you love rationality and data and science and you don't really love intuition and the, you know, the
00:04:28
unknown, the unseen. So, you know, I think if I can convince you of anything by the end of this podcast, then the
00:04:35
impact that that could have on society, I think is huge. I mean, the things I found out are going to shock you.
00:04:40
What do you mean by that? I, as you know, was a was a psychiatrist
00:04:45
in the past. So I'm able to diagnose people and say whether they have a mental illness or not. In the past four
00:04:53
years, I've been keeping a secret. And there
00:04:58
were times in that four years that I had to ask myself if I was in clinical depression,
00:05:04
if I was psychotic, if I was manic, if
00:05:10
the way that my consciousness was expanding. I mean, Steve, I've I've been
00:05:15
part of teams that have locked people up and put, you know, had them injected with stuff against their will because of
00:05:21
things they were saying that's not that dissimilar to things I've experienced in the last four years.
00:05:27
So, I guess we better get into the secret because I sat here with you almost two years ago now and we had a
00:05:34
fantastic conversation, but there was something you didn't tell my audience when we had that conversation that re
00:05:39
reached more than 20 million people. There was something at that moment in time that you didn't tell me, which was
00:05:45
this secret you've been keeping. What is the secret, Tara? Um, I lost my
00:05:52
beloved husband to leukemia almost four years ago and I've written this book which
00:05:59
mentions my personal story. So, and I trust you. So, I really wanted to
00:06:05
come back on the podcast and just explain a little bit to people about
00:06:11
what's been going on for me for the last four years. So your husband Robin, you
00:06:17
met him 2016 and he passed he passed away from
00:06:22
leukemia in 2021. 2021. Now from 2021 when he passed away,
00:06:30
what what happened in your life? What was going on in your world? If I was a fly on the wall in your context, what
00:06:35
would I have seen? He'd been given two weeks to live, but he actually lived for three and a half
00:06:40
weeks. and he died two days before our fourth wedding anniversary. So, I was literally
00:06:47
reading condolence cards on my fourth wedding anniversary. If it wasn't for the people that I have
00:06:52
around me who became like a fortress, I don't think I would be here today. You
00:06:58
know, never having had that experience before, it was just so so devastating. Um, and even though I'm a neuroscientist
00:07:05
and a psychiatrist, I just I just was like like totally lost and
00:07:12
broken. And then I started seeing robins in the garden
00:07:17
every single time I went to the window, both in Hampshire and London. I've never
00:07:22
ever seen so many robins in my life. Like not before or since. I still see them sometimes. But I noticed it. I
00:07:30
thought, of course, that's what I want to see. I have no idea what it means, if
00:07:36
anything. Um, and then about 6 weeks after he passed
00:07:41
away, I was asleep and I heard a noise in the
00:07:47
distance and we had been burgled once, so I went to check it wasn't the alarm in the garages. Couldn't work out what
00:07:53
it was. Thought maybe it was birds in the distance. Went back to sleep. It was about 4:00 a.m. and then I got woken up
00:07:59
by a massive thump to my shoulder. I wouldn't demonstrate it on you because it would be too much for me to hit you
00:08:06
that hard. It wasn't like a tap. So, I opened my eyes and I could see next to
00:08:13
my bed a very vague hazy version of Robin as if
00:08:18
he was pushing himself through trial to be seen. And I was just transfixed. And I saw him
00:08:25
become more and more clear. I could see the outline of his hair and his face. And then suddenly he just dissolved from
00:08:31
the top down. And my eyes went like this. And I remember seeing his shins and his feet. And I was like up on my
00:08:36
elbow watching. And I I just gasped out loud. In my desperation, I did consult a
00:08:44
couple of mediums. And again, I had that dual conversation. I said to myself, this is the kind of
00:08:51
thing that crazy, desperate people do. And within the same breath, it's okay
00:08:57
for me to be crazy and desperate right now. I've lost my best friend, my life partner. Like my everything I thought
00:09:03
about how the world worked has crashed around me. And I ended up think, you
00:09:09
know, being not being impressed by the mediums. and just at some point, I can't even remember when now thinking if it's
00:09:16
possible to communicate with someone that's passed away and he was my husband and my best friend
00:09:24
and I am all about optimizing my brain and expanding my consciousness, then I should be able to do it myself. That's
00:09:31
that's the start of my journey that I've written about in science. And do you think you found the answer?
00:09:36
Yeah. How sure are you? 100%.
00:09:42
I mean, if if if what you're saying is true, then that's a pretty I mean, that's a
00:09:47
revelation, right? So many people have lost lost people or um have gone through
00:09:52
different types of loss in their life. And you're telling me that through the work you've done over the last couple of
00:09:58
years and the research you've done, you understand how to communicate with them in some capacity.
00:10:03
Mhm. And you're 100% sure. 100%. So, listen. Here's what I'm going to do.
00:10:09
I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to challenge you in ways that I think um the viewer might challenge
00:10:16
you sat at home. So I'm going to try and ask the questions that the viewer might ask because there's you know people
00:10:22
the this idea is quite a significant perspective shifting one. So my job in
00:10:28
this conversation although these are sensitive matter matters of course is just to try and play devil's advocate where I can
00:10:34
and I just I want to say that you know you know me and you know that you've asked me to come back on the podcast several times
00:10:39
and I've come when I'm ready so I want you to ask me those questions. Yeah. So where does this journey begin
00:10:45
then? So this you suffer this tragic loss in your life. You go to the mediums
00:10:51
you're let down by them. Where does this begin? Where does your research your your journey of discovery begin?
00:10:57
It starts with this decision to um you know try to
00:11:03
communicate with him myself. There's a realization at some point that it's not a one-way thing that when people pass
00:11:11
away they also have to learn. So it's it's it's like two people having to learn a language to speak to each other.
00:11:17
Like two people who speak a different language having to learn a language that they can both speak. That's that's how
00:11:23
it felt. Obviously, as a scientist, I then wanted to find out as much science
00:11:29
as I could to to try to back it up, which really comes down to the science of whether the mind or the psyche or the
00:11:36
soul can exist separately from the body. And I will say that way before I even
00:11:42
started thinking about this stuff, just the the moment that he died, which he died in front of me, once he'd actually
00:11:48
passed away, I remember a really strong feeling of looking at his body and just knowing that wasn't him.
00:11:55
and the the essence of who he was. I didn't know where it was, but it was not there lying in that bed.
00:12:00
And when did you realize that you were going to start to collect research and
00:12:05
do research on this idea of being able to communicate in ways that most people don't realize we can communicate through
00:12:11
science. And also when you talk about being able to communicate through these
00:12:16
30 plus senses, is that just with the dead or is that with each other? like
00:12:22
can I communicate through you know is there other ways that I can tap into these senses that you've discovered through your research
00:12:28
that will help me be more effective with the living too. I mean I think it starts with yourself. So I think that the fact that if you're
00:12:36
not even aware that you've got 34 senses then you're obviously not consciously tapping into
00:12:41
something that you're not aware of and and some of them are non-concious senses anyway. Um things like the pH of your
00:12:47
blood or like the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood. you're, you know, you're not going to be conscious of those. You can't
00:12:54
necessarily exert much control over them. Although, obviously, if you slow down your breathing or you do a certain type of breath work, it it could have an
00:13:00
impact on those things. The conclusion that I came to, so like I said, I went
00:13:05
to the brink a few times. I went to the brink. Let me give you the first example. I
00:13:10
realized that the first anniversary was coming up on October 26th. And around, you know, a couple of months
00:13:17
before that, I was doing the best that I had been doing. so far. But I was very aware this anniversary was coming and I
00:13:23
wanted to prepare myself mentally. But from the 4th of October,
00:13:29
I suddenly like was in aches and pains all over my body, which actually lasted
00:13:34
for six or seven weeks and was accompanied by me feeling so depressed
00:13:39
that I actually had to look in the mirror and like go through the criteria for clinical depression and work out if I was actually depressed or not. Um, and
00:13:47
I didn't meet all the criteria, but I was in this physical pain. I could not understand why. I went for a massage. It
00:13:54
was so painful. I didn't go again for a year. So, eventually I looked through my um diary on calendar on my phone. And I
00:14:02
looked back to October 4th, which was the day that it started, and that was the day that I had taken him home to
00:14:07
die. That was the day I took him home from hospital. I didn't remember that date, but clearly my body had and the
00:14:13
trauma was just reemerging as like physical pain. Um, and I only realized
00:14:19
quite a lot later that I had to to do some sematic work to actually get rid of the last bits of trauma that um, talking
00:14:26
therapy can't actually get to seatic work. So, body body work, whether that's
00:14:32
massage or uh, dance or art or craniosacral therapy or taichi, you
00:14:37
know, like anything physical. because basically there's an area in the brain, it's actually inside. So I can't really
00:14:44
show it to you on this, but it's kind of inside there. And that part of the brain is to do with articulating speech and it
00:14:51
basically gets shut down by trauma. So those sort of phrases like I'm speechless or I'm dumbfounded or I have
00:14:57
no words indicates the fact that there may be residual trauma that's held in your body that you can't actually
00:15:03
articulate and get out and solve through talking therapy. So, it requires some kind of physical therapy. So, that was
00:15:10
obviously to do with my um sense of pain. And it took me a little while to
00:15:16
kind of put together what that might mean by really like tapping into why was my body um manifesting pain to to sort
00:15:23
of remind me of something or show me something. But also in the first couple of weeks after um Robin's body Robin's
00:15:32
body was taken away the morning after he died and it was uh just under two weeks
00:15:38
till the cremation. In that time I would wake up in the morning and I would be
00:15:43
absolutely freezing cold like shaking and shivering. And it was October. It wasn't like mid- winter. And I would
00:15:50
blast up the heating. When someone else was in the house I would realize it it was like a sauna. It was actually a bit
00:15:55
embarrassing and had to like you know turn it down and like open some windows and Robin actually hated being cold and
00:16:02
he would have been in the morg in a refrigerated drawer that whole time and again I think it was my sense of
00:16:08
temperature that was kind of on the same wavelength as where I didn't consciously
00:16:13
think of where he was but I was feeling freezing cold. So it was looking back it
00:16:19
was things like that that were coincidences absolutely but then over time and I'm talking a couple of years I
00:16:26
could ask for specific signs and get them sometimes at first it would take a
00:16:31
while and then it became like it would happen that day I could ask a question in my head and get an answer. I
00:16:37
mentioned having you know sort of again being at the brink of my sanity having to question things. I was experiencing
00:16:43
something called thought insertion which um in psychiatry is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. It's when you have a
00:16:50
thought in your head that you know isn't yours. So I was experiencing that really vividly.
00:16:56
But can you imagine experiencing that and at the same time being a psychiatrist that is is saying right
00:17:01
Tara you do realize you are having like a psychotic symptom. And so in my
00:17:07
research, one of the things I realized that maybe, you know, if you're going through grief and you don't know the things that I know, you can't articulate
00:17:15
to yourself that grief in many ways is like psychosis. It's changing the levels of
00:17:20
neurotransmitters in your head. It's changing the electric electric and chemical like signaling in your head. I
00:17:26
just have so much empathy for people that that have to go through that and don't have the wherewithal or the
00:17:32
resources that that I did. Do you think one needs to cultivate their ability to
00:17:37
see signs? Do you think it's like going to the gym? Totally. Totally. I It took me years. Um, and like I said, I believe it took
00:17:44
him years as well. Um, so yeah, I I say it's like learning a language, but you're right. It's like
00:17:50
going to the gym. And what does one need to do in that gym to grow their
00:17:55
sign muscle? Well, it always starts with believing, right? Yeah. Um, do you think that's what one of the big
00:18:01
issues in terms of being able to access these other dimensions or dynamics is
00:18:07
most people just don't believe in it? So, I wouldn't I'm not even sure if I'd say most people. I'd say a lot of people
00:18:12
don't believe in it. Or they secretly do, but they're scared to talk about it cuz they think people ridicule them.
00:18:17
Yeah. Cuz I don't know. My my brain my brain feels like I need to have the
00:18:24
scientific evidence of things for me to accept them because I think sometimes I worry that if I don't have scientific
00:18:29
rigor around my beliefs then I would I'm susceptible to believe anything and I'll believe the spaghetti monster at the
00:18:35
bottom of the garden and I'll believe you know every religion in the world and every and everything and then I'm unanchored
00:18:40
and then I blow around like a plastic bag in the wind and then I have no orientation. Yeah. So I think okay rigger is
00:18:46
the basis of my beliefs. I have to have some sort of scientific evidence. I know you do.
00:18:51
Yeah. Um, it's not to say I'm not open-minded because I've had my mind changed so many times in my life that one would be dumb
00:18:59
now to not be open-minded and to not listen. I agree with you about rigger. I completely agree with that. My entire
00:19:05
career has been based on that. But I just, you know, I was pushed up against a wall. So, I had to think differently.
00:19:11
And I think the question I pose to myself is is what if you had to think differently.
00:19:17
So um the psychologist Carl Jung talks about um when he talks about the collective unconscious he talks about
00:19:24
those basically three main things that all humans experience which is birth, life and death. And so we have this
00:19:32
common experience which is actually part of our inherited gene and brain structure. Um so everyone who's ever
00:19:39
lived will experience those things. But if we look at ancient wisdom, for a start, we are made of the carbon and
00:19:47
hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen that came from the big bang. So we're all made of the same thing. Our ancestors
00:19:53
lived in the cycle with nature. I think us actually having broken our connection to nature is a huge part of why we're so
00:19:59
disconnected and unhappy. So if you think of the life cycle of a salmon for example, it you know it goes through its
00:20:08
life cycle and eventually its bones contribute to the phosphorus on the um floor of the forest. So it never really
00:20:14
goes away. Um in many other ways our ancestors repeatedly saw the cycles of
00:20:20
nature and therefore always kind of knew that everything gets renewed and nothing ever completely goes away. And I think
00:20:27
that's a really important thing to return to. I think, you know, when we question things, which you're absolutely
00:20:33
right to do, I think we have to look at things that we didn't think were true that we now know are true as just ways
00:20:40
of being open to the fact that things in the future might become obvious or known
00:20:47
that aren't known now. I think that is an important place of being open-minded to to sit at. And so for example,
00:20:57
um, want to hear about slime mold? You tell me if that's something I want
00:21:02
to hear about. So slime mold are single cellled organisms like amoeba
00:21:09
who go about their daily life on their own very happily as long as their basic needs are met. But if for example
00:21:16
they're facing potential starvation, they will come together and form a slug
00:21:22
because the slug can move towards your vegetable patch, you know, a new food source and they can survive.
00:21:29
Equally, if they are if they are facing potential um extinction,
00:21:36
they will come together and form a a sporing body like a mushroom. So that's
00:21:42
got a stalk and a fruing body that can release fours that will go into the atmosphere to all different places where
00:21:48
these new baby organisms can can grow and thrive. But if you think about it,
00:21:54
the single cells in the stalk are sacrificing themselves for the greater
00:22:00
good because there's no chance that they're they're going to get released into the atmosphere as a spore because
00:22:05
they're in the stalk. So some of them actually cheat and climb up the stalk to get into the fruing body and displace
00:22:11
other cells from the fruitting body. So things like that and for example the
00:22:17
microisal network which is how mushrooms and mcelium feed the roots of trees. Even trees that
00:22:25
have been felled can be kept alive for centuries because the microisal network
00:22:30
which is the connection between mycelium and tree roots can bring water and sugar
00:22:35
to that tree stump to keep it alive. And trees and mcelium don't even only do it
00:22:41
for the same species. They do it because they're part of the entire forest and it's symbiotic relationship and they
00:22:48
care about each other. Things like this would have been like thought to be fantastical 10 years ago. Um, you know,
00:22:56
we're in in LA at the moment and I saw the driverless car for the first time. Now, when I was growing up watching
00:23:02
sci-fi, I never thought I'd see that in my life. So that's all I'm saying that and and
00:23:10
I'm saying it from the point of view of being a cognitive scientist and I'm talking about the nature of consciousness. I'm not talking about
00:23:16
other not asking you to believe you know other parts of science but based on the fact that we don't know everything.
00:23:23
We've learned loads of things that we thought weren't true before. I strongly believe there's a benefit to
00:23:30
humanity of raising this kind of question and having this conversation
00:23:35
which I ask you why it's a taboo conversation. What you know why
00:23:40
shouldn't we be enlightened? Why shouldn't we feel better? Why shouldn't we be more connected? Whatever we've
00:23:46
been doing up until now certainly hasn't been working. When when was it that you made the
00:23:51
decision that you were going to write a book about this called the signs? Was there a particular moment in this
00:23:58
process where you realized that you were going to dig deeper and that then you were ultimately going to share this with the world?
00:24:04
I wasn't intending to write a book at all, but I'd got to the point where I had something that I could share with people that I actually thought would be
00:24:10
useful. And at this point, you're communicating with Robin on a daily basis. On a daily basis.
00:24:16
Give me some color to that. What does that mean? Give me some examples if you can. Well, either will be that like I'll
00:24:21
ask a question in my mind and the answer will come in my mind but I know it's not my own thought or I'll just get a direct
00:24:29
like message from him in my mind that I know isn't me but mostly it's the signs. So I've talked to you about the first
00:24:36
anniversary and how hard that was. By the time of the second anniversary,
00:24:41
um, I was actually in America and I'd been filming in studio for a
00:24:49
week and then I was on the road on the Navajo Nation and that was due to I was due to fly out of the Navajo Nation on
00:24:55
the second anniversary of Robin's passing. And on by that point I was feeling a bit
00:25:02
like I'd completely burnt out and I had a choice about how to reemerge. Um you know whether that was
00:25:09
going to be in a good way or I wasn't going to be able to make it. Um and I
00:25:14
had this analogy of a phoenix rising from the flames in my mind. So on that trip I said
00:25:22
darling send me the sign of a phoenix. You said that to who? to Robin in my head. And I I chose the Phoenix because
00:25:30
it's really unusual. So, it's not like if I said, you know, a dog, I'm probably going to see a dog on the pavement every
00:25:36
day, but I chose something that is not an easy thing to see. And I was actually
00:25:41
in Oklahoma City where, you know, you wouldn't expect necessarily to see like
00:25:47
something unusual. Every single day between my hotel and the studio, I went through Chinatown and I passed a
00:25:53
restaurant called the Phoenix Garden with a big emlazed like you know sign. And on the way there I had had an
00:26:00
indirect flight from Boston and the flight leaving Boston was late. So I missed my connection in Chicago and I
00:26:06
had to spend a night in Chicago and then I was, you know, late for filming and stuff. And so when I was leaving to go
00:26:13
to LA, I was leaving on a on a Sunday and from the Monday onwards I had
00:26:21
a podcast every single weekday in LA. And so the team said to me, "We know
00:26:26
that you cannot miss that flight. We are not going to put you on on an indirect flight. We absolutely promise you direct
00:26:31
flight to LA. So you're fine from Monday onwards." We were in the middle of nowhere for like a week and basically my
00:26:39
flight wasn't booked because we didn't know which airport we were going to be at. We arrived on the eve of the
00:26:44
anniversary of Robin passing and my flight was booked that day and it was from Flagstaff in the Navajo Nation to
00:26:51
LA flying on the day of his anniversary. No direct flights. I had to fly through
00:26:57
Phoenix, Arizona on the day of his anniversary. You probably heard of that old analogy
00:27:03
of when you buy a car, you end up seeing the car everywhere on the road. Like I buy buy a new car and then I go everywhere and it seems like everybody's
00:27:09
got my car because of do they call it confirmation bias in science in psychology where once you've got
00:27:14
something in your head you're more likely to see that thing. I think they've done studies on this where if you are exposed to something or you're
00:27:20
told to think about something then you'll see it more in the world. How do you separate what you're saying from that proven psychological phenomenon?
00:27:28
I don't I say use it to your advantage. But how do you know that wasn't what was happening in your life? Because if you
00:27:34
thought about the word Phoenix and then over the course of a couple of days, you're looking at everything, but you're
00:27:39
only going to register the things that are emotionally reg resonant. You know, I might have seen Phoenix a
00:27:45
lot of time over the last seven days, but it means nothing to you. Yeah. I didn't I didn't register it. Again, I would say the number of times
00:27:52
this has happened, the the sort of like how narrow I make the criteria. So, you
00:27:58
know, sometimes I say, I need to see a button or a symbol of a button or the
00:28:03
word button, but it's got to have happen three times by 11 p.m. tomorrow. Um, and
00:28:09
one of my friends says that, you know, we share something which is if you see a pair of lions. Um, and we send each
00:28:15
other pictures of it. But she says it has to be if you went out of your way and you walked a different way and then
00:28:21
you saw them. If it's like, you know, the normal way that you go or somewhere that you know that they exist, that doesn't count. It has to be if you went
00:28:27
out of your way. So, I had a previous um thing with Robin which was about the figure of eight or the infinity symbol.
00:28:35
Um, and there's a story in the book of how that was cropping up for me when I actually met him. But there was a day
00:28:41
recently where I had some spaced out I had three spaced out meetings in the day. So I thought I'll take the opportunity to walk for an hour between
00:28:47
them all. And for the last meeting of the day, I ended up walking past um UC, which is
00:28:56
University College Hospital, where he was having treatment. And that had been a really traumatic time for me when he
00:29:03
was in hospital there. And I have I will have to say I kind of avoided that area
00:29:08
since then. I'll tell you about a particular story that was like really traumatizing for me. Um so on this walk
00:29:16
to um where I was going for the evening for a book launch event, I ended up walking past the hospital and and I
00:29:23
actually said in my head like why would you make that happen to me? Like why why
00:29:28
do I have to walk past that building? I never want to see that building again in my life. And again, I said, "You have to
00:29:34
send me a sign." And um by the time I got to Houston station, so you know, you can people who
00:29:40
don't know can Google this. It's not very far. There was an elastic band in the figure of H signing on the pavement.
00:29:46
And that means something to me. Um, so the thing about this this
00:29:52
confirmation bias thing is it it's dependent on the reticular activating system which is the system of your brain
00:29:59
that filters out what's not crucial to your survival and filters in what it wants you to notice.
00:30:06
And so actually one of the things I've written about in the book is the art of noticing
00:30:14
because really we live in this world where the light you know life is passing you by at 100 miles per hour. You're not
00:30:20
noticing things that could actually be crucial to you thriving rather than you just surviving.
00:30:26
And in this model called shared trait vulnerability which falls under the field of um research called
00:30:32
neurosthetics. So basically creativity is a positive personality trait, right?
00:30:39
But there is a a high correlation between creativity and psychopathology which is mental illness particularly
00:30:46
depression, schizophrenia and alcoholism. And there are quite a few high-profile
00:30:51
examples of um creative people who had mental illnesses like Alexander McQueen,
00:30:57
Kurt Cabain, Van Go. So what that shows is that there's an area of overlap of
00:31:06
three particular ways of thinking that are underpinned by neurology that are the reasons that people with
00:31:13
mental illness are so creative and they are basically
00:31:20
um hyperconivity. So that's that's two things. That's joining the dots in the material world
00:31:26
of things that aren't obvious to other people, but it's also hyperconivity inside the brain. So, if you think about
00:31:32
all these loes, so heavy. If you think about all these
00:31:37
loes, the more lobes that are firing at the same time, and there's also a cortex
00:31:42
that's known as the association cortex. So, that one, you know, these loes can be firing, but they're not necessarily
00:31:49
connecting up with each other. The more interconnected all this firing is in the brain, the more the brain opens up to
00:31:56
new ideas and so that underpins creativity. And also this usually really involves the visual cortex which is in
00:32:02
the occipital loes and that's why sometimes people whether it's through psychedelics or you know sort of sort of
00:32:09
altered states of consciousness through creativity can can see things that they didn't see before. Mhm.
00:32:14
There's also something called novelty salience which is noticing new things.
00:32:19
um or just noticing things of importance that you would otherwise have filtered out. And there's something called um
00:32:26
attenuated latent inhibition or low latent inhibition which is to do with that filter. And it means that the
00:32:34
filter allows more things in than it normally does. So you can see we've got hyperconnection, we've got noticing more
00:32:40
things, and we've got the filter like loosening and allowing more things in. Now, if you've got a high IQ, high
00:32:48
working memory, and you've got cognitive flexibility, which is you can think, you know, out of the box, that's a really
00:32:55
good thing. If you've got a low IQ, you've got deficits in your working memory, and you've got what's called
00:33:01
peververation, which is you just go over the same thought pro process over and over again, that can lead to you having
00:33:07
a psychological crisis. So I took that model and thought if grief is like
00:33:13
psychosis and I'm currently in a very vulnerable state, is creativity a conduit for me to get not only back to
00:33:20
the state that I was in before, but into a state of expanded awareness where I
00:33:25
can loosen the filter as I choose as I choose fit. I can notice things that I would have passed by before and I can
00:33:33
think differently about how my mind works, how the world works, possibly what happens after someone passes away.
00:33:41
And then I went and, you know, looked into near-death experiences and terminal lucidity and dark retreats. Like I said,
00:33:47
I went down a rabbit hole. And what did you find in that rabbit hole? at the border of life and death.
00:33:53
Usually within 1 to 24 hours of death, someone who has
00:34:00
whose brain hasn't been functioning, who can't remember the names of their own children, suddenly becomes completely
00:34:06
lucid and says, "Steven darling, come over here. Let me, you know, let's have a nice like mother son chat." And then
00:34:13
that gives a lot of people hope, but usually that means it's an hour or 23 hours till the person's going to die. We
00:34:19
can't explain that. How can a brain that's irreversibly damaged suddenly function completely normally? There is
00:34:25
no explanation for that. With the near-death experiences, I was particularly compelled by three
00:34:32
stories. Dr. Mary Neil, an orthopedic surgeon, she's in that Netflix documentary,
00:34:39
Surviving Death. She was submerged underwater for 15 or 20 minutes. She should never have been able to be
00:34:44
resuscitated. She describes her whole journey of going to another realm, seeing, you know, a
00:34:50
being of light, being told that her life isn't over. She has to turn back and return to the physical world, even
00:34:57
though she could see her bloated body and her friends trying to reach her to resuscitate her and they couldn't. Dr.
00:35:04
Eban Alexander, who wrote Proof of Heaven, he is a doctor. He was an
00:35:09
atheist. He was in a coma with bacterial menitis and was pronounced clinically
00:35:14
dead and then basically came back and said that he saw heaven and he now believes in a god that is benign that
00:35:21
cares about the future of humanity. So for me as a doctor hearing these stories
00:35:26
from other doctors was really really convincing. And then there's one story that um Dr.
00:35:32
Bruce Grayson told me he's a professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia who has done 50 years of research into
00:35:39
near-death experiences. And he told me the story of a patient in ICU
00:35:45
who kept going into cardiac arrest and he had a primary nurse who was a young
00:35:51
um 20-year-old nurse and they had a really close bond. And one weekend she
00:35:56
was she had time off for the weekend and he had a different nurse looking after him and he went into cardiac arrest and
00:36:04
he had a near-death experience. And in that near-death experience, he saw his
00:36:09
primary nurse. She said to him, "Your life isn't over. You have to go back and get better. And please tell my parents
00:36:16
I'm sorry about the red MG." So he wakes up in ICU. He's got this
00:36:21
replacement nurse looking after him. and he says, "The strangest thing just happened. I um
00:36:30
had this experience of being in this other world. I saw um my primary nurse
00:36:35
and she said I had to come back and she also said, "Tell my parents sorry about the red MG." So the temporary nurse
00:36:42
starts bursting into tears, runs out of the room. He has no idea why. Someone comes in and says, "What's just
00:36:47
happened?" he explains. And they tell him that his primary nurse was given a
00:36:53
red MG for her 21st birthday, took it out for a test run, crashed it into a
00:36:58
tree, and died. Now, he didn't know she was dead, but he
00:37:04
saw her on the other side, and she told him to come back. And the guy that told you the story was
00:37:10
who relevant to the patient. Who said that? Dr. Bruce Grayson. He um has done 50
00:37:15
years of research on near-death experiences. He's got over 5,000 recorded cases of patients of his own
00:37:23
that he's looked after that have had near-death experiences. And he also shared with me with me the numbers of of
00:37:30
uh cases that other people have on databases. So, you know, we're looking at over 10,000 cases globally recorded
00:37:36
at the moment. What is it that you believe based on those near-death experiences like the
00:37:41
red MG story and based on this phenomenon of terminal
00:37:47
lucidity? So, Professor Alexander Bathani, who wrote threshold about terminal lucidity,
00:37:54
put it really nicely when he said, "Maybe at the border of life and death,
00:37:59
we see something that is true all along, but we don't, for whatever reason, see
00:38:05
it or acknowledge it whilst we're alive and well, which is that the mind and body can operate independently of each
00:38:12
other. It is quite it is quite shocking. is this case from 2009,
00:38:18
an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer's disease who was non-verbal and non-responsive and had no apparent
00:38:24
recognition of her surroundings or families for years. And then one day before her death, she suddenly sat up in
00:38:29
hospital, looked around and recognized her daughter by name, spoke clearly, reminisced about the past, thanked her
00:38:35
family for caring for her. Her speech was coherent, her memory was intact, and
00:38:41
her personality recognizable, as though she had never been ill. She fell asleep that evening and died peacefully during
00:38:47
the night. And what do you think's happening there? What do you think's happening there?
00:38:53
It's possibly, you know, partially explained by a a surge in neurochemicals, but it's not explained
00:38:58
by how can those neurochemicals act if the physical neurons and sinapses are
00:39:04
damaged. There there is no explanation. The only explanation is that the mind is not emergent from material matter. It's
00:39:12
not that the mind, the thoughts, the emotions, the psyche cannot be solely
00:39:19
emerging from physical matter. That's the only explanation from what we understand so far.
00:39:25
And so what is it that you now believe? You believe that our souls and our bodies are two separate things. And where does our soul live if it's not
00:39:33
living inside of me? So like where is Robin? M so I believe
00:39:38
that you know whether whether you want to call it the universe consciousness um collective
00:39:44
consciousness godhead cosmic soup I don't the word for it isn't important
00:39:50
there's there's somewhere that that energy goes and it still exists in some
00:39:56
form and if you believe in reincarnation then you may believe that it then enters another body as a vessel and you know
00:40:02
has a different life um But it doesn't go away.
00:40:09
How do you know? I'm going to say something that you I
00:40:15
know you're not going to like, but I know because I feel it personally. I feel it from I feel it like with the
00:40:20
person I've been closest to in my entire life who I know would never leave me if they
00:40:26
didn't absolutely have to. But I can back that up to the extent of I can I
00:40:32
can say you can't prove that this isn't true. I can back that up with everything that I put in the book. And I'm not the
00:40:38
only one. Dr. David Eagleman at Stanford says, you know, this idea of the brain
00:40:43
being like a radio and receiving signals from outside. We can't prove it, but we
00:40:49
categorically cannot say it's not true. Professor Donald Hoffman suggests that
00:40:54
spaceime is not the basis of how the universe works. suggests that consciousness is the basis of how the universe works. We can't prove that's
00:41:01
not true. And I find that really exciting. I mean, as a scientist, you're supposed to challenge the status quo.
00:41:07
You're supposed to be curious. You can't, as a scientist, believe that everything we know now is all there is.
00:41:13
There's no point to being a scientist if that's what you believe. I asked you this question about the gym earlier on about is it kind of like
00:41:19
training in the gym. Are there things you think people could do to heighten their ability to speak to loved ones
00:41:26
that might have passed or to heighten their ability to tap into signs? So I go through this in the book and and
00:41:31
I chose the order quite carefully. So I talk about neuroesthetics which is you
00:41:37
noticing beauty basically if not like actually engaging in the arts. There's a lot of evidence for engaging in the arts
00:41:44
in terms of like um increasing your novelty salience which is noticing new things which is part of the journey of
00:41:50
opening up that filter. Um and then there's a whole chapter on nature because I think a lot of signs
00:41:56
come from nature like butterflies, robins, um sort of you know spiral
00:42:03
formations, cloud formations. So noticing nature more can help you you know also to
00:42:08
receive these signs. And then community is a huge part of it because you know if I had this conversation with you and you
00:42:15
totally shut me down and said it's not provable. This is ridiculous I'm not airing this episode. That would have a
00:42:20
very different like effect on me to you even being open to like asking me
00:42:26
challenging questions that I welcome but also engaging in this conversation and sort
00:42:31
of you know may feels a little bit like maybe questioning you know some things that you might do differently. Um, so
00:42:37
those are three very important parts of like sort of part two of the book. Part
00:42:42
one is more about what are signs, what are you missing, you know, have you been receiving signs already.
00:42:48
One of the things that I when I was going through my sort of um transition from like being religious to being agnostic, I'd say cuz I wouldn't call
00:42:54
myself an atheist is I was watching all these um atheist minds debate and talk
00:43:00
and stuff and one of the things one of them said is that if coincidence didn't happen in our lives then that would be a
00:43:05
miracle. like statistically, mathematically, if at sometimes you don't think of Dave and then the phone rings and it's Dave, that would actually
00:43:12
be more mathematically improbable than it happening sometimes. Mhm. If you think about, you know, the if you
00:43:17
had this on a like a distribution cup or something, it is likely mathematically that really
00:43:24
unlikely things will happen sometimes. Okay. Right. So, I I've always had that in my
00:43:29
head as a way to sort of rationalize coincidence. So when coincidence happens I think well probabilistically
00:43:35
really unlikely things have to happen and if they never happen then that's a miracle.
00:43:40
Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah it makes sense. Like mathematically you would say like likely things happen often unlikely
00:43:47
things happen less often. Extremely unlikely things happen way less often. Yeah. That's like the nature of like maths,
00:43:54
right? So when extremely unlikely things happen, I say actually that makes sense
00:44:00
because probabistically those things happen infrequently. They're not happening every single day. Like right now I'm thinking of I can name 10
00:44:06
people. I guarantee when I go to my phone none of those 10 people have text me. But if I do that every day one day I'm going to say, "Hey Steve, checking
00:44:12
in." Which makes sense because of the the laws of But I don't want you to do that. I want you to just like be open to naturally
00:44:20
thinking of someone and seeing if that does happen or you know kind of or asking for a sign and seeing if it comes
00:44:26
into your life. That that's that's all I'm asking like what you know just try
00:44:32
it. It's not going to hurt you. And I'm not just saying that to you. I'm saying it to everyone.
00:44:38
And how do you think that would benefit me? I think it makes you believe in something bigger than yourself.
00:44:44
Yeah. Um, and why is that so important? Because I think a life where all you're
00:44:49
trying to do is get through and meet your needs is life can be better than that. Um, I
00:44:57
think a life where you feel more connected to yourself, to others, to something greater gives you purpose. Um,
00:45:05
there's a lot of research that shows that having a purpose that transcends just yourself is actually really healthy
00:45:10
and important. And what is that for you now? that transcendent layer in your life. How do you define it? Is it a religion? Is it
00:45:17
something else? It's definitely not religion. Um I guess it's spirituality and you know a
00:45:24
form which will mean different things to different people. It's definitely about caring for humanity.
00:45:30
Is it a god, a creator? For me, no. Um but 85% of people
00:45:37
globally believe in religion under God. So it's important. Um, I think for me
00:45:43
it's about giving like a voice of relevance and
00:45:49
helping people to feel seen and heard cuz I think that's very lacking and you know I'm in the enormously privileged
00:45:55
position that you have given me of being able to do that and I want to use that in a really like positive way.
00:46:02
How does this overlap with or sit alongside what people call intuition
00:46:08
because you talk about that as well in the book. Yeah. Um, I know there's so much like there's still like so much else I want
00:46:14
to say. Just keep going. So, intuition is I mean intuition is what it is. It's accessing inner wisdom,
00:46:19
right? But I've I've included it as a really important part of the book because I believe that it's a way to
00:46:25
receive and interpret your signs. But um I just want to go back to
00:46:31
something I said earlier which is about how trauma can be stored in your body and you know to some extent it can't be
00:46:39
retrieved through talking therapy because there aren't words for it because it's actually embedded into the tissues of your body. There's a really
00:46:46
exciting new hypothesis for how that might work called the serotonin hypothesis. So, previously
00:46:53
I think it would make sense that if you know, for example, when when Robin was in hospital,
00:46:59
I would like sit in a very hunched over position and my fists would be clenched cuz I felt like I was fighting for his
00:47:05
life all the time. And if I relaxed for a millisecond, he could die. Um, so it
00:47:12
makes sense to me that that those postural issues would show up for me later. and you know in terms of like a
00:47:17
aches and pains and you know perhaps sort of well not perhaps my as my Pilates and yoga teachers keep telling
00:47:24
me like issues with you know certain parts of my spine and stuff but um the serotonin hypothesis is very exciting as
00:47:31
a neuroscientist because a lot of people have heard of Bessel Vanderolk's work and the book the body keeps the score
00:47:38
and it makes sense kind of intuitively that the body does keep the score and and like I've said there's an amount of
00:47:44
trauma that you can't express you can't articulate verbally. So we believe we
00:47:49
understand that there are imprints of that in the body. Mhm. But we have we've never really
00:47:55
understood how that works. Um and we you know I've talked before I think with you
00:48:00
about intuition through a process called hebian learning which is neurons that fire together wire
00:48:06
together gets pushed deeper and deeper into neurons from the outer cortex the
00:48:11
lyic system the brain stem into gut neurons and that's why intuition is called gut instinct and we understand
00:48:17
that through stress postures you could have bracing patterns in your muscles
00:48:22
for like the trauma that you've experienced Fascia is the connective tissue that
00:48:28
holds your entire body together, all your organs, all your muscles. And until fairly recently, fascia was thought of
00:48:35
as a vestigial organ. It was cut away in surgery without thinking of any that it would have any effect on the rest of
00:48:40
your body. Now, it's understood more to actually be an an organ of its own and
00:48:46
an important one. And the serotonin hypothesis goes some way to explain how the level
00:48:54
of constriction of capillaries and the amount of nutrients that's released to skin, fascia, and muscle is a mechanism
00:49:02
for how trauma is held in the body. And with that in mind, what do we do to
00:49:07
get rid of that trauma held in the body? Physical activities. Um so dancing,
00:49:13
singing, drumming, humming, chanting, massage, yoga, craniosacral therapy. And
00:49:21
you'll notice that the ones I started with are, you know, very related to ancient wisdom. So our ancestors knew
00:49:27
this. Um for example, in ancient Greek um uh ancient Greek burials, they would
00:49:34
whail and beat their chests. So they were getting rid of grief by like screaming but also by beating their
00:49:41
muscles and letting like trauma exit their body. I'm very well aware that
00:49:47
there's probably a lot of people who have sent this conversation to a friend who is struggling right now
00:49:53
and that that friend who has lost a loved one, potentially a husband, potentially a wife, potentially, you
00:49:58
know, god forbid a child or a grandparent or something is listening to this because they are in search of
00:50:04
answers for their own healing. Mhm. You've been there. Mhm. You may still be there in some degree.
00:50:14
If you were to advise them on their own healing journey, what advice
00:50:20
would you give them? The first thing would be to not repress
00:50:27
or deny how they're feeling and, you know, really feel the emotions that that have to come
00:50:33
along with grief. Um, I've, you know, I had amazing talking
00:50:39
therapy which definitely helped me a lot. So, if people have access to that, um, professionally, then great. If not,
00:50:44
then, you know, if you've got close friends that you can talk to, then talking it out does help. But, I've
00:50:51
really learned that there's a limit to how much that helps and that some sort of physical therapy um is really helpful
00:50:58
as part of it. Those would be the basics. I would say time in nature has been so healing for
00:51:05
me. Um some form of creative outlet whether it's making or beholding. So you
00:51:10
don't have to be good at art. If if you draw, you know, a picture of how you're
00:51:15
feeling emotionally or a sketch of your loved one, it doesn't have to be good. You get benefits from doing that. It's
00:51:20
an out creative outlet for your grief. That's probably the second level. And you know, the third level to me is if
00:51:27
you've got any inclination to receive signs um or just be open to, you know, a
00:51:33
white feather landing at your doorstep um or a bird coming to visit you or
00:51:39
something that means something to you, then that can bring a lot of comfort and guidance and joy.
00:51:45
And you also assert that things like being in nature, creativity, honing into our intuition increase the probability
00:51:51
of us receiving these signs. Mhm. Well, receiving and being able to interpret in a way that's meaningful for
00:51:58
you. Gut instinct. Um, in the book you talk about how
00:52:03
strengthening one's gut health can have an impact on gut instinct.
00:52:08
Explain that to me. So the the body is basically the
00:52:14
physical foundation for um you know all of your senses to be able to to flourish
00:52:20
to your higher mental faculties to be able to flourish and ultimately for you know whatever spiritual experience you
00:52:27
have of life to to be able to be at its fullest and best as well. So taking care
00:52:32
of the physical foundations is really important and um you know we could talk
00:52:38
about all the usual things like sleep and diet and exercise, mindfulness, stress management, but I want to really
00:52:45
focus strongly on the the gut brain axis because a lot of new research has come
00:52:51
up since I wrote the source. So it's actually, you know, we know a lot about this birectional communication
00:52:58
between the brain and the gut. is actually a three-way system which is the brain, the gut itself, the gut neurons
00:53:05
and the gut microbiome which is trillions of bacteria and fungi and you know organisms that um are basically
00:53:14
determining the health of our entire system because they're connected to our immune system to our skin to our oral
00:53:21
microbiome and and the brain. So the way
00:53:27
that you the the most direct access you have to your brain is through your gut.
00:53:32
The gut is the most direct way that you can influence your brain and you can do that through exercise obviously diet um
00:53:40
supplementation even like um meditation and art and
00:53:45
music therapy have a beneficial effect on your gut microbiome as well which has a knock-on effect on the neurons and the
00:53:52
the brain and they communicate with each other many ways mostly through the vagus nerve. What's the vagus nerve?
00:53:58
The vagus nerve is a cranial nerve. So it comes from your skull. It's Latin for wandering because it's the longest nerve
00:54:05
that goes through your body. So it goes there's two, the right and the left. And they go all the way from your cranium.
00:54:11
What's my cranium? Your cranium is the bone around your brain. Yeah. Um so inside that um down your neck they
00:54:18
go through your diaphragm and to your intestine. I'll put a photo up on screen for everybody wants to see where their vagus
00:54:23
nerve is. Also other nerves. So the nerves that innovate the gut organs um they're
00:54:29
called aphrant intestinal nerves. They're also involved in this communication. Then there's hormones and
00:54:35
there's cytoine um messages which are chemical messages that aren't hormonal.
00:54:40
Your immune system actually also produces neurotransmitters and there are immune cells in your brain as well. So
00:54:47
those are all the ways that we know currently that the brain and the gut communicate with each other. And so what
00:54:52
does this mean in terms of my gut health and ways to influence my my brain? Does
00:54:58
it mean that I I need to be really big on my prebiotics and my probiotics to make sure my my guts intact? And if I do
00:55:04
that, then my intuition will be sharper. Mhm. So that's true, but I always like people to understand what's behind that,
00:55:11
not just mindlessly take prebiotics and probiotics. So what we're trying to do is reduce inflammation throughout the
00:55:18
system. And so basically because
00:55:24
the brain is a small organ in in our entire system but it uses up at least 20% of our energy. So it's very
00:55:31
vulnerable to um what what we call oxidative stress or
00:55:37
free radicals. So every time like there's any turnover of cells in our brain or our body basically as we live
00:55:44
the wear and tear of daily life we release free radicals which are molecules that can damage cells
00:55:51
particularly nerve cells and because the brain is has such high turnover of energy it's particularly vulnerable to
00:55:58
free radical attack. So reducing inflammation and putting things that are
00:56:04
neuroprotective around it like certain vitamins and minerals is really important. And the hippocampus part of
00:56:12
the brain which um it has high cell turnover because it's to do with memory laying down memories and obviously well
00:56:18
into adulthood we're still doing that. That's also very vulnerable to free radical damage and that's why we can get
00:56:24
memory and cognitive impairments and dementias as we get older. So the the
00:56:29
modern western diet causes something called disbiosis which is that your gut isn't in a good state and that creates a
00:56:35
cascade of inflammation and releases molecules some of which can cross the
00:56:42
bloodb brain barrier and therefore cause inflammation in the brain. So we want to minimize that as much as possible
00:56:49
and put in as many protective and beneficial factors as possible. If we're doing that, the system's in what we call
00:56:56
homeostasis, which is good balance. It's kind of starting to take care of itself. It's got all the nutrients that it
00:57:01
needs. It's hydrated. It's oxygenated. That's when you've got extra resources
00:57:07
to do the higher mental functions. And up until today, pretty much I've
00:57:14
described those as being able to solve complex problems, being able to think flexibly, creatively, override your
00:57:21
biases. But now I'm proposing that there's more than that that we can do. There's
00:57:27
accessing levels of intuition that we didn't know we had. very much through
00:57:33
through the same mechanism of how I described trauma being stored in the body. Hidden wisdom is also stored in
00:57:40
the body. It's not just in your brain. And therefore the same therapies like
00:57:46
beholding and making art, humming, drumming, storytelling, dancing, yoga,
00:57:53
just movement can help us to access that intuition that isn't just in our brain
00:57:59
and our mind and take us to a next level of intuition that's not just cerebral,
00:58:05
it's it's physical. I've just invested millions into this
00:58:11
and become a co-owner of the company. It's a company called Ketone IQ. And the story is quite interesting. I started
00:58:17
talking about ketosis on this podcast and the fact that I'm very low carb, very, very low sugar, and my body
00:58:22
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00:58:28
have made me more capable at doing what I do here. And because I was talking about it on the podcast, a couple of weeks later, these showed up on my desk
00:58:35
in my HQ in London. these little shots. And oh my god, the impact this had on my
00:58:41
ability to articulate myself, on my focus, on my workouts, on my mood, on
00:58:47
stopping me crashing throughout the day was so profound that I reached out to the founders of the company, and now I'm
00:58:53
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00:58:58
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00:59:05
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00:59:11
And I'm so honored that once again, a company I own can sponsor my podcast. Use the word dark retreats. I've never
00:59:18
heard that phrase before. So dark retreats come from um a Tibetan
00:59:23
religion or philosophy, but it's um it's seen throughout the ancient
00:59:28
civilization. So the ancient Greeks and Romans used to bury people actually for
00:59:33
days and then they would come out and be like the seers and the mystics of that um community.
00:59:39
But there's most research um available in dark retreats cuz it's still happening today.
00:59:45
What is a dark retreat? A dark retreat is um have you heard of silent retreat? Silent meditation. Yeah. Yeah.
00:59:50
Yeah. My girlfriend went on one. Yeah. So that's the kind of thing she would do. So basically you can go away for a few days to a few weeks and you're
00:59:55
just in silence and you're meditating and doing breath work most of the time. In a dark retreat you are in like pitch
01:00:04
black for I mean you can go and do it for a few hours or a weekend but it's meant to be in sevens. So 7 to 49 days.
01:00:11
The monks do 49 days. If as a you know a person who's interested spiritually you
01:00:16
wanted to do it quite seriously you would go for 7 days and you would be in a room or a cave that's got double walls
01:00:24
so it's completely dark and um
01:00:30
the reason for doing this is that not all of us can have a near-death experience right so this is a way of
01:00:36
emulate it's the closest way of emulating that for anyone like you or I to get access to the benefits of a
01:00:42
near-death experience um which I've outlined them all in the book. So in a dark retreat at first you
01:00:49
sleep a lot because it's dark. You're releasing a lot lot of melatonin from your pineal gland. So you fall asleep in
01:00:56
darkness. You awake in darkness and basically that kind of makes you feel more sleepy. So you sleep a lot. After a
01:01:04
couple of days, you start to see
01:01:10
like pulsations of light. It might be like little shooting stars or kind of just like little sparks here and there.
01:01:18
And then eventually it feels like the walls are dimly alike.
01:01:25
So in complete darkness you start to see light. Obviously there's an element of like
01:01:32
hallucinating at this point. And so after three, four, five days, you will
01:01:39
actually start to see animals real or sort of fantastical. And eventually
01:01:45
people see like deities or beings like people do in near-death experiences.
01:01:52
Um, and when people come out of these retreats, they experience many of the same benefits like, you know, a real
01:01:59
sort of like joy for life, less fear of death,
01:02:04
more compassion for other people, less fear of failing, so you know, taking
01:02:09
more healthy risks. So, it it's a way basically of em emulating a near-death experience.
01:02:15
And it therefore convinces you that there's more than you can see in your day-to-day life. And
01:02:21
therefore that expands your mind in a way that's beneficial. Yeah, it's another uh example of an altered state of consciousness. You can
01:02:27
also get altered states of consciousness through conscious connected or holotropic breath work and through the
01:02:34
use of psychedelic um plants as well. How do we know that it's it's not just a
01:02:41
changing of our neurological state or the the chemicals in our brain that are causing us to interpret things
01:02:47
differently with our senses? Because, you know, we've all I said we all many of us have experienced having some kind
01:02:53
of stimulant or psychedelic or some compound in a rave or at a festival that's made us see the world differently
01:03:00
for a moment. And science would say that's just the neurochemicals in our brain
01:03:05
doing different things which are changing our perception. They wouldn't say necessarily that it's a different realm or a different dimension.
01:03:12
Yeah. And I I think you're right. I think it is that. So as a neuropharmacologist I you know
01:03:18
understand as much as the research says about the it's mo mostly like I said in in the body in the brain with
01:03:24
psychedelics it's mostly 5HT or serotonin 2a receptors and there's a
01:03:29
level of hyperconivity within the brain particularly as I said in the visual
01:03:35
cortex here which allows people to see things that they don't normally see. M um and I think the way to
01:03:42
apply that in your life is that it's a glimpse into what's possible.
01:03:49
Mhm. Um once you've experienced that, it could either be that you find other natural ways of experiencing that. So
01:03:56
there's there's a paper I can forward to you that shows that certain forms of conscious connected breath work produce
01:04:02
the same effect as a moderate dose of psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms. Yes. And this um research came out after
01:04:10
psilocybin was banned and practitioners thought well what are other ways that we can help people to achieve these altered
01:04:16
states of consciousness. Um and personally I believe that you know
01:04:23
having like a completely like all inspiring experience in nature or for me
01:04:28
like the ballet particularly when I've been so lucky sometimes to sit in the wings and you just completely feel like
01:04:33
you're part of it. I mean, I've literally had a spiritual experience sitting in the wings watching actually
01:04:40
was one of my friends, the principal dancer, dancing just so overwhelming. It's completely an altered state of
01:04:46
consciousness. Um, so there are there are other ways of accessing that. Um,
01:04:52
but I think it depends like why you want to and what it means to you, but at
01:04:57
minimum, these sorts of things that I'm talking about are ways of understanding that there's more to life than what we
01:05:03
know. And how does that meaningfully change
01:05:09
like the concept of what happiness is and contentment is and like living a good life is?
01:05:15
So what I think is really interesting is that we don't actually have to experience certain things ourselves. So,
01:05:22
there's a lot of research that shows that students from various different um areas of expertise who simply learn
01:05:29
about near-death experiences actually get some of the same benefits and that these can last for over a year later. So
01:05:37
understanding that when someone sees that there's something greater than us, when someone sees the interconnectedness
01:05:44
of of everything, when someone understands how small some of their
01:05:49
problems are and the greater, you know, picture of things, helps people to be more compassionate, more grateful,
01:05:56
kinder to others, um less materialistic
01:06:01
is is really interesting. And I think anything that we can do to help us, you know, free us from some of those chains
01:06:08
that I think hold us down in the material world, particularly in the western world, is it's healthy for us
01:06:15
physically, mentally, emotionally, but it also brings in this element of
01:06:21
spirituality that I think is just so lacking in the world at the moment and and could be so helpful because if we
01:06:27
look back at the way that our ancestors used their senses and their intuition to interpret the land. Like a cloud
01:06:35
formation could mean that rain's coming, but it could also mean that your ancestors were talking to you. Just
01:06:40
seems like such a beautiful way to live. And when we lived in, you know, in Paleolithic times, we didn't have spare
01:06:47
resources for having fun, but we adorned ourselves. We danced. We told stories.
01:06:52
We made, you know, cave art. So I think that just really
01:06:57
reminds us that those things that are often seen as luxuries or frivolous,
01:07:03
they're not at all. They're fundamentally important. Believing in these things itself is good
01:07:09
for us. Is that what you believe? You believe that believing in something transcendent, whether it's spiritual or
01:07:15
religious, is actually just good for us. So that's reason enough to believe it. It's reason enough to believe it, but I
01:07:20
think it will naturally change what you do once you believe it. You're not going to live in the same way if you if you
01:07:26
know believe some fundamentally different things and the ways in which it changes what you believe are beneficial to you. So
01:07:33
are you saying that that is reason enough to believe it? Like to want to believe it? I think it's reason enough to try it.
01:07:39
Yeah. I mean sometimes it causes people through human history to do awful things, right? To kill themselves, to to
01:07:48
strap bombs to themselves and do horrific things because they believe in something transcendent.
01:07:55
it it can also lead to like destructive behavior. I mean, I don't think there's any
01:08:01
evidence from near-death experiences that that's the case. I think I know what that what you're referring to is
01:08:07
something that's, you know, more fundamentally like religious. And
01:08:14
cuz I was watching that I've been watching Jack told me to watch this Capture Bin Laden documentary. I was watching it last night and these people
01:08:21
flew themselves into buildings because they believe in, you know, they were obviously radicalized in various ways,
01:08:28
but they they believed in going to a afterlife that would be better than this
01:08:34
one and that they were sacrificing themselves for the greater good. So, it's just it's I guess it's a side point that just the
01:08:40
belief in transcendence itself in some regard isn't necessarily always going to guarantee our behaviors on on this
01:08:46
planet are productive. Yeah. And I was going to say like perhaps it's something more dogmatic, but I think you're absolutely right to raise that point.
01:08:53
And I'm not trying to sit here and say I found like the perfect solution and everyone should do this and it's all
01:08:58
good. Like that's just I know that's not true. I'm not trying to say that at all. I think we should absolutely be questioning everything that that I'm
01:09:06
saying and I will keep questioning the way that I'm living my life and keep trying to learn and grow.
01:09:11
I guess the point is just the belief in something transcendent. Does that make our lives necessarily better? I guess the answer is I can. It can.
01:09:18
Yeah. I'm really obsessed at the moment actually with this idea of purpose and meaning because obviously we're living in a society that's more and more
01:09:24
individualistic and independence is kind of vogue and
01:09:29
um because of a variety of things that have happened over the last 50 60 70 years. We have more independence. Women
01:09:35
in particular have a lot more independence which I think everyone is very most people are very um supportive
01:09:40
of. We have more choice than ever before and with choice comes independence. I can choose now when I have a family and
01:09:46
maybe I couldn't choose before. Um, and with choice and with freedom,
01:09:52
I think some of our more short-term hedonistic desires and temptations take
01:09:58
hold and we end up sacrificing the tribe and shared responsibility and dependence
01:10:03
and a lot of our meaning came from like those things. So I I feel to some degree that when we think about how we lad up
01:10:10
from like me to like my family to my city to my nation and then maybe to my God,
01:10:16
those layers have fallen away and now for many of us it's just me and that's causing a crisis of meaning
01:10:23
and purpose in in life because we're kind of unanchored. Yeah. What's your perspective on this? And um
01:10:30
do you think it's true that we're like we're more unanchored than we've ever been? And how do you think we get back
01:10:35
to that? If we can relate to feeling a little bit lost and anchored and the sort of prevalence in my view of people
01:10:41
having more and more midlife crisis and turning to religion or spirituality or something.
01:10:46
Yeah. Well, I I actually called this in March 2020 and it's on record because I was on a podcast and I I said I foresee
01:10:54
a huge mental health crisis, but we could choose for it to be a spiritual
01:10:59
revolution. And so then obviously the you know the rest of the pandemic happened and then
01:11:05
there was sort of a return to society which I think people found really hard mentally as well and at the same time
01:11:13
there was the cost of living crisis, the wealth gap, a new war, the crime rates
01:11:18
you know certainly in London like just for my life experience they had you know significantly grown um for reasons that
01:11:26
we're all contributors too but you know it changes how safe you feel in society.
01:11:31
And I'm a big fan of technology. Obviously, I'm a scientist, but it is
01:11:36
ironic that we seem to be more disconnected than ever when in in one
01:11:42
way we're we're more connected than we've ever been before. Mhm. And I, you know, I I've said this before,
01:11:48
but I'll say it again. I think the way out of that is is a return to ancient wisdom to true connection, which I
01:11:55
believe can coexist with being technologically connected and advanced.
01:12:01
Um, but yeah, I just I just think we've lost what it means to be human, which means,
01:12:07
you know, really being in touch with yourself and being part of a community and and caring about something more than
01:12:14
just your own life and and your immediate, you know, inner circle. And
01:12:19
what is true connection in your definition of the word? Because I guess there's false connection if there's true connection.
01:12:25
So what is true connection? Um and what is false connection? Well, I'll just go over, you know, what I've said before cuz it's about
01:12:30
connection to yourself, to others, and you know, sort of the world or something greater. And I, you know, it's about
01:12:36
something that's that's deep and not transactional. It's about something that's meaningful. It's about something
01:12:42
that's altruistic. I think it's about contributing
01:12:48
that day when you walked past the hospital. What did you experience?
01:12:54
Um, it triggers me seeing that building and I just
01:12:59
I you know I had obviously looked on Google Maps but not really realized I would walk past it and if I had realized
01:13:05
I would have walked a different way and I remember just thinking it's unfair that I had to see this
01:13:12
building. It was unnecessary unnecessarily a trigger for me. and and obvious obviously saying to Robin, you
01:13:18
need to send me a sign. But there there's a reason for that which is, you know, I mean, I went to that hospital every day for a month for his first day
01:13:25
and I think about 3 weeks for the second one. Um, but he had two admissions to ICU and one
01:13:34
of them I'd been, you know, to visit him for the day. He'd been bedridden for quite a few
01:13:41
weeks by then. And I came home. I was just sort of deescalating and, you know,
01:13:47
sitting on the sofa and getting ready for the evening. And then suddenly I saw the emergency line was calling. And I
01:13:54
could hear them saying his heart rate went up to 200, like ICU, we're here
01:14:00
now. You know, we did a crash call. And they're just like talking, talking, talking. And I suddenly just said,
01:14:05
"Should I come back to the hospital?" and she said yes in a tone of voice that
01:14:11
was like you need to get here as quickly as possible. Got in the Uber. It's a 30 minute Uber ride from my house and
01:14:21
messaged my best friend and said that I've got to rush back to the hospital. He was on the 15th floor. So I was like
01:14:27
waiting for the lift. Got up there, saw the matron coming to unlock the door.
01:14:32
And I just said, "Is he in his room?" And she said, "Yes, he's in his But she her face looked like not good. Ran round
01:14:39
and saw all the machinery from ICU in the corridor with like a hundred wires
01:14:45
coming out of the room. Ran into the room and just saw Robin sat
01:14:50
up in bed. Huge smile when he saw me. And he just said to me, "When I thought
01:14:57
this was the end, I just kept thinking, please let me see her face one more time."
01:15:03
And you know after that he did get a bit better but then
01:15:10
um well in that first admission eventually I said to him you know you've got to start sitting out well the doctor
01:15:16
said you've got to sit out of bed and the therapist had come around he said I
01:15:22
don't want therapy I've got you. So like I took the therapy the reflexology lady came around he pretended he was asleep
01:15:28
and eventually I said darling you've got to play the game. I cannot do this by myself and you and you can't just keep
01:15:34
lying in bed. You've got to sit up. So, he got helped into the chair and that
01:15:39
day when I went to say goodbye to him, I hugged him like face to face. And I didn't quite realize that the whole time
01:15:45
I'd been kissing him from the side of the bed cuz he'd been in bed. And when we hugged face to face, I just burst
01:15:51
into tears. And I had never shown him anything but a smiling face the whole time. and I left and I just got this
01:15:58
barrage of text messages saying, "I'm not spending one more night away from you. I'm wasting away in this hospital
01:16:04
when I could be with you. When you come in tomorrow, we're going to tell the doctors that I'm leaving."
01:16:10
So, I thought, "Okay." Came in the next day. It's ward round. And I was pretty
01:16:15
much like part of the ward. Like the consultant would say everything and then say, "Is that okay, Tara?" kind of thing. And he said, "I want to leave.
01:16:22
I'm leaving today. I want to be at home with my wife tonight. And she was very clever. She looked at me and said, "What
01:16:29
do you think, Tara?" Because she knew I'd never put him in danger. But also, I'm standing in front of the man that I
01:16:36
love, and I'm either going to tell him that I don't trust him. I don't trust his
01:16:42
decision-m, the person who always always had my back, or I'm going to have to show him
01:16:49
that I have his back just like he always had mine. And I said to her, I
01:16:55
understand why you wouldn't be in favor of this, but I think I can manage it.
01:17:00
And within two days, he was discharged from hospital. Um,
01:17:07
yeah, off IVs, um, on still on oxygen. We still had to
01:17:12
go in to have like the bone marrow tests and get blood transfusions and platelets
01:17:18
and things, but he slowly started to recover. He it was a slow recovery. So
01:17:23
normally within a week you would get the second round of treatment. He wasn't strong enough for that. But um we got to
01:17:29
the point where she actually said that we could go to Hampshire and then he stopped using the walking stick. He
01:17:35
stopped using the oxygen. We came back to London for the second round of treatment. She said I I could not have
01:17:40
imagined you would bring him back in as good a state as he's in. But the second round of treatment was
01:17:47
totally brutal and it didn't work. Um, so he was in hospital again for a
01:17:54
few weeks and then like I said on October 4th I took him home. Even then the female consultant said to
01:18:02
me, "The last time you took him to Hampshire, he got so much better. If anything changes, bring him back to
01:18:07
London." And the male consultant gave me two syringes of bone marrow stimulating
01:18:14
um drugs and said, "You cannot use this without our permission, but if anything changes, inject him with this and bring
01:18:20
him back to London." So, I still had like a glimmer of hope, which I shouldn't really have had. Um,
01:18:29
and like I said, he he lived for three and a half weeks instead of two.
01:18:34
Um yeah, and like right towards the end cuz he was in a hospital bed on an air
01:18:41
mattress, he said like maybe you could like come and lie on the bed with me. And I mean
01:18:48
he couldn't move. He couldn't raise a glass of water to his lips or anything, but he somehow like moved his arm cuz I
01:18:53
always used to sleep like on his chest. Um, and then after a few seconds he said,
01:18:59
"I'm just really claustrophobic." And you know, I'd like had to put the rails up to stay in the bed because it was so
01:19:04
small. I was going to fall out. And I said, "It's okay, darling." And I think that I think that was his way of saying goodbye to me cuz he died 2 days after
01:19:11
that.
01:19:17
What's on your mind? Um,
01:19:22
just like very sad.
01:19:28
Um, I don't want him to get forgotten.
01:19:37
I've dedicated like my book to him.
01:19:43
But I I also know because we've had this conversation that
01:19:49
there's something there's something there's there's still like
01:19:56
something that I have to do in this life which was the reason that I had to stay.
01:20:03
So yeah, I I think there's like a purpose
01:20:08
to fulfill that that Robin wants me to. So that that's what I'm going to do.
01:20:15
How do you think about falling in love again? because I have played out the horrific thought myself in my own life
01:20:20
of losing my partner and and how difficult it would it appears to be from this vantage point to fall in love again
01:20:28
and meet people and to to think about those things again like how how do you think about that?
01:20:35
Um so I actually
01:20:40
experienced unconditional love which I didn't believe in. So the first time Robin said to me, "I love you unconditionally,"
01:20:47
because I had some baggage from a previous relationship. I said, "Don't say that because I don't think that
01:20:52
exists." And he never said it again,
01:20:58
but every day for the rest of his life, he showed me that it was true. So at some point, I just knew it was true. I
01:21:05
would say, you know, obviously people say things like, "He would want you to be happy." And you know, I was still
01:21:12
wearing my wedding rings for over two years. And you know, even some of his friends said, "You don't need to wear
01:21:17
them anymore." But I said, "I want to." And I wore them for as you know, as long as I still needed to. I
01:21:27
I'm open to receiving love, but I'm not going to go look for it. Let's put it that way.
01:21:33
Why? Um,
01:21:41
I don't know. I mean, it's not really my style anyway, but I think I've been so lucky with what
01:21:48
I've had that I don't I don't I'd be okay if I didn't like have
01:21:55
something like that again. Obviously, I'm too young to like not want to have
01:22:01
that again, but I'm I also feel quite vulnerable. So, I'll just like see how
01:22:07
things go. I've watched so many entrepreneurs treat sales like a performance problem. When
01:22:13
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01:24:13
And if I told you I'd been through what you've been through, and I asked you the question, should I go and look for love
01:24:20
again? What advice would you give to me if I'd lost my partner and I was what,
01:24:26
four years now? Mhm. Away from that. Nearly. Yeah. What what advice would you give me
01:24:31
about love? I think it's very personal. I think, you know, if you want to be in a
01:24:36
relationship, that's absolutely fine. Um, if you're not sure, that's fine,
01:24:41
too. I think there's different levels of how long it would take people. I do know
01:24:46
that when you know the majority of voices were around around me were sort of saying like it's okay for you to do
01:24:52
that again that one of my friends who's engaged to someone who was a widowerower
01:24:58
he said to me at the time I'm telling you right now 2 years is not it's not long enough and that felt like a relief
01:25:05
um so obviously it's almost another two years now I you know I think I believe
01:25:10
that if love is meant for meant for me then it will come to me so I'm I'm not
01:25:17
I'm I'm just calm about it. How are you different? Like what are the very material or like very obvious ways
01:25:24
that you're a different person on the other side of this? Um what would your friends say if I said
01:25:30
how is Tara different? Well, I think they would say that I'm a lot more like fragile and vulnerable cuz
01:25:38
cuz they're like very very protective of me still. Um,
01:25:43
I know they would I know what they would say cuz some of them have said it and I didn't really like to hear this at first, but they said you're going to be
01:25:49
able to help so many people. You know, the first time someone said that I was like, I've been a doctor. I've been a
01:25:56
coach. I, you know, my whole like personality is about helping people. I didn't need my husband to suffer
01:26:02
horrifically and die so that I can help people. But now I do actually feel that I can and I want to. And what do you
01:26:09
want to help them with? And who do you want to help? People that are grieving. Not just people that are grieving. I
01:26:15
think, you know, people are are struggling and suffering in different ways. And people really really want to
01:26:22
feel seen. And I think that's like an important place where I would love to do
01:26:29
something. I think I've got more and more curious about the idea that I might be wrong about subjective reality and
01:26:37
how I see things. And so I wondered if if there's a clearer definition of the
01:26:42
subjective reality that you see like do you think we are these spirits that inhabit our and then like why is there
01:26:48
is there reason why I've come into this body? Is there some bigger karmic purpose as to why I've I I
01:26:56
live? This ultimate question of like what is the meaning of life in the world view that you have like what is the
01:27:03
point? What is the point? Why did I need to live?
01:27:08
I don't know if I can answer that, but I'm going to I'm just going to say like what's coming to my mind, which is
01:27:14
so like you and I might never have met in our lives, right?
01:27:19
Mhm. And for some reason, we did. And
01:27:26
we had never met before I did the podcast with you last time,
01:27:31
but people cannot stop talking about like the level of chemistry as if we'd known each other our whole lives. And
01:27:36
I've always said I felt like I was talking to my little brother. And then that episode goes on to have
01:27:42
like the number of views that it does. Mhm. I don't believe that that's random or a coincidence. I think and there's a
01:27:49
reason for that. And for me, in a way, you were the worst person for me to come and do and tell this story to
01:27:56
for the first time because you were the most skeptical person of all the podcast hosts that I can think of that I'm going to go on.
01:28:01
Mhm. So, there's obviously some importance to that. I can't explain it. I'm I'm not I
01:28:07
didn't come here with all the answers. I'm just lucky enough to be someone with credible
01:28:13
qualifications that's had a, you know, an experience that most people don't talk about that I can open up for people
01:28:21
that that's I would say like all that it is. But I want to add something else that I'm feeling is
01:28:26
relevant as well, which is because of my friendship group and the kind of conversations that we have, I wasn't
01:28:34
allowed by my publisher to include personal stories from my friends. I had
01:28:39
to source stories from people I had either never met or only met once or were friends of friends. So every
01:28:46
personal story that you read in the signs which has the person's real name and it is written by them and gifted to
01:28:53
me for this book are people that I don't know and
01:28:59
they're all saying the same thing. They see, you know, light disturbances when they think of their lost loved one or
01:29:05
they get unmistakable signs or robins visit them. Um
01:29:11
yeah, I haven't made that stuff up. Like there's something to it. I I don't know exactly what it is. I I hope I find out
01:29:17
before I die, but maybe I'll only find out after I die. I don't know. And is there any meaning to all this
01:29:24
stuff? It's kind of going back to the question I asked second ago because you said you think we met for a reason. Mhm. And one could hazard any number of
01:29:31
reasons as to why that was. Maybe it was because you're going to go on to help so many people and reach so many people with an important message, whatever. But
01:29:37
I don't know. This is my curiosity trying to reach a conclusion which is for what? For why? Like why are humans
01:29:44
here? Why why doesn't my dog Pablo have or does he have the same capabilities of
01:29:50
seeing signs and communicating with Oh, he's got more capabilities than you in many respects.
01:29:55
I mean, you talk about that in the book, right? You talk about pets and animals. Yeah. Okay, let me talk about that a little
01:30:00
bit. So, dogs and cats can smell certain diseases and um they can smell imminent
01:30:07
death. So there's something called hyperosmia which is um in humans it's
01:30:13
the ability to smell more than the normal range. So there's a very famous nurse called Joy I think it's Milner who
01:30:20
smelt her husband's Parkinson's disease years before he was diagnosed and her ability to smell that disease has caused
01:30:28
a new swab test to be created that takes chemicals from the skin of people to predict if they're going to get Parkinson's disease.
01:30:35
So there are some outliers in humans that have you know they're called super smellers for example like we're not all
01:30:41
capable of that but some people are blind people
01:30:46
rewire the visual cortex of the brain in the occipital loes here for echolocation.
01:30:52
Humans aren't built for echolocation. Bats and dolphins are. But people who are blind can use up the unused c visual
01:31:00
cortex to um learn how to recognize
01:31:06
how close objects are to them by how long it takes sound to bounce back from surfaces.
01:31:12
So basically animals have senses that we don't have. Some very rare people can
01:31:18
have some of those senses that animals have that most humans don't. We're also capable of rewiring some of our um
01:31:25
neurons for senses that replace ones that we don't have. And I'm just going
01:31:30
to bring us full circle, you know, kind of where we started with can you suspend your disbelief by understanding that
01:31:38
there are lots of things that we can't prove at the moment, but you know, we sort of sciences science is to on the
01:31:45
quest to push boundaries, which is that Russell Foster suggested that not that
01:31:51
the only cells on our retinas are not just rods and cones, which are for vision, but there's a different type of
01:31:56
cell that senses the passing of time through the light dark cycle and you
01:32:02
know that's how we create our circadian rhythms. He was ridiculed by scientists who said we've been studying the eye for
01:32:09
150 years and you think there's a new type of cell that we've missed out in all that time and you found it. And sure
01:32:16
enough, now there are identified cells called melanopsin cells which blind um
01:32:24
rodents can still keep to the circadian rhythm because they can sense the changing
01:32:29
light and dark cycle. But if you put opaque contact lenses on them, they drift off the circadian rhythm.
01:32:37
So, I I'm not going to be able to give you an answer at the end of this podcast,
01:32:42
but maybe that's the beauty of everything that we're not at the end of knowing everything that we need to know,
01:32:48
but there's a lot of really interesting big question marks.
01:32:53
Do you think we'll ever figure out these answers? Do you think science will ever get there? Do you think there'll come a
01:33:00
day when we make discoveries that prove that many of the things that you write
01:33:05
about in the science are in fact true
01:33:10
like scientifically justifiable repeatable? Yeah, I think so. But I don't think
01:33:16
we'll be here at that point. I'm always just fascinated because you know so much about neuroscience and the connection of
01:33:23
not just neuroscience but spirituality and um and then also human psychology in
01:33:30
general. The thing I'm also fascinated about with you is that you're able to tell me things that I didn't know like you said to me last time about looking
01:33:36
into someone's left eye and the fact that sweat leaks through the skin and that menstrual cycle sync up and these
01:33:41
are all things that are like really actionable that have helped me to look at life differently. But also now I don't think I've looked in someone's
01:33:47
right eye in the last two years, especially when they're like annoyed or something. So is there anything else
01:33:52
like that that you've become curious about or discovered or talked about since we last saw each other? That might
01:33:59
be pert um I think we've discussed it which is like noticing beauty. That's been a real game changer for me. That's like
01:34:05
gratitude to the next level and that's an active practice of going through life looking for something
01:34:10
beautiful. Well, it was but then it becomes a habit. Yeah. Okay. Um, and it's producing oxytocin just like gratitude practice
01:34:17
does. So obviously it's kind of self-rewarding. So then you naturally want to do it more and more. But I notice I point it out to
01:34:23
people more as well now, which is that I'm obviously trying to like create a bit of a like crowd effect. Um, not
01:34:29
consciously, but I just can't help myself. Like if I see something really pretty, then I'll say, "Oh, like you
01:34:35
know, did you see that?" Um, certain people do that often and they do seem to be the happiest people. My
01:34:40
girlfriend does that all the time. She she'll like like stop the car because there's a flower that we need to go
01:34:46
spend 45 seconds looking at across the other side of the road. And to a lot of people it's just a
01:34:51
flower and we've kind of almost become used to seeing flowers. Well, that's habituation. Yeah.
01:34:56
So even if you walk past like an amazing tree or an amazing building every day, eventually you'll you'll just not notice
01:35:02
it cuz you're habituated to it. So saliency is, you know, keeping yourself primed like what I call the art of
01:35:08
noticing. Mhm. And where are you right now in terms of your journey of grief?
01:35:15
I mean much better is the first thing I need to say cuz obviously it's been a long and dark time.
01:35:20
Um I know that I know
01:35:26
I'm not there yet because there is a part of me that is
01:35:32
like afraid to let my light really shine. Explain that. I think I sort of touched
01:35:39
on it before that if I I feel like if I, you know, if I like throw myself back into my career now because I've had
01:35:45
quite a few years out and it becomes really successful that there's a level of guilt associated with
01:35:51
that. But, you know, at least I'm aware of that. Um, I've had a few conversations with
01:35:57
close friends about it. I have quite a timeline ahead of me because of book publication and book promo and then
01:36:05
like, you know, next things that we might do. Um, so I think I just need to like keep working on that as things
01:36:12
unfold. Um, I know it's wrong, but it's how I feel
01:36:17
at the moment. We we meet up again in 10 years time. Obviously, we're going to see each other before then, but say we we get together
01:36:24
in 10 years time, and this next season of your life has been a great success. What happened?
01:36:29
Wow. Um, I got over myself and like put myself
01:36:35
out there and like really shone and it actually did really help loads of people. Um,
01:36:42
look at the smile on your face as you say that. Yeah.
01:36:48
I really want to say thank you to you as well for everything. The feeling is mutual.
01:36:55
You know, it really is. you you were transformative for for this show and um everywhere I go still today people come
01:37:01
up to me and tell me about how that conversation helped them it inspired them in some way but also helped them understand as you said earlier in this
01:37:08
conversation that all that we know isn't all that there is to know and just that you know I've tried to
01:37:14
play a bit of a skeptic throughout this conversation I am naturally skeptical but the other thing that's that from being a podcaster the other thing that
01:37:20
happens to you is you become more open-minded it's almost this paradox of you think you're going to learn more.
01:37:26
But actually through the through the conversations I've had, I've realized that there's so much that I don't know.
01:37:32
And actually that's forced me more into an agnostic position than I was before. And what I mean by that is it's forced
01:37:38
me into a state where I can't fall into the trap of thinking I know things. Yeah. So this is also why I I find it
01:37:44
hard to commit to any belief like a religious belief or atheism because there's I continually sit here over and
01:37:49
over again and someone will say something to me and I'll be skeptical and then I'll reflect and then I'll look
01:37:55
at the research or the science or whatever and I'll change my mind and if you change your mind that many times you realize that um your mind should
01:38:01
probably not be fixed to any position. I love that. I'm so proud of you for
01:38:07
hearing that. That's like an incredible thing for people to hear. But it's true and I hope that of my audience, you
01:38:12
know, I was sat with my team a while ago and I was saying, do you know what DOAC stands for? It stands for diversity. I get it. But it also stands for people
01:38:19
that have that are dreamers that are open-minded, which is the O that are in
01:38:25
search of increasing their awareness, and that could be in any definition that you want to describe it, whether it's
01:38:30
awareness of health, psychology, who they are. And the C is about connection. So that's really like hearing your
01:38:36
stories makes me feel like me too. M I feel that too. I'm struggling in that
01:38:42
way too. So that's the framework that I think about the show and that's the also why I try and remain open-minded to all
01:38:47
things that I hear. Um and let people speak. I've never actually said that before, but there it is, guys. Um and I and
01:38:54
that's why I'm I'm so compelled by this conversation today. Of course, like I'm skeptical. Like I think skepticism is healthy.
01:38:59
Yeah. Um but I'm also open-minded and that means that I'm willing to take what you've said to me today and to
01:39:05
investigate it and run the experiments in my own life. And if I am open-minded, maybe I'll
01:39:11
receive some evidence for myself. Yeah. So, thank you. Thank you for doing what you're doing. And also,
01:39:17
you know, as you said earlier, it's much easier and safer in life just to sit in a box of the known. Like, you're not
01:39:22
going to get any arrows. Yeah. But it's when people through history have dared to say that maybe the
01:39:29
earth revolves around the sun or that maybe the earth isn't flat. They've taken the arrows, but that's pushed us
01:39:36
forward as a society into a better way of being. So I always applaud the
01:39:42
the the guts to ask questions,
01:39:47
you know. So I hope that's the audience that I've cultivated. But I hope they're not too narrow narrow-minded or too
01:39:54
fixed, but I'm sure they will debate and share their anecdotes in the comment section. I'm actually really looking to to I'm really looking forward to reading
01:40:00
the comment section. I know on this particular conversation cuz I know what it's it's going to be full of stories and anecdotes and experiences
01:40:06
which I think is going to be really enriching. But I do ask everybody in the comment section to be um open-minded and
01:40:13
empathetic and kind um actively which means replying to
01:40:20
people and being kind because you know grief no matter what your opinion is on it is um is a very delicate thing and uh
01:40:28
we're all trying to find ways to be more happier and more connected and uh to
01:40:35
deal with the reality of of our experience. is we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last
01:40:40
guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. Okay. And the question left for you
01:40:46
is what is the best thing that someone has
01:40:52
done for you? Oh god. Are you sure you don't make these things up?
01:40:57
No, it's what it says here. If anyone wants to read it, it's what it says in the book. It It's got to be Robin showing me that
01:41:05
unconditional love really does exist.
01:41:12
Tara, thank you. Your new book, The Science, Beautiful book, by the way.
01:41:18
Thank you. Beautiful book, The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts, will be out in
01:41:23
September. So, if you're listening to this in September, then it's out, and I'll link it below for anyone that wants
01:41:28
to have a read of this book. Um the the really truly unique thing about you is that you blend all of these different
01:41:35
perspectives into your your own perspective and your own writing and your own research. And so
01:41:43
in reading this book, it pulls everybody in. It pulls in, I think, the skeptics. It pulls in the believers and it pulls
01:41:48
them all into the same room to confront a new possible answer to the nature of reality that might just serve to help so
01:41:54
many of us. So, I highly recommend everybody gives it a read because if you're someone that likes to expand your
01:41:59
mind and think beyond the known, then this is this is the book and this is the moment in time because of all the reasons you've said about loneliness and
01:42:06
individualism and all these things that people need to read books like this. So, I highly I'm so excited for it to be in
01:42:11
the world and I'm so excited to hear what everybody um everybody thinks and how they receive it. So thank you for writing such a wonderful book and thank
01:42:16
you for coming back and thank you again for many years ago now blessing our show in a profound way that pulled in a huge
01:42:23
new audience which is set us on a on an incredible journey. So yeah, thank you Tara. Yes, thank you.
01:42:30
This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the
01:42:36
show. So could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just
01:42:43
that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my
01:42:48
power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback.
01:42:53
We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to
01:42:59
yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is
01:43:07
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01:43:29
You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now,
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01:43:47
I will speak to you there. [Music]
01:44:11
[Music]