 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Leader's Room. My name is Rajiv Peshavriya from the Ecliffe Leadership and Governance Center, and I have a very special guest with me today all the way from Petaluma, California. Dr. Cassandra Wheaton, who is the CEO and President of the Institute of Neurotic Sciences, is here with us. And so welcome. Thank you. Happy to be here. And first of all, could you tell us a little bit what the Institute of Neurotic Sciences is starting with the definition of what does the word noetic even mean? Noetic is a Greek word, and it refers to the inner form of knowing. So if science is the external form of knowing based on observation, measurement, then the inner form of knowing is things like intuition, got feelings, hunches, the way you know that you love your children, for example. How do you know these things? It's an inner form of knowing. So noetic means the inner form of knowing. Science is the outer form of knowing. Noetic science is putting them together. So oftentimes I get this feeling that I know this for a fact, but if you ask me, how did I learn it? I have no idea. Yes. Would that be noetic? Yes, a form of noetic understanding. Okay. Okay. Very good. All right. Then now could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. Well, I'm the President and CEO of the Institute of Neurotic Sciences for the last almost three years. And I've been there for 14 years as a scientist. I'm trained as a clinical psychologist. So I initially intended to be someone who was doing psychotherapy with patients. And then I got very interested in what kinds of things could we learn through science that could help not only one person at a time, but many, many people at a time. So I became very interested in mindfulness and meditation as a potential practice that could be helpful in people's lives for emotion regulation and balance. And as my research continued, I became even more interested in the effect of the mind in general on the body and on other people as we relate to them and the world. So you mentioned meditation and mindfulness. People talk, mindfulness has almost become a movement now, particularly in the US, right? When people talk about mindfulness in many different ways, my question is, is mindfulness meditation also a form of noetic knowing? Well, I would say that mindfulness meditation is a pathway toward noetic understanding or inner knowing. And so mindfulness very simply is defined as moment to moment, non-judgmental awareness of your experience as it unfolds throughout the day. Sometimes people even add a little bit extra, which is approaching every experience with a sense of compassion and curiosity and openness. And so in a way it's bringing conscious attention to aspects of our experience that previously were not conscious or were outside of our awareness. And as we bring mindfulness or conscious awareness to our experiences, and it also then begins to affect our perceptions and our behaviors. So how is it that when people meditate, oftentimes they tell us that after deep meditation, over a period of time, they acquire knowledge that they didn't earlier have? Well, I think it may be that it gives people a different perspective on their experience on all of their perceptions. And so as we move through life, we have many pieces of information that we encounter throughout our day, external information, internal information. And unless an experience is threatening or dangerous or different or surprising, they don't typically catch our attention. We kind of move through our day on automatic pilot and we begin to categorize everything and respond sort of automatically, without mindlessly. So with mindfulness, we begin to approach each experience as though it were happening for the first time. So let's say you have a coworker that you engage with very often, you've decided who this person is, what they're like, what their motivations are. And so whatever they do, you fit them into your current meaning construction. With increased mindfulness, you might actually see this coworker on one day as having possibilities or potentials that you hadn't recognized before. So that's why mindfulness brings us to new information that may be interesting and surprising because we're not just slotting it into our current meaning system and making assumptions. So let me stay with that for a second more. That's very helpful. Thank you. When you look at Buddhism, the Buddha, or you look at Islam, the Prophet, they acquired knowledge, very deep knowledge after meditating for a length of time. And how would you describe that, same as what you just said? Well, I would say the world's wisdom, practices and traditions such as meditation or prayer, contemplation, these are all ways of gaining truth. They're ways of seeing more clearly. Science is also a more modern way of seeing more clearly or gaining truth. And each of these different ways of gaining truth have pros and cons. So the spiritual wisdom way of knowing has the pro of consistent attention to one's direct experience, even if it flies in the face of what you think might be accurate. And so this is the inspiration for so many leaders like, let's take Martin Luther King Jr. who said, I know something else is possible and I can see it, or Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi, so many people said, I don't care what anybody tells me, I know, I see something different can happen. So that's the pro of sort of that spiritual insight. The con is that those kinds of insights that are very subjective can be rife with error. And so you can see also negative kinds of worldviews that have taken over whole cultures or societies or even humanity where we don't think that there's a different way and we rely on blind faith without seeing the evidence that is clearly contradicting that. So science is a beautiful secondary way of knowing that says we are going to rely on evidence, we're going to rely on data, we're not going to assume anything, we're going to try to eliminate as much bias and error as possible. And so that's the power of science is that there's a t-shirt out lately that says science is what's true even though you don't believe it, right? And so if you can bring together these two ways of knowing, not with having one contaminate the other, we may not be able to prove or disprove the existence of God. We may not want to bring any kind of religion or blind faith into science, but if they can meet one another and exchange notes, we think at the Institute of Noetic Sciences this nexus point is where we might find solutions to problems that are plaguing us. So is there some scientific basis to the fact that if you connect with the universe through meditation or other means through attention, intention, or other means, that information that's out there in the universe can be acquired, that's what meditation says, right? Is there some scientific basis to that? Well so far even though the science of meditation is a very robust endeavor, particularly in the West at this point, it's still only at the very beginning of looking into what the possibilities are. So what we know now is that people who engage in meditation practices tend to be more empathic, more compassionate. Even after a very small period of meditation, people are less likely to endorse violent solutions to conflict or giving up liberties out of fear or racism even. So we're showing now that some meditation seems to change the way people look at the world in ways that make them more prosocial, more service-oriented, more connected with a planetary sense of humanity as opposed to a country-based or nationalistic sense. So that we know, we know that even kids that are trained in mindfulness meditation start to become kinder to their peers. And so that's the very beginning. I think the next step in meditation research is going to see if is it possible that someone who has engaged in meditation practices has access to more of these aha moments or innovation or creativity or solutions than people who haven't engaged in such a practice? Or do they have more capacity in their relationships with coworkers or in negotiations or in mediations that might assist in worldwide problems? So you're saying that the Eastern metaphysical claims that if you meditate long enough, there's information out there in the universe that can be acquired. Science is not yet in a position to confirm or deny it. Well, it kind of depends on what you mean. Information in the universe, do you mean being able to kind of access knowledge that you wouldn't otherwise have access to? Yeah, I don't know that that's happened yet. I don't know that that science has happened yet. But I mean, that's the claim of spirituality anyway, isn't it? Because whether you look at Buddhism or Islam or Hinduism or Shintoism or Taoism, that's what they all claim that it's all a field of information and you can tap into it. But you're saying that science has not been able to affirm that yet. Well, I would say this idea that the science of mindfulness, meditation and other forms of meditation leading to people being more pro-social or compassionate or empathic, that is in fact them tapping into a universal truth, which some people would call the golden rule, you know, that how I should live, which is what all of the spiritual traditions are trying to teach, what is the right way to live, what is the most healthy way of living for the individual and for the community, that information people do seem to be accessing when they engage in these practices. So, let me come back to something that you alluded to briefly earlier. Is it true that the mind can heal the body? Well, we know for sure that our minds have the capacity to influence our own bodies, sometimes in a healing way, sometimes in a negative way. And so we know, for example, that fear and stress will activate various parts of our brains, our bodies, our immune systems, our aging, our gene expression. This is very well documented. What is less well documented is do positive states of consciousness also have a healing effect on our body? Do they reverse aging? Do they bring in good hormones instead of stress hormones? Do they ameliorate the effects of disease and do they enhance immunity? Now there is some evidence, again, through meditation research and of course the placebo effect, which is well understood as something that we have to control for because we know that people believing that something is healing not only makes them believe they are getting better but also has physiological indications that they're getting better. Now I say it's well understood that we need to control for it. The placebo effect itself is still not very well understood. Why is it that when someone believes that a medicine might work, even though it's a sugar pill, why does that affect their bodies? So what's next is for us to understand a little bit more about when someone visualizes their body healing, when someone engages in meditation practices or loving kindness practices when they reduce their stress, when they engage in maybe meditation for 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening, why is that already being linked to improvements in brain function, changes in brain structure, immune system enhancements, gene expression changes and there are even studies now showing that it seems to lengthen telomeres, which are the parts of our cells that tell the cell when to age and when to die. So this is a very small change in someone's attention, meditating for 20 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day, but it's having this range of influences on their body that seem to indicate that the mind does have a healing effect on the body. Are you familiar with the work of Dr. Candice Perk? Yes. Can you tell us a little bit about that as to how does the molecules of emotion really work? Well, I don't know as much about her work in detail, but what I do know is that fairly recently in the 1980s or so, psychoneuroimmunology was a field that was hatched by bringing together people who were in the field of psychology, people who were in the field of immunology, people who were in the field of neuroscience so that you could see that what we think, what we believe, what we imagine, what we visualize does appear to have an influence on how our brain functions, which then affects our heart, our immune system, our cells. And I think that Candice Perk's work initially was groundbreaking, and there have been some advancements since then, but there's still quite a bit of resistance in the medical and scientific community to look into the mind as an agent of healing. So if you look at the amount of money that is spent on drug discovery or on improving medical devices, as opposed to the amount of money spent on investigating how the mind might have an effect, the research on the mind is not even 1% of what's being spent on drugs and devices. That's unfortunate, that's been the big debate for a long time, isn't it? But I was very encouraged by the research, particularly from Candice and from Bruce Lipton, all of which are dismissed by a lot of people I know, but at least for once we had some science that said, if you think certain emotions and the chemistry that happens in the body as a result of that, is now we are able to verify it. Yes, well we know for sure. I mean if I asked you right now to think of something that scares you the most and you were to sit and visualize it for five minutes, your heart rate would go up, your temperature would change, probably even your gene expression would change, different things would be happening in your brain, and that's just all from thinking about it. That's not even exposing you to the actual fear. That's exactly right, yeah. So can you give me an example of in your research of where you think science and spirituality has somewhat come closer? Well I'm really interested in the research of our Chief Scientist, Dean Raiden, who has been for many years now looking at mind-mind interactions between people, sometimes isolated from each other at a distance, also mind-matter interactions where we look at whether paying attention to a very sensitive system changes the behavior of the system. Let's say one very well-known example is the quantum optical system where we're looking at does the observer effect as described by physics have to do with this measurement problem or is it in fact the act of observing through consciousness that is making a change in the system? And so all of that research comes from what yogis and people have described for millennia as sort of the nature of reality and human potential as mapped by let's say the Patanjali yoga sutras where they're saying when you engage in these practices, when you clear away the obstructions, you will have the capacity to have influences on physical reality or to communicate with others at a distance. This is exactly what I was referring to earlier, the information access. Yes, yes, so it's very possible that those wisdom practices brought the practitioners and the masters to an understanding of human nature and or human potential and the nature of reality that we have yet to catch up to. What is the future of noetic sciences? Well one thing I'm very excited about at the Institute of Noetic Sciences is we've just launched our IONS Innovation Lab which is a way that we are taking our science and translating it into applications, tools, software apps, mobile apps, devices that can perhaps facilitate people exploring their own consciousness that can facilitate this process of what we and others have called self-transcendence in other words going beyond just this individual self and ego and body to find out how does my consciousness go, you know, am I more than just this than what I think I am and also to provide researchers with methods and tools for doing more science on these topics. So the scientific community in large part has said science should stay away from these areas. We should separate religion and science. There should be no blending between any kind of metaphysical understanding and the scientific endeavor which really makes no sense because it's an aspect of human experience, it's an aspect of reality that is not well understood and of course you can use science to investigate aspects of human experience and reality that are not well understood. So this innovation lab I think will be key to the future of noetic sciences and the fact that most of our science of these topics now is held back by the inability to measure and so we've got to innovate tools where we can measure whether it's someone's own experience through their self-report, whether it's bodily changes based on how they direct their attention or intention, whether it's a physical system that might be able to detect the influence of attention or whether it's something that can connect people at a distance so that they can start to investigate their own sort of connection with each other. So imagine you have a loved one living in a different country and you may have the opportunity to check in with each other using a software app to see if you've had any similar dreams or if your heart coherence is that gets closer as you've been talking to each other on the phone or whether when they're calling and you guess that it's them calling on the phone you can press a button and guess to see if it was them calling just so that people can start to understand maybe there is some force that's connecting us all. It's worth looking into. You mentioned the work of Dean Radin in already having done some experimentation to show what is possible. Can you tell us a little bit about one of them? Sure, well two are probably the ones that stand out for me the most. One is very simply separating two people shielding them from any kind of traditional form of communication with each other. One is told to pay attention to the other person. The other person has physiological measures that are hooked up and they're just sitting quietly. Do you mean like an MRI scan? EEG. Another lab has done MRI but we have EEG, autonomic measures, physiologic measures, heart rate, and galvanic skin response. Things that indicate a sense of arousal and what we find is that when one person is paying attention to the other person versus they're miles apart. Totally separate yes and shielded by a you know steel room so that there's no cheating possible. We find that the physiology of the receiving person changes when attention is being paid to them from the distant person. That's one I think that's very well replicated and quite interesting. The other is looking at this effect of the mind on physical reality using this double slit quantum optical system where physicists know that when the system is being measured or observed there seem to be differences in how we measure the photons in terms of whether they're behaving more like particles or more like waves. This is actually saying that maybe it's the act of observing itself that is influencing the system and so many, many trials now of people paying attention to the system, pulling their attention away, paying attention, pulling their attention away and what we find is during the attention periods there's a change in the behavior of the photons and they act more like particles than waves. What we also find is that when we have people who have had a meditation practice they perform more, they perform better on those tasks. So coming back to leadership, which is what we are all about, we define leadership as the art of creating a better future and I'm sure as in your work at your institute given what you're doing there must be a lot of resistance, there must be a lot of people dismissing your work and actually causing all kinds of obstacles and things and we say that the key fuel for leadership is inner energy to not give up in order to create a better future. What would you say is the connection of any of all the work and the research and the knowledge that you're putting out there in the world through your institute to leadership effectiveness? Well what I would say is that if you think about the metaphor of an iceberg and you've got a little bit of the iceberg that's above the surface of the ocean and a big part of the iceberg that's under the surface of the ocean, what we know about leadership, good leadership, is that people need knowledge, they need expertise, they need skills, they need experience, they need a network, these are all the basic things that we say okay that would be a good leader for my organization. What we learn less about is the part of the iceberg that's under the surface of the water. What is their capacity to utilize their intuition or their gut feelings or their hunches or to be aligned with a sense of purpose and meaning that goes beyond just the short-term gain into long-term goals? What is their capacity to understand that the success of their individual self or their organization cannot be isolated from the success of their community and even of the world? And to what extent are they able to mindfully be in their job from a day to day basis and notice things that are new and different rather than making assumptions and categorizing things into old meaning systems? So there's a certain amount of flexibility and listening to the inner self as in addition to being able to observe the external and to blend integrate those two together and then there's also maybe an indefinable you know sometimes when we have talked to people about the noetic form of knowing or the noetic realm we say you know how do you know when someone is embodying or isn't in connected with that people say well there's a sparkle in their eyes, there's a sense of humor, there's a engagement, there's a way they make you feel when you're in their presence that's different than how other people make you feel and that kind of indefinable sparkle in the eye or the ability to stay aligned with a purpose and a vision no matter what anyone else says and thinks but also not being arrogant and narcissistic and taking into account what other people say and think these are forms of aspects of leadership that probably also haven't been subjected to very much scientific investigation it'd be really interesting to as you're doing to investigate take the time to look into those aspects of leadership that are less well understood. Yeah you know it's a fascinating field out there and I think the next 10 or 20 years are going to be the work that you're doing the work that we're doing and the work that's going on around the world and this is going to shed more light but you know the very thought or the possibility that human thought intention and attention can actually change reality or at least influence reality the fact that it influences people is known through now with mirror neurons and other you know neuro-scientific discoveries that we'll be a little bit closer to that as to how my inner state can affect yours and vice versa but if thoughts can also impact this reality as with some of the experimentation that you're doing that has huge implications to leadership. Well Cassandra thank you very much this has been very enlightening thank you very much for being with us here in Kuala Lumpur we're all looking forward to your session at the Lisa conference tomorrow so thank you very much. You're welcome. And as I was saying you know this is one of many areas of leadership that we don't know enough about and hopefully in the next few years we will know a little bit more year by year day by day and we'll keep bringing you more of more of what we learn about life and leadership thank you very much for listening.