Published!

What I’ve Been Up To…

As part of my PhD journey, I am exploring how science can engage the unexplained: how it might study spirituality, consciousness, and anomalous experience without flattening or explaining them away. What follows is one example of this work, plus a glimpse of other projects I’ve been working on.

The schism between science and consciousness is not just one fracture of our age, but a mirror of so many other polarizations. We are pushed to choose sides: believer or skeptic, rationalist or mystic, science or spirit. In that tug-of-war, what disappears is lived complexity: nuanced, fluid, co-creative. These divides leave us lonely and unmoored, meaninglessness stretching like taffy — sticky and strangely alluring. My work is about opening space in that in-between, a place where science can meet experiences of spirituality, consciousness, and mystery without dismissing them.

I recently co-authored an academic paper that leans into this space. The research began simply enough: a team studying energy medicine invited a clairvoyant to observe subtle energies — light, colors, movement, flow. What emerged was not what anyone anticipated. Instead of describing energy fields alone, the clairvoyant reported the presence of non-physical beings in the room.

This kind of finding tempts us toward reflex. Do you feel it in yourself? Dismissal. Explaining away. Pathology. Fraudulence, or at the very least imagination? I know these impulses well. But if we let them decide for us, then inquiry ends before it begins.

Because the report was so unexpected, the team designed a follow-up. Six independent seers were invited to observe forty Reiki sessions, a standardized healing practice. The results were striking: in every single session, beings were described — ancestors, guides, angelic figures, presences both helping and hindering. Often practitioners and participants perceived them too.

The point is not to prove these beings exist or to define what they are. It is to notice what happens when, under structured conditions, such reports consistently arise. To notice, and then to ask with care: what does this mean for how we understand healing, perception, and consciousness itself?

For me, this work is about reciprocity. It asks science to stretch beyond its historical habits of exclusion and asks each of us to widen our own comfort with mystery. Categories and boxes have their place; they help us interrogate, clarify, discern. But if we let them close too soon, the questions collapse, and so does our chance to discover.

The more I lean into wonder, into possibility, into the simple act of asking what if, the more ease I find. The world does not shrink under scrutiny; it expands. And my place within it grows too — more alive, more synchronistic, more enchanted.

🔗 Read the paper here

---

Additional Research in the Hopper

My broader research constellation spans intuition, capacities that reach beyond the five senses, super experiencers, even AI analyses of UFO archives — all orbiting a central inquiry: how can science engage the unexplained without shutting it down? Here are some of the projects I’m working on in partnership with the University of Virginia, IONS, California Institute for Human Science, and others:

• Intuitive Expression
  Intuition leaves a signature — unique patterns in how people dream, sense, and know beyond the ordinary — and these signatures can be mapped with scientific rigor.
  🔗 Read the preprint and IONS’ blog post

---

• Cultivating Perception Beyond the Five Senses
  Our case study traces one participant’s journey from hypnosis to out-of-body exploration to communication that seemed to emerge from beyond the self, asking whether such capacities can be consciously developed.
  🔗 Read the preprint and IONS’ blog post

  ---

• AI Meets Extraterrestrial Channeling
  Using advanced transformer-based semantic similarity models, this preprint compares trance-channeled communications attributed to ET intelligences with a large-scale archive of historical UFO documents. The analysis highlights both surprising convergences and clear divergences across disclosure, psi, and belief systems.
  🔗 Read the preprint

---

• Super Experiencers
  Explore the lives of people who experience a wide range of mystical and anomalous events throughout their lifetimes. Our new project site is live, and a global survey is coming soon.
  🔗 superexperiencer.org

  ---

• The Destiny Project
  We’ve already received hundreds of responses about experiences of destiny or times when life seemed guided or orchestrated. We’d love to include yours.
  🔗 Mind & Meaning Institute and the University of Virginia survey page