Timothy Schultz:

I am excited to be joined here right now with Dr. Helané Wahbeh. She is the Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the author of The Science of Channeling. She has published widely on intuition and extended human capacities. This is going to be such an extremely fascinating conversation. Dr. Wahbeh, how are you doing today?

Helané Wahbeh:

I'm doing well. Thank you so much. It's great to be here with you today talking about these fascinating topics.

Timothy Schultz:

Thank you so much for taking the time. You are on the forefront of consciousness and studying intuition and all of this. A lot of people that are watching or listening to this will say they just knew something big was going to happen. They felt like it was going to happen before it did. When you hear someone say something like that, what goes through your mind as a scientist?

Helané Wahbeh:

That question is really exciting to me because it means that the person is open and curious about these phenomena. That is basically my life's work, and studying this phenomenon of understanding that we have the capacity to access information and energy from beyond our traditional five senses. This is really surprising to some people because our dominant paradigm is that we have five senses, we have this physical body, and all we really can perceive is what comes from those senses. When people get these really intense gut hunches that turn out to be true, they're blown away and they don't really understand how that can possibly happen. When people make those statements, I get really excited because then I get to share about the work that I do and all the research that has been done about those types of experiences.

Timothy Schultz:

Any examples of some of the wildest examples of intuition?

Helané Wahbeh:

We've done a number of studies where we collect stories from people, what we call anecdotes. This is the most basic level of research, collecting these anecdotes from people. We have an ongoing study that does just this called the NEXA, the Noetic Experiences Archive. If any of your listeners have had these experiences, they can go to our website and enter their own stories. Let me give you a couple of examples. One participant was a nurse and doing home visits. She would go to people's homes to care for them in various ways. She pulled up to her next patient's home and just got an incredibly strong feeling to not go in, that it was not the time to go in. She trusted that and went and visited the next person, and then came back and found out that when she was about to go in, there was actually a robbery happening in the lobby of that building. How could she have possibly known that?

Helané Wahbeh:

There was another incredible example of someone who had a dream that their bike was stolen. When they woke up in the morning, they went down to take their bike to the cafe and their bike, in fact, had been stolen. They dreamt about it before it happened. Another remarkable story was a mother who was driving her children. She was sitting at the intersection at a red light. The light turned green and she heard a very loud "stop" in her mind. She didn't go through the intersection and an 18-wheeler truck came barreling through the other side. It was running a red light and she would have been completely smashed by the 18-wheeler. These are just three examples. These type of stories we hear all the time, and it really relates to this idea of knowingness. They just somehow had access to information that they couldn't possibly know otherwise.

Timothy Schultz:

I love hearing stories like this. It happens to a lot of people quite often. It happens to me all the time. I have a dream story I want to share with you in a little bit, but how do you separate intuition from imagination? If you think something's going to happen, then it happens and it's just a coincidence, does it feel differently? How does a person separate that? What do you say from your perspective and your experience?

Helané Wahbeh:

When I think of intuition, the way that we talk about it is that it is this innate human capacity that all humans have. We all have this capacity to tap into our intuition, but the way it shows up for each person is really quite unique. We call that the Noetic Signature. These intuitive hits show up on a spectrum. It can be a gut hunch or a knowingness like you described. It can be a pre-cognitive dream or knowing the future. It can show up in so many various different ways, even to the extreme of mediumship or trance channeling where people are receiving information from what they believe are deceased humans or non-physical beings. That's the extreme side of the spectrum of what I would call intuition, and then we have everything in between. Each person's intuition shows up for them in different ways. It can be a sensation in their body. It can be an image in their mind. It can be words that they hear. For example, I get goose-bumps. I call them truth-bumps. A lot of people experience this. When I'm receiving information that feels really true on some level, my skin will get goose-bumps all over it. That's just an example of how my body shows me that I'm getting intuitive information. You were asking how do I know that that's actually intuition versus my mind just making it up. Sometimes we can't really know, especially mental visual imagery, the imagination just creating something. Are you just fantasizing about getting the red Lamborghini, or are you really intuiting that that's going to happen? Often, you can't know. You only discover if it was a fantasy or an intuition if it actually comes true. With practice, if you intentfully decide that you want to strengthen your intuition and you start an actual practice, even if it's just a few minutes a day, you set an intention, "I want to strengthen my intuition. I want to be able to discern between intuitive hits and my imagination." You start some sort of mental training like meditation, or a martial art where you become very aware of your mental processes, your thoughts. You can do ego clearing work where you clear the layers of your ego so you understand what motivates you, what your unconscious patterns are. Those things really support you in being able to discern whether it's an intuitive hit or whether it's imagining.

Helané Wahbeh:

The other word you used was coincidence. Some people will call that synchronicity. There are many people who believe that coincidences and synchronicities are actually a manifestation of our intuitive gifts and our interconnectedness, that when you are aware of and aligned with this idea that we're more than our physical body and that we can tap into it, our daily lives, our universe lines up to support us in a way where we see more coincidences or synchronicities.

Timothy Schultz:

What is the most common form of intuition that people experience? In addition to that, more importantly, when you see a synchronicity happen or you have a hunch and then it happens or you had a dream about something and then it happens, where does this information come from?

Helané Wahbeh:

I'll start with the first part because that's much easier to answer. We've done a lot of studies looking at what's the most common flavor of intuition, and it really is what you described, "I just know that this is true" or "I just feel that this is true" or sensations in the body. Those are the three most common ways that people experience their intuition, knowingness on a cognitive level, knowingness on an emotional level, or knowingness in the physical body. The source is a little bit more challenging. The short answer is we don't know what the source is. There's lots of different ideas about that. The one that I resonate the most with is this idea that we are all interconnected, that we aren't separate, even though it seems like we are in these separate bodies. Our consciousness can actually receive, perceive information that extends beyond our traditional five senses. We don't really understand how that works. There are many theories about how it might work. When that boundary between what is me and what is not me is more diffuse, then we can actually get information that we wouldn't think we would know but we do know, because our consciousness actually extends beyond our physical brain and our physical body.

Timothy Schultz:

You have studied this quite a bit. In your research, how is this measured? How do you measure this in the scientific environment?

Helané Wahbeh:

That's a great question. What we've been talking about so far are anecdotes, and that's the lowest level of evidence. It's still evidence but it's not controlled. People would say it's not as rigorous. There could be lots of different explanations for why people have those anecdotal experiences. What we do at the Institute of Noetic Sciences is we design studies that allow us to test this. The way to do that is to really tease apart exactly what type of phenomenon we want to look at. I'll give you a specific example. There's something called telepathy, where people believe that they can pick up mental or physical sensations from other people. We have designed many different experiments to test this in the laboratory in a very controlled way. Our lab has done this. Many different labs around the world have done this.

Helané Wahbeh:

I'll give you two examples. One is called the Ganzfeld protocol. It brings people into the lab and it creates a sensory environment that's homogeneous. They are basically listening to pink noise. They have goggles over their eyes with red light coming in. They're seeing the same thing all the time, this red light and the same noise, so it's basically reducing their sensory input. The theory is that we have so much sensory noise that we aren't aware of this non-local information all the time because we're distracted, if you will. If you take away that sensory variation, we can pick things up a little bit more easily. Anyway, the person's laying in the chair. They're in this homogenous sensory state, and then they are asked to just speak out loud what they are experiencing in their mind. People will often get images or they might hear words. Then we compare what they said to a randomly selected image that a computer generates. No human sees that image until we do the judging at the end. That's a version of a protocol that's been done all over the world in multiple different labs. We have found that yes, the person can actually pick up details about these images that a computer picks. That's one example of an experiment that we do in the lab to test that.

Helané Wahbeh:

Another one that we just finished, which was a really fun study, was bringing in pairs of emotionally bonded people. These people had to have had an experience of what they would call telepathy. We ran them through a number of hoops. They had to complete questionnaires and answer all these questions. The final task that we did was really fun. We had one other pair. We had person A in a Zoom. We had person B in a separate Zoom. We would ask person A to send their positive intention towards person B, and then we would go into the Zoom with person B and we'd say, "Is person A sending you intention? Yes or no," so it was a binary task. We had 10 trials. For each trial, person A was either sending intention or counting backwards from 100. That was a distraction task, this mental counting. Those trials were randomly selected, whether they were sending intention versus subtracting. Then the person B for each try would just guess, are they sending intention or not? There's 10 trials. By chance, they would get five out of 10 correct. We did that with 100 pairs of people and we found that 72 of those pairs, at least one of the people performed above chance so they guessed correctly more than five out of 10 times. We now are going to move into collecting physiology, like EEG and neuroimaging, while people are doing the same task to see if we can tease apart if there's any brain correlates happening when there are sendings happening and when they're guessing correctly and stuff like that.

Timothy Schultz:

My mind is blown here. We had Dean Radin on here two or three years ago. He mentioned some experiments where they could measure things that were happening with the body before the person was aware that it was happening with pictures and that sort of thing. Is that something that you have studied?

Helané Wahbeh:

Yes. This is all around the idea of knowing the future, and that comes in two varieties. There's the knowing the future mentally, like that person had the dream that their bike was stolen, and then there's knowing the future in your body. Knowing the future mentally is called pre-cognition, and knowing the future in the body is called pre-sentiment. What's fascinating about these two things is pre-cognition is a conscious process. I have a dream or I get some information this is going to happen in the future, and it's conscious. Pre-sentiment is unconscious. The body is basically having a physiological response prior to a stimuli.

Helané Wahbeh:

A classic experiment is bringing people in the lab, they're sitting in a chair, there's a big screen in front of them, and the pictures will just randomly change. They're just sitting there in a passive state. There'll be a picture of a boat, a picture of a nature scene, and then there'll be an intense car accident picture. What we see when we analyze the physiological data of that person is they have a arousal response before the stressful pictures. Their body is basically reacting before the picture is shown, in the same way that you would expect their body to react. When it's a relaxing picture, their body relaxes ahead of time, and when it's a stressful picture, their body gets stressed out ahead of time. There have been many of these studies done and meta-analyses done where people have taken all the results of all those studies and put them together to try to summarize them. There are significant positive but small effects showing that yes, our body does have a reaction to future stimuli.

Timothy Schultz:

Helané Wahbeh:

That's an incredible story and congratulations for winning the lottery. I mentioned earlier the Noetic Signature and that each person has a Noetic Signature. We finished a study recently looking at any norms and patterns on the various 12 characteristics of the Noetic Signature that we found. What was so fascinating is that the strongest result was around dreams. Some people, their Noetic Signature includes getting noetic information from their dreams, and then some people don't. I don't get information in my dreams, but you obviously do. That, to me, seems like a strong part of your Noetic Signature. Why get it in dreams? When you're in a dream state, it's an altered state. We know that these phenomena definitely show up more strongly in altered states. Also, your ego, human personality is offline. Maybe it's easier for that information to come through when you're in your sleeping state. If you know my Noetic Signature is strong for dreams, then you can actually cultivate that and make it stronger and set intentions. Get a dream journal and really start building that for yourself. I would ask your audience, am I a dreamer or not a dreamer? If you are a dreamer, that could be a really fun practical exercise that they could work with. What number should I put in for next week's draw, and see what shows up, although numbers are a little trickier to show up with various psi phenomena. That's been shown, especially with remote viewing studies and stuff like that.

Timothy Schultz:

A lot of people report dreams about speaking with people that have crossed over or they believe they're getting information from, some people use the word God, some people use the word universe or quantum field. What does the research say? What do you think from your experience with receiving and communicating, creating reality?

Helané Wahbeh:

Right now, with the tools that we have, we cannot definitively prove or show that these are actually deceased humans or non-physical beings. There's a whole realm of incredible study on mediumship which is the idea that you can connect with deceased humans, and very rigorous studies that have strong, significant, positive findings of getting information about deceased humans through mediumship. The tricky piece is that we can't really rule out if they're getting it through some other psi phenomenon, like telepathy. It's called living agent psi. It's a big challenge in our field that we don't have the tools to be able to demonstrate that specifically.

Helané Wahbeh:

What I advise is to focus less on the source and focus more on the content. Leave the source question as this open question mark, but really be discerning and critical about the content and the information that you're actually getting. Is it useful? Is it positive? Is it going to harm me or someone else? If so, just throw it out. It needs to be supportive. If it's actionable, try to act on it. If you feel like you're knocking your head against the wall, then it's probably coming from your own mind. If you feel more easeful, more flowing, synchronicities showing up, then likely that's coming from some other bigger-than-you source.

Helané Wahbeh:

In thinking about the source as well, another way that I think about it is if we're all interconnected, if we're all part of one larger thing, then even if it is some separate personality, if you will, it's still some aspect of myself. Some people like thinking about it that way, so then you don't worry so much about "There's all these other beings and how am I going to connect with these beings," etc.

Timothy Schultz:

From your experience as the Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and your vast experience over the years, you have probably seen some really interesting, way more intriguing stuff than most people. Is there anything that has surprised you, anything that made you pause?

Helané Wahbeh:

I have so many examples, but I'm going to start with one around healing. We've done a number of studies with energy medicine practitioners like Reiki or therapeutic touch and various energy healing modalities. We did one study with people who had hand and wrist pain. They received one session from an energy healer. We saw statistically significant improvements in their hand and wrist pain after one session and also three weeks later.

Helané Wahbeh:

What was so fascinating to me about that study is we had a clairvoyant here observing each session and we also talked to the various healers. That hand and wrist pain for the 200 people was caused by different issues. Even though they had the same symptom, there were different underlying mental, emotional, spiritual blockages that were creating their pain. With the energy healing, it basically was innately wise in clearing the block regardless of what it is, but the result was the reduction of the symptom.

Helané Wahbeh:

I find that incredibly fascinating because I'm clinically trained as a clinician, the idea that there are so many different reasons why our body can have symptoms. Even though it looks the same on the outside, there's actually a different cause from the inside.

Helané Wahbeh:

I think about that in our current medical system and how things are treated. I think that that's really quite fascinating that there can be so many different reasons why our body is not functioning optimally. You might take 10 people who have a headache and the reason why they have that headache could be 10 different reasons, whether it's a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual issue.

Helané Wahbeh:

I think that's quite fascinating in that energy medicine can deal with any of those 10 causes to support the person to come back to a place of optimal health.

Timothy Schultz:

Some people in my family, for example, tend to be a little more intuitive than some others. Some people think it's genetic. A lot of people argue it's not necessarily and you can enhance your abilities. What is your take from the scientific perspective?

Helané Wahbeh:

My current hypothesis is that there is some nature aspect, that there is some genetic piece that makes us more likely to have some type of intuition over another type of intuition, that we all have the capacity to tap into these intuitive gifts, if you will, but that the way they show up for each person is unique.

Helané Wahbeh:

That uniqueness and what we excel at is partly based on nature, but nurture is definitely at play. You can take classes, you can start a practice, and you can actually strengthen your innate capacity.

Helané Wahbeh:

It is, in my mind, very similar to any type of skill. I joke about basketball. I'm 5'2". I'm super short. I can take a ball. I can dribble it down the court. I can shoot a basket. I'm never going to be in the NBA, but if I practiced every day, I would get better. My skill would improve, but I'm never going be the total superstar because of my genetics.

Helané Wahbeh:

I feel that these intuitive abilities are similar, that we might have these genetic strengths and that with training, we can improve on it. Part of the whole Noetic Signature program is to really invite people to delve into what are my strengths?

Helané Wahbeh:

We developed a whole questionnaire. You can go to our website and take that questionnaire and see what your Noetic Signature looks like.

Timothy Schultz:

For anyone that wants to dive into this further, where can people find your website and also your book, The Science of Channeling?

Helané Wahbeh:

The Science of Channeling book is available at all your regular booksellers. It's a really nice introduction because it is meant for the lay public. It takes all the science that we already know and breaks it down into a very accessible and digestible way.

Helané Wahbeh:

Our website, www.noetic.org

, is a wonderful resource. We have all our publications there. We have all our studies. You can participate in active research.

Helané Wahbeh:

We have free online webinars that happen on Fridays. We have a community and community events where you can dialog with people to learn more about this, so a lot of opportunities for you to engage in however works well for you.

Timothy Schultz:

Amazing. We will link to that in the description if you're watching this on YouTube or in the show notes if you're listening to this today. Helané Wahbeh, I am so incredibly grateful for your time. We are running short on time. I have questions that could go for hours.

Timothy Schultz:

Is there anything that you want to say today that I didn't ask or don't know enough to ask or that you just wanted to say?

Helané Wahbeh:

I would just invite people to be open and curious about this and to not believe a word I say essentially, but to be your own guide and look into the research that's out there.

Helané Wahbeh:

Delve into your own personal experience of it. You will be amazed by how much is out there.

Helané Wahbeh:

Many of you may know that there's a lot of taboo and skepticism, and much of that is from ignorance.

Helané Wahbeh:

While we still have a lot more work to do and more research to do, there is so much out there already demonstrating that intuition is real, that it can support you, it can improve quality of life, it can be trained.

Helané Wahbeh:

How can you strengthen that for yourself to support your own daily lives and your loved ones around you?

Timothy Schultz:

Dr. Wahbeh, thank you so much. I greatly appreciate your time today for joining the program.

Helané Wahbeh:

You're very welcome. It's been a pleasure.