The Psychology of the Future: 30 Thinkers on What Comes Next

A free online video series gathers thirty of the people shaping how we think about mind, growth, and spirituality, and asks them a single question: what does a psychology of the future actually look like? The conversations run past ten hours, and they move across territory that rarely sits in one room together. Science. Meditation. Technology. The messy work of changing a human being from the inside.

Some of the sessions are easy to describe. Dr. James Hardt talks about raising I.Q. Dr. Rick Hanson turns his attention to what he calls the Buddha's brain, meaning what contemplative practice does to the physical organ behind our eyes. Ken Wilber takes up Integral Psychology and what artificial intelligence might mean for consciousness. Virginia Wright speaks to psychedelic therapy. Dr. Cheryl Fraser covers relationships and sexuality, which is a different kind of frontier but a frontier all the same.

The roster is long and it is deliberately mixed. Bill Harris, Dr. Daniel Siegel, Dr. Rich Fernandes, Jun Po Roshi, Rabbi Joel Bakst, Diane Musho Hamilton, Michelle Gale, Graham Hancock, Dr. Rick Strassman, Dr. Peter Pearson, Dr. Ellyn Bader, Lori Petro, and the husband-and-wife team of Dr. Gay Hendricks and Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks all contribute. Researchers sit beside meditation teachers; clinicians sit beside people who have spent decades studying ancient texts.

Threaded through the interviews are the harder subjects too: trauma, the direction a society takes when it ignores its own history, and the renewed interest in psychedelic approaches to healing. Living with some awareness of where we came from turns out to be part of the argument several of these speakers keep returning to.

Alongside the series there is a meditation recording offered at no cost. It is a genuinely free MP3, built to guide your brainwaves toward a relaxed state. The track rests on an old discovery. In 1839 the physicist Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, a Fellow of the Royal Society and later director of the Prussian Meteorological Institute, noticed something about how the brain responds to a particular kind of auditory stimulus. His observation sat largely unused until the 1950s through the 1970s, when it was turned into a working audio technique. Several people have since claimed the technology as their own, but Dove saw the effect first.

The recording applies that stimulus toward mindfulness and relaxation, and it is offered simply as a gift. If you want to understand the reasoning behind it, searching for mindfulness and the psychological effects of brainwave entrainment will point you to published studies indexed on PubMed.gov.

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