Diane Hennacy Powell, M.D., is a practicing psychiatrist and a neuroscientist trained at the Johns Hopkins school of medicine, who also taught neuropsychiatry at Harvard; unlike most of her colleagues had a long-time interest in the mystery of human consciousness and was skeptical of the materialist model of how the brain is the sole generator of mind.
Some years ago Dr. Powell had an insightful Eureka moment: If something as telepathy (i.e. direct mind-to-mind communication) could actually exist, who could be the best candidates in which to find evidence for it? Her work in 1987 with Sir Michael Rutter considered to be the father of child psychology and leading expert in autism, led her to conclude that some of the abilities in non-verbal autistic savants were so mysterious and confounding, they could very well be interpreted as psychic phenomena. What if, Diane posited, these savants are able to solve staggering mathematical problems, not because their brains are highly tuned for pattern recognition and an increased memory, but because they actually manage to extract the answers from the ‘ether’ itself, as it were? Also, non-verbal savants would be the most motivated to develop such talents, due their condition of not being able to communicate with the outside world through ‘ordinary’ means.
With that in mind –no pun intended– Dr. Powell started to conduct some tests with Haley, a 9-year-old autistic girl who seemed to display the capacity to read the minds of her family and therapists; the reason why her parents suspected their daughter was reading their mind was because even though she was able to find the 6-figure results to cube root equations, she was unable to make simple additions and subtractions. As Greg mentioned back in August, Diane had to prepare the tests in order to accommodate the special needs of the child –which prevented the complete isolation between ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’– but even without these less-than-ideal circumstances, Dr. Powell’s initial results –which she presented at the 57th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association— were nothing short of amazing: Not only was the girl able to be above 95% accurate on 10 equations she solved on a 10-minute period, but as Dr. Powell explained to Alex Tsakiris on her latest interview on Skeptiko, sometimes the therapist made mistakes in giving Haley the mathematical question to solve, and she would nevertheless give the right answer to the problem typed in the therapist’s notes –i.e. it was as if Haley was picking the answer’s from the therapist’s mind, instead of solving them in her own head.
In order to keep elaborating her scientific model on how telepathy could arise as a method to extract information from our surroundings beyond the extent of our main physical senses, Dr. Powell needs to keep studying more autistic savants like Haley; children like Nandana, a Indian autistic girl who also seems to be able to read the minds of her parents. With the kind of evidence already gathered, you’d think Dr. Powell would have no problem in securing grants to continue funding her research, yet unfortunately you’d be wrong; Parapsychology is still considered a pseudoscience in the ivory towers of Academia, which has forced Diane to finance her research out of her own pocket.
Which is why she’s seeking to crowdfund the next step in her telepathy project –and this is where YOU come in, dear Grailer:
Would Dr. Powell’s Telepathy project be able to secure the 1st Nobel prize to the field of Parapsychology, as suggested by our good friend Grant Cameron? Although after spending enough time immersed in these topics, it’s easy to become cynic and conclude the non-local nature of Consciousness will never be accepted, my conviction is that if we keep chipping away at the foundation of the Materialistic model, sooner or latter it will all come crashing down and a new scientific paradigm will arise; and people like Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell will be acknowledged for their substantial contributions in trying to adopt a more encompassing scientific model, in which phenomena like precognition and even telepathy will be understood and explained, the same way our ancestors managed to understand electricity and magnetism.
So please contribute to Dr. Powell’s campaign, and help spread her project through your favorite social media. Frank Zappa said the Revolution will not be televised… but he didn’t say anything about crowdfunding, now did he?
Further Reading:
- New Research Suggests Autistic Savants May Have Enhanced Telepathic Abilities
- Evidence of Telepathy in a Nonverbal Autistic Child
- 57th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association
- Skeptiko Episode 257: Dr. Diane Powell Finds Telepathy Among Autistic Savant Children
- Miracle Girl: Nandana has access to mother’s memory
- A Nobel Prize for Woo Woo?
