The neuroscientist describes experiments on precognition, remote viewing, and consciousness, then broadens the discussion to language, quantum computing, and opaque government programs.
When Julia Mossbridge says the problem is not only figuring out whether precognition exists, but being able to say so out loud without losing credibility, the conversation changes tone. Her thesis is simple and ambitious at once: some abilities we call “psi” are not private magic, but phenomena to study with the tools of science. From there the discussion slides into who gets to decide what counts as serious, how language can mute other forms of knowledge, and why, for her, the future of research depends less on authorities and more on experiments.
Julia Mossbridge immediately puts her finger on the fracture that really interests her: not so much whether precognition exists, but whether it can be discussed without losing status. Her argument is that the problem is not a shortage of data, but the cultural threshold beyond which certain questions become almost unspeakable. In this frame, psi is not a private fantasy, but an area of observation that, in her view, deserves the tools of science.
I’m a scientist trained in cognitive neuroscience and computer science, and then I became interested in how time works in the human brain, especially how strange it gets when precognition comes into play.
0:56
I started thinking that people have these abilities, that they’ve been dampened, and that they can be developed. Some people have them naturally, others don’t, but there are people everywhere with these different gifts.
1:31
When Rogan insists on the value of a scientist who collects data on intuition and premonition, Mossbridge shifts the conversation to another level: institutional recognition. She says she has checked the controls, published in peer-reviewed journals, and yet sees her work disappear even from Google Scholar*, as if the friction were not epistemic but administrative.
It seems fascinating to me, but I don’t know whether it counts. Even when I spend years studying it and checking that it’s not a trick, in the scientific world it’s often ignored, or even actively suppressed.
2:09
If it doesn’t feel forbidden, if it doesn’t feel shameful, then you can do something with it. The cultural part matters a lot.
3:28
The divide is no longer between believers and nonbelievers, but between those willing to remain ignorant long enough to learn and those who use their intelligence as armor. Here Mossbridge pushes the argument into academia: her target is not competence, but the performance of competence, that need to seem already arrived that ends up suffocating curiosity.
The thing that drives me crazy about the left is wanting to seem smart and prove it. And the thing that drives me crazy about the right is wanting to be right. Neither of those things really lets us find out what comes next.
13:08
When you’re always busy proving how smart you are and how much you dominate a certain field, you’re not really talking to someone. You’re just trying to win that little verbal game.
21:31
Mossbridge says she went through a training in which the right question matters more than the brilliant answer. Her biology teacher, she says, had students write down one question “like Einstein” and one “from a two-year-old child,” then argued that Einstein looked more like the second than the first. It is a small pedagogical story, but it helps shift the center of gravity: science as an exercise in wonder, not prestige.
When I went to graduate school and entered academia, there was all this pressure to write the grant after about three-quarters of the work was already done, so that once you get the funding you can publish the papers that go with it. You’re not really discovering something, you’re telling what you already know as if you hadn’t looked at it yet.
9:35
I was told, very kindly, that if I took this psychic part out of my CV, I’d have a perfectly good CV for academia. And I thought: are you crazy? That’s the interesting part.
10:05
For Mossbridge, the point is not just that the mind exists alongside the brain, but that reducing it to the nervous machine makes everything else disappear. In her telling, the modern problem is having confused the ability to measure with the ability to understand, and having pushed out of view everything that cannot be translated into procedure.
I’m distinguishing between brain and mind. The brain is this physical piece of stuff, connected to the mind, but the mind is what we’re doing.
33:28
The problem is also that language can take other forms of knowledge away. We’ve moved away from these things and maybe we have fewer instructions than before.
37:40
From there Mossbridge moves to another thesis: culture, and in particular the obsession with displayed intelligence, can become a form of perceptual impoverishment. She says many conversations are not conversations but prestige contests, and links that posture to a loss of listening, humility, and presence.
People want to show everyone how intelligent they are and how dominant they are in a certain field. It’s one of the most infuriating things about conversations where people are not really talking to you.
2:08
Intelligence alone is not enough. The messenger matters, personality matters, and if someone is arrogant or rude, they ruin the message.
28:56
For Mossbridge, the point is not whether these children “believe” in telepathy, but that they treat it as a practiced form of communication, sometimes verifiable, not as a private fantasy. The discussion expands from her experiments with non-speaking students to a larger, more uncomfortable question: if language organizes consciousness, can it also screen out other information arriving before words? The claim that language suppresses intuitive perception thus becomes the bridge between her lab findings and the stories she tells about the young people she works with.
I think it’s absolutely there, and I think it is neuroscientifically defensible that it is there, but that language actually suppresses it.
1:00:55
We worry that the kids aren’t speaking, but in reality they may have access to more information than we do.
1:06:34
Her longest account concerns a series of tests with spellers and non-speakers, conducted away from the communication partner and the target to be guessed. In one cited case, a boy allegedly described a video by saying “it’s a beautiful sky” without seeing the multiple-choice questions, then added details that Mossbridge interprets as too specific to be lucky guessing. Her point is that these students are not just responding to stimuli, but tapping into a layer of information that most adults tend not to consider.
He wrote that he was ready. He said: “It’s a beautiful sky.
1:09:55
And statistically there’s almost no way to calculate how likely that is, because it could have been any video in the world.
1:10:45
If there is one thread tying the final hour together, it is this: Mossbridge tries to move the issue from “do strange phenomena exist?” to “what happens if time is not as linear as we think?”. From there she builds a bridge between retrocausality, consciousness, and a political practice of the future, in which love becomes both a scientific hypothesis and a tool of care.
I think you can do a physics of love. I want to think of it as something I can do physics or mathematics on
1:41:29
Her thesis runs through an almost totalizing idea of information: beneath matter, energy, and spacetime there would be an informational substrate containing the past and the potential future. Mossbridge says she sees signs of this pattern in precognition studies and in her own research, especially when people enter states of self-transcendence or love.
If you can get information about future events at above-chance levels... then that means information can leak backward from the future
1:42:25
This is where Mossbridge links her hypothesis to quantum theory. She argues that quantum processes should not be seen only as objects to trap and cool, but as more natural phenomena, already visible in photosynthesis and perhaps useful for rethinking quantum computing.
We’re trying to imitate classical computers with quantum computers, and we’re not taking these collective properties at the classical level into account
1:49:43
What does Mossbridge claim about precognition?
She argues that precognition is real, measurable, and more widespread than is admitted. She says she has seen it in experiments and in her own experience, even if scientific culture rejects it.
Why does she talk so much about ego and listening?
Because she believes ego makes science, politics, and even conversation less able to seek truth. She says she prefers doubt and listening to performing intelligence.
What role does she assign to language?
She says language helps us think more precisely, but can also reduce other forms of perception, including intuition and telepathy. She treats it as a technology, not a natural fate.
What does she mean by retrocausality?
She means the idea that the future might influence the present or the past in some way. She uses it to read both quantum physics and the psi phenomena she says she studies.
Why does she mention government programs and erased memory?
She recounts episodes from childhood and adulthood that she interprets as possible experiments on children with exceptional abilities. But she also says many of her reconstructions remain hypotheses, not settled proof.
Have a Nice Disclosure
Mossbridge presents her book as a way to talk about disclosure without waiting for an external authority. She says the audio version is read by her herself.
AI-assisted summary of PowerfulJRE's podcast, verified against the original transcript.