From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Null. They called me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decond. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. This is the second part of a two part series asking whether dreams have really predicted the future. We ended the earlier episode without getting to several things facts for one, uh, science, although we're able to put some science in the first episode, and um, perhaps most importantly, questions that we had promised at the beginning of the last episode. So please listened to part one of have Dreams Really Predicted the Future before you dive into part two. This is mostly crazy stuff in the second act. So here's where it gets crazy. Mass the quickest we've gotten crazy. I think maybe ever. I love it. Uh. Do you want to do a little quick recap of some of the hallmarks from our last episode? UM, some of the historical figures we've got Abraham Lincoln who seems to have predicted his own assassination and dream. Um we have Samuel Clemens a k a. Mark Twain, who seems to have had a premonition of his brother's demise in the form of of of a dream where he was laid out his brother in a in a metal casket wearing a suit, a borrowed suit and also bedecked with like a particular spray of flowers. That that that lined up with what he saw in his dream, my crazy dream about Bennett Moon and then that manifesting in reality and the form of her calling into wait, wait, don't tell me. Um what else we got? I think your great aunts Ben and then her potential Obo playing or lack of in the realm. No, no, I didn't want to take time in the show. Uh, with my own personal anecdotes. I always think of that scene and it's always sunny in Philadelphia where Dennis Reynolds is his sister in the show, is talking about her dreams and he tells her stop, no one wants to hear about anybody else's dreams. So I think that affected me because the great the great aunts Obo Portugal, example, is just is just made up to show the credulous, the credulous nature of dreams. But we also talked about how dreams can function as a way of problem solving. Right. Our brains as problem solvers are sometimes more effective when our consciousness is less involved. That's how the periodic table was formulated. That's how um many authors discovered great works like Samuel Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after he awoke from uh from a dream. He wrote the poem in his sleep kind of. He was also on a lot of opium at the time. I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but the sewing machine was also inspired by a dream. Yeah, it was a weird one too, a really violent dream where I believe the inventor was being like boiled in a pot by cannibals and being stabbed with like spears. And in the dream he recognized that the spears had holes in the tips, and that's what gave him the idea for the way you thread the needle or the whatever. I'm not in a selling expert on a sewing machine, and it actually is tied to the very tip of the needle, and that's what allows it to kind of continue to thread and hold on or whatever. But he what a weird way to come to that conclusion. And just for a couple of other examples, Albert Einstein, by his own account, discovered the you know, hit upon some of his own revelations in the world of dreams. At this point, I'd like to recommend a fantastic book about the nature of time by a guy who I think he was at M I T an author named Alan Lightman. He wrote a book called Einstein's Dreams, and it's entirely almost an anthology or a series of vignettes of young Einstein working as a sleepy patent clerk, and every time he falls asleep he encounters another theory of time, which will also be very very important for today's show. We The point is that if you're listening today, or if you're if you're if you're like many listeners who have written to us over the years and said, I love turning on this show as I fall asleep, which thank you. I still think that's a compliment. Essentially, if you have slept regularly over any period of significant time, then odds are that your brain has done the same thing. Your brain is attempting to solve problems for you. Some of those I think it's a point somebody made earlier in previous episode. Some of those may be emotional problems, you know, things with which you are grappling, and some may be scientific things. Some maybe like uh, like Paul McCartney waking up and writing a song? Which song was that? Was it? Yesterday? Yesterday? Which is the most covered song of all time. It's been covered like more than three thousand times. That's pretty cool claim to fame. But yeah, and I mentioned like even being a musical guy, I don't really remember melodies very much. But all of this stuff. The way dreams work kind of depend on the way your brain works, right, Like all of our brains work a little bit differently. We process things in the waking world differently. So how dreams function, I think is a big product of who we are as people. Right. But what if this whole idea of dream you know, sort of precognitive dreams, isn't so much our brains doing a thing as it is like a bigger picture thing that we're experiencing, something tied in with physics, something tied in with a force larger than ourselves. So how do we explain these anecdotes, right, You know, many of which are unprovable, many of which are one person telling you their opinion about what happened to them. And how do we explain the robustly documented tales. Right? One idea involves exactly what you're talking about, Noel, the idea of something larger. This is the science I want to bring to bear today. It involves the concept of a thing known as retro causality. Strap in we're headed for bad country here. M hm, Yes, causality. You've heard this cause and effect. It's the thing that happens when you hold a glass out in front of you and then you drop it and it hits the ground. Why did it do that? Well, it's because gravity exists, and that's what happens when you drop something with mass, it falls to the ground because of gravity. Um. By the way, gravity is maybe a whole episode that we could do just about what that really means, what it is. There's not like gravity doesn't want us to know something, but it's an odd phenomenon that we don't fully grasp. That sounds weird to even say that, but it's true. Um. But this chain of cause and effect happens in a very predictable order, right, as long as there's not no other thing coming in, Like with the glass example, there isn't someone jumping to catch the glass, or there isn't a string wrapped around the glass that pulls it down and actually makes it swing or hang from another surface. But so that's that's causing effect, right, that's causality. So what is retro causality? The same thing, but backwards. Have you ever liked a song so much that you said, let's play it backwards? I don't know, probably not. It would have to be you know, maybe the perfect palindrome of a song to have that kind of symmetry. But you're right. Retro causality backwards causation. This is a concept of cause and effect, where and affect somehow proceeds its cause in what we experience as linear A to B to C one to two to three time, such that we have to walk slowly through this. Later events affect earlier events. Decisions made in the future in the lens of retro causality may affect events in the past. This means this, This could mean huge things for science if it is ever uh proven or agreed upon. It could explain nagging questions about many things in the physical world. But to explain those things, we have to understand what retro causality is and perhaps just as importantly, what it is not. So yeah, I mean, it's it's literally the idea of backwards causation, a reverse of cause and effect fact uh preceding cause. Uh. It's a concept that is is very much tied up into quantum physics and things like string theory and you know, the idea of how you know, maybe even a multiverse kind of situation, because it does sort of lay out this framework of like, how can something that happens on a certain timeline affect things that precede it in a different timeline or earlier on the same timeline. So Lisa Ziga puts it pretty succinctly writing for fizz dot org Um. She describes retro causality as not meaning that signals can be communicated from the future to the past uh no um. Such signaling would be forbidden even in a retro causal theory due to thermodynamic reason. Instead, retro causality means that when an experiment or chooses the measurement setting with which to measure a particle. That decision can influence the properties of that particle or another particle in the past, even before the experiment or made their choice. Um. In other words, a decision made in the present can influence something in the past. Tough to wrap your head around. I was thinking of different examples to the ground this. It's sort of like said, uh, it's sort of It's it's a weird distinction, right, because a decision made in the present should not be able to alter the past from everything we know. You know what I mean. And we can put it in whimsical in a whimsical sense by saying, if you concentrate hard enough in and think I never watched Police Academy for something, then that would mean in retro causality that you might end up not watching it, right, That's that's kind of It's still that it means that you're not telling yourself in the past to do something different, You're not communicating with yourself. The fact that you made the decision in the present means that the past is changed. Yeah, it's an odd thing. I'm just gonna go back to Lisa's example here, saying that the experiment or a scientist somewhere in a lab chooses, you know, use the dial or something to decide what wavelength they're going to be looking at these particles with. Right. So the concept is that just by making that choice to select that setting is going to affect the way those particles exist essentially. But I think more of what's happening here is that the the setting to measure those particles is going to measure those particles at that wavelength where at that energy level, right, Um, Rather than the particle actually changing the properties of the particle changing, you're just measuring different properties. So it's it's tough for me to right maybe understand fully what what at least is saying, just because maybe I just don't have that particle physics degree in meaning to get that. By the way, well it's related to you know, I'm being a big glib with the I'm playing fast and loose with the idea of any kind of comparison or analogy that involves a human being. That's the nature of this show. And we are going somewhere with this, fellow listeners. So I want to see, Um, you're familiar with the uncertainty principle, right, the famous experiment where the double slit experiment, which we've talked about in the past. It's similar to that, the idea that and observe erver effects what is being observed, and to some degree may determine it by taking a measurement. I mean, this is this is fascinating stuff. But maybe we put this de side and keep building our case and then come back because to your point, Knell, we need to consider how retro causality may give us a new perspective on quantum theory and have a real life story about this too. And I can't wait to hear it really quickly too. It is also kind of tied up in one of my favorite scientific, uh descriptive things of all time, Einstein's concept of spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement, which is the idea that objects can be affected by other objects without being physically touched. And that's sort of the basis for this, the idea that these completely separate things in time and space can have an effect on one and other. All right, So let's dive deep into that. And to do so, we're gonna have to get out our text books. You don't have to, don't worry. We're we're gonna get ours out. You can, you can just keep listening. We'll do that right after a word from our sponsor, and we're back. Okay, we're opening our textbooks now and we're gonna talk about quantum physics. So the one we hear about in schools often is called the Copenhagen interpretation, and this version argues that until a systems properties are physically measured in some way, they can encompass essentially a myriad, a large number of different values, different properties. Right, solid matter is a conspiracy. That's kind of what the argument becomes at this level. At a at a like, the closer and closer you look further and further you dive down into reality, you see that particles do not behave the way that solid matter would behave. Imagine reality is a big pool table. It's not the most creative idea, but fine, we need to like, yes, like billiards exactly met So so the the these every particle in the universe of this pool table is maybe a little a little ball, a little ball on the pool table, a six ball and eight ball, a que ball, and they should be their solid matter rolling from one definite point in space and time to another definite point in space and time. That is not the case at a fundamental level. Instead, these particles are like this blurry, shifting cloud of possibility. You know, think of the old descriptions of angels or divine beings that were constantly like their faces were shifting and and all this sort of stuff. Right, these particles, these billiard balls, pool balls, aren't just shifting on the table there like also and maybe other tables that also may exist, or there's another there in the air, there under the floor. Meaning we can be aware of the cloud of possibility. We know that a cue ball could be hitting an eight ball, We know it could be missing inn eight ball. At the same time, we know it could be doing any number of things, maybe specially scratching, right, especially scratching. The probability is high. Uh. And the weird thing is the spooky thing, and we do have spooky action coming up here later in the show. The weird thing is as soon as you look at that cub ball, as soon as you focus on measuring that in some way and seeing how it hits the eight ball, you will only ever see that cube ball, let's say, hitting the eight ball in one place into one of four corner pockets. You'll never see those countless cube balls hitting countless eight balls into every pocket or every direction at once. Think of Schrodinger's cat, right, this is Schrodinger's cat as a pool shark. Wow, you know it reminds me a video in a way. I'm just imagining, um, someone dancing very very fast, or dancing with lots of intensity. Right, if you're watching on video, you get kind of the full picture. But if it's just a snapshot, it's just that one moment right in time, it just looks like somebody in a kind of a strange position or a weird pose, right, but you wouldn't get the full picture of what's occurring. And when you're when you're thinking about video in general or life in general, in the way to capture things, we we can only capture images as frames essentially, right as the really I really like this comparison that, right, So there's no way for us to just have like the video that you're watching now or any video you watch online, you're seeing frames of moments, and there is no way for us to just have to just measure a constant or or a measure all moments at all times when you're looking at something or observing something. It's very strange to think about that. Well, and that that's a really great example because that's on like sort of like a micro level, but on a macro level, it's like, think of the universe in those terms, like what would a snapshot of the universe of all points at all, like you can observable, you know, measure these things in a person like I was doing a goofy dance when you just saying that a minute ago, and then you freeze and you might get a sense of like, Okay, I'm frozen in this horrible rictus kind of pose, but you can't understand the badasseness of my dance moves surrounding it in the same way that you couldn't understand like the totality of all possible moments happening, you know, in time and space. You know, I mean, I think that's really apt. Maw, that's super cool. And this is this is strange because this touches on actually, uh, some concepts that are present in ancient religions. This kind of implies the idea maybe of destiny, the idea of some sort of I don't know, it would be misleading to call it predetermination. We're not we're not being calvinist here, but in no offense to calvinist in the audience. But the point is this cloud of possible, unobserved potential possibility, this cloud of unobserved possibility exists free of a fixed position in time or space. And shout out to one of my favorite pieces of listener mail, ha ha ha remember that guy, Uh the morphic residence. Yes, that's my favorite laugh. I hope you're still listening, but yes, uh, time space six and one hand. This, this idea of existing and more than one spot at once is commonly called super position. It only collapses into a single state or position when the systems observed. Everyone observing, even the most accomplished physicist, can never precisely predict what state will will what the state will be when it collapses. And and some physicists believe a very controversial idea because we have to keep in mind, when you go far enough to the edge of physics, you in the realm of metaphysics, philosophy, and sometimes spirituality. So some physicists for a long time believed that this collapse of superposition upon observation meant that consciousness the mind itself, the software of the brain, not the hardware. The presence of an observer caused right causation, caused the superposition to collapse into a single point in space, time, universe forty two, etcetera. This is weird because it implies some very strange things about time, things that we wish Einstein was here in our in our franchise of time to to talk about and think about. Because you know, to your earlier pointnal those quirky, quirky things about quantum mechanics, spooky action at a distance entangled one bit of one bit of something on one side of the universe. It's very misleading way to describe the universe. But one bit of something very far away uh turns left or up or down in some direction, and then at the same time, in an immensely uh far away place on the other side of the universe, the same thing happens. These are these are connected, right, There's like a push pull symmetry. This is called spooky action because there's not a local action that can explain it. But what if it is evidence of time symmetry. What if at this level of reality, instead of flowing in one direction, a two B, two C one to two to three time flows at the same speed in multiple directions. What if, um, What if at the quantum level, time as we understand it flows in the past, the present, the future, all possible futures, all possible presence. What if on an extraordinarily fundamental level, time becomes less like an arrow shot to a particular destination and more like the air through which that concept of an arrow moves. Yeah, I mean it seems like quantum physics in general as a discipline, it seeks to explain this kind of phenomenon. Because you know, what we heard from Lisa Ziga at the beginning of the episode was what retro costality is not is the concept that a signal can be communicated from the future to the past. It's more about the relationship of those two events and less about like sending messages back and forth in time. I just wanted to put that out there again. Now that's it's a good thing to keep in mind. I it's a massive tangent and I'm not going to go down into it, but this concept beend of time flowing and like in all directions equally. It reminds me of the physical representations that UH, physicists and scientists used to represent gravity. Um, when you know you you show like a essentially the warp of space time right, Um, it reminds me of that kind of only in the opposite as in wherever the present is, wherever that is located, like the moment of consciousness, of being aware. It feels as though it's almost like in a mountaintop and then in all directions is moving downwards and all of the various possibilities in all directions. Um, I don't know. It's not a very good image, but I'm just imagining it in the same way we represent gravity and mass and how that affects gravity. Like it's almost as if conscious awareness or observation is that same thing for time. You're reading my mind. This was something I wanted to I was going to save till the end of the episode. But I think we're we're on the edge of time now right. As a concept, it doesn't really matter apparently when things happen. So so what I like about this concept I think you and I are on the same page here is that I you're you're talking about distortion, right, the way mass can distort gravity, right when you drop a ball onto a taut sheet. Right, So I was thinking of the same thing, and I had followed it down the rabbit hole of information as mass observation is mass. So perhaps a specific event in what we understand as living your time, perhaps the more it is observed, the more concrete or quote unquote heavier it becomes, and the more it distorts, you know, that that sort of ambient field or fertile soil of reality and time. I know. But so that's don't worry. We're getting to dreams. We're talking about this trippy stuff for a reason. In two thousand and twelve, there was a physicist named q. Price who claimed that if the strange things we know to be true about quantum states reflect something real, and if nothing restricts time to one direction, not the band, just the direction of linear time, then the eight ball in our earlier example, in that pool hall cloud of maybes and what ifs, could theoretically roll out of the corner pocket and knock the cue ball itself. I love is this so much in the in the way they talk and the concepts that they that they have to attempt to distill for people like me who just don't get it a lot of times. Well it's so interesting too, because so much of this stuff is like, you know, thought experiments until it becomes real. Like I mean, even like Einstein and his whole idea of quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance, he sort of wrote it off himself, was like, this is way too weird, and I'm going to kind of let this go. And then sure enough science came around a study shown that quantum entanglement very likely is a thing, very much in the way Einstein envisioned it. But he had to have done it on a purely conceptual level at the time, because it's not like it's something that could ever be tested, especially in those days. So it really is a whole different set of equipment that these folks have, you know what I mean, that allows them to think in these purely conceptual realms that end up kind of connecting with reality a lot of the time. It's it's it's fabulous, agreed, And this may seem like a tangent, but it is an important tangent, even if it does not seem immediately related to dreams. What we're saying is that as you are listening to this episode, some of the most intelligent people in the world are arguing over the fundamental concept of linear time. Wow, I'm just trying to think all of the other things I have to do today, and I'm wondering if they're actually gonna come later or maybe already did them just tomorrow. Decide that you've done them tomorrow perfect or maybe because you are deciding that you maybe because tomorrow you are thinking of doing these and remembering that you have done them, that means you've already done I don't you see the problem? If if, if only it were so simple, and it absolutely isn't. And we're gonna talk about why that is and how this connects up with dreams after one more quick sponsor break and we're back. Bell's theorem plays a big role here. It's an idea proposed by one John Stewart Bell, the concept that bizarre things happening in quantum physics can never be explained by actions taking place nearby. It's like we know that billiard balls are moving in all these different directions, but we have no idea what's causing them. We don't see the great Grand pool queue. I guess, which some people say is God. You know what I mean that's how that's how strange this stuff becomes the prime mover, right? Is that another name for God in the situation? And so this this leads us to ask, then what if we're what if we're looking in the wrong realm? What if the cause of these movements is not happening somewhere else, somewhere nearby, but some when else? If causality, Yeah, if causality runs backwards, it means that this particle can carry the action of its measurement back in time too, when it was originally entangled, affecting its partner, which is this other, this thing observed in another version of time. Anyway, this is all still considered fringe science, but the problem is real. We do not fully understand the actions of the quantum realm. And one of the things affecting our lack of understanding maybe our assumption of linear time. So the big question is what does this mean for dreams? Where does the brain come in? Is the brain somehow quantum? Uh? Well, I mean it's made up of the same things that the poolballs are made of in our example, right, It's all just a lot of atoms arranged very intricately in there at least I hope they're intricately arranged. Um m hmm, gosh. Okay, so we know that if if our cells are made up of atoms, and atoms follow these laws of quantum physics, um, even though we don't fully understand them, right, then yeah, our brains are quantum What a weird thought. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna sit here for a while and think about that. Yes, do we I mean, you're right, we're made of the same stuff right, The within our bodies are the building blocks of the stars and the cosmos, dirt and everything else. But do we need quantum physics to explain this thing, this phenomenon that we call consciousness? Right now, A lot of physicists and philosophers are gonna say no, because science is about explaining things in the most efficacious, accurate, and simple way. Right. We talked about brevity being the soul of wit in literature and in the creative realm, but the realm of science takes it to another level. People like Paul for the Guard, who is a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, says there is evidence building that says we can explain everything in the human mind in terms of interactions of neurons, So we wouldn't need to add quantum physics and and the dilemmas inherit in in this concept would need to add that to the engine for the engine to run and for us to understand the process. It's like, if you already have a working car, why would you add a another engine on top of right? Why why would you need two engines if you can already drive with just one? Because really fast, right, Because you think linear time exists, things can happen faster. So I mean, it's true. You're right though, and this is of course a statement from a philosopher, but we we know physicists tend to agree that's right. And then we have David Deutsch, who is a physicist at the University of Oxford, who says, quote, is there any need to invoke quantum physics to explain cognition? I don't know of one, and I'd be amazed if one emerges. That's interesting. He's sort of like putting these in two distinctly different buckets um, So you kind of have two sides of that argument there. So if the brain does engage in any of this quantum you know shenaniganry Uh during what we call thought um. Then there's a particularly popular theory about how all of this could go down, and it involves something called microtubules, which are protein tubes that make up the neurons and in our in our brains, in our bodies um, specifically the support structures within neurons UM. And and that is what potentially quantum you know, physics would would enact upon um the idea that microtubules can exploit quantum physics quantum effects rather to exist in superpositions of two different shapes at the same time. UM. So this goes back to what you were talking about earlier with the idea of superposition. We want to do a quick refresh on that. Well, you can think about it quickly this way. Those neurons are if if this is to be believed, all of your neurons are simultaneously activated and not activated. If you think about it as an io switch or something a state of being on or off. All of your neurons are both on and off at all times. That's what this is essentially saying. Unless I'm getting that incorrect, it's yeah, it's it's existing in multiple states that we would normally think are mutually exclusive. Right, So each of these shapes in this theory amounts to a tiny bit of what you're talking about, Matt, classical information. We would consider it. So this shape shifting quantum bit a cubit, Right, that's the fundamental unit here. Uh, each of those can store twice as much information as their classical counterparts. And then we add entanglement to the mix. I would love to see this explained in the format of a of a YouTube cooking show. Right, So this is where someone sprinkles in entanglement and starts during that stuff in. This is the feature we've been talking about that allows these units, these cupid states, to remain intertwined even when they're not in local contact. That means that we can rapidly build what's called quantum computer, something that can manipulate and store information far more efficiently than a classical computer. Because to your point, Matt, they do not have to they do not have to be restricted to a one zero one thing one at a time. So if retro causality is also in play, that means that these tiny, tiny, tiny tubes, these tubes of protein that you just described, Nol, these pieces of neuron structure could be interacting with time in a way that we do not understand. Fascinating, funky, an amazing concept, also very far from proven as we as we record this right now, all the quantum stuff we're talking about is incredibly fragile. It's not it's not a house of cards in a windy room. A more accurate description would be like an upside down pyramid constructed out of the idea where cards might sometime be balanced on the nose of a blindfolded circus cloud with big clown shoes writing a unicycle across a very high tight rope for the very first time at their first day working for the circus. The slightest change in anything will cause a quantum state to break down, as far as we know. And here's the other thing about your brain, you guys, Um, it isn't exactly fit for this kind of quantum system, at least from what we understand right now, right uh, deep inside there in your head of years. You go ahead, go ahead and feel it if you can, if you've got a freehand. Um, that's just your skull. Remember that's the hard part inside there. It's really warm, it's wet, it's kind of gross, really um and it's just not suitable for any kind of quantum system to really survive for any length of time. But again, that's our understanding of matter and how quantum systems work right now, because it's what we have been able to achieve thus far. Yeah, and as we're recording this, they are numerous people who are chasing down the possibilities right trying to determine whether there is a possibility of a quantum state in the human brain. Well, one person particular note would be Matthew Fisher. Fisher is an expert in developing quantum computers and he believes there is more to this story. If you're interested, I highly recommend reading a little bit more about his proposed experiments because we have to remember, as mentioned in a previous episode, science is a long conversation and it argues with itself and there are many many things that for one reason or another, our species rejected as nonsense, only to later learn that those things are true. So to bring it all back around precognitive dreams. There are so many anecdotes, there's so many arguments, there's so many fascinating experiments. I wanted to mention one that got me involved in retroactive causality a number of years ago. You guys have heard of mc sweeney's, right, yeah, so you you've heard then of Walfen. I know I'm cheating. I know you guys have heard about it because I wouldn't shut up about it off air when I was very into it. So Wolfen is sort of like a magazine need of short films, and wolf Thin issue number seven included a strange bonus, like a bonus article. There's a bonus DVD that had a scientific experiment in retroactive causality. And the idea was that you, without spoiling it, you as the audience, the observer of the experiment that is on this DVD, may somehow affect the results of the experiment just by watching it. I still have it somewhere. I'll send it to you guys if you want to, if you want to check it out. It's it's controversial, but you don't have to don't have to buy it, just borrow it. But the but the idea here is is that, um, we see experiments with this stuff. It's ongoing, and we know with that people many listening in the audience today do feel and do believe that they have had some inexplicable encounter with reality through the world of dream. So, if retro causality is real, if time, as we understand it, flows in more than one direction at the quantum level, and if the neurons in the human brain function in some way like what we would call a quantum computer or a quantum system, a lot of ifs here, And if this system in a human brain is somehow able to not even communicate information, but to influence information on what we call the consciousness or the subconsciousness in an understandable way, then there may just be a theoretical way for our brains to understand time beyond the concept of one second forward to the next. It took a long time for us to get there, but we had to lay out, we had to lay out the case. There is actual science, and that's really what this comes comes down to. There's already some science that appears to show it could be true, which is, you know, fascinating hopeful to me thinking that there might be a way for us to uh see a mistake that's coming our way, or to see, you know, to to help somebody who may need our assistance and somehow we could be aware of that through this connection in some way. I love. I love the possibility that exists here and and just knowing that if there's already science that's leaning, you know, in this way, or at least hinting at this, then it probably says that within you know, our lifetimes, we're going to find out more and we're we we may even be able to prove at some point that we are more deeply connected to each other and to ourselves and to everything than we already understand. Yeah, that's the mission, right to have to in some way illuminate a bit more of this cavernous, strange thing called the universe, reality and life as we know it, this giant shadowy Jim Bay, that we all exist in the shadowy Jim Bay. I love that. Such a vision. No, it's such a good visual and it's fun to say in your lighting looks really really awesome. This is a plug to check out the YouTube channel, which has been resurrected if you are listening in the audio version. So I have to ask. I know that the three of us have various questions that we want to ask each other. So I have to ask you, guys, do you believe that precognitive dreams exist. It's tough. It's tough for me. I would have to say yes, because I have experienced a few things where either I have been given information that I did not have, or I came to information that I was seeking within a dream state and and it you know, maybe maybe that is just my brain doing the de frag process that we we talked about at the top of last episode, but or maybe it is some connection that I don't fully understand um, and it is some kind of precognitive situation. Honestly, I would have to say I would have to say, oh God, this is the stance I always take. I want to believe it so badly that I'm leaning towards thinking that something is there. I'm with it, man. I mean, it's one of these things too, where it's so arrogant of us. We don't understand this quantum physics stuff, and we see the smartest people in the world like Einstein kind of coming up with these concepts that can't be tested and then maybe even abandoning them, and then later it turns out that oh he was onto something. So it's like we were we are not even gonna be around long enough potentially to see the stuff you know fully play out as to whether there's truth to this or not, or the way the human mind works, or one of the ideas that we discussed on a recent news episode about that sense of communicativeness between like, you know, beings, like like communicating through a look or knowing if someone is uh is staring at you really hard. What was the name of that. It was called morphic residents exactly. I mean, that's you know, still on the fringes. But I sent some truth to that, and I sent some truth to this. How about you been? Uh, yeah, well that's what I was getting to. There is no um. There's one question that people keep missing when they talk about precognitive dreams. Whether we consider ourselves skeptics, whether we consider ourselves profits or oracles, or just people who know there's more to the iceberg of reality than what we see drifting above the surface. The question is this, if someone has a dream and they used what happened in the dream to better their situation, right, avoiding the car accident that we mentioned earlier, uh, staying away from that dropping piano, which I don't think ever really happens. I think that's a cartoon thing. But you know what I mean. If if they have a dream and that dream helps them somehow in the waking world, does it matter if it's precognition, Does it matter if it's coincidence. Does it matter if it's the brain playing the probability game? I would argue No. I would argue it's very easy to get lost in our own personal feelings about what quote unquote psychic powers are. If it's like the Turing test, kind of like whether or not something is a robot or a human, whatever the whatever the behind the scenes picture is, if you're still having a good conversation, it's still a good conversation. All that being said, without um it spend too much time talking about myself here. I come from a long history of people who are absolutely convinced that they do have some kind of precognitive dream capacity. And I'll probably hear from extended family members when this episode comes out, and they will probably not be super happy with me for the way that we approach this. Maybe they'll get in touch with you prior to the episode coming out. That's right. If you can prove precognition, we would love to hear from you right to us on Friday, August one, will double check our inboxes that day and let you know. Does that joke even work? I think it does work. But but this is what this is. I think works better if you truly that that was a joke, right, but truly if you are experiencing us in some way right now as we were as we record this on Friday August twenty one, this is what I would say. If you have access to a phone, give us a call. Our number is one eight three three st d w y t K. Now, it's really important. It's vitally important that you do this on Friday August one. So any voicemails that come in today, I'm checking them for you. I'm going to be listening for you. Please do it brilliant. I love it. And there's another thing we can check right now from you social media. You can find us on Facebook, you can find us on Instagram. You can find us on Twitter where we are conspiracy stuff. On Twitter and Facebook also travel to Here's where it Gets Crazy, which has been universally lauded by us as the best part of Facebook. You can find us on Instagram where we're conspiracy Stuff show and You can also find us should you choose as individuals on the social meds. If you would like to find me, I am at how now Noel Brown on Instagram where I post stuff from my core life and you know, um, music production and video game stuff, my kids cosplays all that stuff. You can find them exclusively on Instagram and it's kind of lurk on Twitter. If you wish to free up your stream of various posts on Instagram, you can follow me Matt Frederick underscore I heeart as you will not see anything from me. And if you are opposed to social media, if you are against the idea of calling people on the phone, if you've had a bad dream about it, but you need to tell us and more importantly your fellow listeners a story about dreams, some new information about the possibility of precognitive dreams. You can always reach us via our good old fashioned email address where we are conspiracy at I Heart radio dot com. But wait, remember YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. Stay with me YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. Just think it all the time, know it, feel it and festive. Yes, all right, that's it. Stuff they don't want you to know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Null. They called me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decond. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. This is the second part of a two part series asking whether dreams have really predicted the future. We ended the earlier episode without getting to several things facts for one, uh, science, although we're able to put some science in the first episode, and um, perhaps most importantly, questions that we had promised at the beginning of the last episode. So please listened to part one of have Dreams Really Predicted the Future before you dive into part two. This is mostly crazy stuff in the second act. So here's where it gets crazy. Mass the quickest we've gotten crazy. I think maybe ever. I love it. Uh. Do you want to do a little quick recap of some of the hallmarks from our last episode? UM, some of the historical figures we've got Abraham Lincoln who seems to have predicted his own assassination and dream. Um we have Samuel Clemens a k a. Mark Twain, who seems to have had a premonition of his brother's demise in the form of of of a dream where he was laid out his brother in a in a metal casket wearing a suit, a borrowed suit and also bedecked with like a particular spray of flowers. That that that lined up with what he saw in his dream, my crazy dream about Bennett Moon and then that manifesting in reality and the form of her calling into wait, wait, don't tell me. Um what else we got? I think your great aunts Ben and then her potential Obo playing or lack of in the realm. No, no, I didn't want to take time in the show. Uh, with my own personal anecdotes. I always think of that scene and it's always sunny in Philadelphia where Dennis Reynolds is his sister in the show, is talking about her dreams and he tells her stop, no one wants to hear about anybody else's dreams. So I think that affected me because the great the great aunts Obo Portugal, example, is just is just made up to show the credulous, the credulous nature of dreams. But we also talked about how dreams can function as a way of problem solving. Right. Our brains as problem solvers are sometimes more effective when our consciousness is less involved. That's how the periodic table was formulated. That's how um many authors discovered great works like Samuel Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after he awoke from uh from a dream. He wrote the poem in his sleep kind of. He was also on a lot of opium at the time. I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but the sewing machine was also inspired by a dream. Yeah, it was a weird one too, a really violent dream where I believe the inventor was being like boiled in a pot by cannibals and being stabbed with like spears. And in the dream he recognized that the spears had holes in the tips, and that's what gave him the idea for the way you thread the needle or the whatever. I'm not in a selling expert on a sewing machine, and it actually is tied to the very tip of the needle, and that's what allows it to kind of continue to thread and hold on or whatever. But he what a weird way to come to that conclusion. And just for a couple of other examples, Albert Einstein, by his own account, discovered the you know, hit upon some of his own revelations in the world of dreams. At this point, I'd like to recommend a fantastic book about the nature of time by a guy who I think he was at M I T an author named Alan Lightman. He wrote a book called Einstein's Dreams, and it's entirely almost an anthology or a series of vignettes of young Einstein working as a sleepy patent clerk, and every time he falls asleep he encounters another theory of time, which will also be very very important for today's show. We The point is that if you're listening today, or if you're if you're if you're like many listeners who have written to us over the years and said, I love turning on this show as I fall asleep, which thank you. I still think that's a compliment. Essentially, if you have slept regularly over any period of significant time, then odds are that your brain has done the same thing. Your brain is attempting to solve problems for you. Some of those I think it's a point somebody made earlier in previous episode. Some of those may be emotional problems, you know, things with which you are grappling, and some may be scientific things. Some maybe like uh, like Paul McCartney waking up and writing a song? Which song was that? Was it? Yesterday? Yesterday? Which is the most covered song of all time. It's been covered like more than three thousand times. That's pretty cool claim to fame. But yeah, and I mentioned like even being a musical guy, I don't really remember melodies very much. But all of this stuff. The way dreams work kind of depend on the way your brain works, right, Like all of our brains work a little bit differently. We process things in the waking world differently. So how dreams function, I think is a big product of who we are as people. Right. But what if this whole idea of dream you know, sort of precognitive dreams, isn't so much our brains doing a thing as it is like a bigger picture thing that we're experiencing, something tied in with physics, something tied in with a force larger than ourselves. So how do we explain these anecdotes, right, You know, many of which are unprovable, many of which are one person telling you their opinion about what happened to them. And how do we explain the robustly documented tales. Right? One idea involves exactly what you're talking about, Noel, the idea of something larger. This is the science I want to bring to bear today. It involves the concept of a thing known as retro causality. Strap in we're headed for bad country here. M hm, Yes, causality. You've heard this cause and effect. It's the thing that happens when you hold a glass out in front of you and then you drop it and it hits the ground. Why did it do that? Well, it's because gravity exists, and that's what happens when you drop something with mass, it falls to the ground because of gravity. Um. By the way, gravity is maybe a whole episode that we could do just about what that really means, what it is. There's not like gravity doesn't want us to know something, but it's an odd phenomenon that we don't fully grasp. That sounds weird to even say that, but it's true. Um. But this chain of cause and effect happens in a very predictable order, right, as long as there's not no other thing coming in, Like with the glass example, there isn't someone jumping to catch the glass, or there isn't a string wrapped around the glass that pulls it down and actually makes it swing or hang from another surface. But so that's that's causing effect, right, that's causality. So what is retro causality? The same thing, but backwards. Have you ever liked a song so much that you said, let's play it backwards? I don't know, probably not. It would have to be you know, maybe the perfect palindrome of a song to have that kind of symmetry. But you're right. Retro causality backwards causation. This is a concept of cause and effect, where and affect somehow proceeds its cause in what we experience as linear A to B to C one to two to three time, such that we have to walk slowly through this. Later events affect earlier events. Decisions made in the future in the lens of retro causality may affect events in the past. This means this, This could mean huge things for science if it is ever uh proven or agreed upon. It could explain nagging questions about many things in the physical world. But to explain those things, we have to understand what retro causality is and perhaps just as importantly, what it is not. So yeah, I mean, it's it's literally the idea of backwards causation, a reverse of cause and effect fact uh preceding cause. Uh. It's a concept that is is very much tied up into quantum physics and things like string theory and you know, the idea of how you know, maybe even a multiverse kind of situation, because it does sort of lay out this framework of like, how can something that happens on a certain timeline affect things that precede it in a different timeline or earlier on the same timeline. So Lisa Ziga puts it pretty succinctly writing for fizz dot org Um. She describes retro causality as not meaning that signals can be communicated from the future to the past uh no um. Such signaling would be forbidden even in a retro causal theory due to thermodynamic reason. Instead, retro causality means that when an experiment or chooses the measurement setting with which to measure a particle. That decision can influence the properties of that particle or another particle in the past, even before the experiment or made their choice. Um. In other words, a decision made in the present can influence something in the past. Tough to wrap your head around. I was thinking of different examples to the ground this. It's sort of like said, uh, it's sort of It's it's a weird distinction, right, because a decision made in the present should not be able to alter the past from everything we know. You know what I mean. And we can put it in whimsical in a whimsical sense by saying, if you concentrate hard enough in and think I never watched Police Academy for something, then that would mean in retro causality that you might end up not watching it, right, That's that's kind of It's still that it means that you're not telling yourself in the past to do something different, You're not communicating with yourself. The fact that you made the decision in the present means that the past is changed. Yeah, it's an odd thing. I'm just gonna go back to Lisa's example here, saying that the experiment or a scientist somewhere in a lab chooses, you know, use the dial or something to decide what wavelength they're going to be looking at these particles with. Right. So the concept is that just by making that choice to select that setting is going to affect the way those particles exist essentially. But I think more of what's happening here is that the the setting to measure those particles is going to measure those particles at that wavelength where at that energy level, right, Um, Rather than the particle actually changing the properties of the particle changing, you're just measuring different properties. So it's it's tough for me to right maybe understand fully what what at least is saying, just because maybe I just don't have that particle physics degree in meaning to get that. By the way, well it's related to you know, I'm being a big glib with the I'm playing fast and loose with the idea of any kind of comparison or analogy that involves a human being. That's the nature of this show. And we are going somewhere with this, fellow listeners. So I want to see, Um, you're familiar with the uncertainty principle, right, the famous experiment where the double slit experiment, which we've talked about in the past. It's similar to that, the idea that and observe erver effects what is being observed, and to some degree may determine it by taking a measurement. I mean, this is this is fascinating stuff. But maybe we put this de side and keep building our case and then come back because to your point, Knell, we need to consider how retro causality may give us a new perspective on quantum theory and have a real life story about this too. And I can't wait to hear it really quickly too. It is also kind of tied up in one of my favorite scientific, uh descriptive things of all time, Einstein's concept of spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement, which is the idea that objects can be affected by other objects without being physically touched. And that's sort of the basis for this, the idea that these completely separate things in time and space can have an effect on one and other. All right, So let's dive deep into that. And to do so, we're gonna have to get out our text books. You don't have to, don't worry. We're we're gonna get ours out. You can, you can just keep listening. We'll do that right after a word from our sponsor, and we're back. Okay, we're opening our textbooks now and we're gonna talk about quantum physics. So the one we hear about in schools often is called the Copenhagen interpretation, and this version argues that until a systems properties are physically measured in some way, they can encompass essentially a myriad, a large number of different values, different properties. Right, solid matter is a conspiracy. That's kind of what the argument becomes at this level. At a at a like, the closer and closer you look further and further you dive down into reality, you see that particles do not behave the way that solid matter would behave. Imagine reality is a big pool table. It's not the most creative idea, but fine, we need to like, yes, like billiards exactly met So so the the these every particle in the universe of this pool table is maybe a little a little ball, a little ball on the pool table, a six ball and eight ball, a que ball, and they should be their solid matter rolling from one definite point in space and time to another definite point in space and time. That is not the case at a fundamental level. Instead, these particles are like this blurry, shifting cloud of possibility. You know, think of the old descriptions of angels or divine beings that were constantly like their faces were shifting and and all this sort of stuff. Right, these particles, these billiard balls, pool balls, aren't just shifting on the table there like also and maybe other tables that also may exist, or there's another there in the air, there under the floor. Meaning we can be aware of the cloud of possibility. We know that a cue ball could be hitting an eight ball, We know it could be missing inn eight ball. At the same time, we know it could be doing any number of things, maybe specially scratching, right, especially scratching. The probability is high. Uh. And the weird thing is the spooky thing, and we do have spooky action coming up here later in the show. The weird thing is as soon as you look at that cub ball, as soon as you focus on measuring that in some way and seeing how it hits the eight ball, you will only ever see that cube ball, let's say, hitting the eight ball in one place into one of four corner pockets. You'll never see those countless cube balls hitting countless eight balls into every pocket or every direction at once. Think of Schrodinger's cat, right, this is Schrodinger's cat as a pool shark. Wow, you know it reminds me a video in a way. I'm just imagining, um, someone dancing very very fast, or dancing with lots of intensity. Right, if you're watching on video, you get kind of the full picture. But if it's just a snapshot, it's just that one moment right in time, it just looks like somebody in a kind of a strange position or a weird pose, right, but you wouldn't get the full picture of what's occurring. And when you're when you're thinking about video in general or life in general, in the way to capture things, we we can only capture images as frames essentially, right as the really I really like this comparison that, right, So there's no way for us to just have like the video that you're watching now or any video you watch online, you're seeing frames of moments, and there is no way for us to just have to just measure a constant or or a measure all moments at all times when you're looking at something or observing something. It's very strange to think about that. Well, and that that's a really great example because that's on like sort of like a micro level, but on a macro level, it's like, think of the universe in those terms, like what would a snapshot of the universe of all points at all, like you can observable, you know, measure these things in a person like I was doing a goofy dance when you just saying that a minute ago, and then you freeze and you might get a sense of like, Okay, I'm frozen in this horrible rictus kind of pose, but you can't understand the badasseness of my dance moves surrounding it in the same way that you couldn't understand like the totality of all possible moments happening, you know, in time and space. You know, I mean, I think that's really apt. Maw, that's super cool. And this is this is strange because this touches on actually, uh, some concepts that are present in ancient religions. This kind of implies the idea maybe of destiny, the idea of some sort of I don't know, it would be misleading to call it predetermination. We're not we're not being calvinist here, but in no offense to calvinist in the audience. But the point is this cloud of possible, unobserved potential possibility, this cloud of unobserved possibility exists free of a fixed position in time or space. And shout out to one of my favorite pieces of listener mail, ha ha ha remember that guy, Uh the morphic residence. Yes, that's my favorite laugh. I hope you're still listening, but yes, uh, time space six and one hand. This, this idea of existing and more than one spot at once is commonly called super position. It only collapses into a single state or position when the systems observed. Everyone observing, even the most accomplished physicist, can never precisely predict what state will will what the state will be when it collapses. And and some physicists believe a very controversial idea because we have to keep in mind, when you go far enough to the edge of physics, you in the realm of metaphysics, philosophy, and sometimes spirituality. So some physicists for a long time believed that this collapse of superposition upon observation meant that consciousness the mind itself, the software of the brain, not the hardware. The presence of an observer caused right causation, caused the superposition to collapse into a single point in space, time, universe forty two, etcetera. This is weird because it implies some very strange things about time, things that we wish Einstein was here in our in our franchise of time to to talk about and think about. Because you know, to your earlier pointnal those quirky, quirky things about quantum mechanics, spooky action at a distance entangled one bit of one bit of something on one side of the universe. It's very misleading way to describe the universe. But one bit of something very far away uh turns left or up or down in some direction, and then at the same time, in an immensely uh far away place on the other side of the universe, the same thing happens. These are these are connected, right, There's like a push pull symmetry. This is called spooky action because there's not a local action that can explain it. But what if it is evidence of time symmetry. What if at this level of reality, instead of flowing in one direction, a two B, two C one to two to three time flows at the same speed in multiple directions. What if, um, What if at the quantum level, time as we understand it flows in the past, the present, the future, all possible futures, all possible presence. What if on an extraordinarily fundamental level, time becomes less like an arrow shot to a particular destination and more like the air through which that concept of an arrow moves. Yeah, I mean it seems like quantum physics in general as a discipline, it seeks to explain this kind of phenomenon. Because you know, what we heard from Lisa Ziga at the beginning of the episode was what retro costality is not is the concept that a signal can be communicated from the future to the past. It's more about the relationship of those two events and less about like sending messages back and forth in time. I just wanted to put that out there again. Now that's it's a good thing to keep in mind. I it's a massive tangent and I'm not going to go down into it, but this concept beend of time flowing and like in all directions equally. It reminds me of the physical representations that UH, physicists and scientists used to represent gravity. Um, when you know you you show like a essentially the warp of space time right, Um, it reminds me of that kind of only in the opposite as in wherever the present is, wherever that is located, like the moment of consciousness, of being aware. It feels as though it's almost like in a mountaintop and then in all directions is moving downwards and all of the various possibilities in all directions. Um, I don't know. It's not a very good image, but I'm just imagining it in the same way we represent gravity and mass and how that affects gravity. Like it's almost as if conscious awareness or observation is that same thing for time. You're reading my mind. This was something I wanted to I was going to save till the end of the episode. But I think we're we're on the edge of time now right. As a concept, it doesn't really matter apparently when things happen. So so what I like about this concept I think you and I are on the same page here is that I you're you're talking about distortion, right, the way mass can distort gravity, right when you drop a ball onto a taut sheet. Right, So I was thinking of the same thing, and I had followed it down the rabbit hole of information as mass observation is mass. So perhaps a specific event in what we understand as living your time, perhaps the more it is observed, the more concrete or quote unquote heavier it becomes, and the more it distorts, you know, that that sort of ambient field or fertile soil of reality and time. I know. But so that's don't worry. We're getting to dreams. We're talking about this trippy stuff for a reason. In two thousand and twelve, there was a physicist named q. Price who claimed that if the strange things we know to be true about quantum states reflect something real, and if nothing restricts time to one direction, not the band, just the direction of linear time, then the eight ball in our earlier example, in that pool hall cloud of maybes and what ifs, could theoretically roll out of the corner pocket and knock the cue ball itself. I love is this so much in the in the way they talk and the concepts that they that they have to attempt to distill for people like me who just don't get it a lot of times. Well it's so interesting too, because so much of this stuff is like, you know, thought experiments until it becomes real. Like I mean, even like Einstein and his whole idea of quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance, he sort of wrote it off himself, was like, this is way too weird, and I'm going to kind of let this go. And then sure enough science came around a study shown that quantum entanglement very likely is a thing, very much in the way Einstein envisioned it. But he had to have done it on a purely conceptual level at the time, because it's not like it's something that could ever be tested, especially in those days. So it really is a whole different set of equipment that these folks have, you know what I mean, that allows them to think in these purely conceptual realms that end up kind of connecting with reality a lot of the time. It's it's it's fabulous, agreed, And this may seem like a tangent, but it is an important tangent, even if it does not seem immediately related to dreams. What we're saying is that as you are listening to this episode, some of the most intelligent people in the world are arguing over the fundamental concept of linear time. Wow, I'm just trying to think all of the other things I have to do today, and I'm wondering if they're actually gonna come later or maybe already did them just tomorrow. Decide that you've done them tomorrow perfect or maybe because you are deciding that you maybe because tomorrow you are thinking of doing these and remembering that you have done them, that means you've already done I don't you see the problem? If if, if only it were so simple, and it absolutely isn't. And we're gonna talk about why that is and how this connects up with dreams after one more quick sponsor break and we're back. Bell's theorem plays a big role here. It's an idea proposed by one John Stewart Bell, the concept that bizarre things happening in quantum physics can never be explained by actions taking place nearby. It's like we know that billiard balls are moving in all these different directions, but we have no idea what's causing them. We don't see the great Grand pool queue. I guess, which some people say is God. You know what I mean that's how that's how strange this stuff becomes the prime mover, right? Is that another name for God in the situation? And so this this leads us to ask, then what if we're what if we're looking in the wrong realm? What if the cause of these movements is not happening somewhere else, somewhere nearby, but some when else? If causality, Yeah, if causality runs backwards, it means that this particle can carry the action of its measurement back in time too, when it was originally entangled, affecting its partner, which is this other, this thing observed in another version of time. Anyway, this is all still considered fringe science, but the problem is real. We do not fully understand the actions of the quantum realm. And one of the things affecting our lack of understanding maybe our assumption of linear time. So the big question is what does this mean for dreams? Where does the brain come in? Is the brain somehow quantum? Uh? Well, I mean it's made up of the same things that the poolballs are made of in our example, right, It's all just a lot of atoms arranged very intricately in there at least I hope they're intricately arranged. Um m hmm, gosh. Okay, so we know that if if our cells are made up of atoms, and atoms follow these laws of quantum physics, um, even though we don't fully understand them, right, then yeah, our brains are quantum What a weird thought. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna sit here for a while and think about that. Yes, do we I mean, you're right, we're made of the same stuff right, The within our bodies are the building blocks of the stars and the cosmos, dirt and everything else. But do we need quantum physics to explain this thing, this phenomenon that we call consciousness? Right now, A lot of physicists and philosophers are gonna say no, because science is about explaining things in the most efficacious, accurate, and simple way. Right. We talked about brevity being the soul of wit in literature and in the creative realm, but the realm of science takes it to another level. People like Paul for the Guard, who is a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, says there is evidence building that says we can explain everything in the human mind in terms of interactions of neurons, So we wouldn't need to add quantum physics and and the dilemmas inherit in in this concept would need to add that to the engine for the engine to run and for us to understand the process. It's like, if you already have a working car, why would you add a another engine on top of right? Why why would you need two engines if you can already drive with just one? Because really fast, right, Because you think linear time exists, things can happen faster. So I mean, it's true. You're right though, and this is of course a statement from a philosopher, but we we know physicists tend to agree that's right. And then we have David Deutsch, who is a physicist at the University of Oxford, who says, quote, is there any need to invoke quantum physics to explain cognition? I don't know of one, and I'd be amazed if one emerges. That's interesting. He's sort of like putting these in two distinctly different buckets um, So you kind of have two sides of that argument there. So if the brain does engage in any of this quantum you know shenaniganry Uh during what we call thought um. Then there's a particularly popular theory about how all of this could go down, and it involves something called microtubules, which are protein tubes that make up the neurons and in our in our brains, in our bodies um, specifically the support structures within neurons UM. And and that is what potentially quantum you know, physics would would enact upon um the idea that microtubules can exploit quantum physics quantum effects rather to exist in superpositions of two different shapes at the same time. UM. So this goes back to what you were talking about earlier with the idea of superposition. We want to do a quick refresh on that. Well, you can think about it quickly this way. Those neurons are if if this is to be believed, all of your neurons are simultaneously activated and not activated. If you think about it as an io switch or something a state of being on or off. All of your neurons are both on and off at all times. That's what this is essentially saying. Unless I'm getting that incorrect, it's yeah, it's it's existing in multiple states that we would normally think are mutually exclusive. Right, So each of these shapes in this theory amounts to a tiny bit of what you're talking about, Matt, classical information. We would consider it. So this shape shifting quantum bit a cubit, Right, that's the fundamental unit here. Uh, each of those can store twice as much information as their classical counterparts. And then we add entanglement to the mix. I would love to see this explained in the format of a of a YouTube cooking show. Right, So this is where someone sprinkles in entanglement and starts during that stuff in. This is the feature we've been talking about that allows these units, these cupid states, to remain intertwined even when they're not in local contact. That means that we can rapidly build what's called quantum computer, something that can manipulate and store information far more efficiently than a classical computer. Because to your point, Matt, they do not have to they do not have to be restricted to a one zero one thing one at a time. So if retro causality is also in play, that means that these tiny, tiny, tiny tubes, these tubes of protein that you just described, Nol, these pieces of neuron structure could be interacting with time in a way that we do not understand. Fascinating, funky, an amazing concept, also very far from proven as we as we record this right now, all the quantum stuff we're talking about is incredibly fragile. It's not it's not a house of cards in a windy room. A more accurate description would be like an upside down pyramid constructed out of the idea where cards might sometime be balanced on the nose of a blindfolded circus cloud with big clown shoes writing a unicycle across a very high tight rope for the very first time at their first day working for the circus. The slightest change in anything will cause a quantum state to break down, as far as we know. And here's the other thing about your brain, you guys, Um, it isn't exactly fit for this kind of quantum system, at least from what we understand right now, right uh, deep inside there in your head of years. You go ahead, go ahead and feel it if you can, if you've got a freehand. Um, that's just your skull. Remember that's the hard part inside there. It's really warm, it's wet, it's kind of gross, really um and it's just not suitable for any kind of quantum system to really survive for any length of time. But again, that's our understanding of matter and how quantum systems work right now, because it's what we have been able to achieve thus far. Yeah, and as we're recording this, they are numerous people who are chasing down the possibilities right trying to determine whether there is a possibility of a quantum state in the human brain. Well, one person particular note would be Matthew Fisher. Fisher is an expert in developing quantum computers and he believes there is more to this story. If you're interested, I highly recommend reading a little bit more about his proposed experiments because we have to remember, as mentioned in a previous episode, science is a long conversation and it argues with itself and there are many many things that for one reason or another, our species rejected as nonsense, only to later learn that those things are true. So to bring it all back around precognitive dreams. There are so many anecdotes, there's so many arguments, there's so many fascinating experiments. I wanted to mention one that got me involved in retroactive causality a number of years ago. You guys have heard of mc sweeney's, right, yeah, so you you've heard then of Walfen. I know I'm cheating. I know you guys have heard about it because I wouldn't shut up about it off air when I was very into it. So Wolfen is sort of like a magazine need of short films, and wolf Thin issue number seven included a strange bonus, like a bonus article. There's a bonus DVD that had a scientific experiment in retroactive causality. And the idea was that you, without spoiling it, you as the audience, the observer of the experiment that is on this DVD, may somehow affect the results of the experiment just by watching it. I still have it somewhere. I'll send it to you guys if you want to, if you want to check it out. It's it's controversial, but you don't have to don't have to buy it, just borrow it. But the but the idea here is is that, um, we see experiments with this stuff. It's ongoing, and we know with that people many listening in the audience today do feel and do believe that they have had some inexplicable encounter with reality through the world of dream. So, if retro causality is real, if time, as we understand it, flows in more than one direction at the quantum level, and if the neurons in the human brain function in some way like what we would call a quantum computer or a quantum system, a lot of ifs here, And if this system in a human brain is somehow able to not even communicate information, but to influence information on what we call the consciousness or the subconsciousness in an understandable way, then there may just be a theoretical way for our brains to understand time beyond the concept of one second forward to the next. It took a long time for us to get there, but we had to lay out, we had to lay out the case. There is actual science, and that's really what this comes comes down to. There's already some science that appears to show it could be true, which is, you know, fascinating hopeful to me thinking that there might be a way for us to uh see a mistake that's coming our way, or to see, you know, to to help somebody who may need our assistance and somehow we could be aware of that through this connection in some way. I love. I love the possibility that exists here and and just knowing that if there's already science that's leaning, you know, in this way, or at least hinting at this, then it probably says that within you know, our lifetimes, we're going to find out more and we're we we may even be able to prove at some point that we are more deeply connected to each other and to ourselves and to everything than we already understand. Yeah, that's the mission, right to have to in some way illuminate a bit more of this cavernous, strange thing called the universe, reality and life as we know it, this giant shadowy Jim Bay, that we all exist in the shadowy Jim Bay. I love that. Such a vision. No, it's such a good visual and it's fun to say in your lighting looks really really awesome. This is a plug to check out the YouTube channel, which has been resurrected if you are listening in the audio version. So I have to ask. I know that the three of us have various questions that we want to ask each other. So I have to ask you, guys, do you believe that precognitive dreams exist. It's tough. It's tough for me. I would have to say yes, because I have experienced a few things where either I have been given information that I did not have, or I came to information that I was seeking within a dream state and and it you know, maybe maybe that is just my brain doing the de frag process that we we talked about at the top of last episode, but or maybe it is some connection that I don't fully understand um, and it is some kind of precognitive situation. Honestly, I would have to say I would have to say, oh God, this is the stance I always take. I want to believe it so badly that I'm leaning towards thinking that something is there. I'm with it, man. I mean, it's one of these things too, where it's so arrogant of us. We don't understand this quantum physics stuff, and we see the smartest people in the world like Einstein kind of coming up with these concepts that can't be tested and then maybe even abandoning them, and then later it turns out that oh he was onto something. So it's like we were we are not even gonna be around long enough potentially to see the stuff you know fully play out as to whether there's truth to this or not, or the way the human mind works, or one of the ideas that we discussed on a recent news episode about that sense of communicativeness between like, you know, beings, like like communicating through a look or knowing if someone is uh is staring at you really hard. What was the name of that. It was called morphic residents exactly. I mean, that's you know, still on the fringes. But I sent some truth to that, and I sent some truth to this. How about you been? Uh, yeah, well that's what I was getting to. There is no um. There's one question that people keep missing when they talk about precognitive dreams. Whether we consider ourselves skeptics, whether we consider ourselves profits or oracles, or just people who know there's more to the iceberg of reality than what we see drifting above the surface. The question is this, if someone has a dream and they used what happened in the dream to better their situation, right, avoiding the car accident that we mentioned earlier, uh, staying away from that dropping piano, which I don't think ever really happens. I think that's a cartoon thing. But you know what I mean. If if they have a dream and that dream helps them somehow in the waking world, does it matter if it's precognition, Does it matter if it's coincidence. Does it matter if it's the brain playing the probability game? I would argue No. I would argue it's very easy to get lost in our own personal feelings about what quote unquote psychic powers are. If it's like the Turing test, kind of like whether or not something is a robot or a human, whatever the whatever the behind the scenes picture is, if you're still having a good conversation, it's still a good conversation. All that being said, without um it spend too much time talking about myself here. I come from a long history of people who are absolutely convinced that they do have some kind of precognitive dream capacity. And I'll probably hear from extended family members when this episode comes out, and they will probably not be super happy with me for the way that we approach this. Maybe they'll get in touch with you prior to the episode coming out. That's right. If you can prove precognition, we would love to hear from you right to us on Friday, August one, will double check our inboxes that day and let you know. Does that joke even work? I think it does work. But but this is what this is. I think works better if you truly that that was a joke, right, but truly if you are experiencing us in some way right now as we were as we record this on Friday August twenty one, this is what I would say. If you have access to a phone, give us a call. Our number is one eight three three st d w y t K. Now, it's really important. It's vitally important that you do this on Friday August one. So any voicemails that come in today, I'm checking them for you. I'm going to be listening for you. Please do it brilliant. I love it. And there's another thing we can check right now from you social media. You can find us on Facebook, you can find us on Instagram. You can find us on Twitter where we are conspiracy stuff. On Twitter and Facebook also travel to Here's where it Gets Crazy, which has been universally lauded by us as the best part of Facebook. You can find us on Instagram where we're conspiracy Stuff show and You can also find us should you choose as individuals on the social meds. If you would like to find me, I am at how now Noel Brown on Instagram where I post stuff from my core life and you know, um, music production and video game stuff, my kids cosplays all that stuff. You can find them exclusively on Instagram and it's kind of lurk on Twitter. If you wish to free up your stream of various posts on Instagram, you can follow me Matt Frederick underscore I heeart as you will not see anything from me. And if you are opposed to social media, if you are against the idea of calling people on the phone, if you've had a bad dream about it, but you need to tell us and more importantly your fellow listeners a story about dreams, some new information about the possibility of precognitive dreams. You can always reach us via our good old fashioned email address where we are conspiracy at I Heart radio dot com. But wait, remember YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. Stay with me YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. Just think it all the time, know it, feel it and festive. Yes, all right, that's it. Stuff they don't want you to know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.