Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So my neuroscience wasn’t helping me so much with my near death experience. Or maybe it could help me a lot if I was a materialist, which I wasn’t because they would say, well.
Elizabeth Rovere
You were not a materialist.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
No, I wasn’t. I always read philosophy. I was always. But abstractly. So my experience didn’t change my ism. It grounded it all of a sudden. It’s not just things I can read or philosophy or things I can write on a whiteboard. I’ve tasted it first person and I could be mistaken. It could still be a hallucination. I’m not 100% sure. I think it’s not good to be 100% sure about anything. But I’m more convinced that it’s not hallucination. It tells us something. It’s a crack in the matrix that tells you something more that you aren’t seeing.
Elizabeth Rovere
So what are the edges of consciousness? We talk about things that are edgy or on the margins. On ancient maps, they wrote here be dragons on the edges. But those edges are also called the frontier where we discover new things. My guest today, Alex Gomez Marin, is a modern day explorer of these very edges, asking what’s beyond our five senses and our material reality. A physicist and a neuroscientist, Alex leads the Behavior of Organisms Laboratory in Alicante, Spain, and serves as the director of the Pari center in Italy. His groundbreaking work spans neuroscience, physics and and the study of consciousness. I’m your host, Elizabeth Rovere, a clinical psychologist, yoga teacher, and graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I am forever curious about experiences of wonder and awe and how they transform us with Wonderstruck. We invite you to explore these ideas through conversations with experts and experiencers across disciplines and worldviews. I’d love to start with a couple of things. One is a little bit about your own backstory and also how you got to the Pari center and what the Pari center actually is. I’m thinking about like, you know, you’re a physicist, you’re a neuroscientist, you’re a really curious person. And I just wondered how you went from physics to neuroscience to Pari center. And you also have had a lot of interesting experiences on the path.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes, I have a little bit of imposter syndrome, because, yes, I am a physicist by training. Then I turn out to be a neuroscientist. I say by chance, or maybe by chance and necessity. I can tell you about that. I mean, I was looking for a job so that I could stay a bit longer in Barcelona so that my partner could finish her own PhD. That’s called a two body problem. When you have a couple and you’re in academia, you need to travel, but if times are not synchronized. So I just found a job. They were looking for a neurobiologist, but the new physics. And so that’s really how I started being interested. I didn’t care really about biology. I was very happy with pen and paper, locked in a room doing theoretical physics. Then I started studying these organisms. Fruit flies, then worms, then mice, then humans. So my path retrospectively makes a lot of sense to me. It couldn’t have been planned. And it makes. The more I do things, the more sense everything I’ve done makes to me because it’s really helping me to put the pieces together. But that’s why have this imposter syndrome, because I’m not really a physicist anymore. I joke that I maybe need to renew my physics license after 20 years. And I’m a neuroscientist, but I’m not so interested in the brain. I’m more interested in the mind.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, the mind and what exactly that is, which we don’t really know what that means anyway. Yeah, so. And how did you get from doing that work in Spain to the Pari Center?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah, that’s another story of casualty or synchronicity. Right. So I wrote a piece on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Rupert Sheldrick’s publication of A New Science of Life. And at that time there had been this documentary, actually a great deal was filmed here in Pari. It’s called Infinite Potential, about the life and work of David Bohm. So Bohm came to mind and I mentioned him in this brief piece I wrote. And then I recall that there was this place called the Pari center where they work on Boem. And when this documentary had been recorded, so I just sent the piece there and then a few weeks later they replied back. And then the director at the time, Santana Sabadini, was traveling through Spain and so we kind of met just to know each other. He’s also a physicist. And so that kind of tightened the relationship. And then I was more curious. And then I had this idea, why don’t we do an online series called the Future Scientist? So I started doing that and it worked well. And that’s where I started practicing this art of conversation with people. Like what we’re doing here.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
And then they invited me to be a speaker. And then when they invited me, the chair couldn’t chair the event. So they told me a few weeks before, would you do it? And so I said, yes, I’ll do it. I chaired the event. It went really well. So they asked me, would you be the director? And I said, all right. And this is not even two years ago. It’s very recent.
Elizabeth Rovere
Lots of things have happened since then. It’s just sort of been like opened up in that way.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes. It’s like an acceleration machine. Right. Because then you get to design your own conferences and then you get to meet the people here. This is not like an academic conference. It has a little bit of what’s good in academia. So it’s a dream. It’s like I get to meet all these incredible people, spend time with them. Also the participants are amazing.
Elizabeth Rovere
Absolutely.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So it has just revealed to me I didn’t know this world existed. And also it was at the time, and perhaps we’ll talk about this when I had a few really maybe life changing experiences. And then I went back to my science. What does my physics hat and my neuroscience hat have to say about what I just experienced? But then I realized, well, there’s a community of scientists and philosophers and historians and experiencers that have been working on this for decades. Wow. I didn’t know they even existed.
Elizabeth Rovere
I did want to ask you if you would share with us your story, your near death experience, because I think the more people talk about these things, the more powerful it is and it gives. I think that it’s comforting and I think that it’s comforting for people that have not had near death experience. And I think it’s comforting for people that have had them that are like, oh, that’s what that was. Thank you.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Sure, sure. I don’t want to be flippant about it. I almost died.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, that’s a big deal.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
I lost a lot of blood. I had a leaking in my stomach. We didn’t know where it was coming from. I mean, it wasn’t like I was in the middle of the road with a helicopter picking it up and seeing my body, which some people experience. It wasn’t that it was like more like a slow fading of my energy. And so I spent a few days in the hospital while they were trying to. While they were trying to figure out what was going on with me first. Before I tell you the near death story, which is short, I often don’t tell another thing that I had. I had this kind of dream with incredible animals in a place very similar to this town, which I didn’t know by the time. But anyways, so there’s these huge animals with fire in their heads. Imagine like a super tall elephant with the head of a giraffe. You know, hybrid giant animals with fire in their heads. And they were just putting their head down onto my head and putting that fire on my head. And it wasn’t burning. So I don’t know how it felt then. But I think it has a lot of meaning. I haven’t been able to tease it apart.
Elizabeth Rovere
When did that happen to you?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
A few hours before I had my near death experience.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So I had this dream and I don’t dream a lot and I don’t remember it, but I could tell you, as you were saying at the beginning, that felt pretty real and not like any other dream. So these animals were putting fire in my head one by one and then they would walk by and then they would become carpets and they would fly to the mountains. I had this vision, whatever, but then I had the tunnel vision. So I had the typical near death experience. And I don’t think I knew that that was so typical. Like, I saw the light at the end of the day.
Elizabeth Rovere
So. Yeah. Can you describe it? What do you saw?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Tunnel. I wasn’t in a tunnel. I was in a well. So I was looking upwards and there was this circle of light coming in. It was yellow light and there were three people just looking down. And I know who they were. They were more like spiritual guides.
Elizabeth Rovere
But you know who they were?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
I know, but I don’t usually say who they were. No, no. But they were like spiritually very significant to me.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Like, okay. Like big, big people. Right? Okay. And they’re waiting for me. And I knew it. We didn’t speak. That happens very often. The way people describe it, it felt telepathically. So they were kind of saying, but they weren’t saying, okay, we came here to receive you, you’re coming. So I was looking upwards and I decided that I wasn’t going, like, not yet. And then I came back. So it was really brief.
Elizabeth Rovere
When you decided not yet, do you remember them saying, like, okay, actually I.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Knew why I was there. I knew why they were there. I knew what was the deal that could happen. And simply I refused. And then I came back. That was really it. But then I realized, oh, wow, that’s what people call a near death experience. And then when I started thinking, well, what was that? What does neuroscience say? What would my colleagues say? What would I say about what happened? And then I discovered there’s this huge field of research on near death experience.
Elizabeth Rovere
You didn’t know anything about that? No.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
And it’s huge and it’s well done and there’s a lot of data and they’re very respectable people. It’s like, wow.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah. University of Virginia has a whole division of studying it, right?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah, yeah. Bruce Grayson, Pim van Lommel, and now Sam Parnia and all these great scientists and doctors who’ve been really pioneers for decades.
Elizabeth Rovere
And you said it’s unfolded over time.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
Like how it’s impacted you and how.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
You’ve looked at understanding the significance of it, understanding the gift that it is for me. So I decided to write my near death experience in a Spanish newspaper for a Spanish newspaper a year later when it was the one year anniversary.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, wow.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So there’s an aspect of it which is like, oh, wow. Like, you know, a scientist that almost dies, but then a huge group of people genuinely want to know because they’ve had it themselves or their family members have had it. There’s always somebody, you always know somebody. There’s always somebody who knows somebody that has. That this has happened to them.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
And so then when they read it, they say, oh, wow, like we’re not that weird at all.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s crazy.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
And so because I started talking about it, then people talk it back, it’s like just. That’s the trick. And I was very surprised. Like, you know, people I cannot name, but like people in the Institute of Neurosciences where I work, and in other places they would come and say, wow, it also happens to me. And thank you for sharing because now I feel I can share it with you, which is. It’s a bit strange because why would they need a scientist to say it so that they can tell their own story. We’re all equal. Right. But I get it, okay? Now I’ve said it. And you think you’re not that crazy or that stupid because these are the fears that people have.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, it’s a white coat syndrome kind of thing. Like. Well, for scientists say it’s okay.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
I guess maybe it’s legit because for so long. And we were talking about this at the beginning of this conversation for so long, we summoned the expert to tell us the truth.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes. Right.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
We’ve been very dismissive. But now when we start to listen, then people start telling us when we start to listen.
Elizabeth Rovere
I think it’s important to bring in that you were. You kind of were studying as a traditional scientist, for lack of a better way to say it. Right. And that you had this very profound experience that would you say that it kind of flipped you or that it challenged you in a way that you.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Were like, oh, yes, you mean my near death experience.
Elizabeth Rovere
Your near death experience, yes, yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
But it took time for me to realize what that had done to me.
Elizabeth Rovere
Interesting.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So it was life changing in a way, as I mentioned. But it wasn’t that I came out of that transfigured and like with kind of a vision, I feel I came back from that place dusted with some sort of golden. Dusted with gold. Like, things started to happen more quickly, easier. And so it accelerated what had been cooking for many years, I would suppose.
Elizabeth Rovere
So it took away any obstacles. It was sort of like, cleared the path.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
It cleared the path. And ironically, I had got tenure very few months before I almost died. It’s job security, because then you can have a basis to really pursue the unknown. Right, Exactly. Okay, So I got that. And then a few months later, I almost died. So I felt, okay, you’ve been given a ticket for 40 more years. I was about to become 40, so a ticket for maybe 40 more years and the opportunity to spend time with my family, you know, because my little ones were really little. Now I got tenure and I just came back from this. So it’s like, well, what am I going to do with that opportunity? It’s like a double opportunity I have now. Plus, what this, that experience, as I was saying, how can I interpret it based on what I’ve been trained as a physicist, as a neuroscientist, and what fits and what doesn’t fit. But of course, it took me some time to recover. I went through surgery, and so I was really weak. So it wasn’t like I came on, like, full empowered about this. No, I just discovered that all these doors were opening and that I was like an unfolding. Yes, I was into that path whether I wanted it or not. And I really wanted it.
Elizabeth Rovere
So, you know, it’s so curious to me because it’s like when something like that happens, I mean, how did you. When you went back and looked at your training as, say, theoretical physics or neuroscience, or just what you knew about the world at that time to apply to your experience, to what extent did it help you? Because I imagine that it gave you some help.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah, I like this question because it’s a way of being kind of compassionate and empathic about the orthodoxy before we want to go beyond it. But we’re trained. Maybe that’s a good thing about being trained as a physicist, that you can entertain this crazy shit in a very rigorous way and you have the respectability, because we are a little Bit at the top of the chain.
Elizabeth Rovere
Absolutely.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
And okay, we can play with that, we can criticize it. But look, physics has done amazing things. Now if we move to the neuroscience. Neuroscience is a bit different because it’s dominated by neurobiology, by a more reductionistic and mechanistic and materialistic. I call these three things the unholy trinity. Right? So basically what these mean, they mean is if you study a system, it’s usually a living system or a mind. The way to do it is you need to cut and break things into parts, which we can understand, because you decompose a problem so that you can solve it better. The challenge is how are you going to put it all together? So that’s reductionism then. Mechanicism is the idea that the explanation, the kind of the holy grail of the explanation, when you will be satisfied with your explanation of whatever phenomena you have in front is when you’ll find a mechanism. And the mechanism will be, well, that molecule will just bind here and then this channel will open. This is kind of the holy grail of the mechanistic biological understanding. Physicists, we don’t care about these. We have other. We look for principles, right? So here’s a clash of cultures already. And then there’s materialism, which is very relevant for neuroscience because materialism is this ideology. It’s not really a scientific result, it’s an ideology. It’s a belief system. It’s a belief system within the sciences that says, well, ultimately everything is made of matter and only matter. And matter, ironically, is defined as what mind is not unconscious, doesn’t have any purpose, there’s no intention. So my neuroscience wasn’t helping me so much with my near death experience. Or maybe it could help me a lot if I was a materialist, which I wasn’t. Because they would say you were not a materialist. No, I wasn’t. I always read philosophy. I was always. But abstractly. So my experience didn’t change my ism. It grounded it all of a sudden. It’s not just things I can read or philosophy or things I can write on a whiteboard. I’ve tasted it first person and I could be mistaken. It could still be a hallucination. I’m not 100% sure. I think it’s not good to be 100% sure about anything. But I’m more convinced that it’s not hallucination. It tells us something. It’s a crack in the matrix that tells you something more that you weren’t seeing.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, yes. And I really appreciate you Saying that about having like the openness, about saying like, I’m not 100% sure, but wow, did it feel like it was really real and it makes sense? Like almost like you feel like I know it, but I want to be open to, let’s see, what could it really mean? What does it mean? Does it mean beyond more than what I experienced? And what is the context and what is the context for it and how to understand it? So I think that’s great. I mean, I think that’s wise. But I want to go back. You said something about if you’re a scientist, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a materialist. And that’s this thing. I think that there’s a lot of criticism about science as only reductionism or as only materialism. And it’s like you were saying, like theoretical physicists or even just scientists, they’re inspired by an idea that comes from somewhere that they might play it out. But what I guess I would like to ask you what is science? How do we understand what science is so that we don’t just think it’s rational materialism or reductionism?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
To start answering your question is to compare it to maybe religions. And I do this a bit provocatively, but it’s like when you say, well, what does religion say? You would ask, well, what religion? Because there are different kinds and different within religions, there are different ways of approaching the same. With the sciences it’s the same. But we don’t like to say it because it’s very convenient to scientists and to politicians and to power to speak of science as if it was kind of some sort of idol. You know, I hate the headline that says whatever science says or experts say.
Elizabeth Rovere
Because research studies say blah, blah blah.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Which who says that? And what do the others say? That’s very important. Science is a self correcting mechanism, right? Process. So there are many types of scientists and me having swum these different waters, physicists are very different from biologists or psychologists. And even within physics, it’s not the same if you’re a high energy physicist or a fluid mechanicist, or a material physicist or a thermodynamicist. That’s why I agreed to talk to people also, I enjoy it. But also to please explain to the general public that science is not only what you see on stage. Like backstage, people are screaming, pushing to each other. They know something is not going well, as in a theater, right? And this is very important to understand how science works, what they find, what we find, what we tell the socio political Aspect, what’s rewarded? Where are the grants? It’s a mess. Otherwise, you’re naive for your entire life as a person or as a scientist, and you don’t understand why we aren’t making progress or why don’t paradigm change. It’s because science has this human aspect.
Elizabeth Rovere
Science is something that is human. Exactly. It’s like it’s a human activity. It’s not a God or a truth. Well, people, I think, oftentimes feel like it’s like an ultimate truth. And it’s not really. Just like you’re saying. There’s that whole backstage running around trying to make it work. It’s like that’s a human endeavor.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Okay, I want to be a scientist, but why did I ask to be indoctrinated into materialism? Did I ask to be indoctrinated into mechanicism? Did I ask to be told that if I want to be a proper scientist, I cannot be religious or spiritual? So all these things that need to be kind of unlocked so that we can appreciate, again, the pluralism. You can be a scientist and you can believe in God or in whatever, in crazy shit, and you can be a scientist and just adopt another philosophical ontology and be an idealist or be an experientialist. And it’s very interesting because most of my colleagues, they would say they don’t believe in anything, which makes me laugh right now.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, they do.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Oh, they don’t have beliefs. It’s just that they don’t realize that they have them. It’s very dangerous.
Elizabeth Rovere
Absolutely. Because how could you not have one? You’re a human being. You’ve got to believe in something. You’re functioning in the world in this way. That’s so interesting. Yeah. And to think that you don’t have a belief system would feel. I mean, even if you’re just like, believing in your own family or you believing in yourself, whatever it is, it’s like it would feel very flat or boring in a way, even mechanistic. Not human. Not alive, somehow. And I guess that’s too part of why I like bringing the more holistic pictures, because it’s like wanting to make it feel like it’s more alive and impactful and with meaning. Because that’s what we’re doing as human beings. I mean, I think of it as a psychologist. We talk about, you know, people like, oh, I don’t have any anger. You know, I’m fine. And you’re like, yeah, I don’t know. You know, you’re human. I think you do have Some anger somewhere? Don’t you want to have a sense of what you are emotionally alive to, or be emotionally alive to what’s inside of you in a way that you don’t have to go act upon it, but just that you know what that experience feels like or have a sense of it, because it’s part of this bigger picture that we don’t even know where it ends yet.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
What’s going on with transhumanism. It’s like, oh, these guys thought they got rid of all religion and now through technology, they’re enacting the very same things they thought they had put under the carpet. And they did put them under the carpet and then they just appear through the other side and they cannot see it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Like, ah, yes, yes, yes, absolutely. No, I see that sort of that’s happening with AI. I want to ask you, you talked about self correction in science and whether does or doesn’t happen. And I know that you’ve mentioned before that someone that’s inspired you in physics was Feynman, who was a Nobel prize winning physicist who talked about the need for self correction. And are you saying you just don’t really see a lot of that, like the ability to be wrong or question yourself?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So at the most superficial level, they happen pretty quickly because you find something and you share with your colleagues and they’ll be critical about it and they should. That’s why the kind of the sword of reason is very useful. They’ll prune things. So that’s already a self correction, but it’s more at the superficial level, if you see what I mean. But then the self correction at the deepest level is these other isms that we were talking about. Like you’ve done a lot of science, but then when do we change the worldview? Like changing worldview, it’s not the same as changing your experimental design. Right? So self correction goes fast up there, but it takes a long time for it for science for scientists to say, all right, now we realize that the base upon which we were doing all of this work needs repair. And of course, quantum physics, which we love to talk about, like the world doesn’t seem what we thought it was. And 100 years later, we still pretend quantum physics didn’t happen. If everything is interconnected, then how do we relate to each other, for instance, Right? We keep it separate.
Elizabeth Rovere
How do you integrate everything and be able to function? Because there’s ways in which it can just be very overwhelming. It’s interesting. It’s very interesting that we do split off things all the time with what we can handle. We have to have on a certain sense of our blinders. But how do we incrementally integrate some of these things in ways that start to shift the paradigm so that it reflects human experience? You know, the extraordinary experience that is ordinary or happens more and more? And you were talking about how science or things challenge and over the years, and I know you spent some time talking about the whole thing with Galileo and why we think the way that we do. And there’s that thing that people say, like the shocks to our humanity was like, you know, Copernicus, you know, saying like, you know, we’re, you know, the sun doesn’t really revolve around us. Sorry. Or Darwin, like, yeah, you evolved. You weren’t just put on the earth by God, or you have an unconscious. You don’t really know what you’re doing. And it just feels like those were big shifts and we’ve sort of more or less gone with those. Do you think that we’re on the verge of another one?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah, I love this question because I’m not sure. Yeah, I wish we were. So, like, we all want change to happen, but not too much, Right. It’s like we still want to feel we’re within our habitual familiar. And that applies to home, that applies to science, that applies to the intellect. So we all crave for a paradigm. Well, not all, but in these kind of circles, like the party center, supposedly, the people you talk to, we all want the paradigm to change. But then when we realized that that means we need to change too, and that floor underneath us changes like, well, not that fast. So as you were asking this question, it came to mind, another metaphor or image would be what’s called the psychedelic integration. It’s spoken about a lot today, right? You do psychedelics. And then once it’s finished. It’s not finished. You need to integrate. What that meant. Yes. Well, maybe the same thing. And I just thought about this now as you were telling me this. Maybe the same thing needs to happen with scientific ideas and paradigm changes. It’s not just that it changed. Maybe it already changed, but we need time to integrate the change. And this time can be a long time.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, the fact that I mean that it’s just, you know, when I started doing this podcast, at first it was only two years, but people really do want to hear about it. People are curious. There’s something that just doesn’t. Something feels like it’s missing in a way. And I’m not saying that the paradigm shifts in the ogh were done, it would keep unfolding over time. And, you know, I had this. So when I was flying here, I was reading the New Yorker, like pick up a magazine at the airport. Right. And you know, I don’t know what it’s going to say, but so I have to just read this to you because there’s a philosopher, a political philosopher and a philosopher of social science at McGill University. He’s a professor emeritus. His name is Charles Taylor. He’s 93 years old. And so there’s an article he was wrote in the, you know, article by him in the New Yorker. And I just have to read this to you because I was like, this is cool. Oh, philosophy of social science. Right. He won the Templeton Prize at one point. We are not atoms in a mindless universe, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. And he says art is not an accessory to pleasure, but the means of our connection to the cosmos. That’s a living universe. Right. That’s interconnection. And that’s a guy that, you know, at 93 is saying these kinds of things that. It’s in the New Yorker.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
Which is pretty cool.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s not fringe.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
It’s less fringe.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay. Less. Less.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
No, I think it’s. Maybe I’m. No, probably I’m biased because I work within academia and without. I have this double. I say I’m smuggler, you’re a bridge. It’s not a very nice word, but, you know, I work inside the citadel, but I also work outside and I bring things in and out. So depending, like, if you’re inside, I don’t see a lot of change, at least as fast as it would be needed. But on the outside. Yes. And I think the key is experiences.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So maybe here I can do my one minute summary of the history of science the last 400 years. Because maybe we can see it like that to begin with. Maybe not all, but most traditions everywhere in the world, forever have seen the universe as alive. We are the anomaly. Western science is the anomaly. The Western scientific understanding of the cosmos and of life and everything. It’s the anomaly because everyone else forever has thought otherwise, has thought otherwise, has felt otherwise, has known otherwise. It’s not just right now, then from this point of view, when I understood this, if it’s correct, maybe I’m wrong, but it’s like, wow, science is this weird thing that has happened over the last 400 years around the 17th century. And I like to date it like 1623. Because it’s when Galileo published the assay year. And in the assayer, he makes this distinction between primary and secondary qualities, meaning what you can measure and then what you can feel. And that’s, for me, the original split, I call it a forced divorce. Like, you know, you split this nature, you bifurcate nature. That was a move that was very good for science to start working as a business, because once you did that, and I think he was a bit conscious of that, once you make this distinction, you say, well, let’s leave experiences to the side for a moment, please. And then we’ll work on how apples fall, how planets move, these inert things. So physics is developed, chemistry is developed on top of it, biology on top of its psychology. This is the 400 years of the history of science, Western science as we know it, being the greatest of anomalies. Because we left to the side the very same, you could say, faculty that allows us to do science, which is being conscious beings. And we forgot. It’s like a story and we forgot. But sooner or later, and there have been attempts for this remembrance to come up to the surface, and then we just kick it down again. But after 400 years. Well, you know, decade before, decade after, like in the 90s, for instance, the 1990s, consciousness started to be accepted in academia as a topic of investigation. Psychologists had started, well in the 19th century with William James. But then the behaviorist said, no, no, no, no. Only what we can measure tension with.
Elizabeth Rovere
Like Freud and Jung and behaviorists.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes, and behaviorists won for some time.
Elizabeth Rovere
They did.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Why? Because they looked at the physicists and they said, well, if they can measure it, we also need to measure things. Which was, I think, a mistake because they could have said, well, we’re studying the psyche and maybe the rules of the game need to be a bit different.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So we had this desert, you know, for a few decades with behaviorism and then cognition. So I say there’s the sea of comportment, the sea of cognition, and then the sea of consciousness, like these three Cs. And the sea of consciousness had to wait until the 90s when a Nobel laureate, Francis Crick, sanctioned it like a Pope said, okay, now we can study it. And therefore people started studying it.
Elizabeth Rovere
What did he say?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Well, so he thought he had figured out the problem of life. That’s questionable, but, okay, let’s grant him that. I don’t believe so. But sure, he’s cracked something very important about life. And then he looked around and said, what other big problems are there and one is development and the other one was consciousness. And he said, okay, I’m going to work because I can, I will work.
Elizabeth Rovere
On culture, I can do it. Yep.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
And so then this, I have the.
Elizabeth Rovere
License and the freedom to do it.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes. And the confidence too. And so they started with a very reductionistic approach, mechanistic approach to study consciousness. And then more people join and then there were like the social political aspect of science. I was saying it’s not just theory and experiments. I speak about the stool, the three legged stool. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise the thing doesn’t hold. So it’s not just have great theories and great data. You need kind of a social milieu in place for the thing. So that was put in place in the 90s. But we forget, it’s like we don’t realize that scientists study what they get funding to study. Right. So that’s just to say that 30 years ago consciousness science start walking again after 400 years of putting it to the side. And maybe that’s what we’re feeling now even in philosophy. Right. Materialism used to be the only game in town, but now we can speak about idealism, about panpsychism, about dual aspect monism.
Elizabeth Rovere
Let’s tell our audience too. So you’re saying there’s panpsychism. Let’s break that down and just tell people what that means.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
I’ll do my brief version to the best of my ability. But materialism privileges matter.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
We don’t know what matter is, by the way, but they will say matter is what things are made of and that’s the substance.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right. But we don’t know what that means.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
No. If you ask a physicist what’s matter? Well, it’s mysterious. Like there’s a great percentage of dark matter and dark energy. We say, Cosmologists say it’s just what’s missing for their equations to work. It’s 90 something percent.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
It’s not a small anomaly. Right. So anyways. But they would say the world is really made of matter. And the important thing here is that matter is that substance, that kind of stuff that has no purpose, no intention, no awareness, and also something very important that’s externally related, meaning that if that’s a piece of matter and that’s a piece of matter, they don’t care about each other. The only way they communicate is if they happen to bump into each other. So physics from this point of view, it’s like the art of push and pull. And by the way, that’s what prevents us from understanding these Kinds of experiences that seem to transcend space and time because often there’s no mechanism or contact. But that’s materialism. Idealism kind of goes to the other side and says, no, no, no, no. The only thing that’s really real or at the foundation, it’s mind. And then they need to explain how matter comes into being or how things appear. Material idealism has been made more respectable recently, and there are different strands and it’s always been there, but now it’s been integrated through the work of Bernardo Castro, for instance, who has insisted a lot on it. He’s hammered it and hammered it and also brought into dialogue with research in the neurosciences and so on to say, well, this is not just a viable option. It seems like it’s preferable than good old materialism, which is very promissory. It always promises. That’s also important to say the trick, the business trick of materialism is to say, not yet, always tomorrow. I joke. It’s always tomorrow. We are on the verge. Just give us a few more million or billions and we’ll figure it out. They promised that when we would sequence our genomes, we would know everything. Disneyland of curing. And then, oh, it’s a bit more complicated, but just give us more time. We got it. We just need to figure out the details. So that’s the trick of materialism. It becomes promissory materialism. Okay, idealism. But then in between there are other isms. Another one is pan experientialism. And sorry about that, but pan means everywhere. So it’s the idea that experience, or a proto form of psyche, is everywhere in the universe. But then the materialists make fun. This is like a little Game of Thrones. Yeah, this could be told in this fashion. Then the materialists make fun of the pan experientialists and say, so you’re saying this glass of water is conscious? Ha ha ha. It’s like, no, we can be more sophisticated than that. But the idea is we start with experience everywhere, but then the pan experientialists have other problems to solve, which is, well, so how do you make. I have my own experience and you have yours. And so what’s cutting them and what’s saying from here, there also, when objects or when get together, how do they create greater minds and so on. So they also have the philosophical problems. And then maybe another ism we can mention is dual aspect monism. Monism, there’s just one thing, but it has two aspects. Dual aspect. It smells a little bit like dualism, but it’s not dualism. Dualism is the card, is the separation. It’s, in a way, Galileo as well. There are two things in the world. The forced divorce, the material stuff, and competence on exploiting. That is for science. And then the soul, and that’s for religion.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
And we’re all happy for some time now. Materialists make fun of dualists because. Because they say so. Then tell us how the body talks with the soul, you know, and we know souls don’t exist. And da, da, da.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, it’s kind of funny. It’s like, as you’re talking about, like, you’re saying Game of Thrones, like there’s this camp, this camp, this camp, this camp, this camp. And they make fun of each other, and it’s like, when do they listen to each other?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
They don’t.
Elizabeth Rovere
Because, you know, that’s what’s missing.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
I mean, we don’t know which one is right. Maybe they’re all right in some kind of interesting, integrated way. But how are you gonna get there until you actually can hear what the other person’s saying? I mean, it’s just kind of almost like, you know, couples therapy for ismists.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes, yes. With grievances, misunderstandings, ridicule. Ridicule. Different temperaments. Right. Different life histories. But then there are these dogmatic skeptics that they just want to debunk everything. And so apart from fighting them with reason and philosophy, you also need to understand where are they coming from? Maybe they feel betrayed because they believe something and then they turn out to be false. There was a scam and now they have this. Right. But you’re right. We should talk more. Not talk more, listen more. We don’t listen.
Elizabeth Rovere
I think you’re right about that. I mean, I wonder about that. I think that’s really interesting, what you said about feeling betrayed. Like, why do you ridicule or hate on something? It’s because it’s coming from someplace where you feel like you’ve been really wronged and hurt, you know? So it’s curious.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
An ego.
Elizabeth Rovere
An ego.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
And science practiced in a macho way, just like, yeah, well, let’s do it.
Elizabeth Rovere
And in academia, it’s a lot of. Like that.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes. For good reason and for bad reason.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
I try to integrate them. Like, sure. When you present in a seminar, you’re taught that when you finish, you’ll be beaten intellectually, and that should be fine. Like, it’s not against your person. Right. So we’re trained in this. In this sword of reason again. Right?
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
But also there should be other modes where we can listen, we can be more empathic, more entertain options. Do not seek certainty and clarity and closure so fast. And these are more feminine. And I don’t want to get into male, female, I just say feminine, feminine aspects. Right. Of the whole. But they are more silent and they don’t speak that loud and so they are not that visible. But great advances require that kind of understanding, listening of how nature works.
Elizabeth Rovere
When you say that, it makes me think of like contemplative learning. I mean, we don’t just learn through reason, we learn through like internal awakening, contemplation and you know, other ways as well. And I just think that’s. That part is missing. You know, someone was talking to me about the current state of our education, like pedagogy today and how children learn and what they learn. And it’s just like they, you know, we talked about this briefly, like kids are born and they have these great ideas and they have like this fantastical sense of things and they’re really alive. And then there’s almost this way in which they go through the education system and they, they unlearn so that they can be given what we think we know. Right?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And we don’t have that method where there’s that child centered or way in which awakens on the inside instead of just being imposed upon from the outside. And I think about your research on eov, which I would love for you. I mean, it’s basically being able to see without your eyes, which seems kind of like what?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
Could you just tell us a little bit about that? I think it’s really fascinating because I have a thought about it too, but I want to hear.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
All right, okay. So this is just one way of naming a phenomenon that we don’t know where to put and how it works. And you could even say whether it exists if you want to be skeptical about it. I’ve seen it firsthand and also third hand, you know, like we do the first person and second person and third. So I’m trying to study it objectively, but also entertain it subjectively. Which means trying to practice it myself or just listening to people who can do it and spending time with them.
Elizabeth Rovere
Doing both.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes.
Elizabeth Rovere
Is that what you mean by trans materialism in your way of studying, like looking at the experience and studying it more objectively?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes. What people say they feel they experience. Also the scientist, to the degree that that’s possible, experience us experiencing it too.
Elizabeth Rovere
So it’s the how, not just the what.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
It’s the how, it’s the method. I’m not even sure that the scientific method will remain like this forever. Like maybe the next update of the method is that we inject in it kind of a science of interiority. So it’s like you can map the structure of the world outwards and you can map the structure of your inner experience going inward. Right. And how do you make them both meet? So that’s the challenge for science. That’s the challenge for a science of consciousness.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
You want to honor what we’re studying.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s well said. Yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
They still think, well that’s the thing we need to explain or explain away with mechanism. It’s like, no, you haven’t got it. Like the new game is that experience is central. So that. With respect. So you were asking about extraocular vision. Yes, that’s one way to call it extraocular vision. Like you can see but without the eyes. It has had many names because that’s the name I discovered. It was given in Mexico in the 80s.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh really? Okay.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah, because I was studying this great neurophysiologist called Jacobo Greenberg who disappeared mysteriously and he was doing really pioneering neuroscience work on mind to mind communication. And one of the things he did was to learn how to teach kids to perceive their environment when they were wearing blindfolds. And of course that’s problematic too. And the skeptics would say any stage magician knows that you can use bl. So again, we need to navigate doubt and belief. We need to be rigorous and open minded. But anyways, the point there, and that’s why I am so interested in this phenomenon, is that if it happens, if it’s true, it immediately refutes materialism and it refutes the dominant paradigm in neuroscience which says mind is nothing but what the brain does. Because if I can perceive information beyond the five senses, which is what’s allowed anything else? Well, there are five and then there’s interoception and proprioception, but that’s towards the inside, that towards the outside. Because of this mechanistic view of nature. The only way I can know what’s going on outside is if it’s, you know, if it’s smell, if it’s, if it’s touch, if it’s hearing, if it’s vision. Now if I shoot, shut them all off and that’s the empirical game. Can you make sure everything is off? And if the person can still perceive information in a reliable way, then what’s going on? And the answer is we don’t know. But anyways, we don’t know. We need to study it. That’s why we need to study it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Something’s going on.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Something’s going on. And so I’ve seen kids and I’ve seen adult people in particular. I’m friends with a blind man with whom, you know, I ask him to do things and we check it out and we crank up our controls.
Elizabeth Rovere
Because you need to do it.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Well, yes, yes. And. Well, look, Elizabeth, some days I come back home and I think I’m a loser, stupid. I’m just burning the little reputation that I had, if I had any. Because, like, why are you studying this? But other days I feel I’ve just witnessed a scientific miracle and it’s emotionally disturbing. But it’s also fascinating.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Like, I saw one thing. Let me just. To give more specifics about it. So it’s related to remote viewing, this technique, these protocols that were used in the United States.
Elizabeth Rovere
The US was using it during the Cold War. Probably still is.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes. And they were asking people to, based on some protocol, again, with some codes to draw potentially like military bases or information that they needed for. Yeah, for military purposes. Anyways. So it’s related to that. It’s this ability to perceive something that’s out there. Now, the difference with extraocular vision is that this is not something thousands of kilometers away. There could be something that’s in the room or in a folder, like an image in a folder, and you’re just asking the person to perceive it right there. But you can do it in space and. Or you can do it in time. So one thing that really blew my mind is that you can ask people to draw. And what I’m going to say, it’s hard for me to say because it’s quite impossible based on most of what I’ve studied and learned. You can ask a person to draw an image, and when the person is finished, you can say, okay, now we’ll choose the image. So then you draw a random number and then from a pool, like the lottery, from a pool of Images, let’s say 30 images or 50 images, you select one and then you compare it. And then you need to have a system of judges who would score it. And they really coincide. If it’s once, could be chance. If you do it two times, three times, four times, and then you do the proper statistics. Well, it’s pretty amazing. It’s like they are grabbing that information not just in space, but also in time. Now. Yeah, your eyebrow went like this. Like, what do we do now with this. It’s really baffling.
Elizabeth Rovere
What do we do now with this?
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah, what do we do?
Elizabeth Rovere
Write it off, dissociate or you get an award.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Well, the award was to actually propose the idea and that’s of course good and it’s welcome. And also gives visibility and gives maybe some credibility. Some credibility, sure. I’m really grateful for the ions prize, the Linda O’Brien prize to study this also. Look, the prize was not to come with a result, it was to. That’s very interesting. I don’t know if people sometimes realize that. They say, oh, they’ve given you a prize for your findings. No, no, no. It’s an encouragement to just go and go into the unknown, really. Not just continue digging. This whole pretending you’re doing cutting edge science, it’s like no propose an idea. And actually the rules were you don’t even need to do it, just propose it. I love that. Yeah, that’s visionary.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s visionary. That’s beautiful. Like they’re giving you a prize because you are asking the question and you’re putting it on the table.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes. Ask a question and tell us how you would answer it. But we don’t know what you would find. And of course there’ll be problems along the way and big surprises. Why this question is important is because it’s like the prize is enormous. Like it’s the treasure hunt, but not treasure hunt in terms of. It’s a revolution in our understanding.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s a revolution in our understanding.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
It’s using science and it’s joke here. It’s using science to show what we already knew. It’s important because science is kind of, I can say like this. It’s like the idol is the religion of today and it’s valuable. So the task is to. I’m not sure if it’s. Demonstrate in Spanish. You can play with words differently. Mostrar or demostrar. Mostrari show Demostra is to prove, maybe just to show that these things are scientifically. And I make a lot of emphasis also in language, the adverb. This is scientifically true or demonstrated. But things can be historically true or juridically true or experientially true.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
What the only thing we’re trying is to put a scientific stamp on it. But if we don’t, that thing can still be real. We don’t have authority. We believe, like when we stamp it, it suddenly becomes real. And before it wasn’t. No, that thing is real. I think it’s pretty real now. Can we Bring it to our own system and validate it scientifically. Very interesting. I want to do this. So this is this tight line between what they accuse us of being, pseudo scientists.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
The prefixes are, you know, paranormal, pseudo scientists, supernatural. So it’s a fine line between pseudoscience and scientism. Scientism believes that unless it’s shown scientifically, whatever, it’s a myth. Right.
Elizabeth Rovere
So it’s this that becomes a dogma.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
It’s dogmatic. Yeah, it’s dogmatic or dogmatic or dismissive.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So in between. That’s the work we’re trying to do. Show it. But maybe there’s not. Maybe. Probably there are aspects we cannot address scientifically and others we can.
Elizabeth Rovere
I was just gonna say that when you were talking about that, about, you know, we’re just discovering it rather than creating it. Right. Like, we’re finding it. We’re discovering these things. It’s like. It reminds me of this T.S. eliot quote, which is about, like, you can go on these explorations and you come back to what you already knew, or you come back home. It’s like, oh, but I went all the way out there. But I kind of had to go out there to come back here. But it’s a discovery. I mean, it’s like it’s a finding of something that it exists so that we know. That’s why it seems so familiar, even though at first it might not.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yeah. And thank you for putting it in this way. It’s like, probably mind is everywhere, but we still don’t understand what the brain does.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
So we know the brain is very important. For sure. If they hit me in the head, if you drink too much alcohol, if you have. Yes. Your consciousness is affected.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
That’s a correlation. It can even be causal. But it doesn’t mean that the brain produces the consciousness. It could also be a filter. So maybe the only thing I’m asking my colleagues is to consider another possibility, that the brain is not productive, but it’s permissive of mind or consciousness. It’s like, wow, the brain is doing something very important. Yes, we knew that, but we didn’t really know what it was doing. It’s letting mind in as opposed to magically producing it.
Elizabeth Rovere
I think that’s fantastic. I love the edges going to the edges of consciousness or the edges of neuroscience, because it’s kind of fun when you think of, like, the flat world and, like, sailing off to the edge. It’s like, guess what? You didn’t fall off.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
Yes. Don’t go there. Totally. They say don’t go there. You just destroy your reputation, find nothing, even kill yourself in the don’t go there. And then a few crazy people go, and then they come back and look, not only didn’t I die, it’s full of treasure, opens the world.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, thank you so much Alex. This has been so fantastic to talk to you. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín
My pleasure. Thank you for coming here.
Elizabeth Rovere
I hope this episode gave you a glimpse at why Alex is one of the most exciting minds in the study beyond the pale. Huge thanks to Alex for sharing his experiences and perspectives with us, and thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and think someone else might too, please rate the show and consider sending a link to a friend. We’re excited to hear your thoughts. Share what resonated with you, and drop us a comment. We look forward to hearing from you. Follow us @wonderstruckpod on Instagram. Subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast player, and check out wonderstruck.org for more on our guests and events. Wonderstruck is produced by Striking Wonder Productions with the teams at Baillie Newman and Creator Aligned Projects. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelley, Eliana Eleftheriou, and Travis Reece. And remember, stay open to the wonder in life.
