Writers 
What If Your Brain Is Connected to Something Bigger?
This is the first of a four-part series exploring what Robert Epstein’s Neural Transduction Theory might mean if we follow the idea beyond neuroscience. Over the next four parts, I’ll move from collective consciousness to the soul, our perception of time, and eventually the question at the center of all of it: What are we connected to?
Look at something red. A stop sign, an apple, a book cover, whatever happens to be nearby. You know it’s red. I know it’s red. But how do you know that the red you see inside your mind looks anything like the red I see inside mine?
We can measure the light entering your eyes. We know what the receptors in your eyes are doing, and we can follow the resulting signals into the brain. What we can’t do is climb inside your consciousness and see what you see. We both learned to point at that color and call it red, but that doesn’t necessarily mean your experience of red is identical to mine.
I’ve wondered about questions like that for a long time, especially when it comes to consciousness. Where does the physical process end and the actual experience begin? Every once in a while, I come across something that doesn’t give me a new idea so much as make me look differently at an old one. That’s what happened when I read about psychologist Robert Epstein’s Neural Transduction Theory.
Epstein is asking whether we’ve made a basic assumption about the brain that might not be right. We generally assume consciousness and intelligence are generated somewhere inside that three-pound mass of tissue in our skulls. Epstein proposes another possibility. What if the brain is also functioning as a transducer, connecting us to a source of information or intelligence that exists somewhere outside the brain itself?
My first thought was collective consciousness.
Robert Epstein is a research psychologist, and his idea is called Neural Transduction Theory. The basic premise isn’t difficult to understand. We already know the brain receives information or intelligence that exists beyond the brain itself.
He calls that hypothetical source the OS, which can mean Operating System or Other Side. He doesn’t claim to know what it is, and he hasn’t proven that it exists. What caught my attention was how far he is willing to follow the possibility. Epstein and researcher Liancheng Zhao have considered whether the same basic connection might help explain things ranging from ordinary consciousness and dreams to genius, terminal lucidity, telepathy, claimed past-life memories, and even communication with the dead.
That is a pretty big leap, and there are scientists who think Epstein hasn’t provided nearly enough evidence to make it. Fair enough. Epstein says the theory can be tested, and that matters because eventually the evidence will either take us somewhere or it won’t. I don’t need Neural Transduction Theory to be right for the question behind it to fascinate me.
What happens if it.
