Is The Caudate-Putamen An Antenna For Anomalous Information?

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Is The Caudate-Putamen An Antenna For Anomalous Information?

James Landoli at the Terra Obscura blog
January 8, 2019

What if there was physical evidence of a center in the brain whose configuration tracks with an individual’s intuitive capabilities?
 
In early 2018, researchers caught wind of a scientific study being done by Dr. Garry Nolan, Rachford & Carlota Professor in the Dept. of Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford School of Medicine, and Dr. Christopher ‘Kit’ Green, a physician in private forensic medical practice, and affiliated with the Departments of Diagnostic Radiology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the Wayne State School of Medicine and Detroit Medical Center.
 
(...) In late November of 2018 Dr. Nolan gave a presentation at Harvard Medical School's Consortium for Space Genetics entitled “Can Genetic Differences in Intuition and Cognition Drive Success in Space?” I caught up with Dr. Nolan to discuss the details of his presentation at Harvard for the contents and implications of this data. What I was told was both exciting and intriguing:
 
“We had groups of patients who objectively had a higher density of neuronal connection between the head of the caudate and the putamen.”
 
The caudate-putamen is a defined area in the brain based in the basal ganglia. Originally thought up until a decade ago to be mostly involved in motor control, more recently the caudate-putamen has been shown to also be involved with decision making, higher cognitive function, and intuition: non-conscious processing of sparse information. It is not too far a reach to assume that if humans did in fact have ESP capabilities, this area of the brain would make for a suitable candidate involved in processing information derived through anomalous means.

Is The Caudate-Putamen An Antenna For Anomalous Information?

James Landoli at the Terra Obscura blog
January 8, 2019

I wasn't sure what to make of that article. It looked to me as though the author might have been reading something about psi/anomalous phenomena into work that was dealing with (at most) a propensity to hallucinate.

But perhaps, if people were looking for neurological characteristics that might be tested for correlation with psi, this might be worth looking at.

The Anomalist has a link to a video interview with Garry Nolan from M. J. Banias at Cafe Obscura:



Banias also "curates" Terra Obscura, the site where the article quoted above came from. According to the Anomalist:
Banias and Nolan delve more deeply into a limited set of, well, deeper topics than is typical of many other interviews. Nolan's interest in the "caudate-putamen brain system" and how it may affect intuition and executive functioning comes up early. His instruction on how to talk about these subjects "in just the right way" to get the serious attention of "mainstream" scientists and academics has wide application for paranormalists.

Banias says the discussion is about "Nolan's genetic research, his interest in anomalous phenomena, and how science, Forteana, UFOs, and the paranormal may coexist in one complex (meta)physical system."

He talks about the caudate-putamen from about 11 minutes. 

Quite contrary to the title of the article quoted above, what he actually says (at 16:30) is:
"This might not be the receiver [for psi] - this might not be the antenna - that everybody's interested in, but this might be the processing place just downstream of the antenna, or at least might be directing how the antenna operates."

I didn't listen to much more, but from what I did hear I don't know what the evidence is to suggest either that it's "just downstream" of the antenna, or that it "directs" how the antenna operates, rather than that it is just involved in processing information from whatever source.

Eric Wargo has picked up on this, and writes about it in his latest blog post:
http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4399

He has corresponded with Kit Green and Garry Nolan about their work, and asked them "many questions". Evidently they emphasised the provisional nature of the work:
When helpfully answering my questions by email, they also stressed that their finding about the caudate-putamen in this sample has not been peer-reviewed, nor yet published, nor subjected to double-blind verification.
(Though in the interview with M. J. Banias, Nolan says the data were blindly reanalysed.)

It seems some aspects of the work are also "secret", which makes it even harder to evaluate. Something else that's not quite clear is how much weight should be given to their findings on remote viewers. Wargo says:
A sample of remote viewers for whom MRI scans were available all showed the same caudate-putamen biomarker.
But in the interview Nolan speaks of "a couple of remote viewers in the cohort", so perhaps not very adequate as a sample.

Incidentally, remote-viewing watchers may find this interesting, considering that the cohort consisted of "high-performing military and intelligence personnel who had suffered injuries from anomalous encounters in the line of duty." Is it known which remote viewers suffered injuries in the line of duty, and how it happened?