Part Two: You Were Born Telepathic, Then You Forgot. Dr. Diane Hennacy Explains The Science Behind a Savant Telepathy Test That Scored 97% Accuracy, And Why She Thinks We All Still Have It.

**Mayim Bialik** (0:04)
Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

**Jonathan Cohen** (0:05)
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

**Mayim Bialik** (0:07)
And welcome to our Breakdown. Today we're speaking with Dr. Diane Hennacy. This is part two of our conversation. She's a neuropsychiatrist and consciousness researcher. You might know her from the research she did on the telepathy tapes. She graduated from Johns Hopkins, taught at Harvard. She brings a scientific rigor to the study of anomalous phenomena. We're going to be speaking to her today about the near-death adjacent experiences that she had when she was a young woman. Where does consciousness go in the dream state? What dreams should we be paying attention to?
What are some shared traits found among individuals who report psychic abilities that might reveal more about what the brain is actually capable of?

**Jonathan Cohen** (0:47)
We're also going to be talking about acquired savant syndrome and the extraordinary abilities that can emerge after neurological changes, as well as the role of the gut microbiome in autism.

**Mayim Bialik** (0:58)
Enjoy part two of our conversation with Dr. Diane Hennacy. Break it down. I got to meet one of the non-speaking individuals. He's 18 and got to spend some time with him here socially, not in an interview setting. And I noticed that there was a poetic nature to his communication. He was typing on his own.
And what I was thinking is like, is this what kind of all of our inner voices sound like? Right? It's thinking more in kind of imagery and emotion.
And I think also to, you know, speaking evolutionarily, like this is very recent, like desks and computers and, you know, phones and things like that. For most of human history, this is not how we lived, right? We lived close to nature. We had, yes, a lot of rituals and folk tales and, you know, religious beliefs that many people don't hold to, but the structure of kind of the development of humans as we know it, right, of our species, was one that was very tied to things that do not need to be written down or understood in a linear fashion. Time itself, the fabric of reality, you know, for thousands of years, traditions have talked about, this is a projection, right? This is a shadow on the cave. Plato, right? The only way you live is by dying. You know, all these kind of notions, that's actually our state of nature. And we then place this on it and we meet these individuals with exceptional abilities that honestly are very in tune with the way a lot of our human history was relating.

**Diane Hennacy** (2:45)
100%. Yeah, I would say that really a lot of what they're doing is helping us to remember what we all used to be capable of and that we have been talked out of it.
We've been educated out of it. While the brain is still plastic and developing, instead of working on these kinds of abilities, we've been, in fact, telling children, oh no, that's impossible, or that's just your imagination, or whatever, and everybody wants to fit in. Most people want to fit in, and socially you want to fit in, and you're subject to peer pressure, and so you don't want people to think you're stupid or crazy or this or that.
That stuff all goes underground, and it doesn't get reinforced. Our educational system became all about memorizing stuff that was totally irrelevant. Kids have been bored out the wazoo, and now with AI coming out, it's just like, well, why should I even do my homework? And it's like, you better not cheat just for the principle of it. Let's just face the facts. AI can process language extremely well. What we need to be doing is educating ourselves as a society to be operating out of a higher level of consciousness, because the output of AI depends upon the user using it. AI will respond to the intelligence of the user. And so the more sophisticated that your questions are, the better answers you get from AI, you know? And so we need to be working on getting back to, you know, being, you know, developing our intuition, developing our, you know, more holistic, you know, processing skills, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And AI can handle the stuff that we've been, you know, traditionally, you know, been focusing on in schools. Let, let kids play again. Let them, you know, experience the arts. Let them experience the real world in a way in which they're not, they're, they're not being told what to think. They're discovering what is.

**Jonathan Cohen** (5:17)
What do you think the existence of telepathy in the people that you study means for the rest of us?