Episode summary
In this episode, host Julian Dorey interviews cognitive neuroscientist Julia, who reveals her experience as an unwitting subject in what she believes was a classified government program studying psychic abilities and radiation effects in gifted children. Julia recounts being enrolled in seventh grade in SOAR (Students on Active Research), a program where she underwent weekly counseling sessions she cannot remember, was given unexplained chalky pink drinks, subjected to strange hearing tests with tones, and tested with Zener cards for telepathy. When she requested her school records decades later for a federal security clearance, all teacher comments from grades 1-8 were completely redacted. Her mother, without prompting, confirmed intelligence agencies had been studying her. Julia connects her selection to her maternal grandparents' work at a Department of Energy uranium plant, theorizing researchers were studying whether radiation exposure creates heritable psychic mutations. After moving to Washington DC and filing a FOIA request about SOAR, she experienced coordinated interference including a suspicious job recruitment call exactly three minutes after withdrawing her request. Julia also discusses scientific research by Morris Friedman showing stroke victims with left frontal lobe damage can move objects with their minds above chance rates, suggesting the left hemisphere normally suppresses psychic abilities. The conversation touches on multiple intelligence types, precognitive dreams, and her father's severe OCD and abusive behavior. Julia founded the Institute for Love and Time to develop therapeutic technologies and advocates for disclosure through personal truth-telling rather than waiting for institutional acknowledgment.