A Look Inside People’s Brains Who Say They’ve Had A UFO Encounter

[maximus otter]

A professor has been testing the brains of people who say they’ve experienced a UFO encounter — and these are the symptoms they display.

Dr. Garry Nolan, a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University who has published more than 300 research articles and holds 40 US patents, has spent the past decade analyzing materials from alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP).

His involvement with UAP began after he was asked to use his “blood analysis instrumentation” to help with cases of pilots who were close to alleged UAPs and “horrible” brain damage.

When asked if he could describe the more abnormal effects on the brains observed with the MRIs, Nolan said: “If you’ve ever looked at an MRI of somebody with multiple sclerosis, there’s something called white matter disease. It’s scarring.It’s a big white blob, or multiple white blobs, scattered throughout the MRI. It’s essentially dead tissue where the immune system has attacked the brain,” he continued.

Left - Normal brain; Right - Injury and resulting white matter disease. Photo: Anonymous.

“That’s probably the closest thing that you could come to if you wanted to look at a snapshot from one of these individuals. You can pretty quickly see that there’s something wrong.”

Approximately 100 patients, mostly “defense or governmental personnel or people working in the aerospace industry,” were analyzed.

Ultimately, his team learned the people, who they originally thought were damaged, had an “over-connection of neurons between the head of the caudate and the putamen.”

The number of people that had this “over-connection” led to the open question: “Did coming in contact with whatever it was cause it or not?”

https://nypost.com/2021/12/12/the-brains-of-people-who-say-theyve-had-a-ufo-encounter/

- Quoting from longer article here:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7n...nalyzing-anomalous-materials-from-ufo-crashes

maximus otter

​

 

[Sid]

A professor has been testing the brains of people who say they’ve experienced a UFO encounter — and these are the symptoms they display.

Dr. Garry Nolan, a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University who has published more than 300 research articles and holds 40 US patents, has spent the past decade analyzing materials from alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP).

His involvement with UAP began after he was asked to use his “blood analysis instrumentation” to help with cases of pilots who were close to alleged UAPs and “horrible” brain damage.

When asked if he could describe the more abnormal effects on the brains observed with the MRIs, Nolan said: “If you’ve ever looked at an MRI of somebody with multiple sclerosis, there’s something called white matter disease. It’s scarring.It’s a big white blob, or multiple white blobs, scattered throughout the MRI. It’s essentially dead tissue where the immune system has attacked the brain,” he continued.

Left - Normal brain; Right - Injury and resulting white matter disease. Photo: Anonymous.

“That’s probably the closest thing that you could come to if you wanted to look at a snapshot from one of these individuals. You can pretty quickly see that there’s something wrong.”

Approximately 100 patients, mostly “defense or governmental personnel or people working in the aerospace industry,” were analyzed.

Ultimately, his team learned the people, who they originally thought were damaged, had an “over-connection of neurons between the head of the caudate and the putamen.”

The number of people that had this “over-connection” led to the open question: “Did coming in contact with whatever it was cause it or not?”

https://nypost.com/2021/12/12/the-brains-of-people-who-say-theyve-had-a-ufo-encounter/

- Quoting from longer article here:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7n...nalyzing-anomalous-materials-from-ufo-crashes

maximus otter

​

Wonder if results would be the same for picking anyone of the street and giving them the same kind of analysis testing would produce the same, or similar results?

 

[catseye]

Wonder if results would be the same for picking anyone of the street and giving them the same kind of analysis testing would produce the same, or similar results?

Yes, what are they using as their 'normal'? Couldn't the argument be made that someone 'normal' may have had a UFO encounter that they'd blocked from their memory?

 

[Sid]

Yes, what are they using as their 'normal'? Couldn't the argument be made that someone 'normal' may have had a UFO encounter that they'd blocked from their memory?

What is 'normal' anyway, could just as easily be progressive damage caused by many other emissions, from all kinds of devices that surround all of us everyday of our lives in todays world!

 

[eburacum]

From the longer article;

As we looked more closely, though, we realized, well, that can't be damaged, because that's right in the middle of the basal ganglia [a group of nuclei responsible for motor control and other core brain functions]. If those structures were severely damaged, these people would be dead. That was when we realized that these people were not damaged, but had an over-connection of neurons between the head of the caudate and the putamen [The caudate nucleus plays a critical role in various higher neurological functions; the putamen influences motor planning, learning, and execution]. If you looked at 100 average people, you wouldn’t see this kind of density. But these individuals had it. An open question is: did coming in contact with whatever it was cause it or not?
For a couple of these individuals we had MRIs from prior years. They had it before they had these incidents. It was pretty obvious, then, that this was something that people were born with. It's a goal sub-goal setting planning device, it's called the brain within the brain. It's an extraordinary thing.

Nolan is all over the place in this interview, although that may be the fault of the interviewer.

I know he is in cahoots with the TTSA crowd, but he seems to be implying that this 'damage' is natural and innate, at least in some cases.

 

[Kondoru]

These are super interesting and provocative ideas but you are right, the article isnt clear.

 

[eburacum]

Elsewhere it has been suggested that Nolan is suggesting that people with this particular type of neural anomaly are more likely to see UAPs, or something.
Hmm. Needs more evidence.

 

[Analogue Boy]

It would be interesting to see the analysis from people who claim to have been visited by Jesus or Mary.
In other words, does the brain create the vision or does the event create the muffle in the brain?

 

[EnolaGaia]

This January 2019 guest article on the Silva Record blog provides a sort of reaction viewpoint on Nolan and Green's work. It focuses on the possible implications with respect to enhanced cognitive / intuitive capabilities and notes a possible correlation with 'experiencers' (people who report anomalous incidents and phenomena).

This article includes some slides presented by Nolan and Green, which help to set the context.

Experiencers, Unique Intuition, and Biomarkers

I’ve been fortunate enough to have slides shared with me by Dr. Garry Nolan (@GarryPNolan) a professor at Stanford University who has been undertaking some incredible work on a patient population brought to him by Dr Kit Green that might shed light on individuals with unique cognitive and intuitive abilities. The study was accomplished in close collaboration with Dr Christopher (Kit) Canfield Green who worked for the CIA between the 1970s and 1980s, and who is now a private physician in forensic medical practice, and is affiliated with the Departments of Diagnostic Radiology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the Wayne State School of Medicine and Detroit Medical Center.

The presentation itself occurred during the Consortium for Space Genetics at Harvard Medical School, so carries weight not only from the people giving the presentation but from the venue as well. The whole talk centers on one main topic with two relating subtexts. The leading reason for the talk is questioning whether there is evidence for biological indicators that identifies people with unique forms of intuition and the two subtexts being the intuition itself with related information on what’s known as “experiencers” ...

FULL STORY: https://silvarecord.com/2019/01/09/experiencers-unique-intuition-and-biomarkers/

 

[EnolaGaia]

The author of the 2019 Silva Record article cited above followed up with this May 2020 article, which takes the Nolan / Green neurophysiological themes and attempts to connect them with various works and traditions in (e.g.) ESP, parapsychology, etc.

EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION AND THE CAUDATE NUCLEUS

Bernard Haisch wrote in The God Theory that the brain may be a filter rather than an enlightener. It filters the entire wealth of information and restricts it down to simply sense perception. This could then lead us to assume an individual identity, similar to the "alts" described by Bernardo Kastrup. The people that are able to get a wider sense of reality might therefore be those with greater access to the informational realm and could be those with additional fibre connections in their caudate nucleus, the same people that Aldous Huxley called “visionaries, all of the time” in Doors of Perception. These additional connections could be a brain deficit, or indeed, an evolutionary stage increase. Their perceptions are widening beyond the normal bodily senses and starting to perceive a more complex reality and the information contained in things beyond their usual observed physical attributes. ...

FULL STORY: https://silvarecord.com/2019/01/09/experiencers-unique-intuition-and-biomarkers/

 

[charliebrown]

I am really confused.

Do UFOs give you the “ Havana Syndrome “ or fried brains ?

 

[EnolaGaia]

I am really confused.
Do UFOs give you the “ Havana Syndrome “ or fried brains ?

I don't think that can be considered a point made - or even proposed - in the articles. In the Vice article the interviewer drifts toward asking about the Havana Syndrome, and Nolan says he can't talk about that. It's anybody's guess what that means.

Nolan also specifically states there were patients / subjects examined for whom there were prior scans demonstrating the abnormal neural connectivity condition pre-dated whatever motivated scanning them more recently. He even goes so far as to indicate concluding they'd had the condition since birth.

The main theme I see in the interview (and the other articles I cited) is that people with this enhanced connectivity in the caudate nucleus / putamen may be more receptive / sensitive / imaginative in perceiving and interpreting things.

Nolan seems to dismiss the (original?) interpretation that the distinctive neural evidence represents "damage" at all.

 

[charliebrown]

Actually, just my opinion, people who experience paranormal events are predisposed when born.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Actually, just my opinion, people who experience paranormal events are predisposed when born.

That's consistent with what (I think) Nolan was trying to express - at least as far as the caudate nucleus / putamen is concerned.

 

[PeteByrdie]

This January 2019 guest article on the Silva Record blog provides a sort of reaction viewpoint on Nolan and Green's work. It focuses on the possible implications with respect to enhanced cognitive / intuitive capabilities and notes a possible correlation with 'experiencers' (people who report anomalous incidents and phenomena).

This article includes some slides presented by Nolan and Green, which help to set the context.

FULL STORY: https://silvarecord.com/2019/01/09/experiencers-unique-intuition-and-biomarkers/

The author of the 2019 Silva Record article cited above followed up with this May 2020 article, which takes the Nolan / Green neurophysiological themes and attempts to connect them with various works and traditions in (e.g.) ESP, parapsychology, etc.

FULL STORY: https://silvarecord.com/2019/01/09/experiencers-unique-intuition-and-biomarkers/

As much as it would be a partial vindication of decades of new agey teachings if it turned out some people really are born 'sensitive' and there's a way to diagnose it, when I was reading the original article, the same thing kept popping into my non-sensitive brain. At this stage of diagnostic imaging (almost my whole family has had MRI scans at some point), wouldn't discovering suddenly that a percentage of people, even a quite small percentage, had a brain structure that appears on first glance to be brain damage but isn't be a bit like finding out your house has three previously unnoticed large bedrooms?

 

[Analogue Boy]

Our history of myth and legend is largely based on sightings and reports going back to a time when people had the same health issues we have today but for the vast majority, without the corrective means we take for granted.
Long before we had blurry pictures to ponder over, many witnesses to events saw just about everything as a blur.

What is reality? I suppose a lot of what we see is a actually a blur. The eye is designed with a certain field of vision. It’s actually the brain that fills in the surroundings at the edges and what you think is behind you. And if you’ve ever had bad dreams or nightmares, you know you can never fully trust your brain not to try and scare the shit out of you at times.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Your final question first ...

No, such discoveries wouldn't be shocking signs of having missed something we really should have recognized before.

Believe it or not, there are ongoing 'discoveries' (actually re-definitions for what piece does what ... ) that constitute effectively defining 'new' organs. We see the whole, but we're left to our own devices to figure out the boundaries and functionalities of the components within.

The brain is even more complex (in terms of components per cubic volume and interconnections among those components) than the rest of the body. This relative complexity is amplified by the facts:

(a) we can't simplistically test individual neurons or pathways to clearly specify what does what, and ...

(b) the demonstrable effects aren't evident in the organ itself (e.g., you have to see changes in reported / demonstrated behaviors, perceptions, etc.).

 

[EnolaGaia]

As much as it would be a partial vindication of decades of new agey teachings if it turned out some people really are born 'sensitive' and there's a way to diagnose it ...

There are two ways or contexts for interpreting these findings. One is to frame things in terms of 'sensitivity', as if the additional neural interconnectivity somehow permits the person to perceive things others can't. This is the angle that's seized upon in the May 2020 article I cited earlier. This angle focuses on perception. At the extreme, it presumes "there's more out there to behold than most people can detect."

The other approach is to frame things in terms of what the brain is capable of doing in interpreting and contextualizing whatever it's perceiving (even if the perceptual inputs aren't really any richer than those of folks without the increasing interconnectivity). This angle focuses on cognitive processes (e.g., the aspects described in terms of 'intuition'). At the extreme, it presumes "what the senses behold doesn't mean anything compared to what the mind makes of it."

The former aspect is focused on whether you're picking up all the possible signals; the latter focuses on how much you can make of however much of the ambient signal stream you're picking up.

Maybe it's both; maybe it's more one than the other. It's too early to draw any conclusions.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Actually, just my opinion, people who experience paranormal events are predisposed when born.

Just an additional note ... Brain development is a process that plays out until the person is in their early to mid twenties. The first 5 years involve the most rapid development of the neural tissues and connections, during which the child's brain grows from circa 25% to circa 90% of its adult size.

Nolan only stated that some patients had earlier MRI (whatever) evidence available to demonstrate their atypical neural interconnectivity wasn't the result of whatever recent incident / injury / whatever motivated scanning them. He was probably stretching too far in mentioning the 'since birth' part. The atypical connectivity may have developed along the way rather than being pre-destined from the get-go.

 

[Frideswide]

As much as it would be a partial vindication of decades of new agey teachings if it turned out some people really are born 'sensitive' and there's a way to diagnose it, when I was reading the original article, the same thing kept popping into my non-sensitive brain. At this stage of diagnostic imaging (almost my whole family has had MRI scans at some point), wouldn't discovering suddenly that a percentage of people, even a quite small percentage, had a brain structure that appears on first glance to be brain damage but isn't be a bit like finding out your house has three previously unnoticed large bedrooms?

I'll add here that it seems autistics have a greater number of active connections in the brain than NTs. If I remember from 10 years ago, there is a stage in the development where most people prune excess connections. And then some of us don't!

Basic brain stuff is FASCINATING!

 

[eburacum]

Before we get too carried away with this hypothesis, Nolan only managed to find two people with this pre-existing condition, out of a sample of 100 witnesses. Few scientists would erect a working theory on such meagre evidence.

 

[charliebrown]

A long time ago I was having some face numbness which resolved itself, but I had a brain MRI.

The doctor said I had, since birth, an Arachnoid Cyst and told me to forget about it because it means nothing.

I have wondered if this situation affected my perception.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Before we get too carried away with this hypothesis, Nolan only managed to find two people with this pre-existing condition, out of a sample of 100 witnesses. Few scientists would erect a working theory on such meagre evidence.

Perhaps more importantly - he didn't report any subject for whom a prior MRI demonstrated "normal" caudate nucleus / putamen status in their past generally, much less some past point preceding any UFO (etc.) encounter.

 

[Kondoru]

Maybe he couldnt find one?

 

[charliebrown]

The “ third eye “ or the Egyptian symbol the “eye of Horus” can fit right into the bottom of our brains.

This connects us to the forces of the paranormal.

Some people can connect better to the unknown because of this shape in the brain.

 

[catseye]

I think it would take a mass MRI study (so looking at the brains of people with no symptoms of any problems, no reporting of 'seeing things' or 'hearing things' as well as those who do, in order to draw any conclusions. Everyone's brain is slightly different, only looking at numbers in the tens of thousands could really provide any answers, and those would probably throw up more questions again. For example, doing comparisons of artistic people's brains 'at work', writing, composing, drawing etc, and then comparing those to people who are experiencing a 'sighting' or hallucinations...

After all they tend not to perform many MRIs on perfectly healthy brains of people who report absolutely nothing.

 

[Sid]

After all they tend not to perform many MRIs on perfectly healthy brains of people who report absolutely nothing.

True! Also, people whom have perfectly healthy brains and do report what their eyes have witnessed!

 

[ramonmercado]

This January 2019 guest article on the Silva Record blog provides a sort of reaction viewpoint on Nolan and Green's work. It focuses on the possible implications with respect to enhanced cognitive / intuitive capabilities and notes a possible correlation with 'experiencers' (people who report anomalous incidents and phenomena).

This article includes some slides presented by Nolan and Green, which help to set the context.

FULL STORY: https://silvarecord.com/2019/01/09/experiencers-unique-intuition-and-biomarkers/

Did Garry Nolan check his own brain?

Garry Nolan's Kindergarten Alien Encounter​ 8/26/2022 Immunologist and UFO researcher Garry Nolan told Australian journalist Ross Coulthart that he had encountered alien-like creatures in his childhood bedroom, confirming under his own name a story Diana Pasulka reported about "James," a pseudonym in American Cosmic (2019) that Pasulka indicated she used for Nolan. The two versions of the story agree in some details and differ markedly in important details. This shows exactly the kind of slips and distortions of memory that skeptics have long argued make witness memories an unreliable guide to events without corroborating details. Here is Nolan's account as "James" in Diana Pasulka's reporting in American Cosmic three years ago: At dinner that evening, I made sure to sit next to James. I offered him some wine, and he related his experiences with the phenomenon, which began in his childhood. When he was five or six years old, he recalled, little people would appear in his room. They stood by his bed or looked at him through his bedroom windows. He insisted that he was awake when these events took place, and he said emphatically, “I was not asleep. Oh, and I was paralyzed.” He complained to his parents, who told him that he had had some bad dreams. Yet, he told me that he knew that these night visitors were real. ... And here is Nolan telling the same story differently to Coulthart in a recent interview broadcast this week (51:00 mark): Garry Nolan: This is probably the more unusual one. And again, it’s, I’m hardly the only individual to have had this as you wake up as a young boy. I would have been probably six or seven—because it was in our first house that we, my parents had bought in Windsor—of little men in the bedroom. You know, I mean, I was awake. I knew they were there. I could see them. ... https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/garry-nolans-kindergarten-alien-encounter

​

 

[catseye]

“I was not asleep. Oh, and I was paralyzed.” He complained to his parents, who told him that he had had some bad dreams. Yet, he told me that he knew that these night visitors were real. ...

As soon as I read that I thought 'sleep paralysis.' As a five year old boy he wouldn't know what that was - and plenty of adults have sleep paralysis and don't know what it is and mistake it for some supernatural phenomenon.

 

[RaM]

Defence aerospace government workers, maybe they spend more time than the rest of us at high altitudes.