Psychic Ability 101: Stop Absorbing Others’ Pain & Discover Your Specific Intuitive Gift | Dr. Helané Wahbeh on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown | Reflections on Intuition, Dreams & Discernment (📖 ~8 min · ▶️ 1h:11m) [15 September 2026]

🧠 #Consciousness2.0 Explorer 📡

TL;DR: Dr. Helané Wahbeh joins Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen to explore channelling, intuition, noetic signatures and energetic boundaries. Three ideas particularly caught my attention: how we regulate our receptivity, why intuitive experiences take different forms, and how dreams change our relationship to imagery and the everyday self.

▶️ Watch the episode (1h:11m)

Guest: Dr. Helané Wahbeh, Director of Research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS).

[IMAGE 1 PLACEHOLDER: Hero image]

A note on perspective: This post brings together the episode’s themes, my reflections and related research. Spiritual meaning, practical usefulness and evidence of a proposed mechanism are different questions. I want to give each room without treating them as interchangeable.

1. When the Extraordinary Is Part of Family Life

In the episode: Wahbeh introduces her family’s spiritualist background and her childhood exposure to trance channelling.

Beginning with a family story makes the conversation personal. Before questionnaires, experiments and terminology, there are people trying to understand experiences that matter to them.

My reflection: The language available to us can shape how we describe an unusual experience. One person might call it intuition, another a spiritual encounter, another an unexplained impression.

I am interested in what those descriptions reveal, where they overlap and where they point towards different explanations.

A useful starting point is to distinguish:

What happened: The sensations, images, words or events reported.
What it meant: The person’s interpretation and its significance.
What can be checked: Details that could be independently investigated.

That approach lets us listen closely while keeping the inquiry open.

2. What Do We Mean by Channelling?

In the episode: The conversation explores differences between channelling, trance channelling and mediumship, alongside questions about the apparent source.

Here is a working vocabulary for following those distinctions:

Term	Meaning in this discussion
Intuition	An impression or judgement that arrives without an obvious conscious chain of reasoning.
Channelling	Experiencing information or expression as coming through oneself from a source beyond the ordinary personal self.
Trance channelling	Channelling accompanied by an altered state, sometimes involving changes in voice, behaviour or sense of agency.
Mediumship	A practice associated with claimed communication with deceased people.

[IMAGE 2 PLACEHOLDER: Intuition, channelling, trance and mediumship]

People may interpret a source as a higher self, a guide, a deceased person or another being.

My reflection: Three questions help me approach that material:

Is it meaningful or useful?
Is it accurate?
What supports the proposed source?

These questions can have different answers. Something can be moving and useful while its origin remains uncertain.

[IMAGE 3 PLACEHOLDER: Meaning, accuracy and source]

3. Discovering Your Own Style

In the episode: Wahbeh discusses whether channelling can be learned and why people describe different styles of intuitive experience.

My reflection: This connects with my observation that people seem to notice different things. Some describe images, others bodily feelings, dreams, an inner voice or a sudden sense of knowing.

Rather than immediately choosing an identity, I would begin by asking:

What do I experience, under what circumstances, and how accurately can I describe it?

That is where the Noetic Signature framework becomes interesting to me: it offers vocabulary for experiences that can otherwise be difficult to put into words.

4. The 12 Noetic Signature Factors

Related research: The 44-item Noetic Signature Inventory identifies 12 factors describing reported experiences. The explanations below are brief paraphrases.

Factors 1–6

Inner Knowing: A sense of knowing something without an identifiable reasoning process.
Embodied Sensations: Bodily or sensory experiences interpreted as accompanying intuitive information.
Visualizing to Access or Affect: Using imagery with the intention of obtaining information or influencing outcomes.
Inner Knowing Through Touch: Impressions associated with touching a person or object, sometimes called psychometry.
Healing: Experiences interpreted as involving healing through intention or noetic processes.
Knowing the Future: Impressions interpreted as anticipating later events.

[IMAGE 4 PLACEHOLDER: Noetic Signature factors 1–6]

Factors 7–12

Physical Sensations from Other People: Bodily sensations attributed to another person’s experience.
Knowing Yourself: Inner insight associated with understanding oneself or personal development.
Knowing Other’s Minds: Experiences interpreted as knowing another person’s thoughts.
Apparent Communication with Non-physical Beings: Perceived contact with deceased people or other non-physical entities.
Knowing Through Dreams: Dreams interpreted as conveying information beyond ordinary sources.
Inner Voice: Information experienced as an inward voice.

[IMAGE 5 PLACEHOLDER: Noetic Signature factors 7–12]

The distinction between factors 2 and 7 is useful: a bodily signal associated with an impression versus a bodily sensation attributed specifically to someone else.

The inventory’s initial validation concerns its measurement properties. It does not independently verify the paranormal interpretation of each experience.

My reflection: Several categories resemble observations I have made. Naming them helps me formulate better questions, particularly about dreams, bodily feelings and changes in awareness.

5. Energetic Hygiene: Openness With Boundaries

In the episode: Energetic boundaries and maintenance are presented as important parts of working with these experiences.

My reflection: This is one of the most practically useful themes. How can I remain open and compassionate without feeling responsible for everything happening around me?

“Absorbing someone else’s pain” can describe an intense experience. I would first record what I felt and the surrounding circumstances, then consider possible explanations.

Here is my own simple reflection routine:

Notice: What am I feeling?
Describe: Can I describe it without assigning a source yet?
Contextualise: What was happening before it began?
Pause: Do I need space, quiet or a change of activity?
Choose: What response is useful now?

A boundary can be gentle:

I can care deeply while recognising the limits of my responsibility.

For me, the practical question is whether a practice supports clearer attention, healthier relationships and everyday functioning.

[IMAGE 6 PLACEHOLDER: Energetic boundaries and the reflection routine]

6. Neurodivergence and Sensitivity

In the episode: The conversation raises a possible relationship between neurodivergence and psi sensitivity.

My reflection: I would leave this as a question to investigate rather than a choice between two identities.

Sensitivity, unusual associations and a vivid inner life can be worth exploring in their own right. They do not establish paranormal information access.

Questions I would want researchers to clarify include:

Which traits and experiences are being compared?
Are they measuring reports, task performance or both?
What ordinary sources of information have been considered?
Does the interpretation help people understand their experience?

The distinction matters because understanding someone should not depend on deciding immediately what label fits them.

[IMAGE 7 PLACEHOLDER: Sensitivity, experience and interpretation]

7. Intention and Personal Filters

In the episode: Intention, unconscious patterns and balancing intuition with intellect are recurring themes.

My reflection: Intention can help define what I am trying to do. Discernment helps me examine what actually happened.

Before acting on an impression, I would ask:

What exactly do I think this means?
What else could explain it?
How confident am I?
What would change my mind?
What are the consequences of acting on it?

I find this especially useful when an impression feels compelling. A strong feeling can invite attention without demanding immediate action.

8. The Crown-Aperture Metaphor

One image from this discussion stayed with me: the crown chakra imagined as an aperture that can open or close.

My reflection: This sounds to me like a possible way of deliberately changing attention or felt receptivity. I would explore it as an experiential metaphor while keeping the proposed energy mechanism open.

It also prompted me to separate words I had initially grouped together:

Attention: What is being selected or emphasised?
Awareness: What is present or noticed in experience?
Sentience: The capacity to have subjective experience.

Feeling more receptive does not necessarily mean becoming more sentient.

The question I find interesting is:

What changes when I deliberately shift from “open and receptive” to “centred and selective”?

That could be explored through careful descriptions of the experience, alongside measurable changes where appropriate.

[IMAGE 8 PLACEHOLDER: Crown aperture as an experiential metaphor]

9. Dreams, Visions and the DMN

My original observation: Some people seem to experience vivid visions in dreams when the everyday sense of self feels quieter.

I initially connected this with a quieter default mode network, or DMN. That connection needs more precision.

Related research: Dreaming has been examined in relation to spontaneous thought and default-network activity. It is too simple to say the DMN switches off during dreams, and the DMN is not interchangeable with the ego.

A better version of my question is:

How do changes in imagery, self-monitoring and the sense of self affect what we experience and remember during dreams?

This leaves room for both personal exploration and research.

For apparent dream correspondences, I would record the dream before checking later events, preserve the original wording and keep non-matches alongside matches.

The aim is to learn more from the experience without rewriting it after the fact.

[IMAGE 9 PLACEHOLDER: Dreams, imagery and prospective recording]

10. What I Am Taking Forward

The most useful ideas for me are:

A richer vocabulary for different intuitive experiences.
Boundaries that allow compassion without constant overwhelm.
A more careful distinction between attention, awareness and sentience.
Better records of dreams and impressions.
Willingness to revise an explanation while preserving what an experience meant personally.

I want curiosity to become more precise as it develops.

Explore the related AkashicNET pages:

[IMAGE 10 PLACEHOLDER: Closing reflection]