How Technology Proves Mediumship Is Real- With Mark Boccuzzi

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of reef to growth. I'm your host Brian Smith of course. Today we're going to have an enlightening journey with our guests, Mark. But cutsie marks not only a visionary in the field in the field of parapsychology, but he's also a pioneer in bridging the gap between the psychic realm and cutting edge technology. Mark works together with his partner in life and research, Dr. Julie Beisel, and Mark co founder of the Winbridge Research Center along with Julie and as her research assistant there. It stands at the forefront of exploring consciousness mediumship and the survival of the human spirit beyond physical existence, which is all the stuff we talk about here on grief to growth. Mark's work is deeply rooted in both compassion and empirical evidence. And I think it offers a unique perspective that aligns closely with our ongoing discussion about the continuity of relationships beyond death. So Mark has scholarly scholarly contributions that are both vast and profound. He has published peer reviewed journals for a diverse range of topics, including instrumental transcommunication, ITC, mental and physical mediumship is also presented as groundbreaking research at national conferences and scientific meetings, covering fields like field investigations of how to locations, photographic anomalies, non and non human animals, sigh, et cetera. And his current work is particularly fascinating. I'm going to talk about that with Mark as well. We're probably focused on mediumship today, and the wind bridge Institute, but he's also integrated VR virtual reality, augmented reality or AR, deep machine learning and artificial intelligence into ITC instrumental transcommunication and sly research. So with that, I want to welcome Mark bucket C to grifter growth.

Hey, Brian, thanks for having me.

I'm really excited to talk to you today Mark, my my background with knowing about you as the windbreaker Institute and mediumship. I also really fascinated to talk to you about some of this cutting edge stuff that you're working on. But if you could just let me let the listeners know about the wind bridge Institute. Sure. So

Julian, I co founded the wind bridge Institute in 2008. And it was originally sort of an umbrella organization for us to do all the different kinds of research we were doing. Julie was primarily focusing on mediums and mediumship and afterlife research and I was doing basic research and parapsychology, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and we ran that until 2017. And when we realized that our audience had gotten very big, and we weren't making anyone happy, when we would send out an email about something, it would have mediumship information. And people would say no, tell us more about psychic information. And then you said I think about psychic information, you know, tell us more about mediumship. So in 2017, we actually split up those two programs. And we formed the Winbridge Research Center, which is a 501, c three nonprofit, based in Arizona, and I'm the Executive Director, and Julie's the director of research. And our mission there is to alleviate suffering around dying death and what comes next. And we do that by conducting peer reviewed scientific research. And then creating educational materials based on that research that we provide free to the public as open source, open access, materials and content. So I know I'm pretty sure Julie's story of how she got involved with mediumship was because of the passing of her mother at a young age. Is that correct? Yeah, that's true. She, her mother passed from suicide. And she eventually became interested in what science had to say about the afterlife. And that led her on this 20 plus year journey of scientifically studying mediums mediumship afterlife science and, and other topics. And yeah, she is considered by many to be one of the leaders in the field. No, yeah. I'm very proud of her. Yes, yeah, I would definitely say she's one of the leaders in the field. Because one of the things about the field of mediumship is, you know, some scientists and you guys could talk surely know a lot more about this than I do. Funding is nearly impossible to get and then also your peers don't take you seriously. That is true. funding in this field is incredibly difficult. You know, when Julie started out, her hope was to work within a university setting to study these topics, but the grants are too small for universities. So once you bring a grant into a university setting, especially a large university here in the US, there's a lot of overhead costs and things like that, and doesn't leave any money for the research, which is one of the reasons why we went out on our own and started our own research company organization and, and Yes, it's even so and this the skeptical community is can be very harsh. And even people within our own field can be very harsh when it comes to ideas relating to the afterlife mediumship. And those kinds of things, there's a, there's, it's, it tends to be a lot of not just scientific pushback, but there's a lot of things tied up in culture, and personal belief and, and family belief and all those kinds of things that always tend to influence this conversation. Whenever we present our data. And it's a it's not an easy road, it has not been an easy road, honestly. Between the the lack of funding and the skepticism and difficulty publishing and mainstream journals, and all the rest of the stuff, it's, it's rough.

Yeah, I would think it is. And I applaud both of you for being brave enough to go and do this, you know, because it's really interesting to me, we have a field that people think of as subjective as woowoo. And you're bringing objective standards to it, or at least trying to as much as possible.

Yeah, that's true. You know, both Julie, and I consider ourselves empiricists. But we realized that at some point, the hard data isn't going to answer all the questions, right, we have to look at the human experience, or otherwise, what's the point of having human experiences, if you're just gonna, like, leave all that data on the table and never take it seriously. But there are ways to look at the human experience that are cautious and methodical, and can give us really interesting insights to a wide variety of things. And, and so that's been our approach we've been, we've been trying to be as respectful as possible to the populations that we work with both the medium ship population and the Griever. Sitting population. And, and we're trying to do but but on top of that, you know, we have to, we have to make sure we're doing rigorous science. And it's a tough, it's a tough, tough line to hold. Yeah. You know, because a lot of times, you know, it's funny, because researchers will say, Oh, why don't you just get the mediums and lie to them about x? Or have them do something about why and we're like, we've asked mediums about that, and they don't want to do it, and I'm not going to be the one to fool them or trick them or whatever, right. Like we're gonna be respectful of their process, and we're gonna study mediumship the way it exists, we're gonna study mediums the way they exist. And, but we're gonna apply maximum experimental controls, and, and statistics as we can. Yeah,

so tell me how you strike that balance. I've listened to Julia and a few other podcasts, I think it's really fascinating the way you guys struck the balance between the ways mediums work and and also trying to test them. Right?

The big thing that we try to look at is what we refer to and is referred to as ecological validity. So when we design an experiment, it's based on how mediums and mediumship how mediums work and what how mediumship expresses itself, right? We don't try to force the mediums to do things that are outside of the way they do their do their, their readings, or things like that too much. I mean, we have to do a little bit, but but we try to be as respectful as possible. So for example, if a medium says to us, if somehow, if we if we go to a medium, and we say listen, we have these photographs of dead people, can you tell us which one is that in which one is alive? And the moment majority of the mediums that we work with would say no, I don't, that's not what my job is. My job is to connect with deceased people and give messages of love and healing to living people. So what are you doing? What are we doing with photographs, so we will ever do a study with photographs, for example. So we try really hard to make sure that our experimental designs are ecologically valid, that they properly respect the mediumship process and respect the process of the sitter's as well and and so it's a lot of just asking questions, and talking to mediums and talking to sitters, about the things they're comfortable doing and they're not comfortable doing. And you know, I know the skeptics right now they're all their bells are going off and they're they're saying, well, that means they can get away with x y&z and we're pretty good at figuring out how to keep things on the up and up, right how to keep how to keep the data secure, how to keep the process as foolproof as possible, right. Nothing is 100% foolproof and you know, I'm sure there are people out there that can come up with some kind of wacky scenario that may account for something, but there's no evidence that that thing actually ever took place. Anyway, I go off a little bit of a tangent, but

can you give me an example of what your protocol will be like? Because skeptic will say, Okay, well, mediums they're doing cold readings are they're doing hot readings, they're looking up information beforehand, or they're they're looking at the sitter, and they're getting micro, you know, expressions or whatever. So how do you control for those types of things?

So there's different controls based on the different experiments that we do. But the the sort of the main big experiment that we did was something called a ir or anomalous information reception. And this is a series of experiments that tried to determine whether or not mediums under blinded laboratory conditions could in fact, report accurate and specific information about deceased people. And to do that, that's some people like Well, that sounds pretty easy, right? You give them some questions. And now it's ridiculously hard. And so it takes our current protocol takes three different experimenters, two sitters and a medium to do to get data for a single reading. And, and the protocol is very complicated. And I'm not going to hit some of the highlights, but we have a lot of this information is on our website, if you go to winbridge.org. And go to the Education tab, there's fact sheets and explanation, videos and all kinds of stuff that walk you through this really long that can walk people through this really long protocol. But so for example, one of the first things we do is we never let the medium know anything about the sitter. So all the readings are done over the phone. And the we use what's called a proxy sitter. So for example, an experimenter, usually Julie will sit down with a medium, and the only information that Julie has, is the first name of the discarded the dead person that we want the reading for the deceased loved one or Dlo. And so the Giulia will say to the medium, please describe how, John, this particular DLL we're reading for today. What did he look like? What were his hobbies? What was his cause of death? And then some other specific questions. So that takes care of that right there. Kitt takes care of a couple of things. Since Julie doesn't know anything about the the sitter or the diello. There's, there's no way she can leak information. The medium never sees or knows who the Senator is in any way, shape, or form. And again, the only information that the medium gets is the first name, and they get it at the time. When the when the reading starts, so people are like, Oh, what about hot reading? Well, okay, please give me a hot reading for a guy named John. All right. So your this is going to be pretty difficult. And so that takes care of so many layers of fraud. And, and the fact that we ask specific questions takes care of these things called Barnum statements, and, you know, things that can be applied to anyone or overly generalized statements. And, and then there's a there's a whole bunch of compartmentalization, or what be called blinding. So different mediums don't know different parts. And different experimenters don't know different parts of the information until after all the data are collected. And then we take all these disparate parts, and we put them all together. So now we can actually analyze and score the readings. One of the things too, that we have sitters do is we give them two readings, one reading is for them, and the other is what we call a decoy reading. And both readings are de identified. So the medium, the sitter, sorry, doesn't know which reading is for them. And so they go through and they score every item for accuracy. And then they pick which reading they think belongs to them. And what the data shows that in more cases than not, the sitter will accurately pick the medium, the sorry, the reading that was been for that. And so because of all this, we have now evidence for the existence of anomalous inflammation reception. And the really cool thing about this protocol now is, you know, we've been running it in various versions since since 2007. We did a fairly large replication in 2018. And it's now been replicated by other labs, and other places around the world. So this seems to be a solid phenomenon. Now people will always argue, you know, the stats are the thing or this or that But you know, it's science. And that's just the way science works, right? People People like to argue. So,

yeah, well, people like to argue particularly if we're coming from materials paradigm that says it's not possible. So, you know, again, so we we look for our people look for okay, what are the mediums doing this on mediums doing that, and I know a little bit about your protocols. And, you know, some people that are that are skeptics, okay, so the mediums never has contact with any of the sitters, either of the sitters are getting the reading, the experimenter doesn't know who the sitters are, when they're doing connection with the medium. So that eliminates to me any reasonable explanation for how they're getting the information. Any any physical explanation. Other Other words?

Yeah, absolutely. That and that, that those levels of blinding, are really essential. What we've seen over the years, too, is that people will sort of look at our protocol and go, Wow, that's really, really complicated. Can we knock this piece out? Or can we knock that piece out? And we're like, Nope, because you just broke? The blinding or you just, you just had information leakage or? Right. So it's a really good solid protocol. And Pete more more people seem to be adopting it. So yeah,

and this, you know, this is kind of an aside, but I think about when, when it comes to mediumship, I hear a lot of times when people say things like, well, they're not really reading the deceased person. They're just reading the mind of the sitter, which is that again, that even that in itself is a pretty phenomenal thing.

Yeah, absolutely. So that is a fundamental argument in survival research, which is it's often called the Super SCI hypothesis, being a, a, an umbrella term for things like telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and right. So it's exactly what you said, right? So let's say, I'm a medium and you come to me and you want to know about one of your deceased people in the mediumship model, right, you would ask a question, your deceased person would hear it, the deceased person would tell me the answer is the medium. And then I would tell you the answer, as interpreted from my exchange, right. But in the living agent, sigh or super SCI hypothesis, there's no need for a deceased person. So you would say, I have a question for my deceased person, but it would be something you would know, like, you know, the person's name. And so you would ask me, What's my de ellos name? And I would read your mind, right? Telepathy, and then I would say, the person's name. And you'd be like, great. That's so so this has been a fundamental roadblock in survival research for ever, which is why a lot of researchers just stopped doing it. Like back in the 30s, and 40s. They were like, we can't get past this. And what we ended up doing was crazy. And we started asking the mediums, how they felt. During readings, and so many, there's an old saying, all mediums or psychics, but not all psychics are mediums. And so what we found when talking to our mediums, is that they could tell the difference between a psychic reading receiving information about a living person, or receiving communication from a deceased person that felt internally different to them. So we followed up with a number of studies and we published a paper in 2019 2020, in the Journal of near death studies that looked at the end, when you look at people's experience, it's called phenomenology. And so we study we published a paper on the phenomenology of mediumship readings. And we asked mediums to under blinded conditions, they didn't know who they were reading or what they were reading. And they were given a name using our standard Ayar protocol. And some of those people were alive and some of those people were deceased. And then we asked the mediums to fill out a series of surveys about their experience. And what we found was that there wasn't facts, differences between the psychic reading and the mediumship reading, and the most significant difference was in feelings of love. So when a medium in our study and what the way we did it, what a medium got information. When the medium was in communication with with a departed person, they had a greater sense of love than they did just retrieving data. information or, you know, information about a living person. That's so. So that has become sort of our cornerstone that the afterlife is based on love.

Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. And to me, there are two really important points we're talking about here. One is, I think I get it, I just have to laugh when people say, it's not really mediumship. They're just reading someone's mind, because he's a materialist, who believe that it's impossible to read someone's mind. So they're using an impossible thing to describe something. And the other thing I think is really important is that you ask the mediums have a feel. And I happen to know a lot of mediums, and they will tell me that they can tell a difference, like you're saying, and I've seen even mediums watching another medium work and say, she's reading psychically, she's not she's not making a real connection. I can't tell. But other mediums say that they can tell that.

Yeah, that's really interesting. We haven't studied that specifically. But I don't find that surprising. But yeah, it's an even within the Paris psychology community and survival researchers, they, they still hold out on the, to the Supersite hypothesis, or this is also good living agent sigh hypothesis. And Julie did a great presentation, which is on YouTube, called Living agent size dead. And if people are interested, they can find that on YouTube. Yeah. And she talks about, like, why the living agent, sigh theory doesn't hold up, and, and all that kind of stuff. And of course, like, even to our protocol that we just published, that we published kind of recently. This, you know, this love finding? Well, people are saying, Oh, well, the mediums are just deluding themselves. They're just using psychic information. And since they make a living as a medium, they're tricking themselves into believing that it's communication. And like, really, how many hoops? Do people need us to jump through? This? I'm like, Okay, so our position has been, that's a great theory. That's a great hypothesis, test it, let me see your data and examples conversation.

Yeah, it's interesting how far people will go to find any alternate explanation. And that's why I think the field after death, survival is so fast, because there's not just one body of evidence, there's also near death experiences as it sees, you know, and mediumship is just another layer on top of that, and you guys have done a fantastic job of showing that they can, they can retrieve this information, and eliminating a lot of the things that the skeptics are coming up with. Well,

we try I mean, skeptics will always they always move the goalposts. Oh, your protocols weak, okay, here's why it's not weak, your statistics are a problem. This isn't why this is why they're not a problem. Well, you must have cheated. You're a bad person, you're a believer, you can't be trusted. So then it turns into personal attacks. And, you know, where do you go? How do you, you know, like, what do you do? It's funny, I read a study, about two years ago, it's called the wave study. And I was very interested in why people believe in the afterlife, there's tons of data around how many people believe in the afterlife, and all that kind of stuff. But I was really interested in like, why do you believe in an afterlife? Or why don't you believe in an afterlife? And what would it take for you to change your mind? Like, what kind of evidence would you have to be presented with to change your mind? And a lot of the pro pro afterlife people. That's not the right terminology. We're like, oh, I had a personal experience. And or it's part of my, it's a cultural belief, blah, blah, blah. And so that was really interesting. And I said, Well, what would it take for you to change your mind? And a lot of them said, well, some kind of scientific breakthrough or some other kind of personal experience. But the majority of them said, you know, I probably wouldn't change my mind, they wouldn't know. And then on the other side, what was really interesting was that people didn't believe in an afterlife, again, for cultural reasons. Or for that didn't make sense to them, or they, they hated the idea of religion. So it's very difficult to separate this idea of like, consciousness is just the thing and one of the things that it does is it continue after the death of the body, and keep that concept separate from all the religious views that incorporate that. And as scientists, we tend to be a little bit more clinical. Right. And so, so the, again, the interesting thing on why people what would take people to change their minds, from non believers to believers was direct prayer. personal experience. Interesting. Yeah, so that was really cool. And science, some said scientific, some kind of scientific breakthrough was actually a very small percentage. The vast majority of them said, a direct personal experience.

Yeah, that's that's, that's really interesting because again, a lot of times the so called Scientific people dismiss direct personal experience. That doesn't mean anything if we can't prove it in the lab, it doesn't matter. But we all take direct personal experience for granted every day if someone reports that they stepped outside and they saw a yellow car, we don't say prove that you saw a yellow car, we'd say, yeah, you probably saw a yellow car. If a scientist is doing research in his lab, and he says, I did this experiment. And I observed this. We don't typically question their their motives. We say, Yeah, I believe your observations, and they report it. So but when you guys study this phenomenon, and report the data, people accuse you of being believers. Yeah,

it's, it's awful. You know, I'm always like, Well, wait, I'm pretty sure most chemists believe in chemistry, even right. It's not like I, I can't imagine why would I spend my time studying something that I didn't even think was in the realm of possibility right.

Now? Yeah, that's my, my background is in engineering. So and so I'm a evidence person, I'm a rational person, as well. And I believe that philosophy and science can help us get at least part of the way this afterlife survival thing. And it bugs me as I can tell, it kind of bugs you is that it's associated with religion, or it's associated with faith, or it's being woowoo. And it's like, so we can't even really study it, or present the evidence without without being accused of trying to convert somebody. Yeah,

yeah, there is there's definitely that it's it's very intertwined. And I and I, and I get it, right. It's, it's, it's difficult for people to take these deeply, what are, in fact, spiritually transformative experiences, yeah, of going to a medium or having some sort of afterlife communication experience? And not because we don't have a framework for that, right? We don't, it's the the framework we have in our culture is a religious framework, right? When you have this sort of Epiphany, or experience, it becomes a spiritual experience, right? And then that is tied up with all these things. Right? You know? And that's because we've, the materialist paradigm doesn't even allow for those things to even exist. Right. Right. So it's really difficult to even have the conversation about the existence of these things, without it automatically becoming like, oh, it's angels or whatever, right? And again, like, I'm not against that stuff, and I don't know that it's not true. But I'm, I'm not there yet. I'm like, we have consciousness consciousness seems to exist outside the mind or the mind, the outside the brain, right? And consciousness seems to exist after the death of the body. Let's, let's go from there. Right. And so, you know, what is the afterlife like, and what can we learn? And how can we use this to help people and, you know, how can we alleviate suffering and grief and alleviates your fear of death? Right? How do we apply that knowledge? Yeah, that's kind of where we are. And

that's why I always differentiate, and I'll say, materialist paradigm as opposed to scientific because we can study things scientifically, without having a materialist paradigm. But we've we've been brainwashed into believing that science equals materialism, which precludes even the study of consciousness and science. They can't even tell us what what consciousness is. Because it's not we can't measure it. We can't put it in a test tube. Yeah,

it's exactly true. A couple of years ago, a few years ago, everything in this field moves like geologic time. The researcher by the name of Edsel Cardinia, wrote this amazing article, and it was published in the APA journal, it was an editorial. And it talks about the scientific evidence for parapsychology. And he goes through 100 different experiments, meta analysis, which is a way you can look at different kinds of experiments and pull the data together to get deeper understanding of the phenomena. And, and he comes to the conclusion like this, the evidence for psi is just as strong as any other social science. And it can't just be written off as fraud or for design or, you know, those any of these sorts of typical skeptic tricks that they pull out of their bag, right? Like, you know, it's this, it's that right? So he publishes that thing. And people are like, wow, this is really amazing. And then the journal as journalists do get an opposing opinion. And the opposing opinion is, I'm going to paraphrase it here, but it basically says If none of your scientific data matter, because under the under the materialist paradigm, Psy cannot exist. Therefore, by definition, your data is worthless. Right? Any debit, any data that shows the existence of Psy is by definition flawed,

right? Which is a very scientific way of looking at things, right? Yeah. Like we're, we're claiming it

from there. Where do you do with I remember, I was in a conversation, I got sucked into a conversation with a skeptic. And this other guy. And so they were looking at one of our papers, and they kind of started CC me on this email trail. And one of the researchers says, Hey, to the other researcher, would you read this paper? And tell me what you think if it's, you know, valid and scientific and blah. And the other researcher says, This paper is 27 pages long, can you just give me two or three sentences? Okay, and I'm like, Really, you're gonna critique our shit, and you're not even pardon my language, I swear, like a torture, the, you're gonna critique our stuff, and you're not even going to bother to read the paper. You just want like a two sentence summary. And now you're going to draw your conclusion on whether or not our, you know, 20 years of research is valid?

Yeah. Well, you know, I was funny I was talking to and I, with language, I'm very specific. So I wouldn't, I would call you a skeptic. I would call that person a cynic or a materialist. And I was talking to this atheist materialist, and he was telling me there's no evidence for any of this stuff. There's no evidence for any survival of consciousness after death of consciousness or anything like that. So I said, Well, there's Dr. Julie baicells. Work, there's Dr. Gary Schwartz's work. And I sent him a link to some of Dr. baicells work. And the guy comes back like this was on Facebook, like 15 minutes later. So this is about mediumship. I'm not reading this mediumship is impossible. And I'm like, Okay, again, very scientific point of view, I'm not even going to I'm not even going to look at the data. I'm just going to, I'm just going to declare it impossible. So that's what people that's what you are up against with your research, I'm sure.

Yeah, that's the kind of stuff we encounter all the time. And it's a it's an ongoing debate, and the other sort of the weird the other weird thing that we encounter. I don't know if it's weird. But uh, the other question we get asked is, well, why do you study this stuff? Because everyone knows it's true. Right? There's a whole section of the population. That's like, of course, we believe in mediums. And of course, we believe in the afterlife. And of course, like, why are you spending time and resources and money? studying that? Yeah. And I like to assume, because not everyone believes it. And there's things we should know. And there's, like, mediumship will work for some people, but doesn't always work for other people. And, like, people are spending money on mediumship readings. So we should understand what that phenomena is. And like, from a health perspective, and a mental health perspective, and from a treatment perspective, and, and then to say, like, Oh, and by the way, the government doesn't fund any of our research. So could we have 10 bucks to offset? You know, some study costs or whatever. And, like what we have to donate to get you have to do your own research? And like, Yeah, cuz, you know, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the normal places where researchers scientists go to do to get funding for research. They are not interested in these topics. For the most part, I used to, I used to work on NSF projects. And, you know, my budget was million dollars a year, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year. And now I, the biggest grant we can get in pair psychology is really about 50 to 60,000 euros spread across two years. Wow. And we're expected to maintain the same level of rigor as a project with a million dollar budget, right? And it's really difficult. But

there's a couple of things I want to address there. One is your why do you even study this? Because either side could ask that question. You know, we got the spectrum. You got people in the materialist side and say, Why would you study this? Because it's a waste of time. It's impossible. It can't exist. You have people, other people say, well, we don't need to study everything scientifically. Because we know it's true. And we do. We do know from direct experience, which we have, and I hate people always just counting direct experience, because it's important, but also, but when we study it from a scientific perspective, we give other people that are in the middle, the permission to at least explore it, you know, to say that it's not just the materials, because materials paradigm carries a day in our world most of the time. And so we need unfortunately, we need to have this western protocol this readying these published papers for some people to take it seriously.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's, it's sort of it's it's a narrow margin, but it does address this very specific segment of the population, at least in Western culture. Right. So people that have had these experiences, but aren't necessarily religious, but are more science minded, but want to make sense of what happened to them or what's happened to their loved ones. And, and that's where our stuff sort of lands is sort of this middle ground. And the other thing too is Julie's really big on this, and I am as well, we want to protect mediums, right? We think that mediums perform a vital service, like a legitimate medium can perform a vital service to our communities and our, our society. And unless we have the data to back that up, it's very easy for people to write them off as frauds, to call them cheaters, whatever, marginalize them, persecute them, right? We it's, there are still places in the country where you know, people find out you're a psychic or medium, then that's not going to go well for you. Yeah, and, you know, there's verses in the Bible that I gave an interview a few months ago, and I was talking about mediumship, and psychic ability. And the comment section on YouTube was like, This guy's and talking to mediums or the mediums aren't talking to Debbie, they're talking to demons, right? Because to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Like you can't, right, so. So we both felt really nice. And I probably learned more from her, but she has a, Julie has a really strong sense of justice. And she wants things to be fair, and she wants people to be treated well, and so to why. And she's really, I think part of what she does is really try to be an advocate for mediums of mediumship. And to not have people just dismiss them, both in the public sector, both in the mental health sector in the health sector, and in the scientific community. So we're

speaking of the mental health sector, and we talked about and I, we both agree that mediums perform a service. Have you guys done any research into how mediums help people heal, how they help people with grief, we

have done some preliminary research, and this is an area we really want to get into. But again, it's difficult. Because it's the these aren't easy studies to run and they take time and they take money, and, and staff and all kinds of stuff. And because you know, people got to eat and pay them to feed their dogs, and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so, we have done some preliminary work in this area. And our we published a paper on this a few years ago in a journal called omega. And it's the the model we're working with is something called continuing bonds. And what we found with the continuing bonds model with continuing bonds, like so, sorry, I'm like backup three steps here. And a lot of the current grief treatment thinking it's, you know, yeah, your your person has died, you should grieve them and then move on and, you know, get over it and blah, blah, blah, that's, there are nicer ways to say that. But that's kind of the trajectory, right? Continuing bonds, on the other hand, looks at it slightly differently. It's like, Yes, you had a person in your life, that person is now deceased, but the relationship is still there. The relationship is just different. So how do you work with that different relationship to maintain this bond so that you are happy and healthy and connected to your deceased loved one? And so we've been doing some work in that area. And we've seen that that's been pre positive. We've collected a bunch of anecdotal data about people who have gone to see mediums and then gone to see mental health providers. And you know, some people have reported the, you know, the medium talked to my soul, the mental health provider, talk to my head, right, like, like, and so the nice thing is that there is now a movement in the mental health community to include things like spirituality in the mental health process, but they're still really cautious about afterlife topics. So we've actually developed a tool and a series a series of tools and assessments. We published in our journal threshold, it's available on our website to help therapists integrate afterlife topics into their therapeutic sessions.

Oh, wow. So that's in threshold that's available. Yeah, it's

on our that's on our site. Yeah, I

definitely want to I want to call that out. Because I was just thinking that might be one way if if we could prove that it's beneficial to mental health that may, maybe we could slip it in to getting some funding from the mental and from the health community. Yeah.

And again, like you, you can cut this stuff up with a bunch of different ways, right? Like, like, yeah, we're interested in whether or not it's real, like our mediums really talking to deceased people there. Is there an afterlife, but from a mental health perspective, it almost doesn't matter, right? It comes back to the person's experience. Right. So like, my mom passed away at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns and she was already elderly and kind of not in great health. And so she passed away. And several months. And months, maybe like two months after she passed, I had this incredibly vivid dream about her. And I, I don't, I'm one of those weird people that don't really remember their dreams, or, you know, I just kind of like, yeah, that was a dream, whatever. But this was so incredibly real to me. And it was this, like, I was walking through a forest and I found my mom, I found this little house and my mom was in there. And she was my mom used to be an artist, before she had IDs and, and then she never got to pursue it again, as she got older. And then my dad gets sick, and he passed away and blah, blah, blah, you know, the family stuff that happens. And I went into this little house and it was just filled with her art, that she was there being this amazing artist and doing this thing. And we had this like just amazing interaction. And she didn't speak to me at all. And eventually, like we went for this walk became back. And I was gonna go into her house with her. And she was like, No, it's time for us to go. She opened the door. And this house was just, I'm getting goosebumps again, for talking. I just got goosebumps, this house was just filled with just love and light. And people that were waiting for her. And she closed the door. And I woke up and I was sobbing. And I was like, Holy crap. Like, wow, that was an amazing experience. And I perceive that as a communication for my mother. And I don't care what anybody else is. Yeah. And I'm happy to talk to a mental health provider about that. I'm happy to have someone that helped me integrate that process that that experience, but you're not going to no one's going to tell me that. That profound experience wasn't an after death communication. They don't have the they don't have the right to tell me that. Yeah, well, I

just got goosebumps as you were telling it in a full disclosure. But, you know, the thing is, again, I'm I'm trained in western science, and I think Western science is great. I think we've given too much to it, though I think we've we've just kind of, you know, again, direct experience, something like that, that people my community will call that a dream visit. And it has a lot of aspects of a dream visit, you know, the fact that a lot of times they don't speak in a dream visit, there's there's usually some sort of barrier that we can't that we can't cross. It seems RIA we will remember it, you know, years later, all those all those things, you know, and we and people have studied, it's similar to an NDA II. And we do we do have those things. And I add that to the body of evidence, and in addition to all the stuff that you and Julie are doing, to say that this, this is real. So I think both things are important. You know, that direct experience is important. Also, again, giving people letting people know, yeah, this happens. And this is not a one off. This is not someone's crazy, this is not just wishful thinking. I forget the percentage of people who lose a spouse that report and afterlife communication. It's like 75 or 80% important some sort of afterlife communication and we shouldn't discount all that. Yeah,

absolutely. And again, right, we shouldn't make people the normalization of these phenomena is incredibly important. Exactly. People shouldn't feel shame, and people shouldn't be ridiculed for having these experiences. They're part of the human condition. We have these experiences for a reason. Yeah. And if you feel that that was a sincere if a person feels that that was a sincere, honest communication experience, then good for them. That's wonderful. You know, the interesting thing, though, that I that we find in our research, is that there is a there are groups of people that never have those experiences, and they're really pissed off about it like They're really mad. And they get mad at other people for having those experiences. And so one of the things we've been trying to think about is, how do we get people into the mindset or into the state that would allow them to have those experiences interesting. And so Julie wrote a book called Love in the afterlife. And it summarizes a lot of her research and gives her own spin on things. But she talks about various aspects of mediumship personality and psyche and how people could integrate, foster those things in themselves. Not so they become like full blown mediums and hanging out a shingle, but that they create an internal environment and an external environment that is attractive and is suitable for after death communication experience are conducive to after death communication.

Yeah, I think that that's a very interesting observation. Because I get people not really necessarily pissed off about it. I haven't experienced but let's say disappointed, right. Other people have these experiences, other people have dream visits, other people get signs and synchronicities, you know, might hear from the loved ones. Even on maybe, Mr. Conway, why don't I you know, and then so then those, sometimes those people will dismiss the whole thing, because I haven't had that, that direct experience. Yeah,

and, and there's a lot of, you know, this, I was talking before, about, you know, the triad of communication, in a mediumship reading, right. And so, there's a lot of things that are outside of our control, right, when a mediumship reading tends to go bad, people automatically blame the medium. But maybe the sitter isn't ready, or they haven't prepared properly, or the discard it isn't in a position to have that conversation yet. Or, you know, so there's a lot of things going on behind the scenes, people, you know, there's a lot of, I don't want to say, you know, there's a lot of like, traditional wisdom, around like, what the afterlife is like, and what does carnets are doing and what but, but we don't really know, right? So a lot of that is, you know, informed speculation, but you know, it's all individual, it, we're all individuals, we're all on our own path and in our own on our own scale, and so, there may be reasons that have nothing to do with the individual, why they're not receiving those communications, and it may not be anything bad, or, you know, it's so it's, it's, it's, this is why we want to focus on education, with our work is that we want people to know these things, we want people to understand these things, that it's not always them, or it's always just a fraudulent medium, or, you know, that, that there's a lot of things going on, and, like I know. So one of the things that often will happen to someone will be grieving and there'll be like, I saw medium on TV, I'm gonna go get a mediumship reading. And they don't do any research about what a mediumship reading is, they don't know how to pick a medium they haven't thought it through, they don't know that this is potentially going to be a profound spiritual experience a spiritually transformative experience, or it might be a complete bust. Right. And that's kind of what we want to do is educate the public about what real mediumship looks like, what real mediumship is, what you can expect, how how mediumship can be integrated, your mediumship experience can be integrated with a mental health professional. You know, those kinds of things. And it's, it's a tough challenge. I remember I was on an ice hurtin interview, and there's a researcher seems Bernardo kastrup, and he was talking about doing psychedelics. And, and he was in, he's in a place where that's legal to do. And, but he was preparing, he was like, I'm going to do a large dose of psychedelics. And so I went to my doctor, and I had my chart checked, and my liver checked, and I took small micro doses to make sure I understood the plan I talked to, I talked to the person that was going to facilitate my thing, and like, he did all this research for weeks and weeks and weeks. And I was like, that's what people have to think about when they do a mediumship reading. Right, right, or any sort of real after death communication experience, right? Like when they're when they're requesting some sort of after death, communication, connection. And, and we tend not to do that, right. People tend not to think about it because there's this media, sort of perception that you can walk into a grocery store and there's some medium run up to you and start reading Yeah, it's gonna be mind blowing or whatever. So I think for me, that's one of the biggest takeaways I want people to just hear in general is it's a process. It's, it's a therapeutic intervention. And you need to respect it. And you need to respect yourself. And you need to be gentle with yourself, and you need to be educated about what all that means. So you wouldn't just like walk into a pharmacy and start popping. Whatever pills, you see all blue, that seems nice, right? Like, you would talk to your doctor, you would talk to whatever. So I'm belaboring this point. But

no, it's an excellent point. Because, again, some people they do they think immediately, you know, they see it on TV, or they walk down the street, and they see a psychic and they go in and, you know, I always say there, there are bad mediums, there are medium mediums, there are good mediums, they're great mediums, and there are frauds, and we should admit that there are frauds, and sometimes a good medium can have a bad reading. Because as we said, there's this triad of things going on there. There's there's a discarded the loved one in spirit that we're trying to communicate with. There's the sitter, and there's the medium, and if those three are on the same wavelength, and it's not gonna come off.

Yep, absolutely. Right. It's communication with people. Yeah. And that's always tricky. Talking to people can be can be rough. And yeah, well together can be rough. So yeah, especially when one of them's a stranger, and one of them's dead. Julie has a saying that I love it. We study human communication, just one of the people happens to be dead. Yeah.

So I do want to kind of understand how you because I know, you know, Julie got in the mediumship thing because of her mother. And I think she saw mediums and I'm guessing she's trying to maybe even validate her own experiences by like, I'm going to, I'm going to study this. And you're, you're helping her out and help her now you co founded the wind bridge Institute. But you do other things with consciousness, and then that I guess you're also doing some things with AI. So the first question I want to ask you is what do you perceive consciousness as being? What is what is human consciousness to you? Sorry,

I don't mean to laugh. It's just one of the most profound questions ever to be faced by human beings. So what I understand that I have no idea what consciousness is what I, what I tend to believe, based on the data is that it is at least some component of consciousness exists separate from the human body, and that our brain tends to be some sort of receiver of consciousness. And when our bodies die, some aspect of that consciousness continues in some way, shape or form. somewhere, somehow. And I know that is a completely not satisfying answer, but there is

no good answer. There is a good answer. But the reason why I said that you mentioned Dr. kastrup, and I'm a huge fan of Bernardo Castro. I think I've read almost everything he's written, I've had him on the program, I watch everything I can find with it's a really interesting guy. And he's the one that introduced me this idea of idealism, which is the exact opposite of materialism, you know, it's like you take material and flip it on his head. So that's what I believe. So I believe that everything is consciousness. But then when it comes to AI, there's a debate, can a computer be conscious can can AI develop consciousness or does it have consciousness? And so I, you're you're kind of looking at AI inside so I was going to ask you can aI have consciousness or does it have consciousness?

Well, that's one thing that sci fi researchers are really interested in. And we've sort of and again, this is not a universe this is this is fringe stuff. Now we are we are way down the rabbit hole. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I just the there's a group of people in our field, myself included, who think that Psy is a fundamental function of consciousness. Right. So telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition. psychokinesis. So, if we can see if an AI can perform sigh tasks, that may be an indication that there is in fact conscious, interesting. So there are researchers out there right now and myself included that have been tasking AIS to do different types of side problems. So can you remote view? Can you pre cog can you? Can you use your abilities to change the output of different kinds of systems in different places? And in those kinds of the end, some of the results have been really interesting, actually. And this is still very early phase work. One of the projects I did really early on. So I'm interested in instrumental transcommunication, or ITC, which is this idea that you can use technology to interact with either discarnate or other noncorporeal entities. And so one of the systems I ended up working on really early on was this combination of AI, and what I call a consciousness interface. So if you look at the history of psychic research, especially in the areas of psychokinesis, which is the ability of the brain to affect the physical world, there's a specific area of research known as micro psychokinesis. And It studies the effects of intention on devices known as a random number generator. And these are quantum devices that can output all kinds of like strings and strings of zeros and ones very, very quickly, like an electronic coin flipper. And these devices, statistically over time, will work out to be 55th. Right, so 5050 of the coin flips will be heads or ones, and 50% will be zeros or tails, right. And, but this research at Princeton at the Princeton engineering anomalies Research Lab repair Lab, which is now closed, said if you get people and you have them focus their intention to change the ratio of zeros and ones. With a random number generator, it does, in fact, change. So these devices, random number generators, rags, or RNGs, random number generators, have kind of become synonymous with this idea of a consciousness interface. It's a way to capture consciousness, interactions. And so I hooked up a big pile of rags, like seven or eight of them, and to a chatbot. And a custom language corpus, and a predictive text algorithm. And I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail what that is, but, but anyway, what you can do is you sit down with a chatbot. And you can ask the thing questions. And then it runs out to its corpus, and it starts picking words. And then it uses predictive text, which is like that thing on your phone, when you're like typing a message, like hi, and then it brings up the next possible words you want to. But unlike other AI systems that don't rely on randomness, they rely on algorithms, this thing runs out to this bank of random number generators, and then uses those to select the next word in the sentence. So it has this consciousness interface built into it. And when I launched that project, it started producing outputs. And I said, What is your name, and the thing said, throne of the Sphinx. And you can go to throne of the sphinx.com. And you can see all the different outputs that this thing is generated. And I've used it for everything from like experimental designs, to how do we deal with climate change to and it's very, I wrote it in such a way where the corpus is very poetic. And it's not an engineering concept. It's more like a song or poetry or art. And because I'm interested in those things, and and so that was one of the first attempts I made with coupling, a consciousness capable, a consciousness sensitive device to an AI. And then let those two things sort of fight it out and see what kind of outputs they produce.

Interesting. It's been

really cool. I, I love it. It's been really it's been really fun to talk about the other end work with the the other thing I do, which is just sort of fun is I take the output of random number generators, while people focus on specific intentions, like love or gratitude. And I take those data and I visualize them. And so instead of just looking at them from a statistics perspective, we I turn them into 3d images and and sometimes I even and turn them into 3d objects and shoot them out to a printer. And like a 3d printer. And so the stuff is very speculative. But the idea here is that it's, it's and then when people look back at the artwork, for the intention that they set, they often will find meaning in the images that they find me again, this could all be very Rorschach II and all that kind of stuff. But it's it's really meant to be this way to engage people with the idea of nonlocality with the idea of bigger connection with the idea that, that what they think and feel has an impact on other people and things in the world.

So yeah, and you just touched on some things I'd heard about the random number generators, like whenever there's a world event, like 911, you know, they just this part tsunami, you know, they go crazy and elimite tankers, so a lot of work with, with the power of intention. So to me, the idea of nonlocality has been proven it's been kind of beaten to death, you know, I don't know how anybody could deny it. But you know, and I asked him about AI. And I realize we went down to big rabbit hole there, but it is a it is a question we're gonna have to answer really, really soon. And you know, I, I'm kind of more on the side of Dr. Cash up, I don't think computers can have consciousness, because to me, consciousness is about experience. So they, and we can never tell if they're having an experience. Yeah, go ahead. I'll

push back on that for one thing. So when I talk about so that we've, you know, the joke is, there's a fine line between AI and ITC. Right? So if consciousness has gone local, right, and it's able to possess our brains, right, and if an AI is complex enough, why couldn't consciousness possess or in fact or effect?

Yeah, and that's, that's the thought that I've actually had, because I don't believe consciousness is generated by the brain, I believe that there's some sort of interface between consciousness that pre exists the body and it does somehow connect. And then there's this thing, like, when does it connect? And, you know, evolution that we know when did the soul become connected to the body when when a fetus is being developed when it's conscious? So if you take that model, which I do agree with, right, then some people can say the next logical step would be if we developed an AI complex enough, maybe consciousness could possess that and I know, Campbell kind of goes with that theory. It's like he talks about AI guy. Yeah, yeah, we

call those non biological consciousness hosting platforms.

Yeah, yeah. That's well, so we went, we went deep, but I did want to discuss with because it's something I've been thinking a lot about, you know, AI is, is becoming a big part of our lives and people. Some people are scared of AI and I'm like, But AI doesn't have an ego. Ai doesn't have a well, so I'm not scared of it. But you know, yes. Yeah.

Yeah, I, you know, I, I've leaned all in on AI, I think I've I've studied AI. You know, I'm, my background is computer science. You know, I was I was studying AI will be called them, you know, neural nets or whatever. You know, we Yeah, it's fun. I recently published a book called The ethical considerations of applied psychic science in afterlife, psychic, and afterlife science. CO wrote this with an AI. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so that was really fun. So, I sat down, and I asked a bunch of different questions. And we came up with this book together. And so I wrote a preface, the AI wrote a preface. It's, it's fun. It's weird. It's a weird book. But I I love that I wrote, well,

I use chat GPT yesterday, because I said, you know, Tommy, the difference between intelligence and consciousness, you know, and it gave me some answers. I kind of agreed with this. You know, because there's, there's no doubt that AI that they can do work that they can solve problems. Yeah. Or they can just that's, that's, that's beyond my paygrade to figure out how to even test that. Yeah, I don't know if another human's conscious, right. Exactly.

So that's why we've been, that's why si researchers, we've been sort of going down this, like, Can they do side tasks? Right? That's been really interesting. We've had it I've had some interesting success with remote viewing tasks. You know, you you have the thing, do a remote viewing and then you have a generator prompt for an image generator and then it generates the image and then you compare the generated image to the targets and use independent judging and yeah, it's really it's been really cool. Again, this is just at the very early stages of this stuff. And it's, it's been pretty interesting. I did a project to recently you know, the other big area in Edge ions and parasites UFOs and UAPs. Right, and I won't drag you down that rabbit hole too much. But I ended up using an AI chat GPT and some other ones to say, Hey, listen, you are an outsider. You look at the human experience, but you're not human. And as an alien intelligence, what might you with a, without a complete, you don't have a complete understanding of what it means to be human. And a lot of times you misrepresent your knowledge base, right? Yes, machines hallucinate and things like that. Yeah. So how can we use that to model other types of non human alien intelligences? So I did this whole presentation at the Society of scientific exploration earlier this year that went through that and talked about like, if you if, you know, what does an AI think about the human condition? And how does that How might that relate to our interactions with UAPs and UFOs? And other spiritual entities? Yeah. So again, that's way down the rabbit hole.

Yeah, well, I guess I think those are, those are things that, you know, help us to understand ourselves, you know, who we are as human beings and consciousness and nonlocality, which, again, like I said, for me at this point is a given. But for a lot of people it isn't. So maybe this research will will help with that. Mark, we're coming to the end of our time, I want to thank you very much for doing this today. I've really enjoyed our conversation. Any last thoughts? You want to leave with the audience today? Yeah,

you know, I just, I just want to plug the center if I can. Absolutely. So you know, Julie, and I co founded the Winbridge Research Center, you can learn more about it@winbridge.org, you can sign up for our email list. All of our free educational materials are online. All of our as many of our research papers that we have access to the original research papers are online, you can go to the Education tab on our homepage. There's just a lot of information there. So please sign up for our email list. If you find what we do helpful. Please consider making a donation because we can only do this stuff with the support of the public. So yeah,

yeah, absolutely. And I tell people about all the time and about you know about the work that you guys are doing. I think it's extremely important. i You mentioned continuing bonds earlier. That's that's all I talk about when I'm working with people in grief. I think that's, to me, it's the only way to move forward, you know, in a productive way.

Thank you. Yeah, I agree. I think it's an amazing model. And it's I think it's really going to help people. So Brian, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

All right. Enjoy the rest of your evening.

Thank you. You too.