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Your Brain Is Not A Computer. It Is A Transducer Discover Magazine

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Your Brain Is Not A Computer. It Is A Transducer Discover Magazine

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Your Brain Is Not a
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Computer. It Is a
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Transducer
A new theory of how the brain works
— neural transduction theory —
might upend everything we know
about consciousness and the universe
itself.
By Robert EpsteinAug 25, 2021 5:00 PM

(Credit: Triff/Shutterstock)

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Let’s start with my 95-year-old mom. Her memory is


unreliable, but she’s still lucid, churns out sarcasm like a
pro, and plays a lightning-fast game of double solitaire.
Today I finally quit after she won seven games in a row, and
yes, I was trying my best.

She also hears music continuously, and it’s not the kind of
music that drives us nuts when we can’t get a tune out of ou
head. She mainly hears original music, and she will
sometimes try to hum or sing what she’s hearing. She says
it’s coming from "the neighbors downstairs," and it doesn’t
bother her, she says, because some of it isn’t bad and
because it helps her fall asleep. The fact that other people
can’t hear it doesn’t bother her either. She simply smiles
slyly and says, "Maybe you should get your hearing
checked."

Am I concerned? Well, just a bit — not about the music but


about its source. As I told my mom the other day, I would be
more comfortable if the inconsiderate neighbors lived
upstairs. She laughed and said, "I see what you’re getting at
but don’t worry. I’m not going to hell." Very determined,
my mom. Was she planning to negotiate the issue with a
hand of double solitaire?

Where is all this original music coming from? My mother


has never composed music, and she insists she would be
incapable of doing so "no matter how much you paid me."
That’s mom-speak for case closed.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are surrounded by mysteries


like this. Some, in my view, are highly suspect, such as
demonic possession and communication with spirits. Others
are undeniably real: dreams, daydreams, hallucinations, the
déjà vu experience, and so on. My staff recently came up
with a list of 58 such phenomena. You don’t have to look fa
to find them.

Are we doomed to remain in the dark about these mysteries,


or is there a way to peel back the veil? What if spirits,
dreams, and my mom’s music could all be accounted for by
a relatively simple idea about how the brain works — an
idea that might even be testable?

The idea, which is quite simple on its face, is that the brain
is a bidirectional transducer.

Transduction Is All Around Us

A few inches to the left of the laptop computer on which I


am now typing stands an imposing Sennheiser microphone
that I use mainly when someone is interviewing me for a
radio or TV show. A thick black cable protrudes from the
back of the microphone and snakes its way to a boxy
analogue-to-digital converter, which links to my computer
via a bright red USB cable.

My computer links wirelessly to a router in the next room,


and the router connects to AT&T, my internet service
provider, through a telephone cable that runs from the router
to a wall socket. That cable leads to dozens of other
transition points through which crude representations of my
voice pass before some semblance of it is finally heard by a
talk-show host in, say, London.

If I’m speaking to a host of a BBC radio program,


representations of his or her voice are also traveling in the
other direction from his or her microphone through dozens
of transition points until they finally activate a tiny speaker
in my ear bud, through which I hear a semblance of his or
her voice. If we’re also using video to communicate,
cameras are sending images to screens, again through many
transition points, and again in both directions.

Representations of these images and sounds might be


passing not only through multiple transition points but also
through thousands of miles of copper or fiber optic cables,
or are perhaps being transmitted to satellites hundreds of
miles above the earth and then re-transmitted to receivers on
the ground. Long ago, pathways like this could
accommodate only one conversation at a time, with
communications running in only one direction at a time, but
now such pathways are bidirectional and are often shared
simultaneously by thousands of different conversations.

Remarkably, when everything is working smoothly, my


conversation with the London host is as seamless as it would
be if we were in the same room. Even though I’m 5,500
miles away in San Diego, I can’t detect any time gaps
between my ramblings and the host’s reply. Those gaps
exist, but they’re so short that neither I nor the host can
perceive them.

What’s happening here? Is my voice actually traveling 5,500


miles? Definitely not. If you were the proprietor of a 19th
century mansion, you might have been able to shout into a
speaking tube that snaked its way through your home and
carried your voice all the way to the servants’ quarters. In
that case, the sound of your voice was literally carried to its
destination by the air in the tube.

But when I speak into my microphone, the pattern of sound


waves produced by my voice — a distinctive, non-random
pattern of air pressure waves — is being converted by the
microphone into a similar pattern of electrical activity. The
better the microphone, the more accurately it duplicates the
original pattern, and the more I sound like me at the other
end.

That conversion process — the shifting of a meaningful,


non-random pattern of activity — from one medium (say,
the air in front of the microphone) to another medium (say,
the wire at the back of a microphone) is called transduction.

And transduction is all around us, even in organic processes


Our bodies are completely encased by transducers. Our
sense organs — eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin —
transduce distinctive properties of electromagnetic radiation
air pressure waves, airborne chemicals, liquid-borne
chemicals, textures, pressure, and temperature into
distinctive patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the
brain. Organic compounds can even be used these days to
create new kinds of transducers, such as OECTs: organic
electrochemical transistors.

Evolution didn’t just create millions of new species of


organisms, it also created millions of new types of
transducers, and engineers are now using both organic and
inorganic materials to create thousands more.

To repeat (because this is important): Transduction is all


around us — forms of transduction that have evolved over
eons and new forms of transduction that humans are
inventing right now.

The Ultimate Transducer


What if evolution, at some point, produced a special kind of
transducer that could shift signals from the physical world a
we know it to a very different kind of world?

Nearly all religions teach that immaterial realms exist that


transcend the reality we know. For Christians and Muslims,
those realms are Heaven and Hell. One of the simplest and
clearest statements of such a concept comes from ancient
Greek mythology: As long as the deceased had the required
toll in hand — well, actually in mouth — he or she would b
transported by the ferryman Charon across the river Styx to
Hades, the land of the dead — quite literally, to the Other
Side. (I’ll call it the OS from this point on.) Unfortunately,
not everyone was eligible to make the crossing. If no one
thought to bury you or to put that coin in your mouth, you
were doomed to roam this side of the river as a ghost.

The idea of a realm transcending the one we experience


directly has taken on many forms over the centuries. George
Griffith, England’s most prominent and prolific science
fiction writer of the late 1800s, published a prescient novel
about this realm in 1906: The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A
Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension. The book’s protagonist,
professor Franklin Marmion, is a distinguished
mathematician and physicist who anticipates discoveries and
concepts that real quantum physicists would eventually
propose decades later. Over the course of the story, Marmion
not only reluctantly accepts the fact that a higher dimension
must exist, he also acquires the power to shift his body
there, learning, among other counterintuitive things, that
multiple objects can occupy the same space at the same
time.

Griffith might have been aware of a contemporary of his,


William James, a prominent Harvard philosopher and also
arguably America’s first psychologist. In 1898, James
published a short book entitled Human Immortality: Two
Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, in which he praised
his contemporaries for boldly using scientific methods to
investigate "providential leadings [sic] in answer to prayer,
instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of
death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole
range of mediumistic capacities."

James asserted that a universe-wide consciousness beamed


human consciousness into our brains "as so many finite
rays," just as the sun beams rays of light onto our planet.
Our brains, being limited in their capabilities, he said,
generally filter and suppress real consciousness, while
sometimes allowing ‘glows of feeling, glimpses of insight,
and streams of knowledge’ to shine through. He called this
idea ‘transmission-theory.’

Ideas like James’s have been around for thousands of years.


In his 2006 book, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof,
alternative medicine guru Deepak Chopra says that ancient
Hindu texts teach that the material world we know is
nothing but a projection from the universal consciousness
that fills all space. From this perspective, death is not an
end; it is a merging of a relatively pathetic human
consciousness with that of the dazzling universal one. To
add gravitas to this idea, Chopra does what many recent
authors have done: he suggests that modern formulations of
quantum physics are consistent with his belief in a universal
consciousness.

The connection between physics and modern theories of


mind and consciousness is tenuous at best, but modern
physicists do take the idea of parallel universes seriously.
They debate the details, but they can hardly ignore the fact
that the mathematics of at least three of the grand theories at
the core of modern physics — inflation theory, quantum
theory, and string theory — predict the existence of alternate
universes. Some physicists even believe that signals can leak
between the universes and that the existence of parallel
universes can be confirmed through measurements or
experiments. In a recent essay, physicist A. A. Antonov
argues that our inability to detect the vast amount of dark
energy that almost certainly exists in our own universe is
evidence of the existence of parallel universes, six of which
he speculates, are directly adjacent to our own.

Again, setting the details aside, physicists agree that the


three-dimensional space we experience is simply not the
whole picture. As theoretical physicist Lee Smolin put it
recently, “Space is dead.”

Evidence for Transduction?


Hard evidence that supports a neural transduction theory is
lacking at the moment, but we are surrounded by odd
phenomena that are at least consistent with such a theory.
And, no, I’m not talking about the claims that best-selling
authors have made over the decades about proof that
telepathy, out-of-body experiences, and communication with
the dead are real. No such proof exists, in my view, but othe
well documented phenomena are difficult to brush aside.

When I was a graduate student at Harvard, I noticed a


stranger roaming the hallway near my office and offered to
assist her. Doris, it turns out, had heard voices for years, and
she was hoping she could find someone in the psychology
building — William James Hall — to help her eliminate
them because they "caused trouble." I didn’t have the heart
to tell her that Harvard, at the time, had no clinical
psychology program and that I was doing behavioral
research with pigeons. If her voices had sent her there, they
were troublemakers indeed.

When internal perception goes awry, people can be


overwhelmed by hallucinations, visions, or distortions of
reality so extreme they have to be hospitalized, and Doris
had been hospitalized at times.

But is Doris that different from the rest of us? After all,
even the healthiest among us hallucinate several times each
night — we call it dreaming. And we all have at least two
highly disorienting experiences each day called "hypnogogi
states" — those eerie, sometimes creative interludes
between sleeping and waking.

I have sometimes dreamt intricate full-length movies that


seemed as good as any Hollywood film. Alas, most of the
time, no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to hold on to
even a shred of a dream during the few seconds when I’m
staggering from my bed to the bathroom.

Where does all this content come from, and why do we have
so little control over it?

In recent years, researchers have explored what they have


clumsily labeled "paradoxical lucidity," or, even worse,
"terminal lucidity." These labels refer to what some of us
know as "the last hurrah" — the burst of mental clarity that
sometimes occurs shortly before people die, even people for
whom such clarity should be impossible.

For more than two centuries, medical journals have


published credible reports of highly impaired,
uncommunicative people who suddenly became lucid for a
few minutes before they died. There are documented cases
in which people with dementia, advanced Alzheimer’s,
schizophrenia, and even severe brain damage —– people
who have not been able to speak or to recognize their closes
relatives for years — suddenly recognized their loved ones
and spoke normally.

A 2020 study summarizing the observations of 124


caregivers of dementia patients, concluded that in "more
than 80 percent of these cases, complete remission with
return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability
was reported by observers of the lucid episode" and that ‘"
[the] majority of patients died within hours to days after the
episode." The periods of lucidity typically lasted 30 to 60
minutes.

Some of the historical reports of lucid episodes are truly


extraordinary.

Here is one of many cases reported by the German biologist


Michael Nahm and his colleagues in 2012:

In a case published in 1822, a boy at the age of 6 had fallen


on a nail that penetrated his forehead. He slowly developed
increasing headaches and mental disturbances. At the age of
17, he was in constant pain, extremely melancholic, and
starting to lose his memory. He fantasized, blinked
continuously, and looked for hours at particular objects….
He remained in the hospital in this state for 18 days. On the
morning of the 19th day, he suddenly left his bed and
appeared very bright, claiming he was free of all pain and
feelings of sickness…. A quarter of an hour after the
attending physician left him, he fell unconscious and died
within a few minutes. The front part of his brain contained
two pus-filled tissue bags the size of a hen’s egg (Pfeufer,
1822)….

And another:

Haig (2007) reported the case of a young man dying of lung


cancer that had spread to his brain. Toward the end of his
life, a brain scan showed little brain tissue left, the
metastasized tumors having not simply pushed aside normal
brain tissue but actually destroyed and replaced it. In the
days before his death, he lost all ability to speak or move.
According to a nurse and his wife, however, an hour before
he died, he woke up and said good-bye to his family,
speaking with them for about five minutes before losing
consciousness again and dying.

If the brain is a self-contained information processor, how


can we explain the sudden return of lucidity when the brain
is severely damaged? For that matter, think about the
variability that occurs in your own lucidity over the course
of 24 hours, during which you are, at various times,
completely unconscious, partially conscious, or fully
conscious. If you add drugs and alcohol to the picture, the
variability is even greater, and it can be quite bizarre.

The variability problem is addressed in an intriguing paper


published by Jorge Palop and his colleagues in Nature in
2006, who note that patients suffering from a variety of
neurodegenerative disorders often fluctuate over the course
of a single day between states of extreme confusion and
relatively normal mental states. Such radical changes, they
note, "cannot be caused by sudden loss or gain of nerve
cells." They speculate about changes in neural networks,
but that doesn’t solve the problem.

What if the variability is not caused by changes in


processing power in the brain but rather by transduction
effects? By changes occurring not in our local universe but
in the OS? Or by minor changes occurring at the point of
connection? Or by changes occurring in brain structures tha
are essential to signal transfers?

I’ve also been intrigued by what appear to be credible


reports about visual experiences that some congenitally-
blind people have had when they were near death.
Experiences of this sort were first summarized in a 1997
paper by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, later expanded
into a book called Mindsight (1999). The paper and book
describe the experiences of 14 people who were blind from
birth and who had near-death experiences (NDEs), some of
which included content that appeared to be visual in nature.
Soon after Vicki U. was in a near-fatal car accident at age
22, she remembered "seeing" a male physician and a woman
from above in the emergency room, and she "saw" them
working on a body. Said Vicki:

I knew it was me.... I was quite tall and thin at that point.
And I recognized at first that it was a body, but I didn't even
know that it was mine initially. Then I perceived that I was
up on the ceiling, and I thought, "Well, that's kind of weird.
What am I doing up here?" I thought, "Well, this must be
me. Am I dead?"

Vicki had never had a visual experience before her NDE,


and, according to the researchers, did not even "understand
the nature of light." While near death, she also claimed to
have been flooded with information about math and science
Said Vicki:

I all of a sudden understood intuitively almost [all] things


about calculus, and about the way planets were made. And I
don't know anything about that.... I felt there was nothing I
didn't know.

Several aspects of Vicki’s recollections are intriguing, but


the most interesting to me are the visual experiences. How
can someone who has never had such an experience "No
light, no shadows, no nothing, ever," according to Vicki —
suddenly have rich and detailed experiences of this sort?
Ring and Cooper found others like Vicki – congenitally
blind people who not only had visual experiences when near
death but whose NDEs were remarkably similar to some
common NDEs of sighted people.

Just recently, an Australian woman made the news


worldwide when, post surgery, she woke up with an Irish
accent. Her strong Australian accent was completely gone.
Called ‘the foreign accent syndrome’, this sudden switch in
accents is rare but real. The shift doesn’t make sense given
the framework of reasoning we usually apply to the world,
but what if it’s a transduction error?

And why can’t we remember pain? We can remember facts


and figures and images, and we can even get choked up
remembering strong emotions we’ve felt in the past — but
we can’t remember pain. Are sensations of pain getting
filtered out by transduction pathways? Could that be why
our dreams are pain free? That begs a question that is both
eerie and obvious: Is the OS a kind of pain-free Heaven?

And have you ever met a stranger who made you feel,
almost immediately, that you had known him or her your
entire life? And sometimes this stranger has the same feeling
about you. It’s a strong feeling, almost overwhelming. We
can try to explain such feelings with speculations about how
a voice or physical characteristics might remind us of
someone from our past, but there is another possibility —
that in some sense you had actually known this person your
whole life. If the brain is a bidirectional transducer, that is
not a strange idea at all.

In fact, when viewed through the lens of transduction theory


none of these odd phenomena — dreams, hallucinations,
lucidity that comes and goes, blind vision, and so on —
looks mysterious.

And All That Jazz


This brings me, reluctantly, to the recent rise of
“postmaterialist” science, or at least postmaterialist
psychology. The latter is marked by — or perhaps blemished
by — the founding of the journal Spirituality in Clinical
Practice by the American Psychological Association (APA)
in 2014 and the founding of the Association for the
Advancement of Postmaterialistic Sciences in 2017.
(Disclosure: I have been a full member of the APA since
1983.)

Postmaterialism is all about controlled experiments that


have supposedly proved, or at least supported, claims that
mediums can communicate with the dead, that ghosts will
happily comply when we ask them to climb into little boxes
in a laboratory, that people can send their thoughts to
strangers in another room telepathically, and that future
events can somehow travel backward in time to impact
people’s current behavior.

I am so tempted here to start naming names and tearing


down reputations, but my musical mom raised me better
than that. I will say this: One of the early papers published
in that new APA journal — a paper that was accepted
without peer review — demonstrated thinking so shoddy it
startled me.

Fortunately, I don’t need to tear apart shoddy thinking or


flawed experiments to advocate for transduction theory. In
fact, if this theory proves to be valid, every fantasy of the
postmaterialists will be fulfilled — every fantasy except
one, that is, and that is the postmaterialist claim itself. That’
because parallel universes are not wispy, physics-free
spiritual entities; according to many mainstream physicists,
they are just non-obvious companions of the material
universe in which we happen to live.

A Better Brain Theory


Let’s set aside both the mundane and the exotic reasons we
should take transduction theory seriously and get to the hear
of the matter: The main reason we should give serious
thought to such a theory has nothing to do with ghosts. It ha
to do with the sorry state of brain science and its reliance on
the computer metaphor. One of my research assistants
recently calculated that Beethoven’s thirty-two piano
sonatas contain a total of 307,756 notes, and that doesn’t
take into account the hundreds of sections marked with
repeat symbols. Beethoven’s scores also include more than
100,000 symbols that guide the pianist’s hands and feet:
time signatures, pedal notations, accent marks, slur and trill
marks, key signatures, rests, clefs, dynamic notations, tempo
marks, and so on.

Why am I telling you about Beethoven? Because piano


virtuoso and conductor Daniel Barenboim memorized all
thirty-two of Beethoven’s sonatas by the time he was 17,
and he has since memorized hundreds of other major piano
works, as well as dozens of entire symphony scores — tens
of millions of notes and symbols.

Do you think all this content is somehow stored in


Barenboim’s ever-changing, ever-shrinking, ever-decaying
brain? Sorry, but if you study his brain for a hundred years,
you will never find a single note, a single musical score, a
single instruction for how to move his fingers — not even a
“representation” of any of those things. The brain is simply
not a storage device. It is an extraordinary entity for sure,
but not because it stores or processes information. (See my
Aeon essay, “The Empty Brain,” for more of my thinking on
this issue, and for a truly great thrill, watch Barenboim play
the third movement from Beethoven’s 14th piano sonata
here.)

Over the centuries — completely baffled by where human


intelligence comes from — people have used one metaphor
after another to ‘explain’ our extraordinary abilities,
beginning, of course, with the divine metaphor millennia
ago and progressing – and I use that word hesitatingly — to
the current information-processing metaphor. I am
proposing now that we abandon the metaphors and begin to
consider substantive ideas we can test.

To be clear: I am not offering transduction theory as yet


another metaphor. I am suggesting that the brain is truly a
bidirectional transducer and that, over time, we will find
empirical support for this theory.

Recall that Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity,


published in 1905, and then his General Theory of
Relativity, published in 1915, received no direct and
convincing empirical support for years — first regarding
predictions his equations made about the perihelion
precession of Mercury’s orbit, then about the bending of
light around the sun (observed by Sir Arthur Eddington in
1919), and then about the gravitational redshift of light. It
took a full century before his predictions about gravity
waves were confirmed.

If we can cast some aspects of transduction theory into


formal, predictive terms (I’m working on that now and am
looking for collaborators), we might be able to make
specific predictions about transduction — about subtle
variations in reaction times, for example, or about how
transduction errors might help us explain schizophrenia. We
might also be able to predict quantitative aspects of dreams,
daydreams, hallucinations, and more.

Ignore It at Your Peril


If transduction theory has merit, let’s think about what
happens if we ignore it. If we transported a 17th century
scientist to the present day and showed him or her how well
we can converse with someone using a cell phone, he or she
would almost certainly want to look inside the phone. The
remote voice must be in the phone, after all. To put this
another way, a Renaissance scientist would naively view the
phone as a self-contained processing unit, much as today’s
brain scientists naively view the brain.

But that scientist will never find the remote voice inside the
phone, because it is not there to be found.

If we explain to the scientist that the phone is a transducer,


however, he or she will now examine the phone in a
different way, searching for evidence of transduction, which
he or she — aided by appropriate instruments and
knowledge — will eventually find.

And here is the problem: If you never teach that scientist


about transduction, he or she might never unravel the
mysteries of that phone.

This brings me to the claustrum, a small structure just below


the cerebral cortex that is poorly understood, although recen
research is beginning to shed some light. Many areas of the
brain connect to the claustrum, but what does it do? If the
claustrum turns out to be the place where signals are
transduced by the brain, you will probably never discover
this remarkable fact if transduction is not on your list of
possibilities. (If you’re a history buff, you might also be
aware of another small brain structure — the pineal gland —
that could conceivably be a transduction site. In his first
book, Treatise of man, written in the early 1600s, French
philosopher René Descartes identified this gland as the seat
of the soul. Remarkably, in the late 1900s, scientists
discovered that tissue in the pineal gland responds to
electromagnetic radiation.)

If modern brain scientists begin to look for evidence that the


brain is a transducer, they might find it directly through a
new understanding of neural pathways, structures, electro-
chemical activity, or brain waves. Or they might find such
evidence indirectly by simulating aspects of brain function
that appear to be capable of transducing signals. They might
even be able to create devices that send signals to a parallel
universe, or, of greater interest, that receive signals from tha
universe. Comparative studies of animal brains, which could
conceivably have limited connections to the OS, might help
move the research along.

Efficient and clear transduction might also prove the key to


understanding the emergence of human language and
consciousness; here is a possible explanation for what migh
have been the relatively sudden appearance of such abilities
in humans (see Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book, The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind).
Neural transduction might also prove to be the mechanism
underlying Carl Jung’s concept of the “collective
unconscious.” Even Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal
grammar could get a boost from transduction theory; it
would hardly be surprising that most or all human languages
share certain grammatical rules if languages are all
constrained by signals emanating from a common source.
And then there’s that ‘flow’ state my friend Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi taught everyone about. When I’m in a
hyper-creative mode – now, for example, as I’m writing – I
have almost no awareness of this world or of the passage of
time. Is the OS the source of our creativity?

It might take decades for us to see significant advances in


transduction research, but with vast resources already
devoted to the brain sciences, we could conceivably move
much faster. And if you’re worried that transduction theory
is just another one of those inherently untestable theories —
like string theory or theories about parallel universes —
think again. With neural transduction theory, we have an
enormous advantage: The transduction device is available
for immediate in-depth study.

Implications and Final Notes


Will transduction theory finally clear up the old
consciousness problem? That I doubt, because I don’t think
there is a consciousness problem. Consciousness is just the
experience we have when we’re observing ourselves or the
world. It seems grand simply because we’re part of the
system we’re observing. It’s a classic example of how
difficult it can be to study a system of which one is an
integral part; think of this problem as a kind of Gödel’s
theorem of the behavioral sciences. (For my whole spiel on
this issue, see my 2017 essay, “Decapitating
Consciousness.”)

If transduction theory proves to be correct, our


understanding of the universe and of our place in it will
change profoundly. We might not only be able to make sens
of dozens of odd aspects of human experience, we might
also begin to unravel some of the greatest mysteries in the
universe: where our universe came from, what else and who
else is out there — even whether there is, in some sense, a
God.

If you are as skeptical about flimsy theories as I am, by now


you might be thinking: Has Epstein lost his mind (and, if so
where did it go)? Let me assure you that I am as hard-
headed as ever. I won’t believe in ghosts until Casper
himself materializes in front of an audience and pushes me
off the stage. But I am also acutely aware of how little we
actually know, both about ourselves and our universe. If one
simple idea — brain as transducer — might stimulate new
kinds of research and might also bring order to what seem to
be scores of unrelated, bizarre, and highly persistent human
beliefs, I’m all for it.

Robert Epstein is senior research psychologist at the


American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
in California. He holds a doctoral degree from Harvard
University and is the former editor-in-chief of Psychology
Today magazine. He's authored 15 books and more than 300
articles on various topics in the behavioral sciences. His
mathematical model of the Carrier Separation Plan, a
strategy for quickly eradicating SARS-CoV-2 and
comparable pathogens, can be accessed at
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2021.640009.

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