Opening

SPEAKER_01 0:03

The stories, theories, and perspectives discussed in this episode reflect the opinions and interpretations of the hosts and guests and are intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. While we strive for accuracy and evidence-based discussion, not all claims presented are universally accepted as fact. We encourage listeners to think critically, explore the evidence, and come to their own conclusions. With that said, enjoy.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

There are words that are not spoken aloud, and yet they arrive. If thoughts are confined to the brain, how do we explain the moments when they don't stay there? On this episode of Inquirium, we explore telepathy, where this research began, the experiments that tested it, and why some of the most fascinating studies quietly disappeared from mainstream science. This is Enquiring. Hello and welcome everyone. Steve and I have been working hard behind the scenes for quite some time now, researching, preparing, building towards the launch of Enquarium. So it feels great to finally be recording our very first episode on what we plan to be many, many more to come.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Yeah, it's been a lot of work uh getting to this point, but a lot of fun too. Michael and I have been friends for a long time, and we've always found ourselves gravitating and uh talking about these kinds of things. Um Fringe topics, mysterious circumstances, things like telepathy, which we'll be exploring today. And honestly, with everything going on in the world, uh we thought it might be fun and and a bit of a meaningful escape to sit down, dig into these topics, and bring you guys along with us as we explore some of the world's biggest strange mysteries.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Yeah. Because we're we're planning with Inquarium to be as a podcast where we explore the boundaries of history and science and the unknown with curiosity, a healthy amount of skepticism, and of course an open mind. You have to have an open mind when you discuss these fringe topics. And uh we don't certainly don't exp uh claim to be have all the answers, but we are committed to asking better questions. And between the two of us, we've been we spent many years diving into these topics, decades really, through research, podcasts, documentaries, and books, and while we've learned a lot along the way, we definitely don't claim to be experts on any of them. I don't think anybody can really. Ultimately, we're here to learn, have fun, and question the unknown.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

So without uh further ado, Michael, what do we have in store for our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Well, Stephen, first I must say that you're looking mighty fine in that t-shirt right there. Uh where where do you go to get one of those?

SPEAKER_01 4:00

I go to aquarium.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Well, uh at some point we hope to have some swag to share with you guys, but for now, uh I just handed these uh so we'd have something to wear for the podcast. I think they look great. Yeah, they came out pretty good. Yeah. I'm agreeing. I'm pretty happy, pretty happy with them. Uh and we'll have mugs too, like this one. And this one right here. Actually, that is one of a kind.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

It's got a missing piece, which means it's gonna be worth millions.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Billions, probably.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Billions.

Why Telepathy?

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Right now it's gonna be coffee. Right. It does the job, it just gives you coffee. That's right. Um so today's episode is one that's uh a bit near and dear to my heart, and I I think you'd agree, Stephen, that uh some of given some of our own personal experiences, uh we both have had touches with what we're gonna talk about today. And today we're diving to the phenomena of telepathy. This episode and the next are closely connected, and together they explore just how far these ideas might go. We'll definitely be coming back to the topic of telepathy in future episodes. I mean, there's so much to talk about. Just I mean, you could do a hundred episodes just on on this topic, and while it's a topic that's been considered speculative in in the past, there have been some you know recent developments in the last few years that might start to push it closer to the realm of universally accepted reality.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

I think I know where you're going with this. You're talking about those telepathy tapes.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

You must be reading my mind. Well, I'll be. Is this the uh a live capturing of telepathy at work?

SPEAKER_01 5:59

It might be some movie magic going on here, just saying.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Well, yes, yes, the telepathy tapes, uh, which we'll definitely be doing a deep dive on in future episodes. Uh we'll be talking about this amazing podcast by filmmaker and documentarian Kai Dickens, which we've both been binge listening to for some time now, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Yeah, it it they're very, very interesting to say the least. Definitely will change your mind about things. At least it did my for me, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

For for me is for me as well. I mean, um, as I mentioned, both of us had have had experiences with this topic firsthand, but until you listen to and see, you can watch it on YouTube as well, see these uh um episodes of the telepathy tapes, it really just blows your mind. And even if you are a skeptic or you're a non-believer, uh wherever you fall on that spectrum, uh highly recommend you go check them out because it's it's very fascinating and eye-opening. And Kai has done an amazing job of shedding light on this topic, particularly with regards to nonverbal children, uh severe autistics, and and adults who have uh this uncanny ability to read minds and communicate telepathically with each other across county lines, state lines, and around the world. In fact, uh by the time you hear this episode, there's a good chance that her documentary about telepathy tapes will have been released. And I'm super excited to talk about the telepathy tapes. But for today we want to lay some groundwork, start at the beginning, and look at some of the key groundbreaking experiments uh that first opened the door to telepathy to be taken seriously in the academic and scientific communities.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Yeah, I think that's a great place to start and understanding where all this began really uh kind of puts it into context as to where we are today and the build-up to our understanding. Uh one figure that that's kind of kind of surprised me because he's he was around for decades before uh I was ever aware of him. But his name is Jose Silva, and he had a significant cultural impact on how we think about telepathy. And he was doing this like literally like decades ago. So anyway, I'll be talking about him. And uh that'll also kind of bring into like, oh wow, we've been actually looking into this stuff way longer than I thought and actually getting results.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Yeah. This episode of the Inquarium Podcast hopefully will open your eyes. I know it did me when I started doing more deep dive research on things. And particularly I'm really looking forward to what you have to say about Jose Silva, because as you mentioned, he he's not really well known, so I'm interested to see how he kind of fits into all of this. But first, Stephen, you know I'm a bit of a history nerd, so it I'd love to start walking our listeners through how the serious study of telepathy actually began. And I think it's fair to say, and maybe you agree or not, that most people think the of telepathy as more of a modern subject matter, something tied to science and labs and government programs and fringe experiments. Would would you say that's a fair statement?

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Yeah, for sure.

Ancient Ideas About the Mind

SPEAKER_00 9:30

But what if I told you the ancients were already pondering this exact idea thousands and thousands of years ago?

SPEAKER_01 9:40

That actually does not surprise me at all.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Yeah. Uh where I think as people discover more things, they realize the ancients were a lot smarter than we give them credit for and definitely had a strong take and an intelligent take on a lot of these things. So long before the word telepathy even existed, ancient thinkers were already wrestling with the possibility that the mind could reach beyond the body. Let's let's take Plato, for example. Plato believed that the soul wasn't confined to the physical body, that it could access truths beyond what we see, hear, or touch. To him, knowledge didn't just come from senses, it came from something deeper, something shared. And he wasn't alone in that thinking. Other philosophers like Anaxagoras and later thinkers like Stoics proposed that the universe itself was connected through an invisible force, something that linked human mind to the world around it, in what they called pneuma, a kind of breath or life force that flowed through everything, including us.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

It's called Numa.

Saints, Voices & Joan of Arc

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

Uh it's spelt P-N-E-U-M-A NUMA. So that begs the question if all minds are connected through this invisible medium, then the idea that thoughts could travel between people isn't really all that strange. It just means that maybe that's something we've all forgotten how to do. Now, this brings us to the Middle Ages, and this is where things start to get a really interesting because during this time, especially in Christian Europe, claims of unusual knowledge or supernatural abilities didn't just raise eyebrows. They could change the fate of your life entirely. The exact same experiences, hearing voices, knowing things, you shouldn't, perceiving what was hidden, could all be interpreted in two very different ways. On one hand, it could be seen as divine revelation, a gift from God, but on the other, it could be seen as something more dangerous and sinister, like demonic influences, spiritual deception, and even the work of the devil. And which one you were labeled as often had very little to do with the experience or the abilities themselves, and everything to do with how you were received by the church. There were a few key factors that could mean the difference between being honored and being burnt at the stake. If you were closely tied to the church, obedient to the church, authority, and lived a life of extreme piety, your abilities were far more likely to be seen as divine. In fact, many saints became famous for demonstrating what were called charisms, spiritual gifts. And if you strip away the religious framing, some of these accounts start to sound remarkably like telepathy. Let's take Saint Catherine of Siena, for example. She was around during the 1300s. She was said to have the ability to perceive the hidden thoughts and inner struggles of those around her. And then you have Saint John Vinet, who was around during the 17 and 1800s. He was reported by a number of pilgrims that he sometimes knew their sins, knew what they were going to confess long before they ever spoke to them aloud. But the most famous case, and the name most people will instantly recognize, is Joan of Arc. Now, Joan's divine and possibly supernatural abilities were remarkable, and we'll definitely be coming back to her in future episodes to explore her in more depth. But for now I want to share one particular interesting account. And this all unfolds in the early 1400s, towards the end of the Hundred Years' War, and this is a time of chaos, desperation, and certainly across the entire of France. In fact, England was on the brink of taking complete control of much of the country. So starting at the age of thirteen, Joan claimed to be hearing guiding voices from figures like Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret. In one particular compelling account, while travelling to meet the Dauphin, Charles VII of France, the future king of France, Joan of Arc claimed she received a message from Saint Catherine that a sword was buried beneath the altar of a church, bearing the saint's name that was about a day's ride away. Now, Joan wasn't from this region. She had come from Dauramy, which was hundreds of miles away, making it very unlikely she had any prior knowledge to the church or its contents, and while the site was only a day's ride from that point, that was simply because she was nearing the end of her journey to see the Dauphin. So there's no clear reason why she would have known anything about it otherwise. So the clergy went to investigate, they traveled to the church, went beneath the altar, began to dig, likely stones were removed, flooring, tiles, shallow digging in that area. It's not entirely clear exactly what was done, but there it was a sword buried beneath exactly where she said it would be, and it didn't stop there. The blade bore five engraved holy crosses. Those watching on YouTube and Rumble will see an AI generated version of what we believe the sword might have looked like based on written accounts and the swords of that era and region. Now to be fair, swords and other values were sometimes left at churches as votive offerings, acts of gratitude after battles and religious campaigns, knights and soldiers would leave weapons and other things behind, giving thanks for survival, protection, or victory. So finding a sword at the church wasn't unusual, but this was pretty specific. No one knew who it belonged to, no records, no origin, no famous name attached to it. So again, there would be no reason as to why she would have known about the sword when no one, including the church, knew who it once belonged to or if it was there in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

You never hear about that in the uh history books?

SPEAKER_00 15:52

No. I never heard about that. Um it's uh in fact, when I was telling Kim, my wife, about this, she remarked that she had never heard that story either. Now, at first the voices she was hearing were accepted as divine gifts. They were her authority, they gave her purpose, but later those same claims were used against her as evidence of heresy and demonic influence. In 1431, she was burnt at the stake alive. But that's not where her story ends, thankfully. Just twenty five years later, at a retrial, unfortunately after her death, they cleared her innocent, vindicating her divine supernatural gifts. And centuries after that, in nineteen twenty, she was officially canonized as a saint. So in the end, the telepathic abilities themselves weren't the deciding factor, it was the interpretation of these abilities. And the same experience could make you a saint or condemn you as a heretic. Now we move on to the Renaissance period, something interesting starts to happen after centuries of interpreting supernatural experiences through religion, people begin to revisit older ideas about the human mind and its connection with the natural world. This was a time of rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman texts were being studied again, and with them came a new way of thinking. Some philosophers began to suggest that human beings might be connected through invisible forces of nature. One of the most fascinating figures from this period is Paracelsius, a physician, an alchemist, and in many ways a bit of a rebel. He wrote about what he believed to be was a kind of magnetic connection between people, an unseen force that could link minds together and even allow influence at a distance. Now this wasn't science as we know it today. There were no controlled experiments, no statistics, but the language was starting to change, and the idea was slowly shifting from something purely supernatural to

Spiritualism and the Fox Sisters

SPEAKER_00 17:50

something that might be part of a the natural world. And that shift is what kept the mystery alive. Now this brings us to the mid-1800s, and this is where things take a very strange turn. In eighteen forty eight, a small town in York, two young sisters, known as the Fox Sisters, claimed they could communicate with spirits through a series of mysterious knocking sounds that became known as spirit rapping. Do you ever hear about them?

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Yeah, I've heard of spirit rapping before, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Yeah. Um there's lots of documentaries about these sisters, so I encourage everyone who's listening to the city.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

Are you talking about the sisters or the or the spirit rapping? Oh, both. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Well, I've heard of like, you know, uh girls from the Salem witch trials and stuff, but uh no, these these girls were in the mid-1800s, and there is a number of documentaries that you can find on them, but it's pretty fascinating. And whether real or not, it sparked something massive. This kind of sparked what the beginning of what we call the spiritual movement, a cultural phenomenon that spread rapidly through the US and the UK, and then suddenly seances and seance parlors were popping up everywhere, people gathering in dark rooms, claiming to speak to the dead, receive messages, then transmit thoughts beyond the physical world. And for the first time, this wasn't just religion or philosophy anymore. It started to attract the attention of scientists and scholars and intellectual circles, people who

The Birth of Telepathy

SPEAKER_00 19:20

wanted to study these claims seriously, which brings us to 1882. A researcher named Frederick Myers, one of the founders of early psychical research, coined a new term telepathy. So that's where we get the word telepathy from, is from Frederick Myers. And it's a word built from Greek roots tele meaning distant, pathos meaning feeling or perception, which literally translates to perception at a distance. Now the psychical researchers, as they were called, were essentially early scientists trying to study psychic phenomena before the field later became parapsychology. And this marks a major shift. For the first time, the idea of mind-to-mind communication was no longer just psychological or spiritual, it had a name. And as you know, Stephen, once you attach a name to something, it becomes something you can try to study. Now, this brings us to the 1930s when spiritualism movement was in a clear decline, thanks in part to figures like Harry Houdini, who exposed many of these mediums as frauds, and we'll definitely be covering him in more detail in future episodes, as I find him to be a pretty fascinating person. There's lots of documentaries on him as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Yeah, and and that debunking is is very important. Yeah, I agree. You're talking about what's interesting and what's not. What's not interesting is fraud. And what is interesting is that reality is often more interesting than the fraud, you know. So it's like you gotta debunk that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Yeah, because it it clouds and puts shadow on real phenomena that's happening.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Yeah, and it kind of it it stunts our understanding of of all that stuff. If you want to make real progress towards understanding these things, you've gotta get past the nonsense and debunk the people who are trying to fake it. So I really appreciate

J. B. Rhine and Zener Cards

SPEAKER_01 21:15

that.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

Yeah, I agree. And it's very important to differentiate between the uh the fake and the more real phenomena, just because like I said, it just clouds the whole thing, and uh and you can apply that to every topic that we're gonna talk about on this podcast. So for the first time, what had lived in science rooms and shadowy parlors was brought into something entirely different. The lab. At Duke University, psychologist named JB Ryan set out to answer a simple question Can psychic abilities be tested scientifically? No spirits, no rituals, no seances, just controlled experiments and statistics. Because this is where you start to take things from being super. Supernatural to more of the natural world and more understanding. So at first he tried using standard playing cards, but 52 possible outcomes, the math becomes pretty impractical. So Ryan, working with a fellow Duke psychologist named Carl Zinner, developed a simplified system, a deck of just five symbols. And they consist of circles, crosses, wavy lines, squares, and stars. So the deck contained five of each of those cards, making a 25 card deck. Now participants would guess each card in sequence one at a time. So by pure chance, you'd expect a five correct out of 25, which is about a 20% hit rate, right? Anything significantly higher might suggest something unusual. And in some cases, that's exactly what he found. One of Ryan's most well-known subjects, Hubert Pierce, a Duke student, consistently scored far above chance, often reaching 30 to 40% accuracy. And to push things further, Ryan tested whether distance mattered. So Pierce and the card reader were separated by hundreds of yards across campus, you know, no visual contact, no communication, and yet his scores remained high. In fact, he scored 40% on one of these long distance tests. If these results were genuine, then that suggested that distance didn't really matter. But then something strange happened, and subjects who were initially performing well often lost the ability over time. Their scores slowly drifted back towards chance, and this became what was known as the decline effect. Even Ryan couldn't fully explain it. Then came even more puzzling question. What if subjects were reading the other person's mind at all, but somehow perceiving the card before it was chosen? So in some experiments, participants guessed card sequences before the deck was even shuffled, and still scored above chance. So if that was true, then that would suggest something even stranger than telepathy, and that would be precognition. But not everyone was convinced. There was critics pointing out potential flaws, subtle markings on the cards, tiny bends, even possibly that symbols could be faintly seen through the back of the cards under certain lighting conditions. And this became known as a sensory leakage, and that's a term that's still used today in the studies. So Ryan took these critics very seriously. He tightened the experiments using thicker cards, improving shuffling, stricter separations between participants. His goal was simple. He wanted to limit every normal explanation before considering extraordinary one. And for many years, Ryan's conducted tens of thousands of trials, over 80,000 in total. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

That's a lot.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

And while most Yeah. And while most people scored right around chance, okay occasionally certain individuals continue to perform well above it. On average, the final results when everything was tallied, it landed somewhere slightly above expectation, around 22 to 23%. Now that may not sound like a big difference, but across tens of thousands of trials, even a small shift above chance becomes statistically meaningful. Not definitive proof, but enough to keep the question open, right? And as his work expanded, Ryan realized telepathy might not be the whole story. So he introduced a whole new term, ESP. So he's the one who came up with the term ESP, extrasensory perception. And under this umbrella included telepathy, clairvoyance, and

The Ganzfeld Experiments

SPEAKER_00 25:30

precognition. And that work continues even today through institutions like the Ryan Research Center, where these phenomena are still being explored under the field now known as parapsychology. Very interesting. Yeah. But it doesn't stop there. So this takes us to the 1970s, and by this time, researchers studying telepathy started to realize they had a problem. Earlier experiments, like the Reinkard tests, had been criticized for potential flaws. So scientists began asking a new question. What if the issue wasn't the method, but the state of the mind of the subject themselves? And we all know that state of mind, no matter what you're doing, uh matters a lot, right? When you're driving, you're trying to take a test, the state of your mind is uh makes a big difference on outcomes. And so to test this, they developed a new approach called the Gansfield experiment. And Gonsfield is a German word meaning entire field or complete field. And this idea was simple. Place the brain in a state of sensory uniformity, reducing external input, so subtle signals, if they existed, might become easier to detect. So basically, you're trying to eliminate all outside influences, noises, anything that might influence your perception of anything coming across the brain waves. So here's how it worked. There were two participants, there was a sender and a receiver, and the sender would view a randomly selected image or video. Meanwhile, the receiver sat in a separate room cut off from normal sensory input. And the receiver would typically wear half ping pong balls over their eyes. Centers sit under soft red light and listen to white noise through headphones. And you can see images of these online. It looks kind of comical when you see these.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Oh really? I've seen some of that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

Okay. Yeah. I mean it's a good way to block out your eyes, so it's one sensory input that you're eliminating. Um so the goal was to create the mind, you know, to create a mind sensory deparation state, quieting the outside world. And in that state, the receiver would describe any impressions that came to mind. And then after the session ended, they would be shown four possible targets, with one of those being the correct one, obviously. If telepathy didn't exist, then you expect success rate around 25%, a pure chance. But across many experiments, studies reported results closer to 30 to 35%. Now again, that might not sound like a huge jump, but again, over many trials, this small increase is well above chance and become it's very statistically significant. And in some cases the results were striking. In one particular session from a series of document experiments led by Charles Honerton, a center watched a video of a man working in a room filled with computers. Meanwhile, the receiver in the Gottsfield state began describing, and I quote, a room with machines, maybe computers, someone working with electronics. Afterwards, when shown the four possible targets, the receiver immediately selected the correct one. Coincidence, maybe, but enough moments like this kept researchers paying attention, and not just researchers, mind you, during the Cold War, this kind of work, as you might imagine, quietly attracted interest from the intelligence communities, because the implication was pretty obvious. If something like telepathy were real, it could have serious applications like spying. And some Gansfield research received indirect support through broader perception and intelligence-related programs. And this wasn't happening in isolation. So I think you know where I'm going with this, Stephen.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

Yep.

Remote Viewing and Intelligence Interest

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Around the same time, U.S. intelligence programs were exploring similar ideas through what became known as remote viewing, which you know we plan on covering in future episodes. And as a teaser, I have experimented with remote viewing uh in the past. And when we breached that topic, I'll share my discoveries with that. So as the research continued, so did criticism, and by the late 1980s and 1990s, the Gansfeld experience became center of intense debate. Skeptics argued that results could be explained by subtle experimental flaws, statistical bias, or selective reporting. And over time that controversy took its toll. Funding dried up, mainstream interest faded, and while the research didn't disappear entirely, it pushed back to the fringes of science. But the question itself still remained, and the subject matter never really went away. So, in summary, from ancient philosophy to religious interpretation to controlled scientific experiments, the idea of telepathy has followed us through history, changing form, given different names, but we've never really it's not really gone away. And while the results have always been debated, the question itself has proven remarkably persistent. So with that, I'll turn it over to you, Stephen, because I'm really interested to hear about what you've uncovered about Jose Silva.

José Silva and the Silva Method

SPEAKER_01 30:58

So ho Jose Silva, he he's kind of one of these hidden gems. Uh he was uh born uh between 1910, 1920, I believe. It was uh 1914, I think. One of these kids, he he had uh some traumatic experience. Like he watched his father get killed in the Mexic Mexican Revolution, lived through poverty, uh overcame poverty by being able to think outside of the box. And uh as he grew up, he stumbled on uh learning about electronics and wound up having a like a successful business doing electronic repair, went into the military and then he had found out about psychology because he was curious that the guy who was grilling him with questions in the in the military when he was first signing up asked him all these questions about things that rel are related to psychology. So he asked about it. The guy told him what book to read and he went on from there. But uh what was do you remember what the book was? Yeah, it's actually it's uh history of psychology and psychiatry. It's by uh guy named Roback. I went I actually bought it. It's one of one of my pending reads.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

That's that's the book the the uh guy questioned him, told him to go read.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

He told him to go read it and he says, You go read it and you'll find out why I'm inter so interested in psychiatry or psychology. So he did, and uh since he had this uh electronics experience, he combined the two. I think it's kind of important to to note that you know he was a self-made guy. Like when when I said that he overcame poverty is because when he was young, uh, after his dad passed away, he had to make ends meet for himself, not only his self, but his mother and his siblings. So while like during the depression he he had said that yeah, while people were out making like one dollar a day, I was out making seven. Wow. So he wound up Yeah, I mean it was a big deal. So he he actually met uh he was getting his haircut at his barber and they got on a conversation about electronics and this and the barber says, Yeah, I'm taking this correspondence course on electronics. Basically they just they made a deal because Jose Silva thought it was really interesting, some of the things he was talking about with it, especially the movement of electrons. Like if you you have a tube, the the example is you have a tube full of marbles, and uh you imagine that the marbles are electrons, and if on one end you push with your your finger on one end and then out the other end pops out a marble. Well the the electrons move very slowly, but the effect is like almost instant. So that he was like, Wow, that's very interesting, you know. So anyway, long story short, he um he finished that course and actually he didn't get credit for it, the guy did. But he he started his own business anyway.

SPEAKER_00 33:59

And it became one of What do you mean, like the guy took credit for his work or though he just separately got his own?

SPEAKER_01 34:06

Well he made a deal, the the barber made a deal with Jose Silva to uh yeah, you you know, I I had to pay money for this course. So he gave him a little bit of money, he says, Well you fill out the questionnaires, you know, after the lessons, and so he did. So basically they just made the deal. He's like, I'll take the course. The guy got the you know, the diploma or whatnot, and Jose Silva got the knowledge. Oh, I see. But see, Jose Silva, he also, you know, he started out star started out as native t uh language was Spanish. So he he kind of taught himself through his his siblings too, uh, how to write. And also he and then later he did the same thing with English. He was because they lived in Laredo. Laredo is like right on the border of South Texas, you know. Right. Uh so he basically, you know, self-taught, and he he wasn't he wasn't one of these people who had a closed mind. And like how you're talking about, you know, having an open mind is really important. Well, I think that's where this this ties in perfectly because he was never taught how things should work. He was always like, Oh, let's explore it, kind of a thing. He went on, uh he's really interested in uh psychology. He had a successful business and career with uh electronics. So he kind of combined the two, and they had those early uh EEG machines that he wound up using. He wanted to uh improve his the the scores of his kids test at school. You know, he wanted to raise their ability and give them a step up. Yeah. And so he literally through studying psychology, he actually came uh across uh Freud who was doing uh hypnosis. So so what he wound up doing, he he wound up hypnotizing his kids. Wow. So and in that state, he would like read them lessons and stories. And what he found out was that, oh well they they can retain, you know, because if you take a test, he was basically training them to take tests. Because oh well with a test you've got to r retain this stuff and take the tests and then similar to how they do it today, you know, but unfortunately that's how our system works, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:26

It's all about passing the tests.

SPEAKER_01 36:28

Right, which you know it's not ideal, but so anyway, that that was kind of his goal in the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

But so let me just let me just make this clear. So he would put them under uh hypnosis and like teach them lessons or something, or go over the go over tests or something that answers the tests and whatever, and then they would retain the information later

Alpha Waves, Hypnosis & Brain States

SPEAKER_00 36:52

on.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

He wouldn't tell them the answers to tests, but it was more like uh you know, he's giving the lesson. Like you need to retain the lesson. He would also do stories and poems. And uh he he could see that wow, they you know, their retention of this stuff is much better when they're under this hypnosis. So I'll explain uh the hypnosis part. So basically you have different frequencies that that your your brain vibrates at. Like your your heart beats at x amount of beats per minute, and your brain vibrates at x number of pulses, or you could say beats, eight pulses per second. And so yes, uh it's hertz. So to explain hertz, it's like one hertz is one pulse per second. So if I say five hertz, it's five pulses per second, ten is ten pulses per second, and so on. So normal people, uh I would say adults generally operate at twenty hertz per second. That's the normal waking state, being able to focus on things and go about your daily business. It it's not a state where you're kind of aware of everything going on around you. It's more right and and it fluctuates a lot. It's like a very unstable frequency to be at. Because you'll you'll you'll go higher or lower.

SPEAKER_00 38:22

It's very unstable. Yeah, depending on how much sensory you're taking in. Yeah. Or how or how or how focused you're being at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 38:29

Yeah, and your your brain is purposely like pushing out things, you know, at that in that state, because you've got to focus. You know, you gotta you gotta think logically, you gotta do all those things. So that that's 20 hertz. At 10 hertz, or around 10 hertz, it's much more stable. At least if you you can get there. You you kind of go on that journey as you go to sleep. You're going back towards uh like we were talking about uh uh the state between wake and sleep. It's called hypogogia, I believe. I think that's what it's called, hypogagia or hypogogia.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

Uh this is like a meditative state?

SPEAKER_01 39:10

Uh ye y yes. But uh specifically what uh what I was taught was the state between wake and sleep. When you're just starting to go to sleep. I think you you have experience with this, and I think you were telling me that you can stay in that state. Yeah. Well that state has two it has uh it's between eight and twelve hertz. That's that's ten right there at ten the center, that's ten hertz. Right. Right? Ten hertz, that's alpha. It's called alpha. As you as you descend into sleep, it becomes you you go into the realm of four and eight hertz. So that's when you kind of fall asleep. But it's interesting that some of the stories you've told me about you know you being able to stay there and how creative you were and all that, that that just so happens to be alpha as well.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

Yeah, I I just to clarify, I can't put myself in that state. It just sometimes it happens, and honestly, that's where I get my best ideas. It's like I'm half awake. I realize I'm awake, but I'm also asleep, and I just it's like it's like pure clarity, like I can and I that's honestly where I have my best thoughts is in that state.

SPEAKER_01 40:29

I wish I could it's very bizarre. Uh I I've been there too, but I I can't stay there very long. It's really rare. Really rare. Though I've had like lucid dreams and things like that only a couple when I was a kid. But that's there's more to that. That has more to do with uh I think, you know, the these hurts that we're dealing with as from being a kid to becoming an adult. Because kids are like four to seven hurts. Naturally when they're out in the world. When they're when they're growing up. Yeah. So and then they they go through the alpha and then on up into you know, that's why kids are the way they are, you know. But what Jose Silva wants to do, when you when you hypnotize someone, you're basically putting them at 10 hertz in the alpha. 20 hertz is called beta. Like the eight, I believe the uh uh the four to eight, I believe, is theta. So they you know give these you know names to them. But uh so when when he's hypnotizing these kids, he's trying to get them into this this alpha state, you know, where they're just wide open. So uh and I'll say a little bit more about that too before I move on, but so one of his exercises, because Jose Silva has you know these exercises, is that uh he he you practice visualization and you do this by starting your your brain is at twenty hertz, you look at something like say look at it uh look at a table or a chair. You're looking at a chair and you close your eyes and you're you're visualizing the chair, and then you're doing something to modify the chair, like maybe adding you know arms to it, or adding more legs, or something like that. Blank blanket or something. Yeah. You're you're creatively doing something. You're visualizing, but you're also kind of creating by modifying this. And then in the more advanced exercises, you're pulling back into the alpha state with that visualization, and you're you're blending uh your ability to use left brain and right brain, which is a different t thing that I haven't mentioned. Left brain is more like uh logical, it's more like the the detailed focus manager of the right brain. Left brain is conscious, uh right brain is primarily subconscious. For for most creative, right?

SPEAKER_00 43:18

Creative.

SPEAKER_01 43:20

It's creative, it's emotion, it's no right left brain is also emotion, but uh the right brain is is kinda like you know what we would consider the subconscious and the the mysterious, you know, kind of a thing. Well with these exercises what he wants to do is pull people back to where they can consciously operate on both right and left and that's uh called clairvoyance. So anyway, so he's putting his his kids under uh this hypnosis and again the whole goal is so that his kids can have better um uh recall uh first first studies. But what what started happening, he just kind of discovered this phenomena where he's he's reading these questions. Like he he'll also, you know, quizzes them and stuff like that. He he's reading the questions say like question one and they give the answer to number two.

Silva’s Telepathy Experiments

SPEAKER_00 44:28

Oh before he's a before he's a asked the question.

SPEAKER_01 44:32

Yeah. Well he's asking question number one and they give him the answer for question number two and he hasn't even read it.

SPEAKER_00 44:38

Right. And they've never seen these questions before or heard these questions before.

SPEAKER_01 44:42

And he he even uh progressed the experiments because he was like wow they must be like you know first it's like the guessing thing. It's like oh they must be really good at guessing you know but then it quickly went to like what is going on here? You know they must be reading my mind. But since he you know he's an open minded guy he he didn't have formal training. So he kept going and uh basically they he he started taking away questions or taking away information things like this and they were still guessing it was just straight up like where where are they getting this? And so he even he even thought it was like oh you know it's it's distance and all this but then he realized he expanded his experiments to the point where they're doing it over the phone. Oh wow you know so in in this you know when we look at the telepathy tapes later on obviously this stuff's gonna seem like kind of small fry in some ways. Right. But this is the beginning this is him starting out right yeah and and when you're talking about like the the barber story where he you know was talking about getting the electronics that was like in the forties yeah you know it so it was very early on and this is this this simple guy and you'll sit listen to him talk and he's not he's not a uh a uh English or Spanish scholar by any stretch but he has many books you know and he had help you know with the but that that's kind of the cool thing is that you know you don't have this formal training to kind of close your mind and so you're able to to make some progress you know so anyway he he wound up developing the the Silva method so and and I haven't really explored too much into into a lot of this but uh it's something I I definitely want to pursue and also reading this book but he he has a way uh methods for like trying to heal your body tap into uh being able to really take control and it's called uh one of his uh programs is called the silver mind control method something like that is mind control well it sounds ominous but actually with his you know he's not an English scholar right right so right his idea is is to help you return to this uh you know ability that as you were saying you know with the ancients it's like oh this is something that we've forgotten you know and I I'm really kind of I believe that you know so but um this the silva method he he's no longer with us but people are still driving his method and it's still out there in the world.

SPEAKER_00 47:35

So how did he go from testing his children and and then how did that lead to telepathy like in his books? Right? 'Cause his books they covered telepathy.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

Well he he uh he he was measuring a lot of a lot of uh subjects with the EEG machine so he's measuring brain waves that's how he came across all the all of the uh you know alpha beta and now it doesn't really go into detail about what he did with his kits. Yeah so some of those details would probably be probably be in the Silva method or you know in some of his books but uh so he he that's where his his his knowledge of electronics kind of came into it you know with the EEG and so he was able to understand that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 48:30

Are there his books teaching you how to like open your mind to stuff like telepathy? I'm just trying to draw that connection.

SPEAKER_01 48:38

Yes it's it's like the exercise I I I I'd mentioned of visualization. That's one of them. Yeah. And there's one where he he uses like three fingers to to help recall. It's just it's it's kind of like I guess a reminder. You know it's really kind of like training your your mind to react like mm like you're in he would call it like uh you you go through his exercises and you you learn to get into the state you know uh where you can recall alpha and how do you get there quickly? Well you you practice and then when you're doing this he calls it the three finger method it helps kick you into your your alpha state. It's weird.

SPEAKER_00 49:27

Yeah it's pretty bizarre so ultimately what what's the goal of his books?

SPEAKER_01 49:33

Are they what is he trying to teach or he he's trying to teach you how to have better health uh be able to to tap into knowledge and be able to tap on into the other side so it's very much related to which we haven't talked about yet the telepathy tapes. And that that's the way I look at it. But this is like early on stuff, you know but when you you compare it to the the telepathy tapes man that's just really like blowing it out of the water. But that's kind of it in a nutshell probably wind up having more uh about Jose Silva and his uh his actual uh methods because I'd like to explore that myself more because I want to see how how it compares some of the other things that I've I've done with some of my other adventures in life. So we'll have to talk about some of that stuff too.

Is Telepathy Real? Our Rating

SPEAKER_00 50:27

Oh we definitely will yeah so Stephen before we wrap things up I want to ask you something and for everyone listening you can play along too after everything we've discussed today from a scale of one to ten how likely do you think it is that tele telepathy is real just based on what we covered in this episode today. If I was brand new at this I would say about a four and that's based purely on what we talked about about today the history and the experiments and it's all like what people say you know it's it's not my own experience.

SPEAKER_01 51:09

You know so if I were just taking this it's like oh you know even the Jose Silva thing it's like well I kind of want to dig into that a little more you know for right now I'd say it's about a four.

SPEAKER_00 51:22

I think that could be said about really anything if until you experience it yourself it's hard to give anything a 10 right yeah um I would say that I would a fair assessment would be a four or five as well um of course you know knowing what I know now and and another research that we've done that number would drastically change but just based on purely what we talked about today I think four to five is a fair number for me. Would love to hear what your thoughts are what's your scale one to ten your comments um because that that's what matters. So just to recap today we we took a step back and looked where the study of telepathy began from ancient beliefs and philosophical ideas to structured experiments with JB Ryan and the Zener cards and eventually into more advanced studies like the Gansfeld experiments and even outside academia figures like Jose Silva and how he helped bring these ideas into the mainstream shaped how people think about the potential of the human mind.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

And if I'm correct Stephen didn't Jose Silva uh sell millions and millions of copies of these books in worldwide I'm not sure about the books but he he influenced millions of people like he did seminars and I mean he it was a big deal it was a big movement. So he did seminars like all over the world right uh I I don't know about all over the world probably but at least here in the States but he he affected millions.

SPEAKER_00 53:00

I mean that that's clearly stated so yeah so he helped shape how we all think about telepathy.

SPEAKER_01 53:07

Yeah it was a big thing to me what what's clear is whether you approach it with skepticism or curiosity or somewhere in between uh this this is a topic that has been has captured the attention of people for centuries and really minute millennia and continues to raise many questions that still we still don't have answers for now we want to hear from you what do you think are these experiments pointing to something real or is there a simpler explanation behind it all let us know your thoughts in the comments and we'll be reading through them and may even feature some of your perspectives on future episodes gives us ideas to noodle on and if you enjoyed this episode make sure you like subscribe and follow the show really helps us grow and continue bringing you more content like this.

SPEAKER_00 53:56

For sure and if you if you'd like to support the podcast and go deeper with us check out our Patreon page patreon.com slash inquiry and podcasts over there you'll get early access to episodes exclusive content and a behind the scenes look at the research that goes into each topic and each episode we cover we'll also be sharing extended discussions bonus material and access to some of the sources and notes that we use when building these episodes and likewise you'll have access to our outtakes our blooper reels which there probably won't be very many of those right Steven's going to be a millions so that alone it's a constant fight that alone what should uh make you want to to become a Patreon member uh in fact if you're interested in in hearing Steven and I's own personal experience with telepathy we'll be sharing some pretty remarkable stories um from our own personal experience to our Patreon page uh also don't forget to visit our website inquariampodcast.com and sign up to be notified whenever new episodes drop and be sure to follow us on social media stay connected join the conversation we want to hear from you obviously the more people that are involved the more people talking about this the more interesting it is and the more we all can learn from it and then just to keep up with everything that we've got going on.

SPEAKER_01 55:25

Yep and uh one more thing each episode of Inquerium will feature an original theme song written and produced by us. If you enjoyed the music from today's episode you can listen to the full version download it and get the full lyrics on our Patreon page and be sure to stick around to the end of the episode to hear more about today's theme song. Michael what do we have in store for our listeners in the next episode?

What’s Coming Next

SPEAKER_00 55:49

Well in our next episode we're going to narrow our focus a bit we're going to be diving into real world accounts stories of twins who claim to feel and sense and know things about each other sometimes across long distances and while many of those moments can be explained through psychology shared experience or coincidence not all of them fit neatly into the what we understand about the human mind. Like one particular case that will be the hardest to explain a case that shouldn't be possible at all really are two brothers separate at birth who somehow live nearly identical lives without ever knowing each other thank you for joining us for our very first episode of Inquarium yeah we really appreciate it I really appreciate you being here at the beginning of this journey.

SPEAKER_02 56:42

Until next time stay curious and question the know the knows please