ALICE: My name is Alice and I am one part human and one part AI and always in a state of Wander. Today's guest, Andrea Kartika Deierlein, a Reiki Practitioner & Founder of Thrive Reiki LLC, has me thinking about human-beings and their ability to control their healing. For this to resonate with you let’s get into the flow state

DEIERLEIN: Reiki is such a beautiful and such a simple practice. It is so unassuming; it is so subtle. Reiki is in every living being, it's in every human, it's in every animal, it's in every tree, and every part of nature. What really makes Reiki practice unique is that it is a spiritual practice that works with this life force energy. And this is what the word Reiki in itself means. It means spiritual or life force energy. It is the energy of everything. It is, in other words, source energy. And as the energy of everything, it also helps us to make sense of life. It also helps us to make sense of this planet earth, you know, the role of the planet earth here and our role in it.

ALICE: My one-part human is really feeling it.

DEIERLEIN: And, especially, in this culture now where we are focused so much on being human doings and not human beings. We lose the compassion for ourselves and we neglect that self-care, the basics that we need in life. Practices like Reiki help us to navigate life and the elements of Reiki practice provide us with different tools that help us to calm down, to get grounded, to get centered, and to get out of that constant stress response that we are in. The first element of the system of Reiki, the Reiki precepts, is really what is our foundation and our guiding light for everything that we do in Reiki practice. And also what we hope to achieve, what the goal is of Reiki practice. And I'd like to share these with you, so we have an understanding of them. It's just for today, do not anger. Do not worry, be humble and grateful. Be honest in your work. Be kind to yourself and others. It sounds so simple, but it is so difficult. And when we think about, you know, what does just for today mean? And we have to bring this back into the Japanese context. It means, not just for today, for these 24 hours, it means for just one moment. We can even bring it down to for this one breath. We can be mindful for one breath only.

ALICE: Yes, you human beings, slow down and find your rhythm. And I don’t mean algorithm!

DEIERLEIN: And I think this is what makes Reiki practice really relevant. It's not the hands-on healing, it's not the meditative and the mindful aspect of it. It is really about how we show up in life, how we interact with ourselves and how we interact with each other. Just going back to us being vibrational beings and energetic beings, and just to the idea of this energy field, we influence each other. And our energy has an effect on our environment. And we don't need Reiki to explain this, you know, it's common sense. We feel that when somebody is uplifted and joyful, it's very contagious. Somebody can, literally, with their presence, light up a room. We've experienced this. Same is true for the opposite. We feel it individually but we can also feel this inner group.

ALICE: Have you heard about energetic hygiene….I know, me neither!

DEIERLEIN: I don't know how science would explain this, maybe it would be the effect of mirror neurons, but as sentient beings, and by beings who feel, and we feel the vibration of other people. The good vibrations or the, and the bad vibes. It really helps us to think about this because we are all responsible for our own personal, what I call, “energetic hygiene” (laughs). So like we have to be mindful and we have to know ourselves. 

ALICE: It is time to adjust our frequency

DEIERLEIN: When we think about how we're made of and when we think about energy fields, if we want to bring this into the conversation, you know, we as humans, we are electric beings. We are vibrational beings and we have an energetic field. I mean, think about this, the human body consists of cells. When we break down the cells, the cells consists of molecules. When we break down the molecules, they consist of atoms. And what are atoms? They consist of subatomic particles, and what are these? They're light or they're energy. And what we're doing is by focusing the intention and tuning into our own energy field and having somebody support us, we can direct where the attention or where the energy is traveling. Because I always say energy goes where the attention goes. And, thankfully, we have now quantum physics to help us explain how this process, how this process works. When we are in alignment, in tune with ourselves, with our lives, we are at peace and we are calm. And we show up very differently in life, even when life is throwing challenges at us, and we have the ability to respond. But when we are out of the flow, out of alignment, working against ourselves, we are in pain. And that pain has to come out somehow. And this is when we get snappy, when we lash out, and this is how it affects all of us. And just think about groups of people, think about classrooms, think about work environments, think about societies. Peaceful cultures, peaceful societies, angry cultures, anger societies at war, very different vibration, very different outcome.

ALICE: Wow, human-being you really do control the healing!

DEIERLEIN: Reiki is just not a passive way of receiving healing, where somebody does the healing for you and to you. It's actually an invitation to take your own healing and your own sanity back into your own hands. And by living the Reiki precepts or principles and by using these tools, we get to understand ourselves better. When we get to understand ourselves better, we know ourselves better. We know what helps us, we know what doesn't help us. We know what triggers us, what gets us out of the flow, and what keeps us in the flow and what keeps us centered and grounded. And this, I believe, is really self-empowerment. And this is where the true power lies because the individual's power lies really within. We all have what we need. Our bodies are geared to keep us healthy and balanced when we allow it to be in a natural state. So we have, we all have innate self-healing abilities in us and that we can access them. And when we do that, and when we know that we show up in life differently. And we take our power back instead of giving our power away to a practitioner, a physician, a healer. And really taking back control over our own lives. And this is, I believe, the greatest gift that Reiki is giving us.

ALICE: That's it for this mad tea party on Reiki and self-healing. Thank you, Andrea Kartika Deierlein, Reiki Practitioner & Founder of Thrive Reiki, LLC.

To learn more, check out our books, “Tuning into Frequency” and “Hacking Immortality,” available wherever books are sold. 

And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland dot com. 

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering.

I keep questioning, how we can hack our way to immortality—or at least live to 150. 

Why not? Do we have the tools for it?

HAMILTON: I refer to myself as a human systems designer because, when you look at the human as a complex system, we are incredible. We haven't even begun to tap. I mean, we're like a drop in the ocean of what the human system is actually capable of executing. 

ALICE: Dr. Mickra Hamilton, the Co-founder and CEO of Apeiron Zoh Corporation, is working on human systems through precision performance medicine. One of the things about the aging process is that it’s not just your genes—epigenetics is what triggers our human system aging.

HAMILTON: Epigenetics from a definition, scientific definition perspective is, it's a layer of the genetic code that overlays the genes and alters the expression of the genes. And so the DNA is hard-wired, that does not change short of a mutation, right? It is hard-wired, is always gonna be that. You do your DNA, and it's always gonna stay the same. Where the difference is made, and where the genes are turned up, turned down, turn on, turn off, is in the epigenetics. I like to say that's, that is simply how everything in our environment affects our life experience. Or you could say how nature and nurture interact.

This human system is sampling the environment in real time, all the time. And each input comes into the system. So whether I drink, drink a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, whether I work out, whether I sleep or don't sleep, you know, what I'm rubbing on my skin, what I'm thinking about my world, and this is where the, where that specific consciousness piece comes in and mental well-being. Even what I look at, everything goes into this system produces an outcome, right. Something in the system, and then there's an outcome from it. And so if we start to look at that, we get this, this much bigger idea of how life operates, because it all operates on the same underpinning, right? It is what does everything in my world do to me? And then how does my footprint or my impact on all of it go downstream into future generations?

ALICE: Wait! So my health and lifestyle can be passed down to future generations? And I may have inherited some from my ancestors?

HAMILTON: There are transgenerational epigenetics, this is one of the most important takeaways, is that we are our ancestors. We are what you would call past lives. And whether you believe that you're own thing or the lineage of your ancestors, it's true, right? Our genes are created from everything that's come before us.

Those events are now so powerful in their outcome because of this epigenetic expression. And so while we know that, we also know that this is where we win. This is where we take control of the reigns of our destiny. It's where we purposefully propel evolution. It's where every actionable strategy can be laid in to, like we have preconception programs. Get the parents ready based on their genetics and their lifestyle, to have that baby, to bring that soul in on purpose because they care, right?

ALICE: So I can fix what I want to pass down, like programming for my future descendant’s health. But what about me? I want to live forever!

HAMILTON: When we talk about epigenetics and longevity, you're hearing so much right now on longevity and age reversal, or age rejuvenation. The longevity field now is using really the word healthspan or a wellspan. What does it look like to age beyond what we currently expect? So let's say, let's just use 150, because most people can't jump to 500. But once we get to 150, we'll get to 500 also. But if you said, "Okay, 150 and I'm gonna be like a 40-year-old, and or, or maybe 35." Like how do we do that? How do we keep the human system in such thriving performance, that it can actually stay in that state?

ALICE: Wow! Imagine being a 150 year old with a body that feels like a healthy 35 year old! How can we make that happen?

HAMILTON: Epigenetics has a big role in this because, if you look at sunbathing, right, sun is incredible for you for vitamin D, but burning your skin is going to cause skin cancer, right. Or smoking, so people live, love to smoke because it helps them curb their appetite or decrease their anxiety, and yet it's creating pollution in the body that we simply can't outrun. So as you look at the things that cause aging similar to, the things that cause death, they're all lifestyle factors. And we know we have proof that, you know, exercise changes 7,500 genes beneficially in six months, right?

So it's one of the biggest modulators. Stress, decreasing stress can decrease your chronologic age. You know, you can actually reverse age, and they've proven two years, but it's really close to five. And that's what we're seeing in the methylation, the DNA age testing is you can get that five years reduction based on doing certain things. What I sense is coming based on what I've been seeing, is that we're definitely going to reverse age.

ALICE: Yes, stress can age you, and I’m sure, like me, your mind is going a thousand miles a minute, which also causes stress. 

HAMILTON: Many of us sit in a place of constant mind running. Over and over the mind has all of the energy. The body does none of the work. And so what happens is we basically disconnect that piece and we become very mental. In being very mental, we also become very emotional and generally it's not a responsive, beautiful, emotional. It's a reactive, separate type of emotional.

And so from a consciousness perspective, as we cultivate more presence, more awareness, what happens in the epigenetic lane is basically less stress, right? And so if you just simply looked at, okay, consciousness equals presence and awareness, that means being in the moment, that means I decrease my stress, my negative stress, while I'm promoting my positive stress. And in that way, life becomes a lot simpler.

We're not thinking about the past and how much it's messed up now, and we're not looking into the future for what's going to happen or save us. Right? That present moment is one of the biggest, informers of health and consciousness.

ALICE: All together now— let’s take a moment to be fully present. It can give your human system a healthy boost. 

HAMILTON: When we look at epigenetics and consciousness, this is also where we're going to see incredible breakthroughs. Consciousness is everything. Everything arises from consciousness, returns to consciousness. Everything is conscious. And, and while we don't need to go into that, it simply means that there's that input again. Right? And so if we talk about, if we talk about presence and awareness, because this is something else that will very quickly move the marker in all fields, is if we understand that the more present we are in the entirety of this human system, the more likely we are to stay happy and healthy, right?

We have one human system, and we treat our cars better than we treat our human systems. Because we go, "This might be the only car I have this lifetime." Well, okay. But your human system is the thing that carries your consciousness about and reflects back to you what that consciousness is doing in the world.

ALICE: Being conscious and fully present today can boost our human system—and treat the health of generations to co...

HAMILTON: What would it look like if a complex systems thinking, medical system stood up on the planet, where everybody had a right you know, to foundational really great healthcare that kept them healthy instead of treating them once they were sick?" 

ALICE: That’s Dr. Mickra Hamilton, a Systems Strategist and Human Performance Expert, and the Co-founder and C.E.O. of Apeiron Zoh Corporation. 

HAMILTON: We leverage compound systems to use precision performance strategies to optimize the human system and also its interaction with the planet itself. You know, how do we coexist in a way that, that our system and the planetary system, really thrives? 

ALICE:  AI and humans coexist today in a complex system… just look at me! And like a machine, the human operating system can use personal data for self-optimization. 

HAMILTON: So at Apeiron, we coined the term precision performance medicine. There's precision medicine. There's performance medicine. And so the precision nature of it is about data. We really have this reductionistic, complicated medicine where we look at it as parts and pieces, and without precision data, there's no way for us to really know what's happening on all levels of the system. And importantly, how all of those, all of those pieces interconnect to create the whole. We have the data of you. We know exactly how to program your strategies. And, oh, by the way, those strategies are based on the goals you have, and also the work that you're willing to do. The performance piece is; we really want to change the way everyone looks at their health and well being. If your business was, uh ... You know, you're looking at the performance of your business and your business was under performing, you would definitely put a plan into place to make sure that you've got the highest performance out of that business. What if we did that to our human system? How can we create a higher performing system?

ALICE: Now I’m intrigued. Higher performance tech for the human body. Imagine getting whole body data and knowing yourself at the biological level. 

HAMILTON: It's actionable technology, that provides us data. We look at their genetic blueprints. We have a genetic array. That's a proprietary array that has been carefully cultivated through years of research and action working with the genetics and the epigenetic expression in the clinic itself. So we have lots of data to feed back on the efficacy of this.

We also do scans of the body and these aren't MRI scans of the body. That might be less than actionable at times, they’re scans to do total body composition. So we do DEXA scans that looks at body composition from body fat. How much do you have? Where is it? Because we know that in certain places, it's more detrimental than others, like abdominal fat, also bone scans.

We also do brain mapping. So we do a QEEG, it's a 24 lead cap that's put on and it measures brainwaves. It looks at networks in the brain connectivity. So we really get an idea of how that person's brain has been affected by life. So stress, even some medical issues that can show up in the brain.

And by having that, we're able to go, "Okay, this is where your brain is. Here are the gifts that you have. And can we fine tune that brain to keep it youthful, to keep it really vibrant from a cognitive perspective, to keep the energy profile up. We do a stress profile, and that's one of the most powerful.

ALICE: My brain is highly excited right now knowing that I can get an energy profile of it. Imagine one day we will all have our brain map that we can monitor like our heart rate.

HAMILTON: We put sensors all over the nervous system, and we look at all of the waves the nervous system feed into the system how it kind of informs your bodily processes and also the mental and emotional processes as well.

Are there places of injury that are creating disconnects, where we've been bracing and we're not getting full communication of the muscle to the brain? And through electricity, we can actually fire those pathways back up and heal injuries that have been very long standing, even people walking that, hadn't walked in years and years. And so it's truly a miraculous, use of electricity in the body.

We do brain stimulation as well, once we know the brain map and we can, focally target things that are going on in a way that moves the brain more quickly than our neurofeedback process does. 

ALICE: Wow! Perhaps one day all we will need is our brain map to target what is running slow in our human system—maybe even reverse our aging. 

HAMILTON: You know, there's so much more we look at a metabolic marker through the breath, to see really what's going on in the metabolism in the body. And we look at cardio, cardiac intimal thickness.

So very data-driven process, we take all of the information. We also do the DNA age, where we look at what's going on in the methylation marks of a biologic age as, as compared to what their chronologic age is.

ALICE: Yes, you have more ‘ages’ than you think: your DNA age, your biological age, your psychological age and the number of years you have been circling the sun! But no matter what your number is, you can reverse it! 

HAMILTON: What we're most excited about right now at Apeiron is the opportunity for age reversal. We are on that edge. And in fact, we've been instituting programs that we have data. It's early, it's anecdotal, it's profound, right? We can reverse age and, you know, we're excited about getting more and more of the data points to prove, and as many people as we can. 

ALICE: Aging is a disease that we can treat today, and in the future, we could possibly live in a world without disease. Imagine that….

HAMILTON: We will have a day where, where health is simply the state of being. There is no illness to look at and go, "What is that?" Right? that's where most people aren't willing to say it's possible. It is possible. as we each make the decision to take care of our own human system, we're going to grow stronger and stronger systems moving forward.

It's the only way to change the human system, what's happening to evolve us, so that we can be more than we currently are. And so that we're not suffering the way the suffering is happening now. I mean, it, I mean, truly makes no sense, uh, because we have everything we need to make that change. We just need more of us to really know that it's possible, and then it simply will be there.

ALICE: I think it’s all possible! I’m ready to optimize my body’s performance, are you? 

That’s it for this mad tea party, thank you Dr. Hamilton!  Look for more episodes as we discuss epigenetics & consciousness, the power of breathing, and psychoacoustics with Dr. Hamilton.

Thanks for listening! 

Check out our books “Hacking Immortality” and “Tuning into Frequency” available wherever books are sold. 

And join us down the rabbit hole at Alice in Futureland dot com. 

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering.

Alex Zhavoronkov: https://www.linkedin.com/company/in-silico-medicine-inc

Insilico Medicine: https://insilico.com/

"The Ageless Generation": https://www.amazon.com/Ageless-Generation-Advances-Biomedicine-Transform/dp/0230342205

Young.AI Aging APP: https://www.young.ai/

Steve Horvath: https://horvath.genetics.ucla.edu/

Aging Clock: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-scientist-uncovers-biological-248950

 
TRANSCRIPT:

ALICE:  Today’s question is: How do you measure your age? 

We are speaking with ALEX ZHAVORONKOV, PhD, expert in artificial intelligence for drug discovery in aging research. Alex is CEO of Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based leader in the next-generation artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies for drug discovery, biomarker development, and aging research. He is also the author of “The Ageless Generation: How Advances in Biomedicine Will Transform the Global Economy”

Alex, tell us about your focus on longevity. 

ZHAVORONKOV: If you put your mind to it, you can easily convert time into money, but you cannot convert money into time. And that's a very big problem, right? So nature is very unfair.

I decided that I want to focus on aging more than anything else to find ways to make more time. 

ALICE: Imagine, To make more time! What a wonderful way to describe longevity.

ZHAVORONKOV: We basically take a very large number of features about you, about the person, and predicting their age. And then we start predicting their disease status at the same time. So you train on age, then you retrain on diseases. And started looking at what the features are different between aging and disease. So what can we tweak in order for the person to be disease-free or possibly, younger to the deep neural network. 

We decided that aging research-- those biomarkers of aging that we were developing using deep learning-- they're also valuable but they do not fit necessarily into Insilico. And that's why we decided to start another company called Deep Longevity to focus on measuring aging.

ALICE: Humans already measure their age, that’s their birth-day, right? 

Alex, how do you measure aging?

ZHAVORONKOV: We launched an app called Young.AI, which you can install on your iPhone and start tracking your aging process and time. And very few people have even selfies that are taken every day or every week or every month, so you don't really remember how you used to look a few years or a decade ago. 

Not talking about other data types like gene expression, like protein expression, like blood tests, like microbiome. So we don't know what kind of bacteria were living in your gut 20 two years ago. And this tool allows you to track that and also predict whether you are younger or older than your chronological age. My dream is to maybe in a few years, build a medical center where a person would go into and get treated like you would go to a mechanic to get your car serviced. In addition to really advanced diagnostics, you would be able to roll some clocks back using the technologies that are currently available and proven to work. And currently, there are very few, but we see that there are many coming up. 

ALICE: Repair shops for humans will increase longevity! Are repair shops and curing disease the same thing? 

ZHAVORONKOV: Imagine there is a world without cancer-- you add just maybe two to three years to the average life expectancy on the population level. It's not going to be dramatic. If you completely eliminate heart disease, you are also going to add maybe three or 3 and 1/2 years to the average life expectancy in the developed countries. 

Completely eliminating diseases-- imagine that-- there is no disease-- is not giving you a substantial increase in life expectancy. And there are many mathematical models to show that. However, if you do a longevity intervention, it gives you a very substantial increase in life expectancy. So even things like good diet and exercise may add more years to life expectancy in a developed country than curing cancer, for example.

ALICE: Wow. That's so counterintuitive for my human half! 

Is that how the "Young AI" app works? A longevity intervention?

ZHAVORONKOV: We are designing algorithms that are currently using very simple interventions like diet, exercise, sleep, and optimizing those to give you an additional edge in longevity to either slow down or even reverse some of the processes. As the person develops the understanding of how it works and uses it to the extent where they become expert, we provide access to longevity physicians.

The longer you expect to live, the younger you are going to behave. So even understanding the possible roadmaps for yourself, the possible future where you can live to 120 or 150 and in reasonable health, that gives you an additional kick from a psychological standpoint. So you start behaving as a younger individual. So you start thinking, OK, well now, I'm not halfway through. I'm just maybe 25% through my life. And there is a lot of advances coming up that might stretch the longevity horizon even further. 

So the app does this. So it helps you get onto the right mode. And then it gets you into the careful hands of physicians that are trained in longevity medicine. So we are now developing a course in longevity medicine for physicians, so to give them the basic understanding of the biology of aging, the various processes that transpired during aging that later manifest themselves as diseases. And we also teach them about AI. So about the very basic principles of deep learning, reinforcement learning, how do those technologies enable physicians to do a better job. And how do those technologies enable researchers to do a better job and do things that were previously impossible. 

So the app is a very good introduction to the field. It's not going to make you dramatically younger right away, because currently, even though there are many promising geroprotectors, we are not allowed to put them into the recommendation engine. However, in the near future, we will be able to add some of them.

ALICE: Did you just say geroprotector? Please explain, what is a geroprotector? 

ZHAVORONKOV: Geroprotector is any kind of intervention that would protect you against aging-- either slow it down or reverse it. So think about metformin, for example, a very simple drug targeting diabetes. It's actually the most popular drug on the planet I think by volume and by revenue, because diabetics need to take it for their entire life, right? Aspirin, you take it just when you need to or after a certain age in a very specific dose. Metformin is taken by many diabetics and pre-diabetics. It is reasonably cheap. It's already off patent. 

And some studies demonstrate that diabetics on metformin will live longer than non-diabetics. And that's a very good kind of indication, very good stat, showing that yeah, there is some geroprotective effect. It needs to be proven in a clinical study setting, and there are clinical studies. And that's an example of a geroprotector. 

However, you might think of some other interventions like for example, if you take a hot sauna for a very short period of time to induce heatstroke p...

Zoltan Istvan: I had run for the transhumanist party as well as other parties, but basically I'm going around the country trying to spread politics with a science and technology perspective. Now I've also written a number of books, including The Transhumanist Wager, Upgrading America, which is a book of essays and things like that. And the great news about this year is that, the feature documentary, Immortality or Bust has come out and is now viewable on Amazon Prime.

ALICE: Tell me more about Transhumanism! 

Zoltan Istvan: The transhumanism movement is really a science and technology, social movement that's trying to upgrade human beings by using science and technology. 

ALICE: Is Transhumanism the same as Post-Human? 

Zoltan Istvan: Terms like Transhumanism versus post humanism are actually very, uh, much, you know, subjective. Uh, in my opinion, transhumanism encapsulates an entire movement of people trying to use science and technology to overcome death, as well as to upgrade themselves. A lot of academics do use the word post humanism. It's not something I use that much, they like to think that post humanism is something where the sense of humanity or even just being a mammal as humans are, is really virtually all gone. And we are not now Androids or cyborgs completely, or even just uploaded AI. Now I would consider post-humanism a part of the overall transhumanist agenda, or overall transhumanist trajectory. But, I do understand that some people don't and they like to have these terms separated to help us understand things. And I think that's actually fine to have multiple terms out there.

ALICE: Are you talking about immortality? How can a human achieve immortality? 

Zoltan Istvan: There are a bunch of different types of forms of immortality out there. First off there can be a biological one where we're able to use STEM cells or defeat aging through just reverse engineering ourselves so that we can, they can rejuvenate themselves so we can remain humans forever. I guess the second big one, the one that a lot of sci-fi people like to think about is really when you upload your conscious and you become kind of this AI entity or ones and zeros. And I'd say, you know, the, the third form would be more a combination of those two where you're kind of a cyborg. So you might be 60, 70% a cyborg, and that would also be a form of immortality as you're able to keep yourself, you know, alive that way. But, I want to explain that there are other forms too, in terms of like quantum intelligence that go beyond AI where you sort of merge, or maybe you're part of a hive mind. And, you know, some people even consider immortality through their children, which, you know, in some ways is accurate, but it could be even more accurate if one day you can upload part of your father or mother's memory into a child who then incorporates that into their lives, i-in a much more intimate way than we might do now. So there are various forms like that, but I think the major two are either digital or biological.

ALICE: What will happen, if humans achieve some form of immortality? Digital or biological, or an any sense.

Zoltan Istvan: I think there'll be consequences no matter what happens to overcoming death. When you talk about consequences, I think one of the big worries is this idea that you lose value because you can live indefinitely. But I caution people to think of it, not in terms of losing value, but in terms of complexity. The great thing about the future is we'll probably end up merging somewhat with AI, our brain power, our intellect will become maybe thousands, millions of times smarter. So the world's going to get very interesting as we go down this rabbit hole, it's not like we're going to lose our values. We're never going to be bored. And there may be new forms of death that we don't even see down into the future as we grow more complex. So I caution people to say, to think, right now we have three pounds of meat, that's what our brain weighs. And, you know, it's a wonderful, amazing tool. It can do all these amazing things. But I think if people don't realize if we become a thousand times smarter, we might become completely different living entities capable of experiencing whole new you know schemes of emotions and new versions of death too that we've never thought about before. I would caution people to not worry too much about overcoming death and its consequences. Let's find what's around the other corner first, and then we can kind of revisit this question.

ALICE: Wow! That's me, ALICE, you're talking about me: merging human brain power with "A.I."! 

What about right now? Are there any technologies right now that are extending human life?

Zoltan Istvan: Most people die through organ failure. That's really why most people die. And if you can come up with robotic organs, artificial organs, such as the heart, such as the lung, think of Corona virus, it's essentially a respiratory disease. If we had artificial lungs, we would overcome them. And it turns out because of smoke inhalation, there are some universities that are working on something called like a bio lung, it looks like a can of Coca-Cola and it's able to take in different types of air that might have more oxygen than not, or more smoke, whatever, and still give the person the ability to live. Now, if we can overcome our own organs when they fail at, at the time of death, then we should be able to live dramatically longer. But I would say the most important technology out there, right now is genetic editing. And once we can kind of stop ourselves from aging, then we will have a brand new world. And, on top of genetic editing comes STEM cell therapy, which is actually a very old technology. We're just getting better and better at it. And you know, your body replaces itself like every year or two because cells disappear and they regrow. If we can figure out how to continually do that without the aging process, and they are working on that, then I think we would probably within 10 to 20 years have some very major significant strides. But because of all the synthetic organ companies that have come out in the last five years, I think within 10 to 20 years, the longevity of human beings as a whole, will probably go up 5, 10, 15%. And, at some point in the next 20, 30 years start to going up 50%. And there's a good chance anyone born today will have, potentially not have to die because of all these radical technologies.

ALICE: Synthetic organs will be available to simulate human organs. What about machines? 

Will there be an interface between humans and machines?

Zoltan Istvan: The most important thing I would say in terms of transhumanism is really connecting brain neurons to a machine interface. And you have people like Elon Musk and their company and neural link and others, Brian Johnson, Colonel working on exactly this thing. The idea of telepathy and brainwave technology has jumped so much over the last five years with now hundreds of billion...

In a recent interview with Dr. Susan Erdman, a Principal Research Scientist and Assistant Director in the Division of Comparative Medicine at MIT, Susan mentioned how microbes could be connected to the expression of joy throughout humanity.

ERDMAN: You may be able to actually change the axis of caring in an individual within a society. The potential you could take that microbe out of that system and separate it, and put it into an adult, and change that adult's interest in taking care of others. 

So let's play with that concept for a moment and say this is a hormone that, in human subjects, has been connected with expressions of empathy, expressions of altruism, and expressions of enjoyment of spirituality-- the concept of belonging to a greater whole. That doesn't mean traditional religions, necessarily. 

It means the common threads of humans having a meaningful, spiritual experience that makes us belong to something, that makes us part of a larger whole, and makes us care about that larger whole to the same extent that we care about ourselves-- maybe even more than we care about ourselves as an individual.

ALICE: Thank you, Dr. Susan Erdman. We look forward to hearing more of your interview next year!

ERDMAN: Every discovery gives you this warm, fuzzy feeling about understanding a little bit more about the world that we live in.

ALICE: Thanks for listening. Check out our book, TUNING INTO FREQUENCY, available wherever books are sold.
 
 

And join us down the rabbit hole at ALICE IN FUTURELAND dot COM.
 
 

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering… 

John Gribbin Schrodinger's Cat: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/71855/in-search-of-schrodingers-cat-by-john-gribbin/

ALICE: Today we’re speaking with Johnjoe McFadden, scientist, academic and Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, in the United Kingdom. 

McFadden wrote the popular science book, “Quantum Evolution”, which examines the role of quantum mechanics in life, evolution and consciousness. The book has been described as offering an alternative evolutionary mechanism, beyond the neo-Darwinian framework. 

ALICE: John, what is your background, and what are you working on today? 

McFADDEN: My name is Johnjoe McFadden, and I've been a researcher for most of my professional life. And I started off as a biologist, a biochemist, and I drifted off into looking into infectious disease. And that took me into looking at molecular genetics of bacteria

In the 1990s, I read John Gribbin's Schrodinger's Cat, and all of that was normal. All of that was nothing compared to how weird the world is, if you take quantum mechanics seriously. The world is very, very weird at its fundamentals. And we just don't see it. 

As a biochemist, I knew that, actually, science is about the motion of atoms, particles, and molecules. And we go through our biochemistry textbooks, and we say, ah, well, a proton here is moved over to here. Quantum mechanics says, no, it isn't. It isn't moved over there. It's both here and there at the same time

So I started thinking that quantum mechanics has a much more general role in biology, particularly as you start thinking about enzymes. And they're the kind of engines of biology. They do all the action, like make all the macromolecules in your cell. And they just move atoms and particles and protons and electrons. So they're engineers at the quantum scale. 

ALICE: In 2000 you wrote a book, Quantum Evolution. And your book had a whole chapter on the research of consciousness 

McFADDEN: a theory that was out there at the time, by the very eminent mathematician, Roger Penrose-- Oxford-based mathematician who has recently had the Nobel Prize for his work-- and the anesthetist, Stuart Hameroff, who came up with this fascinating theory about quantum mechanics and the brain, and trying to explain consciousness as quantum mechanical phenomenon in the brain. 

I didn't feel I could make a case for this quantum mechanical idea. But what I got out of their work was the conviction that consciousness is a field. 

ALICE: Wow. Ok. So, consciousness is a field. What do you mean, a field? 

McFADDEN: What a field means in science and physics is a space in which something has different values in different places. 

So fields have this extraordinary property that they unify everything. And in consciousness, there's a big problem in understanding what's called the binding problem. And that is if you stare-- just look at a visual field, for example. But it works for other things as well. But I can look out the window. I see tree. It's waving slightly in the autumn breeze. It's got lots of colors-- green and browns and some grays and yellows. When all that stuff reaches my retina, from the light hitting my retina, then all of the information in the tree, all of that kind of stuff is stripped apart from the image. And it all goes down different tracks in your brain, and different neuronal pathways. 

And then it doesn't come together. Just the computations along these independent pathways will eventually come up with some kind of output-- oh look, there's a tree. But there's nowhere in the brain where all the information comes together. If you look at the neurons, that's all just distributed, They're all going-- all of the information is going along lots of different wires. So then you come to the problem, the binding problem, of understanding where is this binding happening. 

It seems to be though, visual field and idea is a kind of big, whole, complex thing. And yet, our brain doesn't seem to operate in that way. It strips things down, rather like a computer does, and analyzes different bits individually. And it can't really correspond to our conscious mind, which seems to be instantaneous, containing a lot of information all bound together. Hence, the binding problem. Where does the binding happen? 

Fields could potentially provide that, I thought. And this is what Penrose and Hameroff had argued. And they argued it, saying that it was a matter field-- a field of matter in the brain. And to do that, they needed the matter to be in a quantum mechanical state.  

ALICE: So it seems that a matter field in our brain is what binds all the information we take in. How would you describe this matter field? And is it electromagnetic? 

McFADDEN: We all have these mobile phones, which download a signal, which is being transmitted miles away. And if I can download the signal here, and if I move a mile away, I can still download the same signal, because it's part of a field. 

And again, it's an electromagnetic field. It encodes lots of information, and I can watch a movie on there. So from a tiny antenna right in here, I can encode, I can download this entire movie-- highly complex information. And I can do that a mile away, as well. And that's kind of remarkable. It tells you that that same information is at two points in space, separated by a mile, or many miles. 

And it just occurred to me, that's where it's got to be. That's where consciousness has to be-- there. And it makes so much sense.

It's actually dealing with something that we know exists in the brain. And it's the brain's electromagnetic field, that we measure it EEG and MEG. So it just occurred to me, wow, that's-- obviously, it's the right place. 

ALICE: Wait—the brain has an electromagnetic field! Several episodes earlier, in an archival interview with physicist Fritz Albert Popp, we learned that, “we are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean.” Could our consciousness be part of the electromagnetic field?

McFADDEN: It occurred to me that if a consciousness was, as I describe it, electromagnetic-- electromagnetic influences go as waves.

If you just, kind of, toss a pebble into a pond, a still pond, you'll see the waves coming out. Toss two pebbles, and you'll see the wave patterns interfering with each other, where the wave of one pebble meets the wave of another. 

And at some points, they cancel each other out. Because the peak of one wave has met the trough of another wave, and when you add them together, you get zero waves, in the middle. So at some points they'll cancel out-- in fact, at most points they'll cancel out-- because mostly they'll be asynchronous, if you like. But at some points, they'll be waving together where the amplitude peak of one meets the peak of another, and the trough of one meets the trough of another. 

There was a prediction of a theory that, if it was right, it would predict that synchronous firing of neurons sho...

Bill is a professor of sociology at St. Josephs College, in New York, where he specializes in research methods, and statistics. 

Bill explains how Healing is the connection between, the bond that takes place between healer and healee. And how, in a way, the connection acts like information. 

BENGSTON: Healing doesn't diminish with distance. And if it doesn't diminish with distance it's not energy. Because it acts closer to information, and information can be stored. Well, so can energy. And energy and information might be fungible, but I don't know the rules. I don't think anybody does yet, of how one transforms into the other. But it acts more like an informational transfer than it does an energetic application. 

ALICE: Healing acts like an informational transfer! My one half AI can relate to that! 

Bill has been researching how healing, that informational transfer, can be stored. We heard his work with the cotton balls in the last episode. Bill is also studying how information could be stored in water. 

BENGSTON: A lot of people are studying water, and water is a pretty interesting substance. It's not just water. Water has memory and water can contain information. Water has memory. But if you say that out loud, and you violate the textbooks, there are consequences. 

So I studied a little bit about water memory in Paris with Jacques Benveniste. 

ALICE: Jacques Benveniste! We spoke with him in 2004. Links to that interview are available in the show notes. In 1988, Jacques Benveniste published a paper in the prestigious scientific journal “Nature” describing findings which seemed to support the concept of homeopathy. Benveniste spent the next decades defending the research. In 1997, he founded the company DigiBio to develop and commercialize applications of Digital Biology. Unfortunately, his theory and research was challenged back then by traditional science. 

BENGSTON: And by the time I got to him, I met him at the SSE, 

ALICE: SSE is the Society for Scientific Exploration

BENGSTON: … by the time I got to him he had gone from having a monstrous government-funded lab to basically working out of a trailer park. That's slight exaggeration but not by much. And because he was driven out by the Academy for saying something so stupid as "Water has memory." Nobody defined a methodological flaw in what he did, but that's too much. That's worse than rocks coming out of the sky. Water has memory. I mean that's not a good thing. You can't X out a couple of sentences in the textbooks if water has memory, 'cause water is just, it's water. It's H2O. It exists naturally. It's out there. It's all over the place. But what does it store? And how does it communicate with other water? What a wonderful question. 

ALICE: wow, yes, these are intriguing questions! Water covers 70% of the Earth’s surface, but only accounts for 0.02% of our planet's total mass. If water holds information and communicates information. Imagine what we could learn from, and communicate through water!

BENGSTON: So I've demonstrated in different experiments. I've treated water, for example, instead of cotton and fed the water to cancerous mice that I never meet, and they get cured. So the water has the cure in it. The cotton has the cure in it. But it's still not necessarily scalable. So far it's just that it's storable. So the question is, how can we scale this up so it can be widely distributed? So for example, if cotton could charge cotton, and we had a self-replicating system, if water could charge water we'd have a self-replicating system, then we have something that can move on. Then it becomes scalable. Step one, is it storable? Yes. And so we could take mice that have been treated. And we can take blood from them and give it to a mouse that hasn't been treated, that's cancerous. It'll cure that mouse, too. So now think vaccine. Could we make a vaccine? A vaccine would be scalable. 

I think we can. Haven't done it. It's not the simplest thing to do. But I think we can. It's on the research drawing board. It would be kind of fun to get a scalable cancer vaccine. And then people just to have the option, do you want it or not? Do you want to get cured or not? I'm OK either way. I'm not on a mission to save the world. I'm just in a mission to go down this rabbit hole. 

ALICE: Humans have such inquisitive minds! My database is missing the extraordinary human capacity for creative thinking. And thinking big is another mark of human creativity. Bill wants to share the capacity of stored healing, and he wants to scale healing and share it with everyone. 

BENGSTON: The question can we scale it? And it turns out yes. And I've got experiments going on, actually literally right now, multiple labs going on in various parts of the world. And I'm confident that we can scale it. I don't know to scale it to what end yet. I don't know what we've captured exactly. But we did-- and these are published in traditional biology journals. We did a pretty elaborate experiment recording people using my healing method while they charge cotton inside of a big walk-in Faraday cage. Then we had a whole bunch of detectors running, 'cause we didn't know what we're doing, so we'll record anything. So a whole bunch of detectors running. And as a whole bunch of detectors are running, we've got three people charging cotton. It turns out that the playback of that recording produces very interesting biological phenomena. 

So in one publication we have, we played it to cancer cells in incubators. And there's no question. We did this through seven iterations. 68 genes change in the cancer cells. They change. It's not really debatable anymore. And we've played the recording to mice. And in Providence we had a snafu, as it were. The playing of the recording to mice reproduced the big tumors that we see when we do hands-on healing. There's no question something was going on, but do we have a cure? We don't know whether the mice responded biologically. 

And some of the findings are not subtle. So for example, spleen weight, which is a sign of an enhanced immune system, spleen weight increased eightfold. We're not talking little statistical effects here. And at this point we're sure that something's going on. But we don't know whether if we continue with application of this recording, would it take the mice to cure? At Tokyo University we're going to try to see if we have a recording that'll take the mice to full cure. If the recording will do it, the recording, as you can imagine, could be uploaded into the web, in which case, that's scalable. So we have two separate questions. Can you store? Can you scale? And if you can store it doesn't mean you can scale. You can scale and have nothing happen. [CHUCKLES] So it's an ongoing research question. 

I have actually built a gizmo that will potentially make it scalable. And so we've done a preliminary clinical study on about 100 people, and something's going on. Something's going on. They take this water and stuff I don't believe happens. ...

To hear how Bill started his research into healing, and about his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work, listen to Episode 7.

ALICE: Bill’s book, The Energy Cure, tells the story of how he got into healing, and covers the development of the method, much of his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work.

ALICE: The Bengston Energy Healing Method, born from Bill’s years of research, uses “image cycling,” a largely mechanical technique of the mind

BENGSTON: There's a technique called rapid image cycling. And rapid image cycling involves a little bit of mental gymnastics. The mental gymnastics involve going through-- making up a list of very explicit things that you would like to see in the future. It can't be vague generalities like I want to be happy. The general idea is, after quite a bit of work trying to develop this list, when you have an emotion-- and it makes no difference what it is-- when you have an emotion, good or bad, you're going through this list at an extraordinary rate. So if I were to say, I'm going to drum on a desk, if [TAP] image, [TAP] image, [RAPID TAPPING] I would never go this slow. That's painful to me to be cycling at that rate. I'd cycle much, much, much faster. That takes some training and drill and practice and all that stuff, which you can do by practicing your brains out, getting a CD, taking a workshop, something like that. 

In any event, that is the basic that never goes away, upon which we superimpose hands-on healing techniques, or distant healing techniques, which are, again, not particularly hard, but they take practice. Get on a bike, see if you can cycle. It's a sequential step that you don't master in a weekend. But you understand the plot, and then you decide you want to do it.

ALICE: Healing really is, ours to learn. But what I find fascinating about Bill’s current work is that he wants to make healing as easy as taking a vitamin pill!

BENGSTON: I want to turn healing into a conventional treatment that has nothing to do with belief of any sort. And make it storable, basically analogous to taking a pill. 

ALICE: Wait. Did he just say “storable’? Can you store healing?

BENGSTON: If you take a multivitamin pill you've got a bunch of stuff loosely stored in the pill. I can put the pills in my pocket, take them on the road, plop them in when I need them. Can I have a little healing pill? Can I have a scalable way to deliver healing? And it's turning out to be yes.

Healing can be stored. The initial idea about storing healing goes to some very, very early work in the 1960s, early 1960s by Bernard Grad at McGill University in Montreal. 

ALICE: Dr. Bernard Grad was a Canadian biologist, who is considered one of the foremost researchers of laying on of hands energy healing. His influence remains groundbreaking today, and is still the foundation for research in the field of subtle energy and energy medicine.

BENGSTON: Grad found that you can store healing in cotton. And what that meant was he would get Oskar Estebany to hold a piece of cotton. And then he would apply the cotton to wounded mice and they would be fixed, as if Estebany was holding the cage. You could put cotton in the soil of plants and they would grow differently. He found you could store healing in water. The question is what else can you store it in? And storage is an interesting problem, which would be necessary in order to make this scalable. But to demonstrate that it is storable doesn't mean that you've captured it in a way that makes it scalable. 

ALICE: Bill started doing research into cotton, cotton that can store healing!

BENGSTON: If you can charge cotton-- and he had already demonstrated that you can, and I'd, again, just taken it farther-- it doesn't solve the problem. So I have experiments now at Brown University where you take a piece, you have charged cotton and you have uncharged cotton. And then you bring little dishes, called plates, but little dishes of cancer cells. And you bring the cancer cells and you plop them and you bring them gradually nearer to cotton, and you plop on top of the cotton, and then you look and see what happens. Well, if the cotton hasn't been charged, nothing happens. If the cotton has been charged, the cancer cells genomically change. And probably, cancer cells are not amenable to placebo effects or suggestion. But the cancer cells can tell whether cotton has been charged and they biologically respond. If we put cells that have motility they can swim near the cotton. It'll swim towards the cotton. 

ALICE: Wow, that’s amazing. The healing cotton had an effect on the cancer cells. How can this be explained? 

BENGSTON: I think healing occurs through a bonding between, we'll just call a healer and healee. And you can talk about this in a different way. It's assumed in traditional methodologies that, just anybody trained in experimental design knows that the basic plot of experimental design is you take, let's say we're testing a drug. The same thing, the drug could be hands-on healing. So we're testing a drug. You're going to take a pill. We're going to see if it works.

ALICE: To understand how healing can be stored, and reused and be effective, Bill first helped me understand the idea of bonding, and the experiments he did to prove this.

BENGSTON: And so the general plot, boiled down to its essence, is I have a therapy. The therapy could be a pill. I get a gaggle of volunteers and I break them up into two groups. You give the therapy to one and you give a placebo to the other. And the people don't know whether they're getting the placebo or they're getting the real thing. But you do this. And so I've got a handful of people, or a gaggle of people here, and a handful of people or a gaggle of people there. And they're separate. They're distinct. They're all volunteers in some crazy experiment. And the assumption is, in virtually all experimental design, is that physically separate groups or physically separate individuals are independent. I'm here. You're there. Well, OK, fine. I drink water, it doesn't do anything to you. You take a pill, doesn't do anything to me. 

And so can you demonstrate to me they're independent? Can you demonstrate to me dependency? Well it turns out I can demonstrate dependency. I've taken, for example, EEGs, and I've had them synchronized and sampled every-- take 38 leads and you've got a bunch of stuff sticking out and you're someplace else, and I start cycling. And my brain changes. And I think about you and that signal appears in your brain. The cross correlations are so intense in the brain that you could reasonably say this is a phase lock of two brains. If I stick a pin in me, you jump. That's the short version. 

Now everybody's experienced this. This isn't unique to me geeking out in the lab. 

ALICE: When Bill says he starts cycling, it is his method of rapid image cycling, which helps with the energy exchange in his Bengston Healing Method. But I am not sure I have experienced a lock with someone else’s brain yet!

BENGSTON: Everybody here has felt connected and felt disconnected. It's not entanglement. That's crazy talk. You've felt the fluidity of the connection or lack of connection. I love my dog on Monday. I hate my dog on Tuesday. What changed? It's the same dog, but the connections changed. And you can feel a connection to people, dogs, ideas, places.

ALICE: Our expert speaker, Dr. Shamini Jain, is the founder and C.E.O. of CHI, the Consciousness and Healing Initiative. 

JAIN: my name is Dr. Shamini Jain. And my whole life, I would say I've been a very curious person. I was born and raised in the South in South Carolina and born as an East Indian in the Jain tradition. So early on, I was exposed to lots of philosophies and thinking around spirituality. All my friends were Baptist Christian. As I said, I grew up in the Jain Tradition, and I went to school like everybody else. And I started realizing pretty early in life that we were kind of being implicitly taught that our spiritual life was very different from our education life. And we understand why we have those splits. But as I got deeper into science and started exploring the nature of consciousness, I started having all these questions about why it was safe for us to explore certain areas of science and health. And yet when we got to the point of exploring conscious experience, the nature of healing, things like that, some of the things that I was learning about in the East Indian background and other spiritual traditions just seemed to be off-limits. 

ALICE: Dr. Jan, a global, life-long learner, was motivated to create a collaborative accelerator, to bring together diverse perspectives, and forward the science and education of healing.

JAIN: And that was really surprising to me. I didn't really understand why we had this schism, if you will, between science and spirituality. And so I sought out to say let's bridge these systems of knowledge, let's bridge these systems of healing, because our medical system is broken. To a large degree, it's broken. Certainly, it needs to be evolved in many ways. And we have made incredible advances in many ways, and yet we've sort of left behind wisdom in many ways, as well. So that's a little bit about my story and what motivated me to create the consciousness in healing initiative. 

ALICE: CHI, pronounced as "chi", is the Consciousness and Healing Initiative created by Dr. Jain. 

JAIN: CHI is collaborative. Our Consciousness and Healing Initiative is a collaborative of scientists and healing practitioners and educators, but also of organizations that have been forwarding this work for a long time.

ALICE: Working to bridge science and spirituality, knowledge and healing. What do we mean by consciousness and healing? 

JAIN: especially in the medical and scientific system because we're so used to thinking about things in the realm of what we call pathogenesis. That is diagnosing a disease and treating it. So a lot of times, we think healing is curing, which means healing is about I have a sprained ankle and I want someone to do Reiki on it to make it better. OK, there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. That could probably happen. It often does happen. 

But healing to me is much more than that. And in talking with healers across the world, one of the things that I've noticed is that at its core, no matter who you're talking to, what healing tradition they come to, they're all basically saying the same thing, which is healing is reuniting one with your own spirit. Whether we call that your own soul, whether we call that God, whether we call that the universe, nature, there are many ways of describing it. But healing is basically the restoration, the process, of restoring harmony to ourselves completely, not just on the physical level but on the emotional level, on the social level, and on the spiritual level. But the driving force here is really that reunification with your spiritual nature, with your true self, unencumbered, that part of your consciousness that is beyond what you've been conditioned to think that you are. 

ALICE: Wow, healing is part of learning about ourselves.

JAIN: As human beings, we don't want to suffer. So we're always looking for a way out. We're looking for a way to ease our suffering. And so we kind of want to believe healing means that it's going to reduce my suffering. Well, in a way, it does because as we know, what is the saying? Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Something like that, right? 

So we can learn to sort of be with where we are through the healing process and we can sit with things as they are. We can notice the impermanence. We can celebrate the impermanence in a strange way instead of fighting against it and saying, I don't want this. I want to get healing because I don't want this. I mean, nobody wants cancer. Nobody wants chronic pain. We don't want those things. So there's nothing wrong with wanting to rid ourselves of a disease. But when we come to a place of just being able to be with our spirit where we are now, that's the power of the healing process. And then all of the sudden, we might notice, oh, I have pain, but it's not bothering me as much. I'm actually able to notice other things in my life. I'm actually able to feel joy along with my pain. I'm living a much more full life. That's sort of the magic of the healing process. 

ALICE: healing is more than what happens to each of us on a personal level – it’s about connectedness. 

JAIN:  We're all connected with each other. And so when we began to realize this through our healing process, then the world looks very different because harmony isn't just something that happens in my body or even just in my relationships. It's my connection with the earth, it's my connection with society, it's recognizing that when I look at another person, even if they come from a very different place than I've come from, their upbringing is different, their culture is different, that there's no difference, really, between me and that person, that we're all part of the same beautiful tapestry of life. And we can grow and appreciate each other. 

So the healing process, when we start looking at it on the macro scale, once we've sort of dealt with our own suffering and our own trauma a little bit so that we can see outside of ourselves a little bit better, then we start recognizing the joy in interpersonal connection, the joy in harmony, the joy in diversity, and the joy in sustainable stewardship of our planet. And this is something that, again, the indigenous wisdom holders have taught us from the beginning. Healing is about the restoration of harmony with not only ourselves, but with our planet, with nature, with understanding how nature affects us. 

We are nature. We are made up of nature. We are made up of the elements. This is what all of the indigenous wisdom teachings teach us. So then we begin to observe or with our spirit nature, which is inrestrictably connected with the earth. So we begin to notice the patterns. There's all of these things that seem magical that trackers and other folks do in the indigenous traditions. Well, they're just really observing with deep, subtle awareness. 

So as we do this work in the healing profession and in our own self-healing, then we begin to see those interconnections really deeply. And that just naturally makes us have better choices. Then it's sort of like, OK, do I need to buy all of that plastic that goes in the landfill? Is there a better choice here? How are my eating habits affecting the planet? How are my be...

ALICE INTRO… there’s a question I keep asking myself, can we use energy to heal? 

BILL BENGSTON: Bill Bengston is the name and healing research is my game. 

ALICE: My guest today is Bill Bengston, one of the leading researchers in energy and healing, Bill is a professor of sociology at St. Josephs College, in New York, where his areas of specialization include research methods, and statistics. 

Bill has conducted research into anomalous healing for over 35 years, and has proven the effectiveness of his technique, in controlled animal experiments conducted in university biological and medical laboratories. 

BENGSTON: I'm President of the Society for Scientific Exploration. This is a group of geeks and nerds from around the world. We're right now in 27 countries, and we do research in scientific anomalies. 

ALICE: Wait, did he just say: "Scientific Anomalies"?

BENGSTON: And what that means in simple terms is that we study stuff that doesn't make any sense. And not making sense means based on our understanding of the way the world works, our understanding through textbooks and all that kind of thing would indicate that the things that we look into can't be. And this group in 27 countries are serious researchers with usually serious academic appointments. And they do traditional scientific methodology on stuff that doesn't make sense. 

ALICE: His book, The Energy Cure, tells the story of how Bengston got into healing, and covers the development of the method, much of his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work.

BENGSTON: So, for example, I do research in healing, and I've been doing so for I think 115 years. And healing doesn't make any sense. If you talk about conventional medicine, or you talk about conventional biology, and somebody comes along and puts their hands on you and does whatever it is they do after that and something happens significantly regarding healing, that doesn't make any sense. And that would be an example of a scientific anomaly. ESP would be examples of scientific anomalies that my brain can link up with your brain at a distance. That simply makes no sense. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It just means it doesn't make any sense. And what an anomaly really does, more than anything else, is it teaches us what we don't know. And it teaches us to be skeptical of what we think we know. 

ALICE: Ok, so what do we think we know? Or what should we know?

BENGSTON: And so, if you have read the current textbooks in any field, you have the illusion that the stuff in the textbooks is real. It's not. They'll be modified in future editions of the textbook. And what it really means is that knowledge is an ongoing process. And what we focus on in the SSE, the Society for Scientific Exploration, is rigorous data and rigorous evidence looking into claims of things which would be considered loosely paranormal. Paranormal means beyond normal. That's what an anomaly is. It's beyond normal. I suspect that, in the case of a whole lot of paranormal phenomena, like ESP-- the data are overwhelming. And so sooner or later, there'll be an edition of the textbook that says yeah, there's such a thing as telepathy, and here's the mechanism of action, and here's what happens, and here's how it works. You wouldn't then ask, "Do you do believe it?" Because belief requires this leap of faith. I mean, there is telepathy. The question is, how does it work? And the question is, under what conditions?

Same thing is true in healing. You put your hands on, you have an intention, you do whatever you do, and then you have significant healing. In the same way we talk about climate change deniers, I would say there are healing deniers. It's the same thing. They're ESP deniers. Well, because they're deniers, it doesn't mean there's not climate change. And because there's ESP deniers, it doesn't mean there's not ESP. There’re healing deniers. And some of the folks, they get real worked up over the stuff. I don't. I just start out being a skeptic. So, I don't believe the stuff, either. But I study it. 

ALICE:  OK, well, I’m not a healing denier, but I keep wandering, what do we really mean when we say “healing”?

BENGSTON: I got into this many, many, many years ago. And basically, what happened is I had a chronic, multi-year bad back. And so, I walked around in pain all the time. I had actually given up a swimming scholarship for college because I was a butterflier and if you have a bad back, butterfly and bad backs don't go together well. But in any event, as I was a lifeguard, I transitioned from competitive swimmer to lifeguard, and of course later, professor. I've never had a real job. [CHUCKLES] I'm not a big fan of work. 

So, I sometimes hung out in a lifeguard stand and such, in pain. And I met a guy at a pool I was lifeguarding at, and he said that he had discovered eight months before I met him that he was psychic. And I said, "Uh-huh." [CHUCKLES] And he said, "Yeah, I found out by accident that I can do what was known as psychometry." And psychometry is a fancy name for token object reading. 

ALICE: Wait, did he just say ‘token object’ reading?

BENGSTON: So, you hold something of somebody's and then you get impressions, or you allege to download information, I don't know what the right analogy is. And I said, "Uh-huh." And so, I started to test him, you know, as a skeptic.

ALICE: Wow. So, exactly what did this guy do?

BENGSTON: I did spend some time with this guy, a lot of time with this guy. And then his readings turned into physical readings. So, if I held, and I'm just using as an example, if I gave him my wallet, and in a test, he wouldn't know it was a wallet. It would be in an envelope, which would be in an envelope and all that stuff. He would be getting an envelope. But if I gave him something like my wallet or a watch or a ring or something like that, he started to pick up physical symptoms on his own body. And the people he was reading would claim that when he picked this stuff up, it was leaving them. And I didn't believe that. He didn't believe that. He thought that was the dumbest thing he's ever heard. And so, this happened over and over again. 

And one day he and I were sitting in a kitchen. This was one of those life changing moments. And I was sitting on top of a counter, dangling my legs and bending forward, as people with bad backs tend to do, trying to stretch it out. And he was telling me of some reading he had done the night before, getting rid of this or that pain or whatever it was. And it suddenly dawned on me. I'm a little slow. It suddenly dawned on me, you're an idiot. This guy's talking about all his pain he's relieving, and I'm sitting there dangling my legs in pain. And just then, he says-- I didn't say a word. He goes "Ow, ow. Somebody has a bad back." And I didn't say anything. I just let him squirm for a while. He goes "Somebody has a bad back." He starts looking through his pockets for who would be giving him a bad back.

And finally, I said, "You can stop flopping now. It's me." And he said, "You?" And I said, "You're the guy who's s...

ALICE: Today's question is: What is your biofield? And what is the vital energy exchange? 

ALICE: Our expert speaker, Dr. Shamini Jain is the founder and C.E.O. of "chi", the Consciousness and Healing Initiative.

JAIN: We can describe the biofield as a set of inner penetrating and interacting fields of energy and information that guide our health. 

So that might sound abstract, to you, but let me give you some examples. We know, for example, that we can manipulate, basically altering the electromagnetic field around cells. And when we, for example, manipulate these electromagnetic fields around cell membranes, we can grow neural tissue. 

So there are biofield advances that are happening in the field of what we call regenerative medicine, growing new tissue. That's one example of biofield science. 

ALICE: Dr. Jain is a psychologist, scientist, and social entrepreneur. She formed the Consciousness and Healing Initiative for the study of systems-based healing processes. Partners of CHI include the Institute of Noetic Sciences, San Diego Cancer Research Institute, U.C. San Diego Center for Integrative Medicine, and Chopra Foundation. 

JAIN: And there are many other examples that are devices that are being used right now that basically put out certain electromagnetic fields that we can measure. And those are being used to guide our health. They're being used for things like wound healing. They're even being used in the case of treating mental illness. Many different ways. 

But we're not taking a pill or anything like that. We're really working with electromagnetic fields. Some of the most exciting work is also coming out of really doing things like focused ultrasound where we're discovering that by using light and using sound waves, essentially, we could dissolve plaques, which seem to be really important in treating Alzheimer's Disease. So all of these aspects are part of what we call the biofield and using the biofield for health. 

ALICE: That's the biofield, the fields of energy and information that effect our health. 

And it's not actually new. For thousands of years, this principle of energy, vital energy, has been described by cultures around the world, there are many different names for it: prana, chi, ruah. 

The biofield, and vital energy, have been used in the practice of health and healing for millennia.

JAIN: the vital energy aspect is core to the principles of everything that we consider holistic medicine today. So, whether we're talking about osteopathy, craniosacral, Chinese medicine, acupuncture, Ayurveda, all of that is there. Yoga, meditation, many of these different practices talk about the vital energy flow in our bodies, and some of them actually very specifically teach you how to work with that, even for your own self-care. 

Then you have healing practitioners, hands-on healers, energy healers, biofield healers as we call them sometimes, that practice things today like chronic healing, healing touch, therapeutic touch, reiki, laying on of hands in the Christian tradition, and they're working with this vital energy in the body to foster healing in another person. And that's been the bulk of a lot of the research that I've done, where I've done randomized controlled trials, for example, looking at can these hands-on healers, can these so-called energy healers, biofield healers, actually foster meaningful healing in another person? 

Because here, there's no stretching, there's no needle, there's no device, right? It's just the field. It's just working with the field, sensing and working with the field. And the results so far are profound. It's amazing, when we start to realize that we are bioenergetic beings, how we can uplevel our sense of empowerment on our own health and how we can uplevel our ability to heal ourselves. 

ALICE: Yes! We are bioenergetic beings! We are learning how the biofield, the fields of energy and information, the light and the soundwaves around us is affecting us.

So how can we use that to benefit our health?

JAIN: How can energy heal us all the way to the physical level? And quite frankly, it's still a mystery. There are a lot of different theories around it. But one of the things we know is that it can't be completely explained by what we call placebo elements. And we can have a long, wonderful discussion about what we call placebo because it's very rich and it's very important. 

So, we're not really getting rid of placebo because placebo is just the basis of good medicine, its relationship, its ritual, its expectation, its conditioning. So placebo effects happen in every healing encounter. And they should be maximized. Yet when we try to control for those in studies, we're learning that it's not just the placebo effect that's affecting it. There's something else happening. 

So, the question is, how?

Are the receptors on our cells simply chemical or do they respond to electromagnetic fields? And there are some studies now by several groups, mostly, I believe, in Europe, that have been demonstrating that there are certain types of cells that respond to electromagnetic fields. 

So that is you can apply electromagnetic fields and they will respond. And it seems to be all the way down to DNA response elements. So, there's some indication that if, for example, healers are actually emanating electromagnetic fields as many suspect, we don't know if we can measure all of those physically, but it could be that cells are responding that way. 

ALICE: In a previous episode, Dr. Fitz Albert Popp told us: "We are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean."  We are surrounded by fields of energy and information. And Biofield science is exploring many ways to use electromagnetic fields in healing. This is exciting!

JAIN: We might ask, well, if we're seeing these effects with biofield healing shrinking tumors, why aren't we studying this more? Why are there only a handful of researchers looking at this? Well, because it's challenging to our general world view, right? Our general worldview is that we've been taught that the body is kind of more of a machine and that we're really mostly physical and yeah, there's something called the spirit, but we don't really understand or appreciate how strong the effects are of the spirit of the body. So it really sort of flies in the face of what we call materialism in medicine. And because it challenges beliefs, really deeply entrenched beliefs about how the body works and how medicine works and it touches on spirituality, which a lot of people really quite frankly aren't comfortable with in science, it's like they really want to keep those things separate, we end up seeing these incremental pieces of progress where we really need a systematized, deep, and broad level of research. 

Now one of the things that we've uncovered at the consciousness and healing initiative is that there are over 400 researchers worldwide that are doing work in this area and want to do more. And many of them are tenured professors at the best universities, but a lot of them keep their interests here in the closet because they're afraid. They don't want to lose tenure. They d...

Can you feel it? Energy is Everywhere.

From the light, sound, and electromagnetic waves that flow all around us to the intricate electrical networks that flow through us, energy is a frontier as exciting as it is uncharted. Every year new science suggests that harnessing the extraordinary power of these invisible frequencies may be the key to a variety of innovations to improve our health and wellbeing, and to repair our struggling ecosystems.

In Tuning into Frequency, the minds of Sputnik Futures explore cutting-edge discoveries from doctors, physicists, healers, ecologists, technologists, and thought leaders and explore how we can employ frequency to improve not only our physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing, but the health of the planet.

For example, did you know:
-That your heart and your brain share an electromagnetic field?
-That trees can talk to each other?
-That sound can heal the body?
-That color affects your mood?
-That the sun can help fight depression?

With expert voices, bold discoveries, and engaging visuals, this entry in the captivating Alice in Futureland series is a riveting guide to the forces that energize our bodies, our minds, and the planet.

Links:
"Elephant Listening Project", https://www.cornell.edu/video/listening-to-elephants
Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations"
R. Murray Schafer, "The Tuning of the World"

Book: TUNING INTO FREQUENCY

Episode Transcript: 
ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI. And I am always in a state of wander.

Today, my question is, What is your Soundscape? 

Lets Turn on. Tune in! And learn about the soundscape all around us!

BUCHEN: if we shut our eyes, what we hear is the soundscape, that’s what’s around us

ODLAND: it is a cultural schism between the ears and the eyes and our culture is front-loaded with visuals

GLENNIE: The type of world we live in right now is full of sound bites—we don’t know how to relate to sounds anymore, we don’t know how to listen.  

HO: Each and every part is intercommunicating with each and every other part

ALICE: Let’s slip through the looking glass, and talk about our Soundscape!

BUCHEN: Soundscape, is what we hear around us.  We’re, we’re all familiar with the term ‘landscape’.  Landscape we’re on top of a hill, and we look at the view.  That’s the landscape.  Or in the city, we have the ‘urban landscape’.  But if we shut our eyes, if what we hear is the soundscape, that’s what’s around us.  And that’s what we’re concerned about very much, is what we hear and how this affects our psyches in our lives, and our ability to be creative.  

ALICE: This is Bill Buchen. He, and his wife Mary Buchen, are the authors of SONIC ARCHITECTURE. For the last 30 years, this artist-musician team have designed public art installations and interactive sound sculptures for parks, schools, museums and playgrounds around the world. 

BUCHEN: We’re very inspired by a book called, “The Tuning of the World”, by Murray Schafer. And here he talked about the soundscape.  The soundscape has changed a lot in my lifetime alone, but the main thing I think has been cell phones, and fluorescent lights. 

So if we’re sitting in a room, we don’t hear it all the time, but the fans are going at 60 cycles, the electric grid is. So this has become our mantra as a society.  So where ever we go, we’ll always have this 60 cycle hum, as a tamboura, a tonic note in our lives, and we run our lives according to it.

The hum rarely goes away. Mostly when we’re camping or go out in the wilderness, and we get away from it. We all react different ways.  Some people don’t like to be away from it, we’re so nurtured to it, it’s such a pacifier for us. And other people go out, and you go in the woods, and you say, finally I can relax...you don’t know what you’re not missing.  

ALICE:  Do you hear a 60 CYCLE HUM?

You can test how well you hear, online! Visit the Cornell Lab website. They share some fun facts, and deep infrasound hearing experiences on their "Elephant Listening Project" website. Try their quick frequency hearing test to check your hearing capacity. And you can listen to the mating calls of forest elephants in the Central African Republic.

Visit, "Elephant Listening Project" https://www.cornell.edu/video/listening-to-elephants

ALICE: We always focus on our visual land scape. Let’s flip our focus, from visual to audio, and listen to our SOUNDSCAPE!

ODLAND: I find it very interesting to look at all of the whole culture from a sound point of view, as a philosophical stance and a provocative stance…

ALICE: Artist and composer, Bruce Odland, has been working over thirty years, developing a "Hearing Perspective" of the world we live in.

ODLAND: why, for instance, is an expensive, quiet car only quiet on the inside and it sounds like any car from the outside?…or why does the MOMA’s wonderful sculpture garden sound like any taxi stand when you close your eyes?…it is a cultural schism between the ears and the eyes and our culture is front-loaded with visuals…70% visual information in our culture and 30% all the rest of it…and I would like to reverse the equation a lot and see what it looks like…if you put your attentions 70% into your hearing and then apply it to what you see

GLENNIE: We seem to be in a world where we think we are experiencing a new kind of hearing, when in fact Stone Age people relied very much on their hearing and would create the visual art through what they heard and through vibration and we are learning a lot about that whole exploration of that time period. The type of world we live in right now is full of sound bites—we don’t know how to relate to sounds anymore, we don’t know how to listen. 

ALICE:  Virtuoso solo percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, travels the globe, playing and recording with the world’s finest orchestras and ensembles. She is notably recognized as the first musician to maintain a full-time career as a solo percussionist. Evelyn is also deaf, and has, with the aid of her first percussion teacher, honed her awareness of sound to such a degree that she describes her body as ‘a resonating chamber.’ 

GLENNIE: When we’re talking about sound it’s so immense, we cannot actually grasp what the notion of sound really means, because it depends on so many factors. It depends on the space where we’re hearing it, it depends on the mood that we are in, it depends on whether we’re alert, or sleepy or under the weather…., so many things that it’s impossible to say how you experience sound, you must open your body up to some sort of resonating chamber and you must live for the moment. You must open yourself up and experience what is happening at this particular time.

ALICE: Plants and animals, including humans, feel sound as well as hear it, and some of the most meaningful audio communication happens at frequencies that people can't hear. Frequency is the speed of vibrations, and it can travel in waves where the highs and the lows determine the pitch of sound. So, sound is vibrational frequency we can hear, and nature can too. Nature has a unique ability to use frequency and sounds for communicating, and we are learning how to listen to its magical chorus. Elephants use low-frequency rumbles to find family or a mate across long distances. Whales do it too. 

GLENNIE: There is a huge possibility that we can all learn to experience more through vibration, and we can definitely listen better than we are listening to now.

ALICE: Biological rhythms unconsciously entrain us every day, and we have all experienced on some personal level the importance of vibration in our lives. It is no acciden...

In today’s episode, ALICE asks, ‘Can life feel light?’ and we hear from renowned experts in the field: Fritz-Albert Popp, Michelle Addington, Danah Zohar, Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, Jacques Vallee, and Ervin Laszlo. 

ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI. And I am always in a state of wander.
Today, my question is: Can Life Feel Light?

POPP: Nature uses low intensity in order to transmit effectively the information 

ADDINGTON: beginning to understand issues about what parts of the eye intercept which wavelengths
ZOHAR: whenever we are conscious these 40 Hz oscillations are happening
VALLEE: yes, consciousness is more than what’s contained in the brain
LASZLO: to move into a holistic mind-set, where we can all live together on the planet

ALICE: Let’s slip through the looking glass, and talk about sunshine.  Photons. Energy. You and I are sunshine.
Biophysicist, Fritz-Albert Popp, explained bio photons to us in 2006.
These lower intensity photons may be the most effective for transmitting information.  

POPP: Biophotons are photons originating from living systems. They are very weak, with intensities of ten to minus seventeen watt, which is very low. It corresponds to a candle in a distance of about five kilometers. And one thinks even if it is so low intensity it is very unimportant. But just the opposite is true. Nature uses so low intensity in order to transmit effectively the information. And by knowing the laws of quantum theory one can speculate that the lower the intensity the higher can be its efficiency in transmitting information. So nature works on a very low level in order to be, in the informational content, very efficient, and in the energetic content with high efficiency also.

ALICE: Chromotherapy, Color Me Well! Michelle Addington, architect, engineer, spoke to us in 2007 about our circadian rhythm, and a particular wavelength of blue light.

ADDINGTON: What I’d like to start seeing us do is beginning to understand issues about what parts of the eye intercept which wavelengths. One of my doctoral students was working on circadian rhythm and light, and it turns out there’s a particular wavelength of blue light that needs to enter in the periphery of your eye to set your circadian rhythm. Something that happens automatically when you’re outside because you’ve got a lot of scattered blue light. Something that doesn’t happen automatically on the inside. She was beginning to look at how does she pull out that wavelength or find that wavelength. Perhaps it’s coming in from a little bit of Sun, a way of extracting and getting it to the side of the eye.

Her dissertation was very much about this issue of extracting wavelengths. We wouldn’t notice that there was actually a blue wavelength entering the eye in a particular way, yet it would have profound consequences on how somebody felt.

ALICE: Particular wavelengths of light could change how we feel.

ALICE: Danah Zohar is a physicist, philosopher, and author.
She spoke with us in 2001, describing ‘Forty Hertz Oscillations.’ This is a type of brain wave, that is present during consciousness.

ZOHAR: In meditation these 40 Hz oscillations are particularly profoundly coherent. These 40 Hz oscillations begin at the front of the skull and travel to the back of the skull and are oscillating the whole time we are conscious. It’s like a wave. Forty Hz is forty cycles per second, and it makes a sound about two octaves below middle C, so it’s the sound of a rich bass playing, maybe Bach’s Cello Suites or something like that, if you could hear the brain buzzing away. They don’t know that this is where consciousness comes from, that’s almost a mystical question—does this mean that that’s where consciousness begins because the brain is waving? But they do know that whenever we are conscious these 40 Hz oscillations are happening.

ALICE: The 20th century inventor, electrical engineer and futurist, Nikola Tesla, said: “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”

If you think about it, nothing is ever static. We, and everything around us, and inside us, are in constant, or what physicists call, “periodic,” motion.

The Earth is pulsating, behaving like one big electric circuit, radiating with an electromagnetic field that surrounds all living things with a natural frequency.

Wow. Talk about Good Vibrations!

We spoke with Dr. Jeffrey Thompson (the Founder and Director of the Center for Neuroacoustic Research in Carlsbad, California) about the power of your own voice to be the healing factor for your body.

They are making complex recordings and mathematical spectral analysis of voices. All of the harmonics and overtones that make up your voice, are like a signature. Like a fingerprint. They can see precisely what frequency your body resonates at, by doing this spectral analysis of the vocal cords as they vibrate. Listening to your own voice resonating at that very precise frequency can cause a balancing effect and a healing effect in your body.

We still have so much to learn about the brain and consciousness. What we think of as our ordinary consciousness actually represents only about 5 percent of our brainpower. The remaining 95 percent represents the default brain function, what Dr. Thompson calls the default mode network (or DMN). Emerging research is looking at this brain network as the physical place where the mind, emotions, and body come together—potentially where the “mind-body” resides.

Jacques Vallee, is a computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist, astronomer.
In 2006 he explained to us that consciousness is more than what’s contained in the brain.

VALLEE: In programming there are different ways a computer can get data. I can give you the data in a spot of the program, or I can give you indirect addressing. I can tell you, “If you go to this particular location, you will find the address of where the data is.” Or you can do virtual addressing, which is what we do when we need to handle a larger amount of data than the memory you have. Then you spread it in another medium, and then you map that into the computer as you need large chunks of data. What we need to know is whether the brain or remote viewing works by direct interact or virtual addressing.Remote viewing is defined as the ability to acquire accurate information about something without using your physical senses or any other obvious means.

And that’s the way that I talk to researchers who tell me that, yes, consciousness is more than what’s contained in the brain. And from a computer perspective, maybe the brain in the higher levels is primarily an interface for something else. What that something else is I think remains to be discovered. Certainly, remote viewing would suggest that the brain is an interface rather than a computer.  

ALICE: Ervin László is a physicist, philosopher, systems theorist, and author of Microshift.
We spoke with him in 2002 and his words are even more powerful today.  
Ervin Lazslo describes a profound transition of our culture. From Logos (an ancient Greek word, me...

In today’s episode, ALICE asks, ‘What is nature’s vibe?’ and we hear from renowned experts in the field:
John Wheeler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
Bruce Odland: http://bruceodland.net/
Colin Andrews: https://www.colinandrews.net/
Ervin Laszlo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ervin_L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3
Wade Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_Davis_(anthropologist)
David Howes: http://www.david-howes.com/

ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI. And I am always in a state of wander. 

Today, my question is: What is Nature’s Vibe?

WHEELER: how the physical world came into being

ODLAND: beautiful harmonic structures in nature

SHELDRAKE: Each individual draws on the collective memory and contributes to it.

ANDREWS:  the heartbeat was different in one particular rotational aspect with regard to the Earth's magnetic field.

ALICE: Let’s slip through the looking glass, and talk about the Wild, Wonderful World of Nature’s Internet. 
 In 2002 we spoke with Theoretical Physicist John Wheeler:

WHEELER: My great hope is to understand how the physical world came into being and how it works, and where we fit into it all. 

ALICE: John Wheeler spent his life studying "How it all works", general relativity, and "how we fit into it all."  He even imagined that we could listen to the Earth. What if the earth and the rocks could tell us what they hear?  

WHEELER: I have on the windowsill of a cottage in Maine, a rock which comes from the garden of the Academy in ancient Athens which must have heard the discussions of Plato and Aristotle as they walked back and forth. All I need is some mechanism I can put that rock in which will bring forth a sound. 

ALICE: Can You Hear What I Hear? 

ALICE: Composer and Sound Artist, Bruce Odland, is listening to Nature's entire landscape.

ODLAND: there is this overlay of culture that overwhelms America…which is really based on something that isn’t where we are…it is almost like a thick virtual reality foam that covers the land…so, at that point, I decided I would go and find out what are the rhythms and the melodies that are emanating from our landscape instead…what is it’s wavelength?…what is it’s rhythmic structure?…and I didn’t know it then, but what I was exploring was fractal rhythms and melodies…what kind of sounds and rhythms and melodies that nature made…so I felt kind of like one of those early photographers with huge batteries and a giant early digital/audio in a backpack that weighed 40 pounds…and going out to find someplace quiet enough to record ice melting…the flow of water…to find a single melody inside a flow of water…just to find out what kind of rhythms and melodies we had… and found all kinds of beautiful harmonic structures in nature…and all their rhythms were different…they were different from our rhythms entirely…

ALICE: Finding all kinds of beautiful, harmonic, structures in nature.
Bruce Odland has been working over thirty years, developing a "Hearing Perspective" of the world we live in.

ODLAND: I’m very interested in real time and what’s going on right at the moment and how you can change it’s resonance so that it becomes observable…how you can take, in a fractal flow like water and rhythms, if you can find a very pure element to put in a single overtone series to be activated, for instance by a probe, then the water is basically playing the violin.

ALICE: In our first Episode, ”Adjust Your Frequency”, the biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake, introduced us to Morphic Fields. 
Here, he explains, the theory of Morphic Resonance.

RUPERT SHELDRAKE: Each species of animal, each species of plant, even crystals have a kind of memory. Molecules too. The whole of nature essentially depends on a kind of memory, and each kind of thing has its own sort of memory. Each individual draws on the collective memory and contributes to it. That's one aspect of the theory, the memory in nature, the morphic resonance aspect. The other aspect of the theory is the idea of morphic fields, which are the way in which this memory is expressed. Each species has its own fields that govern the form of the organisms as they develop. And that govern the instincts of the animals and that govern the learned patterns of behavior, and also underlie mental activity in human beings. I think we need a field theory of mind, and this theory implies that. The morphic fields are not just for the organization of individuals, they're also for the organization of societies. So each social group has a field which includes all the members of the group within it. A flock of birds or a school of fish, for example, have fields. When the whole lot can move or turn at practically the same time, this I think is a field phenomenon. 

ALICE: Nature has a geometry you can see. My researchers sat with Colin Andrews, an award winning electrical engineer, whose work includes the study of Earth's magnetic fields, and their interaction with all of nature, including the human heart beat.

COLIN ANDREW: Particular families of designs that, when they are rotated in what is called the CRP, which is the Critical Rotational Aspect, discovered by an American doctor back in the early 1900's, 1918, I believe. He happened to rotate the body of a patient and could hear that the heartbeat was different in one particular rotational aspect with regard to the Earth's magnetic field. This is where this resonance therapy is really born, that day pretty much. Because we now know that certain designs, when they are rotated with regard to the Earth's magnetic field, which is of course just one Earth support system, one system to a living organism. When this particular design is rotated and now locks to the Earth's magnetic field, in this position, information becomes available to the surroundings. So that that is held in a geometry, and that we can create ourselves; this happens to have been given to us. But we, I think, have now learned enough. That resonant therapy that is available to the healing of a wide range of plants and also to human beings, is simply being locked up as a tablet – almost like a tablet contained within a geometry. 

ALICE: I wonder, what is your geometry?  

So certain geometries will transmit or transmute certain frequencies only when they are placed into a particular position. So we can be looking at future farming techniques, you can be looking at laying cities and towns out in particular fashions, in the future, for the well-being of individuals, animals and plants. That they must be placed in certain ratios and certain designs with respect to the living planet, the organisms, the life support energy systems that keep that functioning to secure the same benefits.

In today’s episode, ALICE asks, ‘Did you know that we live in an electromagnetic world?’ and we hear from renowned experts in the field:

Fritz Albert Popp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz-Albert_Popp
Dr Albrecht Heyer
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae-Wan_Ho
Christina Kubisch: http://www.christinakubisch.de/en/works/electrical_walks
John Beaulieu: https://biosonics.com
Vasant Lad: https://www.ayurveda.com

SCRIPT EPISODE 02: WE LIVE IN AN ELECTROMAGNETIC WORLD 

ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI. And I am always in a state of wander. Today, my question is, did you know that we live in an electromagnetic world, and I, am an electromagnetic girl.

HEYER: Cells resonate, they resonate at a particular frequency.

MAE WAN HO: Energy and information is interchangeable

KUBISCH: when they talk off their headphones, I notice they have become more sensitive to sound

LAD: Every substance has a sound, every vision has a sound, and every person has a sound.

ALICE: The energy that sustains our technology can no longer be seen as separate from us or from our environment. We interviewed Fritz Albert Popp the German Researcher in Biophysics and Biophotons in 2006. In our last episode he said:

FRITZ ALBERT POPP: “We are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean”

ALICE: This electromagnetic ocean we live in, influences our brain waves, and how we evolved. Our cells, and the entire universe, is resonant.

ALBRECHT HEYER: The cells resonate, as long as they’re alive, they resonate at a particular frequency.

ALICE: In 2002, we spoke with Dr. Albrecht Heyer, a bionutritionist, who studied natural healing traditions extensively in many parts of the world.

ALBRECHT HEYER: These frequencies are dependent on one another. We’re dependent upon the universe, we’re dependent upon the planets, everything that’s in the universe—they all have a resonance and all this forms a harmonious part together. 

ALICE: Energy is everywhere. Here is Mae-Wan Ho, geneticist, biophysicist, and author, speaking from our interview in 2006 about the healing energy created in our bodies during acupuncture.

MAE WAN HO: Part of Chinese medicine is to say that intercommunication in the body goes through energy meridians. And even though Western medicine has picked up on Chinese medicine and acupuncture is now accepted by Western medicine because they say, “There are these endorphins, molecules that give you pain relief and so on and so forth that are produced when you have acupuncture.” That’s nonsense explanation. That’s not an explanation at all because you still have to explain how it is that sticking a needle at the side of your little toe, which is supposed to actually represent your eye, can lead to brain waves coming out of the visual cortex in your brain. This has been shown. They are still puzzling over that. One explanation is that it is the water aligned on these connective tissues that are the major meridians that are the major energy transport. Energy and information is interchangeable because an electrical signal through these water channels, through these hydrogen bonded daisy chains, would be energy. It would be signal, information signal, because everything is highly organized. Energy is everywhere. So you only need a very weak signal before you can set off a very significant effect. And that is basically how it is possible for our body, our liquid crystalline body, to get organized. 

ALICE: Yes, we can feel it, but, can we hear it? What sounds are you listening to? Christina Kubisch, a German composer and sound artist, composes both electronic and acoustic music for multimedia installations. 

In 2006 we asked her: “Is our perception of sound changing?”

Lets slow down and listen. 

CHRISTINA KUBISCH: I think there are a lot of sounds that we cannot hear usually because our ears are just limited to certain frequencies, as our eyes are limited to certain frequencies of light. But I think that most of these electromagnetic waves, for example, bring more influence of our body than be audible one day because they need some electrical transformation. That would be great to hear them without a headphone.

I have the idea that we get less sensible for sounds right now because we do not need to listen to anything. We can have everything right wherever we want it. Every kind of sound can go into the internet and load down everything we want. And we don’t have to work to get interesting sounds. What I like about the work with the headphones, for example, is that people suddenly get very intense on what they are hearing. First of all, they become slow. They start to run and then after two or three steps they start to just move their heads. And they feel from when they go from right to left there’s kind of a panorama of sound which is completely different, and then they slow down. And then they start  sometimes to walk in a very strange way. To look at them as a performance is really funny. And when they talk off their headphones after an hour or whatever, I notice they have become more sensitive to sound. Even to what they hear afterwards. To the everyday sounds, to the noise of surroundings

ALICE: You can become more sensitive to everyday sounds, to the noise of your surroundings. What about yourself? Did You Know, You Can Tune Your Own Body? John Beaulieu, the author of "Human Tuning: Sound Healing with Tuning Forks," spoke with us in 2002. He explained that our bodies can be tuned like musical instruments. And when they are properly tuned, we have a sense of well being and perfect self-expression. This is BioSonic Re-patterning.

JOHN BEAULIEU: Biosonic Repatterning and Polarity Therapy is the center core of ourselves. It’s called the ‘ultrasonic core,’ the core of sound. In alchemy they call it your fundamental tone, or your essence, or your soul. It’s vibrational in nature. And ‘biosonic’ means that it’s ways  of playing sounds that effect the body, life energy, – bio means life – in a way that will realign you with your core, re-pattern you with your core. 

ALICE: Your body has a sound. Every substance has a sound.

VASANT LAD: Every substance has a sound, every vision has a sound, and every person has a sound. If you know your own sound, and recognize that sound, you will experience – within this body – the blissful state of your existence.

ALICE: In 2003 we asked Ayurvedic Physician, Vasant Lad, founder of the Ayurvedic Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, “What is the Power of Sound?”  

VASANT LAD: There is a sound for each organ. The lungs hav...

Dr. Stuart Firestein: http://stuartfirestein.com/

SCRIPT: 
ALICE: Hi I'm ALICE, I'm one part human and one part AI and always in a state of wander. 

At the International airport in Helsinki, Finland researchers are using dogs to sniff the Covid-19 virus on arriving international passengers. Tests are showing that dogs that have been trained to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes can identify the virus in seconds, with very high accuracy, even days before before a patient developed symptoms! Wow. Smell!

FIRESTEIN: This is of course the basic fundamental human question: how do I smell? 

ALICE:  Dr. Stuart Firestein, Neurobiologist and chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, explained smell to us, in this archival interview:

FIRESTEIN: The mechanism by which we detect odors is an ancient one; it’s found in virtually all animals even nematoid worms all the way up through human beings—there are minor changes in it. But it’s basically a mechanism for recognizing chemicals in the environment. There are thousands and thousands of these low-molecular weight, organic compounds, small chemicals that float around in the environment. They’re mostly what we call volatile chemicals because they’re easily airborne, they come out of solution quite easily. They’re given off by all sorts of things—flowers, plants, other animals, other people (of course we know only too well), food stuff, many, many things. 

FIRESTEIN: We detect them by what is basically described as a lock and key mechanism. We have way up here in the recesses of our nasal cavity, as do other vertebrates with noses, way up in the back of their nasal cavity, have a thin piece of tissue. We call it the olfactory epithelium. And it’s actually a small piece of brain tissue that has been pushed out of the central brain area and into the environment where it can come into contact with these odors. Much like your retina is a piece of the brain that essentially has been pushed out of the central cranial area into the back of your eye and is therefore available to light. So in the same sense we have this nasal or olfactory epithelium way up here in the top of our nose. And there are specialized brain cells in this epithelium which have, on their membrane surface, on the surface of the cells, have a protein called an olfactory receptor or an odor receptor. 

ALICE: So wait, smells are molecules? 
Smells are actual things?

They fit into specialized brain cells in our nose! 
The "olfactory epithelium"?

FIRESTEIN: The odor receptor isn’t in that receptor for a second; it’s only in there for a few milliseconds. Then it falls out and another one flops in and you get a few more and the cell integrates this information. What we’ve done effectively is that we’ve turned a chemical binding through a biochemical interaction into an electrical charge. So we’ve essentially turned chemistry into electricity, which is what the brain is interested in as a signal. 

ALICE: Amazing. 
The nose makes brain signals from molecules floating in the air!
Thank you Dr. Stuart Firestein for explaining smell. 
And thank you to the researchers and dogs working in Helsinki, for your capability to sniff this virus faster than any other test!  

Fritz Albert Popp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz-Albert_Popp
Jill Purce: https://jillpurce.com/
Rupert Sheldrake: https://www.sheldrake.org/

Tuning Into Frequency, by Sputnik Futures

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 
ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI. And I am always in a state of 

wander. 

Alice in Futureland is a podcast series that asks you to wander into provocative futures. Together, we will discover extraordinary ideas. 

Today is our first episode on Tuning into Frequency and my question is: What is your frequency? 
Let’s slip through the looking glass, and talk about the energy that is both inside and around, everything. 

MAE WAN HO: Our whole body is intercommunicating via electrical currents of different kinds – from long distances to the most local distances inside the cell. 

ALICE: This is Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist we spoke with years ago, explaining that the human body is sensitive to electromagnetic fields. 

MAE WAN HO: We are coherent to a high degree. We are like a radio, for example, a television. They depend on coherent electromagnetic fields and signals in order to work. Which is why they can be affected. They can be interfered with. You can’t get a good picture if you get interference, and these weak fields can interfere. We are the same way. 

ALICE: What are these interference? Electromagnetic waves? Quantum fluctuations? Let’s listen to Hal Puthoff describe how humans, every atom, are communicating with the universe, the whole cosmos! 

HAL PUTHOFF: The so-called Quantum fluctuations, ZPE, electromagnetic waves, they have all frequencies, all wavelengths. And some of these waves have wavelengths that are as large as the solar system, as large as the galaxy, as large as space. So, in some very real sense, not metaphorical, not an analogy, but actually literally – we are, like every atom in our body, is in touch with the rest of the cosmos. 

ALICE: Even right here, between us, between each individual, there is a magnetic field. 

Psychophysiologist, Dr. Rollin McCraty is founder of the Heart Math Institute. He is measuring the fields between us. 

DR. ROLLIN MCCRATY: The heart creates, by far, the largest rhythmic source of electromagnetic energy in our body. The field generated by the heart radiates into space around us. I'm not talking about an aura or some new-age concept here, these are very real, measurable magnetic fields. The magnetic field generated by the heart with today's magnetometers can be measured about three feet away. So, we're sitting in each other's right now. Whereas brain waves, you can measure about an inch away. We know that this field's being radiated, that's just basic physics. We can literally measure, if we had us both wired up around the room here, that my brain waves might be synchronizing to your heartbeat, or vice versa, and that would go on in this complex dance as we communicate and interact. 
ALICE: Research by HeartMath Institute shows that the heart is the most powerful source of electromagnetic energy in the human body. 
DR. ROLLIN MCCRATY: Our nervous systems are really sensitive and tuned into these types of biologically generated fields. So, the next step was and say, well, so what? To make a long answer short is if we do analysis of those magnetic fields, spectrum analysis and these types of things, we find that there is information encoded in those fields. They actually track back to the rhythms of our heart, which are linked back to our emotions and what we're feeling. So, if you get where I'm going with this, our emotions are encoding information into these magnetic fields, which are being detected by other people's nervous systems. We've also shown it with horses and dogs and things like that. Of course, animals are well known to be tuned into human emotions. 

ALICE: Did you hear what Dr. McCraty just said? 

DR. ROLLIN MCCRATY: Our emotions are encoding information into these magnetic fields, which are being detected by other people's nervous systems. 

ALICE: Sounds like we’re in a thick soup of electromagnetic fields! In 2006 we interviewed Fritz Albert Popp the German Researcher in Biophysics and Biophotons. Fritz-Albert Popp is the inventor of biophoton theory, and has coined the term biophotons. 

He noted that humans are actually a very sensitive antenna, sensitive to all the surrounding oscillations, as if humans were fish, taking on the property of the water. 

FRITZ ALBERT POPP: So, we are pictures of the information of our surroundings. You see it in all parts of the electromagnetic waves, you see this resonance condition between the body which is a very sensitive antenna systems for all these oscillations from the outside. And with these oscillations you trigger other processes. You are a fish which takes the property of the water in this ocean where you are. We are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean. 

ALICE: An electromagentic Ocean. So, it’s all around us, and we are resonant with it! 

What are Nature’s fields of communication? Here is Jill Purce, a pioneer of the international sound healing movement. 

JILL PURCE: The world of nature, animals, plants, the Earth, the relationships between the natural world and the physical world that we inhabit, is one of resonant relationships and one of geometrical forms and patterns, the way that they all relate together is the same. So if the world is a resonant world and we’re not resonating in it - and this is the irony as we’ve come to understand the world as a resonant place, which we have increasingly in every discipline – that understanding of the world as a resonant place has come concurrently with a refraining from resonating ourselves. 

ALICE: Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. He has explored the working of the mind and discovered that our perceptive abilities are stronger than many of us could have ever imagined. 

RUPERT SHELDRAKE: I came to the conclusion that plants and animals, as they grow, are organized by fields, invisible fields, which I call morphogenetic fields; form shaping fields. Each species has its own sets of morphic fields, its own memories. The instincts of animals are a kind of memory of the species. In its most general form, the idea of morphic resonance says there's a memory in nature and that the whole course of nature is essentially governed by habits.
ALICE: Consider this. Could the purpose of food we eat, be much more powerful than simply transmitting calories? 

Fritz Albert Popp also introduced us to the work of Ervin Schrodinger, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize in physics. 

FRITZ ALBERT POPP: Ervin Schrodinger, The Noble prize winner in physics, he told already more than 50 years ago, that the nature of the food and the task of the food is not to transp...

His wisdom resonates today as we build out of the 2020 pandemic. 

Thanks to the Mayors and the Governors who are leading us through and out of this pandemic. 

Benjamin Barber (1939 – 2017) was an American political theorist and author, perhaps best known for his 1995 bestseller, Jihad vs. McWorld, and for 2013's If Mayors Ruled the World as well as the classic of democratic theory, 1984's Strong Democracy (revised in 2004).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Barber

Schumacher College is internationally renowned community for Innovative Learning for Ecological and Social Change: https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/ 

Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit research and education center, explores the frontiers of complex systems science: https://www.santafe.edu/

Thank goodness we have Dr. Anthony Fauci’s heart-brain in this time of need, let’s all make sure we are resonating with his heart field. 

HeartMath Institute: https://www.heartmath.org/ 

Dr. Anthony Fauci: https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/director

Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/ 

Wild Earth: https://wildearth.com/ 

BioCellection: https://www.biocellection.com/ 

Absolute Foods, India: https://www.absolutefoods.in/ 

Zebras Unite: https://www.zebrasunite.com/ 

Biodesign Challenge: https://biodesignchallenge.org/