Neuroscience Expert Dr. Tara Swart: Evidence We Can Communicate After Death (Transcript)

And I don’t think it’s agreed what that might be.

So I actually did a literature review of several pieces of research about how many senses humans have, and we actually have 34 as we currently understand it.

The Shocking Truth About Human Senses

STEVEN BARTLETT: 34. And so what does this mean? Like, what is the cause? You’re making an assertion here? What is the assertion that you’re making, and what does that mean for the material sort of consequences of my life?

DR TARA SWART: I’m making a hypothesis based on both the analogy of the observable universe and the fact that we have this expanded suite of senses to challenge you and to understand that you are capable of much more than you think you are.

And, you know, you’re a really good case in point for me because you love rationality and data and science and you don’t really love intuition and the unknown, the unseen. So, you know, I think if I can convince you of anything by the end of this podcast, then the impact that that could have on society I think is huge. I mean, the things I found out are going to shock you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you mean by that?

DR TARA SWART: I, as you know, was a psychiatrist in the past, so I’m able to diagnose people and say whether they have a mental illness or not. In the past four years, I’ve been keeping a secret.

And there were times in that four years that I had to ask myself if I was in clinical depression, if I was psychotic, if I was manic, if the way that my consciousness was expanding. I mean, Steve, I’ve been part of teams that have locked people up and put, you know, had them injected with stuff against their will because of things they were saying. That’s not that dissimilar to things I’ve experienced in the last four years.

The Secret Revealed

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I guess we better get into the secret, because I sat here with you almost two years ago now, and we had a fantastic conversation. But there was something you didn’t tell my audience when we had that conversation that reached more than 20 million people.

There was something at that moment in time that you didn’t tell me, which was this secret you’ve been keeping. What is the secret, Tara?

DR TARA SWART: I lost my beloved husband to leukemia almost four years ago, and I’ve written this book which mentions my personal story. So, and I trust you. So I really wanted to come back on the podcast and just explain a little bit to people about what’s been going on for me for the last four years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So your husband, Robin, you met him 2016, and he passed away from leukemia in 2021. Now from 2021, what happened in your life? What was going on in your world? If I was a fly on the wall in your context, what would I have seen?

The Journey Through Loss and Discovery

DR TARA SWART: He’d been given two weeks to live, but he actually lived for three and a half weeks, and he died two days before our fourth wedding anniversary. So I was literally reading condolence cards on my fourth wedding anniversary.

If it wasn’t for the people that I have around me who became like a fortress, I don’t think I would be here today. You know, never having had that experience before, it was just so, so devastating. And even though I’m a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist, I just was like totally lost and broken.

And then I started seeing robins in the garden every single time I went to the window, both in Hampshire and London. I’ve never, ever seen so many robins in my life. Like, not before or since. I still see them sometimes, but I noticed it. I thought, of course, that’s what I want to see. I have no idea what it means, if anything.

And then about six weeks after he passed away, I was asleep and I heard a noise in the distance. And we had been burgled once. So I went to check it wasn’t the alarm in the garages and couldn’t work out what it was. Thought maybe it was birds in the distance. Went back to sleep. It was about 4am and then I got woken up by a massive thump to my shoulder.

I wouldn’t demonstrate it on you because it would be too much for me to hit you that hard. It wasn’t like a tap. So, opened my eyes and I could see next to my bed a very vague, hazy version of Robin, as if he was pushing himself through treacle to be seen. And I was just transfixed.

And I saw him become more and more clear. I could see the outline of his hair and his face. And then suddenly he just dissolved from the top down. And my eyes went like this. And I remember seeing his shins and his feet. And I was like up on my elbow watching, and I just gasped out loud.

In my desperation, I did consult a couple of mediums. And again I had that dual conversation. I said to myself, “This is the kind of thing that crazy, desperate people do.” And within the same breath, “It’s okay for me to be crazy and desperate right now. I’ve lost my best friend, my life partner, like my everything I thought about how the world worked has crashed around me.”

And I ended up not being impressed by the mediums. And just at some point, I can’t even remember when, now thinking: If it’s possible to communicate with someone that’s passed away, and he was my husband and my best friend, and I am all about optimizing my brain and expanding my consciousness, then I should be able to do it myself. That’s the start of my journey that I’ve written about in signs.

The Certainty of Communication

STEVEN BARTLETT: And do you think you found the answer?

DR TARA SWART: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How sure are you?

DR TARA SWART: 100%.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, if what you’re saying is true, then that’s a pretty, I mean, that’s a revelation, right? So many people have lost people or have gone through different types of loss in their life. And you’re telling me that through the work you’ve done over the last couple of years and the research you’ve done, you understand how to communicate with them in some capacity and you’re 100% sure?

DR TARA SWART: 100%.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So listen, here’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to challenge you in ways that I think the viewer might challenge you sat at home.

DR TARA SWART: Sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’m going to try and ask the questions that the viewer might ask because there’s, you know, people, this idea is quite a significant perspective shifting one. So my job in this conversation, although these are sensitive matters, of course, is just to try and play devil’s advocate where I can.

DR TARA SWART: And I just, I want to say that, you know, you know me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I know you.

DR TARA SWART: And you know that you’ve asked me to come back on the podcast several times and I’ve come when I’m ready, so I want you to ask me those questions.

The Beginning of Scientific Investigation

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So where does this journey begin then? So this, you suffer this tragic loss in your life, you go to the mediums, you’re let down by them. Where does this begin? Where does your research, your journey of discovery begin?

DR TARA SWART: It starts with this decision to, you know, try to communicate with him myself. There’s a realization at some point that it’s not a one way thing, that when people pass away, they also have to learn. So it’s like two people having to learn a language to speak to each other. Like two people who speak a different language having to learn a language that they can both speak. That’s how it felt.

Obviously, as a scientist, I then wanted to find as much science as I could to try to back it up, which really comes down to the science of whether the mind or the psyche or the soul can exist separately from the body.

And I will say that way before I even started thinking about this stuff, just the moment that he died, which he died in front of me, once he’d actually passed away, I remember a really strong feeling of looking at his body and just knowing that wasn’t him and that the essence of who he was, I didn’t know where it was, but it was not there lying in that bed.

Expanding Communication Beyond Death

STEVEN BARTLETT: And when did you realize that you were going to start to collect research and do research on this idea of being able to communicate in ways that most people don’t realize? We can communicate through signs. And also when you talk about being able to communicate through these 30 plus senses, is that just with the dead or is that with each other? Like, can I communicate through, you know, is there other ways that I can tap into these senses that you discovered through your research that will help me be more effective with the living too?

DR TARA SWART: I mean, I think it starts with yourself. So I think that the fact that if you’re not even aware that you’ve got 34 senses, then you’re obviously not consciously tapping into something that you’re not aware of.

And some of them are non conscious senses anyway. Things like the pH of your blood or like the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood, you’re not going to be conscious of those. You can’t necessarily exert much control over them. Although obviously if you slow down your breathing or you do a certain type of breath work, it could have an impact on those things.

The conclusion that I came to, so, like I said, I went to the brink a few times. I went to the brink. Let me give you the first example. I realized that the first anniversary was coming up on October 26th, and around, you know, a couple of months before that, I was doing the best that I had been doing so far, but I was very aware this anniversary was coming and I wanted to prepare myself mentally.

But from the 4th of October, I suddenly was in aches and pains all over my body, which actually lasted for six or seven weeks and was accompanied by me feeling so depressed that I actually had to look in the mirror and go through the criteria for clinical depression and work out if I was actually depressed or not. And I didn’t meet all the criteria, but I was in this physical pain. I could not understand why I went for a massage. It was so painful. I didn’t go again for a year.

So eventually I looked through my diary calendar on my phone and I looked back to October 4th, which was the day that it started. And that was the day that I’d taken him home to die. That was the day I took him home from hospital. I didn’t remember that date, but clearly my body had and the trauma was just re emerging as like physical pain.

And I only realized quite a lot later that I had to do some somatic work to actually get rid of the last bits of trauma that talking therapy can’t actually get to.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Somatic work.

The Physical Manifestations of Grief

DR TARA SWART: So body work, whether that’s massage or dance or art or craniosacral therapy or Tai chi, you know, like anything physical because basically there’s an area in the brain, it’s actually inside. So I can’t really show it to you on this, but it’s kind of inside there. And that part of the brain is to do with articulating speech. And it basically gets shut down by trauma.

So those sort of phrases like “I’m speechless” or “I’m dumbfounded” or “I have no words” indicates the fact that there may be residual trauma that’s held in your body that you can’t actually articulate and get out and solve through talking therapy. So it requires some kind of physical therapy. So that was obviously to do with my sense of pain. And it took me a little while to kind of put together what that might mean by really, like, tapping into why was my body manifesting pain. To sort of remind me of something or show me something.

But also, in the first couple of weeks after Robin’s body. Robin’s body was taken away the morning after he died. And it was just under two weeks till the cremation. In that time, I would wake up in the morning, and I would be absolutely freezing cold, like, shaking and shivering. And it was October. It wasn’t, like, mid winter. And I would blast up the heating when someone else was in the house. I would realize it was like a sauna. It was actually a bit embarrassing and had to turn it down and open some windows.

And Robin actually hated being cold. And he would have been in the morgue in a refrigerated drawer that whole time. And again, I think it was my sense of temperature that was kind of on the same wavelength as where I didn’t consciously think of where he was. But I was feeling freezing cold. So it was looking back, it was things like that that were coincidences. Absolutely.

But then over time, and I’m talking a couple of years, I could ask for specific signs and get them sometimes. At first, it would take a while, and then it became like it would happen that day. I could ask a question in my head and get an answer.

The Psychiatric Perspective on Grief

I mentioned having, you know, sort of, again, being at the brink of my sanity, having to question things. I was experiencing something called thought insertion, which in psychiatry is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. It’s when you have a thought in your head that you know isn’t yours. So I was experiencing that really vividly.

But can you imagine experiencing that? And at the same time, being a psychiatrist that is saying, “Right, Tara, you do realize you are having, like, a psychotic symptom.” And so in my research, one of the things I realized that maybe, you know, if you’re going through grief and you don’t know the things that I know, you can’t articulate to yourself that grief, in many ways, is like psychosis. It’s changing the levels of neurotransmitters in your head. It’s changing the electric and chemical, like, signaling in your head.

I just have so much empathy for people that have to go through that and don’t have the wherewithal or the resources that I did.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think one needs to cultivate their ability to see signs? Do you think it’s like going to the gym?

DR TARA SWART: Totally, totally. It took me years and like I said, I believe it took him years as well. So yeah, I say it’s like learning a language. But you’re right, it’s like going to the gym.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what does one need to do in that gym to grow their sign muscle?

DR TARA SWART: Well, it always starts with believing, right?

The Challenge of Belief and Scientific Rigor

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Do you think that’s one of the big issues in terms of being able to access these other dimensions or dynamics is most people just don’t believe in it. So I’m not even sure if I’d say most people. I’d say a lot of people don’t.

DR TARA SWART: Believe in it or they secretly do, but they’re scared to talk about it. Cause they think people ridicule them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Cause I don’t know, my brain feels like I need to have the scientific evidence of things for me to accept them. Because I think sometimes I worry that if I don’t have scientific rigor around my beliefs, then I would. I’m susceptible to believe anything and I’ll believe it in a spaghetti monster at the bottom of the garden and I’ll leave, you know, every religion in the world and every. And everything. And then I’m unanchored and then I blow around like a plastic bag in the wind and then I have no orientation.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I think, okay, rigor is the basis of my beliefs. I have to have some sort of scientific evidence.

DR TARA SWART: I know you do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. It’s not to say I’m not open minded because I’ve had my mind changed so many times in my life that one would be dumb. Now to not be open minded and to not listen.

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science

DR TARA SWART: I agree with you about rigor. I completely agree with you. My entire career has been based on that. But I just, you know, I was pushed up against a wall, so I had to think differently. And I think the question I posed to myself is, what if you had to think differently?

So the psychologist Carl Jung talks about, when he talks about the collective unconscious, he talks about those basically three main things that all humans experience, which is birth, life and death. And so we have this common experience which is actually part of our inherited gene and brain structure. So everyone who’s ever lived will experience those things.

But if we look at ancient wisdom for a start, we are made of the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen that came from the big Bang. So we’re all made of the same thing. Our ancestors lived in the cycle with nature. I think us actually having broken our connection to nature is a huge part of why we’re so disconnected and unhappy.

So if you think of the life cycle of a salmon, for example, it, you know, it goes through its life cycle and eventually its bones contribute to the phosphorus on the floor of the forest. So it never really goes away. In many other ways, our ancestors repeatedly saw the cycles of nature and therefore always kind of knew that everything gets renewed and nothing ever completely goes away. And I think that’s a really important thing to return to.

I think when we question things, which you’re absolutely right to do, I think we have to look at things that we didn’t think were true, that we now know are true as just ways of being open to the fact that things in the future might become obvious or known that aren’t known now. I think that is an important place of being open minded to sit at. And so, for example, want to hear about slime mold?

STEVEN BARTLETT: You tell me if that’s something I want to hear about.

The Intelligence of Simple Organisms

DR TARA SWART: So slime mold are single celled organisms like amoeba, who go about their daily life on their own very happily as long as their basic needs are met. But if, for example, they’re facing potential starvation, they will come together and form a slug, because the slug can move towards your vegetable patch, you know, a new food source, and they can survive.

Equally, if they are, if they are facing potential extinction, they will come together and form a sporing body like a mushroom. So that’s got a stalk and a fruiting body that can release spores that will go into the atmosphere to all different places where these new baby organisms can grow and thrive.

But if you think about it, the single cells in the stalk are sacrificing themselves for the greater good because there’s no chance that they’re going to get released into the atmosphere as a spore because they’re in the stalk. Some of them actually cheat and climb up the stalk to get into the fruiting body and displace other cells from the fruiting body, things like that.

And for example, the mycorrhizal network, which is how mushrooms and mycelium feed the roots of trees, even trees that have been felled, can be kept alive for centuries because the mycorrhizal network, which is the connection between mycelium and tree roots, can bring water and sugar to that tree stump to keep it alive. And trees and mycelium don’t even only do it for the same species. They do it because they’re part of the entire forest and its symbiotic relationship and they care about each other.

Things like this would have been like, thought to be fantastical 10 years ago. You know, we’re in LA at the moment and I saw the driverless car for the first time. Now, when I was growing up watching Sci Fi, I never thought I’d see that in my life.

So that’s all I’m saying that, and I’m saying it from the point of view of being a cognitive scientist. And I’m talking about the nature of consciousness. I’m not talking about other. Not asking you to believe, you know, other parts of science, but based on the fact that we don’t know everything. We’ve learned loads of things that we thought weren’t true before. I strongly believe there’s a benefit to humanity of raising this kind of question and having this conversation, which I ask you why it’s a taboo conversation. What, you know, why shouldn’t we be enlightened? Why shouldn’t we feel better? Why shouldn’t we be more connected? Whatever we’ve been doing up until now certainly hasn’t been working.

The Decision to Write “The Signs”

STEVEN BARTLETT: When was it that you made the decision that you were going to write a book about this called the Signs? Was there a particular moment in this process where you realized that you were going to dig deeper and that then you were ultimately going to share this with the world?

DR TARA SWART: I wasn’t intending to write a book at all, but I’d got to the point where I had something that I could share with people that I actually thought would be useful.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And at this point, you’re communicating with.

DR TARA SWART: Robin on a daily basis.

STEVEN BARTLETT: On a daily basis, yeah. Give me some colour to that. What does that mean? Give me some examples if you can.

Daily Communication and the Phoenix Sign

DR TARA SWART: Well, it either will be that, like, I’ll ask a question in my mind and the answer will come in my mind, but I know it’s not my own thought, or I’ll just get a direct, like, message from him in my mind that I know isn’t me. But mostly it’s the signs.

So I’ve talked to you about the first anniversary and how hard that was. By the time of the second anniversary, I was actually in America and I’d been filming in studio for a week. And then I was on the road on the Navajo Nation. And that was due to. I was due to fly out of the Navajo Nation on the second anniversary of Robin’s passing.

And by that point, I was feeling a bit like I’d completely burnt out. And I had a choice about how to re-emerge, you know, whether that was going to be in a good way or I wasn’t going to be able to make it. And I had this analogy of a phoenix rising from the flames in my mind. So on that trip I said, “Darling, send me the sign of a phoenix.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said that to who?

DR TARA SWART: To Robin? In my head. And I chose the phoenix. Cause it’s really unusual. So it’s not like if I said, you know, a dog. I’m probably going to see a dog on the pavement every day. But I chose something that is not an easy thing to see. And I was actually in Oklahoma City, where, you know, you wouldn’t expect necessarily to see like something unusual every single day.

Between my hotel and studio, I went through Chinatown and I passed a restaurant called the Phoenix Garden with a big emblazoned like, you know, sign. And on the way there, I had had an indirect flight from Boston, and the flight leaving Boston was late, so I missed my connection in Chicago and I had to spend a night in Chicago. And then I was late for filming and stuff.

And so when I was leaving to go to LA, I was leaving on a Sunday. And from the Monday onwards, I had a podcast every single weekday in LA. And so the team said to me, “We know that you cannot miss that flight. We are not going to put you on an indirect flight. We absolutely promise you direct flight to LA, so you’re fine from Monday onwards.”

We were in the middle of nowhere for like a week and basically my flight wasn’t booked because we didn’t know which airport we were going to be at. We arrived on the eve of the anniversary of Robin passing, and my flight was booked that day. And it was from Flagstaff in the Navajo Nation to LA. Flying on the day of his anniversary. No direct flights. I had to fly through Phoenix, Arizona on the day of his anniversary.

Addressing Confirmation Bias

STEVEN BARTLETT: You probably heard of that old analogy of when you buy a car, you end up seeing the car everywhere on the road. Like, I buy a new car and then I go everywhere and it seems like everybody’s got my car because of, do they call it confirmation bias in science, in psychology, where once you’ve got something in your head, you’re more likely to see that thing. I think they’ve done studies on this where if you are exposed to something or you’re told to think about something, then you’ll see it more in the world. How do you separate what you’re saying from that proven psychological phenomenon.

DR TARA SWART: I don’t. I say use it to your advantage.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But how do you know that wasn’t what was happening in your life? Because if you thought about the word Phoenix and then over the course of a couple of days, you’re looking at everything, but you’re only going to register the things that are emotionally resonant. You know, I might have seen Phoenix a lot of time over the last seven days.

DR TARA SWART: And it means nothing to you?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR TARA SWART: So I didn’t register it again. I would say the number of times this has happened, the sort of like how narrow I make the criteria. So, you know, sometimes I say I need to see a button or a symbol of a button or the word button, but it’s got to happen three times by 11pm tomorrow.

And one of my friends says that, you know, we share something, which is if you see a pair of lions and we send each other pictures of it. But she says it has to be if you went out of your way and you walked a different way and then you saw them, if it’s like, you know, the normal way that you go or somewhere that you know that they exist, that doesn’t count. It has to be if you went out of your way.

So I had a previous thing with Robin, which is about the figure of eight or the infinity symbol. And there’s a story in the book of how that was cropping up for me when I actually met him. But there was a day recently where I had some spaced out. I had three spaced out meetings in the day. So I thought, I’ll take the opportunity to walk for an hour between them all.

And for the last meeting of the day, I ended up walking past UCH, which is a university college hospital where he was having treatment. And that had been a really traumatic time for me when he was in hospital there. And I have, I will have to say I kind of avoided that area since then. I’ll tell you about a particular story that was like really traumatizing for me.

So on this walk to where I was going for the evening for a book launch event, I ended up walking past the hospital and I actually said in my head, like, “Why would you make that happen to me? Why do I have to walk past that building? I never want to see that building again in my life.” And again, I said, “You have to send me a sign.”

And by the time I got to Euston Station, so you can. People who don’t know can Google this. It’s not very far. There was an elastic band in the figure of eight lying on the pavement. And that means something to me.

The Science Behind Signs and Synchronicities

So the thing about this, this confirmation bias thing is it’s dependent on the reticular activating system, which is the system of your brain that filters out what’s not crucial to your survival and filters in what it wants you to notice. And so actually, one of the things I’ve written about in the book is the art of noticing. Because really we live in this world where life is passing you by at 100 miles per hour. You’re not noticing things that could actually be crucial to you thriving rather than you just surviving in this model called shared trait vulnerability, which falls under the field of research called neuro aesthetics.

So basically, creativity is a positive personality trait, right? But there is a high correlation between creativity and psychopathology, which is mental illness, particularly depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism. And there are quite a few high profile examples of creative people who had mental illnesses like Alexander McQueen, Kurt Cobain, Van Gogh.

So what that shows is that there’s an area of overlap of three particular ways of thinking that are underpinned by neurology that are the reasons that people with mental illness are so creative. And they are basically hyperconnectivity. So that’s, that’s two things that’s joining the dots in the material world of things that aren’t obvious to other people. But it’s also hyperconnectivity inside the brain.

So if you think about all these lobes, so heavy, if you think about all these lobes, the more lobes that are firing at the same time, and there’s also a cortex that’s known as the association cortex. So that one, you know, these lobes can be firing, but they’re not necessarily connecting up with each other. The more interconnected all this firing is in the brain, the more the brain opens up to new ideas. So that underpins creativity.

And also this usually really involves the visual cortex, which is in the occipital lobes. And that’s why sometimes people, whether it’s through psychedelics or, you know, sort of, sort of altered states of consciousness through creativity, can, can see things that they didn’t see before.

There’s also something called novelty salience, which is noticing new things or just noticing things of importance that you would otherwise have filtered out. And there’s something called attenuated latent inhibition or low latent inhibition, which is to do with that filter. And it means that the filter allows more things in than it normally does.

So you can see we’ve got hyperconnection, we’ve got noticing more things, and we’ve got the filter like loosening and allowing more things in. Now, if you’ve got a high IQ, high working memory, and you’ve got cognitive flexibility, which you can think out of the box, that’s a really good thing. If you’ve got a low IQ, you’ve got deficits in your working memory and you’ve got what’s called perseveration, which is you just go over the same thought process over and over again that can lead to you having a psychological crisis.

So I took that model and thought, if grief is like psychosis and I’m currently in a very vulnerable state, is creativity a conduit for me to get not only back to the state that I was in before, but into a state of expanded awareness where I can loosen the filter as I choose fit, I can notice things that I would have passed by before and I can think differently about how my mind works, how the world works, possibly what happens after someone passes away. And then I went and, you know, looked into near death experiences and terminal lucidity and dark retreats. I went down a rabbit hole.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what did you find in that rabbit hole?

Terminal Lucidity and Near Death Experiences

DR TARA SWART: At the border of life and death, usually within one to 24 hours of death, someone who has, whose brain hasn’t been functioning, who can’t remember the names of their own children, suddenly becomes completely lucid and says, “Stephen darling, come over here. Let me, you know, let’s have a nice mother, son chat.” And then that gives a lot of people hope. But usually that means it’s an hour or 23 hours till the person’s going to die.

We can’t explain that. How can a brain that’s irreversibly damaged suddenly function completely normally? There is no explanation for that.

With the near death experiences, I was particularly compelled by three stories. Dr. Mary Neal, an orthopedic surgeon, she’s in that Netflix documentary Surviving Death. She was submerged underwater for 15 or 20 minutes. She should never have been able to be resuscitated. She describes her whole journey of going to another realm, seeing, you know, a being of light, being told that her life isn’t over, she has to turn back and return to the physical world. Even though she could see her bloated body and her friends trying to reach her to resuscitate her, and they couldn’t.

Dr. Eben Alexander, who wrote Proof of Heaven, he is a doctor, he was an atheist, he was in a coma with bacterial meningitis and was pronounced clinically dead. And then basically came back and said that he saw heaven and he now believes in a God that is benign, that cares about the future of humanity. So for me as a doctor, hearing these stories from other doctors was really, really convincing.

Then there’s one story that Dr. Bruce Greyson told me. He’s a professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia who has done 50 years of research into near death experiences. And he told me the story of a patient in ICU who kept going into cardiac arrest. And he had a primary nurse, he was a young 20 year old nurse and they had a really close bond.

And one weekend she had time off for the weekend and he had a different nurse looking after him and he went into cardiac arrest and he had a near death experience. And in that near death experience, he saw his primary nurse. She said to him, “Your life isn’t over. You have to go back and get better. And please tell my parents I’m sorry about the red MG.”

So he wakes up in ICU, he’s got this replacement nurse looking after him and he says, “The strangest thing just happened. I had this experience of being in this other world. I saw my primary nurse and she said I had to come back. And she also said, tell my parents sorry about the red MG.”

So the temporary nurse starts, bursts into tears, runs out of the room, he has no idea why. Someone comes in and says what’s just happened. He explains and they tell him that his primary nurse was given a red MG for her 21st birthday, took it out for a test run, crashed it into a tree and died. Now, he didn’t know she was dead, but he saw her on the other side and she told him to come back.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the guy that told you this story, was who relevant to the patient who said that?

DR TARA SWART: Dr. Bruce Greyson. He has done 50 years of research on near death experiences. He’s got over 5,000 recorded cases of patients of his own that he’s looked after that have had near death experiences. And he also shared with me the numbers of cases that other people have on databases. So, you know, we’re looking at over 10,000 cases globally recorded at the moment.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is it that you believe based on those near death experiences like the red MG story, and based on this phenomenon of terminal lucidity?

The Mind-Body Connection

DR TARA SWART: So Professor Alexander Batthyány, who wrote Threshold about terminal lucidity, put it really nicely when he said, “Maybe at the border of life and death, we see something that is true all along, but we don’t, for whatever reason, see it or acknowledge it whilst we’re alive and well, which is that the mind and body can operate independently of each other.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: It is quite shocking. There’s this case from 2009, an 82 year old woman with Alzheimer’s disease who was non verbal and non responsive and had no apparent recognition of her surroundings or families for years. And then one day before her death, she suddenly sat up in hospital, looked around and recognized her daughter by name, spoke clearly, reminisced about the past, thanked her family for caring for her. Her speech was coherent, her memory was intact and her personality recognizable as though she had never been ill. She fell asleep that evening and died peacefully during the night. And what do you think’s happening there? What do you think’s happening there?

DR TARA SWART: It’s possibly, you know, partially explained by a surge in neurochemicals, but it’s not explained by how can those neurochemicals act if the physical neurons and synapses are damaged? There is no explanation. The only explanation is that the mind is not emergent from material matter. It’s not the mind, the thoughts, the emotions, the psyche cannot be solely emerging from physical matter. That’s the only explanation from what we understand so far.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so what is it that you now believe? You believe that our souls and our bodies are two separate things? And where does our soul live if it’s not living inside of me? So like, where is Robin?

DR TARA SWART: So I believe that you know, whether, whether you want to call it the universe, consciousness, collective consciousness, godhead, cosmic soup, I don’t. The word for it isn’t important. There’s somewhere that that energy goes and it still exists in some form. And if you believe in reincarnation, then you may believe that it then enters another body as a vessel and you know, has a different life, but it doesn’t go away.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you know.

DR TARA SWART: I’m going to say something that you’re. I know you’re not going to like, but I know because I feel it personally. I feel it from. I feel it like with the person I’ve been closest to in my entire life who I know would never leave me if they didn’t absolutely have to.

But I can back that up to the extent of I can say you can’t prove that this isn’t true. I can back that up with everything that I put in the book. And I’m not the only one. Dr. David Eagleman at Stanford says, you know, this idea of the brain being like a radio and receiving signals from outside, we can’t prove it, but we categorically cannot say it’s not true.

Professor Donald Hoffman suggests that space time is not the basis of how the universe works suggests that consciousness is the basis of how the universe works. We can’t prove that’s not true. And I find that really exciting. I mean, as a scientist, you’re supposed to challenge the status quo. You’re supposed to be curious. You can’t, as a scientist, believe that everything we know now is all there is. There’s no point to being a scientist if that’s what you believe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I asked you this question about the gym earlier on about, is it kind of like training in the gym? Are there things you think people could do to heighten their ability to. To speak to loved ones that might have passed or to heighten their ability to tap into signs?

The Journey to Receiving Signs

DR TARA SWART: So I go through this in the book, and I chose the order quite carefully. So I talk about neuro aesthetics, which is, you know, noticing beauty basically, if not, like, actually engaging in the arts. There’s a lot of evidence for engaging in the arts in terms of, like, increasing your novelty salience, which is noticing new things, which is part of the journey of opening up that filter.

And then there’s a whole chapter on nature, because I think a lot of signs come from nature, like butterflies, robins, sort of, you know, spiral formations, cloud formations. So noticing nature more can help you also to receive these signs.

And then community is a huge part of it. Because if I had this conversation with you and you totally shut me down and said, “It’s not provable, this is ridiculous, I’m not airing this episode,” that would have a very different effect on me to you even being open to, like, asking me challenging questions that I welcome, but also engaging in this conversation and sort of, you know, maybe feels a little bit like maybe questioning, you know, some things that you might do differently.

So those are three very important parts of, like, sort of part two of the book. Part one is more about what are signs? What are you missing? You know, have you been receiving signs already?

The Mathematics of Coincidence

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that I, when I was going through my sort of transition from, like, being religious to being agnostic, I’d say, because I wouldn’t call myself an atheist, is I was watching all these atheist minds debate and talk and stuff. And one of the things one of them said is that if coincidence didn’t happen in our lives, then that would be a miracle.

Like, statistically, mathematically, if at some times you don’t think of Dave and then the phone rings and it’s Dave, that would actually be more mathematically improbable than it happening. Sometimes if you think about, you know, if you had this on, like a distribution cover or something. It is likely, mathematically, that really unlikely things will happen sometimes.

DR TARA SWART: Okay, right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’ve always had that in my head as a way to sort of rationalize coincidence. So when coincidence happens, I think, well, probabilistically, really unlikely things have to happen. And if they never happen, then that’s a miracle.

DR TARA SWART: Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Does that make sense?

DR TARA SWART: Yeah, it makes sense.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Like, mathematically, you’d say, like, likely things happen often. Unlikely things happen less often. Extremely unlikely things happen way less often. Yeah, that’s like the nature of, like, maths, right?

DR TARA SWART: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when extremely unlikely things happen, I say, actually that makes sense because probabilistically, those things happen infrequently. They’re not happening every single day. Like, right now I’m thinking of, I can name 10 people. I guarantee when I go to my phone, none of those 10 people have text me. But if I do that every day, one day I’m going to say, “Hey, Steve, checking in.” Which makes sense because of the laws of probability.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah, but I don’t want you to do that. I want you to just, like, be open to naturally thinking of someone and seeing if that does happen or, you know, kind of. Or asking for a sign and seeing if it comes into your life. That’s all I’m asking. Like what? You know, just try it. It’s not going to hurt you. And I’m not just saying that to you, I’m saying it to everyone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how do you think that would benefit me?

DR TARA SWART: I think it makes you believe in something bigger than yourself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. And why is that so important?

DR TARA SWART: Because I think a life where all you’re trying to do is get through and meet your needs is life can be better than that. I think a life where you feel more connected to yourself, to others, to something greater, gives you purpose. There’s a lot of research that shows that having a purpose that transcends just yourself is actually really healthy and important.

Finding Transcendent Purpose

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is that for you now, that transcendent layer in your life? How do you define it? Is it a religion? Is it something else?

DR TARA SWART: It’s definitely not religion. I guess it’s spirituality and, you know, a form which will mean different things to different people. It’s definitely about caring for humanity.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it a God, A creator?

DR TARA SWART: For me, no. But 85% of people globally believe in religion under God, so it’s important. I think for me it’s about giving, like a voice of relevance and helping people to feel seen and heard, because I think that’s very lacking. And you know, I’m in the enormously privileged position that you have given me of being. Being able to do that. And I want to use that in a really, like, positive way.

Intuition and Signs

STEVEN BARTLETT: How does this overlap with or sit alongside what people call intuition? Because you talk about that as well in the book.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah, I know. There’s so much like. There’s still, like, so much else I want to say.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just keep going.

DR TARA SWART: So intuition is. I mean, intuition is what it is. It’s accessing inner wisdom. Right. But I’ve included it as a really important part of the book because I believe that it’s a way to receive and interpret your signs.

The Serotonin Hypothesis: How Trauma Lives in the Body

But I just want to go back to something I said earlier, which is about how trauma can be stored in your body. And, you know, to some extent it can’t be retrieved through talking therapy because there aren’t words for it because it’s actually embedded into the tissues of your body.

There’s a really exciting new hypothesis for how that might work called the serotonin hypothesis. So previously, I think it would make sense that if, you know, for example, when Robin was in hospital, I would sit in a very hunched over position and my fists would be clenched because I felt like I was fighting for his life all the time. And if I relaxed for a millisecond, he could die.

So it makes sense to me that those postural issues would show up for me later in terms of aches and pains and, you know, perhaps sort of. Well, not perhaps my, as my Pilates and yoga teachers keep telling me, like, issues with, you know, certain parts of my spine and stuff.

But the serotonin hypothesis is very exciting as a neuroscientist because a lot of people have heard of Bessel van der Kolk’s work and the book “The Body Keeps the Score.” And it makes sense kind of intuitively that the body does keep the score. And like I’ve said, there’s an amount of trauma that you can’t express, you can’t articulate verbally.

So we believe, we understand there are imprints of that in the body, but we’ve never really understood how that works. And I’ve talked before, I think, with you, about intuition through a process called Hebbian learning, which is neurons that fire together, wire together, gets pushed deeper and deeper into neurons from the outer cortex, the limbic system, the brainstem, into gut neurons. And that’s why intuition is called gut instinct.

And we understand that through stress postures, you could have bracing patterns in your muscles for, like, the trauma that you’ve experienced fascia is the connective tissue that holds your entire body together, all your organs, all your muscles. And until fairly recently, fascia was thought of as a vestigial organ. It was cut away in surgery without thinking of any that it would have any effect on the rest of your body.

Now it’s understood more to actually be an organ of its own and an important one. And the serotonin hypothesis goes some way to explain how the level of constriction of capillaries and the amount of nutrients that’s released to skin, fascia and muscle is a mechanism for how trauma is held in the body.

Releasing Trauma from the Body

STEVEN BARTLETT: And with that in mind, what do we do to get rid of that trauma held in the body?

DR TARA SWART: Physical activities. So dancing, singing, drumming, humming, chanting, massage, yoga, craniosacral therapy. And you’ll notice that the ones I started with are very related to ancient wisdom.

So our ancestors knew this. For example, in ancient Greek burials, they would wail and beat their chests. So they were getting rid of grief by, like, screaming, but also by beating their muscles and letting, like, trauma exit their body.

Advice for Those Who Are Grieving

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m very well aware that there’s probably a lot of people who have sent this conversation to a friend who is struggling right now, and that that friend, who has lost a loved one, potentially a husband, potentially a wife, potentially, you know, God forbid, a child or a grandparent or something, is listening to this because they are in search of answers for their own healing.

You’ve been there, you may still be there in some degree. If you were to advise them on their own healing journey, what advice would you give them?

DR TARA SWART: The first thing would be to not repress or deny how they’re feeling and, you know, really feel the emotions that, that have to come along with grief. I’ve, you know, I had amazing talking therapy, which definitely helped me a lot. So if people have access to that professionally, then great. If not, then, you know, if you’ve got close friends that you can talk to, then talking it out does help.

But I’ve really learned that there’s a limit to how much that helps and that some sort of physical therapy is really helpful as part of it. Those would be the basics, I would say.

Time in nature has been so healing for me. Some form of creative outlet, whether it’s making or beholding. So you don’t have to be good at art. If you draw a picture of how you’re feeling emotionally or a sketch of your loved one, it doesn’t have to be good. You get benefits from doing that. It’s an Creative outlet for your grief. That’s probably the second level.

And the third level to me is if you’ve got any inclination to receive signs or just be open to, you know, a white feather landing at your doorstep or a bird coming to visit you or something that means something to you, then that can bring a lot of comfort and guidance and joy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you also assert that things like being in nature, creativity honing into our intuition increase the probability of us receiving these signs.

DR TARA SWART: Mm, well, receiving and being able to interpret in a way that’s meaningful for you.

The Gut-Brain Connection and Intuition

STEVEN BARTLETT: Gut instinct. In the book, you talk about how strengthening one’s gut health can have an impact on gut instinct. Explain that to me.

DR TARA SWART: So the body is basically the physical foundation for, you know, all of your senses to be able to flourish, to your higher mental faculties to be able to flourish, and ultimately for, you know, whatever spiritual experience you have of life to be able to be at its fullest and best as well. So taking care of the physical foundations is really important.

And you know, we could talk about all the usual things like sleep and diet and exercise, mindfulness, stress management, but I want to really focus strongly on the gut brain axis because a lot of new research has come up since I wrote “The Source.”

So it’s actually, you know, we know a lot about this bidirectional communication between the brain and the gut. It’s actually a three way system, which is the brain, the gut itself, the gut neurons, and the gut microbiome, which is trillions of bacteria and fungi and, you know, organisms that are basically determining the health of our entire system because they’re connected to our immune system, to our skin, to our oral microbiome and the brain.

So the way that you, the most direct access you have to your brain is through your gut. The gut is the most direct way that you can influence your brain. And you can do that through exercise, obviously diet, supplementation, even like meditation and art and music therapy have a beneficial effect on your gut microbiome as well, which has a knock on effect on the neurons and the brain. And they communicate with each other many ways, mostly through the vagus nerve.

Understanding the Vagus Nerve

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the vagus nerve?

DR TARA SWART: The vagus nerve is a cranial nerve. So it comes from your skull. It’s Latin for wandering, because it’s the longest nerve that goes through your body. So it goes, there’s two, the right and the left, and they go all the way from your cranium.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s my cranium?

DR TARA SWART: Your cranium is the bone around your brain.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR TARA SWART: So inside that down your neck, they go through your diaphragm and to your intestine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll put a photo up on screen for everybody who wants to see where their vagus nerve is.

DR TARA SWART: Also, other nerves. So the nerves that innervate the gut organs, they’re called afferent intestinal nerves. They’re also involved in this communication. Then there’s hormones and there’s cytokine messages, which are chemical messages that aren’t hormonal.

Your immune system actually also produces neurotransmitters, and there are immune cells in your brain as well as. So those are all the ways that we know currently that the brain and the gut communicate with each other.

The Gut-Brain Connection and Intuition

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so what does this mean in terms of my gut health and ways to influence my brain? Does it mean that I need to be really big on my prebiotics and my probiotics to make sure my gut’s intact, and if I do that, then my intuition will be sharper?

DR TARA SWART: So that’s true. But I always like people to understand what’s behind that, not just mindlessly take prebiotics and probiotics. So what we’re trying to do is reduce inflammation throughout the system.

And so, basically, because the brain is a small organ in our entire system, but it uses up at least 20% of our energy, so it’s very vulnerable to what we call oxidative stress or free radicals. So every time there’s any turnover of cells in our brain or our body, basically, as we live the wear and tear of daily life, we release free radicals, which are molecules that can damage cells, particularly nerve cells.

And because the brain has such high turnover of energy, it’s particularly vulnerable to free radical attack. So reducing inflammation and putting things that are neuroprotective around it, like certain vitamins and minerals, is really important.

And the hippocampus part of the brain, which has high cell turnover because it’s to do with memory, laying down memories, and obviously, well into adulthood, we’re still doing that. That’s also very vulnerable to free radical damage. And that’s why we can get memory and cognitive impairments and dementias as we get older.

So the modern Western diet causes something called dysbiosis, which is that your gut isn’t in a good state, and that creates a cascade of inflammation and releases molecules, some of which can cross the blood brain barrier and therefore cause inflammation in the brain. So we want to minimize that as much as possible and put in as many protective and beneficial factors as possible.

If we’re doing that the system’s in what we call homeostasis, which is good balance. It’s kind of starting to take care of itself. It’s got all the nutrients that it needs, it’s hydrated, it’s oxygenated. That’s when you’ve got extra resources to do the higher mental functions.

And up until today, pretty much I’ve described those as being able to solve complex problems, being able to think flexibly, creatively, override your biases. But now I’m proposing that there’s more than that that we can do. There’s accessing levels of intuition that we didn’t know we had very much through the same mechanism of how I described trauma being stored in the body.

Hidden wisdom is also stored in the body. It’s not just in your brain. And therefore, the same therapies like beholding and making art, humming, drumming, storytelling, dancing, yoga, just movement, can help us to access that intuition that isn’t just in our brain and our mind and take us to a next level of intuition that’s not just cerebral, it’s physical.

Dark Retreats: Ancient Practices for Modern Consciousness

STEVEN BARTLETT: Use the word dark retreats. I’ve never heard that phrase before.

DR TARA SWART: So dark retreats come from a Tibetan religion or philosophy, but it’s seen throughout the ancient civilization. So the ancient Greeks and Romans used to bury people actually for days. And then they would come out and be like the seers and the mystics of that community. But there’s most research available in dark retreats because it’s still happening today.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is a dark retreat?

DR TARA SWART: A dark retreat is… Have you heard of silent retreat? Silent meditation?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah, my girlfriend went on one.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah. So that’s the kind of thing she would do. So basically you can go away for a few days to a few weeks and you’re just in silence and you’re meditating and doing breathwork. Most of the time in a dark retreat you are in pitch black for… I mean, you can go and do it for a few hours or a weekend, but it’s meant to be in sevens. So seven to 49 days. The monks do 49 days.

If as a person who’s interested spiritually you wanted to do it quite seriously, you would go for seven days and you would be in a room or a cave that’s got double walls, so it’s completely dark. And the reason for doing this is that not all of us can have a near death experience. Right? So this is a way of emulating. It’s the closest way of emulating that for anyone like you or I, to get access to the benefits of a near death experience, which I’ve outlined them all in the book.

So in a dark retreat, at first you sleep a lot because it’s dark, you’re releasing a lot of melatonin from your pineal gland. So you fall asleep in darkness, you awake in darkness and basically that kind of makes you feel more sleepy, so you sleep a lot.

After a couple of days you start to see like pulsations of light. It might be like little shooting stars or kind of just like little sparks here and there. And then eventually it feels like the walls are dimly alight. So in complete darkness you start to see light. Obviously there’s an element of hallucinating at this point.

And so after 3, 4, 5 days you will actually start to see animals, real or sort of fantastical. And eventually people see deities or beings like people do in near death experiences. And when people come out of these retreats, they experience many of the same benefits, like a real sort of joy for life, less fear of death, more compassion for other people, less fear of failing, so taking more healthy risks. So it’s a way basically of emulating a near death experience.

Altered States and Perception

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it therefore convinces you that there’s more than you can see in your day to day life. And therefore that expands your mind in a way that’s beneficial.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah, it’s another example of an altered state of consciousness. You can also get altered states of consciousness through conscious, connected or holotropic breath work and through the use of psychedelic plants as well.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we know that it’s not just a changing of our neurological state or the chemicals in our brain that are causing us to interpret things differently with our senses? Because, you know, we’ve all… I said we all, many of us have experienced having some kind of stimulant or psychedelic or some compound in a rave or a festival that’s made us see the world differently for a moment. And science would say that’s just the neurochemicals in our brain doing different things which are changing our perception. They wouldn’t say necessarily that it’s a different realm or a different dimension.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah, and I think you’re right. I think it is that. So as a neuropharmacologist, I understand as much as the research says about the… It’s mostly, like I said, in the body, in the brain, with psychedelics, it’s mostly 5ht or serotonin, 2a receptors. And there’s a level of hyperconnectivity within the brain, particularly, as I said, in the visual cortex here, which allows people to see things that they don’t normally see.

And I think the way to apply that in your life is that it’s a glimpse into what’s possible. Once you’ve experienced that, it could either be that you find other natural ways of experiencing that. So there’s a paper I can forward to you that shows that certain forms of conscious connected breath work produce the same effect as a moderate dose of psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms.

And this research came out after psilocybin was banned and practitioners thought, well, what are other ways that we can help people to achieve these altered states of consciousness? And personally, I believe that having like a completely awe inspiring experience in nature, or for me, like the ballet, particularly when I’ve been so lucky sometimes to sit in the wings and you just completely feel like you’re part of it.

I mean, I’ve literally had a spiritual experience sitting in the wings watching. Actually was one of my friends, the principal dancer dancing, just so overwhelming. It’s completely an altered state of consciousness. So there are other ways of accessing that, but I think it depends, like why you want to and what it means to you. But at minimum, these sorts of things that I’m talking about are ways of understanding that there’s more to life than what we know.

The Impact of Transcendent Beliefs on Happiness

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how does that meaningfully change, like the concept of what happiness is and contentment is and like living a good life is?

DR TARA SWART: So what I think is really interesting is that we don’t actually have to experience certain things ourselves. So there’s a lot of research that shows that students from various different areas of expertise who simply learn about near death experiences actually get some of the same benefits and that these can last for over a year later.

So understanding that when someone sees that there’s something greater than us, when someone sees the interconnectedness of everything, when someone understands how small some of their problems are in the greater picture of things helps people to be more compassionate, more grateful, kinder to others, less materialistic is really interesting.

And I think anything that we can do to help us free us from some of those chains that I think hold us down in the material world, particularly in the Western world, is it’s healthy for us physically, mentally, emotionally, but it also brings in this element of spirituality that I think is just so lacking in the world at the moment and could be so helpful because if we look back at the way that our ancestors used their senses and their intuition to interpret the land like a cloud formation, could mean that rain’s coming, but it could also mean that your ancestors were talking to you.

Just seems like such a beautiful way to live. And when we lived in Paleolithic times, we didn’t have spare resources for having fun, but we adorned ourselves, we danced, we told stories, we made cave art. So I think that just really reminds us that those things that are often seen as luxuries or frivolous, they’re not at all, they’re fundamentally important.

The Double-Edged Nature of Transcendent Beliefs

STEVEN BARTLETT: Believing in these things itself is good for us. Is that what you believe? You believe that believing in something transcendent, whether it’s spiritual or religious, is actually just good for us? So that’s reason enough to believe it?

DR TARA SWART: It’s reason enough to believe it, but I think it will naturally change what you do once you believe it. You’re not going to live in the same way if you believe some fundamentally different things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the ways in which it changes what you believe are beneficial to you. So are you saying that that is reason enough to believe it? Like, to want to believe it?

DR TARA SWART: I think it’s reason enough to try it, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, sometimes it causes people through human history to do awful things, right? To kill themselves, to strap bombs to themselves and do horrific things because they believe in something transcendent, it can also lead to destructive behavior.

DR TARA SWART: I mean, I don’t think there’s any evidence from near death experiences that that’s the case. I think I know that what you’re referring to is something that’s more fundamentally religious.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I was watching that… I’ve been watching… Jack told me to watch this capturing bin Laden documentary. So I was watching it last night. And these people flew themselves into buildings because they believe in, you know, they were obviously radicalized in various ways, but they believed in going to an afterlife that would be better than this one and that they were sacrificing themselves for the greater good.

So it’s just, it’s, I guess it’s a side point that just the belief in transcendence itself in some regard isn’t necessarily always going to guarantee our behaviors on this planet are productive.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah, and I was going to say, like, perhaps it’s something more dogmatic, but I think you’re absolutely right to raise that point. And I’m not trying to sit here and say I found the perfect solution and everyone should do this and it’s all good. Like that’s just… I know that’s not true. I’m not trying to say that at all. I think we should absolutely be questioning everything that I’m saying. And I will keep questioning the way that I’m living my life and keep trying to learn and grow.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I guess the point is just the belief in something transcendent. Does that make our lives necessarily better? I guess the answer is I can’t.

The Crisis of Meaning and Purpose

DR TARA SWART: It can, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m really obsessed at the moment actually with this idea of purpose and meaning because obviously we’re living in a society that’s more and more individualistic and independence is kind of vogue. And because of a variety of things that have happened over the last 50, 60, 70 years, we have more independence.

Women in particular have a lot more independence, which I think everyone is very, most people are very supportive of. We have more choice than ever before. And with choice comes independence. I can choose now when I have a family and maybe I couldn’t choose before.

And with choice and with freedom, I think some of our more short term hedonistic desires and temptations take hold and we end up sacrificing the tribe and shared responsibility and dependence. And a lot of our meaning came from those things.

So I feel to some degree that when we think about how we ladder up from me to my family, to my city, to my nation, and then maybe to my God, those layers have fallen away now. For many of us, it’s just me. And that’s causing a crisis of meaning and purpose in life because we’re kind of unanchored.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s your perspective on this? And do you think it’s true that we’re more unanchored than we’ve ever been? And how do you think we get back to that if we can relate to feeling a little bit lost and unanchored and the sort of prevalence, in my view, of people having more and more midlife crises and turning to religion or spirituality or something?

The Spiritual Revolution

DR TARA SWART: Yeah. Well, I actually called this in March 2020, and it’s on record because I was on a podcast and I said, “I foresee a huge mental health crisis, but we could choose for it to be a spiritual revolution.”

And so then obviously, the rest of the pandemic happened, and then there was sort of a return to society, which I think people found really hard mentally as well. And at the same time, there was the cost of living crisis, the wealth gap, a new war, the crime rates.

You know, certainly in London, just for my life experience, they had significantly grown for reasons that we’re all contributors to. But it changes how safe you feel in society.

And I’m a big fan of technology, obviously I’m a scientist. But it is ironic that we seem to be more disconnected than ever, when in one way, we’re more connected than we’ve ever been before.

And I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. I think the way out of that is a return to ancient wisdom, to true connection, which I believe can coexist with being technologically connected and advanced.

But yeah, I just think we’ve lost what it means to be human, which means really being in touch with yourself and being part of a community and caring about something more than just your own life and your immediate inner circle.

Defining True Connection

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is true connection in your definition of the word? Because I guess there’s false connection if there’s true connection. So what’s true connection and what is false connection?

DR TARA SWART: Well, I’ll just go over what I’ve said before, because it’s about connection to yourself, to others, and the world or something greater. And it’s about something that’s deep and not transactional. It’s about something that’s meaningful. It’s about something that’s altruistic. I think it’s about contributing.

The Hospital Trigger

STEVEN BARTLETT: That day when you walked past the hospital, what did you experience?

DR TARA SWART: It triggers me seeing that building and I just, I had obviously looked on Google Maps, but not really realized that I would walk past it. And if I had realized, I would have walked a different way.

And I remember just thinking, it’s unfair that I had to see this building. It was unnecessarily a trigger for me. And obviously saying to Robin, “You need to send me a sign.”

But there’s a reason for that, which is, I mean, I went to that hospital every day for a month for his first day, and I think about three weeks for the second one. But he had two admissions to ICU and one of them I’d been to visit him for the day. He’d been bedridden for quite a few weeks by then.

And I came home, I was just sort of de-escalating and sitting on the sofa and getting ready for the evening. And then suddenly I saw the emergency line was calling and I could hear them saying his heart rate went up to 200. ICU were here now. We did a crash call and they’re just talking, talking, talking.

And I suddenly just said, “Should I come back to the hospital?” And she said, “Yes,” in a tone of voice that was like, you need to get here as quickly as possible.

Got in the Uber, it’s a 30 minute Uber ride from my house, and messaged my best friend and said, “I’ve got to rush back to the hospital.” He was on the 15th floor. So I was waiting for the lift. Got up there, saw the matron coming to unlock the door and I just said, “Is he in his room?” And she said, “Yes, he’s in his room.” But her face looked like not good.

Ran round and saw all the machinery from ICU in the corridor with a hundred wires coming out of the room. Ran into the room and just saw Robin sat up in bed, huge smile when he saw me. And he just said to me, “When I thought this was the end, I just kept thinking, please let me see her face one more time.”

And after that he did get a bit better. But then, well, in that first admission, eventually I said to him, “You’ve got to start sitting up.” Well, the doctor said, “You’ve got to sit out of bed.” And the therapist had come round, he said, “I don’t want therapy, I’ve got you.” So I took the therapy. The reflexology lady came round, he pretended he was asleep.

And eventually I said, “Darling, you’ve got to play the game. I cannot do this by myself. And you can’t just keep lying in bed. You’ve got to sit up.” So he got helped into the chair.

And that day, when I went to say goodbye to him, I hugged him face to face. And I didn’t quite realize that the whole time I’d been kissing him from the side of the bed because he’d been in bed. And when we hugged face to face, I just burst into tears. And I had never shown him anything but a smiling face the whole time.

And I left, and I just got this barrage of text messages saying, “I’m not spending one more night away from you. I’m wasting away in this hospital when I could be with you. When you come in tomorrow, we’re going to tell the doctors that I’m leaving.”

The Decision to Leave Hospital

So I thought, okay. Came in the next day, it’s ward round. And I was pretty much part of the ward round. The consultant would say everything and then say, “Is that okay, Tara?” kind of thing.

And he said, “I want to leave. I’m leaving today. I want to be at home with my wife tonight.” And she was very clever. She looked at me and said, “What do you think, Tara?” because she knew I would never put him in danger.

But also, I’m standing in front of the man that I love, and I’m either going to tell him that I don’t trust him, or I don’t trust his decision making, the person who always, always had my back, or I’m going to have to show him that I have his back just like he always had mine.

And I said to her, “I understand why you wouldn’t be in favor of this, but I think I can manage it.” And within two days, he was discharged from hospital. Off IVs, still on oxygen. We still had to go in to have the bone marrow tests and get blood transfusions and platelets and things. But he slowly started to recover. It was a slow recovery.

So normally within a week, you would get the second round of treatment. He wasn’t strong enough for that. But we got to the point where she actually said that we could go to Hampshire. And then he stopped using the walking stick. He stopped using the oxygen. We came back to London for the second round of treatment. She said, “I could not have imagined you would bring him back in as good a state as he’s in.”

But the second round of treatment was totally brutal and it didn’t work. So he was in hospital again for a few weeks. And then, on October 4, I took him home. Even then, the female consultant said to me, “The last time you took him to Hampshire, he got so much better. If anything changes, bring him back to London.”

And the male consultant gave me two syringes of bone marrow stimulating drugs and said, “You cannot use this without our permission. But if anything changes, inject him with this and bring him back to London.” So I still had a glimmer of hope, which I shouldn’t really have had. And he lived for three and a half weeks instead of two.

And right towards the end, because he was in a hospital bed on an air mattress, he said, “Maybe you could come and lie on the bed with me.” And he couldn’t move. He couldn’t raise a glass of water to his lips or anything, but he somehow moved his arm because I always used to sleep on his chest.

And then after a few seconds, he said, “I’m just really claustrophobic.” And I’d had to put the rails up to stay in the bed because it was so small. I was going to fall out. And I said, “It’s okay, darling.” And I think that was his way of saying goodbye to me because he died two days after that.

Finding Purpose After Loss

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s on your mind?

DR TARA SWART: Just very sad. I don’t want him to get forgotten. I’ve dedicated my book to him. But I also know, because we’ve had this conversation that there’s something. There’s still something that I have to do in this life, which was the reason that I had to stay.

So yeah, I think there’s a purpose to fulfill that Robin wants me to. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Love After Loss

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you think about falling in love again? Because I played out the horrific thought, myself, in my own life, of losing my partner and how difficult it would, it appears to be from this vantage point to fall in love again and meet people and to think about those things again. How do you think about that?

DR TARA SWART: So I actually experienced unconditional love, which I didn’t believe in. So the first time Robin said to me, “I love you unconditionally,” because I had some baggage from a previous relationship, I said, “Don’t say that, because I don’t think that exists.” And he never said it again. But every day for the rest of his life, he showed me that it was true. So at some point, I just knew it was true.

I would say, obviously people say things like, “He would want you to be happy.” And I was still wearing my wedding rings for over two years and even some of his friends said, “You don’t need to wear them anymore.” But I said, “I want to.” And I wore them for as long as I still needed to.

I’m open to receiving love, but I’m not going to go and look for it, let’s put it that way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

DR TARA SWART: I don’t know. I mean, it’s not really my style anyway. But I think I’ve been so lucky with what I’ve had that I don’t need to. I’d be okay if I didn’t have something like that again. Obviously I’m too young to not want to have that again, but I also feel quite vulnerable. So I’ll just see how things go.

Advice on Finding Love After Loss

STEVEN BARTLETT: And if I told you I’d been through what you’ve been through, and I asked you the question, should I go and look for love again? What advice would you give to me if I’d lost my partner and I was, what, four years now away from that?

DR TARA SWART: Nearly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. What advice would you give me about love?

DR TARA SWART: I think it’s very personal. I think, you know, if you want to be in a relationship, that’s absolutely fine. If you’re not sure, that’s fine, too. I think there’s different levels of how long it would take people.

I do know that when, you know, the majority of voices were around, around me were sort of saying, like, it’s okay for you to do that again. That one of my friends who’s engaged to someone who was a widower, he said to me at the time, “I’m telling you right now, two years is not. It’s not long enough.” And that felt like a relief.

So obviously it’s almost another two years now. I, you know, I think, I believe that if love is meant for me, then it will come to me. So I’m not. I’m not. I’m just calm about it.

Personal Transformation Through Grief

STEVEN BARTLETT: How are you different? Look, what are the very material or, like, very obvious ways that you’re a different person on the other side of this? What would your friends say if I said, how is Tara different?

DR TARA SWART: Well, I think they would say that I’m a lot more like, fragile and vulnerable. Because. Because they’re like, very, very protective of me still.

I know they would. I know what they would say because some of them have said it, and I didn’t really like to hear this at first, but they said, “You’re going to be able to help so many people.” You know, the first time someone said that, I was like, I’ve been a doctor, I’ve been a coach, I You know, my whole, like, personality is about helping people.

I didn’t need my husband to suffer horrifically and die so that I can help people, but now I do actually feel that I can, and I want to.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what do you want to help them with, and who do you want to help? People that are grieving.

DR TARA SWART: Not just people that are grieving. I think, you know, people are struggling and suffering in different ways, and people really, really want to feel seen. And I think that’s, like, an important place where I would love to do something.

The Meaning of Life and Subjective Reality

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think I’ve got more and more curious about the idea that I might be wrong about subjective reality and how I see things. And so I wondered if there’s a clearer definition of the subjective reality that you see.

Like, do you think we are these spirits that inhabit? And then, like, why? Is there reason why I’ve come into this body? Is there some bigger karmic purpose as to why I live? This ultimate question of, like, what is the meaning of life in the worldview that you have? Like, what is the point? What is the point? Why did I need to live?

DR TARA SWART: I don’t know if I can answer that, but I’m going to. I’m just going to say, like, what’s coming to my mind.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR TARA SWART: Which is so, like, you and I might never have met in our lives, right? And for some reason, we did, and we had never met before. I did the podcast with you last time, but people cannot stop talking about the level of chemistry, as if we’d known each other our whole lives. And I’ve always said I felt like I was talking to my little brother.

And then that episode goes on to have the number of views that it does. I don’t believe that that’s random or a coincidence. I think there’s a reason for that. And for me, in a way, you were the worst person for me to come and do and tell this story to you for the first time, because you were the most skeptical person of all the podcast hosts that I can think of that I’m going to go on. So there’s obviously some importance to that.

I can’t explain it. I didn’t come here with all the answers. I’m just lucky enough to be someone with credible qualifications that’s had a, you know, an experience that most people don’t talk about, that I can open up for people that’s, I would say, like, all that it is.

But I want to add something else that I’m feeling is relevant as well, which is because of my friendship group and the kind of conversations that we have. I wasn’t allowed by my publisher to include personal stories from my friends. I had to source stories from people I had either never met or only met once, or were friends of friends.

So every personal story that you read in the Signs, which has the person’s real name and is written by them and gifted to me for this book are people that I don’t know. And they’re all saying the same thing. They see, you know, light disturbances when they think of their lost loved one, or they get unmistakable signs or robins visit them. Yeah, I haven’t made that stuff up. Like, there’s something to it.

I don’t know exactly what it is. I hope I find out before I die, but maybe I’ll only find out after I die. I don’t know.

Animal Senses and Human Potential

STEVEN BARTLETT: And is there any meaning to all this stuff? It’s kind of going back to the question I asked a second ago, because you said you think we met for a reason. And one could hazard any number of reasons as to why that was. Maybe it was because you’re going to go and help so many people and reach so many people with an important message, whatever, but. But I don’t know.

This is my curiosity trying to reach a conclusion, which is, why, like, why are humans here? Why doesn’t my dog Pablo have. Or does he have the same capabilities of seeing signs and communicating with.

DR TARA SWART: Oh, he’s got more capabilities than you in many respects.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, you talk about that in the book, right? You talk about pets and animals.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah. Okay, let me talk about that a little bit. So dogs and cats can smell certain diseases, and they can smell imminent death. So there’s something called hyperosmia, which is in humans. It’s the ability to smell more than the normal range.

So there’s a very famous nurse called Joy, I think it’s Milner, who smelt her husband’s Parkinson’s disease years before he was diagnosed. And her ability to smell that disease has caused a new swab test to be created that takes chemicals from the skin of people to predict if they’re going to get Parkinson’s disease.

So there are some outliers in humans that have, you know, they’re called super smellers, for example. Like, we’re not all capable of that. But some people are blind. People rewire the visual cortex of the brain in the occipital lobes here for echolocation. Humans aren’t built for echolocation. Bats and dolphins are. But people who are blind can use up the unused visual cortex to learn how to recognize how close objects are to them by how long it takes sound to bounce back from surfaces.

So basically, animals have senses that we don’t have. Some very rare people can have some of those senses that animals have that most humans don’t. We’re also capable of rewiring some of our neurons for senses that replace ones that we don’t have.

And I’m just going to bring us full circle, kind of where we started with. Can you suspend your disbelief by understanding that there are lots of things that we can’t prove at the moment, but we sort of. Science is on the quest to push boundaries, which is that Russell Foster suggested that the only cells on our retinas are not just rods and cones, which are for vision, but there was a different type of cell that senses the passing of time through the light dark cycle, and that’s how we create our circadian rhythms.

He was ridiculed by scientists who said, “We’ve been studying the eye for 150 years and you think there’s a new type of cell that we’ve missed out in all that time, and you found it.” And sure enough, now there are identified cells called melanopsin cells, which blind rodents can still keep to the circadian rhythm because they can sense the changing light and dark cycle. But if you put opaque contact lenses on them, they drift off the circadian rhythm.

So I’m not going to be able to give you an answer at the end of this podcast, but maybe that’s the beauty of everything, that we’re not at the end of knowing everything that we need to know. But there’s a lot of really interesting big question marks.

The Future of Scientific Discovery

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think we’ll ever figure out these answers? Do you think science will ever get there? Do you think there’ll come a day when we make discoveries that prove that many of the things that you write about in the Signs are in fact true? Like scientifically justifiable, repeatable?

DR TARA SWART: Yeah, I think so, but I don’t think we’ll be here at that point.

The Practice of Noticing Beauty

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m always just fascinated because you know so much about neuroscience and the connection of not just neuroscience, but spirituality and then also human psychology in general. The thing I’m always so fascinated about with you is that you’re able to tell me things that I didn’t know.

Like you said to me last time about looking into someone’s left eye and the fact that sweat leaks through the skin and that menstrual cycle sync up, and these are all things that are, like, really actionable. That have helped me to look at life differently. But also now I don’t think I’ve looked in someone’s right eye in the last two years, Especially when they’re like annoyed or something.

So is there anything else like that that you’ve become curious about or discovered or talked about since we last saw each other that might be pertinent moments?

DR TARA SWART: I think we’ve discussed it, which is like noticing beauty. That’s been a real game changer for me. That’s like gratitude to the next level.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s an active practice of going through life looking for something beautiful.

DR TARA SWART: And well, it was, but then it becomes a habit.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, okay.

DR TARA SWART: And it’s producing oxytocin. Just like gratitude practice does. So obviously it’s kind of self rewarding. So then you naturally want to do it more and more. But I notice I point it out to people more as well now, which is that I’m obviously trying to like create a bit of a like crowd effect. Not consciously, but I just can’t help myself. Like if I see something really pretty, then I’ll say, “Oh, did you see that?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Certain people do that often and they do seem to be the happiest people. My girlfriend does that all the time. She’ll stop the car because there’s a flower that we need to go spend 45 seconds looking at across the other side of the road. And to a lot of people it’s just a flower. And we’ve kind of almost become used to seeing flowers.

The Art of Noticing and Habituation

DR TARA SWART: Well, that’s habituation. So even if you walk past an amazing tree or an amazing building every day, eventually you’ll just not notice it because you’re habituated to it. So saliency is keeping yourself primed. Like what I call “the art of noticing.”

Processing Grief and Moving Forward

STEVEN BARTLETT: And where are you right now in terms of your journey of grief?

DR TARA SWART: I mean, much better is the first thing I need to say. Because obviously it’s been a long and dark time. I know that. I know I’m not there yet because there is a part of me that is like afraid to let my light really shine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Explain that.

DR TARA SWART: I think I sort of touched on it before that if I feel like, if I throw myself back into my career now because I’ve had quite a few years out and it becomes really successful, that there’s a level of guilt associated with that. But at least I’m aware of that. I’ve had a few conversations with close friends about it.

I have quite a timeline ahead of me because of book publication and book promo and then next things that we might do. So I think I just need to keep working on that as things unfold. I know it’s wrong, but it’s how I feel at the moment.

Envisioning Future Success

STEVEN BARTLETT: We meet up again in 10 years time. Obviously we’re going to see each other before then, but say we get together in 10 years time and this next season of your life has been a great success. What happened?

DR TARA SWART: Wow. I got over myself and I put myself out there and really shone and it actually did really help loads of people.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Look at the smile on your face as you say that.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah. I really want to say thank you to you as well, for everything.

The Impact of Open-Minded Conversations

STEVEN BARTLETT: The feeling is mutual, you know, it really is. You were transformative for this show. And everywhere I go still today, people come up to me and tell me about how that conversation helped them. It inspired them in some way, but also it helped them understand, as you said earlier in this conversation, that all that we know isn’t all that there is to know.

DR TARA SWART: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And just that, I’ve tried to play a bit of a skeptic throughout this conversation. I am naturally skeptical. But the other thing that’s from being a podcaster, the other thing that happens to you is you become more open minded. It’s almost this paradox if you think you’re going to learn more.

But actually, through the conversations I’ve had, I’ve realized that there’s so much that I don’t know, and actually that’s forced me more into an agnostic position than I was before. And what I mean by that is it’s forced me into a state where I can’t fall into the trap of thinking I know things.

So this is also why I find it hard to commit to any belief, like a religious belief or atheism, because I continually sit here over and over again and someone will say something to me and I’ll be skeptical and then I’ll reflect and then I’ll look at the research or the science or whatever and I’ll change my mind. And if you change your mind that many times, you realize that your mind should probably not be fixed to any position.

DR TARA SWART: I love that. I’m so proud of you for hearing that. That’s an incredible thing for people to hear.

The Philosophy Behind The Diary of a CEO

STEVEN BARTLETT: But it’s true, and I hope that of my audience, I sat with my team a while ago and I was saying, do you know what DOAC stands for? It stands for diversity. I get it. But it also stands for people that have, that are dreamers, that are open minded, which is the O that are in search of increasing their awareness. And that could be in any definition that you want to describe it, whether it’s awareness of health, psychology, who they are. And the C is about connection. So that’s really hearing your stories makes me feel like me too. I feel that too. I’m struggling in that way too. So that’s the framework that I think about the show.

And that’s also why I try and remain open minded to all things that I hear and let people speak. I’ve never actually said that before, but there it is, guys. And that’s why I’m so compelled by this conversation today. Of course I’m skeptical. I think skepticism is healthy. But I’m also open minded and that means that I’m willing to take what you’ve said to me today and to investigate it and run the experiments in my own life. And if I am open minded, maybe I’ll receive some evidence for myself. So thank you. Thank you for doing what you’re doing.

And also, as you said earlier, it’s much easier and safer in life just to sit in a box of the known. You’re not going to get any arrows. But it’s when people through history have dared to say that maybe the earth revolves around the sun or that maybe the earth isn’t flat, they’ve taken the arrows. But that’s pushed us forward as a society into a better way of being. So I always applaud those that have the guts to ask questions.

So I hope that’s the audience that I’ve cultivated. I hope they’re not too narrow minded or too fixed. But I’m sure they will debate and share their anecdotes in the comment section. I’m actually really looking forward to reading the comment section. I know on this particular conversation because I know it’s going to be full of stories and anecdotes and experiences which I think is going to be really enriching.

But I do ask everybody in the comments section to be open minded and empathetic and kind actively, which means replying to people and being kind because grief, no matter what your opinion is on it, is a very delicate thing. And we’re all trying to find ways to be more happier and more connected and to deal with the reality of our experience.

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. Not knowing who they’re leaving it for.

DR TARA SWART: Okay.

The Closing Question

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the question left for you is, what is the best thing that someone has done for you?

DR TARA SWART: Oh, God. You sure you don’t make these things up?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, it’s what it says here. If anyone wants to read it, it’s what it says in the book.

DR TARA SWART: It’s got to be Robyn showing me that unconditional love really does exist.

Final Thoughts and Book Recommendation

STEVEN BARTLETT: Tara, thank you. Your new book, “The Signs.” Beautiful book, by the way.

DR TARA SWART: Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Beautiful book. “The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts” will be out in September. So if you’re listening to this in September, then it’s out. And I’ll link it below for anyone that wants to have a read of this book.

The really, truly unique thing about you is that you blend all of these different perspectives into your own perspective and your own writing and your own research. And so in reading this book, it pulls everybody in. It pulls in, I think, the skeptics, it pulls in the believers, and it pulls them all into the same room to confront a new possible answer to the nature of reality that might just serve to help so many of us.

So I highly recommend everybody gives it a read, because if you’re someone that wants to expand your mind and think beyond the known, then this is the book, and this is the moment in time because of all the reasons you’ve said about loneliness and individualism and all these things that people need to read books like this.

So I highly, I’m so excited for it to be in the world, and I’m so excited to hear what everybody thinks and how they receive it. So thank you for writing such a wonderful book, and thank you for coming back. And thank you again for many years ago now, blessing our show in a profound way that pulled in a huge new audience, which has set us on an incredible journey. So, yeah. Thank you, Tara.

DR TARA SWART: Thank you.

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