What if the phenomena that mainstream science dismisses as coincidence — the phone call from someone you were just thinking about, the gut feeling that saved your life, the dream that came true — are actually measurable, replicable, and rooted in genetics? Dean Radin has spent four decades at institutions like Bell Labs, Princeton, Stanford Research Institute, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences doing exactly that kind of measurement. His conclusion: the evidence for telepathy, precognition, and related phenomena is strong, the data has been there for 150 years, and the real question is why science keeps refusing to look at it.
A Career Built on Choosing the Weird Door
Radin began as a classical violinist before switching to electrical engineering, then earning a PhD in experimental psychology — a trajectory he describes as repeatedly choosing the unknown over the comfortable. The throughline was always consciousness. In college, he read about the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell after Mitchell had a mystical experience on the way back from the moon. Mitchell felt one with the universe, and rather than dismiss the experience, he created a scientific organization to study it. Radin filed that away for decades before ultimately landing there — where he has worked for the past 25 years.
Along the way, he worked at Bell Laboratories, where he quietly ran small psychic experiments and presented findings at the Parapsychological Association — an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a point most people don't know. That presentation led directly to an invitation to join the classified Stargate program at SRI International.
Stargate: What the Remote Viewing Program Actually Did
Stargate — known under various code names over the years — was a classified U.S. government program studying remote viewing, the claimed ability to perceive distant locations or events using only the mind. Radin joined the research side of the program, working under Hal Puthoff and later Ed May. His clearances climbed from Top Secret to Top Secret SCI to a Special Access Program level where even the code word itself was classified.
The research mission was distinct from the military's operational use of remote viewers. Radin's team was tasked with answering fundamental questions: Is this real? What are the limits? Can it be blocked or shielded? And most importantly, what distinguishes someone like Joe McMoneagle — a star remote viewer who claimed to receive target information spontaneously, sometimes hours before a session — from everyone else?
The answer, after extensive psychological and physiological testing, was frustratingly inconclusive on most dimensions. Two factors did emerge: natural talent, which appears partially genetic, and psychological openness — a willingness to experience without immediately categorizing. People who were psychologically rigid seemed to block the effect entirely.
One of the most documented operational successes involved locating a crashed nuclear bomber in Africa. The aircraft had gone down in dense jungle, invisible from aerial surveillance. A remote viewer named Fran, who specialized in map dowsing, was given a blank sheet of paper linked by association to an actual map. She marked a location. A search team went there, found locals who confirmed something had fallen from the sky nearby, and recovered the aircraft within a few kilometers of her mark. President Carter later cited this example publicly when asked about unusual experiences during his presidency.
The Presentiment Experiment and the Body That Knows the Future
After Stargate, Radin developed what he calls the presentiment experiment — a laboratory test of whether the human body reacts to emotional stimuli before those stimuli are randomly selected. The setup is straightforward: a subject is wired with sensors measuring skin conductance, pupil dilation, and other physiological signals. They press a button. Five seconds later, a random number generator selects an image — either emotionally neutral or emotionally charged. The generator selects after the button press, so no one, including the experimenter, knows what's coming.
The finding: approximately one and a half seconds before an emotional image is selected, subjects show measurable physiological arousal. Before neutral images, they remain calm. The effect is reliable and statistically robust.
Radin traces the intuition behind this experiment to a classic scenario: you're driving a familiar route, approaching a green light, and something tells you to slow down. You do. A truck runs the red light and would have killed you. In the laboratory, this happens with random pictures. In real life, a colleague of Radin's described a version of it involving a bullet he inexplicably removed from his revolver two weeks before it would have been the chamber that fired at his head when another man pulled the trigger during a drunken fight.
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Diagram of the presentiment experiment setup, showing the timing relationship between button press, physiological response, and random image selection
Watch at 58:20 →
The Genetics of Psychic Ability and the Inquisition's Shadow
One of the more startling threads in Radin's recent research involves the genetics of people who report psychic experiences. Working with colleagues including immunologist Gary Nolan, Radin's team recruited 3,000 self-identified psychics from psychic families, vetted them extensively, conducted face-to-face interviews, and collected DNA from 13 who passed the full screening. They then compared these subjects to matched controls.
The psychics, unexpectedly, showed no unusual genetic variants — they were what geneticists call wild type. The controls, however, showed a significant mutation in an intron sequence: the portion of DNA once dismissed as junk but now understood as the epigenetic layer that turns genes on and off. Something in the controls' makeup was suppressing psychic sensitivity.
A follow-up study using data from 23andMe and Ancestry identified 212 single nucleotide polymorphisms correlated with reported psychic experiences. One showed a correlation with a probability of a million to one.
The most historically unsettling finding came from a specialist in the genetics of societies. Countries with longer exposure to Christianity showed a higher prevalence of this suppressive intron mutation. The team's interpretation: the Inquisition, which systematically identified and executed people believed to have unusual perceptual or healing abilities over several centuries, functioned as an involuntary eugenics program — pruning the population of people with certain psychic genetics. The genome, Radin argues, still carries the signature of that pruning.
Spoon Bending, Nasal Sprays, and the Limits of What We Know
Radin is careful to distinguish between stage magic and what he calls real magic — anomalous physical effects that appear to involve consciousness interacting with matter. He describes attending a spoon-bending party and, while mimicking a woman who claimed to bend the bowl of a spoon by touch, inadvertently bending his own spoon 90 degrees without conscious intent or apparent physical force. The metallurgical explanation he later learned: a sudden impulse of 50 to 70 pounds of force — more than he could consciously generate — can momentarily soften the grain boundary lattice of metal, leaving a 20-second window in which the material behaves like putty. What generated that impulse remains unexplained.
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Radin demonstrates the bent spoon from the party, showing the 90-degree bend at the bowl rather than the neck
Watch at 2:24:10 →
The more immediately applicable research is happening through a company Radin co-founded called Cognenics. Working from the insight that psychic sensitivity may involve specific receptor systems in the brain — particularly the 5-HT2A receptor also targeted by psilocybin — the team has developed an intranasal delivery method for RNA interference. A compound is inhaled, travels through the nasal passage to the olfactory cleft, crosses the bone separating the nasal cavity from the brain, and downregulates the target receptor directly.
In mice and rats, the treatment produces approximately 100% improvement in memory and a near-total reduction in anxiety simultaneously. In primates, previously aggressive animals became calm for two days following a single dose. The current target is dementia — specifically the short-term memory loss that Radin watched his father lose, along with his ability to follow a television program or track a conversation.
The longer-term question — whether the same platform could enhance perception into what researchers call extrasensory ranges — remains open. Radin acknowledges the ethical complexity. He recounts asking the guru Sadhguru whether studying psychic enhancement was worthwhile, and receiving an answer that gave him pause: telepathy is not just receiving thoughts, it is also transmitting them. The ability to inject thoughts into another person's mind, Sadhguru warned, would be a seductive power that most people lack the ego development to handle responsibly.
A More Comprehensive Model of Reality
Underlying all of this research is a philosophical challenge to what Radin calls the unexamined assumption of materialism — the idea, taught throughout scientific education without being labeled as an assumption, that the physical world is all there is. Radin argues that materialism is genuinely good at explaining physical phenomena and generating technology, but fails entirely to explain subjective experience. The hard problem of consciousness — why there is something it is like to be a thinking entity — remains unsolved within a purely materialist framework.
The alternative he finds most useful is dual aspect monism: the idea that mind and matter are two aspects of a single underlying reality, the way two sides of a coin are distinct but inseparable. Meaning, in Carl Jung's formulation, is what causes the split. Consciousness, under this model, has non-local properties analogous to quantum entanglement — connections across space and time that explain why precognition works, why telepathy works, why a number assigned to a target creates a connection a remote viewer can follow.
Most of the founders of quantum mechanics, Radin notes, were idealists who believed consciousness was fundamental. They were also, many of them, mystics who read extensively in Eastern philosophy. The most successful physical theory in history was built by people who thought everything was ultimately made of mind. That, Radin suggests, is a data point worth taking seriously.
