 Welcome to Skepticoat where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. Today we welcome Dr. Arno DeLorm to Skepticoat. He's here to talk about his new book Why Are Mines Wander? Understand the science and learn how to focus your thoughts. And Arno is super qualified to talk about this topic. He has just a stellar academic background, having published over a hundred period papers, and he's currently a distinguished professor at University of California, San Diego. Right here in my backyard, which happens to be, and a lot of people don't realize this, really one of the top universities in the country in a lot of fields related to science and medicine. He's also an ion scientist, that is the Institute for Neuetic Sciences, and I know that's an organization that many folks who are listening to this show are familiar with. Finally, since we're going to talk about consciousness and where your mind goes and what your mind is, he is a long-time meditator. So he's familiar with this topic on a personal level as well. Arno, welcome to Skepticoat. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. So I think we should start with talking about this fine new book you have. Tell us what it's about. So it's about consciousness first. And why are mind wanderers? Mind wandering is like you're reading a book and then you start thinking about something else. And that's what we call mind wandering. And that happens when you read a book, but that also happens when you're washing the dishes or you're washing the dishes or when you're meditating. So I experienced that first when I was meditating and I was mind wandering a lot. So that's why I started to study mind wandering in my academic pursuit. Also when I started almost 20 years ago, this wasn't studied at all. Now it's more popular. But yeah, that's how it became interesting in the topic. What is mind wandering? Mind wanderers, can you tame your mind not to wonder is it worth it? And what are the techniques? So yeah, that's what the book is about. So you're just kind of dipping your toe into all sorts of philosophical, metaphysical and spiritual questions when you do that. I just thought you touched down on it so maybe you want to go a little bit deeper. I mean, there is a deep, deep of knowledge, you know, locked up in these wisdom traditions about mind wandering and about mind focusing and about techniques or about what that means and all this kind of stuff. So to what extent did that kind of drive your kind of internal curiosity and then bringing that into the laboratory like you like to do and from a scientific perspective, how much did you lean on what, you know, meditators have been saying for hundreds if not thousands of years about this mind wandering thing? Yeah, I lean on it very much. So the book has two parts, you know, one of the part is more the theory and the neuroscience and then the other part is more about techniques. What can you use to try to decrease your mind wandering and, you know, it's like we can discuss whether it's good to mind wonder or bad to mind wonder, you know, it's like debates, wherever, you know, wherever it's necessary or not. What's interesting is that if you ask expert meditators people who meditate like sometimes do free retreats they still mind wonder in their meditation so they can't stop the wandering mind and so the practical part to come back to your question is very much anchored into yeah, eastern tradition of meditation and meditation technique and the ones which were adapted to the west mindfulness and other techniques I've experienced myself in my practice and so I put in the book. You know, I think you're touching on something, there's some wonderful adaptation and movement forward that's going on in the western tradition as it's trying to reimagine and reinterpret and I think in so many ways really taking the whole topic of consciousness expanded consciousness meditation so much further and you know, within the non dual community I think this is a hot topic that you're bringing up of what is really the purpose of meditating and am I missing the point when I'm trying to enter into that expanded state when instead of realizing you know, kind of, and it gets very Buddhist that I'm always there and that even the thought of trying to will myself to be in a different state might be missing the point. I was just listening to Eckhart Tolle and I think he has been making that point more lately and of course he's kind of one of the leading voices in a lot of this stuff so what are some of your thoughts on what you touched on to focus or not to focus that is the question to wonder or not wonder. Wander or not wonder well you don't really have the choice you have to wonder but you know that reminds me so I'm a Zen practitioner and about 15 years ago I was on this trip to India I did a lot of my research in India with expert meditators and so I was at this ashram with a friend of mine and we were doing this it was in the, you know, Vivekananda and Ramakrishna following and so we were doing this ceremony and this teacher at the end there was a lot of chanting very very different from Zen and the teacher came at me at the end and asked me how was it for you you're probably not used to that how was it and I was like it felt very much like my meditation sometimes your mind is engaged totally in the chanting and sometimes you're just thinking about other things and you smile, I don't know if you agree or not but for me I took that as an agreement that we experienced that in many different tradition meditations so it's not specific to one meditation tradition and it is also central to our meditation not only we do it all the time in our meditation but also we judge ourselves as you said I mean, for me like a good meditation is one where I didn't mind wonder too much I was concentrated I was focused and ones where my mind was all over and I was thinking about all these things I have to do is not a very good meditation and even though in this Zen tradition which I follow you're supposed not to judge yourself don't judge yourself and so I also want to mention so I get different traditions but one of them is transcendental meditation I was lucky to be trained in this technique as well and in this techniques mind wandering is seen very differently mind wandering is seen as thoughts bubbling up to the surface so it's actually a good thing to mind wander in this tradition which helps to not judge yourself as much you have a lot of mind wandering and then you're like oh I had a good meditation session lots of thoughts bubbling up lots of energy was released and so it's also a different perspective help to not judge yourself too much as your mind wandering of course all this discussion folds back into the fundamental question about the nature of consciousness rest that and I listened to a YouTube talk that you just gave tell us where you stand on that I mean obviously this whole conversation we're having presupposes fundamentally a post materialistic post physicalist understanding of consciousness tell us you're also in the neuroscience world you can't walk through the hallways of you know Cal San Diego and kind of just proudly say of course that's all baloney how do you work those two worlds yes so you know what you're touching on so I'm one of the minority of scientists we just published this paper what if consciousness is more than the brain and we got a lot of interest in that mainstream paper and yeah the idea is that you know I start from the hypothesis mostly based on my practice and also you know my intuition that I cannot be reduced to you know just a bunch of dead matter as you know Francis quick would say and that's also based on some thoughts experiments which are not necessarily new but if you imagine you have a very fast camera you know that can film down to I don't know 10 to the minus 15 or not 10 to the minus 18 or something seconds I'm probably wrong there in the units but you know very very fast and you can see every single molecular reaction in the brain because you know we know how the neuron works and we know how they transmit information etc so we have a lot of understanding how this machinery work by your chemical machinery so let's say we can see everything we can see slow emotions everything that happens and you know where is consciousness there you know it's just like do you just speed up the movie and now consciousness emerge magically I personally find it hard to believe so I believe there is you know something more to consciousness than just the emergence from speeding up the movie of biochemical reaction so that's an hypothesis and that's you know I've done many experiments to try to prove or you know disprove the hypothesis that consciousness is more than the brain and in some way you know consciousness might be fundamental you know a force in the universe like the other forces you know the strong force weak force and electromagnetic force you know the thing that kept going through my mind as I was kind of listening to your presentation doing this show and on this topic for a long time is how we just remain stuck in it it just seems silly it seems ridiculous of course I mean the emergence of consciousness from the brain has never been proven there's no empirical data for it and on the contrary you know it's not like we haven't presented mind manner interactions right there at IANS I mean Dean Raiden has Six Sigma results of pre-sentiment experiments that completely shatter the materialistic paradigm they can't be incorporated into the materialistic paradigm with its relationship to time or causation you know that's all kind of out the window I guess I get a little bit frustrated that we even give any weight to it we understand why it's been around we understand that shut up and calculate kind of keeps the engines of our society working but from a really from a philosophical and scientific basis you know Max Planck 100 years ago consciousness is fundamental is the paradigm that is the best fit for the data is it not? Yeah and I mean the I think you know one of the issue we still have in the field is you know the lack of model you know how does consciousness interact with matter you know you can say consciousness is fundamental but you know we still have to figure out how it interacts with the physics we know how does it integrate into the physics so it's work on this and actually we're organizing this price at ions for any experimental idea that consciousness is more than the brain so we got three winners last year and then we're doing another contest this year but you know one of them was Hoffman with this but you might have had on your show with his conscious agents you know where consciousness is fundamental and then you build you know the break of you can build quantum mechanics from these conscious agents so that's one model but still this model has problem because you know we're subjectivity in that model it's just a mathematical model so there's still lots lots to do there's lots to do but back to I guess where I was before the other side hasn't done their part I mean they haven't offered any empirical data showing how consciousness can emerge from matter there's none there's zero and on the other hand there's all sorts of data of mind manner interactions you might we mentioned Raiden in the pre-sentiment which is just it's replicated now you know 40 times in his lab and other labs around the world he's got a six sigma result he's got the global consciousness project another six sigma result you got Mossbridge another person from IONS I mean you have at least seminal kind of parapsychology experiments that rather kind of conclusively present solid data that just shatters the existing paradigm so I don't know why we feel a need to prove it seems like proof is shifted to the other side where they have to either they have to provide the model for how that data the good data that we have could be incorporated in and if we keep kind of coming from the position that let us prove it to you I mean they'll just do the same thing that they've always done just to say that's not enough we need more where the we're the dominant paradigm that's not scientific to say we're the dominant paradigm that's not even you know that's the one funeral at a time thing I just I don't know I think we need a different way to kind of leap forward past that I mean I believe you know scientists are about data you know so I can the data you know you just have to keep on publishing and keep on showing data and I'm not of the camp and I don't think Dean would be in this camp he's continuing to do experiments as well so he's not stopping to do experiments and I've published many paper with Dean and Julia and yeah so I don't think you know from our perspective you know it is fully demonstrated you know there's still issues of reproducibility you know which are you know addressed and Von Lucca do for example you know experiments which you might have heard of but yeah it's not without necessarily problems we've demonstrated there's nothing to be done anymore you know first you know one experiments isolated doesn't demonstrate anything has to be reproduced independently by different labs and then you know in this field we're also lucky that at least for me you know this has improved the methodology I use just because I want to know for myself so I'm going to use the best statistics and also I've published paper for example I release the data so other people can have access to the data so I think it's a long process and also you don't want to rush it you know you don't want to and you want other people to reproduce it and then yeah scientists you know believe in data and there is this one funeral one funeral at a time you mentioned you know it's like the old scientist or you know it's not really because they're holding onto their beliefs and this happens but I have trust in science and that scientists are more about data than their own belief at least the true scientist and that you know the proof of the data it's never a proof but you know the proof beyond reasonable of the data we are prevail whatever it comes out to be yeah we won't drag that on too long you know Max Planck 100 years ago he was the king of the heap when it came to physicists right so Einstein kind of sat at his feet and threw parties for him saying what he was what a great physicist he was and now he was the best till World War II kind of created a little rift but other than that it wasn't like he was a philosopher sitting back with his pipe in his mouth when he says I regard consciousness as fundamental that was his experimental conclusion from looking at light and looking at the observer effect and looking at what everyone else was doing so the idea that 100 years ago the best science we had the best physics we had suggested that and now we should wait longer you know and Dean Raiden may be continuing to do that research but you know the last time I talked to him other than his peculiar transhumanist kind of tendencies he seems pretty frustrated with the fact that he has conclusively proven this if you will beyond what is normally accepted as necessary you know how many replications do you need to do how many people achieve a six sigma result in these kind of human machine interactions I mean that's pretty remarkable anyways there's so many other things to talk about one of the things I'm super interested lately is artificial intelligence and I stumbled across and this is on your ions website and the blog post is artificial intelligence and consciousness so in this blog post it was more to the type of intelligence artificial intelligence we're doing like chat GPT it's still very mechanical you know even though people don't really understand what's going on in these models they're still run on computers there is a lot of intelligence in this network but I don't think there is much consciousness now it doesn't mean that they can't be cautious I believe for example you know in the Francisco Varla so Francisco you know was a well-known neuroscientist that passed about 15 years ago and he created the mind and life institute together with Richard Davidson but he had this hypothesis you know of auto poetic systems and auto poetic systems is just that a system is defined by its function rather than its parts that's why you can do artificial heart and that's why you could do artificial brain and I also believe that if the brain now that's more you know hypothesis but you know if you consider consciousness as a force or field of nature you can imagine that the brain is like a particle accelerator you know that's like a fusion reactor that maintains this field of consciousness and there is no reason why you know it should be the brain or you know some other construct that will feel the same function so I do believe you know that consciousness is not limited to humans you know you have animals but even you know you can have completely different like a silicon brain but the type of intelligence artificial intelligence we're seeing today is not there at all it's just still very mechanical and predictive to some extent so that's what was the blog was about now it doesn't mean that artificial intelligence won't bring us closer to that goal mostly because artificial intelligence is going to accelerate everything you know accelerate science accelerates unfortunately wars accelerates you know human evolution to a degree I think we we don't really realize you know so yeah the singularity might be near because of artificial intelligence and the way you know things are speeding up so it will bring us closer to artificial intelligence being conscious but right now yeah it's not yeah there's so many points that I'd pick on there I mean first off I've done a lot of research I used to be in AI a long long time ago I was in my PhD program studying artificial intelligence I started an AI company back when expert systems were hot and going so I've always had an interest in the field and stayed on top of it and was never a big believer until lately and now what they've done and the technology behind this which a lot of people I don't think are aware of I think it's much more powerful than many people realize because they see the front-facing AI and they see you know image generation where there's six fingers on the hand the hand is or the face is distorted and stuff like that and they don't see what's going on I mean yes machine learning is so much more advanced and you really even know at this point because every day they're making new advances but are you with the kind of bootstrapping idea with AI that really what we're seeing right now is us feeding the data to AI the next level of really explosion in growth is when AI generates synthetic data and then the iterative power of that is kind of unimaginably so that I wonder if we're not a lot closer to this edge than we thought and then let's come back after that and talk about sentience because what I think I think Max Planck is right and I think by definition that means that AI can never be sentient because all matter is derived from consciousness consciousness is fundamental so a silicon chip by definition can never be sentient because it is derived from matter it's the wrong way around in the equation okay two huge points there to kind of we can rustle to the ground I'm aligned with you I do believe silicon can become sentient if you have if you implement the way humans are sentient you can do it in silicon doesn't matter if it's in cells or silicon as long as it's fulfilled the same function so that's the same auto poetic idea or viola but what matters is the function more than the substrates on which it's based so the brain is designed in a specific way and it has specific functions that is able to channel consciousness and my worldview of consciousness is fundamental and there's no reason why silicon wouldn't be able to do that in terms of the performance of AI I personally believe AI will not only accelerate everything but is also a threat to humanity because you can totally imagine AI taking over the world and it doesn't have to be sentient it just can be completely like it's just optimizing this function and human programed it but he optimized human human optimized AI to guarantee human survival for example but the AI decides that the best way to make human survive is to park them in prisons so it's totally imaginable that AI could potentially take over the world in 10 years without being sentient it's just optimizing this function that has been programmed into it which is number 1 to survive and number 2 to help human but it got sidetracked because it wasn't programmed in the same way and that's the main issue in AI is the alignment problem you want the AI to do something but it will find a way to do it simpler and maybe bypass what you really wanted it to do and it's very hard to explain it I want you to do this but not this but this etc I have a bunch of thoughts on that but I want to return to the function thing as the Turing test that you're kind of saying you're really kind of restating the Turing test it's function if it fools you into thinking it's sentient it's sentient it's the work that you are doing and so many other of your colleagues are doing like we can talk about your mediumship research in a while what I think you're doing is redefining the Turing test because I would suggest that now sentience has to include that ability to look at those images and make that judgment and now I think that puts everyone like well no I could never do that I could never do as well or better than humans do in the pre-sentiment experiment have to if that's part of our consciousness then we can just look at it from a functional standpoint if you want I think what it suggests is a deeper reality that we are in consciousness rather than and that consciousness is this largely expanded realms and realms that you explore in your meditation traditions tell us they are I think that is the most parsimonious explanation for the data but even if you just want to say nerdy neuroscience UCSD you still got to say ok sit down chatbot you got to do our nose medium experiment and you got to do the pre-sentiment experiment until you can do those you're not sentient what do you think about that? I agree in principle now you know we test subjects there's some who can do it some who cannot and then we do statistics across many people and we show on average people can do it but if I use that as a test or sentience you got to say a lot of humans are not sentient so I don't think it's necessary the best test I had this idea of the oneness where you had this Google engineer who believed the AI was sentient I can't remember his name but a little bit like this if enough humans consider that the life of AI is more valuable or as valuable as the life of their child that would be from my perspective one of the Turing tests you can do that humans are convinced that it is sentient and they're convinced enough that it is sentient sentient and they can be confused but if the humanity is convinced that AI is sentient or me for this specific test AI is sentient and the way you can demonstrate if it's convinced or not is by doing this kind of test where do you put would you turn off the AI do you think that's cruel between this AI and this child seeing how people attributes not only agency but sentience to that AI and how humanity treats it so that's the oneness Turing test okay since I brought it up a couple times and I never really give you a chance to explain I think a lot of people find it just fascinating tell folks about your mediumship experiment and how it is, I read a little blurb how it's like one of the most highly kind of read or noticed articles on Research Gate which you had an interesting comment but they don't take it seriously but they do so yeah the mediumship experiment is from the assumption that consciousness is fundamental now how do you show that consciousness is fundamental so you have different branches consciousness can be fundamental but it cannot interact with the physical world so so you can actually never show that consciousness is fundamental it's just a epiphenomenon and I think that's where most scientists you know neuroscientists at least 70% stand is like okay consciousness qualia exists but you know it can- break it down at these little microtubules I can accept that I can live with that just don't bring it into my life yeah and it's also that illusion is free will free will is illusion I think that's where most neuroscientists would stand that consciousness qualia exists but it doesn't have any functional role in the world you can't influence anything with your consciousness you just happen to be conscious and you have no free will and I would say 70% of scientists are in that camp and then the other camp is you also have the materialist reductionist which would be I think right now a minority you know compared to these scientists would believe consciousness exists and then you have you know the scientists like me would believe consciousness is fundamental and then when you have consciousness as fundamental you have again two possibilities consciousness is fundamental but it is still contained within the brain somehow so it can't have any effect outside the brain and then you have the other hypothesis consciousness can have an effect outside the brain and that's based on the fact that consciousness is a field like the electromagnetic field it extends to infinity so there's no reason why it should start at the brain and so if consciousness is fundamental it can have an effect outside the brain how do we test that that's the matter you've been mentioning my matter is actually much harder to study than telepathy for example so if you look at the literature there's many more reports of telepathy even spontaneous report of telepathy the person who invented the brain waves Hans Berger I think in 1923 about 100 years ago did that because he had a telepathy experience with his sister and you know we have all these reports of twin experiencing each other's feelings even at a distance so that's much more common than people influencing electrons on the bench it's also much easier to study and so that's why I was interested in mediumship so you have psychics we'll try to predict the future and then you have mediums who claim they're in contact with your DCs relative and when they claim they're in contact with DCs relative they just want to bring you proof they want to condense you that's the case so they're gonna say oh yeah they like this they like that etc and here the idea is that I wasn't testing whether they were in contact with DCs relative it could have been telepathy with a client I was just testing whether there was some abnormal information they were having access to that they should not have access to based on you know the mainstream view that these phenomena don't exist so it could have been telepathy it could have been something else here I wasn't testing that I was doing a double blind experiments with mediums where we just gave them a name so for example we will ask the medium I can tell us something about John so I would ask the medium tell us something about John and we had somebody that wanted a reading about John but I don't know that person that's why it's double blind the only thing I know is somebody wants a reading about John and my colleague you know contacted that person that wants a reading about John and told them somebody's gonna do a reading about John at about that time and then I have another person you know that wants a reading about Robert and so I asked the medium okay now you've given up reading about John give me a reading about Robert and so you know they tell me so we have them 20 questions you know what's their hobbies and you know what's their how did they pass what's their body characteristics and you know that's another one of them so I can talk about one this one later the first experiment is that's what we did and the idea is now I have two reading about one about John one about Robert and I'm gonna send both of these to the person that wanted John and the person that wanted to reading about Robert and of course I removed the name so they don't know which one it is and they have to tell us okay I think that was reading for me or I think this was the reading for me and they also rate each questions independently and when we did that we did find what we had above chance expectation that the medium would be correct and so that was one experiment the one you just showed was the issue of doing this experiment is very heavy we have to talk to the people who wants reading we have to communicate with them and you know send them their response and when we were with the medium they say oh yeah sometimes I see a picture and I know what happened to that person I know how they died etc so we did this specific experiment where we had 200 pictures of individual and these were people who died you know in different circumstances it could be dead by firearm it could be a car accident or it could be a heart attack and we had mediums in front of the computer screen they just had to press a button just looking at the picture for about 10 seconds and say I think this person died of heart attack or I think this person died of car accident or I think this person died by firearm so that's what you just showed these pictures and of course we spent a lot of time trying to balance so you know we have about 200 images and one third is of one type so one third of car accident one third of heart attack one first of dead by firearm and we tried to balance so there's no more people smiling in one category no more female than male no more obese in the heart attack category of course so we balance all the image so that takes a lot of time but once we have the image we can have the mediums in front of the computer screen trying to select the button and you know of course we respect you know people who have passed we use you know public pictures and the result we found was that yeah when we took 10 I think we had 10 mediums and 10 controls when we took everybody we had results which were above chance expectations so people were able to guess in quotes you know whether the person died of a heart attack or they died by firearm or they died by car accidents yeah that's this plot so chances at 33% because there's three categories of image and you can see there is more bars above than below the line and it's not like yeah they're gonna guess 100% it's more like they're gonna guess 35 instead of 33 but we have so many image but this 35 is actually very what we call significant it's very unlikely to happen by chance here we have odds against chance of 1 in 41 so it means there's like very little chance it happens by chance now you know does it mean it's real or can they use other methods it's not ruled out like for example you look it's been shown you know if you look at an image of someone smoking and someone not smoking you can detect you know which one are smoking so maybe it's written on their face somehow but you know they're going to die of a heart attack or they're you know they have like they look you know maybe a bit more impulsive and you know they're more likely to die you know in the by fire arm so yeah you know it's they're still that's not even go there with all that apologistic no it's not apologistic it's extremely important that's the controls you know if you use the control at some point you gotta close all the loopholes right and then once you close all the loopholes then what so you know the whole field of after death communication and there's multiple forms of after death communication right there's mediumship there's also spontaneous there's induced after death communication you know the people from University of North Texas Dr. Janice Holden has done all sorts of work in inducing this 60% of people who are married for a long time loses spouse report after death communication there's all sorts of ways to verify that data too I mean I think that the reality of after death communication is more or less established I think it's fantastic that you did this research and great more let's give you another hundred million dollars to go do another thing you're all for it another because there's no money in this kind of research but you know all for it right but the point being I do want to say it's fantastic to be familiar with Dr. Julie Byshell from Windbridge we did some studies together great so she's been doing this for a long time comes the same conclusion no matter how you slice it after death communication is real now I want to pin you back to this other thing the new Turing test must include this right because what you said is hey you know just not everyone has this capability so we can't incorporate it into a Turing test well it's not everyone can do graduate level calculus but we don't say you're not sentient if you can't do it or any other field of study if this is a part of the human experience then why shouldn't that become part of what we consider to be sentient I think we're just on the cusp of being there and saying okay these you know you go to India right and all those people would say of course this is part of your or of your nature is to have these capabilities why wouldn't we incorporate those into I'm still pitching incorporate them if you want to you can incorporate them alright you're not going to stop me no great it won't hurt to incorporate them yeah right I hear you okay so what else do we really need to talk about particularly with regard to the book and with regard to your research at University of California San Diego what is kind of most on your mind right now to turn it back to the book in your mind and where your mind is wandering yeah and so in the in the book there's also this section where do thoughts come from and the idea they could potentially come from outside the brain so you know you have different thoughts you know thoughts which are related to yourself and thoughts you know which are like the mediums you know when they have the when they have experience you know they experience it as thoughts where do these thoughts come from so it's also you know leaving the door open to yeah thoughts not coming from the brain and consciousness being fundamental and you know what else what else are we doing so yeah I'm doing all these experiments on consciousness being fundamental also at UC San Diego I'm studying AI and brain waves so more building what you know large models based on lots of data to process brain waves and lead to the future discoveries I do believe you know AI will accelerate sciences in all realms so it's not only whether AI sentience but also using AI as a tool to accelerate discovery in science and understand better how the brain works. Where do you come down on the big spiritual questions who am I why am I here are those topics you even think are approachable from either your personal experience as a meditator or your spiritual experience I don't know if you've had any spiritually transformative experiences so that's why I got into science actually I was in sixth grade and I'm from France I was in suburbs of Paris in the courtyard at school and you know and I didn't know what I wanted to be of course you know being 12 and the thoughts struck me I want to know why I'm here and so that's why you know in my upbringing if you want to know why you're here and you're in you know western country that means you're going to study the brain and so that's what I did and you know I realize science can just tell you how things works you know I will never tell you why and that's just not the goal of science science is a method you just use it as a method so you can test a lot. From my perspective there's no suit of science there's only bad science bad science is when you don't use the appropriate statistics and you don't design your experiment in a way that is rigorous enough to you know address your hypothesis so so that's where I transitioned you know about 20 years ago to you know studying more you know fringe topics using the tools of science because yeah science doesn't care what you study what are you doing with the near-death experience science then how are you incorporating that into your world view and I guess for me you know the question is at what point do we say okay that data is good enough now we have to start taking serious the accounts and start incorporating those in as well because there seems to be this kind of forced bifurcation within materialistic science where we can kind of push against it you know so long and they keep pushing back pushing back and we get blogged up in kind of quote-unquote proving it which is not the job of science I don't think I think the job is to put forth the most parsimonious explanation for the data and say that's where we're at we're never going to prove anything so what are you doing with the near-death experience data and at what point do we start looking at those accounts and taking them seriously because there's a treasure trove of potentially understanding we could have about what is in these extended consciousness realms yeah so near-death experience it's very hard to study I haven't studied myself near-death experience even though I have colleagues who've done that you know in the ICU but so yeah near-death experience is when you see the light basically you know your heart stops you see the light when you come back to tell your story but in a lot of near-death experience you have OBE out-of-body experiences and these ones we're trying to study because first there's some individual who claim they can do out-of-body experience at will so we can you know you can potentially study these people and also we have designed VR paradigms where so virtual reality paradigm where we're trying to induce out-of-body experiments out-of-body experience so that's one of the area of research we're pursuing because once you create out-of-body experience so we had this other paper where we asked I think 150 scientists what would be the most convincing results for you you know in psi experiments but would convince you and they'd say well if out-of-body experience can for example experience some object that they're not supposed to for example they get out-of-body and they can read something that they're not supposed to see from their vantage point that would be convincing to these scientists and so you know that's one of our area of research where we're trying to induce out-of-body experience and see if people can experience you know prove their senses things that were you know from their vantage point they're not supposed to experience like sound in a different room or you know image hidden somewhere excellent that sounds absolutely fantastic so our guest today has been Arnaud DeLaum and the book that you're going to want to check out let's bring that up one more time why are minds wander understand the science and learn how to focus your thoughts but please also visit his ions page there's so much more to this fantastic research that he's doing and he was nice enough to share just some of the things he's into and every time he brings up a new topic you just realize how transformative that can be for science I mean this latest thing he just goes oh yeah out-of-body experience we're doing that too and here's how we're going to do it and mediumship of course we got that covered so a lot going on and it's fantastic that he's pushing it forward and being so successful with it because you are gaining a lot of attention and traction so that's to your credit thanks again where do you see things going and what is the best way for people to kind of join in your world and see what's going on with your work yeah so on the mind-wandering people can go and meditation people can go to my webpage and then for all the experiments all the fringe experiments on mediumships out-of-body experience it's more the ions website so ion.org fantastic well Dr. DeLorm it's been absolutely great having you on and thanks again for taking this time with us well thank you for having me