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