- 5/26/2025
Can we perceive objects and events beyond the world detected by our five senses? The true limits of our human brain remain a scientific mystery. New studies in neuroscience are showing that our minds can really detect events and objects that our conscious selves know nothing about. Can we predict events in the future? Is there such a thing as a global consciousness? Could physical laws on the cusp of being discovered be at the root of all this?
Blindsight has been studied. Schrödinger's cat is supposed to show that "nothing in this universe is certain until someone makes a measurement," narrates Freeman. Eugene Wigner argued that consciousness casuses collapse, necessary for existence.
In the 1950s, Richard Feynman found "advanced wave" solutions to Maxwell's equations from the 1860s. Freeman narrates that matter traveling backwards in time may be proof of antimatter.
Interviewed experts: Beatrice de Gelder, David Chalmers, Roger D. Nelson, Rupert Sheldrake, Michael Persinger, Michio Kaku, Dean Radin, Daryl Bem.
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#season2
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#coamology
#astronomy
#spacetime
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Blindsight has been studied. Schrödinger's cat is supposed to show that "nothing in this universe is certain until someone makes a measurement," narrates Freeman. Eugene Wigner argued that consciousness casuses collapse, necessary for existence.
In the 1950s, Richard Feynman found "advanced wave" solutions to Maxwell's equations from the 1860s. Freeman narrates that matter traveling backwards in time may be proof of antimatter.
Interviewed experts: Beatrice de Gelder, David Chalmers, Roger D. Nelson, Rupert Sheldrake, Michael Persinger, Michio Kaku, Dean Radin, Daryl Bem.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season2
#episode5
#coamology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#sensesofhuman
#sixthsense
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00Touch. Taste. Sight. Smell. Hearing. These are the senses that connect us to the world.
00:19But are there more than five senses? Researchers are diving into hidden folds of our brains,
00:29discovering that the blind can actually see, that thoughts can fly across space, and that
00:39somehow we might have the power to feel the future. Is there a sixth sense? Space. Time.
00:55Life itself. The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:17The human brain is a truly remarkable organ. It contains as many nerve cells as there are
01:24stars in the Milky Way. Sights, sounds, smells, anything happening in the world around us triggers
01:33waves of activity that ripple through this vast network in our heads. Could this network interact
01:41with the world in ways we don't yet understand? We are only just beginning to see what these cells
01:48are really capable of. As long as the brain remains a mystery, the sixth sense cannot be
01:55written off as superstition. Scientifically, it's entirely possible. I was mostly a good kid,
02:06but every once in a while, I stepped out of line. But even with my back turned,
02:19I knew when I'd been caught, I could just feel her accusing stare. Was this a sixth sense?
02:37At Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Beatrice de Gelder is researching how emotions
02:44travel from person to person. She studies blind sight, a strange phenomenon in which
02:55some blind people are able to see emotions in other people's faces. We tend to think as a
03:02visual perception as a matter of intact eyes. In fact, the eyes only see because they are
03:08connected to the brain. Most of Beatrice's patients don't appear blind. On the outside,
03:15their eyes look perfectly normal. But on the inside, there is hidden damage. In a healthy
03:24brain, a complex symphony of signals flows from the eyes to a region called the visual cortex.
03:31But if the visual cortex gets damaged, usually as a result of a stroke, the signals can no longer
03:39be picked up. A stroke normally affects only one side of the cortex, leaving the patient blind in
03:46one eye. Beatrice is investigating whether the brain might have other ways to pick up signals
03:54from that eye. She uses a partition to separate what a patient's blind eye and functioning eye
04:01can see. A computer shows images of happy, sad, or angry faces to one side only. So we present a
04:12stimulus. It's an image of somebody laughing, somebody expressing joy. Electrodes on the
04:18patient's face pick up any twitches of his muscles, detecting if he reacts to the emotions on
04:24display. We see that his face was actually imitating. He was using the same muscles without
04:33knowing it, of course, than the model he's seeing on the screen uses to produce that smile. What's
04:40remarkable is that the emotional faces are being shown only to the patient's blind side. The seeing
04:48eye only sees neutral expressions. Yet, time and again, Beatrice's patients imitate the emotions
04:56their blind eye is looking at. But the response is not a conscious one. We ask the person, were you
05:06sure or are you guessing? And we systematically get the answer that they were guessing. Beatrice
05:13believes blind sight is a deeply buried subconscious sensory system rooted in a hidden
05:19part of the brain that receives signals from the eyes only when the image is loaded with emotion.
05:27But where could that part of the brain be? We are really trying to tap into the different layers of
05:35the brain from the surface landscape. We try to sort of go underground in a way you can see that
05:41it's like underground or undercover work. What is it all built on? What are the lower more ancient
05:48layers? Beatrice uncovered those layers by showing the same images of facial expressions to blind
05:55sight patients while they were inside an MRI. Normally, information from the eyes travels down
06:03the optic nerve directly to the visual cortex. But when the eyes are looking at human emotions, the
06:11signals diverge from that path and travel to the amygdala, the superior colliculus, and six other
06:17structures in the brain. The human visual system consists at least of nine different pathways. Only
06:26one of those we begin to understand and then eight other ones are completely in the background. So
06:33it's only in a case where that one needs to be sidestepped that the alternative pathways have a
06:38chance. Beatrice has identified subconscious mental pathways that allow us not to see emotional
06:48stimuli but to sense them. We all have these pathways even though they are normally overwhelmed
06:55by our primary sense of sight. It's the first scientific evidence of a new sense beyond the
07:03five we know. One should have a sympathetic ear to those noises about sixth sense because we don't
07:09have a clear view yet of the abilities of the brain. Beatrice's work has shown that our brains
07:16can sense things even when we are not aware of them. It implies that any search for a sixth
07:24sense depends on understanding the boundary between conscious awareness and subconscious
07:30experience. Once a month, an elite group of philosophers meets at a small tavern in Greenwich Village.
07:42They call themselves the New York Consciousness Collective. At the helm of this jam session is
08:02David Chalmers. He may never fill Madison Square Garden but his research is earning him a growing
08:09fan base in academia. He's trying to understand the nature and limits of consciousness.
08:17Consciousness is pretty well the biggest mystery in the world and for these reasons because it's
08:29such a hard problem, scientists tend to just to set it aside. Science is objective, consciousness
08:35is subjective. It's just in the last couple of decades really that scientists have started
08:39coming back to consciousness as a problem in its own right. David believes the way to understand
08:46consciousness is to think of it in layers. Layers constructed from the data our senses are gathering.
08:53So consciousness has all these different levels. First of all there's primary consciousness. It's
08:59just consciousness of the things around you. I look out, I might see someone and see what's
09:03around them. That's my first level of consciousness. But then if I stop and reflect I could be conscious
09:10of my consciousness. I can become conscious of what I'm thinking about. Then we've got consciousness
09:15within consciousness. If I reflect again I can start to be conscious of the fact that I'm conscious
09:22of my consciousness. Then you get consciousness that contains consciousness that contains
09:29consciousness. Go three levels deep. In principle you could repeat this to infinity.
09:34Since our brain is dealing with so many layers it stands to reason that we might not always be
09:44aware of everything we're sensing. So some things are in the background of your consciousness way
09:51out in the distance. Some things are flickering through your consciousness. They grab your
09:58attention for a moment. Then they move on. Some things are in the focus of your consciousness.
10:06They grab your attention. They don't let go. But how do we discover what we are missing?
10:13Why does only certain neural activity manage to fight its way into our awareness? What's
10:22actually happening in our brains when we are conscious of something is still a complete
10:27mystery. One of the basic questions about consciousness is whether you can explain it
10:32in terms of physical processes. Because we've got used to the idea in science that you start
10:38with a few basics in physics like space and time and matter. Put them together. You can
10:43explain everything else. You explain chemistry. You explain biology. Now I think in the case of
10:48consciousness this great chain of explanation breaks down. My view is we've got a new fundamental
10:53building block in nature of consciousness and we need to understand the fundamental laws
10:58that govern it. This scientist thinks he's discovered a new and surprising aspect of
11:06consciousness. He believes it does not simply exist within our minds but extends outward as
11:14well. And he claims he has the evidence to prove it. What is a thought? Neuroscientists would say
11:28it's just a pattern of electrical activity inside our brains. But if I scowl or smile,
11:35my thoughts can cross a room. In fact, they're reaching out to touch you right now. Some
11:42scientists believe this is how the sixth sense works. That human thoughts merge into
11:48a collective consciousness that spans the globe. Roger Nelson has spent the past 30
11:58years looking for evidence of a global mind. Consciousness lives in the real world. The
12:06touch is very light, but to the degree that it's a real touch, it's extremely important.
12:11Most people don't believe this is possible. The research shows that it is possible. In the mid
12:201980s, Roger began investigating a strange phenomenon that had been reported by several
12:25other researchers. They had noticed that the readouts of electronic devices called random
12:32number generators could be affected by people sitting next to them if those people focused
12:38their thoughts on them. In the course of a long series of experiments over years, we found that
12:44people could change the behavior of these random number generators very slightly but significantly.
12:50Random number generators are electronic coin tosses. Instead of heads or tails,
12:57they throw ones or zeros. Their results are supposed to be totally random. Roger reasoned
13:07that if one person sitting close by could alter their readouts, then perhaps the massed thoughts
13:13of entire cities could do the same. Could random number generators placed around the world be used
13:21to track the minds of millions of individuals? What we have done is set up a scientific
13:27experiment with a fairly simple hypothesis. The idea is when large numbers of people share a
13:34consciousness state, especially emotional, then our network will show deviations from randomness.
13:41By the late 1990s, Roger had persuaded several colleagues across the globe to collect random
13:48number data in their labs. The Global Consciousness Project was born. This is a map
13:55that shows where the Global Consciousness Project has installations all around the world. That's
14:02Hawaii there, Australia, New Zealand, lots of them in Europe. There's a random event generator,
14:10a random number generator attached to a computer at each of those places. This global network runs
14:1524-7, collecting data and then sending it back to a server at Roger's lab in Princeton. We take the
14:25real-time data and every second the color block will appear. Mostly it's small, but when there's
14:32a big deviation in the data, like that. Oh my god, another one. This is unusual to see so many large
14:42deviations in such a short time. Every time there was a major global event, Roger checks to see if
14:50his network deviates from normal. And many times it does. Some of the strongest changes took place
14:57during the presidential elections of 2008. When the polls closed, the media were saying,
15:06looks like Obama has won. This graph shows the data from the time the polls closed for the next
15:14five hours. In the middle of that is Obama's victory speech. We have never been just a
15:22collection of individuals. We are and always will be the United States of America. This is a strong
15:32trend. It just goes straight up this incline. It's like thousand one odds that we should have
15:39that accumulation of positive effects in a data set this size. We have more than 340 independent
15:49experiments. When we put all the data together from 12 years of these experiments, the bottom
15:56line result has odds against chance of a billion to one. Roger's data suggests there is some form
16:09of global consciousness. But how might it actually work? Biologist Rupert Sheldrake believes the
16:19answer lies in a hidden field generated by all living things. He calls it a morphic field.
16:27Fields are regions of influence. It's easier to see what fields are with magnetic fields. These
16:39balls are little magnets. And as I drop them onto the plate, the balls attract each other or repel
16:45each other. They turn around and so they all join up in patterns. There's a self-organizing property
16:51in fields. They're inherently integrative. And what I'm suggesting is that there's another kind
16:57of field called morphic fields, which organize the bodies of animals and plants and organize
17:02the activities of brains and minds. Rupert believes that morphic fields are what allow
17:10birds to fly in perfect formation, what guide the mass migrations of herd animals. And he also
17:17believes they are the reason we get that uncanny feeling when someone stares at us. He has even
17:28run a series of experiments to try to prove that this sense is real. Not looking. You either
17:40look or you don't look in a random sequence of trials at somebody else, and they have to guess
17:45in each trial if they're being stared at or not. Not looking. The starer should concentrate their
17:53mind on the person they're looking at. When I do it, I also think of the person's name. Looking.
17:59So I can concentrate all my attention on them. When I'm not looking at them, I look at the floor
18:05or I close my eyes, and I think of something completely different. Not looking. Brilliant.
18:14Fourteen right and six wrong. Something's going on. And although the effect's not big,
18:22it's consistent and it's repeated over large numbers of trials. Rupert has gathered a body
18:29of evidence that shows people really do appear to know when they are being stared at. For him,
18:35it supports the idea that our bodies are surrounded by morphic fields, an invisible
18:41extension of ourselves. What I'm suggesting is that our minds work through extended fields that
18:48stretch out far beyond our heads into the world around us, linking us to other people and to our
18:54environment. Many scientists dismiss Rupert's ideas, arguing that if morphic fields exist,
19:02we should have detected them by now. But in a darkened lab in Sudbury, Ontario, this researcher
19:10believes he has, and that he has evidence that thoughts can fly from one mind to another.
19:18Every minute of every day, we are surrounded by an invisible force. Our world is wrapped in a
19:32magnetic field. For many creatures on Earth, life would be impossible without it. Birds, sea turtles,
19:40and fish rely on this global magnetism to navigate. Could our minds be using it too?
19:48And is it perhaps the root of the sixth sense? Michael Persinger runs the Neuroscience Research
20:00Group at Laurentian University in Canada. The powerful effect of Earth's magnetic field on
20:07animals inspired him to investigate whether it could also influence us. Animals can use the
20:15three-dimensional magnetic field of the Earth as a kind of navigation or homing device. There's
20:21very good evidence for it. The connection Michael suggests could exist between Earth's magnetic
20:27field and human brains is much more controversial. The sixth sense is effectively the ability to
20:34detect information at a distance. That's one of the definitions, through mechanisms not known to
20:39date. The critical question is, how is it done? The magnetic field of the Earth is basically the
20:46medium within which we were all exposed, all seven billion of us. And that's what allows the
20:54potential exchange of information. According to this theory, Earth's magnetic field is like an
21:00ocean rippling with waves. Electrical activity from our brains can surf along on top of it,
21:07passing from one person to another. It's a radical idea, but Michael has designed an
21:15elaborate experiment to put it to the test. And if you do, don't drill into his head,
21:21Trepining is outlawed a candidate. His team placed two subjects, Mandy and Mark, in rooms
21:2920 feet apart. The rooms are acoustically and visually isolated from one another. They are
21:37also completely shielded from Earth's magnetic field. Michael replaces that with a precisely
21:44controlled magnetic field of his own design, generated by electrical coils on this headband.
21:52In this way, he can be sure that Mandy and Mark experience identical magnetic fields.
21:59By producing the same complex configuration of magnetic field in two different brains
22:05at a distance, you're basically imitating what happens in nature in the Earth's magnetic field.
22:10I'm going to turn off the lights and I'll be recording your EEG the entire time.
22:20And we'll be able to see if indeed their brain activity is the same
22:23once they share the same magnetic field. Over the course of the next 20 minutes,
22:30a light will flash at Mark several times while Mandy remains undisturbed in her darkened room.
22:37Michael and his team monitor both of their brain's activity.
22:43Three minutes in, the light begins to flash in Mark's room.
22:48I can see a nice spike right there. About five minutes later, the light flashes again.
22:54Same intensity. I actually can see the spikes even in this one.
22:58Mandy's brain activity spiked right at the time Mark saw the flashing light.
23:07Now, Dr. Persinger's team need to know what Mandy experienced while she sat in the dark.
23:15Well, at about three minutes in, in my left visual field of my left eye,
23:21I experienced a bright flash and it lasted very briefly and it felt like it just sort of
23:28faded into the darkness again. Later on at around six to eight minutes in,
23:34I had a flash in my right peripheral field. When the light was flashing to one, producing
23:40all these changes, the other person's brain activity, even though they were in the dark,
23:43also changed. The experiment seems to show
23:47that two brains in separate locations can share a single experience.
23:54Human thoughts are not non-physical. They are physical units of action potentials from the
23:59nerve itself. Can they be transmitted across space under certain conditions? Absolutely,
24:04and there's evidence for it. If we have seven billion human brains all immersed in the magnetic
24:10field, which they are, then a change in one, if it's connected, and we are because the magnetic
24:14flux lines go right through us, right through our brains, then a change in one could influence
24:19everyone. Michael Persinger believes he has evidence for a primitive form of sixth sense.
24:29An ability to share simple sensations with people who are far away from us. But our senses may not
24:36just be able to travel across space. They may be able to reach out across time and feel the future.
24:48Science is full of ideas that seem hard to believe.
24:53Take quantum mechanics. In this strange world of subatomic physics,
24:59a particle can be in two places at once, until we look at it.
25:08Most physicists will tell you where the particle ends up is just a roll of the dice.
25:13But there's another theory. My conscious mind could be controlling this subatomic world,
25:20and the sixth sense could be what makes the universe tick.
25:28Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist. As a pioneer of string theory, which proposes the
25:35world is actually nine-dimensional, he believes scientists need to keep an open mind about the
25:42sixth sense, no matter how strange it may sound. We physicists are concerned with the sixth sense.
25:50We're conservative revolutionaries, in the sense that we have to be open to all sorts of crazy,
25:55bizarre phenomena. Who would have thought that there's something called radioactivity?
26:00Who would have thought that we would have quantum forces? So we have to be open to these things.
26:06The most successful physical theory of all time is called quantum mechanics,
26:11the theory of the atom, because it's based on the idea of probabilities,
26:16that you don't really know where an electron is,
26:19and electrons can exist in some sense in multiple states at the same time.
26:25The fuzzy nature of subatomic particles might just provide a way to explain the sixth sense.
26:33Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics,
26:37designed a thought experiment to drive home the strange rules of his theory.
26:42Let's say we put a cat and a vial of poison in a box.
26:49We add an atom of radioactive uranium and a Geiger counter.
26:54If the uranium decays, it sets off the Geiger counter,
26:58which then releases the poison and silently kills the cat.
27:04Before we open the box and look, we can't actually know whether the uranium has decayed or not.
27:12Since radioactive decay is a probabilistic quantum event.
27:19Here's the question. Is the cat dead or alive?
27:23Well, according to quantum mechanics, the cat is neither dead nor alive,
27:28but the sum of the two states.
27:32Well, at that point, you say, well, that's nonsense. That's preposterous.
27:36How can you be both dead and alive simultaneously?
27:40Schrödinger's cat was supposed to show that nothing in this universe is certain
27:45until someone makes a measurement.
27:48But another pioneer of quantum mechanics, Eugene Wigner,
27:51believed it could teach us something else about the working of the universe.
27:56That consciousness controls everything.
28:01Wigner said, let's take it one step farther.
28:04If I, a human being, looks at the cat, I am conscious.
28:08Therefore, consciousness determines existence.
28:14At that point, Einstein went ballistic and said, what?
28:17You're saying that the fact that you are a conscious being
28:20determines the fact that the cat is alive?
28:23Answer is yes. And Wigner made one more step.
28:26And that is, how do I know I'm alive?
28:30You see, the cat and me, we're part of the same body.
28:32The cat and me, we're part of the same universe.
28:35If I don't know the cat is alive or dead,
28:38I could also be dead at the same time and not even know it.
28:42So who determines that I'm alive?
28:44Well, Wigner's friend looks at me, I look at the cat, and we exist.
28:49But then who looks at Wigner's friend?
28:52And there's an infinite chain of people looking at people,
28:56looking at people, until finally you hit cosmic consciousness.
29:03Some consciousness that's ethereal, that envelops the universe,
29:07which looks at us and says, aha, the cat is alive.
29:14Wigner believed that consciousness is an inextricable part of reality,
29:19that nothing really happens in the physical world
29:22unless a conscious mind observes it.
29:26Most physicists regard cosmic consciousness
29:28as an intriguing idea that will never be provable.
29:33But in Princeton, New Jersey, Roger Nelson may have some solid evidence.
29:40In the vast array of data collected by his Global Consciousness Project,
29:45one date stands out above all others.
29:50We explored the data around 9-11 because there were changes.
29:54This shows a little more than a week around 9-11.
29:58Here, right in the middle, is September 11th.
30:02And this little block respects the time when the first plane hit
30:06to the time when the last building fell.
30:10On that faithful day,
30:12Roger's global network recorded random number data second by second.
30:19Here, we already have some activity that doesn't really look normal.
30:23And at this point, which is 4.30 in the morning,
30:26the data really changed and took off in a way that I think is highly significant.
30:32This is an aberration in the random walk.
30:35And it happens to be centered on 9-11.
30:38And it happens that in order to be centered on 9-11,
30:41it started before the first plane hit.
30:50We don't have an explanation for that.
30:569-11 was the first and only time
30:59the Global Consciousness Network responded to an event before it actually began.
31:05Roger believes it shows human consciousness does not just react to major events.
31:12It is an inextricable part of them.
31:15But the nature of that connection is still unclear.
31:22One of the really hard questions that we're dealing with is how it works.
31:27Is it a global consciousness that we can sort of imagine,
31:31we can't perceive directly?
31:33Is it a global consciousness having a premonition?
31:36And we honestly cannot say what of those things it could be.
31:44Is this the first evidence of cosmic consciousness?
31:50Something that's part of the very fabric of the universe?
31:54This man believes it is.
31:57He claims he has evidence that each one of us
32:00has an extraordinary mental power to predict the future.
32:09The future is always out there, just beyond our reach.
32:16The question is, can we ever perceive it before it becomes the present?
32:22We've all had gut feelings that something is about to happen.
32:27Now, researchers claim to have proof that those feelings are more than superstition.
32:35They could be coming from your sixth sense.
32:43Dean Radin, a senior scientist at the Institute for Noetic Science,
32:48is a leading voice in the study of the sixth sense.
32:52Most people at one time or another have an experience that they might call
32:55an intuitive hunch or a gut feeling.
32:59A prototypical case is driving down the road and you're coming to an intersection
33:04and you just get a bad feeling, so you slow down.
33:07Something feels spooky.
33:13And a truck goes through the red light and would have hit you broadside
33:16if you had not slowed down.
33:18Well, what is that?
33:19Sometimes it's coincidence.
33:21Sometimes people make up things.
33:23The presentiment experiment is a way of seeing whether or not, in principle,
33:27that sometimes it's actually because you're getting your future experience.
33:32Dean has developed a scientific method to test whether people can really anticipate
33:37events in the future, an ability he calls presentiment.
33:45Today, he's working with a volunteer, Janet.
33:49Okay, have fun.
33:50Thanks.
33:51He has asked her to look at a series of images on a computer monitor
33:56while he records her body's physiological responses.
34:01What she looks at are a randomized series of photos,
34:05some bland, some emotionally charged.
34:13Dean charts Janet's skin conductance, a measure of her stress level,
34:17against the types of images she was seeing.
34:21What Dean and any other psychological research should expect to find
34:27is a sharp change in the response right after an emotionally jarring image.
34:34But that's not what he finds.
34:37This line shows where the actual picture shows up.
34:40So, if this picture shows up here, you would think that there shouldn't be any chance
34:45you would think that there shouldn't be any difference in the overall average of the
34:50emotional pictures and overall average of the calm pictures.
34:53But when she sees an emotional picture, there's a bump up.
34:56So, now we go backwards in time, five seconds before, and we can see that from that moment,
35:01that if it's going to be an emotional picture, she's already becoming emotional,
35:05as compared to the calm.
35:07This difference is what I call a presentiment response.
35:11According to Dean's research,
35:13Janet's body is responding to the pictures five seconds before she sees them.
35:20It's the same effect he's found in hundreds of trials over the past 30 years.
35:27All of his subjects show this presentiment response.
35:31It appears as though the information is leaking backwards in time.
35:35What this experiment suggests is that there's some kind of anticipatory effect
35:38that's five seconds.
35:40We don't know what the limit is.
35:43If our minds really can see into the future, how can we explain it scientifically?
35:52In the 1860s, during the time of the American Civil War,
35:56physicist James Clerk Maxwell in England worked out the entire theory of light and electromagnetism.
36:04What Maxwell showed is that light, this mysterious thing that pervades our universe,
36:09is actually a wave.
36:11So we now know that light is nothing but a wave of electricity and magnetism oscillating together.
36:20Think of a dancer waving this gigantic flag.
36:24The hand motion comes first, and then the wave starts to unfurl.
36:29But let me let you in on a dirty little secret.
36:32There is a second solution to Maxwell's equation that has haunted physics for the last 150 years.
36:41There are also these bizarre advanced waves, solutions that allow you to see the future.
36:48In the advanced wave solution, the flag moves before the dancer's hand.
36:53Information travels from the future to the present.
36:57To the present.
36:59So could this alternate solution to one of the basic laws of physics explain Dean Radin's results?
37:07In the 1950s, genius physicist Richard Feynman realized that advanced wave solutions were
37:14actually mathematical clues that a new form of matter existed.
37:19Antimatter.
37:21What looks like matter traveling backwards in time is actually antimatter acting perfectly normal.
37:32Matter going backwards in time is the same as antimatter going forwards in time.
37:39We thought that maybe, just maybe, it might be possible to see the future,
37:44communicate with our descendants from the present time.
37:47But here comes Feynman, who says no.
37:52Feynman won a Nobel Prize for this work.
37:56But Dean Radin isn't convinced that advanced waves
38:00rippling backwards in time from the future can be written off entirely.
38:06In modern physics, now we at least have a plausibility argument.
38:09Well, we can no longer say that the physical world makes it impossible.
38:13We know that it is possible.
38:14So the challenge now is to say, well, how do we connect this missing gap?
38:19Advances in theoretical physics are one way.
38:23But there is another.
38:25More evidence.
38:28This researcher could be the man who finally convinces the world that the sixth sense is real.
38:36Scientists have been searching for evidence of the sixth sense for well over a century.
38:42If it exists, it can't be as strong as the other five senses.
38:46Otherwise, we wouldn't still be arguing about it.
38:50But if we can prove that the sixth sense is real, it won't matter how weak it is.
38:57It would turn modern science on its head.
38:59Darrell Bem has had a long and successful career
39:02as a professor of psychology at Cornell University.
39:07Now, he too has turned his focus to the sixth sense.
39:13I wanted to do work on precognition or premonition
39:16because it just boggles the mind to think that the future can affect the past.
39:22Darrell has spent the last eight years testing this very question.
39:29A person is shown two curtains and are told that behind one of the curtains will be a picture
39:35and behind the other is a blank wall.
39:37And their task is to pick the curtain that has the picture behind it.
39:42Just like Dean Radin, Darrell is trying to figure out what the sixth sense really is.
39:47Most of the time, their success rate is 50-50.
39:51In other words, they're guessing.
39:54But when, and only when, the computer shows erotic images of a person
40:00and the computer shows a picture of a person,
40:02Darrell is trying to figure out what the sixth sense really is.
40:07The computer is a computer.
40:09It's a computer that can read the mind.
40:11It's a computer that can read the mind.
40:13It's a computer that can read the mind.
40:15When the computer shows erotic images, subjects can predict what's behind the curtain 53% of the time.
40:23A small but statistically significant beating of the odds.
40:29Darrell believes disability to sense erotic opportunities in the future
40:33has developed over millions of years.
40:36It was shaped by evolution to give individuals an edge in finding mates.
40:41Evolution rides on reproductive advantage,
40:44the ability to seek out and have sexual opportunities.
40:48So it would make sense evolutionarily to think that precognition or something like it
40:55would certainly serve reproductive advantage and survival advantage.
41:02If he's right, Darrell has revealed a completely unexpected aspect of human nature.
41:08Time may not flow neatly in one direction
41:13and humans, being evolutionary survivors, have learned to use that to their advantage.
41:21I call it feeling the future because it tries to get in the fact that
41:25the future is able to affect both your thoughts, cognition, and your emotions.
41:32When it was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
41:36Darrell's article caught worldwide attention.
41:41Sixth sense research, long on the fringes of science, is moving ever closer to the mainstream.
41:49There is more sixth sense stuff around than we are maybe willing to acknowledge
41:54because we are processing much more information on a continuous basis than we are aware of.
41:59It's clearly physical, it's tied to small amounts of energy,
42:03and it tells us that there's a connection between us and our world around us
42:07that we haven't previously fathomed.
42:10We're at the point where we can show that we have anomalous findings.
42:14And what do we mean by anomalous?
42:16It means it doesn't fit into the current structure of how we conceptualize physical reality.
42:22We're looking at the edge of what's known.
42:25I think we can say with high confidence that in the realm of psychic phenomena,
42:29something interesting is going to happen.
42:31In the realm of psychic phenomena, something interesting is happening.
42:35Is there a sixth sense?
42:39It's not even the right question to ask anymore.
42:42Mainstream brain research has already uncovered previously unknown sensory pathways.
42:48But whether our thoughts can join a global mind, or whether we can sense the future,
42:54we only have fragments of evidence so far.
42:57In the end, we will find the answers, because they're all right here.