Clairvoyaging
019: NeuroMeditation and Psychic Mind Science // with Dr. Jeff Tarrant
For this episode, we sat down with Dr. Jeffrey Tarrant, founder and director of the NeuroMeditation Institute and Psychic Mind Science. Dr. Tarrant has studied the brains of psychics and mediums like Laura Lynne Jackson while they are receiving information. In our discussion with Dr. Tarrant, we explore the fascinating intersection of meditation, mental health, and psychic phenomena, and the complexities and stigmas that come with research in the psychic realm. We discuss the four unique meditation styles identified by Dr. Tarrant and learn how they can be harnessed using neurofeedback to address specific mental health challenges. This was an incredible conversation, and one not to be missed.
To learn more about Dr. Tarrant and the NeuroMeditation Institute, or to take the meditation quiz:
https://www.neuromeditationinstitute.com/
To learn about Psychic Mind Science and upcoming classes or events:
https://psychicmindscience.com/
-- SUBSCRIBE in your preferred podcast app!
-- Follow @clairvoyagingpodcast on Instagram.
-- Send us an email: clairvoyagingpodcast@gmail.com
-- Become a Clairvoyager and get access to exclusive extras!
Looking to book a distance Reiki session with Lauren?
https://www.hellolaurenleon.com/
For this episode, we sat down with Dr. Jeffrey Tarrant, founder and director of the NeuroMeditation Institute and Psychic Mind Science. Dr. Tarrant has studied the brains of psychics and mediums like Laura Lynne Jackson while they are receiving information. In our discussion with Dr. Tarrant, we explore the fascinating intersection of meditation, mental health, and psychic phenomena, and the complexities and stigmas that come with research in the psychic realm. We discuss the four unique meditation styles identified by Dr. Tarrant and learn how they can be harnessed using neurofeedback to address specific mental health challenges. This was an incredible conversation, and one not to be missed.
To learn more about Dr. Tarrant and the NeuroMeditation Institute, or to take the meditation quiz:
https://www.neuromeditationinstitute.com/
To learn about Psychic Mind Science and upcoming classes or events:
https://psychicmindscience.com/
-- SUBSCRIBE in your preferred podcast app!
-- Follow @clairvoyagingpodcast on Instagram.
-- Send us an email: clairvoyagingpodcast@gmail.com
-- Become a Clairvoyager and get access to exclusive extras!
Looking to book a distance Reiki session with Lauren?
https://www.hellolaurenleon.com/
Way. Feather Media presents Claire Voyaging.
Speaker 2:What's going on everybody?
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Speaker 1:And he keeps seeing it going boo-boo. Oh, bless his heart. Hey guys, what's up? We've got a great one today, but first just a little housekeeping. I've never said that before, I'll never say it again.
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Speaker 2:Lauren's such a shill. She wrote that whole thing. She wrote that whole thing for you listener.
Speaker 1:Guys, that's what I do.
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Speaker 2:Are you a lobbyist?
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm going to Congress. Next. I'm going to start talking about intuition.
Speaker 2:They're going to love that.
Speaker 1:I'm going to have them buy mugs from our website. So that's my housekeeping.
Speaker 2:You said you weren't going to say it again. I know.
Speaker 1:I was closing the loop.
Speaker 2:Okay, consider it closed. It's a closed circuit. Walk away yeah.
Speaker 1:So you know what else, listener? We finally did it. We talked to a doctor For today's episode. We talked to Dr Jeffrey Tarrant, founder and director of the Neuro Meditation Institute and Psychic Mind Science. He's a licensed psychologist and he's board certified in neurofeedback, which is basically like studying your brain's activity while you're meditating or doing other things. But I'll let Dr Tarrant explain it, because he knows it much better than I do, and he has studied the brains of psychics and mediums like Laurel and Jackson. I'm a big fan Laurel and Janet Meyer, who has channeling abilities. This entire conversation was super fascinating and it was like where science meets the psychic realm.
Speaker 2:This guy's on the cutting edge of what's coming up and you get to hear me pretend to keep up with someone much, much smarter than I am.
Speaker 1:You, frank, could have kept asking questions for the rest of the day.
Speaker 2:In addition to being incredibly smart, he is incredibly nice. So here we go, dr Jeff Tarrant.
Speaker 1:Enjoy.
Speaker 2:Dr Jeff Tarrant, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 3:Hey, it's, I appreciate the offer and, yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:We usually have people get started just telling us, like what their credentials are and how you got started in this.
Speaker 3:Right yeah, the easy questions, right yeah.
Speaker 2:The ones that make you stutter and feel stupid for not getting them right.
Speaker 3:Right. So I mean, my background is actually initially in counseling psychology, is a counseling psychologist, but very early in my career got involved with neurofeedback and so measuring brainwave activity, looking at that to see are there certain paths that patterns that show up that might be related to different kinds of mental health concerns, and then using that to figure out how to help the nervous system become more flexible and adaptive. Right, so that's been kind of my clinical work all along, but I've always had an interest in meditation and consciousness and things of that nature healing. And so, you know, it was kind of a natural transition to start. It's like, hey, I've got all this equipment right, like, why don't I measure people's brains when they're doing other stuff? Yeah, not just for mental health but for, you know, expanded states of consciousness, if we want to think of it like that.
Speaker 3:And then, you know, really about 11 years ago was introduced to a woman that you know has a pretty remarkable ability she channels South American tribal languages. Whoa, we might need to return to that conversation. Yeah, and so that's actually what got me started in. All of this was kind of was introduced to her by her son who basically said hey, do you want to measure my mom's brain and I was like, yes, and so you know I blame her, it's her fault that I got into this. So, yes, how I got into this, it's Janet Mayer's fault.
Speaker 1:I'm playing to her right now.
Speaker 3:Janet Mayer, it's you, it's your fault, you know, because once I started kind of looking at her and working with her, then she started introducing me to all kinds of other mediums and psychics and you know, you just started kind of going down that rabbit hole and meeting more and more people and just expanding that work. And so it's just been one stop after another for the last 11 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh my gosh Wow.
Speaker 2:My big question for you is do you make it a strong distinction between, like your clinical work, stuff that you know is more common and acceptable to the larger science world, versus some of this other stuff that I guess would be considered like I don't know, theoretical or exploratory? How does this work for you? Or woo, woo, yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, it's interesting because, you know, for the first I don't know how many ever years that I was doing this work. It wasn't really public knowledge. I was doing it really for myself. I was, you know, I was writing a lot of notes and I was, you know, working on theoretical chapters for a book and collecting all this data, but I really wasn't doing anything outs external with it. It was all just kind of mine, you know, because out of curiosity.
Speaker 3:But then over the last two or three years, as this work has picked back up again and I started being more vocal about it and sharing it with people, kind of what I was doing. And yeah, it was interesting because I wasn't expecting it, because for me it was just like part of what I do and I wasn't making any distinction. It was like, you know, I study the brain, I study consciousness, I study these interesting states of awareness and it's just a natural progression for me. But of course that's not the way that a lot of people responded, I shouldn't say a lot. A handful of people kind of pushed back and, either directly, in a friendly way, commented to me and said is this really the direction you want to go? Because I'm not sure this is a great idea.
Speaker 3:And then I had one instance in particular where there was a group that was using my kind of neuromeditation approach, which is more it's using meditation but it's more for a mental health perspective, and they were incorporating that into their work and they literally essentially fired me as soon as they found out that I was doing this. And so now I've tried to sort of separate the worlds just a little bit, and I have mixed feelings about that, because I feel like this deserves the same amount of attention and credibility as everything else and it shouldn't be separated, and at the same time I don't want to push people away that aren't necessarily open to this but could benefit from some of the other pieces of work that I do. And so now I've got these two things, I've got the Neuromeditation Institute and I've got Psychic Mind Science. I've got these two branches now for that work.
Speaker 1:Was there a before, was there a period where you didn't believe in psychics? Was that like nah, I don't believe that.
Speaker 3:Yes, and actually it's a little bit weird. Maybe not, but when I was young I believed in all kinds of crazy stuff and that was all of my interests. And, of course, when I was young I don't know how old you guys are- we're so young, we're so young, yeah, yeah. That's what I thought.
Speaker 1:We're both 22.
Speaker 3:That was going to be my guess 22, 23, something like that, Exactly yes thank you.
Speaker 3:But when I was a kid, the movies Star Wars and Poltergeist and Close Encounters of the Third Kind that was all the stuff that was just coming out ET and so a lot of my interests were totally absorbed in that kind of paranormal whether it was ghosts or UFOs and aliens or Bigfoot all of that was fascinating to me and I loved it all.
Speaker 3:And then really things changed. I was pretty open for a long time, really, until I blame graduate school and I feel like I'm blaming a lot of people. I'm blaming Jan for giving me into this, I'm blaming graduate school for becoming a skeptic, but really I mean, there was something I think about my training as a psychologist that really made me much more skeptical about all of this and really thinking about the role that the mind plays in this and how the mind can trick us and we can trick ourselves into believing certain things or perceiving certain things, you know, for lots of different reasons, and I don't think it's, and I think that's true. I think the mind can trick us and we can. You know, the mind is complicated. Humans are tricky. The psyche is a mess.
Speaker 2:And so You've met me before, yeah.
Speaker 3:You know. So I became kind of a hardcore skeptic. I subscribed to Skeptic Magazine and Skeptical Enquirer and was reading James Randy's books and you know, it was kind of like this can all be explained, right, it was my kind of my way of, you know, moving into this Michael Shermer, right, all those guys, right, it was like this can all be explained by logical ways of thinking. And then you know, at some point you know what it was. I think it was like. You know, I don't like living like this. It feels really rigid and overly controlled and it eliminates the possibility that there's magic in the world and I'm using the term magic loosely.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so then, when I kind of started exploring meditation and Qigong and yoga and things of this nature and started experiencing for me I think this the first point was experiencing energy, whatever you want to call that Qi, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And feeling this energy in and around me that I could use and I could interact with, and I could interact with other people with. And I was like well, wait a minute, what does this mean? Right, if there's this energy field that I can work with and I can use, well, then I'm not just this meat sack, right, like there's something different going on here, right. And so I think for me that was the turning point of being much more open again and going okay, wait a minute, I want to understand this, I want to see how this works and try and figure it out, right, like, how can I and not just from a scientific perspective, but I want to use it, I want to work with it, I want to develop my own consciousness and my own spirituality in these ways.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:But kind of keeping that science angle, if I can right.
Speaker 2:And I know that the science community has a tendency to be very rigid, like you were saying, like you know. That's what science is right it's observing what you can know. It seems like you're redefining that line with your work, which is pretty amazing. So you have yeah, of course, no, thank you. You have drawn your own line, just for your own, like how you categorize your studies between neurofeedback and psychic mind science. What is the big difference between those two things?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean so the work that I do with the NeuroMeditation Institute. There's two elements. One of them is trying to make meditation a little bit more easily understood. In terms of that, there are different types of meditation. Meditation is not all the same thing. It's a big blanket umbrella term. Right? That actually means a lot of different things because it depends on how you're using your attention and what your intention is. And, of course, when you change your attention and intention, it changes how the brain is behaving. So kind of the angle of the NeuroMeditation Institute is that different styles of meditation impact your brain differently and have different implications for mental health because of that. So, from a psychological perspective, we can start to get a little bit more defined about how we're using meditation. If people want to meditate for anxiety or for depression or for PTSD, we know enough now that we can say this type of practice is going to probably get you there quicker than this type of practice. And so then, developing strategies and, some of it, using technology to help people get there, because that's the other problem.
Speaker 3:If you ask a room full of 50 people how many of you meditate, two people will raise their hand, and if you ask them. How many of you have ever tried to meditate? 49 raised their hand right. So it's clear that everybody knows meditation is good for you, but yet very few people do it consistently because it's hard and it's awkward and it's challenging and it's vague. So we're trying to define it. It's a little bit more of a Western approach right To a brain-based approach to meditation for mental health. So that's that work right, which so is fairly traditional. I mean, yes, we're doing meditation, but we're using science to back up what we're doing and tying it into mental health work. And then the psychic mind science right Is all of the other stuff, so studying ESP and telepathy and energy healing and psychokinesis, and you know I'm getting ready to start doing some work with remote viewing.
Speaker 3:And so you know, but a lot of that is I'm still looking at the brain. That's still an interest of mine. You know, how does the brain get into these states? Like what happens in the brain with people who are really talented with these different psyabilities, because if we can understand what their brain is doing might, then we be able to use that information for the rest of us to be able to train our brains, to help us access those abilities. I think we all have the potential but, like, the brain gets in the way really most of the time. And so how can we learn what's going on so that we can learn to shift our brain into these more expanded states, if we want to learn how to communicate with the spirit world or move objects with our mind or whatever it might be right, right, have you had anyone follow a technique that had zero psychic ability and then opened it up, following like something that you've researched?
Speaker 3:Well, that's a tricky one, right? Because personally I don't think anybody has zero ability.
Speaker 1:Right, we all have a little bit of something right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of. I think we all have the potential, but I think it's like any other skill where you could teach just about anybody to play the guitar. Now, there's gonna be some people that the first time they pick it up, all of a sudden they're playing stairway to heaven, right, and you're like dude, like what?
Speaker 1:Not fair, yeah what.
Speaker 3:How did you do that?
Speaker 1:And then there's other people.
Speaker 3:It's like natural ability. Yeah, natural ability, it's just easy for them, they get it, yeah, they understand. And then there's other people where it's like they might have to take lessons every week for a year before they can play stairway to heaven, right, Right, but they can get there, and so I feel like it exists on a continuum in that way. And, of course, it's also a tricky question because most of the people who come to me and are interested in this already have a little bit of an opening right, or they wouldn't be kind of coming to do this, yeah, right. With that said, I have seen some people who come in and go like, oh, I really wanna. I feel like I have some things happen, but it's very sporadic and it's spontaneous and I don't really have any control over it and are able to learn to access that in a more consistent way. And I think that's where the technology comes in really helpful, because we can use some of the technology to kind of nudge the brain in the desired direction.
Speaker 1:There's a survey on your website and which I think is cool, and I took it last night and What'd you get? My highest number was for mindfulness. It was like a 55 score. You like do this survey. It's like 20 questions and then just for our listener and then you get a score and then that's which type the style of meditation you're supposed to do. So mine was mindfulness. I got a 55 out of 100. That was the highest one. What does that mean? What does that mean?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, just real quick, we've kind of identified four primary styles of meditation, and this isn't just us making stuff up, this is from the research literature, right? You know that this is stuff that people have been looking at for years and years and years. Now we have kind of relabeled them a little bit to make it more user friendly, because, for example, one of the styles that you see when you look at research is called automatic self-transcending, which A is a mouthful and your average person isn't gonna have any idea what that means. Yeah Right, so we call it quiet mind. Oh great, which is right, exactly right. It's like oh okay, I know what that means.
Speaker 2:No, that's a trademark title right there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, tm. Quiet mind TM. So the four styles that we've identified are focus, mindfulness, open heart and quiet mind, and of course there's other things that are out there, but these are kind of the four biggies, right, and you know, focus is fairly obvious in some ways it's everybody's that's ever tried to meditate is familiar with this where you're putting your attention on one thing, your breath, whatever, you know a mantra, doesn't really matter what it is, the mind wanders off. You catch the mind wandering and you bring it back. Yeah, right.
Speaker 2:Like a little puppy.
Speaker 3:Like a little puppy. So you know, that's so. That's focus. Now, mindfulness, of course, right now is being used in our culture to mean just about everything, yeah Right. And so I've got mixed feelings about us using that term, because it's confusing to some people. But you know, we're really using it in the context of the way that, like John Cabot Zen uses the term, which is much more about having sort of an observer awareness, where you're aware of what's happening in the present moment your thoughts, your emotions, your mental state, your body sensations, whatever but you're not attached to that, you're not creating a narrative about it, you're simply present with whatever is happening, almost more in like a sensory, experiential mode as opposed to an analysis, interpretation mode, and so there's lots of ways to engage with that. But that's different. That's different than like focus, and you can hear the difference when you describe it. It's like, oh, those aren't exactly the same thing, they're a little bit different, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because, just like with my results, frank will sometimes be more aware of my emotions before I am, and I think that's like maybe some kind of trauma response that I'm like I'm still trying to bring my awareness to my body and my emotions and things like that. So I think the result that I got was because of that. Sometimes, like I react out of just like pure emotion or something like that and just being more present, that was why I got that result.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense, right, yeah, and the quiz was set up to be fairly obvious, right? Like, if you look at the items and which style they're loaded to, it makes sense, yeah, right. Like, if there's a question, that's like I have a hard time staying focused, like, okay pretty obvious what that's going to load to, right yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know. And so then there's open heart, which is a broad category but includes all the meditations that are like around forgiveness or gratitude, or loving, kindness or compassion. So those are different from the other ones because you're activating an emotional state, a certain type of emotional state. The other ones we don't even talk about emotions you might observe them, and mindfulness you might observe oh, I'm feeling a certain way, but you're trying not to connect to it, you're trying not to attach to it, you're just observing it. Oh, that's interesting. Whereas with open heart, no, you're actually engaging with that feeling and then doing something with it, usually right, sending that feeling out to others or sending it to yourself or whatever you might be doing.
Speaker 3:And then quiet mind again pretty obvious. Sometimes I joke that we should call it quieter mind. Quiet mind is maybe it sounds like too too intense, right, like people are, like I can't do that, I can't get my mind quiet, yeah and so, but, but that's really what it's about is like, can we learn to settle down all of that internal chatter that gets in the way? And sometimes we're not even aware of all the internal chatter until you start to sit down for a second and then it's like holy smokes. Wow, this is. There's a lot going on up there.
Speaker 3:And so you know, trying to you know, so that's more like the transcendental meditation kind of Zen approaches are kind of fit into a quiet mind style. So those are the four primary meditation styles and they each are better for certain kinds of things. Mindfulness is good for ADHD, obviously, right. Or for somebody who's got some cognitive challenges, right. So maybe cognitive decline in the elderly or maybe the mild traumatic brain injury or actually focus is good for a lot of things. To be honest, it's kind of the base, the baseline for everything else.
Speaker 3:Mindfulness is really good for stress and anxiety. That's the main thing that mindfulness is good for. It's like number one. Okay, because you're learning to be more objective in how you perceive things instead of, instead of getting pulled into it. Yes, yeah, yeah, open heart is good for all kinds of things as well. But you know you think about depression or unresolved grief or resentment or right. So these things that we might, in air quotes, called negative emotions, negative feeling states that people get stuck in, can we start to reverse that? Right? And because the brain is so malleable, you have to kind of teach it how to do that, because the brain is oriented toward negativity. That's where it's going to go. If you just let the brain do its thing, it's going to go toward negativity Nine times out of 10. Man, that's so tough. Yeah, I know it is tough.
Speaker 1:It's a bummer, right yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's a survival mechanism, you know, because it makes more sense. It makes more sense to focus on threats and danger than it does to focus on what makes you feel good. Wow, and so, yeah, yeah. So the nervous system is, you know, it's designed to help us, but of course, in our current day and age, it's often not that helpful because we just make stuff up. We make up stories about the threats out there that may or may not be real.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it doesn't matter. The nervous system doesn't care, it's going to act like it's real anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then each of these results, like each of these styles, you have kind of a suggested meditation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, we try to put some resources that are just accessible to anybody, you know. So some guided meditations and things like that, yeah, and information on the YouTube channel that you know. We've got a bunch of videos on our YouTube channel that can explain some of the concepts, and we do have for each of the styles we've got a six-week online course, so that's kind of self-paced at this point and so it kind of walks them through a progression of some of the science stuff. For your left brain, right, the left brain wants to know like, why, how does this work? Why am I doing this? Yeah, so we explain that and then we, you know, start walking people through different types of practices of a wide community so that people can find an approach that fits for them. It's not a one-size-fits-all program, you know. We recognize that everybody's a little bit different, and so you know, experimenting with a variety of strategies and tools and techniques so that people can find the one that works for them. That's really great. So that's kind of.
Speaker 1:That's so cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that's the ultimate goal.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you hook up your clients to some really cool helmets and stuff like that. Helmets, yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't call them helmets, but we do talk about head gear, head gear.
Speaker 2:So you know.
Speaker 3:Okay, you know.
Speaker 2:The sensors on the head gear that you're wearing. What are we measuring? Is it brain waves? What are we looking at?
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's a few different, you know, kind of technology-assisted approaches that we use, and so the basic one is yeah, it's using neurofeedback, so we're monitoring brainwave activity and we can connect that with meditation.
Speaker 3:So, again, just to use focus as a simple one, because everybody understands, you know, we can monitor a couple of different areas of the brain while somebody's doing a focus meditation and connect it to an audio track, like a spa music kind of a thing or like a meditation music track. And so what happens is, as long as they're focused and holding their attention on something, without getting sucked into mind wandering and whatever, then the volume of the music is like at a nice level. They can hear it really easily, it's nice and pleasant, kind of supports them. As soon as the mind wanders, the EEG signals change, right, because now you're thinking about stuff related to yourself and we know how to measure that. So as soon as that happens, then the volume of the music starts dropping. So you're meditating and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, what happened to the music? And then it's like it makes you aware of yourself, right, like you look at yourself and go okay, wait a minute, what just happened?
Speaker 2:Oh, I know someone who needs that kind of thing. I'm pointing to my wife. Oh, I love that.
Speaker 3:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:That's what a cool simple tool to make. I mean, I'm sure it's not simple, but that's a very effective strategy to get people to refocus. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so you know we've got approaches to use that very effectively. With focus, it's really easy. Well, really easy. It's a very clean approach. Using EEG for focus, also for quiet mind Both of those two we can get really, really clean data and it's very effective, Actually, one of the systems that we've been using more lately. It's really great because I can work remotely with people. Right, I could make a protocol for you, push it to you, you download it on your phone or your iPad, and then you've got a little headgear at home that you put on and you run your session right off of your phone. What, yeah, and then I get the data immediately so I can review your progress, see how it is, make adjustments, change your feedback, whatever, and push it back out to you. So it's this kind of like distance training that makes it much more accessible rather than having to come to the office every time you want to do something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so cool, that's so cool. Yeah, thanks like.
Speaker 2:Take my money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm listening to, like specific Hertz.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have things that are like here is a specific frequency, the music based off of a frequency, and we also use binaural beats frequently.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I can't speak to the. You know, like the 963 Hertz thing. I don't know enough about that to be intelligent in my response. It makes sense to me that never stopped me, sir.
Speaker 3:It usually doesn't stop me In this case, you know, I'll have some self-control. But you know, as far as binaural beats and isochronic tones and isochronic tones are just on and off, right, so it's just do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Oh, you know, when you hear that, that sounds kind of terrible, it's not that pleasant, but it's actually very effective, okay. So anyway, back to your question does that, does it work? Yes, and different people are more sensitive to it than others, and you might have even found that for yourself. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3:As far as sound therapy, I would say yes, that you can use, and this is the way I like using some of the music. Right is picking music tracks that you're using for, if you're using it for neuromeditation or using it for something else, that has the right feeling tone for the state of consciousness that you want to get into. So if I'm doing a quiet mind meditation, space music perfect. If I'm doing a focus meditation, space music may not be quite right, because focus requires me to be a little bit more alert and engaged in a different way. So I still may want some kind of relaxation music, but it may need to have a little bit more dynamic, quality or something that's a little more engaging than just, you know, lasers holding a note for an extended period, right, okay, so interesting.
Speaker 2:Is isochronic tones is that almost? It seems like it would be in the same ballpark as binaural tones, except for maybe a little more intense.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're in the same ballpark and in some cases people will layer them on top of each other. Oh wow, they'll be doing both and it's going to be Frank tomorrow.
Speaker 3:Yeah, isochronic tones tend to be a little more in training. So if you're trying to pull the brain to a specific frequency, isochronic tones seem to be better at that. But binaural tones seem to work really well to induce sort of a relaxation effect, and so that's why, like, if you combine them, that can be really nice for some people, right, because you're getting kind of the best of both worlds.
Speaker 2:Let me pivot here. Now let's get into the psychic stuff, if that's okay. It seems like you're on the cutting edge of what is future science and I want to know, in your opinion, what is going to be just accepted by neurologists everywhere, say, in 10 to 20 years or something.
Speaker 3:Accepted in terms of this funny world, of the funny world. The funny world, yeah. The world of high strangeness, yeah, a little early, so long as you're not out there with your patients, you're on theformer side of high strangeness, and so I think, as soon as you're a bit lighter, you can bring your精 um, so you can be sure you're on that whole.
Speaker 3:You know that's a great question, because you know, honestly I don't know, because we've had good evidence for a lot of this stuff for a long time and the scientists, you know, the mainstream scientists are still kind of just, they just won't look at it, they just won't consider it, even though there's mountains of research. There was a study that just came out six months ago, published in a good journal, the journal Cortex, which is, you know, a high level journal, peer reviewed. They took a group of people and used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, which you know, in a hospital setting. It's this big device where they can zap your brain and essentially shut off certain parts of your brain temporarily. But they zapped people's left prefrontal lobe and so shut that down for temporarily and then had them do a microcycliconesis test to see if they could influence the output of a random number generator. It's kicking out zeros and ones. And so they said, okay, we're going to zap your brain and I'll see if you can make there be more ones. And then they took another group of people and didn't zap their brain and had them do the same test.
Speaker 3:And guess what the brain zapping group did significantly better on this mind over better test, right. And so it's interesting because this stuff is coming out, but it's like who's who's paying attention and who's going to take it seriously to understand that clearly we can have an end, like in this case we can have a mental influence on quantum systems. We can influence the outcome just by thinking about it. Princeton had a lab for 30 years that studied this stuff, right, you know the Pear Lab, princeton Engineering Anomaly Research Lab. Princeton's a very well respected university that had this lab in the engineering department, no less, right, studying this. And so it's like why wouldn't we take this seriously, right? So anybody who doesn't take it seriously, they haven't looked at the data.
Speaker 1:Well, how much of it is like stigma, like cognitive dissonance or something Like? How much of it is someone not wanting to believe the evidence? Is there something to that?
Speaker 3:And that's exactly what happens, right, I think, a lot of times is that people they've already got, they already think they know the answer and so they're not interested in any other information. They've already eliminated the option that it's possible, and so you know, how do you, how do you work with that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know what do you do with it.
Speaker 3:You know if somebody's that close minded, you're not going to get through to that. You know you're not going to be able to convince them.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And what I find encouraging is that more and more scientists are starting to be to speak out and be a little bit more vocal about this work, and the more I get into it, the more I keep meeting them and it's like it's very encouraging that it's like oh, these are like legit scientists who are not only open to this, but they've seen stuff right, right, yeah, and so I'm encouraged by that, because there are scientists who are open, but they won't say it Right. And what I find encouraging is that I'm seeing more scientists starting to be put themselves out there Now, maybe a little bit more cautiously than than I am, but but still they're, they're acknowledging this stuff and they're they're coming out and saying we need to study this, right. So that's what I mean, like they might be a little more cautious and they, you know, they might be saying well, we don't have clear evidence yet. However, there is pretty convincing data suggesting that this is worth studying further, right.
Speaker 1:So these are like that. Yeah, very cautious.
Speaker 3:And that's, that's the way researchers write stuff, right, that's how they, that's how we're trained. I mean, I'm beyond that. I've seen too many things. Uh, you know, I I'm convinced that there's all kinds of things that are going on, that we have no clue about how it works, but that consciousness is way bigger than we think it is and way more complicated. And so why wouldn't we study it? I mean, in my mind, isn't that what science is for? Yeah, I thought so. I thought so too. You know, it's like well, if lots of people have this experience, that seems worth studying. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you've got millions of people who report something, it's like huh, should we look at this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it seems like, maybe, right, yeah, I can ask you, then the thing what are the big things that you have seen that have really changed your mind or carried like huge implications?
Speaker 3:You know I mentioned Janet Mayer at the very beginning, you know, and you know working with her, um. So you know she was already sort of a psychic medium to begin with and had these, had some of those abilities, but then she went and did a holotropic breath work session which is, you know, a specialized kind of a breathing process where you're breathing kind of rapidly.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:You know it's in a therapeutic context and there's a vocative music playing and it ends up being kind of a psychedelic type session, right, you know. Anyway, she did this with her sister and midway through the session sat up and just started speaking this language and she had no idea what she was saying, she didn't know if it was a language, she didn't know what was going on and it continued like after this set, after this holotropic breath work, she uh you know it was just spontaneously she'd be at the grocery store and all of a sudden this language would start coming out of her right, and she's like what the hell's going on?
Speaker 2:You know, and so when you say coming out of her, do you mean that she was like talking on purpose or was spontaneously speaking?
Speaker 3:I think initially it was just kind of coming out of her mouth, right, like she, like she wasn't trying to make it happen. It just, you know it's happening, oh my gosh, um. And then over time she kind of got control over it so she can kind of turn it on and turn it off right. And it took her four years of recording things and sending it to different researchers and universities, trying to get somebody to pay attention Can you imagine?
Speaker 3:Oh my God Can you imagine the responses she probably got right, I don't know, um. And so she finally found a PhD anthropologist at the Smithsonian who was also, uh, had some shamanic background in South America, oh my gosh. And he recognized the language and said, hey, let me look at this. And so started looking at it and turns out she was speaking four different tribal dialects. What South American tribal dialects? Uh, yanomami, fulnio, I'm not going to remember them all and you know. So he got some of them translated and then, of course, unfortunately, he died, this anthropologist. But but it's like, so, getting this verified, that's like no, you're actually saying something. And it was like teachings and prayers and healings and this. And it's like where is this coming from? Right, like yeah.
Speaker 2:So so these were like dead languages.
Speaker 3:No, there's, there's still there, but they're like tribal, you know, like languages in South America that, uh, you know, you wouldn't know unless you lived there, right.
Speaker 1:Was she channeling a person or or like just who knows? Still don't know.
Speaker 2:That's for another episode. Yeah, I guess. So. Yeah, who knows right.
Speaker 3:Wow, and then that, and seeing where there's some like evidence that this is a real language and it's like, well, how do you explain that? Yeah Right, like, how do you like it has to be channeling something right? I don't know if it's an entity or if it's a, if it's an actual person who's in the Amazon and there's, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, I'm assuming skeptics had something to say about that. What was their argument? Did they have an argument?
Speaker 3:I mean, usually they say, you know, oh, it's probably glossolalia, right, speaking in tongues, and you know that, you see, in different Pentecostal traditions in particular, and and so most of the you know, most of the people was like, oh yeah, it's glossolalia and it's like, well, no, it's not glossolalia because a it's not part of any religious spiritual tradition and it's been translated to be an actual language, and not just one but multiple dialects. And so you know and this is somebody who you know had a year of high school Spanish and that's it, you know, you know, no other foreign language hasn't traveled extensively, you know, and so it's like there's no other explanation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's no way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's no way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so then your other. You had another big yeah.
Speaker 3:The other big one was. So I've been involved in this docu-series project. Hopefully it'll get get going here pretty soon. That'd be awesome. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited about it.
Speaker 3:But the main, the main focus was looking at these nonverbal autistic individuals who are basically 100% telepathic with their primary caregivers oh my gosh. And so yeah, so so far I've been able to measure the brains of three of them and each one of them are just completely amazing because you know, and we set up these kind of rigid testing conditions, you could show the mom, draw a card out of an UNO deck, pull a book off of a shelf, open up to a page and point to a sentence, pick a random number that's four digits long, it doesn't matter. Show the mom anything. And then the kid because they use like a letter board to communicate, so they point to, to letters and numbers on a board and they can get it 100% right every single time. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what you show the mom, that's incredible. Yeah, full sentences, Right, that's amazing. Just write it out. Yeah, it's nuts.
Speaker 3:There was one. There was one we were doing. We were using an UNO deck and we took out all of the weird cards, right, like the wild cards and the skip cards and all that kind of stuff. So it was just colors and numbers, and we had the researcher position behind the kid and the mom, right, so that so that they couldn't see what was going on, and they'd shuffle the deck, draw a card, show it to the mom, stick it back in the deck and then so then they would say the, the number and the color right Of the card. This is what the kid would do, and so we're doing this and we're going through and they're getting them all right. And then the one time they point to a plus sign, there's a plus sign on the board and then they do a two and then it was like blue, belt BLUE, and it was like the hell, was that plus thing on there? Sure enough, one of the plus draw two cards got stuck in there. We thought we cleaned it out, but but it didn't that.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:There's no way.
Speaker 3:Exactly, there's no way right. Like I mean, the first time I saw this my job I hit the floor because I was like, I was like what? Yeah? I was like this is, this is nuts, yeah, you know. So they've got direct information, they got a direct link. And it's like so again, when you see that, like how do you deny that our consciousness is way bigger than we think it is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really brings up the concept of, like the brain being a receiver for something else. It's like a receiver filter where, because we've interviewed a lot of psychics and they talk about how overwhelming it can be at times and I would imagine that at a certain point of overwhelm you would come off or be measured as a nonverbal autistic individual. Ugh, I can't even formulate a question from this because that's so wild to me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean it's pretty impressive. When you see it, you know it's like okay, all right, you know what do you do with that? Right, yeah, yeah. And of course it's interesting because you know, because they are autistic. It's very obvious when you watch them they're not trying to trick anybody. They're not. It's just super straightforward. Yeah, it's like wow.
Speaker 2:Wow, a nonverbal autistic individual would not come across as an aspiring magician or anything like that yeah. This is the real deal.
Speaker 1:That's so cool. I hope that docu-series.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:That comes together. That sounds really cool. Yeah, I have a quick question as a fan of Laurel and Jackson, the psychic and medium. You studied her brain, right I have, yeah.
Speaker 2:What were the big takeaways from that?
Speaker 3:I've measured Laura's brain twice, I think you know, and we've become pretty good friends. That's awesome Over the years. Yeah, yeah, we've actually been doing some workshops together over the last year and a half.
Speaker 1:Oh, nice and that's been a lot of fun.
Speaker 3:You know her brain. There's a couple things that are interesting going on, but I think the one that's the most intriguing is really related to how she gets information. So when you talk to her she describes very clearly that when she's doing a psychic reading she sees the information in her left visual field.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 3:Right, so she sees it over here, and when she's doing a mediumship reading she sees it in her right visual field.
Speaker 2:I've never heard of that. That's crazy.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, and that's what I mean. Like it's unique, right. Like I've worked with a lot of mediums and nobody's ever described it that way. They describe a screen, A lot of them describe a screen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she holds a screen in her book.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but Laura has this very unique you know, it's like oh, it's on the left, it's psychic, it's on the right, it's mediumship, whoa. And so what makes that really cool is because, again, the way the brain, the visual system in the brain works, that information should cross over to the opposite side of the brain, to the occipital lobe, so the occipital lobe's in the very back of the brain. It's a visual processing, and so the information from the right visual field gets processed in the left visual center and then the information in the left visual field gets processed in the right occipital lobe.
Speaker 2:Crossing the streams, yeah, Crossing the streams.
Speaker 3:And so this is what was really cool about measuring her brain, because that's exactly what we saw, oh wow. When she's doing a psychic reading, you see it light up with gamma activity, the fastest brain wave on the opposite side. And when she's doing a mediumship reading, you see it light up on the opposite side. So some different brain waves go on mediumship versus psychic. Yeah, the mediumship is a little quieter of a brain wave state. The psychic is more active, more energized. But you see that distinction very clear, clear as day. It doesn't necessarily prove anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But it's pretty compelling because nothing in her external visual field is changing. It's nothing that she's looking at out here. It's whatever she's seeing internally is being registered in her visual centers, and so she's seeing something.
Speaker 2:You're seeing activity happening that's clearly doing something, and just because people can't describe it means they're just ignoring it.
Speaker 3:I don't understand Well so you're so interesting to me.
Speaker 3:I mean, here's part of the problem, right is that, from a research perspective, what we like to do when we're setting up a study is you want to control everything.
Speaker 3:You want to control as many variables as humanly possible so that everybody's doing the exact same thing under the exact same conditions, and so if you try to do that with mediumship and psychic abilities, you lose a lot of the effect because you're trying to control things that don't really respond well to being controlled like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so, for better or worse, my approach has been almost more like a case study approach. Sure, so instead of trying to control everything, it's like well, I'm going to look at each person individually and see what their brain is doing, and let's just look at that, like, let's just look at them by themselves, instead of trying to group everybody together and say, oh, let's put everybody's data into one pile and see what we get, because I can tell you what you'd get. You'd get nothing. You'd get chaos, a bunch of chaos. It wouldn't look like anything significant because everybody's different. So the exact example, like Laura Lynn's process of how she sees in the two visual fields well, if nobody else does that well, then you're going to lose her data. When you combine all the data, you wouldn't see that.
Speaker 1:Right, it would just get washed. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know. So there's, I mean, and there's, don't get me wrong, there's a there's. It's important to do that kind of hardcore research. That's important, Of course. I'm glad people are doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you know, you do lose some information, I think. So I think that's where I'm trying to kind of like, that's where I have more fun.
Speaker 2:Are you developing like a new methodology to study this type of thing, because the old model doesn't quite work for this, like you're saying?
Speaker 3:I mean I don't know if it's a new methodology, but you know, I mean maybe maybe it's new, you know in terms of just sort of like almost like single subject design, you know, and I mean again, that's not, that's not new, right. But you know, looking at so, for example, like one of the things that would be a really obvious thing to look at, is like oh, is Lara's brain different than your average brain?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Right and and people ask that question all the time and in general it's like well, not really, because all of our brains are different than an average brain right, like it's like you know, you know, so that's not a great question to ask.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's a good question to ask, but it doesn't. It doesn't show us as much compared to if you say, well, let's measure Lara's brain at baseline when she's having a conversation about the weather or traffic in New York, right, Like, let's measure her brain then, and then let's measure her brain when she's doing a psychic reading, and then let's subtract them from each other. So we're looking at the difference. What's the difference between having a regular conversation and doing a psychic reading? You're sort of eliminating all of the common aspects of the brain being engaged while you're talking.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, and then what you're left with is like what's the difference? You know what's different about a psychic reading, and so you know, maybe that's unique, maybe that's a unique approach that we're using.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think so, I'd say so, but then again I'm a guy with a podcast and a couple of guitars behind me, so Dr Franklin.
Speaker 1:Dr Franklin.
Speaker 2:Doctor of what? Doctor of a runny nose? It also kind of makes me wonder for your like layperson or someone who wouldn't label themselves as a psychic. I wonder what daily activities would most closely resemble someone who is in a psychic state. I wonder if this is some kind of state that, like we're not even recognizing, was tapping into a part of our brain, or it's not quite a question?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, I mean, yeah, that'd be a whole podcast by itself, yeah, but the so I mean, I think what I would say is that I think, for the most part, the information that they are picking up for most of us is so subtle that it gets drowned out by everything else and we don't even notice that it's there. It's there, we just don't see it because it's way more subtle than this physical world of sights and sounds and smells and all the noise going on in our brains related to thoughts and emotions and drama. And, you know, being able to learn and this is, you know, back to the meditation Like, can we learn to quiet down parts of the brain so that all of the normal noise that's in the way diminishes? And then you got to pay attention. And you got to pay attention differently than the way you normally pay attention, you know.
Speaker 3:And so some people, I just think, are naturally good at that. Yeah, and then the rest of us, you know we have to learn how to do that right. You're like, well, how the heck do you quiet down your brain? By the way, which is one reason why those autistic individuals may be extra tapped in is because they don't have the language capacity. They don't use language in the way that we use language, and when you use language, you're limiting information. As soon as you put a word on something, you've limited it. That's true.
Speaker 1:Oh man, yeah, and you have this internal dialogue constantly running. That's like.
Speaker 2:That's why it's always kind of amazing when, like, another language has a word for a feeling that we don't have. It's like, oh, you were redefining this. Words are nothing but labels, huh.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean the example I use a lot and I think it's a good one. You know, a lot of different religious and spiritual traditions say very overtly you can't talk about God Because if you talk about God, you've limited God. So because as soon as you say something, you've changed it, you've limited it. And so when you think about how we do that with language, every time we use language we've created a structure and a story about what it is and how it behaves and how it relates to us. And so if you don't do that, just think how much that opens you up. Right now, you just have pure information.
Speaker 2:Yeah, have you dabbled in like sensory deprivation at all?
Speaker 3:Yes, I mean I've dabbled in just about everything, thank you, but I'm not a huge fan of float tanks myself. I know a lot of people love them because I feel like my system still on alert a little bit, because I feel uncomfortable floating and I can't really fully let go. But I've done things like a psychomantium.
Speaker 2:What is that?
Speaker 3:It was created by Raymond Moody, I don't know how many years ago, and basically it's a big black box, right Like a little room, like think of a closet, and completely covered in black. You know, you put a black chair in there and a black foot rest and then you put a mirror up in the top corner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tyler Henry did that.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, we saw that on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, ok, ok, yeah, and so, and then you have just a tiny little light in there and so you sit in there with your eyes open and you know you're thinking about your loved one that you want to connect with, who's crossed over or whatever, and stare at that mirror, and so it's a sensory deprivation exercise. Right, because there's there's nothing in there to look at, and I've done that before and had, you know, heard voices and saw things, and you know, and so you can use those techniques. What I tend to use is I use the technology right as a way to almost flip the script. Yeah, because you can do it the other way Instead of eliminating all sensory information, you can overload the circuits and it does kind of the same thing. So you can provide so much stimulation that the brain just like shuts off and gives up and it's like I don't know what to do with this.
Speaker 2:So that's how I feel when I walk into any target Costco.
Speaker 1:Complete sensory.
Speaker 2:Listen, I can give you a psychic reading, but we have to go to Costco. I need to pick up a few things.
Speaker 1:I just start shutting down and becoming sad.
Speaker 2:You're tapping into something. Yeah, one more quick question that this should only take like a minute or two to answer.
Speaker 1:Sure, You're going to.
Speaker 2:Where does consciousness come from?
Speaker 3:I love it. I've been doing a lot of podcasts recently and people will always wait till the end to drop that like a big bomb question, like that. You know it's like oh yeah, that's an easy one, you know. Of course I don't have an answer for that, but at least my own experience at the moment just from my own experience with different things that I've worked with my feeling is that that consciousness is everywhere and everything and that it's all. You know. Just like all the mystics say, it's all unified, it's all one thing, everything's connected and interconnected and this idea of separation is just a mental construct that we've created in this weird little human body.
Speaker 3:And this is a very limiting experience. Just like the brain filters out information, so does our physical body. You know, we know that right Like we can only see a tiny little range of the electromagnetic spectrum, so we know that the electromagnetic spectrum is way bigger. There's all kinds of energy out there that we can't perceive. The ears can only pick up a certain range, the eyes can only pick up a certain range, so our whole system is like a filter that limits information and says this is all you get to experience right now is this little tiny range of stuff, and you know. So we're kind of stuck with this body for the moment, right, and so we do with it what we can, but this is not the reality.
Speaker 3:You know, this is not reality. This is just a weird little avatar that we get to play with for a while, and you know, but everything else? But you know, consciousness is everything and it's everywhere, because everything is energy. Ultimately, you know, everything is energy. Right, it's like, oh, this is all just a big dance. It's just a big dance of energy and things manifest and they de-manifest, and they move and they shift, and it's just a big play. And we get to do this and we get to pretend like there's time right. Time isn't real, you know. And so you know, we get to have these weird little blips, but that's not what it is right, and so I don't know if I'm answering the question or not but these are just my rambling thoughts, you know, about kind of how this stuff works right, and I think that's why we can tap into these other things.
Speaker 3:It's like if we can at least momentarily get out of the rigidness of our system, then you know it's like, oh well, there's a whole bunch of other stuff out there, you know. It's just hard to connect with when we're kind of like stuck in this physicality.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, Dr Jeff Tarrant, I know you have some books out and anything that you're currently working on that you're excited about. Let us know about it. What's going on?
Speaker 3:Thanks, yeah, yeah, some shameless self-promotions.
Speaker 2:Please.
Speaker 1:Yes please do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so my latest book Becoming Psychic Lessons from the Minds of Mediums, healers and Psychics, that came out last November. You can find that kind of wherever you buy books. You can get it at Target, cool, you know you can check out our websites. So one of them is psychicmindsciencecom, the other is neuromeditationinstitutecom, and you know we have different classes and workshops and trainings and things. Yeah, that's probably the easiest way to find the info and different resources and ways to contact me.
Speaker 1:Great, and we'll link all of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll link it all in description. I also think you're gonna be hearing from us soon. I don't think we're done here. Yeah, thank you, dr Jeff.
Speaker 3:We can definitely do a part two. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:I have way too many questions. I'm just trying to be cool right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he is. Yeah, Thank you so much. It was great to talk to you. I appreciate it. Thank you guys.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening. Visit wwwclarivoyagingcom for show notes, merch, or just to say hi. If you'd like to support our journey, visit wwwbuymeacoffeecom. Backslash Clarivoyaging. This has been a production of Wayfeather Media.