Mediumship Under The Microscope

Hi everyone. This is Ky Dickens and you're listening to The Telepathy Tapes podcast.

In season one, nonspeakers showed us that telepathy is possible, shattering our assumptions about the world itself. This season, were turning to others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create. What if only by listening to those who've been ignored we could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from, and where we're going? This is The Telepathy Tapes and we're opening up the next channel.

In our last episode, we explored what happens when we die and whether consciousness can survive the body. And what we found was compelling. Across centuries and cultures, people have described near-death experiences with striking consistency. A sense of leaving their body, encountering a light being, having a life review, and coming back transformed.

It left us with a powerful question: if consciousness can exist beyond the body, could communication across that boundary be possible? Because for one young non-speaker named Emelia, that boundary doesn't seem to exist.

Spirits were something that sort of started happening when we first talked, but now they're here all the time and she's talking to people who have passed and we have messages for people and not necessarily like who are close to us, but it's almost always one person removed that we have these messages for.

Today, we'll explore mediumship and whether it's truly possible to connect with the other side. We'll meet organizations that have run rigorous blind tests on mediums, we'll look at their brain scans, and meet one of America's most vetted mediums, Laura Lynne Jackson. And along the way we'll return to Emelia, the 11-year-old you met in season one. Because her abilities may hold the key to one of the oldest debates in the history of psi research.

Does mediumship prove that consciousness survives death, or might one be using psychic abilities to tap into an informational field or the mind of someone in grief? To even begin answering that question, I think we need some solid ground. At least for me, I need to know if mediumship, which is talking to a deceased person on the other side, has ever even been tested, and whether research has managed to separate genuine ability from guesswork or fraud.

And that question led me to the Forever Family Foundation. For nearly two decades, they've been putting mediums through rigorous blind testing, building evidence that helps both researchers and grieving families take this mystery seriously.

I'm Bob Ginsberg and I am the co-founder of Forever Family Foundation.

I'm a very different person than I was 23 years ago. I used to be a logical left brain thinker. I didn't believe in life after death. I thought that was a fairytale. I mean, after all, we were our brains or brains produce consciousness.

Overwhelming grief, following the tragic death of Bob's daughter, Bailey, in a car accident, would dramatically change that logic.

I went to sleep every night, you know, praying to the universe that I wouldn't wake up. I mean, I, I wanted to die. I, I didn't see any way of surviving my daughter's death. And as with many people, tragedy propels you into a new world and you start exploring and searching for meaning or answers.

Bob turned to academic research for both comfort and answers. He desperately wanted to believe that consciousness survives our physical deaths, but wishful thinking was not enough. What he wanted was evidence.

And I met with scientists and medical doctors across the country that studied the mind of consciousness, and I wanted to know if there was any credible evidence, by credentialed people, that we could survive our physical death. And I wanted to know what every parent would wanna know that lost a child: Does my child still exist? You know, and how is she? The two big questions, you know? And the more I learned and reading literally, you know, 500 books or more, I was amazed that the mainstream was not aware of the evidence I was reading about.

Bob and his wife Fran, confronted this lack of awareness and the taboo of consciousness survival when they attended a grief group for grieving parents. Discussions around mediumship or communication with the other side or even the afterlife, were strictly forbidden.

And every time either I or my wife brought up the subject of life after death, the moderator would shut us down by saying, "This is not the purpose of the group. We don't talk about such things. Our purpose is only to teach you ways of coping with the loss." And you know, we thought that was really odd because frankly, everybody in the group, that's all they wanted to talk about. 'Cause what could give you any more comfort than knowing or believing that your child still existed in some form?

It was in New York at the time, in the middle of the winter, and we used to stand outside in the parking lot, at you know, 15 degrees and, and, and talking for an hour with the parents. And I saw a glimmer in their eyes and we were sharing some stories and experiences. Then we started to think, well, there has to be some sort of a forum where people can feel free to talk about their experiences and what they learned without the fear of being judged or labeled or crazy, or 'this is just a product of your grief.'

And that's one of the things that led us to form our organization, Forever Family Foundation.

Bob and Fran founded Forever Family Foundation in 2003, which in their own words is a global movement that helps to change the worldview about grief and life after physical death. They are a 100% volunteer run nonprofit organization that brings scientists and academics together to educate the public about the established evidence of consciousness survival. And in the process they support those in grief.

Our two goals were to educate the public about evidence that we're more than a physical bodies and to support research into consciousness and life after death. The overriding thing is, is to support the bereaved. We don't support the the bereaved by counseling, we support the bereave by information.

So Bob, what type of research are you engaged in?

We were interested in all the various disciplines of research, you know, near death experiences and reincarnation, and then the life experiences and so forth. And starting with telepathy and ESP and precognition.

Because in order for you to believe that we survive a physical death, you have to be able to show that our minds connect independently of our brains. 'Cause if that's true, then the thought that we could survive physical death becomes not only probable, but logical. So we start there.

In addition to extensive academic research, direct personal experience had the most impact on Bob's journey.

I went to a few mediums, even though I didn't believe in mediums, but my wife dragged me to to a couple. The day before I went to the reading, I went to the cemetery. My daughter had a thing every month, she'd come up to me and say, "All right, dad, admit it. Admit that I'm your favorite child." You know? And I'd say, "Bailey, I'm not gonna admit that. I love all my children."

So I knelt down, you know, at her grave site and I said, "Okay, you know, I admit it, you know, you were my favorite." And the first thing the medium says to me is, is, "Bob, I have your daughter here and she's telling me to tell you that she's real happy that you admitted that she was your favorite."

And I said, "Wow." I had just said that like 24 hours earlier." That's the one I said, I'm trying to figure out the trick, I mean, how, how did she know those things? I didn't wanna die when I went to sleep that night, you know? Just gave me hope, 'cause I don't know how else to explain what the medium was able to do.

On the other hand, mediumship is not an exact science, there are a tremendous number of practitioners out there that can't do what they claim.

Bob opened to the possibility that a credible medium could truly be connecting to the deceased. But he and Fran had also sat for mediums who were not very convincing.

So Bob started to form an idea: to develop a system to evaluate mediums for accuracy in a controlled environment.

We take the study of mediumship and identifying those who can and cannot very seriously, because they're on the front lines and there's no oversight. So anybody can say they're a medium, start charging a lot of money.

So the Forever Family Foundation began testing and evaluating mediums. Under controlled conditions, each medium sits with five different sitters and is scored using five separate evaluation methods. A sitter, by the way, is the person working with the medium who's seeking to connect with the other side.

We have a pool of trained sitters, meaning people that know about mediumship and that we've trained to identify evidence, what represents general evidence, specific evidence.

Mediums who received high scores are officially certified with Forever Family Foundation and volunteer to help those in grief. And volunteers a key word, these mediums don't get paid. And this is how Bob and Fran started working with psychic medium, Laura Lynn Jackson.

So Forever Family Foundation was just profound in my journey, and it was actually Garrett, my husband, who saw an ad in like a diner window, the organization had just started, I think it was like 2004.

Laura was an English teacher by day, and her mediumship abilities were mostly a secret.

The whole time I was teaching, I couldn't dismiss these abilities. They were always there, but my husband's an attorney and he was always like, you cannot let anybody at work know this. So anyway, I decide I'm gonna go get tested to see if I would be able to pass these tests for Forever Family Foundation, in order to volunteer as a medium to help people in grief. Which for me seemed ideal, right?

Because I could do it in secret. So I get to the Huntington Hilton that night and there's this big kind of like ballroom area and there's like five different stations set up and at each station there's a camera, there's a person behind a, a desk with like a clipboard and a scoring thing,

evaluating the evidence and scoring it. If it's a general statement, is not gonna be scored very positively, you know? But if you said to me, "Bob, I have your grandmother, Rebecca here, and I know that she was a nurse in the Army," and those two facts were true, I mean, that would be given higher scores than a general statement.

And I realize that, you know, smartphones and Googling people weren't really around back then. But how did you make sure that mediums didn't know anything about the sitter before the session?

We set up stations with a, a sitter and the medium with a screen dividing the two so they couldn't see each other. We take steps to make sure that obviously the sitter has never had a reading with that medium or has never heard of that medium, and we only give the medium the sitter's first name.

And this restriction prevents a technique used by fraudulent mediums called a hot reading. Where a medium has access to a sitter's full name and can research information about them and their deceased loved ones prior to the reading, and then they present this information as if it's coming from the other side.

They had trained sitters really well where the sitters could only say like "yes" or "no" to anything you were bringing through.

Training sitters not to give the medium any leading information is a way to control for what's known as a cold reading. Which like a hot reading, is a technique for a fraudulent medium. They'll use feedback from the sitter to gather information, presenting it as being from the deceased loved one.

And they were constantly scoring you, and then they videotaped the whole thing so that  a third party could watch it to make sure there was no feeding the mediums or anything like that.

So, Bob, how did Laura Lynn perform?

She was way beyond proficiency guidelines. She was kind of an all star  as far as evidence goes.

So Laura Lynn Jackson became a certified medium with Forever Family Foundation and they passed on average only one medium per year. It is hard to pass their test and Laura has volunteered for them extensively ever since.

Shortly after I passed Forever Family Foundation's test Fran and Bob asked if I would volunteer to do you could call it a gallery reading.

A gallery reading is when a medium reads for a group of people instead of just one person at a time.

I was told it was going to be 10 sets of parents who had lost children, and I remember the weeks leading up to it feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility. I I knew I I had these abilities but it's interesting I always feel like as a teacher I would walk into a classroom right with a lesson plan and a backup lesson plan and three different ways to teach it. And whenever I would walk into a room as a psychic medium about to do something like this, when I tell you I've got nothing I've got nothing. I'm closed until I'm open. I'm thinking like is this gonna happen? What if this doesn't happen? I remember thinking I am going to try to connect these parents with their children to model what is possible and if I am not able to do that how is that gonna leave them feeling

And Laura if it's okay I wanna read the caption You wrote about this in your book the Light Between Us because it captures the scene so vividly So you wrote I was on Jericho Turnpike heading west When the messages started coming in I squeezed the wheel of my Honda pilot and swerved right pulling into a Staples parking lot just a bit earlier I've been taking deep breaths trying to stay calm because I was so nervous scared to death really. Soon I would be in a room with suffering people. My role that evening was to try to ease their pain. My fear was that I would make it worse. Then suddenly they started to come to me, the children all at once as a group."

And all these children rushed in. They all rushed in and they all started giving me messages to let me know, like who they were and who their parents were and how they had crossed and what the messages they wanted.

And I was like, "Wait, wait, wait. You gotta wait till I get there." But I know that they did that to let me know that I wasn't walking in alone. And so I remember walking into that room and taking a deep breath in, and the minute I opened, they just all came through and they guided me to their parents one by one, by one, by one.

They told me their names, they told me how they crossed. Like one family, their son drowned, trying to save someone else. Another one got the flu and got sepsis and crossed within three days, and she gave all these details, including her name and the fact that her parents had to pull her off life support, like the timeline for that, like details that they had never told anybody.

And I felt just so humbled and honored to be  the vehicle to bring those messages through that night and connect their parents. And the reason I'm getting very moved is just the, the love. I watched, how that transformed the parents in the room because they left that evening knowing that their children were so present in their lives still and loved them so much. Such unique and specific information came through that evening that there's just no way to experience something like that and not be forever changed by it.

Ugh. I love that story. And I followed up with some of the parents that Laura had met back then in her early days, volunteering for Forever Family.

My name is Dr. Mo Hannah. I'm a college professor, I've been teaching at, uh, a small liberal arts college for over 30 years now.

Nearly 20 years ago, Dr. Hannah tragically lost her daughter, Monique.

Monique was an extraordinary kid, as many young people who die young. She was poetic and she was very artistic, very deep and very emotional, and very different. And we were extremely close, and I could never have predicted what happened to her.

It was something that you, you cannot fathom. The pain of that kind of grief was not just psychological and emotional, it was physical. It was literally like having a physical illness.

There's not words. I can't fathom how hard that must have been.

I'm a practicing psychologist, so I have a psychotherapy practice helping people with their problems, and I didn't have a clue as to how to get past this, how to survive. I had three younger children, I had to be on this planet. I got in contact with the Forever Family Foundation just in time, just when I needed it.

Knowing that the Forever Family vets mediums, did you believe in mediums in the afterlife, or was that kind of a stretch?

It was a stretch when Monique passed, I did not believe in an afterlife. But I got a reading from Laura Lynn that, uh, it stayed with me for the rest of my journey. There was no question in my mind she made contact with my daughter.

Many people record medium sessions because honestly in that moment it's emotional overload and often you wanna go back later and check their words and ask, wait, did that really just happen?

Okay, I'm getting a younger female who is coming through as a daughter to you. And she's also apologizing and taking responsibility for her crossing. I get this often with individuals who have crossed through suicide. Does this make sense to you?

She knew that Monique had been living in New York City, that she'd been going to NYU, that she had taken her own life and that she had had an attempt that involved pills.

This was in the earlier days of the internet, none of this information was available back then. There were things that she absolutely would've had no way of knowing, you know?

Yeah. And people forget that Facebook and Instagram weren't around back then, that you couldn't just Google someone.

Not all mediums can do what Laura Lynn can do or what the Forever Family Foundation mediums can do .   She was able to come up with very evidential details, and she's really a phenomenal evidential medium.

Laura's volunteer work with the Forever Family Foundation continues to this day, but so does her work as a research subject and another nonprofit organization dedicated to survival of consciousness investigation, is Windbridge Research Center Co-founded by husband and wife research team Mark Boccuzzi and Julie Beischel in addition to co-leading research at the Windbridge Research Center Mark is also the managing editor of Threshold a Journal of Interdisciplinary Consciousness Studies and has spent decades in the fields of research technology and education And Julia co-founder and executive director at Windbridge received her PhD in pharmacology and toxicology and has minors in microbiology and immunology So they're both fluent in mainstream biology and medical science Which is important especially when researching mediums because they know how to scrutinize claims against rigorous conventional standards We spoke with Mark about Windbridge's research activities

The big question is can mediums report accurate and specific information about a discarnate or deceased loved one under controlled laboratory conditions And the short answer to that question is yes they can We develop a rather extensive protocol that takes care of things like information leakage, cold reading, hot reading and statements that are too vague that could be applied to anyone. And so generally all the criticisms that people raise about mediums and mediumship readings and the potential for fraud.

Windbridge is known for its rigorous testing protocol that uses multiple layers of blinding to control for fraudulent cold readings.

They have to perform blinded phone readings for us  that have to meet a certain level of accuracy. The medium will be on the phone with an investigator who we call a proxy sitter.

A trained investigator sits for the medium in place of the actual sitter seeking the connection. Medium readings are done with proxy sitters and over the phone, so mediums are physically unable to cold read the sitter for any information.

So they never interact directly with the actual sitter. The only information that's provided is the first name of the discarnate or the deceased loved one. From there the medium then has to provide accurate and specific information about the deceased loved one or DLO, describe cause of death provide a physical description provide hobbies and so on. That information was considered to be accurate, higher than a level that would be expected by chance.

So Laura you're one of very few mediums who've passed the very challenging tests at Windbridge and now you're kind of part of their science and research team What was that like When I went through that series of testing and passed it was like wow the scientist part of me really wanted and needed to have that sort of like concrete validation Well as scientists we're very cautious about words like proof and belief and those kinds of things but the data suggests at this point that there is some sort of life after death or continuation of consciousness after death This is the current party line at the Woodbridge Research Center Given the information about accuracy and given the information about phenomenology it seems that mediums are in fact connecting with some sort of discarnate individual that discarnate individual knows a lot about the sitters.

So Windbridge's  blinded accuracy testing can be seen as evidence that their research mediums are able to report statistically relevant, accurate information to the sitters about their deceased loved ones. For me, it seems pretty clear something's going on, the question is what?

Is it truly a connection to the other side, or is it some other psychic ability making it look that way? Just to cover the basics Psychic abilities refer to perceiving information about the past present or future through extrasensory perception And mediumship refers specifically to communication with someone who's passed on There's two competing theories: One theory is yes they're actually interacting with a discarnate or deceased loved one, Or they're getting the information from some other psychic mechanism They're just I'm using finger air quotes here They're just reading my mind which in and of itself is kind of amazing but it means that there's no need for a discarnate

So Laura, where do you fall on that question? Is mediumship connecting to their side or is it like a heightened psychic ability?

You know, there's a saying that all mediums are psychic, but not all psychics are mediums. And what that means is that your psychic abilities are what open the doorway for you to reach I think the highest level of being able to perceive unseen energy and communicate, which is mediumship. When Windbridge came along and started studying many of our US mediums we all were reporting the same exact experiences What we did was we had the mediums give psychic readings and mediumship readings and then they had to describe their experiences for each reading and what does it mean when they all independently report the same thing And mind you they didn't know what anyone else reported The mediums did in fact have a difference between the experience of having a psychic reading and having a mediumship reading There's a much more loving feeling that comes through when a medium is having a medium ship reading versus just using telepathy clairvoyance or precognition to get information about a sitter That's the fundamental finding of this phenomenology research connection feels different And that difference was captured in the dimension of love The feeling that I have when I do readings for people too There's this profound love but can that difference she feels between psychic and mediumship readings be measured Can science or research back it up Laura it turns out is a great medium to study due to how she receives her information She says she sees it on an internal screen psychic information on one side mediumship information on the other My screen looks like a wide screen tv It's an inner screen It is not extending outside of my body And medium ship is always on the right hand side for me My psychic looks on the left hand the medium ship comes in on the right and people who come in from the other side. Those spirits, they always show up first as points of light before they show me anything else. Most mediums have their own way for receiving information.

Some hear voice in their mind, some see images, some feel emotions or physical sensations that aren't their own. However it arrives. The process is telepathic and the medium must translate all that into words that we can understand. But Laura's unique split screen makes her a rare subject for study. If her brain shows different activity during mediumship and psychic abilities, it would help rule out the idea that she's just psychically somehow picking up from the living or downloading data from an informational field.

It could point to mediumship being something different altogether. I was a pretty hardcore skeptic for several years. We're physical bodies. We live, we die. We turn into warm food, the idea that maybe there's something more. I really assumed that this was all defense mechanisms or wishful thinking.

That's Dr. Jeff Tarrant, he's a licensed psychologist and a board certified neurofeedback specialist. And Jeff first met Laura Lynn Jackson at a Forever Family Conference almost 10 years ago. He was there to discuss some research that he'd just completed, so went to this conference. We presented our thing, met Laura, and then at the end of the conference, that was the first time that I mapped her brain.

So all of us at some point has probably seen a QEG in movies or tv. Often the subject wears what looks like a swimming cap with wires and electrode sensors that pick up tiny electrical signals from the scalp. And the brainwave frequencies translate into digital information so lots of squiggly lines and color coded brain maps showing activity in specific brain areas.

So then Jeff, what do you do with that information? We can put numbers on them. It's called a quantitative EEG. And then when we have numbers, we can compare 'em to something. How do they compare before or during a mediumship reading. So then we can see how the brain is changing in terms of these different brainwave patterns and what that might mean in terms of states of consciousness.

When attempts are made to try to figure out like what's going on with people who can access this information, they're watching what my brainwave activity is doing when I'm in normal talking mode, when I go into psychic mode or when I'm doing media mystic readings. And it's fascinating. So Jeff collected this brain scan, EEG data from Laura Lynn's brain at work.

And you know what was really interesting is when we examined her brainwaves during both a psychic and a mediumship reading. The patterns that we saw matched exactly what she reported. Remember that Laura said mediumship information or messages from the other side appear on the right side of her internal screen and psychic information on the left side.

Information from the left visual field comes in and it actually crosses over and gets processed in the right back of the brain in the right occipital lobe. And so that's exactly what we saw was wh when Laura was doing a psychic reading, there was a huge increase of brain activity on that right occipital lobe.

And then same thing when she did mediumship, we saw it on the other side. So did you see anything else in Laura's brain scans that felt, you know, neurologically remarkable? There was a clear distinction between the psychic and the mediumship, aside from the side of the brain that was being involved when she was doing a psychic reading, there was much more activation.

All of the brainwaves increased back there on that right side. But the biggest ones were the fast brainwaves. So high beta and gamma. Gamma is the fastest brainwave that we usually deal with right now. It's associated with activation, but it's also associated with things like being in a flow state or being in the zone, integrating high level information without effort.

Okay, so there were fast flow state brainwaves on the intuitive, non-analytical right side of the brain when Laura was doing a psychic reading. So then what was the difference with the medium reading? But what was interesting is when she did a medium ship reading, looking at the other side of the brain, the only brainwaves that increased were the slow brainwaves, so delta and theta.

There was no increase in fast brainwaves at all. Okay, so slow brainwaves, does that mean that something is kind of turned off or like going offline? Yeah, so the mediumship was almost like turning everything off and so to me it, it suggests the mediumship is much more of a receptive state, so a very different process.

One of 'em was much more activating for her, the psychic one, then the mediumship one. Okay. So going back to Laura Lynn, Laura, all this brainwave data, you know, the left to the right, the slow and the fast frequencies. Does this data match how it feels for you? When we read psychically, we're retrieving information.

We're like reaching out and getting it, and when we read me MyAlly, we're just sitting back and receiving, just receiving it, receiving it, receiving it. So it feels very different, but it's also on different parts of my screen. The other thing that supports that idea is her right frontal lobe. During mediumship also shut.

It's like getting out of your own way so that you can hear other information, so your frontal lobe's not planning and trying to think about the future. The brain has a lot of different mechanisms in place to filter information. It, it screens out the vast majority of what is out there because if you were tuning into every single piece of information out there.

From a sensory perspective, you couldn't function. So one of the things that I think is going on with some of these mediums and psychics is that they are able to temporarily turn off some of those filtering mechanisms so that they do have access to more information. When I read, it's completely telepathic and it's so rapid, and it's always been so frustrating to me that I have to like.

Slow it down and put it into language that I just wish, like there was a way that somebody, when I was doing a reading could like touch my finger, get on my screen and like download it at the same time. Since meeting Laura, Jeff has done brain scans on more mediums, most of which have been rigorously vetted by the Forever Family Foundation, the Windbridge Research Center, or the University of Arizona.

And he found an interesting observation when looking at their scans and it has to do with the right parietal lobe. The right parietal lobe to the back, right quadrant. It got kind of dubbed the God spot by the media. The reason that it, it got that name, the God spot, when people had injuries and that part of the brain was damaged, people became more empathic.

They also reported having more spiritual experiences. When you look at the function of that part of the brain, it's really about boundaries and saying, I'm Jeff. I exist only in this physical body. I'm separate from you. And so if you disrupt that, what appears to happen is that the boundaries between self and other become more flexible.

You're able to step outside of your small ego and connect to something else. We see that part of the brain kind of go offline, especially in mediumship all the time. I can't say that it's like the signature. That would sort of define like, oh, are you a real medium or not? But I would say it does show up maybe 75% of the time, and it usually doesn't show up in psychic stuff.

Jeff's brain scans make clear that psychic readings and mediumship readings are not the same thing. The brain is doing something entirely different in each case. One is more active, reaching out for information while the other is more receptive. Almost like shutting something down to let something in.

And that brings us back to Emelia, the 11-year-old non-speaker in Wisconsin. What makes her different from mediums and so unique is most mediums cannot telepathically communicate with someone who's alive. They can only do it with someone who's passed on. Emelia, on the other hand, can do it with both. One of Emelia's pretty cool gifts is that she can talk to people who have passed away like spirits early on.

I think I'm thinking, where is that information coming from? Is it from someone who actually passed or is it. Somehow something else isn't telepathy. That's Maura mom of Emelia, who is eight years old when you met them in the podcast last season, diagnosed with DDX three X syndrome. Doctors said Emelia would have a limited ability to understand and connect, and they were wrong.

When Emelia began communicating by pointing to letters on a letter board, she revealed a staggering inner world. Not only was she an incredible poet with an interest in genetic science and an astute awareness of everything around her. She could accurately identify hieroglyphic symbols. She understood both Spanish and Portuguese two languages.

Her family did not speak. She could read the mind of not just her mom, but her therapists and teachers, and perhaps most perplexing. Emelia told her mom, she could connect with people who were not physically there. And before we explore Emelia's connection with people who've passed, it's important to show how her telepathic abilities first emerged with the living.

These early exchanges became the first real evidence that what she was spelling was not imagination, and they serve as an important data point. Later in the episode, like three years ago at school, I said, who's your best friend? And she said Fiona. And so I tried to find Fiona at school and they couldn't find a Fiona.

At first, her mom thought maybe these were just imaginary playmates, and so I just let it go thinking, well, I don't know, maybe she was just making it up or I don't know. At the, at the time, I didn't know. However, since you last met Emelia, a lot has changed. She got a lot more body control, which is amazing, and now she's able to type completely independently, which is exciting.

Emelia's progress seemed to dovetail with a groundswell happening. Across the non-speaking community, parents started finding each other, started online groups and bonding over experiences that they had once kept quiet, especially around things like telepathy. When all of this started kind of coming out and I learned about the Hill, she let me know that Fiona was actually a friend from the Hill, which made more sense because that's why we couldn't find her.

The hill was introduced in season one. It's a telepathic chat room where some nonspeakers say they hang out and communicate. And then we started realizing just how many people that she knew from the hill but had never physically met. And the fun thing was that we actually got the opportunity to meet them in person.

Maura has connected the dots with various parents from around the country. People, she's not met yet. The thing they have in common is their children all say they're talking to one another on the hill. We did have a FaceTime calls with a couple of people, and Maura ended up meeting with at least four families so Emelia could meet friends from the hill in person.

And when they saw each other for the first time, it was so fun to see that there was such a love between them that they clearly knew each other and they had stories. One of the cool things about all of this with all the friends and discovering all these people and then actually finding them, and uh, as a parent, like going through this whole thing, you're constantly like struggling with, is this real?

Is, it's not real, like what's going on? Then when she's talking about this person and then you actually find them and you find that they're actually talking to each other and then they validate that it's been crazy to actually see that these people exist and they have been talking on the hill, and it just validates all of the things that they've been saying.

As her typing got better and better, she started being asked to deliver messages, and these messages were seemingly not from other nonspeakers. They were messages for grieving friends and acquaintances, and even strangers for people whose loved ones had passed. Her dad and Mike did not know what to make of any of this at first.

I've definitely been more skeptical my, my whole life. So not, not a believer for sure, until Emelia started showing signs of other possibilities. I think in the last couple of months there was a point where she was really overwhelmed with spirits and I said, what are they here for? What do they want? She said to give a message to a loved one.

And I said, all right, well, is there somebody that you have a message for? Is there somebody here now? And she said Yes. And I said, okay. For us to be able to give a message to somebody, we need to know who it's from and who it's for. And so she typed right away, her name is Hunter Chastain. And so then she gave a whole message and she said who it was from.

It was from his mom. And now this is a person who, I've met him maybe once and, but I don't know him. Emelia may not have even met him. Um, and so it was this very specific message and we passed along and this message was not vague or generic. It expressed happiness that his daughter was learning to ride a horse.

And then there was some comment about the Kentucky Derby, which didn't make any sense to me. And so when I passed that along to them, uh, her thing was the Derby. Like she loved the Derby. And there's so many things that you could say, well, it's kind of generic, and anyone could think that, but she's just getting so specific about things that she's sharing.

It's crazy. Just random people that she meets that she has no, no reason to know anything about them, right? She's shared things about their relatives current past with with us as well. Emelia said it's jolly giving people the message because when they're getting the lesson, they see that spirits are real.

I can tell now when she's hearing somebody, and I always describe it, like if somebody was talking in the other room and you wanted to hear 'em, and you're like, wait a minute, and you like, listen. You can see when somebody's doing that, when they're focusing and listening, and that's what she does. She like pauses and she's listening, and then she'll type and then she'll pause again and listen.

And then she'll type again. So Maura, it kind of feels like Emelia can engage in, I don't know, three lanes of telepathy, if you will. Um, I guess the first would be reading the thoughts of those close to her, like you or her teachers. And I guess second would be communicating telepathically at a distance with other nonspeakers.

And then the third would be communicating telepathically with people from beyond the grave. So does it all feel the same to her? Is there a difference between telepathy with. A living person and with someone who's passed. I asked Emelia how she knows the difference between a spirit or a non-speaker.

'cause she's talking to them both all the time. She said that nonspeakers look nothing different than their bodies, but that spirits look like energy. And she also said that. nonspeakers give me more holler like they're louder. Um, and she said, people get loud in my hill, which I think is funny. And that spirits, she said that they're kind of slower and it's hard to hear like the actual words.

I think more subtle than the nonspeakers and. She said that they feel different. She said nonspeakers feel more dominant and more milling like they're hanging around there closer and that spirits feel like, feel like distant and jolly, which I thought was interesting that. Spirits are happy. So we returned to the big question we asked earlier.

Could medium ships simply be telepathy in disguise? Are mediums really talking to the other side, or are the best ones just world-class psychics, pulling memories and feelings and thoughts from the bereaved sitting in front of them. One thing that's different with Emelia is that when she's passing on these messages, it just kind of comes on randomly and she'll just start typing and sharing it.

It's not like somebody's sitting in front of her and she has the opportunity to read what they're thinking. It's messages for like a friend's, friend's husband, or really kind of distant random people and people that we don't have real access to or connection to. In short, because there's no sitter in Emelia's case and there's nobody nearby seeking the information, her experiences pushed back against the idea that mediumship is simply psychically dipping into someone else's memory.

Emelia herself explains that it's the spirits who find her from this bit of data. It seems possible to conclude then that mediums could truly be engaged in communication across the boundary of life and death, and of course, the way that communication would work. Is via telepathy language without voice, without even a body.

It seems to me one way to validate this would be to look at brain scans done on mediums and see if they look similar to a brain scan done on Emelia when she's telepathically engaged with another non-speaker who's alive, but just not physically in her same space, and to do this. All roads lead to Dr.

Jeff Tarrant. As you heard earlier, Jeff has already mapped the brains of world-class mediums and several telepathic nonspeakers, and he was in touch with Emelia and her mom, Maura already. Emelia loves neuroscience. She always wants to help nonspeakers, and she expressed her excitement to meet Jeff and participate in some brain scans.

Her parents were also excited and I think more than anything, just to validate that the mysteries unfolding in their home were real.

So this past summer, Jeff traveled to Wisconsin to meet Emelia and her parents and to run a series of EEG brain scans to get a sense of what Emelia's brain is doing when communicating telepathically with a living non-speaker who's not around. Emelia, I'm gonna put this cap back on you and then here you can help me hold this.

You are like a pro at this. You're so good, Emelia. Emelia and her parents are sitting at a table as Dr. Tart carefully fits the electrodes and cap on her head. And then Dr. Tart got what he calls a baseline scan to capture her brain in a normal state of being where she's just kind of hanging out, flipping through a picture book in comparison.

To what I'm calling telepathic communication. During the telepathic communication part of the test, Emelia was asked to engage with a friend telepathically from a distance. This was new data and significant data because up until this point, Dr. Tarrant had only tested nonspeakers doing telepathy type exams.

They had to communicate the word that their mom or teacher was looking at, or the number or the picture. They weren't asked to communicate and engage with another non-speaker from a long distance. She wasn't actually doing a telepathy exercise the same way that we did with John Paul in Houston, but she was talking to her friends.

So like friends on the Hill, I don't know if it was the Hill necessarily. I think it was one friend in particular who is often in her psychic space. And so they were having this conversation, uh, that was going on for a while while we were recording. And so even though it wasn't necessarily talking to spirits, it seemed like it was a telepathic communication.

When Dr. Tart reviews the data with the family, he's sitting with them at their kitchen table, and he's built a PowerPoint presentation with various slides of squiggly lines and color coded brains, and all sorts of information that looks foreign to me. There's a lot of interesting data that at a bare minimum, it suggests that something is happening differently from engaged in telepathic communication compared to a baseline or compared to just a regular conversation.

What was most fascinating and consequential to me was when Dr. Tarrant decided to look back on the readings he's done with vetted mediums and compare them to Emelia's brain scan, and here's why. This is fascinating, because as you know, Dr. Tarrant has compared the medium brain scans to each other and found similar patterns.

But he's not yet had the opportunity to compare brain scans of telepathy with brain scans of mediumship. And I don't wanna confuse this comparison with what we saw earlier when Laura Lynn scans showed clear differences between psychic work, which is actively reaching for information and mediumship, which is receiving it passively.

What we're looking at here is something a bit different, the mode of communication. Whether Emelia is connecting with a living non-speaker across the country or a medium is connecting with someone who's past, both seem to be engaging in communication without speech or without a physical body. And the question is whether that lights up in the brain the same way in, in Emelia's case, if you look at the theta activity in particular, you can see the beta increasing, but most of the increase in activity was in the right, and especially in this kind of back quadrant on the right hemisphere.

I thought that this was interesting, and again, potentially important because I've seen this pattern before, and so I wanted to just give you some examples of other places I've seen it.

Then Dr. Tarrant pulls up a slideshow featuring brain scans from some of the vetted mediums he's already tested.

So this is Laura and Jackson's data, and so look at hers.

Wow. Angelina Diana, who's another really well-known Forever Family Foundation medium. And then here's Joanne Gerbers, again, another well-known Forever Family Foundation Medium.

We'll put all these scans up on our YouTube page so you can see them. But in short, their scans look just like Emelia's.

So when Emelia was talking to another non-speaker who is alive, who's, who's here, uh, and physical earth but speaking to them telepathically Her brain pattern looked remarkably like many of the mediums that I've observed before they were doing mediumship readings Maybe there's some overlap between telepathy and medium ship In fact I've heard Laura say before that mediumship is telepathy The brain scans illustrate an unusual spike in wave pattern in the back right quadrant of the brain It's that same area that's been dubbed the gods spot Scientists don't really use that term but they do agree This region is linked to how we sense boundaries between ourselves and others the right varietal lobe So what it's doing, its normal job, it's creating an ego boundary. And so what we think might be happening is that when people are engaging in things like mediumship or telepathy, they've got some sort of way to disrupt the normal functioning of this area, which then allows them to extend their consciousness to connect with others.

Emelia's brain scans offered something tangible to her parents showing that her brain was doing something unique when engaged in telepathy. But having the scans didn't actually answer the harder question, which was, what do we do now?

How do we help an 11-year-old who's overwhelmed with telepathic messages every day? For her parents, the search shifted from proof to guidance. And that search eventually led them to someone whose work you've already heard this episode, Laura Lynn Jackson.

So, as we are kind of going through this journey, I've, you know, just trying to take in as much information as I can and learn from people and figure out how to guide this. And one of the books that I read was, um, The Light Between Us by Laura Lynn Jackson. And I actually, I listened to it on audio because I never have time to actually read. And so we were driving somewhere and I had one earbud in listening and Emelia was in the back. She was listening to her iPad, so she had music on really loud. And we got where we were going, and Emelia typed, um, "Cool lady," and I said, "Who?" And she said, "Book lady." So she had been listening the whole time, I mean, it was literally in my ear, so she was listening to, in my head.

Okay, so you had earbuds in your ears so she couldn't even hear you, right?

Yeah. And so on the way back she asked me to listen to it again 'cause she wanted to keep listening to it. And so Emelia said it would be cool to meet her. And she was really hoping that she could help her with the spirits.

And then did you get ahold of Laura? And how was that? Was she receptive?

When we first talked to her, we talked over email and she was really excited to hear from us and excited to meet Emelia. So she is gonna try to help Emelia manage this.

And just a few months ago, Laura Lynn traveled to Wisconsin to visit Emelia and see if she could help her manage the influx of energy around her.

When I first knew I was meeting with Emelia, I thought I was gonna go in there and I was going to come help organize energy for her. I've been doing this for so long and it's such a comfortable thing for me to do.

But I did not anticipate what was gonna happen. Right before I met her, I started getting what I call spinny energy in me, which is like used to happen to me decades ago before I would do like a really big gallery reading where I'd get all like these people on the other side coming at me at once and I couldn't manage the energy and I would like, I'd have to shake my hands and like shake 'em outta my hands.

Hi. Hi Emelia. I'm so excited to be with you. I've been looking forward to meeting you. What beautiful light you have.

Come on over, buddy.

Laura Lynn, Emelia and Mara sit on the big couch in Mara's cozy den I'm excited She needs help with something Yes So she there's another non-speaker Mm-hmm She has been trying to help and Mara means that a non-speaker is telepathically hanging around in Emelia's space talking to her actually nonstop The backstory is that this girl is lonely hasn't yet learned to spell and wants help But for an 11-year-old without the agency to help her she's feeling overwhelmed and saddled with a burden of guilt that she rightfully just can't manage She is constantly here Yeah With her and to the point that it's it's all the time and she can't get her to go away She has no solitude Laura sat with Emelia for a little under two hours and was so patient and loving and at times you could tell Emelia felt really dysregulated and was trying so hard to engage There was a lot of ups and downs but also a lot being exchanged Much of it through spelling and whispers and some of it seemingly nonverbal So I was excited to get recaps from everyone later The first recap happened in the car When Laura and I were on the way to a restaurant to grab a table for dinner and Emelia and Moura were about 10 minutes behind us I thought I was gonna come there not necessarily as a teacher but as a helper right And I thought I was there to kind of help organize what was going on on her screen But when I sat down next to her And then I touched her on the arm Something totally crazy happened She brought me into her screen and it was a screen I had never experienced before because my screen is on the left hand side and the right hand side This screen wasn't on either of those places It was above my head It was like if we were looking at waiting for an elevator and there was like a little half moon at on top of it And I had never experienced that space on my screen before And what I also was understanding was I would see on like the top left hand part like energy of People who were here in the here and now still alive talking to Emelia And on the right hand side I would see people who had crossed talking at the same time And all of this was happening at once It was like if you walked into let's say a barn and there were bats perched in the ceiling but you didn't know about them and then you entered and all of a sudden they all fluttered at you That was what I was experiencing and Emelia was handling it and I was like Oh my God Like what is going on And I saw all these energies demanding her attention demanding her attention and specifically one of her friends who's still here on earth just like glomming on her glomming on her like not letting go And so I I telepathically spoke to that friend which shocked me because she could hear me and talk back which I've never communicated telepathically with a a live human right All my conversations are with people who are no longer in a physical body That seems to be a a prerequisite to communicate with me Thought wise but I kept talking to this girl and saying and she was just saying like no no no I was saying but your grandfather who crossed is right over there Why don't you go you know work with him he'll help you No because he's not on earth anymore He's there and that can't help me And the the more I tried to help the more I realized I was so in over my head and realizing I had no control of the situation So I did something that You know I probably haven't done since I've been a little girl I called on my grandfather who's on the other side with such a voice of love and goodness and joy and I said Papa can you please come help Emelia with this friend this girl who won't leave her alone who's here on Earth but like in her energy space because she's not listening to me But I know you can help Will you do that And that's how I left it because I felt in over my head and I also felt that I had been called into bear witness to what Emelia experiences and she is a force of light She just stays in it and she handles it And it was just everything all at once When we had all arrived at the restaurant we sat down in a quaint cozy booth overlooking a lake and Emelia was eager to spell and she spelled to her mom that Molly has gone to the cool grandfather who's helping and and more I didn't know what that meant to me at all and I was like Emelia Whose grandfather is that Is that Molly's grandfather and she spelled out that it was my grandfather and nobody knew I had called him my grandfather to help And that was the one person who finally helped There was no way they could have heard Laura Lynn's confession about asking her own departed grandfather for help I even reviewed all the mike's from all of our audio input when I got home, this was never spoken of at the house. And yet here was Emelia in the restaurant saying Laura Lynn's grandfather was trying to help her.

And about a week later, more and Emelia were actually coming to Southern California for a spelling conference. I met them at the beach and we had a chance to connect about how things were going for Emelia post the visit with Laura Lynn.

I wanted to know if it was helpful. Okay. Hold on, hold on. Lemme get out my phone mic. Okay, so how have things been going? Is Emelia doing better?

Laura really empowered Emelia, not just, not only to like embrace her gifts and love her gifts, but how to be in control of them. She helped her understand that she didn't have to give messages to everyone, and that's important because she did feel compelled to help everyone that came to her.

And a good example of this is we, we jumped on a plane right after we met her and we were, you know, sitting on the plane and Emelia said, "I need to give the girl in front of me a message," and I said, "Do you want to?" And she said, "No." And I said, "Well, you, you don't have to,  just because somebody wants to give you a message doesn't mean you have to."

And that was something that Laura explained to her is that you need to care for yourself as well. Another thing that Emelia said was that Laura helped her manage the influx of people that were coming to her at night, I think, when she's sleeping. And so that was really, really helpful.

After a five year journey of surprises and doubt and hope and confusion and questions, Emelia finally received some real constructive help. For Maura and Mike who do not have a woowoo bone in their bodies and have slowly, reluctantly come to accept their daughter's abilities as real, there's finally some peace.

The brain scans gave grounding, Laura Lynn gave tools, and Emelia has learned to set boundaries. And yet the hardest part may still be ahead because mediumship carries a double weight: a history of fraud, and a culture of fear. Yes, there were con artists and rigged seances that exploited grief and tainted the field.

But there's another story that we rarely name religious hypocrisy because when a sanctioned holy man hears the dead, it's considered sacred. But when a common woman does, it's often considered witchcraft. The same experience is canonized in one mouth and condemned in another. Is this truly about danger? Or is it about control?

She really has no skin in the game. She's not like charging money and she's just offering up this information that she just feels compelled to share.

Emelia is inconvenient evidence. An 11-year-old non-speaker spelling each word with effort and intention, offering specific validated messages from the other side that bring relief.

There's no fee, no fame, and no agenda but love. She wants sleep more than the spotlight, and yet the messages land and they bring peace and hope, and even faith.

I mean, in a world that taught us to fear each other and doubt divine perception, the cruelest trick may be this, we've been taught to fear our own power.

What I've learned sitting with Laura Lynn, observing her work, reading her books, and bearing witness to the healing she's caused, is that she tends to always leave people with this message.

I think we all have these abilities, and I don't think you need a medium to connect with your loved ones on the other side, you can do it.

Like telepathy this capacity is human. And maybe the real question that we should be asking isn't, "Is this allowed? But "What heals?"

So many times I've had people on the other side who crossed, they've shared, you know, your life is a gift. And I think we need to be reminded of that. You need to honor your light. You need to honor your role here because it's so much greater than you can even imagine.

And so often our lives are remembered by what we create. Creation seems to be the core of this entire place we call Earth. Every building, every tool, every tradition, everything was created from a thought. So if we're trying to understand consciousness and whether it's manufactured in the brain or received like an antenna, maybe the best place to look is in the very act of creation itself. Because whether you call it inspiration or genius or big magic or the hand of the divine, the act of making something from nothing may be the clearest evidence The consciousness is not just a byproduct of biology But a force that finds us and then binds us to something bigger and wiser and possibly with a consciousness and will of its own Join us next week when we explore creativity itself where ideas come from and do they seek us out If you wanna go deeper ask me anything or get ad free episodes subscribe at the telepathy tapes dot super cast.com or tap the super cast link in the show notes Thank you to my amazing collaborators Original music by Rachel Cantu Logo and cover art by Ben Korra design audio mix and finishing by Michael Rubino contributing producer Lori Rubin and our incredible hardworking podcast staff Jill Paches Katherine Ellis and Selena Kennedy And I'm Ky Dickens, creator and host.

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