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Plenty of people want to switch on a sixth sense. Few stop to ask what happens if it switches on and then refuses to switch off. Dr Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, has spent decades running controlled experiments on telepathy, presentiment and remote viewing. Yet when someone asks him how to become more psychic, his usual reply is a question: are you sure you want that?
He said it in a 2015 interview that was only published years later, and he repeated it in a recent episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown. It is worth taking seriously, because it comes from someone who believes the phenomena are real, not from a skeptic trying to scare you off.
Why the old traditions hit the brakes
In December 2025 Radin published a short essay after a public conversation with Sadhguru. His summary of what he heard was that almost every spiritual tradition treats unusual perceptions as something that may appear along the path, but never as the destination. Chasing them, he writes, puts you and the people around you at risk. The worry is not that nothing is happening. The worry is that power can arrive long before the wisdom to carry it, and the combination tends to destabilise both the person and the community.
Sadhguru’s image, as Radin relays it, is a child handed a button that says not to press it. The full dialogue is on YouTube for anyone who wants the source.
Radin adds a modern problem. People once had monasteries, lineages and elders who knew how to hold such experiences. Most of us have none of that now, so the experience gets filed under whatever label is nearest: demonic, divine, a special gift, karmic punishment, spiritual superiority or illness. Each label carries its own damage, and none of them encourages careful thinking about what to do next.
It is telling that one reviewer of his book Real Magic observed that the negative side of psi being real is not discussed enough. The interviews are where the caution lives.
When the signal has no off switch
Radin says he regularly receives emails from people who are distressed by impressions they cannot control. Precognitions and telepathic flashes arrive on their own schedule, and the writers want it to stop. In his words this kind of uncontrolled openness can drive a person to the edge.
He puts it in evolutionary terms. Getting a warning that saves your life is a fine thing. Picking up the passing thoughts of every neighbour all day is not. Our ordinary waking state, he argues, filters most of this out for good reason.
Mayim Bialik pushes the idea further, though as her own speculation. She compares the overwhelmed psychic to someone on the autism spectrum who cannot filter the feel of clothing on skin. Her suggestion is that the brain’s filtering machinery may be what separates a manageable life from an exhausting one.
Can it be trained? Radin is candid that it is only partly trainable. Meditation helps, but he thinks a large share is genetic, and a large share depends on what your family allowed you to believe and express. People can improve up to a ceiling, and beyond that progress is slow. He estimates that perhaps one person in a thousand is naturally gifted.
Everything starts to look like an omen
The second cost is interpretive. Radin says the downside of sensitivity to precognition is that the world starts to look like one long sequence of signs. The skill, he says, is learning to tell the inner feel of a true foreshadowing from plain fear.
He tells a small story to show it. The night before the recording he heard owls near his home, which was unusual, and part of him wondered whether it meant something about the interview ahead. That is exactly the move he is warning about.
His experiments suggest that glimpses of the future are probabilistic rather than fixed, which he finds comforting. He once dreamed a vivid car crash, changed his route to avoid a risky highway entrance, and was then rear-ended at a red light in a minor collision. A mechanic suggested the dream may have spared him something worse. Radin’s reading is that the future he sensed was a likelihood, not a verdict.
Then there is the weight of knowing. The hosts discuss people who see disasters in advance and are left asking what they are meant to do with it, whom they could even tell, and whether they will be blamed afterwards. That is a heavy thing to carry quietly.
If you want to hear Radin make the case himself, here is the full conversation:
What it can do to the people who live with you
Radin’s own words stop at the individual, so the next part is my reflection, built on two things he does say.
The first is that these sensitivities seem to run in families. The hosts mention Highland second sight and the Hungarian grandmother who always had a story. Radin puts a good part of the ability down to genes and the rest down to what a family permitted. If you pry the door open, you may be opening something your children or siblings also carry, or you may be the first in a household with no language for it.
The second is the dynamic between the host couple on the show. One of them is far more tuned in than the other, and is sometimes thrown off by things the other never notices. The less sensitive partner finds this unsettling and does not see why anyone would choose it.
That is the quiet cost I wonder about. A spouse lives with a person whose mood follows signals nobody else can see. Children grow up beside a parent who sometimes announces warnings. A family has to decide, without any manual, how seriously to take the next one. A gift that looks private turns out to be shared by everyone in the house.
Radin even speculates that one day genetics might turn such sensitivity up or down, perhaps offering relief to someone diagnosed with schizophrenia who cannot stand what they perceive. That is his hope, not a treatment, but it shows how seriously he takes the burden.
Where help already exists
If any of this sounds like your life, the first step is not a technique. Radin himself acknowledges that people claiming flawless abilities may be deluded, mentally ill or fraudulent, so rule out health causes with a doctor first.
There is also a real professional field built around the experience. Clinical parapsychology prefers the neutral term exceptional experiences and treats the distress as a problem of meaning and adjustment, not automatic proof of illness or of the paranormal. The IGPP in Freiburg, founded in 1950, pairs psi research with counselling for people reporting such experiences. Such services are rare, which is the reason to know they exist.
Practically, the advice from Radin and his hosts is plain. Meditate. Learn to ask whether an impression is yours or someone else’s. Accept that you cannot follow every signal. Choose what deserves attention, because attention is the one resource you cannot expand.
Power after wisdom
Thomas Campbell makes a similar point in My Big TOE: psi is a by-product of lowering fear and growing in clarity and love, not a prize to chase. Radin’s essay lands in the same place when it calls for exploration without hunger for power.
So, do you really want to be psychic? The better question may be whether you are growing into someone who could hold it gently, and whether the people sharing your home would thank you for it.
