By: Lisa Hanning

It is that time of the year when the hours of dark overtake the hours of light in the Northern Hemisphere. That time of year when the plants and trees start to drop their leaves and the vibrancy of summer begins to slow down… signaling the coming death-like dormancy of winter. That time of year when many celebrate and honour those who have passed on, as well as the end of harvest and the coming of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, on October 31st. It is around this time of year that our minds turn to experiences and phenomenon not easily explained and so my mind turns to the question = could there be a link between acquired brain injury and the onset of psychic abilities?

I had never considered myself to be someone who has psychic abilities before my acquired brain injury. Although I wasn’t closed to the idea that some people had “a gift” of sensing beyond the norm. Sure, I may have had a feeling of déjà vu or a strong intuition that turned out to be right, once in a blue moon, but shortly after my brain injury these experiences – what some would call “psychic” or “psi” experiences increased in their frequency. I saw auras, around plants, trees, animals, and people, I would also, on occasion, hear a voice, one solitary female voice, but different from my own inner voice, and she would tell me things that were about to happen and then they did happen, sometimes days, sometimes weeks later.

I was afraid that people would think I was experiencing psychosis, and I did not at all feel that I was experiencing psychosis, although I was healing from a brain injury. I did feel that I was in touch with a reality, albeit a more extraordinary reality than the one that I had deal with prior to my Tbi.

The voice I heard, as I recall, always spoke to me from my left side and it did not have a paranoid or persecutory tone like the voices often do when one is in a state of psychosis, I was

not only afraid that people would think that I was deluded or psychotic, I was also afraid that people they would think that I was making it up, that I was “malingering”. So, I kept these experiences to myself until about 5 years after I had experienced them. As my brain healed my paranormal experiences faded and became non-existent.

So, the question is, were these experiences all in my head? I tend to think not. I theorize that because my rational brain was offline basically that I was more open to paranormal experiences. Research has been conducted on people who claim to be psychic mediums ( people who can communicate beyond the physical realms with beings and entities) with EEG machines and it has found that when mediums are connecting to other realms the part of the brain that creates our self-awareness as a separate entity goes into electrical activity much like what an epileptic seizure looks like on an EEG. While this increased activity is happening in a localized part of the brain, the rest of the brain quiets right down to little to no activity.

There are some researchers who have dedicated a great deal of their life’s work to looking at the potential connection between mind states and psychic abilities. Dr. Morris Freedman a neuroscientist who is the medical director at BayCrest Clinic, is one of those researchers and he has made various connections between injuries to the frontal lobe and the presence of psychic experiences. Another researcher is Dr. Edward Kelly who has dedicated much of his career to exploring the connection between psi experiences and the use of psychedelics, as well as the connection between deep meditation and an increase in psychic awareness. Increasingly researchers are starting to hypothesize that the health brain acts as a filter to the manifestation of psychic or psi phenomenon.

I will share one of my experiences with you dear reader and you can interpret it as you wish. It was a warm sunny summer day in the Kootenays of BC. My daughter, son, husband and I were

preparing to go on a month-long journey together. I was about two years into my recovery and still had a long healing journey ahead. I was fondly watching my daughter wish her dear cat named Luna farewell when suddenly, the female voice I had mentioned earlier, whispered to me in a kind and gentle voice that this was the last time that my daughter was going to see her cat. A couple weeks later our house/cat sitter called us and shared that she had not seen our dear sweet Luna for a couple of days and as it turned out, our Luna never returned home and my daughter never did see her cat again.

So dear reader, what do you think? Was this a co-incidence? Was it a hallucination or was an ancestor, guide, angel, or perhaps my higher self sharing what was to come to pass in the near future? To this day, I feel a sense of regret for not saying anything to our house/cat sitter about what I had heard. Would it have changed the outcome and given us more time with our dear feline friend, Luna? Who knows. And I guess I will always wonder.

My brain has made a near complete recovery from my Tbi and while a changed brain it fires on all cylinders again (so to speak) and while I do feel a deeper connection to my intuition and inner wisdom I have not had any strange psi–like occurrences since.

There is much more to learn about the mind and the brain and how they interact with one another and the potential to sense beyond what we currently believe is possible, beyond the perceived limitations of time and space.

References

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/esp-and-the-big-stuff/EB5D053AD29B8C763994C893FAABBE80# retrieved October 20th 2024

https://www.aphantasiaexperiments.com/blog/a-glimpse-beyond-the-unexpected-intuitive-world-of-children-with-epilepsy retrieved October 22.2024 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945223002733?via%3Dihub retrieved October 22. 2024 Could we have psychic abilities if our brains didn’t inhibit them? – ScienceBlog.com retrieved October 22,2024 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-leading-edge/202404/when-hearing-voices-is-not-a-symptom-of-mental-illness retrieved October 23, 2024