So your husband, Robin, you met him 2016, and he passed away from leukemia in 2021. 2021. Now, from 2021, when he passed away, what happened in your life? What was going on in your life?
If I was a fly on the wall in your context, what I've seen, he'd been given two weeks to live. He actually lived for three and a half weeks. And he died two days before our fourth wedding anniversary. So I was literally reading condolence cards on my fourth wedding anniversary.
If it wasn't for the people I have around me who became like a fortress, I don't think I would be here today. You know, never having had that experience before, it was just so, so devastating. And even though I'm a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, I just. I just was, like, totally lost and broken.
And then I started seeing robins in the garden every single time I went to the window, both in Hampshire and London. I've never, ever seen so many robins in my life. Like, not before or since. I still see them sometimes, but I noticed it.
I thought, of course that's what I want to see. I have no idea what it means, if anything. And then about six weeks after he passed away, I was asleep and I heard a noise in the distance, and we had been burgled. Once I'd went to check it wasn't the alarm in the garage.
Is. Couldn't work out what it was, or maybe it was a distance. Went back asleep. It was about 4am and then I got woken up by a massive thump to my shoulder.
I wouldn't demonstrate it on you because it would be too much for me to hit you that hard. It wasn't like a tap. So I opened my eyes and I could see next to my bed, a very vague, hazy version of Robin, as if he was pushing himself through treacle to be seen. And I was just transfixed.
And I saw him become more and more clear. I could see the outline of his hair and his face. And then suddenly he just dissolved from the top down. And my eyes went like this.
And I remember seeing his shins and his feet. And I was, like, up on my elbow, watching. And I just gasped out loud. In my desperation.
I did consult a couple of mediums, and again I had that dual conversation. I said to myself, this is the kind of thing that crazy, desperate people do. And within the same breath, it's okay for me to be crazy and desperate right now. I've lost my best friend, my life partner, everything.
I thought about how the world Works has crashed around me and I ended up not being impressed by the mediums and just at some point, I can't even remember when. Now thinking, if it's possible to communicate with someone that's passed away, and he was my husband and my best friend, and I am all about optimising my brain and expanding my consciousness, then I should be able to do it myself. That's the start of my journey that I've written about in science. And do you think you found the answer?
Yeah. How sure are you? 100%. I mean, if what you're saying is true, then that's a pretty.
That's a revelation, right? So many people have lost people or have gone through different types of loss in their life. And you're telling me that through the work you've done over the last couple of years and the research you've done, you understand how to communicate with them in some capacity and you're 100% sure? 100%.
So listen, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to challenge you in ways I think the viewer might challenge you. So I'm going to try and answer the questions that the viewer might ask because there's, you know, people, this idea is quite a significant perspective shifting one. So my job in this conversation, although these are sensitive matters, of course, is to try and play double aspect where I can.
And I just, I want to say that you know me and you know that you've asked me to come back on the podcast several times and I come when I'm ready, so I want you to ask me those questions. Yeah. So where does the journey begin then? So you suffer this trouble, tragic loss in your life, you go to the mediums, you're let down by them.
Where's this begin? Where does your research, your journey of discovery begin? It starts with this decision to try to communicate with him myself. There's a realization at some point that it's not a one way thing, that when people pass away, they also have to learn.
So it's like two people having to learn a language to speak to each other. Like two people who speak a different language having to learn a language that they can both speak. That's how it felt. Obviously, as a scientist, I then wanted to find as much science as I could to try to back it up.
Which really comes down to the science of whether the mind or the psyche or the soul can exist separately from the body. And I will say that way before I even started thinking about this stuff. Just the moment that he died, which he died in front of me once he'd actually passed away. I remember a really strong feeling of looking at his body and just knowing that wasn't him and that the essence of who he was.
I didn't know where it was, but it was not there lying in that bed. And when did you realise that you were going to start to collect research and do research on this idea of being able to communicate in ways that most people don't realise? We can communicate through science. And also when you talk about being able to communicate through these 30 plus senses, is that just with the dead or is that with each other?
Like, can I communicate through you? Is there other ways that can happen to these senses that you just go through research that will help me be more effective with a living too. I mean, I think it's best of yourself. So I think that the fact that if you're not even aware that you've got 34 senses, then you're obviously not consciously tapping into something you're not aware of.
And some of them are non conscious senses anyway. Things like the PH of your blood or like the balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide in your blood, you're not going to be conscious of those. You can't necessarily exert much control over them. Although obviously if you slow down your breathing or do a certain type of breath work, it could have an impact on those things.
The conclusion I came to. So, like I said, I went to the brink a few times. I went to the brink. Let me give you the first example.
I realized that the first anniversary was coming up on October 26th and around, you know, a couple of months before that. I was doing the best that I had been doing so far, but I was very aware this anniversary was coming and I wanted to prepare myself mentally. But from the 4th of October, I suddenly was in aches and pains all over my body, which actually lasted for six or seven weeks and was accompanied by me feeling so depressed that I actually had to look in the mirror and go through the criteria for clinical depression and work out if I was actually depressed or not. And I didn't meet all the criteria, but I was in this physical pain.
I couldn't understand why. I went from a massage, it was so painful. I didn't go again for a year. So eventually I looked through my diary on calendar, on my phone and I looked back to October 4th, which was the day that started, and that was the day that I'd taken him home to die.
That was the day I took him home from hospital. I Don't remember that date, but clearly my body had. And the trauma was just reemerging as, like, physical pain. And I only realised quite a lot later that I had to do some somatic work to actually get rid of the last bits of trauma that talking therapy can't actually get to.
Somatic work. So body work, whether that's massage or dance or art or craniosacral therapy or tai chi, anything physical, because basically there's an area in the brain, it's actually inside, so I can't really show you on this, but it's kind of inside there. And that part of the brain is to do with articulating speech. And it basically gets shut down by trauma.
So those sort of phrases like I'm speechless or I'm dumbfounded or have no words indicates the fact that there may be residual trauma that's held in your body that you can't actually articulate and get out and solve through talking therapy. So it requires some kind of physical therapy. So that was obviously to do with my sense of pain. And it took me a little while to kind of put together what that might mean by really, like, tapping into why was my body manifesting pain.
To sort of remind me of something or show me something. But also, in the first couple of weeks after Robin's body was taken away, the morning after he died, and it was just under two weeks of the cremation, in that time, I would wake up in the morning and I would be absolutely freezing cold, like, shaking and shivering. And it was October, it wasn't like midwinter. And I would blast up the heating when someone else was in the house.
I would realize it was like a sauna. It was actually a bit embarrassing. I had to, like, you know, turn it down and open some windows. And Robin actually hated being cold.
And he would have been in the morgue in a refrigerator drawer that whole time. And again, I think it was my sense of temperature that was kind of on the same wavelength as where I didn't consciously think of where he was that I was feeling freezing cold. So it was looking back, it was things like that that were coincidences. Absolutely.
But then over time, and I draw a couple of years, I could ask for specific signs and get them. Sometimes at first it would take a while, and then it became like it would happen that day. I could ask a question in my head and get an answer. I mentioned having, you know, sort of, again, being at the brink of my sanity, having to question things.
I was experiencing something called thought insertion, which in psychiatry is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. It's when you have a thought in your head that you know isn't yours. So I was experiencing that really vividly. But can you imagine experiencing that and at the same time being psychiatrists that is saying, right Dara, do you realize you're having like a psychotic symptom?
And so in my research, one of the things I realized that maybe, you know, if you're going through grief and you don't know the things I know, you can't articulate to yourself that grief in many ways is like psychosis. It's changing the levels of neurotransmitters in your head. It's changing the electrochemical like signaling in your head. Just have so much empathy for people that have to go through that and don't have the wherewithal of the resources that I did.
Do you think one needs to cultivate their ability to see signs? Do you think it's like going to the gym? Totally, totally. It took me years and like I said, I believe it took him years as well.
So yeah, I say it's like learning language for your eyes, like going to the gym. And what does one need to do in that gym to grow their sign muscle? Well, it always starts with believing, right? Yeah.
Do you think that's one of the big issues in terms of being able to access these other dimensions or dynamics is most people don't believe in it. So I'm intraprened. Most people say a lot of people don't believe in it. Well, they secretly do, but they're scared to talk about it because they think people ridicule them.
Yeah. Because my brain feels like I need to have the scientific evidence of things. I need to accept them. Because I think sometimes I worry if I don't have scientific rigor around my beliefs then I would unsusceptible to do anything.
And I'll be in the spaghetti once I bought the garden and I'll leave, you know, every religion in the world and everything in the animal anchored. And then I'd bear around a plastic bag of wind. And I have no orientation. So I think a king radar is the basis of my beliefs.
I have to have some sort of scientific evidence. I know you do. Yeah. It's not to say I'm open minded because I've had my mind changed to me times in my life that one would be dumb now to not be open minded and to listen.
I agree with you, Outrik. I completely agree that my entire career has been based on that. But I just, you know, I was pushed up against wall, so I had to think differently. And I think the question I posed to myself is, what if you had to think differently?
So psychologist Carl Jung talks about, when he talks about the collective unconscious, he talks about those basically three main things that all humans experience, which is birth, life and death. And so we have this common experience, which is actually part of our inherited gene and brain structure. So everyone who's ever lived will experience those things. But if we look at ancient wisdom, for a start, we are made of the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen that came from the Big bang.
So we're all made of the same thing. Our ancestors lived in the cycle of nature. I think us actually having broken our connection to nature is a huge part of why we're so disconnected and unhappy. So if you think of the lifecycle of salmon, for example, it goes through its lifecycle and eventually its bones contribute to the phosphorus on the floor of the forest.
So it never really goes away. In many other ways, our ancestors repeatedly saw the cycles of nature and therefore always kind of knew that everything gets renewed, nothing ever completely goes away. And I think that's a really important thing to return to. I think, you know, when we question things, which you're absolutely right to do, I think we have to look at things that we didn't think were true, that we now know are true, as just ways of being open to the fact that things in the future might become obvious or known that aren't known now.
I think that is an important place of being open minded to sit at. And so, for example, want to hear about slime mould? You tell me if that's something I want to hear about. So slime mold are single celled organisms like amoeba, who go about their daily life on their own very happily as long as their basic needs are met.
But if, for example, they're facing potential starvation, they will come together and form a slug, because the slug can move towards your vegetable patch, a new food source, and they can survive equally. If they are facing potential extinction, they will come together and form a sporing body like a mushroom. So that's what a stalk and a fruiting body that can release force that will go into the atmosphere to all different places where these new baby organisms can grow and thrive. If you think about it, the single cells in the stalk are sacrificing themselves for the greater good because there's no chance that they're going to get released into the atmosphere as a stalk because they're in stalk.
So some of them actually cheat and climb up the stalk to get into the fruiting body and displace other cells from the fruiting body. So things like that. And for example, the mycorrhizal network, which is how mushrooms and mycelium feed the roots of trees, even trees that have been felled, can be kept alive for centuries because the mycorrhizal network, which is the connection between mycelium and tree roots, can bring water and sugar to that tree stump to keep it alive. And trees and mycelium don't even only do it for the same species, they do it because they're part of the entire forest and it's symbiotic relationship and they care about each other.
Things like this would have been like thought to be fantastical 10 years ago. You know, we're in LA at the moment and I saw the driverless car for the first time now when I was growing up watching Sci Fi, I never thought I'd see that in my life. So that's all I'm saying. And I'm saying it from the point of view of being a cognitive scientist.
And I'm talking about the nature of consciousness. I'm not talking about other, not asking you to believe other parts of science, but based on the fact that we don't know everything. We've learned loads of things that we thought weren't true before. I strongly believe there's a benefit to humanity of raising this kind of question and having this conversation, which I ask you why it's a taboo conversation.
Why shouldn't we be enlightened? Why shouldn't we feel better? Why shouldn't we be more connected? Why shouldn't we.
Whatever we've been doing up until now certainly hasn't been working. When was it that you made the decision that you were going to write a book about this called the Signs? Was there a particular moment in this process where you realised that you were going to dig deeper and then you were ultimately going to share this with the world? I wasn't intending to write a book at all, but I got to the point where I had something that I could share with people that actually thought would be useful.
And at this point you're communicating with Robin on a daily basis. On a daily basis. Give me some colour to that. What does that mean?
Give me some examples if you can. Well, it either will be that, like I'll ask a question in my mind and the answer will come in my mind, but I know it's not my own thought or I'll just get a direct, like, message from him in my mind that I know isn't me, but mostly it's the signs. So I've talked to you about the first anniversary and how hard that was. By the time of the second anniversary, I was actually in America and I'd been filming in studio for a week.
And then I was on the road on the Navajo Nation. And that was due to. I was due to fly out in the Navajo Nation on the second anniversary of Robin's passing. And by that point, I was feeling a bit like I'd completely burnt out.
And I had a choice about how to reemerge, you know, whether that was going to be in a good way or I wasn't going to be able to make it. And I had this analogy of a Phoenix rising from the flames in my mind. So on that trip, I said, darling, send me the sign for Phoenix. You said that to you?
To Robin? In my head. And I chose the Phoenix because it's really unusual. So it's not like if I said, you know, a dog.
I'm probably going to see dog on the pavement every day. I chose something that is not an easy thing to see. And I was actually in Oklahoma City, where, you know, you wouldn't expect necessarily to see, like, something unusual every single day. Between my hotel and studio, I went through Chinatown and I passed a restaurant called the Phoenix Garden with a big emblazoned, like, you know, sign.
And on the way there, I had had an indirect flight from Boston, and the flight leaving Boston was late, so I missed my connection in Chicago and had to spend a night in Chicago. And then I was late for filming and stuff. And so when I was leaving to go to la, I was leaving on a Sunday. And from the Monday onwards, I had a podcast every single weekday in la.
And so the team said to me, we know you cannot miss that flight. We are not going to put you on an indirect flight. We absolutely promise you. Direct flight to la.
So you're flying from Monday onwards. We were in the middle of nowhere for, like, a week, and basically my flight wasn't booked. We didn't know which airport we were going to be at. We arrived on the eve of the anniversary of Robin passing, and my flight was booked that day, and it was from Flagstaff in the Navajo Nation to la.
Flying on the day of his anniversary. No direct flights. I had to fly through Phoenix, Arizona on the day of his anniversary. You've probably heard of that old analogy of when you buy a car, you end up Seeing the car over on the road like I buy a new car and then I go over and see if I ever buy my car.
Because of the quick confirmation bias and science and psychology. Wait. Once you've got something in your head, you're more likely to see that thing. I think there done studies on this where if you are exposed to something or you talk about something, then you'll see it more in the world.
How do you separate what you're saying from that proven psychological phenomenon? I don't. I say use it to your advantage. How do you know that wasn't what was happening in your life?
Because if you thought about where Phoenix and then over the course of a couple of days you're looking at everything but you're only going to register things that are emotionally resonant. You know, I might have seen Phoenix a lot timer over the last seven days again I would say the number of times this has happened, the sort of like how narrow I make the criteria. So you know, sometimes I say I need to see a button or a symbol of a button or the word button. But it's got to happen three times by 11pm tomorrow.
And one of my friends says that, you know, we share something which is if you see a pair of lines and we sent each other pictures of it. But she says it has to be if you went out of your way and you walked a different way and then you saw them, if it's like the normal way that you go or somewhere that you know that they exist, that doesn't count. It has to be if you went out of your way. So I had a previous thing with Robin which was about the figure of eight or the infinity symbol.
And there's a story in the book of how that was popping up when you actually met him. But there was a day recently where I had three spaced out meetings in the day. So I felt like the opportunity to walk for an hour between them all. And for the last meeting of the day I ended up walking past Uch, which is University College Hospital where he was having treatment.
And that had been a really traumatic time for me when he was in hospital there. And I will have to say I kind of avoided that area since then. I'll tell you about a particular story that was really traumatizing for me on this walk to where I was going for the evening for a book launch event. I ended up walking past the hospital and I actually said in my head like why would you make that happen to me?
Why do I have to walk past that building? I never want to see that building again in my life. And again, I said, you have to send me a sign. And by the time I got to Euston Station, so people who don't know can Google, this is not very far.
There was an elastic band in the figure of H sign on the pavement. And that means something to me. So the thing about this confirmation bias thing is it's dependent on the reticular activating system, which is the system of your brain that filters out what's not crucial to your survival and then filters in what it wants you to notice. And so actually, one of the things I've written about in the book is the art of noticing, because really we live in this world where life is passing you by at 100 miles per hour.
You're not noticing things that can actually be crucial to you thriving rather than you just surviving. And in this model called shared trait vulnerability, which falls under the field of research called neurosthetics. So basically, creativity is a positive personality trait, right? But there is a high correlation between creativity and psychopathology, which is mental illness, particularly depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism.
And there are quite a few high profile examples of creative people who had mental illnesses like Alexander McQueen, Kurt Cobain, Van Gogh. So what that shows is that there's an area of overlap of three particular ways of thinking that are underpinned by neurology, that are the reasons that people with mental illness are so creative. And they are basically hyperconnectivity. So that's two things that's joining the dots in the material world of things that aren't obvious to other people.
But it's also hyperconnectivity inside the brain. So if you think about all these lobes, so heavy. If you think about all these lobes, the more lobes that are firing at the same time. And there's also a cortex that's known as the association cortex.
So that one, you know, these lobes can be firing, but they're not necessarily connecting up with each other. The more interconnected all this firing is in the brain, the more the brain opens up to new ideas. So that underpins creativity. And also this usually really involves the visual cortex, which is in the occipital lobes.
And that's why some, sometimes people, whether it's through psychedelics or, you know, sort of, sort of altered states of consciousness through creativity, can see things that they didn't see before. There's also something called novelty salience, which is noticing new things, which is noticing things of importance that you would otherwise have filtered out. And there's something called attenuated latent inhibition or low latent inhibition, which is to do with that filter. And it means that the filter allows more things in than it normally does.
So you can see we've got hyperconnection, we've got noticing more things and we've got the filter like loosening and allowing more things in. Now if you've got a high iq, high working memory, and you've got cognitive flexibility, which you can think, you know, out of the box, that's a really good thing. If you've got a low iq, you've got deficits in your working memory. That's you've got what's called perseveration, which is you just go over the same thought process over and over again that can lead to you having a psychological crisis.
So I took that model and thought, if grief is like psychosis and I'm currently in a very vulnerable state, is creativity a conduit for me to get not only back to the state that I was in before, but into a state of expanded awareness where I can loosen the filter as I choose, as I choose fit. I can notice things I would have passed by before and I can think differently about how my mind works, how the world works, possibly what happens after someone passes away. And then I went and looked into nerdit experiences in terms of lucidity and dark retreats. Like I said, I went down rabbit hole.
What did you find in that rabbit hole? At the border of life and death, usually within one to 24 hours of death, someone who has, whose brain hasn't been functioning, who can't remember the names of their own children, suddenly becomes completely lucid and says, stephen darling, come over here. Let me, you know, let's have a nice mother son chat. And then that gives a lot of people hope, but usually that means it's an hour or 23 hours till the person's going to die.
We can't explain that. How can a brain that's irreversibly damaged suddenly function completely normally? There is no explanation for that. With the near death experiences, I was particularly compelled by three stories.
Dr. Mary Neal, an orthopedic surgeon, she's in that Netflix documentary Surviving Death. She was submerged underwater for 15 or 20 minutes. She should never have been able to be resuscitated.
She describes her whole journey of going to another realm, seeing, you know, being of light, being told that her life isn't over. She has to turn back and return to the physical world. Even though she can see her bloated body and her friends trying to reach her to resuscitate her and they couldn't. Dr.
Eben Alexander, who wrote Proof of Heaven, he is a doctor, he was an atheist, he was in a coma with bacterial meningitis and was pronounced clinically dead. And then basically came back and said that he saw heaven and he now believes in a God that is benign, that cares about the future of humanity. So for me as a doctor, hearing these stories from other doctors was really, really convincing. And then there's one story that Dr.
Bruce Grayson told me. He's a professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia who has done 50 years of research into near death experiences. And he told me the story of a patient in ICU who kept going into cardiac arrest. And he had a primary nurse who was a young 20 year old nurse, and they had a really close bond.
And one weekend she had time off for the weekend and he had a different nurse looking after him and he went into cardiac arrest and he had a near death experience. And in that near death experience, he saw his primary nurse. She said to him, your life isn't over. You have to go back and get better.
And please tell my parents I'm sorry about the red mg. So he wakes up in icu, he's got this replacement nurse looking after him and he says, the strangest thing just happened. I had this experience of being in this other world. I saw my primary nurse and she said I had to come back.
And she also said to tell my parents sorry about the red mg. So the temporary nurse starts, bursts in tears, runs out of the room, he has no idea why. Someone comes in and says what's just happened. He explains and they tell him that his primary nurse was given a red MG for her 21st birthday, took it out for a test run, crashed it into a tree and died.
He didn't know she was dead, but he saw her on the other side and she told him to come back. And the guy that told you the story was who relevant to the patient who said that? Dr. Bruce Grayson.
He has done 50 years of research on near death experiences. He's got over 5,000 recorded cases of patients of his own that he's looked after that had near death experiences. And he also shared with me the numbers of cases other people have on databases. So, you know, we're looking at over 10,000 cases globally recorded at the moment.
What is it that you believe based on those near death experiences like the red MG story and based on this phenomenon of terminal lucidity? So Professor Alexander Barthione who wrote Threshold about terminal lucidity, put it really nicely when he said, maybe at the border of life and death we see something that is true all along, but we don't, for whatever reason see it or acknowledge it whilst we're alive and well, which is that the mind and body can operate independently of each other. It is quite shocking. This is a case from 2009.
An 82 year old woman without sinus disease who was nonverbal and non responsive and had no apparent recognition of her surroundings or families for years. And then one day before her death, she suddenly sat up in hospital, looked around and recognized her daughter by name, spoke clearly, reminiscent about the past, thanked her family for caring for her, her speech was coherent, her memory was intact and her personality recognisable as though she had never been ill. She fell asleep that evening and died peacefully during the night. And what do you think's happening there?
What do you think's happening there? It's possibly, you know, partially explained by a surge in neurochemicals, but it's not explained by how can those neurochemicals act if the physical neurons and synapses are damaged? There is no explanation. The only explanation is that the mind is not emergent from material matter.
The mind, the thoughts, the emotions, the psyche cannot be solely emerging from physical matter. That's the only explanation from what we understand so far. And so what is it that you now believe? You believe that our souls and our bodies are two separate things?
And where does our soul live if it's not living inside of me? So where is Robin? So I believe that whether you want to call it the universe, consciousness, collective consciousness, Godhead, cosmic soup, the word for it isn't important. There's somewhere that that energy goes and it still exists in some form.
And if you believe in reincarnation, then you may believe that it then enters another body as a vessel and has a different life. But it doesn't go away. How do you know I'm going to say something that I know you're not going to like. But I know because I feel it personally.
I feel it from. I feel it with the person I've been close to in my entire life, who I know would never leave me if they didn't absolutely have to. But I can back that up to the extent of I can say, you can't prove that this isn't true. I can back that up with everything that I put in the book.
And I'm not the only one. Dr. David Eagleman Stanford says, you know, this idea of the brain being like a radio and receiving signals from outside. We can't prove it, but we categorically cannot say it's not true.
Professor Donald Hoffman suggests that space time is not the basis of how the universe works. Suggests that consciousness is the basis of how the universe works. We can't prove that's not true. And I find that really exciting.
I mean, as a scientist, you're supposed to challenge the status quo. You're supposed to be curious. You can't, as a scientist, believe that everything we know now is all there is. There's no point to being a scientist if that's what you believe.
What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.