Alice in Futureland

ALICE: Today, we’re continuing our conversation on Healing Energy, with leading researcher, Bill Bengston. Bill is a professor of sociology at St. Josephs College, in New York, where he specializes in research methods, and statistics. 

To hear how Bill started his research into healing, and about his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work, listen to Episode 7.

ALICE: Bill’s book, The Energy Cure, tells the story of how he got into healing, and covers the development of the method, much of his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work.

ALICE: The Bengston Energy Healing Method, born from Bill’s years of research, uses “image cycling,” a largely mechanical technique of the mind

BENGSTON: There's a technique called rapid image cycling. And rapid image cycling involves a little bit of mental gymnastics. The mental gymnastics involve going through-- making up a list of very explicit things that you would like to see in the future. It can't be vague generalities like I want to be happy. The general idea is, after quite a bit of work trying to develop this list, when you have an emotion-- and it makes no difference what it is-- when you have an emotion, good or bad, you're going through this list at an extraordinary rate. So if I were to say, I'm going to drum on a desk, if [TAP] image, [TAP] image, [RAPID TAPPING] I would never go this slow. That's painful to me to be cycling at that rate. I'd cycle much, much, much faster. That takes some training and drill and practice and all that stuff, which you can do by practicing your brains out, getting a CD, taking a workshop, something like that. 

In any event, that is the basic that never goes away, upon which we superimpose hands-on healing techniques, or distant healing techniques, which are, again, not particularly hard, but they take practice. Get on a bike, see if you can cycle. It's a sequential step that you don't master in a weekend. But you understand the plot, and then you decide you want to do it.

ALICE: Healing really is, ours to learn. But what I find fascinating about Bill’s current work is that he wants to make healing as easy as taking a vitamin pill!

BENGSTON: I want to turn healing into a conventional treatment that has nothing to do with belief of any sort. And make it storable, basically analogous to taking a pill. 

ALICE: Wait. Did he just say “storable’? Can you store healing?

BENGSTON: If you take a multivitamin pill you've got a bunch of stuff loosely stored in the pill. I can put the pills in my pocket, take them on the road, plop them in when I need them. Can I have a little healing pill? Can I have a scalable way to deliver healing? And it's turning out to be yes.

Healing can be stored. The initial idea about storing healing goes to some very, very early work in the 1960s, early 1960s by Bernard Grad at McGill University in Montreal. 

ALICE: Dr. Bernard Grad was a Canadian biologist, who is considered one of the foremost researchers of laying on of hands energy healing. His influence remains groundbreaking today, and is still the foundation for research in the field of subtle energy and energy medicine.

BENGSTON: Grad found that you can store healing in cotton. And what that meant was he would get Oskar Estebany to hold a piece of cotton. And then he would apply the cotton to wounded mice and they would be fixed, as if Estebany was holding the cage. You could put cotton in the soil of plants and they would grow differently. He found you could store healing in water. The question is what else can you store it in? And storage is an interesting problem, which would be necessary in order to make this scalable. But to demonstrate that it is storable doesn't mean that you've captured it in a way that makes it scalable. 

ALICE: Bill started doing research into cotton, cotton that can store healing!

BENGSTON: If you can charge cotton-- and he had already demonstrated that you can, and I'd, again, just taken it farther-- it doesn't solve the problem. So I have experiments now at Brown University where you take a piece, you have charged cotton and you have uncharged cotton. And then you bring little dishes, called plates, but little dishes of cancer cells. And you bring the cancer cells and you plop them and you bring them gradually nearer to cotton, and you plop on top of the cotton, and then you look and see what happens. Well, if the cotton hasn't been charged, nothing happens. If the cotton has been charged, the cancer cells genomically change. And probably, cancer cells are not amenable to placebo effects or suggestion. But the cancer cells can tell whether cotton has been charged and they biologically respond. If we put cells that have motility they can swim near the cotton. It'll swim towards the cotton. 

ALICE: Wow, that’s amazing. The healing cotton had an effect on the cancer cells. How can this be explained? 

BENGSTON: I think healing occurs through a bonding between, we'll just call a healer and healee. And you can talk about this in a different way. It's assumed in traditional methodologies that, just anybody trained in experimental design knows that the basic plot of experimental design is you take, let's say we're testing a drug. The same thing, the drug could be hands-on healing. So we're testing a drug. You're going to take a pill. We're going to see if it works.

ALICE: To understand how healing can be stored, and reused and be effective, Bill first helped me understand the idea of bonding, and the experiments he did to prove this.

BENGSTON: And so the general plot, boiled down to its essence, is I have a therapy. The therapy could be a pill. I get a gaggle of volunteers and I break them up into two groups. You give the therapy to one and you give a placebo to the other. And the people don't know whether they're getting the placebo or they're getting the real thing. But you do this. And so I've got a handful of people, or a gaggle of people here, and a handful of people or a gaggle of people there. And they're separate. They're distinct. They're all volunteers in some crazy experiment. And the assumption is, in virtually all experimental design, is that physically separate groups or physically separate individuals are independent. I'm here. You're there. Well, OK, fine. I drink water, it doesn't do anything to you. You take a pill, doesn't do anything to me. 

And so can you demonstrate to me they're independent? Can you demonstrate to me dependency? Well it turns out I can demonstrate dependency. I've taken, for example, EEGs, and I've had them synchronized and sampled every-- take 38 leads and you've got a bunch of stuff sticking out and you're someplace else, and I start cycling. And my brain changes. And I think about you and that signal appears in your brain. The cross correlations are so intense in the brain that you could reasonably say this is a phase lock of two brains. If I stick a pin in me, you jump. That's the short version. 

Now everybody's experienced this. This isn't unique to me geeking out in the lab. 

ALICE: When Bill says he starts cycling, it is his method of rapid image cycling, which helps with the energy exchange in his Bengston Healing Method. But I am not sure I have experienced a lock with someone else’s brain yet!

BENGSTON: Everybody here has felt connected and felt disconnected. It's not entanglement. That's crazy talk. You've felt the fluidity of the connection or lack of connection. I love my dog on Monday. I hate my dog on Tuesday. What changed? It's the same dog, but the connections changed. And you can feel a connection to people, dogs, ideas, places.

I think that individuals can be bonded together and the separateness isn't quite as separate anymore. And I suspect in a drug trial, for example, where you've got a gaggle of people broken up into independent groups, they're identifying… I think this is somehow connected. I don't know. Mice can become bonded to each other by shared experiences. They can be bonded together maybe by mice consciousness? They can be bonded together by the consciousness of the experimenter. I don't know the rules of bonding. So, there's bonding. There's unbonding. 

ALICE: Ok, so what makes it bonded? 

BENGSTON: Well, if I'm obsessed with, let's say I have an antiviral, and everybody's in the antiviral, I think you're going to get, if this group gets an effect, this group, whether they've taken the antiviral or not, will also get the effect. And so, if you study placebos-- and most people don't-- but if you study placebos you'll find some reasonably interesting phenomena. Placebo effects are directly proportional to the amount of the treatment in the other group. Now contemplate that. So, I give you x dosage, I get x placebo effect. If I give you 2x dose, I get a 2x placebo effect. Now, how do you explain that psychologically? 

If you explain it as resonant bonding it's starting to make sense. Bonds become stronger as the number of bonders, bondees, I don't know what the right term is, are present. In my experiments, for example, the more mice in an experiment, the faster they'll collectively get cured. So if I have an experiment with five mice, they'll take longer to get better than an experiment with 25 mice. 25 mice will take longer than 75 mice. And I think what's happening is, a treatment to any one cage is a treatment to all the mice. Kind of like upping the placebo. 

ALICE: Wow. So the more mice, or people, in the healing experiment, the shorter the time, and the more successful the healing effect will be. Treat one cage of mice, and you are treating all of them. 

BENGSTON: As you move from, in FDA trials, from phase one to phase two to phase three, the number of bodies increases. As the number of bodies increase, similarly the placebo effect gets proportionately stronger. So by the time you get to a stage three FDA clinical trial, you have so many people that the placebo effect becomes so strong, you perceive nothing has happened, because the perception that something has happened is a function of what's the difference between the two groups. And as the placebo effect gets proportionately stronger, there's no difference. And so if you think nothing happened, in geek terms, this would be known as a type two error, where you think nothing has happened but something actually has happened. 

ALICE: And something did happen…

BENGSTON: I did an experiment in one medical school where we had six rooms going on of six different conditions for treating the mice. And in all six rooms, all of the mice were cured. Now in this model, 100% should die. Instead 100% lived. But there was no difference among the six rooms. They were all cured. The conclusion was nothing happened. That's a type two error. I think we're making those errors all over the place routinely in conventional science because the scientists, like myself at one point, belong to the religion that physical separateness means independence

ALICE: Healing is connection between, the bond that takes place between healer and healee. 

I had one more question for Bill: What does he think will be the most important contribution he could make in healing?

BENGSTON: I think the most important conceptual contribution I could make will be regarding resonant bonding. I have designed a sequence of experiments, because this is my superpower. But I've designed a sequence of experiments which I can't find a flaw in, which will actually parse out how much of placebo may be psychological. There may be something in there. How much is psychological, and how much is a physical connection. I haven't been able to do it yet. It has to be done in humans. I found placebo effects in mice that exactly mirror what happens when you study humans. I found placebo effects in cell cultures. And so that the bonding occurred-- something happens to the untreated group or the one that's alleged to be the control. So I think that would probably be my most important conceptual understanding, if I could unravel bonding, 

ALICE: And getting back to that treated piece of cotton…

BENGSTON: I actually have Grad's original cotton here. He gave it to me as a gift after I had done something or other. Actually, I was just publishing a paper explaining how placebos work by resonant bonding, and how people have misinterpreted almost all experiments they've done in the last decades. And I went to his house in Montreal because he's a fierce critic. And he sat there, worked on it for hours. And he said, "I think you're right." And then he went to the back and he said, "I'd like to give you as a gift, 'cause you've gone past me, the original cotton I have." So that, to me, is a treasure. Yeah, that's one of the coolest gifts I've ever had. The Great One giving me cotton.

ALICE: Talk about bonding! Thank you Bill, for the great insights on storing healing, and I can’t wait to take a healing pill one day! But first, we will learn more about storing healing in water on our next episode with Bill. 

For more on energy healing, check out our book “Tuning Into Frequency” everywhere books are sold. 

That’s it for this mad tea party, stay tuned as we continue to explore energy healing futures with Bill Bengston because… 

BENGSTON: There's so many interesting things to poke at. And the most wonderful thing, by doing experiments, is you find out, virtually at the end of every experiment, how little you know. 

ALICE: I hope you, like me, keep wandering…. 

ALICE: Our expert speaker, Dr. Shamini Jain, is the founder and C.E.O. of CHI, the Consciousness and Healing Initiative. 

JAIN: my name is Dr. Shamini Jain. And my whole life, I would say I've been a very curious person. I was born and raised in the South in South Carolina and born as an East Indian in the Jain tradition. So early on, I was exposed to lots of philosophies and thinking around spirituality. All my friends were Baptist Christian. As I said, I grew up in the Jain Tradition, and I went to school like everybody else. And I started realizing pretty early in life that we were kind of being implicitly taught that our spiritual life was very different from our education life. And we understand why we have those splits. But as I got deeper into science and started exploring the nature of consciousness, I started having all these questions about why it was safe for us to explore certain areas of science and health. And yet when we got to the point of exploring conscious experience, the nature of healing, things like that, some of the things that I was learning about in the East Indian background and other spiritual traditions just seemed to be off-limits. 

ALICE: Dr. Jan, a global, life-long learner, was motivated to create a collaborative accelerator, to bring together diverse perspectives, and forward the science and education of healing.

JAIN: And that was really surprising to me. I didn't really understand why we had this schism, if you will, between science and spirituality. And so I sought out to say let's bridge these systems of knowledge, let's bridge these systems of healing, because our medical system is broken. To a large degree, it's broken. Certainly, it needs to be evolved in many ways. And we have made incredible advances in many ways, and yet we've sort of left behind wisdom in many ways, as well. So that's a little bit about my story and what motivated me to create the consciousness in healing initiative. 

ALICE: CHI, pronounced as "chi", is the Consciousness and Healing Initiative created by Dr. Jain. 

JAIN: CHI is collaborative. Our Consciousness and Healing Initiative is a collaborative of scientists and healing practitioners and educators, but also of organizations that have been forwarding this work for a long time.

ALICE: Working to bridge science and spirituality, knowledge and healing. What do we mean by consciousness and healing? 

JAIN: especially in the medical and scientific system because we're so used to thinking about things in the realm of what we call pathogenesis. That is diagnosing a disease and treating it. So a lot of times, we think healing is curing, which means healing is about I have a sprained ankle and I want someone to do Reiki on it to make it better. OK, there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. That could probably happen. It often does happen. 

But healing to me is much more than that. And in talking with healers across the world, one of the things that I've noticed is that at its core, no matter who you're talking to, what healing tradition they come to, they're all basically saying the same thing, which is healing is reuniting one with your own spirit. Whether we call that your own soul, whether we call that God, whether we call that the universe, nature, there are many ways of describing it. But healing is basically the restoration, the process, of restoring harmony to ourselves completely, not just on the physical level but on the emotional level, on the social level, and on the spiritual level. But the driving force here is really that reunification with your spiritual nature, with your true self, unencumbered, that part of your consciousness that is beyond what you've been conditioned to think that you are. 

ALICE: Wow, healing is part of learning about ourselves.

JAIN: As human beings, we don't want to suffer. So we're always looking for a way out. We're looking for a way to ease our suffering. And so we kind of want to believe healing means that it's going to reduce my suffering. Well, in a way, it does because as we know, what is the saying? Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Something like that, right? 

So we can learn to sort of be with where we are through the healing process and we can sit with things as they are. We can notice the impermanence. We can celebrate the impermanence in a strange way instead of fighting against it and saying, I don't want this. I want to get healing because I don't want this. I mean, nobody wants cancer. Nobody wants chronic pain. We don't want those things. So there's nothing wrong with wanting to rid ourselves of a disease. But when we come to a place of just being able to be with our spirit where we are now, that's the power of the healing process. And then all of the sudden, we might notice, oh, I have pain, but it's not bothering me as much. I'm actually able to notice other things in my life. I'm actually able to feel joy along with my pain. I'm living a much more full life. That's sort of the magic of the healing process. 

ALICE: healing is more than what happens to each of us on a personal level – it’s about connectedness.  

JAIN:  We're all connected with each other. And so when we began to realize this through our healing process, then the world looks very different because harmony isn't just something that happens in my body or even just in my relationships. It's my connection with the earth, it's my connection with society, it's recognizing that when I look at another person, even if they come from a very different place than I've come from, their upbringing is different, their culture is different, that there's no difference, really, between me and that person, that we're all part of the same beautiful tapestry of life. And we can grow and appreciate each other. 

So the healing process, when we start looking at it on the macro scale, once we've sort of dealt with our own suffering and our own trauma a little bit so that we can see outside of ourselves a little bit better, then we start recognizing the joy in interpersonal connection, the joy in harmony, the joy in diversity, and the joy in sustainable stewardship of our planet. And this is something that, again, the indigenous wisdom holders have taught us from the beginning. Healing is about the restoration of harmony with not only ourselves, but with our planet, with nature, with understanding how nature affects us. 

We are nature. We are made up of nature. We are made up of the elements. This is what all of the indigenous wisdom teachings teach us. So then we begin to observe or with our spirit nature, which is inrestrictably connected with the earth. So we begin to notice the patterns. There's all of these things that seem magical that trackers and other folks do in the indigenous traditions. Well, they're just really observing with deep, subtle awareness.  

So as we do this work in the healing profession and in our own self-healing, then we begin to see those interconnections really deeply. And that just naturally makes us have better choices. Then it's sort of like, OK, do I need to buy all of that plastic that goes in the landfill? Is there a better choice here? How are my eating habits affecting the planet? How are my behaviors affecting the planet? Because now we can feel her. We're part of her. 

ALICE: how, if we are awakened to our healing potential, we can see the interconnectedness of all & we can create the world we want to see

JAIN: in science and medicine, in the Western world, it's sort of been very myopic. It's kind of been one way of thinking and we've kind of not really taken into account the wisdom of the cosmology from indigenous tradition. 

So as we begin to bring in the more holistic cosmologies, which are necessarily rooted in healing, then our perspective changes. Our understanding of reality and what it is changes. Our relationships change as a result. And we begin to create that world that we want to see. So if we are awakened to our healing potential, then that means that we're awakened to our interconnection, the diversity and celebrating the diversity of life, and knowing that everything that we do, everything that we think, everything that we say is affecting everything around us because we're not separate. 

And that's empowering because we get to create the world we want to see. We get to create that harmonious world. We get to celebrate each other. All of this is possible. 

ALICE: Energy is all around us – fields of energy and information, our Biofield!

JAIN: One of the questions that we have is about whether healing as we've talked about it, energy healing, what people call energy healing, subtle energy healing, is actually informational healing. And why is this distinction important? Because energy has a very specific definition, OK? So by its very nature, some of the things that we are seeing in the healing profession, like the non-local healing that I mentioned before, the fact that a healing practitioner can affect someone's physiology at a distance. 

That doesn't jive with our understanding of what we call energy, right? So there are other things that happen, too, in terms of even when the healer is in the same room with a patient, sometimes a patient will have an extraordinary spiritual experience where they might experience, for example, ancestors, a grandmother, or a grandfather literally being there in spirit form guiding the process. Is that energy or is that information? 

And when we're looking at healing from a distance, we can't quite say that this is electromagnetic in nature. So there has to be something else that's happening. And this is where we get into exploring whether or not these fields of what we call energy and information are both having effects. So there could be this subtle energy that is measurable in some ways. Maybe some of it is electromagnetic. Some of it may not be electromagnetic. It may be in the form of what people call scalar waves and other descriptions, torsion fields and things like that, which are subtle but are still kind of described as energy in some ways.  

And then there's the informational aspect of it, too, which suggests that this is beyond measurement. It may be beyond measurement. At least at this point in time, it may be beyond measurement. We always kind of want to measure everything. As scientists, we do. It's like, well, I can't believe it unless I can replicate it, I can measure it. Well, that's great. That's absolutely part of science. We do want to do that. 

But if we're seeing an effect over and over and yet we still can't quite deduce the mechanism, does that mean the effect isn't there or does that mean that we just don't quite know how to measure the mechanism? So this is really important because a lot of times, the field, the funding, the support for the field, the ability to go forth and do more studies and a very promising area becomes limited because we don't "understand the mechanism." 

ALICE: Could that mechanism be us, our biofield? And the experiences we feel during our healing process? 

JAIN: We might want to get a little bit more comfortable with studying informational effects by actually asking the person what they're experiencing. This is called mixed methods research, where we integrate both what we call the qualitative aspects of a person's experience along with the quantitative. 

The other way we could do it is just to ask people what their experiences are like so we can get a better understanding of what we're calling information transfer during the healing process. 

ALICE: Wow, healing as information transfer. I, for one, am excited to hear more about the outcome of the studies that CHI and others are doing to help us harnessing our own healing, and perhaps that of our planet. 

Which leads me to one more question for today’s expert, Dr. Shamini Jain, on interconnectedness and information: I would like to know, Are we all stardust?

JAIN: I absolutely love the question. I have to share with you. One of my last talks for this year in 2020 that I gave in person in February before coronavirus hit was actually sharing the lyrics from a song that I think we all know, which is Woodstock, written by Joni Mitchell. And what does it say? We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.  

We're certainly more than just our physical bodies. 

ALICE: Thanks to today’s expert, Dr. Shamini Jain, the founder and C.E.O. of CHI, the Consciousness and Healing Initiative, for explaining healing and consciousness, the connectivity of all humans and the energy we share. 

Again, we learned that Yes, we are, Bioenergetic beings!

Dr. Shamini Jain: http://www.shaminijain.com/CHI, the Consciousness and Healing Initiative: https://www.chi.is/Tuning Into Frequencies 

Bill Bengston: https://bengstonresearch.com
The Energy Cure: https://www.soundstrue.com/products/the-energy-cure
SSE Society for Scientific Exploration: https://www.scientificexploration.org
Tuning into Frequency

ALICE INTRO… there’s a question I keep asking myself, can we use energy to heal? 

BILL BENGSTON: Bill Bengston is the name and healing research is my game. 

ALICE: My guest today is Bill Bengston, one of the leading researchers in energy and healing, Bill is a professor of sociology at St. Josephs College, in New York, where his areas of specialization include research methods, and statistics. 

Bill has conducted research into anomalous healing for over 35 years, and has proven the effectiveness of his technique, in controlled animal experiments conducted in university biological and medical laboratories. 

BENGSTON: I'm President of the Society for Scientific Exploration. This is a group of geeks and nerds from around the world. We're right now in 27 countries, and we do research in scientific anomalies. 

ALICE: Wait, did he just say: "Scientific Anomalies"?

BENGSTON: And what that means in simple terms is that we study stuff that doesn't make any sense. And not making sense means based on our understanding of the way the world works, our understanding through textbooks and all that kind of thing would indicate that the things that we look into can't be. And this group in 27 countries are serious researchers with usually serious academic appointments. And they do traditional scientific methodology on stuff that doesn't make sense. 

ALICE: His book, The Energy Cure, tells the story of how Bengston got into healing, and covers the development of the method, much of his early experiences in the lab, and clinical work.

BENGSTON: So, for example, I do research in healing, and I've been doing so for I think 115 years. And healing doesn't make any sense. If you talk about conventional medicine, or you talk about conventional biology, and somebody comes along and puts their hands on you and does whatever it is they do after that and something happens significantly regarding healing, that doesn't make any sense. And that would be an example of a scientific anomaly. ESP would be examples of scientific anomalies that my brain can link up with your brain at a distance. That simply makes no sense. Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It just means it doesn't make any sense. And what an anomaly really does, more than anything else, is it teaches us what we don't know. And it teaches us to be skeptical of what we think we know. 

ALICE: Ok, so what do we think we know? Or what should we know?

BENGSTON: And so, if you have read the current textbooks in any field, you have the illusion that the stuff in the textbooks is real. It's not. They'll be modified in future editions of the textbook. And what it really means is that knowledge is an ongoing process. And what we focus on in the SSE, the Society for Scientific Exploration, is rigorous data and rigorous evidence looking into claims of things which would be considered loosely paranormal. Paranormal means beyond normal. That's what an anomaly is. It's beyond normal. I suspect that, in the case of a whole lot of paranormal phenomena, like ESP-- the data are overwhelming. And so sooner or later, there'll be an edition of the textbook that says yeah, there's such a thing as telepathy, and here's the mechanism of action, and here's what happens, and here's how it works. You wouldn't then ask, "Do you do believe it?" Because belief requires this leap of faith. I mean, there is telepathy. The question is, how does it work? And the question is, under what conditions?

Same thing is true in healing. You put your hands on, you have an intention, you do whatever you do, and then you have significant healing. In the same way we talk about climate change deniers, I would say there are healing deniers. It's the same thing. They're ESP deniers. Well, because they're deniers, it doesn't mean there's not climate change. And because there's ESP deniers, it doesn't mean there's not ESP. There’re healing deniers. And some of the folks, they get real worked up over the stuff. I don't. I just start out being a skeptic. So, I don't believe the stuff, either. But I study it. 

ALICE:  OK, well, I’m not a healing denier, but I keep wandering, what do we really mean when we say “healing”?

BENGSTON: I got into this many, many, many years ago. And basically, what happened is I had a chronic, multi-year bad back. And so, I walked around in pain all the time. I had actually given up a swimming scholarship for college because I was a butterflier and if you have a bad back, butterfly and bad backs don't go together well. But in any event, as I was a lifeguard, I transitioned from competitive swimmer to lifeguard, and of course later, professor. I've never had a real job. [CHUCKLES] I'm not a big fan of work. 

So, I sometimes hung out in a lifeguard stand and such, in pain. And I met a guy at a pool I was lifeguarding at, and he said that he had discovered eight months before I met him that he was psychic. And I said, "Uh-huh." [CHUCKLES] And he said, "Yeah, I found out by accident that I can do what was known as psychometry." And psychometry is a fancy name for token object reading. 

ALICE: Wait, did he just say ‘token object’ reading?

BENGSTON: So, you hold something of somebody's and then you get impressions, or you allege to download information, I don't know what the right analogy is. And I said, "Uh-huh." And so, I started to test him, you know, as a skeptic.

ALICE: Wow. So, exactly what did this guy do?

BENGSTON: I did spend some time with this guy, a lot of time with this guy. And then his readings turned into physical readings. So, if I held, and I'm just using as an example, if I gave him my wallet, and in a test, he wouldn't know it was a wallet. It would be in an envelope, which would be in an envelope and all that stuff. He would be getting an envelope. But if I gave him something like my wallet or a watch or a ring or something like that, he started to pick up physical symptoms on his own body. And the people he was reading would claim that when he picked this stuff up, it was leaving them. And I didn't believe that. He didn't believe that. He thought that was the dumbest thing he's ever heard. And so, this happened over and over again. 

And one day he and I were sitting in a kitchen. This was one of those life changing moments. And I was sitting on top of a counter, dangling my legs and bending forward, as people with bad backs tend to do, trying to stretch it out. And he was telling me of some reading he had done the night before, getting rid of this or that pain or whatever it was. And it suddenly dawned on me. I'm a little slow. It suddenly dawned on me, you're an idiot. This guy's talking about all his pain he's relieving, and I'm sitting there dangling my legs in pain. And just then, he says-- I didn't say a word. He goes "Ow, ow. Somebody has a bad back." And I didn't say anything. I just let him squirm for a while. He goes "Somebody has a bad back." He starts looking through his pockets for who would be giving him a bad back.

And finally, I said, "You can stop flopping now. It's me." And he said, "You?" And I said, "You're the guy who's supposed to be psychic. You're a loser. You've known me the whole-- for how many months now? You didn't even know I had a bad back. I think this does not speak highly of you." [CHUCKLES] And he said, "Keep your pain to yourself." I said, "Better idea, fix it." And he said, "How?" And I said, "Damned if I know." So, I leaned over on a kitchen table, standing up, leaned over. And he said, "What should I do now?" And I said, "Put your hands on my back and fix it, you big dope." And he put his hands on, and he goes, "OK, well, what should I be doing?" I said, "Just let it go, let it go." And I got to tell you, my back started to feel like it had been novocained. And then from the outside in, the Novocain feeling disappeared. I haven't had a back pain since. That'll get your attention. It's reasonably interesting. And then you're left with two possibilities. One, walk away, keep your world safe, and pretend it never happened. Or two, try to figure out what in heaven's name just happened. For better or for worse, I decided to go and try to figure out what in heaven's name just happened. 

I would drag his hands around and say, "Put your hands here, put your hands here, put your hands here." And I watched hundreds of people. And it was seriously interesting. Some things responded incredibly quickly, dramatically. For example, cancer. Cancer was not particularly a difficult problem. Some things, eh, not so much. So, it's a standing joke, but it's real, historically. He couldn't do warts. So, cancer was easy. Warts made us both flop on the floor and panic. And it turned out the more aggressive the cancer, the easier it was to fix. That was one of the first clues. 

ALICE: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Aggressive cancer is easier to fix all with the touch of hands?

BENGSTON: So, we did this. This is, again, a very short version, plopping around, putting his hands-on things, seeing what happens. And then I started to join him. And the question was A, could I do it too? B, is this thing teachable? And C, what in heaven's name is going on? 

ALICE: Ah, could Bill learn how to heal? Could you or I learn to heal with touch?

BENGSTON: And so, it turns out, yeah, I could do it too. It turns out probably, probably it's teachable. Now I say this with a certain amount of irony, because I teach it. [CHUCKLES] And I also, being a good skeptic, I published a paper in, I don't even remember what journal. I think Explore Journal of Science and Healing, with a biologist buddy of mine entitled Can Healing Be Taught? And I suggested no one has ever demonstrated that it can. So, it doesn't mean it can't. It's just means there's a certain amount of belief that healing can be taught. 

ALICE: One night during a healing session of about a dozen people, Bill met Dave Krinsley, who at the time was the head of geology department at City University of New York, and together they decided to take this healing by hands therapy under serious controlled conditions. They worked with a junior member of the bio department…

BENGSTON: She was working on a mammary cancer in mice and had been working on the mammary cancer for 20 years. And it's the single most-studied animal model ever. I think that's fair. There were over 2,000 publications in scientific journals on this one mouse model. In the mouse model, mammary cancer, certain kinds of mice are given a certain strain of cancer and 100% of them die in a month. 100%. And the distribution of death looks like a traditional, normal curve. Standard deviation is 3 days. So, they die very tightly. What are the odds of them living 10 days, of 11 days, of 12 days, like that? And no mouse ever, anywhere, under any circumstances, regardless of treatment, had ever lived past 27 days. Could I turn it into a negatively skewed distribution so that mice are living longer? Let's find out what happens. 

ALICE: They set up a lab at City University in New York, but the healing guy Bill was working with backed out of the study.

BENGSTON: So, it was suggested since he's not doing it, I should do it. And I said, "Me? I'm not a healer. I can barely spell 'healing.'" And so nonetheless, I got a cage of mice, bunch of mice in a cage. And I put my hands around and I did the healing techniques that he and I had developed. And I don't believe this stuff. And the tumors started to grow. And I assumed it was failing. And I said, "OK, it doesn't work. I'm an empiricist. Let's pull the plug. It doesn't work." And my heartless friend said, "Give it a couple more days." I said, "But it doesn't work." And he said, "Give it a couple more days." 

Couple more days later, tumors are much bigger. And I went come on, pay attention, doesn't work. Let's be constrained by reality here. Couple more days, tumors getting bigger. I'm trying to pull the plug. They're trying to say go a couple more days. Tumors then grow a blackened area on the tip of them and now I'm sure that the mice are dying. And then the tumor ulcerates, opens up, and it looks ugly. And I'm jumping up and down going folks, this doesn't work. Couple more days. And the tumor ulcerates to a huge opening. The mice are otherwise healthy. The eyes are clear, the coats are fine, they're running around the cage, they're having fun, they're playing pinochle, they're doing whatever it is that they're doing in the cage. Except they got this big wonking ugly thing on the back of them. And a couple more days, couple more days, and then suddenly the thing collapses. And the mice are cured. 

ALICE: WOW! The mice are cured of their cancer tumors… now, was this an anomaly?

BENGSTON: They're not they're not under remission. They're cured. And by cured, it's not that the symptoms went away. It's, they have no more cancer. And they lived their entire lifespan. No mouse has ever had a recurrence of cancer. And I can take it farther, but we didn't know this at the time. We can re-inject cancer into this mouse and it won't take. The mouse is not only cured, it's immune from cancer.

So, first thing we had to do is replicate it, see is it a fluke, is it this, is it that? And in the replication, I said, "This is kind of weird. First all I wasn't supposed to be the subject in this thing to start with. And secondly, if I'm the only one who can do this, that's not good. That's not a good place to be." So, I said, "I got a great idea. Let's get some naive, inexperienced volunteers. Let them replicate it. And I'll teach them how to do it.” So, I got four volunteers to be the healers in the next experiment, totally inexperienced, not anything that would even remotely relate to any of this stuff. And we replicated this and all the mice were cured. 

ALICE: ALL the mice were cured, again and again. Bill and his team replicated the experiment over and over again, using naïve volunteers….

BENGSTON: Now at this point I think I have 18 replications. So that's close to enough. And so, then we moved from that to secondary questions. Not is there healing? If you asked "Is there healing?" Again, it's a stupid question. But rather, how does it work? What are its correlates? Does it have a dose response? Does it develop in a modellable fashion so after each treatment this happens? What's behind it? These are secondary or second order questions which are much more interesting. And to this point now, 120 years later, I'm still looking into it. But now my emphasis is on making it scalable. 

ALICE: So, what’s Bill’s endgame with this research? 

I want to turn healing into a conventional treatment that has nothing to do with belief of any sort. And make it storable, basically analogous to taking a pill. If you take a multivitamin pill you've got a bunch of stuff loosely stored in the pill. I can put the pills in my pocket, take them on the road, plop them in when I need them. Can I have a little healing pill? Can I have a scalable way to deliver healing? And it's turning out to be yes. 

ALICE: aaahh, Storable healing?? We’ll learn more about Bill’s experiments in storing healing into things like water and cotton in the next episode. But, for now, you can go down the rabbit hole of healing and learn about Bengston Energy Healing Method, born from Bill’s years of research. The Bengston Method uses “image cycling,” a largely mechanical technique of the mind, that, like any new skill, takes practice and commitment to become proficient at it. You can learn more at www.bengstonresearch.com.

For more on energy healing, check out our book “Tuning Into Frequency” everywhere books are sold. 

That’s it for this mad tea party, stay tuned as we continue to explore energy healing futures with Bill Bengston because… 

BENGSTON: There's so many interesting things to poke at. And the most wonderful thing, by doing experiments, is you find out, virtually at the end of every experiment, how little you know. 

ALICE: I hope you, like me, keep wandering….

Dr. Shamini Jain: http://www.shaminijain.com/
CHI, the Consciousness and Healing Initiative: https://www.chi.is/
Dr. Fritz Albert Popp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz-Albert_Popp

ALICE: Today's question is: What is your biofield? And what is the vital energy exchange? 

ALICE: Our expert speaker, Dr. Shamini Jain is the founder and C.E.O. of "chi", the Consciousness and Healing Initiative.

JAIN: We can describe the biofield as a set of inner penetrating and interacting fields of energy and information that guide our health. 

So that might sound abstract, to you, but let me give you some examples. We know, for example, that we can manipulate, basically altering the electromagnetic field around cells. And when we, for example, manipulate these electromagnetic fields around cell membranes, we can grow neural tissue. 

So there are biofield advances that are happening in the field of what we call regenerative medicine, growing new tissue. That's one example of biofield science. 

ALICE: Dr. Jain is a psychologist, scientist, and social entrepreneur. She formed the Consciousness and Healing Initiative for the study of systems-based healing processes. Partners of CHI include the Institute of Noetic Sciences, San Diego Cancer Research Institute, U.C. San Diego Center for Integrative Medicine, and Chopra Foundation. 

JAIN: And there are many other examples that are devices that are being used right now that basically put out certain electromagnetic fields that we can measure. And those are being used to guide our health. They're being used for things like wound healing. They're even being used in the case of treating mental illness. Many different ways. 

But we're not taking a pill or anything like that. We're really working with electromagnetic fields. Some of the most exciting work is also coming out of really doing things like focused ultrasound where we're discovering that by using light and using sound waves, essentially, we could dissolve plaques, which seem to be really important in treating Alzheimer's Disease. So all of these aspects are part of what we call the biofield and using the biofield for health. 

ALICE: That's the biofield, the fields of energy and information that effect our health. 

And it's not actually new. For thousands of years, this principle of energy, vital energy, has been described by cultures around the world, there are many different names for it: prana, chi, ruah. 

The biofield, and vital energy, have been used in the practice of health and healing for millennia.

JAIN: the vital energy aspect is core to the principles of everything that we consider holistic medicine today. So, whether we're talking about osteopathy, craniosacral, Chinese medicine, acupuncture, Ayurveda, all of that is there. Yoga, meditation, many of these different practices talk about the vital energy flow in our bodies, and some of them actually very specifically teach you how to work with that, even for your own self-care. 

Then you have healing practitioners, hands-on healers, energy healers, biofield healers as we call them sometimes, that practice things today like chronic healing, healing touch, therapeutic touch, reiki, laying on of hands in the Christian tradition, and they're working with this vital energy in the body to foster healing in another person. And that's been the bulk of a lot of the research that I've done, where I've done randomized controlled trials, for example, looking at can these hands-on healers, can these so-called energy healers, biofield healers, actually foster meaningful healing in another person? 

Because here, there's no stretching, there's no needle, there's no device, right? It's just the field. It's just working with the field, sensing and working with the field. And the results so far are profound. It's amazing, when we start to realize that we are bioenergetic beings, how we can uplevel our sense of empowerment on our own health and how we can uplevel our ability to heal ourselves. 

ALICE: Yes! We are bioenergetic beings! We are learning how the biofield, the fields of energy and information, the light and the soundwaves around us is affecting us.

So how can we use that to benefit our health?

JAIN: How can energy heal us all the way to the physical level? And quite frankly, it's still a mystery. There are a lot of different theories around it. But one of the things we know is that it can't be completely explained by what we call placebo elements. And we can have a long, wonderful discussion about what we call placebo because it's very rich and it's very important. 

So, we're not really getting rid of placebo because placebo is just the basis of good medicine, its relationship, its ritual, its expectation, its conditioning. So placebo effects happen in every healing encounter. And they should be maximized. Yet when we try to control for those in studies, we're learning that it's not just the placebo effect that's affecting it. There's something else happening. 

So, the question is, how?

Are the receptors on our cells simply chemical or do they respond to electromagnetic fields? And there are some studies now by several groups, mostly, I believe, in Europe, that have been demonstrating that there are certain types of cells that respond to electromagnetic fields. 

So that is you can apply electromagnetic fields and they will respond. And it seems to be all the way down to DNA response elements. So, there's some indication that if, for example, healers are actually emanating electromagnetic fields as many suspect, we don't know if we can measure all of those physically, but it could be that cells are responding that way. 

ALICE: In a previous episode, Dr. Fitz Albert Popp told us: "We are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean."  We are surrounded by fields of energy and information. And Biofield science is exploring many ways to use electromagnetic fields in healing. This is exciting!

JAIN: We might ask, well, if we're seeing these effects with biofield healing shrinking tumors, why aren't we studying this more? Why are there only a handful of researchers looking at this? Well, because it's challenging to our general world view, right? Our general worldview is that we've been taught that the body is kind of more of a machine and that we're really mostly physical and yeah, there's something called the spirit, but we don't really understand or appreciate how strong the effects are of the spirit of the body. So it really sort of flies in the face of what we call materialism in medicine. And because it challenges beliefs, really deeply entrenched beliefs about how the body works and how medicine works and it touches on spirituality, which a lot of people really quite frankly aren't comfortable with in science, it's like they really want to keep those things separate, we end up seeing these incremental pieces of progress where we really need a systematized, deep, and broad level of research. 

Now one of the things that we've uncovered at the consciousness and healing initiative is that there are over 400 researchers worldwide that are doing work in this area and want to do more. And many of them are tenured professors at the best universities, but a lot of them keep their interests here in the closet because they're afraid. They don't want to lose tenure. They don't want to be ridiculed by their colleagues. But this is just sort of the natural way things happen. We saw this in the consciousness field when people couldn't talk about consciousness. Now there are whole conferences and journals dedicated to its study. We even saw this in the mindfulness field for a long time. So it's just the natural way of things. 

But getting that investment and that support will be really important because there's so much to explore. And it's so important for addressing some of the huge chronic health and chronic mental health issues that we have right now. Once we realize how much power we have by just working with our subtle awareness and our subtle energy field to guide our health, I mean, it's a huge game changer for medicine. It's a huge game changer for preventive medicine. 

 
ALICE:  I look forward to when the A.I. and human parts of me can tap my own biofield. Perhaps, someday, we will all be emitting good healing vibrations... 

JAIN: My research director, Dr. Richard Hammerschlag says often, he says, when I was a kid, it was all about hi-fi. It was the hi-fi system and then it became the wifi system. And as you said, in some ways, a lot of collaboration is what brought the wifi system up to where it is now. And Bluetooth, we can say, is being part of that. So now he says we're ready for the bifi system. We're ready to all tap into our individual and collective biofields. And as you say, that's really only going to happen with deep collaboration and understanding that we don't have to own this. Nobody owns the bifi. You own your own bifi. And it's freely available for you to tap into for your healing. 

ALICE: Yes! I'm ready for the bifi system!
One more question for today's expert, Dr. Shamini Jain.
I would like to know, "Are we all stardust"? 

JAIN: I absolutely love the question. I have to share with you. One of my last talks for this year in 2020 that I gave in person in February before coronavirus hit was actually sharing the lyrics from a song that I think we all know, which is Woodstock, written by Joni Mitchell. And what does it say? We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. We're certainly more than just our physical bodies. 

ALICE: Thanks to today’s expert, Dr. Shamini Jain, the founder and C.E.O. of "chi", the Consciousness and Healing Initiative, for explaining the Biofield and Vital Energy Exchange. Humans have used the biofield in health for millenia, and now, more researchers than ever are working to understand it. Today we learned that light and soundwaves could someday treat Alzheimer’s disease. Again, we learned that yes, we are, bioenergetic beings!

Check out our book TUNING INTO FREQUENCY

And visit us at ALICEinFutureland.com

Tuning Into Frequency The invisible force that heals us and the planet.
A riveting guide to the energy that surrounds us and how tuning into the power of frequencies can help us heal ourselves, and the planet.

Can you feel it? Energy is Everywhere.

From the light, sound, and electromagnetic waves that flow all around us to the intricate electrical networks that flow through us, energy is a frontier as exciting as it is uncharted. Every year new science suggests that harnessing the extraordinary power of these invisible frequencies may be the key to a variety of innovations to improve our health and wellbeing, and to repair our struggling ecosystems.

In Tuning into Frequency, the minds of Sputnik Futures explore cutting-edge discoveries from doctors, physicists, healers, ecologists, technologists, and thought leaders and explore how we can employ frequency to improve not only our physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing, but the health of the planet.

For example, did you know:
-That your heart and your brain share an electromagnetic field?
-That trees can talk to each other?
-That sound can heal the body?
-That color affects your mood?
-That the sun can help fight depression?

With expert voices, bold discoveries, and engaging visuals, this entry in the captivating Alice in Futureland series is a riveting guide to the forces that energize our bodies, our minds, and the planet.

Guest Speakers:
Bill & Mary Buchen, SONIC ARCHITECTURE, http://sonicarchitecture.com/about/
Bruce Odland, http://bruceodland.net/
Evelyn Glennie, https://www.evelyn.co.uk/
Mae-Wan Ho, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae-Wan_Ho
Aaron Antonovsky, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Antonovsky

Links:
"Elephant Listening Project", https://www.cornell.edu/video/listening-to-elephants
Beach Boys song "Good Vibrations"
R. Murray Schafer, "The Tuning of the World"

Book: TUNING INTO FREQUENCY

Episode Transcript: 
ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI. And I am always in a state of wander.

Today, my question is, What is your Soundscape? 

Lets Turn on. Tune in! And learn about the soundscape all around us!

BUCHEN: if we shut our eyes, what we hear is the soundscape, that’s what’s around us

ODLAND: it is a cultural schism between the ears and the eyes and our culture is front-loaded with visuals

GLENNIE: The type of world we live in right now is full of sound bites—we don’t know how to relate to sounds anymore, we don’t know how to listen.  

HO: Each and every part is intercommunicating with each and every other part

ALICE: Let’s slip through the looking glass, and talk about our Soundscape!

BUCHEN: Soundscape, is what we hear around us.  We’re, we’re all familiar with the term ‘landscape’.  Landscape we’re on top of a hill, and we look at the view.  That’s the landscape.  Or in the city, we have the ‘urban landscape’.  But if we shut our eyes, if what we hear is the soundscape, that’s what’s around us.  And that’s what we’re concerned about very much, is what we hear and how this affects our psyches in our lives, and our ability to be creative.  

ALICE: This is Bill Buchen. He, and his wife Mary Buchen, are the authors of SONIC ARCHITECTURE. For the last 30 years, this artist-musician team have designed public art installations and interactive sound sculptures for parks, schools, museums and playgrounds around the world. 

BUCHEN: We’re very inspired by a book called, “The Tuning of the World”, by Murray Schafer. And here he talked about the soundscape.  The soundscape has changed a lot in my lifetime alone, but the main thing I think has been cell phones, and fluorescent lights. 

So if we’re sitting in a room, we don’t hear it all the time, but the fans are going at 60 cycles, the electric grid is. So this has become our mantra as a society.  So where ever we go, we’ll always have this 60 cycle hum, as a tamboura, a tonic note in our lives, and we run our lives according to it.

The hum rarely goes away. Mostly when we’re camping or go out in the wilderness, and we get away from it. We all react different ways.  Some people don’t like to be away from it, we’re so nurtured to it, it’s such a pacifier for us. And other people go out, and you go in the woods, and you say, finally I can relax...you don’t know what you’re not missing.  

ALICE:  Do you hear a 60 CYCLE HUM?

You can test how well you hear, online! Visit the Cornell Lab website. They share some fun facts, and deep infrasound hearing experiences on their "Elephant Listening Project" website. Try their quick frequency hearing test to check your hearing capacity. And you can listen to the mating calls of forest elephants in the Central African Republic.

Visit, "Elephant Listening Project" https://www.cornell.edu/video/listening-to-elephants

ALICE: We always focus on our visual land scape. Let’s flip our focus, from visual to audio, and listen to our SOUNDSCAPE!

ODLAND: I find it very interesting to look at all of the whole culture from a sound point of view, as a philosophical stance and a provocative stance…

ALICE: Artist and composer, Bruce Odland, has been working over thirty years, developing a "Hearing Perspective" of the world we live in.

ODLAND: why, for instance, is an expensive, quiet car only quiet on the inside and it sounds like any car from the outside?…or why does the MOMA’s wonderful sculpture garden sound like any taxi stand when you close your eyes?…it is a cultural schism between the ears and the eyes and our culture is front-loaded with visuals…70% visual information in our culture and 30% all the rest of it…and I would like to reverse the equation a lot and see what it looks like…if you put your attentions 70% into your hearing and then apply it to what you see

GLENNIE: We seem to be in a world where we think we are experiencing a new kind of hearing, when in fact Stone Age people relied very much on their hearing and would create the visual art through what they heard and through vibration and we are learning a lot about that whole exploration of that time period. The type of world we live in right now is full of sound bites—we don’t know how to relate to sounds anymore, we don’t know how to listen. 

ALICE:  Virtuoso solo percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, travels the globe, playing and recording with the world’s finest orchestras and ensembles. She is notably recognized as the first musician to maintain a full-time career as a solo percussionist. Evelyn is also deaf, and has, with the aid of her first percussion teacher, honed her awareness of sound to such a degree that she describes her body as ‘a resonating chamber.’ 

GLENNIE: When we’re talking about sound it’s so immense, we cannot actually grasp what the notion of sound really means, because it depends on so many factors. It depends on the space where we’re hearing it, it depends on the mood that we are in, it depends on whether we’re alert, or sleepy or under the weather…., so many things that it’s impossible to say how you experience sound, you must open your body up to some sort of resonating chamber and you must live for the moment. You must open yourself up and experience what is happening at this particular time.

ALICE: Plants and animals, including humans, feel sound as well as hear it, and some of the most meaningful audio communication happens at frequencies that people can't hear. Frequency is the speed of vibrations, and it can travel in waves where the highs and the lows determine the pitch of sound. So, sound is vibrational frequency we can hear, and nature can too. Nature has a unique ability to use frequency and sounds for communicating, and we are learning how to listen to its magical chorus. Elephants use low-frequency rumbles to find family or a mate across long distances. Whales do it too. 

GLENNIE: There is a huge possibility that we can all learn to experience more through vibration, and we can definitely listen better than we are listening to now.

ALICE: Biological rhythms unconsciously entrain us every day, and we have all experienced on some personal level the importance of vibration in our lives. It is no accident that the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” was an immediate critical and commercial hit, widely acclaimed as one of the finest and most important works of the rock era. Besides its catchy refrain, the making of the song in 1966, during the height of the 60’s “flower power” movement, was unprecedented, with a complexity of short, interchangeable musical fragments. The title “Good Vibrations” came from Brian Wilson’s fascination with cosmic vibrations. 

HO: quantum physics gives you a very good in-road into thinking about coherence…to thinking and feeling. If you really take that seriously there is no separation between thinking and feeling.

ALICE: Mae-Wan Ho, is a geneticist, biophysicist, and author, she spoke with us in 2006 about Quantum Coherence, and she explained it with Jazz! EVERY PART OF YOUR BODY IS INTERCOMMUNICATING, like a big jazz band!

HO: Each and every part is intercommunicating with each and every other part…yet it is improvising and totally free at every moment. And now this takes some thinking about. And the imagery I offer is quantum jazz. Think of a very, very large jazz band, with instruments as small as a tiny little molecule or even smaller and then instruments as big as we are and they each play together making jazz, improvising together, spontaneously and free. But they keep in step and in tune with the whole. That is the notion of quantum coherence. 

ALICE: When you are in a positive state of emotions, your heart’s rate is more ordered, sending similarly ordered input to the brain, and you think and perform better. We can experience a sense of coherence, a mixture of optimism combined with a sense of control, as defined by the sociologist Aaron Antonovsky in 1979, to explain why some people stay healthy under stress.  We know that when you are in a state of positive emotions such as happiness, it is antithetical, anatomically, to feel unwell. Sounds logical, right? 

Thanks to our experts, in today’s episode, we learned to listen to the soundscape. The sounds around us, and our own sounds. Like a fingerprint, every person has their own distinct sound. 

That’s it for this mad tea party on the Soundscape.

Check out our book, TUNING INTO FREQUENCY, available wherever books are sold.

And join us down the rabbit hole at ALICE IN FUTURELAND dot COM.

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering…

Color and light are deeply rooted in the early healing practices of ancient cultures. Light defines our universe, and sunlight is the primary source of energy for all life on Earth. Our bodies thrive on incoherent light from the Sun, and our cells emit light (biophotons). The DNA in our cells can produce coherent light, carrying the precise information required for the growth, functioning, and healing of our magnificent bodies. Yes, you and I are the body light!

In today’s episode, ALICE asks, ‘Can life feel light?’ and we hear from renowned experts in the field: Fritz-Albert Popp, Michelle Addington, Danah Zohar, Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, Jacques Vallee, and Ervin Laszlo. 

ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI. And I am always in a state of wander.
Today, my question is: Can Life Feel Light?

POPP: Nature uses low intensity in order to transmit effectively the information 

ADDINGTON: beginning to understand issues about what parts of the eye intercept which wavelengths
ZOHAR: whenever we are conscious these 40 Hz oscillations are happening
VALLEE: yes, consciousness is more than what’s contained in the brain
LASZLO: to move into a holistic mind-set, where we can all live together on the planet

ALICE: Let’s slip through the looking glass, and talk about sunshine.  Photons. Energy. You and I are sunshine.
Biophysicist, Fritz-Albert Popp, explained bio photons to us in 2006.
These lower intensity photons may be the most effective for transmitting information.  

POPP: Biophotons are photons originating from living systems. They are very weak, with intensities of ten to minus seventeen watt, which is very low. It corresponds to a candle in a distance of about five kilometers. And one thinks even if it is so low intensity it is very unimportant. But just the opposite is true. Nature uses so low intensity in order to transmit effectively the information. And by knowing the laws of quantum theory one can speculate that the lower the intensity the higher can be its efficiency in transmitting information. So nature works on a very low level in order to be, in the informational content, very efficient, and in the energetic content with high efficiency also.

ALICE: Chromotherapy, Color Me Well! Michelle Addington, architect, engineer, spoke to us in 2007 about our circadian rhythm, and a particular wavelength of blue light.

ADDINGTON: What I’d like to start seeing us do is beginning to understand issues about what parts of the eye intercept which wavelengths. One of my doctoral students was working on circadian rhythm and light, and it turns out there’s a particular wavelength of blue light that needs to enter in the periphery of your eye to set your circadian rhythm. Something that happens automatically when you’re outside because you’ve got a lot of scattered blue light. Something that doesn’t happen automatically on the inside. She was beginning to look at how does she pull out that wavelength or find that wavelength. Perhaps it’s coming in from a little bit of Sun, a way of extracting and getting it to the side of the eye.

Her dissertation was very much about this issue of extracting wavelengths. We wouldn’t notice that there was actually a blue wavelength entering the eye in a particular way, yet it would have profound consequences on how somebody felt.

ALICE: Particular wavelengths of light could change how we feel.

ALICE: Danah Zohar is a physicist, philosopher, and author.
She spoke with us in 2001, describing ‘Forty Hertz Oscillations.’ This is a type of brain wave, that is present during consciousness.

ZOHAR: In meditation these 40 Hz oscillations are particularly profoundly coherent. These 40 Hz oscillations begin at the front of the skull and travel to the back of the skull and are oscillating the whole time we are conscious. It’s like a wave. Forty Hz is forty cycles per second, and it makes a sound about two octaves below middle C, so it’s the sound of a rich bass playing, maybe Bach’s Cello Suites or something like that, if you could hear the brain buzzing away. They don’t know that this is where consciousness comes from, that’s almost a mystical question—does this mean that that’s where consciousness begins because the brain is waving? But they do know that whenever we are conscious these 40 Hz oscillations are happening.

ALICE: The 20th century inventor, electrical engineer and futurist, Nikola Tesla, said: “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.”

If you think about it, nothing is ever static. We, and everything around us, and inside us, are in constant, or what physicists call, “periodic,” motion.

The Earth is pulsating, behaving like one big electric circuit, radiating with an electromagnetic field that surrounds all living things with a natural frequency.

Wow. Talk about Good Vibrations!

We spoke with Dr. Jeffrey Thompson (the Founder and Director of the Center for Neuroacoustic Research in Carlsbad, California) about the power of your own voice to be the healing factor for your body.

They are making complex recordings and mathematical spectral analysis of voices. All of the harmonics and overtones that make up your voice, are like a signature. Like a fingerprint. They can see precisely what frequency your body resonates at, by doing this spectral analysis of the vocal cords as they vibrate. Listening to your own voice resonating at that very precise frequency can cause a balancing effect and a healing effect in your body.

We still have so much to learn about the brain and consciousness. What we think of as our ordinary consciousness actually represents only about 5 percent of our brainpower. The remaining 95 percent represents the default brain function, what Dr. Thompson calls the default mode network (or DMN). Emerging research is looking at this brain network as the physical place where the mind, emotions, and body come together—potentially where the “mind-body” resides.

Jacques Vallee, is a computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist, astronomer.
In 2006 he explained to us that consciousness is more than what’s contained in the brain.

VALLEE: In programming there are different ways a computer can get data. I can give you the data in a spot of the program, or I can give you indirect addressing. I can tell you, “If you go to this particular location, you will find the address of where the data is.” Or you can do virtual addressing, which is what we do when we need to handle a larger amount of data than the memory you have. Then you spread it in another medium, and then you map that into the computer as you need large chunks of data. What we need to know is whether the brain or remote viewing works by direct interact or virtual addressing.Remote viewing is defined as the ability to acquire accurate information about something without using your physical senses or any other obvious means.

And that’s the way that I talk to researchers who tell me that, yes, consciousness is more than what’s contained in the brain. And from a computer perspective, maybe the brain in the higher levels is primarily an interface for something else. What that something else is I think remains to be discovered. Certainly, remote viewing would suggest that the brain is an interface rather than a computer.  

ALICE: Ervin László is a physicist, philosopher, systems theorist, and author of Microshift.
We spoke with him in 2002 and his words are even more powerful today.  
Ervin Lazslo describes a profound transition of our culture. From Logos (an ancient Greek word, meaning, a principle of order and knowledge.) To a planetary culture, which is denoted by the term: Holos.

LASZLO: Holos arrives if and when there is a real transformation of consciousness. It is the next age in a positive development. So we need to work toward it because the age of logos, which is the current age, is not sustainable as it is. Obviously, The big challenge is to move into a holistic mind-set, where we can all live together on the planet. It will have many implications for our consciousness, for the way we perceive the world, for the way we relate to each other, for the values we hold, all of these. But it has to happen fast if we are to avert these major problems that face the world today.In all respects we need to open the mind, our collective, individual, and collective mind, to the kind of world in which we live . . . and also open the mind to the possibility of creating the holos world, which would be a sustainable and humane world.

ALICE: Ervin Laslo’s wisdom is ever more relevant to the uncertainty of today, and the inevitable transition to come. Whether you believe in the science or the spiritual explanation for this great shift, one thing is clear to us: we are on a new energetic path. Can you feel it?

Thanks to our experts, in today’s episode, we discovered that light defines our universe, and sunlight is the primary source of energy for all life on Earth. But what is more interesting is that the photons absorbed by our reti-nas were created in the Sun’s core, tens of thousands of years ago before being emitted by the Sun. But once that photon escaped the Sun’s surface, it took only eight short minutes to arrive on Earth—and make its way inside you. Yes, you and I are the body light!

Check out our book, TUNING INTO FREQUENCY, available wherever books are sold.

And join us down the rabbit hole at ALICE IN FUTURELAND.COM.

We will be bringing you new episodes, so stay tuned, and keep wandering…

Beyond detecting the presence of friendlies or foes, nature also has a synchronized symphony of frequency that the tiniest of species to massive humpback whales leverage to track their migration patterns. Not only that, but many animals are also thought to have an internal compass and are using other frequencies of Earth, even the universe, to tune into the length of day and night, the phases of the moon, and seasonal changes. 

In today’s episode, ALICE asks, ‘What is nature’s vibe?’ and we hear from renowned experts in the field:
John Wheeler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
Bruce Odland: http://bruceodland.net/
Colin Andrews: https://www.colinandrews.net/
Ervin Laszlo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ervin_L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3
Wade Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_Davis_(anthropologist)
David Howes: http://www.david-howes.com/

ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI. And I am always in a state of wander. 

Today, my question is: What is Nature’s Vibe?

WHEELER: how the physical world came into being

ODLAND: beautiful harmonic structures in nature

SHELDRAKE: Each individual draws on the collective memory and contributes to it.

ANDREWS:  the heartbeat was different in one particular rotational aspect with regard to the Earth's magnetic field.

ALICE: Let’s slip through the looking glass, and talk about the Wild, Wonderful World of Nature’s Internet. 
 In 2002 we spoke with Theoretical Physicist John Wheeler:

WHEELER: My great hope is to understand how the physical world came into being and how it works, and where we fit into it all. 

ALICE: John Wheeler spent his life studying "How it all works", general relativity, and "how we fit into it all."  He even imagined that we could listen to the Earth. What if the earth and the rocks could tell us what they hear?  

WHEELER: I have on the windowsill of a cottage in Maine, a rock which comes from the garden of the Academy in ancient Athens which must have heard the discussions of Plato and Aristotle as they walked back and forth. All I need is some mechanism I can put that rock in which will bring forth a sound. 

ALICE: Can You Hear What I Hear? 

ALICE: Composer and Sound Artist, Bruce Odland, is listening to Nature's entire landscape.

ODLAND: there is this overlay of culture that overwhelms America…which is really based on something that isn’t where we are…it is almost like a thick virtual reality foam that covers the land…so, at that point, I decided I would go and find out what are the rhythms and the melodies that are emanating from our landscape instead…what is it’s wavelength?…what is it’s rhythmic structure?…and I didn’t know it then, but what I was exploring was fractal rhythms and melodies…what kind of sounds and rhythms and melodies that nature made…so I felt kind of like one of those early photographers with huge batteries and a giant early digital/audio in a backpack that weighed 40 pounds…and going out to find someplace quiet enough to record ice melting…the flow of water…to find a single melody inside a flow of water…just to find out what kind of rhythms and melodies we had… and found all kinds of beautiful harmonic structures in nature…and all their rhythms were different…they were different from our rhythms entirely…

ALICE: Finding all kinds of beautiful, harmonic, structures in nature.
Bruce Odland has been working over thirty years, developing a "Hearing Perspective" of the world we live in.

ODLAND: I’m very interested in real time and what’s going on right at the moment and how you can change it’s resonance so that it becomes observable…how you can take, in a fractal flow like water and rhythms, if you can find a very pure element to put in a single overtone series to be activated, for instance by a probe, then the water is basically playing the violin.

ALICE: In our first Episode, ”Adjust Your Frequency”, the biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake, introduced us to Morphic Fields. 
Here, he explains, the theory of Morphic Resonance.

RUPERT SHELDRAKE: Each species of animal, each species of plant, even crystals have a kind of memory. Molecules too. The whole of nature essentially depends on a kind of memory, and each kind of thing has its own sort of memory. Each individual draws on the collective memory and contributes to it. That's one aspect of the theory, the memory in nature, the morphic resonance aspect. The other aspect of the theory is the idea of morphic fields, which are the way in which this memory is expressed. Each species has its own fields that govern the form of the organisms as they develop. And that govern the instincts of the animals and that govern the learned patterns of behavior, and also underlie mental activity in human beings. I think we need a field theory of mind, and this theory implies that. The morphic fields are not just for the organization of individuals, they're also for the organization of societies. So each social group has a field which includes all the members of the group within it. A flock of birds or a school of fish, for example, have fields. When the whole lot can move or turn at practically the same time, this I think is a field phenomenon. 

ALICE: Nature has a geometry you can see. My researchers sat with Colin Andrews, an award winning electrical engineer, whose work includes the study of Earth's magnetic fields, and their interaction with all of nature, including the human heart beat.

COLIN ANDREW: Particular families of designs that, when they are rotated in what is called the CRP, which is the Critical Rotational Aspect, discovered by an American doctor back in the early 1900's, 1918, I believe. He happened to rotate the body of a patient and could hear that the heartbeat was different in one particular rotational aspect with regard to the Earth's magnetic field. This is where this resonance therapy is really born, that day pretty much. Because we now know that certain designs, when they are rotated with regard to the Earth's magnetic field, which is of course just one Earth support system, one system to a living organism. When this particular design is rotated and now locks to the Earth's magnetic field, in this position, information becomes available to the surroundings. So that that is held in a geometry, and that we can create ourselves; this happens to have been given to us. But we, I think, have now learned enough. That resonant therapy that is available to the healing of a wide range of plants and also to human beings, is simply being locked up as a tablet – almost like a tablet contained within a geometry. 

ALICE: I wonder, what is your geometry?  

So certain geometries will transmit or transmute certain frequencies only when they are placed into a particular position. So we can be looking at future farming techniques, you can be looking at laying cities and towns out in particular fashions, in the future, for the well-being of individuals, animals and plants. That they must be placed in certain ratios and certain designs with respect to the living planet, the organisms, the life support energy systems that keep that functioning to secure the same benefits.

ALICE: So it’s true, nature has a compass.
In 2002, systems theorist, Ervin Laszlo, referenced Cleve Backster's work with plants, communicating emotions with distant, detatched parts.

ERVIN LASZLO: Cleve Backster explains in his book The Secret Life of Plants, originally he had been using [lie detectors] on plants and now he’s using it on detached parts of the cells of the body. And he has the same results as he had in plants, namely when the subjects undergo an emotional experience, his or her cells react as well.It doesn’t matter how far away they are. —Ervin László, systems theorist, 

Sputnik Futures interview, 2002 
 

ALICE: The call of the wild! Wade Davis, explorer in residence at National Geographic, spoke with us in 2002. He warns us to be careful, and not dismiss an idea just because it doesn’t fit into our current paradigm.

WADE DAVIS: You look at the Polynesian seafarers who could, just by reading the ocean like a series of rivers which is how they saw the currents, by looking at the rhythm of the waves, they could sense the presence of a distant atoll far beyond the horizon. You talk about how the even the taxonomy of the Amazonian shaman when the y begin to characterize and systematize creation particularly with some of their sacred plants. For example, one of the most important Amazonian plants is something called Ayahuasca, which is a liana and to the botanical eye, there’s one main species that’s used. But that species is, actually by at least one tribe that I know, the Siona-Secoya, they recognize 17 different types of it. Now to our scientific taxonomic eye they’re all referable based on morphological traits to the same species. Indistinguishable. They consistently distinguish them and from great distances in the forest. And you ask them what is the foundation of their taxonomy and they’ll say to you, ‘Well, you take each on the night of the full moon and it sings to you in a different key.’ Well obviously that’s not an idea that is going to get you through Harvard with a Ph.D. but it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than counting stamens. But more importantly you start thinking of what that intuition really say to you. How do they find these plants in the forest, for example? And they say to you, ‘the plants talk to us.’ And we, of course, with our Descartian rational mind say, ‘well, that’s nonsense.’ And it’s only nonsense because it doesn’t fit into our paradigm. But when you begin to consider the possibility that different societies belief systems can make almost for different individuals, but also make for different levels of perception.

How do they figure that out in a flora of eighty thousand species? How do they learn to combine these things in this kind of interesting way? The only scientific explanation is trial and error. But I’m not a statistician, but you could begin to imagine how absurd that is. How many points of experimentation and rejection would have to occur before they found that? Then the people themselves say, “don’t’ you know anything? The plants talk to us.” And you begin to think, well maybe it’s true. Whatever that means, plants talking to people. Obviously I don’t mean they, like in a Disney cartoon, their lips start moving, but there’s something about that level of engagement with that world. 

ALICE: If only we could talk to the Animals (and Insects), and what would they say?”
Two anthropologists; Constance Classen and David Howes, the co-authors of "Ways of Sensing", gave us this example in 2002.

DAVID HOWES: Among Certain aborigines of Australia have invented a way of communicating with whales, as they understand it, that consists of wiping the sweat of the armpit with its distinct aroma and its chemicals, then speaking into one’s hand, placing it in the ocean, and sending this chemical/olfactory/ auditory message to the whales. It’s meaningful for them and they have understood that communication among whales is not visual but is by these chemical and auditory signals. Now, as far as the human language and whether human language can actually be mixed with sweat and odor and transmitted in that way? Well, why can’t it be? Why shouldn’t it be? 

ALICE: Thanks to our experts, in today’s episode, we discovered that nature has a synchronized symphony of frequency, and that many animals and plants are thought to have their own internal compass, and that plants, might really, be trying to talk to us.

Well, that’s it for this mad tea party on nature’s vibe. I hope you learned as much as I did.

Check out our book, TUNING INTO FREQUENCY, available wherever books are sold.

And join us down the rabbit hole at ALICE IN FUTURELAND.COM. 

We will be bringing you new episodes on frequency, so stay tuned, and keep wandering…

Did you know that the same electromagnetic energy that surrounds us is in us, and can work with us? Our body is an antenna system, intercommunicating via electrical currents of different kinds—from the long distances between our biological parts to the most local distances inside each cell. Thanks to wearable health trackers, we are getting to intimately and instantly know some of the electrical waves inside us. There’s electricity in our bodies, and our cells are conduits of electrical currents. So yes, you are electric! 

In today’s episode, ALICE asks, ‘Did you know that we live in an electromagnetic world?’ and we hear from renowned experts in the field:

Fritz Albert Popp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz-Albert_Popp
Dr Albrecht Heyer
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae-Wan_Ho
Christina Kubisch: http://www.christinakubisch.de/en/works/electrical_walks
John Beaulieu: https://biosonics.com
Vasant Lad: https://www.ayurveda.com

SCRIPT EPISODE 02: WE LIVE IN AN ELECTROMAGNETIC WORLD 

ALICE: Hi, I’m Alice. I’m one part human and one part AI. And I am always in a state of wander. Today, my question is, did you know that we live in an electromagnetic world, and I, am an electromagnetic girl.

HEYER: Cells resonate, they resonate at a particular frequency.

MAE WAN HO: Energy and information is interchangeable

KUBISCH: when they talk off their headphones, I notice they have become more sensitive to sound

LAD: Every substance has a sound, every vision has a sound, and every person has a sound.

ALICE: The energy that sustains our technology can no longer be seen as separate from us or from our environment. We interviewed Fritz Albert Popp the German Researcher in Biophysics and Biophotons in 2006. In our last episode he said:

FRITZ ALBERT POPP: “We are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean”

ALICE: This electromagnetic ocean we live in, influences our brain waves, and how we evolved. Our cells, and the entire universe, is resonant.

ALBRECHT HEYER: The cells resonate, as long as they’re alive, they resonate at a particular frequency.

ALICE: In 2002, we spoke with Dr. Albrecht Heyer, a bionutritionist, who studied natural healing traditions extensively in many parts of the world.

ALBRECHT HEYER: These frequencies are dependent on one another. We’re dependent upon the universe, we’re dependent upon the planets, everything that’s in the universe—they all have a resonance and all this forms a harmonious part together. 

ALICE: Energy is everywhere. Here is Mae-Wan Ho, geneticist, biophysicist, and author, speaking from our interview in 2006 about the healing energy created in our bodies during acupuncture.

MAE WAN HO: Part of Chinese medicine is to say that intercommunication in the body goes through energy meridians. And even though Western medicine has picked up on Chinese medicine and acupuncture is now accepted by Western medicine because they say, “There are these endorphins, molecules that give you pain relief and so on and so forth that are produced when you have acupuncture.” That’s nonsense explanation. That’s not an explanation at all because you still have to explain how it is that sticking a needle at the side of your little toe, which is supposed to actually represent your eye, can lead to brain waves coming out of the visual cortex in your brain. This has been shown. They are still puzzling over that. One explanation is that it is the water aligned on these connective tissues that are the major meridians that are the major energy transport. Energy and information is interchangeable because an electrical signal through these water channels, through these hydrogen bonded daisy chains, would be energy. It would be signal, information signal, because everything is highly organized. Energy is everywhere. So you only need a very weak signal before you can set off a very significant effect. And that is basically how it is possible for our body, our liquid crystalline body, to get organized. 

ALICE: Yes, we can feel it, but, can we hear it? What sounds are you listening to? Christina Kubisch, a German composer and sound artist, composes both electronic and acoustic music for multimedia installations. 

In 2006 we asked her: “Is our perception of sound changing?”

Lets slow down and listen. 

CHRISTINA KUBISCH: I think there are a lot of sounds that we cannot hear usually because our ears are just limited to certain frequencies, as our eyes are limited to certain frequencies of light. But I think that most of these electromagnetic waves, for example, bring more influence of our body than be audible one day because they need some electrical transformation. That would be great to hear them without a headphone.

I have the idea that we get less sensible for sounds right now because we do not need to listen to anything. We can have everything right wherever we want it. Every kind of sound can go into the internet and load down everything we want. And we don’t have to work to get interesting sounds. What I like about the work with the headphones, for example, is that people suddenly get very intense on what they are hearing. First of all, they become slow. They start to run and then after two or three steps they start to just move their heads. And they feel from when they go from right to left there’s kind of a panorama of sound which is completely different, and then they slow down. And then they start  sometimes to walk in a very strange way. To look at them as a performance is really funny. And when they talk off their headphones after an hour or whatever, I notice they have become more sensitive to sound. Even to what they hear afterwards. To the everyday sounds, to the noise of surroundings

ALICE: You can become more sensitive to everyday sounds, to the noise of your surroundings. What about yourself? Did You Know, You Can Tune Your Own Body? John Beaulieu, the author of "Human Tuning: Sound Healing with Tuning Forks," spoke with us in 2002. He explained that our bodies can be tuned like musical instruments. And when they are properly tuned, we have a sense of well being and perfect self-expression. This is BioSonic Re-patterning.

JOHN BEAULIEU: Biosonic Repatterning and Polarity Therapy is the center core of ourselves. It’s called the ‘ultrasonic core,’ the core of sound. In alchemy they call it your fundamental tone, or your essence, or your soul. It’s vibrational in nature. And ‘biosonic’ means that it’s ways  of playing sounds that effect the body, life energy, – bio means life – in a way that will realign you with your core, re-pattern you with your core. 

ALICE: Your body has a sound. Every substance has a sound.

VASANT LAD: Every substance has a sound, every vision has a sound, and every person has a sound. If you know your own sound, and recognize that sound, you will experience – within this body – the blissful state of your existence.

ALICE: In 2003 we asked Ayurvedic Physician, Vasant Lad, founder of the Ayurvedic Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, “What is the Power of Sound?”  

VASANT LAD: There is a sound for each organ. The lungs have a separate sound, heart has a separate sound, the liver, kidney and all chakra system has a sound. They are using certain sounds to heal certain organs. Suppose a person has weak liver and if you say the sound ‘Rim,’ it will heal the liver. If a person has a weak spleen, if you say the sound ‘Kline,’ it will clean the spleen. If a person has weakness in the heart and you say ‘Yum,’ that sound will open the heart chakra and person’s heart irregularity can be controlled. So, our bodily organs, they have different shape, different vibration and different sound. And ancient Rishis, they discovered the relationship between sound and organ – and by saying that sound a certain way, you can heal.

ALICE: YUMMMM, I’m getting my heart chakra resonating!

Thanks to our experts, in today’s episode, we discovered that the same electromagnetic energy that surrounds us, is in us, and can work with us, and that our bodies and cells are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean.

Well, that’s it for this mad tea party on electromagnetic energy. I hope you learned as much as I did!

Check out our book TUNING INTO FREQUENCY available wherever books are sold.

And join us down the rabbit hole at ALICEINFUTURELAND.COM

We will be bringing you new episodes on frequency so stay tuned, and keep wandering…

University of Helsinki:  https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/life-science-news/the-sharp-noses-of-covid-dogs-are-utilized-at-the-helsinki-vantaa-airport

Dr. Stuart Firestein: http://stuartfirestein.com/

SCRIPT: 
ALICE: Hi I'm ALICE, I'm one part human and one part AI and always in a state of wander. 

At the International airport in Helsinki, Finland researchers are using dogs to sniff the Covid-19 virus on arriving international passengers. Tests are showing that dogs that have been trained to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes can identify the virus in seconds, with very high accuracy, even days before before a patient developed symptoms! Wow. Smell!

FIRESTEIN: This is of course the basic fundamental human question: how do I smell? 

ALICE:  Dr. Stuart Firestein, Neurobiologist and chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, explained smell to us, in this archival interview:

FIRESTEIN: The mechanism by which we detect odors is an ancient one; it’s found in virtually all animals even nematoid worms all the way up through human beings—there are minor changes in it. But it’s basically a mechanism for recognizing chemicals in the environment. There are thousands and thousands of these low-molecular weight, organic compounds, small chemicals that float around in the environment. They’re mostly what we call volatile chemicals because they’re easily airborne, they come out of solution quite easily. They’re given off by all sorts of things—flowers, plants, other animals, other people (of course we know only too well), food stuff, many, many things. 

FIRESTEIN: We detect them by what is basically described as a lock and key mechanism. We have way up here in the recesses of our nasal cavity, as do other vertebrates with noses, way up in the back of their nasal cavity, have a thin piece of tissue. We call it the olfactory epithelium. And it’s actually a small piece of brain tissue that has been pushed out of the central brain area and into the environment where it can come into contact with these odors. Much like your retina is a piece of the brain that essentially has been pushed out of the central cranial area into the back of your eye and is therefore available to light. So in the same sense we have this nasal or olfactory epithelium way up here in the top of our nose. And there are specialized brain cells in this epithelium which have, on their membrane surface, on the surface of the cells, have a protein called an olfactory receptor or an odor receptor. 

ALICE: So wait, smells are molecules? 
Smells are actual things?

They fit into specialized brain cells in our nose! 
The "olfactory epithelium"?

FIRESTEIN: The odor receptor isn’t in that receptor for a second; it’s only in there for a few milliseconds. Then it falls out and another one flops in and you get a few more and the cell integrates this information. What we’ve done effectively is that we’ve turned a chemical binding through a biochemical interaction into an electrical charge. So we’ve essentially turned chemistry into electricity, which is what the brain is interested in as a signal. 

ALICE: Amazing. 
The nose makes brain signals from molecules floating in the air!
Thank you Dr. Stuart Firestein for explaining smell. 
And thank you to the researchers and dogs working in Helsinki, for your capability to sniff this virus faster than any other test!