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[00:00:00] Some people would say, well, it's mirror neurons why humans are emulating themselves, why their breathing is synced up or why their blinking is syncing up. But these also are occurring across distances where people don't have a visual connection with another person. They don't even have a voice connection. >> Keep watching to learn more and don't forget to subscribe. Book four in the new thinking aloud dialogue series is
[00:00:30] Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring consciousness and parasychology. Now available on Amazon. >> New thinking aloud is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parasychology and
[00:01:00] the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.edu. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Aloud magazine for free or order printed copies. Go to newthinkingaloud.org. Thinking Aloud.
[00:01:30] Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Michionlo. >> Hi, I'm Dr. Deborah Katz. I'm a guest host on New Thinking Aloud, produced by Dr. Jeffrey Michishlov. Before we get started with the interview with my next guest, Dr. Nancy Mclofflin Walter, I'd like to tell you a little story.
[00:02:00] Nancy and I were classmates in the PhD program at University of West Georgia's psychology program. And we were in a transpersonal psychology class one day when our teacher said he was going to have us do a mindfulness meditation. Basically, we were to sit there for a few minutes and just contemplate and tune inwards with our eyes closed. There was only about seven or eight of us
[00:02:30] sitting around a long table. On my one side was Dr. Nancy Walter, not yet a doctor, but on the other side of me was our friend and classmate, Dr. Lisa Watts. And the three of us were feeling a little bored and a little rambunctious. So we decided we would do a little parasychology experiment. We decided that we would try to contact
[00:03:00] each other during the meditation and see if afterwards we could tell what the others were thinking. And so as we got started, I closed my eyes and after a little bit, I started to get a little panicky because I thought, "Oh my gosh, we did not decide who was going to be the sender or who was going to be the receiver." And so I really couldn't
[00:03:30] relax cuz I thought that was going to really mess things up. Well, we're sitting there and all of a sudden I hear this loud wrapping at the table and I look down, open up my eyes, and I see Nancy and Lisa looking at me like, "Oh my gosh, did you just hear this?" It sounded like it had come up from the underside of the table. Well, at that
[00:04:00] point, meditation is over. And so Lisa and I turned to Nancy and said, "Um, yeah, how did that go?" And Nancy exclaimed kind of in a frustrated tone. She's like, "How was I supposed to concentrate?" All I could hear Deborah saying in her head is, "We didn't pick a sender and receiver." And all I could see with Lisa was as if she was dancing around the room. And as it turned out,
[00:04:30] that was exactly what Lisa was envisioning, that she was dancing around the room. She visualized that with herself the whole time. Nancy picked both of these things up flawlessly. Nancy is so receptive and so empathic. And she also just happens to be the director of research or co-director of research at the Monroe Institute. and she's held that position for quite a
[00:05:00] while. She formerly was part of a grant project where she worked at the University of Virginia Department of Perceptual Studies along with working at Monroe and then she went over to Monroe full-time. So, we have so much to talk about with her today. We're going to be talking about Monroe's sound science, about how this impacts people both with their own personal development, how it
[00:05:30] relates to mental health and wellness, how it relates to remote viewing. We're going to be talking about all sorts of topics that have to do with out of body experiences, like how can you tell if you're really having an OBBE or are there different kinds of OBBEs? We have a lot to cover and we're so glad that you are joining us here. Let's get started. So Nancy, I'm so thrilled to be here with you today and we have so much
[00:06:00] to talk about. Thank you for joining us. >> Thank you for asking me. >> Yeah. And did you ever imagine when we were in graduate school together that we would be here today already years after you've become director of research for the Monroe Institute? >> Never. It's a very interesting story how I got here that involves you, but I never imagined that I would be here.
[00:06:30] >> Yeah. This is so cool. And do you want to tell the story? And I don't know how you tell it, but I usually tell people that you um had emailed me and said someone had sent you a job listing for you to apply to, but that you thought that it was my job and then I needed to apply. So that's how I ended up here. For those that aren't
[00:07:00] familiar with Monroe Institute, can you just give like in a nutshell what happens there? And when you refer to pods, which I know very well because I spent many many hours inside one nestled in there like a nice warm little pee, but can you describe what happens at Monroe in just a tiny bit of the history? Monroe Institute has been around for just over 50 years and Robert
[00:07:30] Monroe had um created the Monroe Institute to look at the effects of binaural beats on the brain and the experience primarily around the remote viewing tasks but also for the shared experiences out of body experiences that he was having which she has written had written extensively about in his books.
[00:08:00] So what goes on at Monroe is we have continued that research and education aspect at the institute. So the research division is a huge part of what goes on. But ahead of that is the experience that the participant gets. It's a place to explore and expand their consciousness in a very supportive environment where people no longer necessarily feel like they're the odd man out for having exceptional experiences
[00:08:30] with their consciousness and other beings. So, it's really it's a campus uh where people are free to explore and then within these defined programs. So it's not we don't just offer remote viewing and meditation but there are also things like spoon bending and psychokinesis those types of offerings but people are very much involved in the research and invested in the research.
[00:09:00] We get um people who are specifically directing donations towards the research because they understand our access to a broad audience and it's very rich. We get people anywhere from noviceses to experts and psychic and mediumship. So there's a wealth of knowledge there and a wealth of data that we're drawing upon
[00:09:30] to move the field of consciousness forward in research and other institutions are aware of that and we've been creating more collaborations. So one of the things that makes Monroe unique is that research is such an integral part of the program. Even when people are coming in to be participants and have these experiences, you're always analyzing what's happening with them and a lot of times you're hooking them up to EG equipment and do
[00:10:00] do you monitor other aspects of their physiology. So not every program we are looking at uh collecting data on specific participants but even the trainers are collecting their own data uh within their programs as well. For example, our MC squared program, the trainers there are keeping track of the hits and misses on say like a dice roll
[00:10:30] or seed growing. and then a remote the remote viewing courses they're also collecting data and then during the breaks in the afternoon which are built into every program we do get volunteers to come then come into the lab and participate in any ongoing protocols that we have and also as the co-director of research I'm I will begin implementing a pre-participant survey so moving Moving
[00:11:00] forward, everyone who comes to campus, they would have filled out a form which will then let us know if they've had any exceptional experiences and what areas they've had those experiences and if they have any exceptional abilities themselves, whether it's inner species communication or psychic mediumship or remote viewing. We want to know that. We want to get to understand our participants better so we
[00:11:30] can better utilize the resources for research. And there'll also be a system in place where they can then sign up uh certain days and of depending on availability they can sign up ahead of time just like they would for a massage. They can sign up to be involved in a research project that we have ongoing at the same time. >> Oh, that's fantastic. And where does this research end up? What do you do with the
[00:12:00] data? Is it published in journals or what happens with it? We're working on several publications. There's the uh we have limited resources at the moment. So it's just myself and a co-director who are not only collecting the data but we rely on ourselves to then clean it and disseminate it and analyze and all
[00:12:30] the writing. So, we're trying to get a a process of volunteers and interns to handle some of the data so that will help us process it faster so then we can generate more publications a lot quicker. That's what this summer will be about is getting the ball moving on that which fire already started with several people
[00:13:00] because the the data to be processed is really going in and examining the EEG readouts. Is that right? And that's extremely time consuming. >> Yes. If you're rejecting data the data by I d in a program it is time consuming there are scripts that you can write for the program but some not all of the data can be cleaned up with an automated process some of it
[00:13:30] has to be done by hand pro most likely because we're often using so few channels on an EEG because we're isolating what areas of the brain we're looking that so those aren't easily automated through AI but we're working on getting that done faster so that it will then not seem so arbitrary you know AI will be able to do that but it's a process of then teaching it how to not
[00:14:00] throw out something that would seem like artifact to a machine but would knowing the circumstances the researcher would then say you know that's not artifact that's something else is going on. >> So, it sounds like AI could make an enormous difference for you with your research. Like before AI, how long would it take? Let's say if you had 15 minutes
[00:14:30] of data, you had monitored someone's brain for 15 minutes. How long might it take one person to analyze that? like just 15 minutes or longer than that. >> If they're if they know exactly what to look for, depending on how many channels were involved, it should not take that lengthy of a time for a 15 minutes. But to put it in perspective, my first year
[00:15:00] at UVA, I was tasked with cleaning the data on 110 subjects from the discovery program. So 110 subjects and each file contained approximately 40 to 45 minutes at a time. And then you're looking at that data 5 seconds at a time to see if there's artifact. And it's a matter of zooming in, zooming out. And lowass
[00:15:30] filters and highpass filters can get rid of most of the artifact for you. But then you still have to go through it frame by frame and make that determination by eye. So it took about a year to process 110 files. >> Wow. That's And was that working full-time or part-time? 4 days a week towards that about 80% of my time was dedicated towards those files >> and with about 110 subjects and then