In the first half, author with several forms of synesthesia, Maureen Seaberg, discussed recent discoveries about the senses and how our smelling, vision, hearing, taste, and touch are far more sensitive than we realize. According to Seaberg, the newest sensory research demonstrates we are as powerful as any other animal and beyond any machine; at the upper limit, we can see light at the level of a single photon, and feel through the sense of touch the difference of a single molecule. One of the most talented sensors is a woman who can smell Parkinson's disease and even COVID, she reported, adding that new technologies like AI, and virtual and augmented reality are creating a golden research era in perceptual laboratories.
"What's really interesting," she said, "is the senses are plastic. And unlike other forms of abilities like intelligence, they can be learned and grown." Hearing is actually our most wide-ranging sense, and "we can hear from 20 Hertz to 20,000 hertz," with the ability to pick up on tiny sound waves that are smaller than the diameter of an atom, she detailed. Seaberg described synesthesia, as rather than a crossing of the senses, like having bonus senses for one stimulus. For instance, the musician Billy Joel is said to be a synesthete, as he sees beautiful, colorful forms in the air when he's composing music. Seaberg revealed that she is a "super-color seer," in which she can detect many more color variations than the average person.
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A graduate of the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology, Bob Peterson is an expert in out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and the paranormal. In the latter half, he addressed the related topics of astral projection, lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, and night terrors. He described an OBE as when your conscious awareness is separate from the physical body (which tends to be just another inanimate object in the room). Basically, it's like you're a ghost and "can walk through walls or floors or whatever," he shared, adding that the experience happens to everyday people who are not mentally ill and has occurred to around 20% of the population.
Interestingly, in some OBE or astral projection cases, people have visited places and seen things in "reality" that were later corroborated to actually have been at the site, while in other incidents, the out-of-body descriptions do not match up with the actual location. When the experiencers' reports don't correspond to reality, what they may be perceiving "is like an echo or a shadow of the physical world," Peterson suggested. In terms of visiting the deceased during an OBE, he believes there must be a kind of cooperation between the living and the dead to make that happen. On the subject of night terrors, he said they are like the "residuals" of a nightmare, in which someone wakes up, but they still see the dream hallucination. Sleep paralysis, he continued, is related to the body's function of naturally freezing movements during the REM dream state, but on occasions when the brain or mind wakes up before their physical body does, they find themselves paralyzed and subject to vivid hallucinations.
News segment guests: Mish Shedlock, Howard Bloom