Why what you thought it means to be human may be out of touch

Not so long ago what it meant to be human was very different from what it means to be human today. This difference has the potential to impact every person in the world. When I grew up there were two universally accepted truths about being human. The first being that our DNA is fixed and it does not change during our lives. Our DNA determines our fate. The second truth was that once we grow and reach adulthood, somewhere around late teens or early 20s, our brain is fully wired and no new neurons grow, nor new connections are made. The most that can change is the strength of existing connections. These two truths were coupled with the weirdness attached to our intuitive understanding of reality as described by the paradoxes of quantum physics: fundamental particles can influence one another instantaneously across the galaxy, and Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive. There is no view of reality that seemed to integrate our intuitive understanding of the world we form we look out the window and see the sun shining in the sky and the scientific view of the world at a subatomic level.

Before discussing how things are different nowadays I want to share a story. It is an experience I had when I was a student, and there is an element in that story that links to the rest of the discussion.

I was 23 at the time and I hitch-hiked a ride on a sailing yacht that left Tel Aviv in Israel setting sail to Turkey. The boat belonged to two friends that needed a third person to help maintain a continuous watch during tonight.

It all started very well. We left Tel-Aviv one afternoon in the middle of autumn. The next day we ran into the first winter storm of the season. A few hours later, for not apparent reason, the boat began filling up with water. We spent hours broadcasting an SOS message and fighting the rising level of water. I used two plastic bin to scoop water from inside the cabin to the deck above. We were eventually rescued by a passing container ship off the coast of Lebanon. The ship was on its way to Livorno in Italy. The yacht sank from what seemed to have been a faulty seal in the propeller shaft through which water gushed in.

When we arrived to Italy the other two guys decided to go back to Israel to join their families. I, being the young student that I was, wanted to have a bit of fun and decided to travel around for another week. A few days later, while I was having breakfast in the youth hostel, a girl I did not know walked up to me and began speaking in Hebrew. She recognised the shirt I was wearing. I found out a few days later she was three months pregnant.

By this stage you may be wondering what is the relevance of this story, as interesting as it may be, to the topic of this piece? Six month before I sailed to Europe, someone I know read my future in a coffee cup. This is an old middle eastern custom that is done by drinking strong black coffee cooked on a stove, that is turned over when only the wet grounds are left at the bottom, and left for a few minutes to dry . I was told to expect three events: Somehow get to Italy, meet a woman with a particular name name, and either meet, or be involved with a pregnant woman (given I was a young student at the time, starting a family was the furthest thing from my mind). I told him he must be joking and that I had no intention of travelling to Italy, getting anyone pregnant and that I didn’t know anyone by that name. Roll forward six months and I ended in Italy after setting of to Turkey. The girl that approached me in Venice had the same name as the name in the cup, and she was pregnant.

This is not the only time I experienced events in my future being predicted in a manner that was hard to ascribe to random chance. I cannot escape the conclusion that under certain conditions it is possible to information about the future.

In the last few years a few papers investigating precognition, the ability to predict the future, have been published showing that some people do have the ability to predict events before they happen. Although the research has been criticised, the methods used to prove the results are of the same quality as in other papers in the social sciences. Some people do seem to have the capacity to know in advance the kind of information that is being shown to them. The latest estimate I have seen is that about 30 percent of people possess the capacity for precognition.

Let’s stop and think about this for a moment. We accept a few things for granted about the world, like the fact that time flows from the past to the future, and that our perception of the world is limited by our senses. We cannot see beyond the horizon, or hear a person singing miles away. My experiences taught me that we cannot take the flow of time for granted. What about space?

Another set of experiences that I had, and is well documented ,is the ability to feel people from a distance. There are many accounts about twins where something happens to the one twin and the other somehow, as if by magic, at a distance, senses it. There are many accounts of parents knowing that something is happening to their children and vice versa. I have personally experienced emotional events that were happening to partners that I was emotionally connected to. My conviction was so strong that I told the people I was with what I believe is happening to those partners, which was verified a few days later.

It does make me think about the nature of reality and what it means to be human. Gleaning information about the future and feeling each other from a distance implies that our common perceptions of the limitations of being human are misconstrued. Maybe the ability to feel people from a distance is a general property of being alive, part of the same family of senses that allows dogs to return to their home thousands of miles away, or birds develop a sensitivity to the Earth’s magnetic filed and use it for navigation. It seems that people that deeply emotionally connected access a mechanism that can resonate across vast distances.

If we accept these experiences than we need to find an explanatory framework that allows for information to flow from the future to the present, and expand our framework of what it is to be human. Recently I have been been doing some research with an American physicist Doctor Jack Sarfatti. A San Francisco based genius who was extensively written about in the book “How the Hippies Saved Physics” by David Kaiser.

Jack introduced me to the idea that one of the approaches developed to resolve some of the paradoxes in quantum physics is the an two state formalism: the idea that the present is a mixture of information from the past and from the future. Every moment contains information about the history leading up to it and information that has back-propagated from the future. A mixture of a destiny wave and a history wave. This sounds a bit far fetched, but a similar idea was developed by Feynman and Wheeler in the 40s in order to explain certain areas of field theory. This concept of information arriving back from the future can resolve some of the deepest paradoxes in quantum physics, including Schoedinger’s Cat. The cat cannot be both dead or alive because the information about the status of the cat in the future is already in the present before the box containing the cat is opened. This also removes the difficulties that arise from entanglement that Einstein called spooky action at a distance.

We are faced with a choice: we either accept a traditional quantum physics idea of the world where distance has no meaning and things can occur instantaneously across a distance of light years, which to me seems unintuitive, or we can accept that our traditional concept of time is not accurate. Time may be very different from how we intuitively perceive it. It is much messier than a simple linear axis. My personal experiences, and the experiences of many other people regarding predictions and pre-cognition lends support to the idea.

This raises an interesting question: If some information from the future is present now, and some people have access to it, where does this leave free choice?

This leads us to the two largest advances that we’ve seen in understanding of the biology of being human in the last 20 years. One of these advances has been the discovery of neuroplasticity. It is now common knowledge that neurons, and neural pathways, are continuously generated and destroyed throughout our lives. We do not posses static brains that complete their development in our early 20s. We can grow new neural pathways through meditation, learning a new language, or a learning to play a new musical instrument. We can rebuild connections in our brain and restrengthen the neural connections between neurons. This completely changes what it means for us as people to take care of ourselves and take charge of our destiny. We now know that we can significantly impact the health of our brain in a way that was unknown in the past. We can take responsibility for our cortical health for the first time.

The second idea is the concept of epigenetics. It is the realization that the DNA sequence that we are born with is only a small part of the information that is required in order to explain how genetics affect us. The DNA sequence has a lot of molecules and markers that determine which of the elements in the sequence are going to be expressed. Gene expression through changes in the epigenetic code can change very quickly. We now know that how we behave, what we eat, how we think, changes how the our DNA is expressed. This is very fundamental concept.

We are now much more empowered as individuals than ever before. Our potential to change both our brain and our genetic expression is real and it is in our hand. We have the responsibility to our future selves to understand what behaviours will have the best possible impact on our brain and genetics.

We have freedom now like no other generation in human history had before us. We are no longer victims of our past. We are not determined. We are determining ourself in every moment by the thoughts and actions that we take. With that freedom comes great responsibility. Everything that we do is imprinted on our brains and in our body. And so it is our imperative to create an ecology of the brain that will lead to the the best possible framework for it to develop. This implies paying attention to what we eat, how we behave, how we think. Do we meditate? How do we see other people. All of those activities have impact. Nothing is in vacuum any longer.

And this is amazing, and at the same time very scary.

There’s been measured changes in DNA expression of people that meditate within 24 hours.. Just imagine: 24 hours after you begin meditating, your body’s already reacting differently. It’s a miracle that we can have this power over our bodies. Think of the impact this has on our ability to help our immune system work better, heal diseases. It also means that we can no longer shirk from the responsibility of being the best people that we can.

Pulling all these ideas together implies that being human now means that we accept that the past and the future are not so separated. People can connect on a deeper level that transcends space, in ways we do not even begin to understand. That the future may be present as part of any quantum event, which practically means the future is everywhere. We have the power to change our brains and our DNA. We are creators in a universe boundless with possibilities. We live in a new world where things which we did not think possible are possible, but we also have much more responsibility than we ever did towards our interactions with our environment. If we have the courage and the discipline to execute this responsibility, to ourselves, other, and the world around us, we can live the life that we have only dreamt of.