A Psychology of the Future
Welcome, and thanks for joining this re-opened run of A Psychology of the Future. More than 15,000 people showed up for the first round, enough that we decided to unlock the full panel again. The lineup pulls together people working at the edges of psychology, neuroscience, contemplative practice, and the harder-to-categorize corners of human experience.
A few threads run through the whole gathering. One is the brain itself, and what measuring it can tell us. Dr. Rick Hanson and Dr. Elisha Goldstein both come at this from a neuroscience angle, looking at how attention and practice reshape the mind over time. Dr. James Hardt takes it further into the territory of EEG and states of deep meditation, work he has carried on through Biocybernaut. Howard Martin brings the HeartMath approach, which reads the heart's rhythms as a form of biofeedback rather than treating the brain as the only thing worth monitoring.
Then there is the question of frameworks large enough to hold all of this. Ken Wilber's Integral Theory shows up repeatedly, and you can see its fingerprints on several of the other talks. John Dupuy applies that same integral lens to addiction and recovery. Diane Hamilton pairs it with Zen, as does Jun Po Roshi, who comes out of the Mondo Zen tradition.
Mindfulness turns up in a corporate setting too. Dr. Rich Fernandes speaks about how practices born in monasteries ended up inside Google and other companies, the sort of translation that would have seemed unlikely a generation ago.
Relationships get their own serious attention. Drs. Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson of The Couples Institute, along with Drs. Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, treat the work between two people as its own discipline rather than a soft afterthought. Parenting sits close by. Dr. Daniel Siegel connects it to self-awareness, and Lori Petro and Michelle Gale each make the case for raising children consciously.
Some of the most provocative material deals with altered states and the substances that produce them. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies frames the research side. Julie Holland, MD, discusses MDMA and post-traumatic stress. Gabor Mate, MD, ties ayahuasca to the kind of trauma that gets passed through families and societies. Dr. Rick Strassman revisits his work on DMT and the spiritual reports it tends to generate. A documentary preview, Neurons to Nirvana, gives a visual companion to all of it.
Stranger territory gets a hearing as well. Rabbi Joel Bakst links the pineal gland to ideas drawn from Kabbalah. Graham Hancock argues about the deep origins of human civilization. Herb Mertz talks about quantum REG technology and the Psyleron devices built around it, probing whether intention can nudge random systems. The Monroe Institute is represented by Nancy McMoneagle and Michael Langevin, carrying forward decades of experiments with consciousness beyond the ordinary waking state.
Peak performance rounds things out through James Arthur Ray, and Janet Attwood brings The Passion Test as a way of locating what actually drives a person. Hans Christian King speaks to spirit and relationships from a more intuitive vantage point.
Centerpointe Research Institute and its founder, Bill, round out the contributors, and several speakers have made free books and audio available alongside their sessions. Images and slides throughout were provided by the conference from public sources.