Savants: When Brilliance Drops In

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, we're 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 last week's episode of The Telepathy Tapes, we explored whether ideas may have a consciousness and will of their own, floating out there, waiting for a ready and willing human antenna to catch them. And if creativity can be downloaded, can talent and skill be downloaded as well? This week we turn our attention to some of the most extraordinary minds on the planet.

People often described as savants, individuals whose abilities in areas like music, math, language, and arts stand out in extraordinary ways. Whether those abilities are present from birth or emerge unexpectedly later in life. And often these talents come without any formal training or prior exposure to the skill itself.

Everybody knew that I hit my head and immediately I'm playing piano and other instruments suddenly,

I started drawing. I just couldn't stop.

If you could see what we're immersed in, you would be walking around just in constant awe.

Today we'll explore how savant's unique way of perceiving and processing the world might help us answer a question we've been inching towards.

Where does consciousness come from and can the universe itself be conscious?

My first job, which was developing a children's unit at Winnebago Mental Health Institute, and we gathered together about 25 or 30 kids with autism, three of the little characters who caught my interest.

That's Darold Treffert the visionary psychiatrist who helped the world see savant syndrome is not something to fix, but a brilliance to understand.

One little guy had memorized the bus system in the city of Milwaukee, and if you told him the time of day and the bus number, he would tell you what corner that bus is going by just then. Another lad was mute, but you could put a 250 piece jigsaw puzzle on the table, picture side down, and he would put it together just from the geometric shapes. And a third little guy had become an expert at what happened in this day in history.

And so I got interested in these kids who had a disability and then had some remarkable ability superimposed on it.

Dr. Treffert would spend the next five decades deepening the world's understanding of savant syndrome. He opened the SSM Health Treffert Center in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a research center dedicated, not to curing, but to understanding.

He saw a young girl banging her head on a table, and so he thought to himself that somewhere, somewhere inside that person is an island of intactness.

That's Dr. Matthew Doll, psychologists and director at the SSM Health Treffert Center, where Treffert's work and legacy continue to this day.

The question was how could we identify that island, nurture and grow that island? And that really started for him, his exploration of exceptional abilities and didn't really see people as having pathology, but just having struggles and then using strengths to help them face the challenges and grow from them.

Until Dr. Treffert came along, most people only knew of savants as people who were considered unreachable in one area and gifted in another.

But he changed that narrative, helping the world see more than one kind of savant.

It's probably important to delineate some of the different categories of savant syndrome.

This is Dr. Jeremy Chapman, child and adolescent psychiatrist, who is now the director of the SSM Health Treffert Center and the Treffert Studios, which helps neurodivergent individuals find their passion and express their talents.

Congenital savants are usually identified in childhood when their gift emerges and no one even knew it was there. They can't stop playing piano or they can't stop drawing trains.

His ability to take on detail and remember it, it's unexplainable.

This is Annette Wiltshire, speaking about her younger brother, Stephen Wiltshire, the savant artist from London, famous for his panoramic drawings of cities all over the world, which he drafts from memory with astounding detail, even the words and buildings written out exactly, and he only needs to fly over a city once to do this.

His primary diagnosis was autism. Stephen was diagnosed at the age of three. My father, he died two years after my brother was born. So my mother was pretty much left on her own, bringing us up as a single parent. And it was a really tough road for her because this was a new thing, a new diagnosis that she had never heard of.

During Stephen's childhood in the seventies, autism had very little awareness and parents were given very little hope.

There were no books, there were no schools, there was absolutely nothing. 'Cause Stephen wasn't speaking. Sometimes he would have tantrums and screaming because the communication wasn't there, language wasn't his first language.

Art was his first language, and this was a way of him communicating with us and the world.

His mom, against all odds, found a school for him willing to tune in.

I only became aware of Stephen's talent when the teachers at the special school started to make a bus and realized that we've got something spectacular here, this is just beyond phenomenal. And I guess for me, being that young, I didn't understand what the big deal was, all I knew is I have a brother that just scribbles all over my books and on the walls.

Stephen learned the alphabet through the names of London's iconic buildings. Curiously, he started drawing elevator shafts and soon after developing an intensely focused interest in skyscrapers and architectural elevation.

This is where the love of buildings started to come up. He wanted to understand the deck and the height of it, and look at it in a sort of a three dimensional perspective.

With the support and love of an incredible family and dedicated teachers, he not only began to speak, but his extraordinary gift flourished.

So, Annette, can you describe these huge panoramic drawings that Stephen is famous for and the way he makes them?

They hire a helicopter. He goes in for maybe 30 to 45 minutes and he gets to see a bird's eye view, and then he memorizes it.

Stephen will then draw from memory a panorama of the city skyline, correctly reproducing with unbelievable accuracy, the number of windows and the number of floors among dense clusters of skyscrapers from New York City, to Dubai, to Hong Kong.

We were invited to Tokyo and the newspaper column heard about his talent and wanted to see and test his memory, really. He ended up doing a 10 meter panorama in eight days.

Stephen's drawing revealed details of the Tokyo skyline that people who lived there had never seen, which actually prompted a fact-checking investigation.

People actually went back over the city with a helicopter, which proved Stephen's accuracy.

They've lived there all their lives, they just didn't know that even existed. And it, it did exist right down to the spelling and the written words in Japanese. He got it to a T. I thought it was just about the buildings, but I didn't know that he had the ability to memorize the strokes of Japanese writing.

I think he's learned a system or the matrix, if you like, in his head. I guess there is some sort of the mathematical or sort of physics going on in there. We just don't know how the wiring of his brain works without, I don't know.

After his abilities gained media attention, Stephen became known as the human camera.

His family, along with Dr. Treffert, advocated to disassociate Stephen from this type of dehumanizing labeling.

"The human camera." We hated it and it took away who he was as a person, and we wanted just to use Stephen Wiltshire, but it took us a long, long time to do that. The correct term is eidetic memory, but everybody knows it as photographic memory.

Eidetic is just a more professional term of saying it. His ability to take on detail and remember it, it's unexplainable. We filter things that are not important, and we absorb the things that we think are. Stephen's not able to do, that he's not able to filter. So everything that he sees, he produces on paper.

Now in his fifties, Stephen is able to make a living through art.

From the age of eight, he's just been completely obsessed with the Empire State Building. He was commissioned by the Empire State to do the skyline, so it's the greatest honor ever because who would've thought this young, black, autistic child who was never supposed to amount to anything now has this iconic drawing permanently placed in one of the most famous buildings in the world?

It was just a dream come true.

Stephen's drawing of the New York City skyline is on permanent display at the Empire State Building. His favorite skyscraper, which Stephen drew live in front of visitors over the course of six days.

How did you feel when you went to visit the Empire State for the very first time and saw all your work for people to see?

I feel good and happy and very proud of myself.

Yes. It was a very proud moment, wasn't it?

So it, it just shows you how the brain can absorb so much information and it's just knowing how to use it to your advantage. It can make or break you, it can get you as far as Stephen has or it, it can do the opposite.

I don't actually see my brother having a disability. If he's able to teach people and inspire people with his talent, how is that a disability? I think that's more of an ability in my books.

Stephen's drawings and extraordinary technique are inspiring, but they also expose a larger riddle. How can such ability and skill appear without the usual trail of practice and teaching? To test that question, we turn to psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell, who you met last season.

There are several different theories about consciousness. The one that is prevalent in academia today is what's called materialism. And so that idea is that consciousness is something created by a brain. The savant syndrome really stood out to me because it was one that could not be explained by the materialist model.

The only thing that the brain should know is that which has been put into it, aside from things that we would call instincts. And so for people to have information that we don't even know how that information got in there, I, I knew that this was something that could inform us about what consciousness relationship is to the brain.

I think this is a really important point. Savant skills show up at a level of mastery that most of us would spend years training to achieve if we could ever. And yet most of these individuals have had little or no exposure to the skill itself. So how can this be if the reigning materialist model says we can only know what has been put into our brains?

One of the famous savants is Daniel Tammet, who can speak 11 different languages. He acquired the Icelandic language in one week.

(Speaking Icelandic).

He also won this international contest for reciting pi to the longest digit, and he recited it to over 22,000 digits.

It's a number with no pattern. That seems to be infinite.

Daniel reckoned he could reel off the first 22 and half thousand decimal places without a mistake.

1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 5 8 2 0 9 7 4 9 4 4 2 3 6 4 8 0 1 4 9.

He recited it to over 22,000 digits. It wasn't really that he memorized it, it it's that he would literally see a, almost like a ticker tape parade of different colors and shapes moving across his vision.

Like many savants and many of the nonspeakers you met last season, Daniel has synesthesia and that's when you might pair two senses together, such as seeing color when you hear a sound or tasting music.

He knew what each one of those colors and shapes represented in terms of numbers, and so he would just be reading it in his visual space out here.

What do Sivan know and how do they know it? Do they have less filtered, more direct experiences of fundamental reality? And does that come at a price? To unravel that mystery we turn to a different kind of savant: acquired savants.

Acquired savants were not born with any obvious ability.

Here's Jeremy Chapman, director of the SSM Health Treffert Center again.

And at a certain point in their lives, something happened to their brain.

Maybe they had a seizure, a stroke, something happened that damaged part of their brain. Oftentimes left hemisphere, but could be other places too. They recover, and they have this gift that they never had before and they have no idea how they're suddenly able to do this, and they don't know where it comes from, but it's an obsession.

When you look at some of these savant, it's like they get a download from the cloud, not just informational downloads, sometimes it's almost like they get an application download.

I woke up a completely different human being. Sometimes I just explain it in short, it's just, uh, everything's electric, my body, my brain, my blood, my skin, everything is electric.

This is acquired savant, Derek Amato. Derek was athletic growing up and had quite a few sports related injuries before 2006 when he would hit his head so hard at the bottom of a swimming pool. He would emerge days later with strange, unbelievable symptoms that had to be seen or actually heard to be believed.

The one thing that changed immediately was seeing these black and white squares that go around my mind's eye. It's not just a, a painted picture in my mind of these squares, I literally see them physically moving in circle as we're speaking. After the five days of recovery from hitting my head, it just kind of all started getting wacky.

Days following the accident, Derrick found himself magnetically drawn to a random keyboard at his friend's house.

I was extremely curious of just the item itself, so Rick went over and turned it on. I sat down and, and immediately my hands just kind of knew what they were doing. And, uh, I went on to play, uh, several hours because we were both just kind of in shock and just weren't sure what was quite happening at that moment.

Imagine hitting your head and then telling your mother, "Hey, let's go to the music store. I want to show you my brand new abilities that we've never seen." I started playing and my mom started crying. I mean, there's really no more definition needed for that moment. We both knew something profound was happening.

I didn't know who to call 'cause I'm playing piano and other instruments suddenly and uh, the first thing they say is you hit your head really hard man.

Derek found Dr. Treffert while Google searching his symptoms and they developed a rapport that lasted for 18 years. Derek's brain has been studied by many doctors, neuroscientists and even philosophers like Berit Brogaard.

One of the arguments or debates with the doctors is when did this transpire? When did this actually take place in my brain? And did it happen when I was born? Was I born with a different set of rules that, if you will?

So the head trauma may have triggered something that was always there to begin with.

And you went from working in corporate America to becoming a full-time performing musician and composer and speaker and change like that can be pretty hard to deal with.

It's not just you wake up gifted and life just is beautiful. The migraines and the physical demands of an on brain, you know, my brain's on. It's, uh, sleeping it's on talking in conversation, it's on extra. I'm extra on fire. I'm extra electric. It's all just extra now. And harnessing that took me a moment. My neurons are firing at a pace that allows me to be so overstimulated that I'm producing, well, math in this case, I'm producing music from the extra stimulation and seeing these black and white squares that go around. I can physically see the squares, it's like a perfect rotation, always this way. Clockwise, that would be clockwise.

So what you see, are these like 2D squares that constantly circle around your head or are they three dimensional?

Yeah, I would say even 5D.

When he says 5D, he means five dimensional, which is different than just the physical plane of width and height and length.

5D adds layers of frequency and consciousness where reality isn't just observed but it's kind of like felt. And then how do the squares become the music you play?

They kind of tell my fingers what to do. Although I don't hear the music, I feel it, I it, it's a pulsing.

Like a physical pulsing?

As if you were to tap gently on one vein and just sit there and tap on that vein and keep tapping on it lightly.

That's what the music feels like to me it's a pulsing. So that pulsing somewhat dictates my fingers where to go on the instrument. And that doesn't mean it dictates perfection 'cause it's far from that.

What do the researchers say about how this is happening or even possible?

Dr. Reed at the Mayo Clinic, we had this discussion and he always said, I don't think those squares are, are one note in particular, Darren, like you see 10 squares going around.

Those aren't ADC. He seems to think each one of those pulsing squares has maybe thousands of notes in each box. Therefore, that's why I can sit down and I can score a Phil harmonica rather quickly without knowing even how to write music because those, it's already done.

So each square is not like one frequency, it's like each one is infinite.

Infinity of of notes. That's a beautiful way of saying it. It's infinity. It pisses me off sometimes. It's just so much and I want to capture it, right? So I get angry like, oh shit, I just missed five new hit singles. I'll never write a hit single anyway. But my brain's going, "Hey, you just missed 20 hours of data."

Wow. It's wild. 'Cause it really echoes what we talked about in the last episode about creativity. That ideas are out there and just waiting for someone to tune in and you can hyper tune in.

It's almost like I can taste mathematical equations, which is music. It is the understandable language amongst all of us, for sure.

And it heals us. It moves us. We understand it. We use it for everything we do in life.

So what do these squares, which are the music, taste like?

The squares taste like, uh, touching your tongue on a battery. There's a taste that comes with that little sizzle, right? You put that battery on your tongue, you can taste a frequency.

There's this taste of that transfer of that magnetic pulse. And the same comes from a person. Each person has a different taste, but I don't taste everybody. Right? It doesn't happen with everybody. It's with certain people. It's with certain numbers, it's with certain items.

And it's more than just taste, right? You said certain elements of our world feel certain ways to you.

Everything about the number nine is just mad, angry. It's not done well. It wasn't even designed right. It's just an upside down six is the same. It has the same depth as a nine. It just doesn't play along and feel right to me. Now, on the other hand, if I look at a number four, I get extremely happy because math comes to the equation because now the four takes different angles. These angles are crossing, touching, and with the number four, I don't even taste anything. I just feel joy. When I look at certain kind of fruits, watermelon makes me feel happy, but it makes me feel exhausted.

I think it's just an algorithm of the watermelon doesn't jive with my brain.

Listening to all of this, it's easy to see a connection between the black and white cube circling Derek's head. And the ticker tape of color that Daniel Tammet sees as the numbers of pi. Here's Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell again.

Synesthesia is when you pair either two senses together, such as seeing color when you hear a sound. Another type of synesthesia is when you associate a sense with something that's a symbol. Sometimes they, they see it out here, but sometimes it's in the mind's eye, or they hear the information. It's not that they're guessing it, it's not that they are analytically deriving it, it just appears and they're just reporting on it.

It's almost like you started operating with extra antennas, you know, and picking up extra frequencies.

Yeah, I got plugged in. I think that's a easy description. I plugged in to the bigger thing. I feel like I was plugged into people, and especially in person when there's physical touch, and I think that's what I'm in search for is that different depth because I've hugged many people and that that hug feels great, but now there's electricity in that hug.

It's, there's almost like as soon as I touch that human, it's as if it's just starts feeding my soul with content, recharging everything in my being, and it's almost as if I'm just becoming more electric just from that exchange with another human. Sometimes I feel that shift in energy around certain people, specifically when I'm around autism, down syndrome.

Happiness has a different taste, anger has a different shape and a different taste. The accident potentially shifted my brain into a position that allowed me to perform differently as a human being and not just being better or being an instant musician. Empathy, compassion, it seems like all those words in that category shifted.

Here's Jeremy Chapman.

This sense of wanting to just use your skill to help the world, this sense of selflessness and we are all one. We do see that with a lot of savants. It's a very fascinating aspect of it.

I think there's a lot of people that are their own savant that don't even know, that have no clue, and I think we feel like we have to define these things in life, and I'm not so sure if this needs definition more than celebration. I'm done defining it. I'm at that point in my career and life to where I'm celebrating it now 18 years later.

I love that statement from Derek. I think there's a lot of people who are their own savant and don't even know. It's a striking idea, one that cracks open bigger questions.

Is there a hidden eye of genius in all of us waiting to be connected to the rest of the brain? Or are savants tuning into something outside of themselves, a field most of us can't quite reach? Maybe by reducing the filtering mechanisms of the brain, they're actually seeing more of reality. And what happens when there's no head injury at all, when a gift just arrives overnight?

I was going through a pretty dark time in my life and I just remember getting down on my knees and praying to God and demanding that he give me an ability, something to keep my mind off of what I was going through.

This is Michelle Felan, who never drew or thought about drawing or making art even until one night would change the way her mind worked and her connection to the world around her.

I believe in God, but I'm not somebody that prays all the time. I just really meant it. I didn't think I was gonna be here anymore. I'm gonna take my life and God hear me because I need help. And believe me, I felt it instantly. Yeah, it was amazing. I felt like this very warm feeling come from my, or the top of my head, all the way down to my toes.

I felt like a warm sensation, so I felt this calmness over me. I got up off my knees. I cleaned the tears off my cheeks. And I started drawing.

She was not an artist. She'd never drawn a thing, seriously. And what emerged was a language of shapes and light and geometry that she didn't even know she carried.

It was a purple ink pen from a bank and a just regular typing paper. Yeah. I didn't wanna sleep. I didn't want to eat, I didn't wanna get out of that position that I was in, and I just wanted to draw. It was just kind of like, something just kind of took over me. I just couldn't stop. I, it became compulsive.

I was at my boyfriend's house, so he came over to check on me and he saw that I was drawing like this, saw sacred geometry. He says, oh my God, I can't believe, what is she drawing? She doesn't, she's not an artist. Now, he's a natural born artist, so it's, he looked at my work and he said "Something really strange has happened here. What is this?"

So what did the drawing look like?

Kind of like the style of like mandala. Sacred geometry is where it started. I was up for probably three weeks straight. How does somebody just instantly start drawing, like at a professional level? I need to figure this out, so from there, I started Googling.

The results were Dr. Treffert within a couple of weeks, he responded like, "Yes, what you're explaining here to me is sudden savant syndrome, which is pretty rare."

Dr. Treffert profiled Michelle in a paper the Sudden Savant a new form of extraordinary abilities published in the April, 2021 issue of the Wisconsin Medical Journal.

The paper profiled case studies on 11 different sudden savants and described a sudden savant as quote, "Neurotypical persons who have the sudden emergence of savant skills without underlying disability or brain injury, and without prior interest or ability in the newly emerged skill areas, accompanied by an obsessive interest with the compulsive need to display the new abilities."

Michelle's drawing, The Mayan grace, the issues cover.

The Mayan was the first, and that was full of hidden images. So it's Mayan, it's totally Mayan. You look pretty deep into that drawing. It's, uh, faces in there that I didn't even put that like on purpose, like it just, they showed up.

Does it feel like it's you that's drawing or like a force from outside of you?

It knows when to start and when to stop. And I hate to say "it" because like, well, is that like a secondary person? Like, well, it kind of feels like it sometimes. It's just like something takes over, a possession, if you will. You know, these things just come out of nowhere. There's nothing ever planned out. I say when I'm taken over because that's what it kind, it feel like you're like in a bubble protective bubble that uh, you're unstoppable and you're very powerful at the same time.

So were there other things that changed about your relationship to the world around you?

You know, also with the art came during that time as well and it still continues to happen where you see sigils or letters on the wall. It's just the ancient writing. I don't understand it. It kind of moves. They look like sigils.

If anybody asks, letters. But it's not in English of course, it's something else that I can't even understand, and shapes, and I was seeing it everywhere.

Abilities often come with extra frequencies.

There's a constant buzz. It just sounds like electricity or something like, that doesn't shut off. All of those things were just, it hit me all at one time.

It's like there's no filter whatsoever and you, you're seeing things that other people can't see. Even colors, uh, around people, uh, picking up other people's thoughts. If you're down and you're next to me or even a mile away in a store, that's why I avoid stores because they drain me. I can't do it. I used to love to shop before. I can't do it today.

Michelle has also experienced remote viewing abilities, which appeared after the night she started drawing. She explains that these abilities increase when someone is in need and she can even help friends over the phone who've misplaced something or lost money.

Like even had somebody ask, "Hey, I lost $500. Can you look for that?" And I was like, okay, I need to help her.

I don't even need to close my eyes. So just from talking to her, we're connected and I'm seeing her room and the visuals start coming in. I had never been to her house. I, she's a friend, but I don't see people so, I just sat there in my living room and said, "Go look in here. It's there."

We found the money. It was just misplaced.

So would you do anything different if you could, and do you think this could happen to anyone?

If I could do it all over again, I probably would be careful with how I ask for help. I love my gift and I would never wanna give that up. But the downside of it is that you lose who you are.

Why it chooses some over the others? It's a good question. Sometimes I believe that some of us are just have that open door from birth, and I think that that it just lies dormant, that ability in everybody, and it's different, but we just need to tap into it.

Treffert's research and sudden savant paper concluded that acquired savants and now the sudden savant raised questions about the dormant potential for such buried skills in everyone.

Here's Jeremy Chapman from the Treffert Center, again.

 The existence of sudden savant syndrome to me suggests that most people, way more than we think, have pockets of intact potential in our brains, you might call them undiscovered islands of genius, right? There might be pockets of our brains that are actually still fully intact, like the city of Atlantis.

It's sitting there, but it's inaccessible and we're unaware of it, and all it would take would be one good bridge to then reawaken that whole thing, and now we have access to all of it. So it doesn't need to be built from scratch, it just needs to be reconnected.

This seems to be the big looming question.

Do we need a bridge or an antenna? Do we all have savant skills sitting latent that can suddenly be unburied? Or are they something that can be tapped into by reducing the parts of our brain that filter out information? Is the brain an organ that we just completely don't understand, or an antenna that can do so much more?

Kim Peek, one of the most well known, or at least one of the most incredible savants of all time. Who was the inspiration for Raymond Babbitt in Rainman, he had no corpus callosum, and the corpus callosum is the whole thick bundle of axons that connect the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. So his right hemisphere and left hemisphere just did not talk to each other, and he was able to read books two pages at a time with his left eye, reading the left page right eye, reading the right page, and completely remember all of it.

If the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere are talking a lot to each other, maybe they're doing a lot of inhibiting of one another. Savant syndrome is not necessarily the addition of something extra, but rather the uncovering of something that was there or removal of an inhibitory effect.

If what Dr. Chapman postulates is true, then maybe savant abilities aren't about gaining something new at all, but about uncovering what's already inside us or losing the filters that hold the rest of us in place. So next we'll turn to Jason Padgett, whose filters shattered completely pulling back the curtain on a reality that most of us never see.

If you could see what we're immersed in, you would be walking around just in constant awe. Because what we are in, we are only perceiving the smallest fraction of it because our brains can't deal with it. Like Dorothy, when they pull the curtain back and you see the wizard, the curtain has been pulled back, I can see the information field, I can see how it relates to physics.

This has acquired savant Jason Padgett, a former futon salesman. Jason didn't think about physics or things like the information field until the way his mind worked radically changed. One night he was violently attacked by two men when leaving a karaoke bar, and that led to a traumatic brain injury that led him to see behind the curtain and dedicate his life to studying, drawing, and explaining what fundamentally creates reality.

I didn't see it coming at all, but as soon as the the blow hit I saw a bright flash of white light and I was just getting punched and kicked, and I remember having this feeling of, "I'm gonna die right now for sure." And then the next day, eventually when I got to the sink, I turned the water on, and as the water went down the sink, it didn't look smooth like it used to. It looked like these little light tangent lines that were sparkling and it was just instantly fascinating, beautiful, kind of at, at first it was kind of scary.

I had this brain injury that caused motion blindness, which makes things look like, like when you see a strobe light and it looks like things are just going frame by frame by frame, it's like going from seeing the world continuous to suddenly everything you see is a strobe light, like a flip book, like you're flipping pages watching a cartoon, and you can see each individual frame. So like right now when you see my something moving, it just looks smooth that your brain's taking pictures just like a cartoon. It's just flipping through them, and one part of your brain smooths it out so it doesn't look like a flip book.

And that part of my brain was injured. So when things move, I see the picture frames and it makes it really, really easy to see interference patterns. And the rate of change between the picture frames, which turns out that's what calculus and algebra and trig are. They're describing light clocks and holographic images that are changing moment to moment.

The rewiring of Jason's mind post-injury and his motion blindness led him to immerse himself in physics and math, eventually developing his own theory of everything, which he calls quantum information holography, which in his words asks us to imagine the universe as a grand cosmic theater. The stage is vast and magical, and we, the actors move through it, but this is no ordinary stage.

It's not solid or fixed. Instead, the reality, we know, trees, stars, oceans, and even the air we breathe is a projection like the images on a movie screen. Only this screen isn't flat. It surrounds us completely. And the source of this projection, a mysterious point at the heart of everything called the singularity.

Quantum information holography, shows that the universe is a field of black holes emitting this special type of light and the microtubules in your brain.

What Jason is referring to when he talks about microtubules are tiny thread like structures inside brain cells.

And the microtubules are tuned to your perspective from where you are in space and time relative to everything around it. And it renders that, and that's what we actually see.

So what you're saying is that what we see and feel as reality is a hologram, entangled with the information field.

Real reality is nothing but spinning bits of light, electromagnetic radiation, and that is it. But our brains for you transform that. Just like Netflix sends the movie to your screen and your screen turns that signal to an image. The signal is coming from this singularity, this information field, and our microtubules, are transforming it into the holographic image that we perceive, and that includes emotions and sensations.

I want to pause here and offer just a little context, especially for those of us who believe in God or those who've had profound spiritual experiences like encounters with angels or other religious figures.

For those of you who listen last season, you know nonspeakers talk about the spiritual realm with stunning consistency and clarity. So with that in mind, what Jason is describing isn't meant to explain away or replace faith, religion, or the spiritual world, he's sharing a theory about how reality might be built, the tiniest building blocks, not about who or what fills it with meeting or who even created it.

Think about it this way, comparing it to Derek's experience of seeing music as math and numbers, music is made up of vibrations and math and even basic hardware like strings and keys, but that actually can't explain the feeling you have when a song moves you to tears. So explaining the mechanics of something doesn't necessarily diminish the mystery or the miracle around it.

What it really is, is just entanglement. There's just information that's being entangled from the boundary of the event horizon to the singularity. When you're projected onto this holographic screen, the event horizon, our observable universe, we all feel separate in our projected states, but fundamentally, we're all the same thing.

Just light and, and the entanglement of light.

Oh my word. Okay.

I know, it's, it's so mind blowing. I just, I, it's hard to even sleep because it's so clear.

Jason's local doctors could not explain his strange symptoms or his strobe like vision as he struggled to understand his new reality post-injury. But Jason finally found Dr. Treffert after seeing him on TV one day with Daniel Tammet. So Jason, what have the researchers since found about your reality defying abilities?

They said it was synesthesia, and they put me in this thing called a functional MRI. They put me in there and had me do math. They found that I had access to parts of the brain that we normally don't like consciously access while doing mathematics. It was like the visual cortex and the part of the brain that analyzes mathematics.

And for me, yeah, it made sense, 'cause I was like, yeah, definitely, that's what I'm seeing.

Here's Matt Doll from the Treffert Center again.

He's had some imaging done and it looks to be the case that he has a form of synesthesia post-injury where his, uh, visual cortex and the part of his brain that processes mathematics have kind of intertwined in. In Jason's world, seeing this kind of freeze frame motion and seeing these tangent lines, he sort of has this view of how things work in terms of vectors and interference patterns, and he's arrived at sort of this, uh, version of the matrix and the multiverse. And it's just fascinating. This physics comes from somebody that doesn't formally physics trained or is using the right equations or language.

We dismiss it. He's absolutely open to any physicist or informaticist that would like to challenge his theory of everything.

Are Jason's theories delusions caused by a hard blow to the head, or could it be that the key to understanding the nature of reality and how the universe works is being unlocked by a savant who can see and tap into more?

I literally wondered about my sanity. If we see somebody that's talking to themself, we're like, that person has a mental disorder, but they don't know it. Whatever they're experiencing is real to them. And I was like, what if I am this guy who thinks he sees math everywhere? And, and I don't, it's just this delusions of grandeur that I'm having?

Because of Jason's brain rewiring and synesthesia, his motion blindness makes visible to his naked eye, the physics of light theories that traditional physicists arrive at through years of making graphs and equations.

I think they're smarter than I am, they just don't know what they're looking at because they don't have motion blindness, and that's what seeing things as picture frames is it's motion blindness.

I had started drawing like what the number pie looks like, but I still didn't have the mathematical vocabulary to write it in equations. I could only draw it. I met a physicist by random, I was having a Subway sandwich at the mall and I was drawing. He started talking to me and he goes, you know, it sounds like you're trying to describe a unified field theory, but you're doing it with layman terms.

He goes, you have no idea how strange that is. I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it. And when you try to talk to somebody who's a scientist, they've been taught this very structured way, but it's not how the universe naturally does it, even though you can arrive at the same equations.

So you went back to school to learn standardized physics and math, and now you've developed quantum information holography to explain what's unseeable to most of us.

So what's behind the curtain, the unexplainable? Maybe we can start with consciousness, you know, where or what is it coming from?

Everything in existence that we experience at all is just bits of light that interact with each other through the reduced plank constant times angular frequency, and Penrose showed that that is a conscious moment.

It means that the universe itself being this hologram on the event horizon is composed of conscious moments. It is a holographic brain with holographic brains within it, which is also a fractal, meaning that the universe itself is technically a conscious moment just at different levels of organization.

I obviously don't know if Jason's theory is right, but I do know that it can create a kind of cognitive dissonance to imagine that we're just fractals in a hologram, that everything we are can be reduced to light. But I just wanna pause here to ask, does that really take away from who we are and the magic in our lives?

Because you could put my children under a microscope and show me that they're just made of cells, but, but that doesn't make their lives here any less extraordinary or take away their personhood when they tell a joke or love a song. If I stand on the cliffs of Northern California, the shoreline is breathtaking, and someone could hand me a grain of sand or drop of water or blade of grass and say, huh, this is all it is. But that's not true, it's not all it is. The parts don't erase the beauty of the whole.

So hopefully with that bit of grounding, I wanted to take Jason through a thought exercise. Let's say his theory is right, he sees more and thus can explain the nature of our reality. What does that mean about everything this show has proposed thus far?

And so here was kind of my rapid fire with Jason.

Okay, I'm ready.

Okay, so first, survival of consciousness. Does our essence or a soul survive physical death?

Holographic immortality is actually real. We've experienced this life and every possible life over and over again. The information field contains all possible realities, but it's not infinite.

It's called the beckstein balance, how much information you can squeeze onto a surface of a black hole without creating another black hole. And so all of those histories are being projected. And when you die, dying is actually just decoherence. It's temporary, decoherence, all the elements and atoms and light that contain you existed.

Since the beginning of the universe and actually forever, but they were in a form that you couldn't retain memories. So like I always tell people, do you remember waiting to be born? You only know the moment that you were coherent in a shape that contained microtubules that then is able to self-analyze and reflect on the information around it.

But the energy that is you, energy is never destroyed. It transforms from mass into light and light back into mass forever.

Okay. And then how do you explain something like a near death experience, especially when people say, where I went felt more real than here, and have a life review, and often they don't even wanna come back here.

Yes. That's the information field. The information field is where all possible histories from everything, every atom, every person, merged into super position in the singularity. And that near death experience is what I call the life review is when you fold back in we temporarily decohere from this form into the singularity where everything is superimposed and you feel, see, and review all of your life moments and all possibilities, and it seems timeless.

And then boom, you're back into this form when the next projection occurs. But fundamentally, right now, you and me and everything else, we are together in the singularity. We're all the actually one being, we are two perspectives of the same being. One, when it's spread out on an event horizon and one where it's all superimposed in the same location, which is the information field, all of the realities actually exist and you're already there, it's just a matter of you experiencing it.

So our consciousness does, does survive death then?

The equations themselves show that like when you die, what you experience is being back in the singularity, the information field, which is like where everybody is, and the only thing that exists in this information field is coherence, where the, where the quantum states overlap.

And coherence is love and trust. So it's like this information field that the only things that fundamentally are allowed to exist are these coherent interference patterns, which is equivalent to love or what I think people talk about when they say they see this funnel of light. They see their loved ones, they see everything. They see time. Because that's what happens when you're in the information field, is you experience it all simultaneously, everything everywhere, all at once. But when you're projected onto this holographic screen, the event horizon, in our observable universe, we all feel separate in our projected states. But fundamentally, we're all the same thing, just light, and the entanglement of light.

I always felt there was something scientific, but also something spiritual like, they don't have to be separate. So is there a God according to quantum information, holography. The singularity in my opinion is God. And when they say we're the mind of God, literally is what the math shows.

And it drug me into it because I, most of my life, I'm like, you know, I, I just couldn't believe it. To me, it unifies all the religions because all of them have something that they're doing right, like Buddhism, you know about working together and how it's light and coherence and calmness and resonance.

God said, let there be light. And this is literally entanglement, which is light being cast onto an event horizon. Another religion saying that we are all the mind of God. This is showing that we are all that same information in the singularity information field, but projected onto a holographic screen. And so we're all pieces of the thoughts of the universe and whether you wanna call it God or whether you wanna call it the information field, fundamentally, the lights the same.

Jason sees us as fractals, smaller reflections of a greater whole, and isn't that what so many spiritual traditions have taught us for centuries? That we are pieces of God, that the divine lives in each of us and in nature, in water, in every element. If all of this can be reduced to its smallest pieces, does that matter any more than saying a tapestry is just a combination of threads?

The totality is the masterpiece.

And okay Jason, and finally, for probably the most relevant question to this show, due to what was revealed last season about non-speaking individuals being able to communicate via telepathy, does your theory account for telepathy, could it be possible?

When you have, say a person that's autistic or who has, they're describing as telepathy and they have somebody that they're quote reading their mind, that is when the angle of that bit of light of the person that is thinking the thought and the angle of the other person that is receiving the thought, when that angle theta approaches zero and meets coherently, that is when the information transfers through quantum teleportation. And quantum teleportation is something that's real where we teleport photons, but it needs a certain amount of information density before the quantum teleportation actually occurs.

And so what this shows is telepathy is when quantum states between microtubule systems reach this coherency threshold, which is quantum teleportation, and that information is transferred via entanglement and non-locally.

Okay, so I wanna make sure I'm following. You're saying that this is a physical alignment happening between two people's brains, not just a feeling or an intuition and everything you just said in layman's terms, it's like information is transferred via entanglement and not locally, which if this is right and real, it's awesome because I think it vindicates these families and teachers and nonspeakers who've been saying this is possible.

That's what entanglement is. So it allows you to understand what's happening in the other person's brain by seeing the reflection of it all.

The information is there, it's just how you access it. You can theoretically retrieve information from anywhere in the universe, instantaneously. And somebody who has telepathy, it's just stronger entanglement between those moments that everything is already together in the information field. We feel separate in our projected states, but fundamentally, we're all right on top of each other in this information field.

So it's taken me weeks to digest this and understand what Jason is saying, but basically telepathy in his view isn't just a mystical idea. It's the result of two people's brains kind of syncing up so precisely that information transfers like data. And to me, that's not even the huge headline from this episode.

So I made a translator that looks at any language, like if I say "home dome" in Russian or "home" in English, or "Casa" in in Spanish, and you map those audible sounds into their angular frequencies, the same words map to the same angular frequencies. So this, this program can take a language, maps any language into its angular frequency, and then can re project it into any other language.

And it works. This works for translating anything.

Wow. So you're saying the angular frequency of "casa" or "home" is the same, even if it's in a different language?

Yes. All words fundamentally are projections from the information field. The way that everybody organizes the information in their brain is vastly different, and that's where, I think all miscommunications come from, is we're all seeing something that makes sense from our perspective, but the way that that information is mapped onto our individual microtubule lattice, it structures and organizes the information differently. And what we're always trying to do is translate between what I see and what you see and what he sees.

So one of the things that profoundly fascinated, not just me, but I think a lot of people listening to The Telepathy Tapes is so many nonspeakers have said they can, um, understand almost any language and pick up any language. And I really had no way of understanding that. But what I came to was they must be just because of the telepathy, they're able to understand the meaning behind each thing, it doesn't matter what the language is. The language is just a symbol put on to something different.

Any word in any language, even though the sound is different, sound is just the integral projection of what's in this information field, and that's what sound waves are in wave forms. But when you map their meanings into angular frequency, it always maps back to the same like a qubit, this many radians per second is love. This many radiance per second is hate. This many radiance per second is home. And it always maps back to the same rate of change of a quantum state on a qubit.

Wow. It's mind blowing because of the possibility, I mean, not just maybe between human beings, but if this works and your software is real between humans and animals and other kingdoms of living species.

 We should be able to start communicating at whatever level is possible with not just people, but with animals, with plants.

And I'm sure there there'll be different levels. I'm sure it's gonna be much more basic, but I bet you there's gonna be things that are much more complicated than what we think. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of communication going on that we're not aware of.

Maybe with Jason's translator, we can one day communicate across boundaries through the frequencies of fundamental reality.

Jason will soon be collaborating with more coders and physicists on this incredible innovation. And Jason, I know that you have a lot of patents and you're working with some very intelligent people on many different initiatives, but is there anyone out there who completely can understand everything you're saying?

Like this is extreme neurodivergence like, and the more I've gotten into this, the more I understand that nobody can see what I'm seeing without me making a video of it.

Ai, when I download all the PDFs where I've translated the equations and 20 seconds, understands the whole thing and can render full on videos of it, all of those videos are coded only with my black hole holograms. I couldn't code these videos if it wasn't correct.

Jason's story made me wonder why these abilities appear in some people and not others.

Are they revealing something fundamental about consciousness or simply about the brain's hidden potential? And if filters can fall away, is that doorway inside of all of us or reserved for just a few? And these questions aren't new at Treffert Center, they've been asking them for decades.

I almost enjoy certain aspects of this remaining mysterious as much as I want to explain them, I think there is something beautiful about stepping back and saying, you know what? Sometimes we just have no idea how it works.

Dr. Treffert's legacy, seeing islands of genius where others see limitation expands every day at the Treffert Center and Treffert Studios.

People like Stephen Wiltshire, oftentimes they're born with a disability and some undiscovered gift, and it's a matter of, chance that they get exposed to the thing that they can thrive in. And so we didn't want to rely on that, so we have now outfitted our facility, Treffert Studios, to have a hybrid outpatient mental health clinic and creative production studio under one roof to serve the savants community of the world.

And last July, The Telepathy Tapes visited Treffert Studios for a historic event, the first official international gathering of savants in history. It was titled The Archipelago. The event connected many of the islands of genius who worked with Dr. Treffert over his career. It was a loving celebration of his vision and their unique talents. And what's exciting is this event plans to continue.

So we brought islands of genius together into an archipelago and we had an art gallery there. We had a live music performance. We are trying to identify and connect and elevate the world's savant community. So we'll be back next year. It'll hopefully be bigger and better.

Highlights from the interviews that we did with savants from The Archipelago will be released as a bonus episode this Friday.

It is wild it seeing them meet each other for the first time. So inspiring and just when we saw these people look at each other, hug each other, tears streaming down their faces, it was absolutely magical because they connected in a way that we knew none of us could understand. And it's in a way that probably people only can relate to one another and they have a shared experience of being doubted, ostracized, perhaps, or just feeling lonely and disconnected from the rest of humanity because of their experience of the world.

These stories didn't leave us with answers, but they did leave us with openings. If savant abilities can emerge fully formed like circuitry suddenly lighting up, then maybe the real question isn't how it happens, but what other things might be lighting up in the mind that we've long dismissed? What if the mysterious pathways or antennas that can suddenly unlock music and art and language can also unlock something more subtle like telepathy or intuition or remote viewing?

This is exactly what Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell has been asking for years. If mainstream science can accept savant skills, people knowing things they've never been taught, then why shouldn't ESP or extra sensory perception be seen through that same lens, instead of dismissing it as something strange or fringe?

Here's Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell again.

Savant syndrome was widely accepted among neurologists and scientists as a real phenomena that there are these people. When I thought about savant syndrome for. People to have information that we don't even know how that information got in there. I thought that is so similar to what we call ESP or extrasensory perception, that I think it's really a mistake by materialism to accept the one and then to say the other is pseudoscience.

Anybody who's trying to study things like precognition or telepathy, that they are engaging in quackery.

In season one, we saw nonspeakers spell out information they had no conventional access to. They knew about strangers who they'd never met writing books miles away and could recite the exact lines that were being written.

They could accurately convey information about what their parent was reading or watching in another room. So yes, Dr. Hennessy Powell raises an important point. Shouldn't ESP be considered a savant skill? People are receiving information in their brains that they haven't been taught or given access to.

Why can mainstream scientists look at savant skills and say, we don't know how that information got there, but we acknowledge it's happening. But most can't do it with things like ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance.

And I thought this has got profound implications for not just our understanding of the brain, but the field of psychiatry.

And for us as humans, because there are a lot of people who walk around feeling like they can't really share who they are because the experiences they have are pathologized by, by science. On the one we, we think, oh, wow, isn't that amazing? That's like Rainman. And then the other type of individual, we'd say, that person needs to be on medication, they're, they're crazy.

And if knowledge can be accessed rather than taught, then ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance might not be that fringe at all. It might be part of the same spectrum of savant abilities that science already recognizes. We've just labeled it and stigmatized it differently.

Dr. Treffert, he also felt that skepticism amongst the scientific community.

And we would talk about how important it is because it, it's consistent with all of our work and all of his work that we just don't know. We have to be humble, we have to be curious. It's a lot we don't know about nonverbal communication. And then there's a lot we don't know about this interconnectedness that we all experience.

I do think that you're asking the right question, what do we know? And I do think Dr. Treffert was right and once we understand, we're gonna understand so much more about ourselves.

The language translator that Jason Paget is working on hints that beyond the noise of language, there may be a shared frequency, something universal threading through all of us.

And if that's true, then what's at stake isn't just science or technology, it's how we love, how we connect, how we belong to each other and the living world around us. Because if an angular frequency, as Jason calls it, can translate words between humans, maybe they can carry meaning across even wider distances between us and other species.

Next week, we'll meet speaking and non-speaking individuals who might represent another kind of savant, hiding in plain sight, people who say they can communicate with animals. At its heart, this isn't just about language, it's about relationship, about listening beyond words, and the possibility that love and understanding can travel on frequencies we've barely begun to recognize.

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. It takes a village to make this podcast. And I wanna thank our producers, Jessie Stead Jil Pasiecnik, and Katherine Ellis. Original music is by Rachel Cantu, mix, mastering and additional music is by Michael Rubino.

Our associate producer is Solina Kennedy. Original artwork is by Ben Kendora Design And I'm Ky Dickens, your executive producer, writer, and host.

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