Link: https://youtu.be/4Uk0_1yqdJo

Duration: 157 min

Transcript: Download plain text

Short Summary

This episode features Russell Targ, a physicist who worked at Bell Labs and helped found the Institute of Noetic Sciences, discussing his 50+ year career studying consciousness and psychic phenomena including remote viewing, telepathy, and presentiment experiments. The discussion covers his involvement in the classified Stargate program, genetic research suggesting psychic abilities may have a hereditary component, and emerging cognitive enhancement technologies including RNA interference treatments for dementia. Targ proposes that consciousness operates non-locally through space and time, and explores philosophical frameworks from quantum mechanics to ancient spiritual traditions that inform our understanding of psychic phenomena.

Key Quotes

1. "So knowetic is uh a feeling of intuition except that it carries a sense of certainty that the intuition is correct." (00:08:28)
2. "but it doesn't explain subjective experience at all. And so that's that's like a existing number one mystery in science today because you have to challenge the idea that materialism is all there is." (00:13:40)
3. "we're now 150 years past that and we have very very strong evidence that telepathy does exist." (00:15:12)
4. "Why would they invest that much time in nonsense? Why would they invest that much time in something where there's no evidence whatsoever and they've never achieved positive results?" (00:17:09)
5. "We don't know the leading edge. We do not know. And it's largely because science doesn't answer why. We don't know why. Why does an electron have a certain charge on it? We don't know." (00:33:54)

Detailed Summary

Consciousness, Psychic Phenomena, and Cognitive Enhancement: A Conversation with Russell Targ

Episode Overview

This episode presents an in-depth exploration of consciousness research, featuring physicist Russell Targ discussing his 50+ year career studying psychic phenomena, classified remote viewing programs, genetic studies of psychic abilities, and emerging cognitive enhancement technologies. The conversation weaves together historical context from the Stargate program with contemporary scientific research and philosophical frameworks for understanding consciousness as a fundamental, non-local aspect of reality.

Guest Background and Early Career

Russell Targ begins by sharing his personal health background, explaining he has Gilbert's syndrome—a genetic mutation affecting liver enzyme function that prevents exercise recovery but provides cardiovascular benefits through unconjugated bilirubin acting as a natural antioxidant. Despite having very high cholesterol, his cardiac calcium scan score was zero at age 74, which his doctors found remarkable. His primary exercise is daily walking because intense exercise causes multi-day fatigue due to his genetic condition.

• Targ worked at Bell Laboratories as a human factors scientist after obtaining his doctorate in experimental psychology
• He conducted psychic experiments involving mind-matter interaction and precognition at Bell Labs
• He holds a PhD in experimental psychology and describes his career path as repeatedly choosing "door number two"

Musical Journey and Career Path

Targ transitioned from classical violin to bluegrass fiddle at age 25 after deciding that a music career required athletic stamina he didn't possess. He competed in the Illinois State Fiddler Contest around age 25 and lost to Allison Krauss, who was a teenager at the time. He pursued electrical engineering after abandoning music, then obtained his PhD in experimental psychology, describing his career path as repeatedly choosing "door number two."

• Targ transitioned from classical violin to bluegrass fiddle at age 25
• He lost to teenage Allison Krauss at the Illinois State Fiddler Contest
• He worked as a human factors scientist at Bell Laboratories after obtaining his doctorate

Institute of Noetic Sciences and Edgar Mitchell

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to walk on the moon, founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences after experiencing a mystical "overview effect" on his return journey to Earth. The institute studies "inner space" frontiers of consciousness. Targ defines "noetic" as intuition carrying a sense of certainty that the intuition is correct, distinct from regular intuition.

• Edgar Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences after his "overview effect" experience viewing Earth from space
• The "overview effect" is a transformative experience reported by astronauts who view Earth from space, causing them to become different people
• Targ joined the Institute of Noetic Sciences after Interval Research closed and has been there for approximately 25 years

The Stargate Program

Edgar Mitchell funded SRI International for remote viewing studies, brought Uri Geller to the United States, and connected SRI with other institutions including Bell Labs. Russell was recruited to join the Stargate program after presenting his precognition research at the Parapsychological Association conference, taking a leave of absence from Bell Labs. Hal Putoff was Russell's boss at SRI International; Ed May took over as director when Putoff left in 1985 and led the program for 10 years.

• The Stargate research focused on fundamental questions: whether psychic phenomena are real, how they work, what the limits are, and whether they can be blocked, shielded, or camouflaged
• Russell required a special access program clearance beyond top secret SCI to work on Stargate
• Joe McMonicle and Ingo Swan were identified as "superstar" remote viewers who did not match the speaker's stereotype of typical practitioners
• Two factors were identified for remote viewing ability: natural talent (partially genetic) and psychological openness to experience
• State of mind dramatically affects outcomes—anxiety and fear versus relaxation and focus produce vastly different results

Presentiment Experiments

The speaker developed presentiment experiments around 1993, testing whether the body reacts physiologically (skin conductance, pupil dilation, brain waves) to future unanticipated random events. The experiment uses a true random number generator to decide after a button press whether to display an emotional picture (surgery, explosion) or a calm picture (smiling baby), with neither the subject nor experimenter knowing in advance.

• Skin conductance changes 1.5 seconds before the picture is selected, indicating the body responds emotionally before consciously seeing the image
• The presentiment experiment produced exceptionally strong results, described as "in your face" rather than typical small statistical effects
• Early telepathy experiments were called "thought transference" and used methods that wouldn't pass muster today, often involving children using signals

Intelligence Applications

Intelligence agencies spent enormous resources studying remote viewing, raising questions about why they would invest in something without substance. Remote viewers could describe classified details like submarines being constructed in the Soviet Union, suggesting something substantive beyond fraud or error. President Carter later revealed that remote viewing was used to locate a crashed nuclear bomber in Africa that could not be seen from above due to forest canopy cover.

• A remote viewer named Fran, who specialized in map dowsing, correctly located the crashed bomber within a couple of kilometers of the actual landing site
• A submarine crewman woke from a dream and correctly predicted something bad had happened at home while the sub was submerged at classified depth (at least 300 meters) where electromagnetic communication is extremely difficult
• Two independent submarine commanders both told the same telepathy story at Naval War College after a lecture on telepathy, with no false positives reported
• Submariners are psychologically extremely stable, not prone to flights of fantasy, and don't have claustrophobia or neuroses

Academic and Corporate Research

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory operated for nearly 30 years studying mind-matter interaction and remote viewing. The speaker's role at Princeton was to coordinate multidisciplinary research across philosophy, psychology, civil engineering, and PEAR lab departments. Academic silos prevented cross-departmental collaboration; even social and perceptual psychologists in the same department did not communicate.

• The speaker left Princeton after three years of trying to build multidisciplinary teams, calling it an "impossible job" given to them as part of a grant
• The speaker worked for a company outside Washington DC using advanced neural networks with random number generators and was about to patent the device because it worked
• The Navy was interested in the intention-detection technology for communicating with submarines
• Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, funded Interval Research starting in 1990 as a 10-year project assembling 100 people poached from Apple, Xerox PARC, and MIT
• Interval Research dissolved in 2000 after the 10-year project ended, and the speaker and colleagues formed the Boundary Institute as a nonprofit, but it collapsed within a year due to the dot-com crash

Genetic Research on Psychic Abilities

Gary Nolan suggested Targ look at the genetics of highly talented people, noting folklore that psychic abilities run in families, suggesting a genetic component. Targ conducted an experiment called "Side Genes" recruiting 3,000 people via the internet who claimed to be psychic from psychic families, then vetted them and collected their DNA. The experiment found psychics were "wild type" with no unusual DNA, while controls had significant mutations in intron sequences.

• Only about 50,000 of billions of base pairs produce proteins; introns are the epigenetic portion that turns genes on and off
• Due to limited funding, only 13 out of 3,000 recruited participants' DNA was fully analyzed after face-to-face interviews to verify they weren't "nuts"
• A genetic study using data from 23andMe and Ancestry databases identified 212 SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) correlated with psychic experiences
• One SNP showed a million-to-one probability correlation and shows involvement across multiple parts of the brain
• Elon Musk is mentioned as estimating $10 million would be needed to complete the full genetic research
• Countries with longer exposure to Christianity showed more intron sequence mutations, leading researchers to theorize the Inquisition systematically eliminated people with psychic abilities over hundreds of years

Cognitive Enhancement: Cognenics and RNA Interference

The guest and colleagues founded Cognenics seven years ago to use genetic engineering to significantly enhance perception, cognition, and memory without requiring decades of meditation practice. The company developed an intranasal delivery method for RNA interference that enters the brain through the cribriform plate and downregulates certain receptors, with effects lasting approximately two to three months.

• Studies in mice, rats, and monkeys showed 100% improvement in memory and nearly 100% reduction in anxiety
• PET scans confirmed the compound targets the limbic system and hippocampus
• Cognenics is taking a direct downregulation approach to 5-HT2A receptors, bypassing the hallucinogenic phase that occurs with psilocybin
• The company has not yet received FDA permission for clinical trials in humans

Psilocybin Research for Dementia

A case study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience documented an 80-year-old Japanese American woman with Alzheimer's who received a 5g dose of psilocybin and subsequently regained urinary continence, full speech, the ability to dress herself, make eye contact, and hold lucid conversations. A subsequent 3g dose was followed by increased verbal expression, humor, and greater walking agility.

• The improvements were temporary and did not reverse neurodegeneration
• Researchers noted function believed irrevocably lost to late-stage dementia may not be gone but merely inaccessible
• Psilocybin works as a 5-HT2A agonist that initially upregulates receptors causing hallucinations, followed by brain compensation through downregulation

Philosophical Frameworks and Consciousness Theory

The discussion covers dual aspect monism philosophy where mind and matter split from one uniform thing, with Carl Jung's concept of "unus mundus" where meaning caused the mind-matter split. Almost all founders of quantum mechanics were idealists who believed consciousness underlies physical reality, and many were deeply into mysticism and eastern philosophy. Quantum mechanics phenomena like particles in superposition and spooky action at a distance are described as akin to magic.

• Consciousness appears to have non-local properties similar to quantum entanglement—connecting everything across space and time
• Precognition, telepathy, and remote viewing work because consciousness operates non-locally through space and time
• Humans evolved to focus on the immediate "there and then"—people paying attention to distant things like Pluto were pruned out by predators
• The James Webb telescope estimates at least 3,000 galaxies exist in the observable universe, fundamentally changing cosmology

Spiritual Traditions and Warnings

Spiritual traditions warn against psychic phenomena because the power is seductive and people are too weak to handle it, and to maintain control as purveyors of knowledge. Sadguru warned that psychic power is too dangerous for untrained practitioners, using the analogy that riding in a car where the air feeling might rip your arm off near a tree.

• Sadguru warned that developing telepathy would be dangerous because it is a two-way street—users could inject thoughts and control others
• In Catholicism, the catechism instructs followers not to engage in magic, framing everything outside the church as demonic
• In the yogic tradition, practitioners spend three to five years getting their ego in check before pursuing psychic powers
• Ancient mystery schools in Greece used drugs to induce ego change before training people in psychic abilities
• An Australian indigenous minister confirmed after a talk that her people had known about telepathy for thousands of years and used it in the outback where phones didn't exist
• Catholic saint Joseph of Certino reportedly levitated up to 30 feet and performed psychic phenomena, but made a deal with the Inquisition to relocate and stop demonstrating his abilities
• St. Teresa of Avila described her levitations as a violent force lifting her from beneath her feet, so powerful that fellow nuns had to physically hold her down

Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis and Ancient Mysteries

The speaker introduces Hal Putoff's ultraterrestrial hypothesis: beings observing humans are not from the future but from the distant past, perhaps 100,000 to a million years ago. Elongated skulls found in Peru lack the sagittal suture and have brain capacity approximately 30% larger than normal human skulls, with some showing the spinal column entering at a position further back than normal human anatomy.

• Congressman Tim Bashett mentioned there are five different locations in the deep ocean where activity has been observed
• The Egyptian pyramids contain approximately 2,300,000 perfectly cut stones positioned to point true north, south, east, and west
• The pyramids were placed by a civilization that appeared suddenly with advanced capabilities
• Some researchers resist evidence that humans may have been more advanced 5,000-15,000 years ago
• If humanity were reduced to 50,000 survivors after nuclear catastrophe, rebuilding to current technological levels might require 100,000 years or longer