108. Removing the Materialist Blinders of Science – Mona Sobhani
Neuroscientist Mona Sobhani made a profound and brave inner journey. It amounts to a transformation, an awakening. She used to be a hardcore physicalist. Around 2018, in the midst of a life crisis, she began questioning the tenets of conventional western science. They didn’t hold when it came to explaining many nonphysical human experiences. So, she dove into the literature, did dozens of interviews and wrote a book about everything she learned and experienced on the way. ”I eventually became much more open minded”, she says. ”But I had an ego struggle. It’s hard to let go of this box of beliefs. You just ignore things that don’t match the beliefs. That’s how the human mind is built. My mind was constantly being blown, with each interview I did.” Mona’s ”Old me” would have dismissed someone’s story about a spiritual experience as imagination or misinterpretation. Her ”New me” will listen with curiosity and compassion. Everybody experiences the world in a unique way. It comes down to the first-person sentient experience, which is the hard problem of consciousness in science. ”In neuroscience, we don’t have any way of measuring how it is to be you or me. You just have to take people at their word”, Mona says. ”Consciousness is the beginning, the middle and the end. What else is there? You can’t really tell somebody that they didn’t experience something, even though we do that all the time.” She soon realized that you have to ignore a lot of evidence to make the physicalist paradigm work. ”And that’s not a very good model.” Mona Sobhani thinks there might be a paradigm shift underway in neuroscience. New papers present theories that say consciousness could be an energy field and that there is an interaction between the field and the brain. Some physicists today say things that intuitives have said for a long time and that are found in ancient texts. Mona’s book, Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, is packed with references to scientists, philosophers, studies and books. It covers every conceivable spiritual field. She has herself acquired personal experience from many of them, like intuitive readings, meditation, breathwork, psychedelics, astrology and tarot. Psychedelics can broaden your consciousness vastly, she says. ”The boundaries between you and the rest of the world get blurred.” ”It’s such a big problem that neuroscience only focuses on the everyday waking state.” It is difficult to find incentives for truly novel research in our current system, according to Mona. There is much bias and inertia. Scientists who apply for a grant must follow old research closely. ”You can only move just a little bit further. You must not shock the reviewers. True innovation is not rewarded.” The media is tainted with a similar bias. And when scientists communicate, it is often ”a disaster”, Mona says. ”They often say ’there is no evidence for that’, but that is misleading. What it really means is that it hasn’t been investigated. But the readers never know that.” Mona’s website Mona’s book