Can Consciousness Be Measured in the Lab? Superhuman Research

Caroline Cory, a filmmaker, author and consciousness researcher, traces her life's work back to a childhood experience at age five, when a room filled with light convinced her she was in the presence of something larger than herself. In a conversation with Michael Beckwith on his podcast Take Back Your Mind, she explains how she spent years studying her own experiences, developed methods for expanding awareness and self-repair, and then made a deliberate choice to stop relying on personal testimony and bring consciousness into the laboratory. Her film Superhuman 2: The Rebirth follows that logic: it works with people who are blind and asks whether trained perception can identify shapes, letters, words and objects without ordinary sight. The argument at the center of the talk is not mystical comfort. It is the claim that a belief in human potential becomes useful only when someone can verify it.

What did a five-year-old see that changed a life?

Cory's account begins with spontaneous experiences that she says allowed her to perceive beyond the ordinary world. She described sensing energy, seeing beings and hearing things, and she was careful to say she first had to rule out the possibility that she was simply unwell. Once she had, she concluded that she was tapping into a larger field of consciousness, and that she had known from the start that there was more to existence than what the senses report.

The first experience came at five, and it is the detail that gives the rest of her story its shape:

"I saw this light that filled the room and I realized I was in the presence of divine beings, and we were merged in this magnificent energy. I could hear, see, sense everything."

— Caroline Cory, in conversation with Michael Beckwith, Take Back Your Mind [6:28]

At the time, she said, she didn't think much of it. You are five, and you don't know what you are experiencing. The meaning arrived later, when she recognized a signature she now calls source, a frequency of pure love she could return to "no matter what I'm doing." That recognition gave her a reference point, a way of checking whether the work she was doing was expanding in the right direction. It is worth noticing how early this structure took hold: an experience, then a memory of its quality, then a practice of returning to that quality. Everything that followed in her work is built on that loop.

Why did personal experience need a laboratory?

Many people who have unusual experiences either learn to live with them quietly or become teachers and healers. Cory did both. The question Michael Beckwith put to her was why she went further, into the scientific realm. Her answer began with a frustration: she moved first into psychology and found it too narrow for the subject of consciousness. She then spent what she estimated as fifteen to twenty years doing research that was, for the most part, on herself. The aim was to understand the mechanics of how she could sit quietly and then find herself merged with what she calls divine intelligence, downloading information.

Over that long period she said she came to understand frequencies and the mechanics of what was happening, and she developed methodologies to expand consciousness along with approaches to self-healing and self-repair. The results she described were striking. People, she said, would spontaneously heal certain conditions. Traumas and phobias that had persisted for years dissolved, sometimes instantly. People who wanted to stop drinking, including some who took her online class rather than attending live sessions, reported that their alcohol addiction lifted.

Her response to those outcomes is the hinge of the entire conversation:

"If you're a believer, that's wonderful. But it was more than that. It was, wait a minute, something real is happening. We need to tell the rest of the world that this is real. To believe in yourself, to believe in your potential."

— Caroline Cory, in conversation with Michael Beckwith, Take Back Your Mind [7:42]

This is the pivot from faith to method. A testimony of transformation can persuade people who already share the framework. It does little for a skeptic, or for a person who has never had an experience and wants reasons to try. So Cory asked how she could do that, and her answer was direct: "I need scientists. I need to kind of bring that to the lab and do experiments and verify, validate, get data on the fact that your consciousness is in fact affecting the physical world."

"I started working one scientist after another and having incredible results."

— Caroline Cory, in conversation with Michael Beckwith, Take Back Your Mind [9:49]

Her collaborations, as Beckwith introduced them, include scientists affiliated with Harvard Medical School, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Stanford University. In 2010 she founded Omnium Media, a company devoted to films that bring scientific investigation to subjects often considered outside conventional inquiry. Her earlier films, Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible and A Tear in the Sky, received nine international film festival awards and two nominations, according to Beckwith's introduction.

What does Superhuman 2 test that the first film didn't?

Cory described Superhuman 2: The Rebirth as a film that explores consciousness and untapped human potential through documented experiments and scientific inquiry. Beckwith is one of its contributors. The sequel's central move is to work with people who are blind. The purpose, as the episode presents it, is to show that potential takes different forms, and that some of those forms cannot be explained by the ordinary channels of sight.

The film's participants were trained and tested to identify shapes, letters, words and objects despite profound visual impairment. That design matters. If someone can identify a written word without functional sight, the researcher has to ask what channel is carrying the information, and whether the explanation is conventional at all. The experiments are framed as a way of testing the possibility that consciousness can perceive beyond the physical senses. The episode's description notes one experiment that surprised even Cory, though the excerpt available does not give its details, so those are best discovered in the film itself.

Beckwith's own enthusiasm for the subject came through in his framing. He said he loves the word potential and does not like seeing people fail to activate theirs. Cory's film gives that love an empirical test: not a claim that potential exists, but a set of protocols that ask what happens when a person is pushed to the edge of their known capacities.

Can perception happen without the senses?

The idea underneath the blind-participant work is one of the more provocative in the conversation. Cory's personal experience told her that awareness is not confined to the body's sensory apparatus. Her research program was an attempt to find out whether that awareness could be measured, repeated and observed by people who did not already share her conviction. The result she is reaching for is a claim with two parts: that consciousness is active in the physical world, and that its activity can be verified by data.

It is important to hold that claim carefully. The episode does not present a settled scientific consensus, and Cory's language often moves between what she observed in herself and clients, what the scientists found, and what she believes is possible. The honest reading is that she is describing a research program in progress, one she considers worth funding and filming precisely because it has not yet been resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

Why does potential come in different forms?

The film's emotional center appears in an exchange near the top of the episode, where the discussion turns to children performing music. Cory said she wanted to show that potential comes in different forms, and the crew she described was visibly moved by watching young performers at the piano. A speaker in the episode's opening put it this way:

"You can tell there is like an aura, like they're tapping into something. And that's like, you get goosebumps, like the whole crew as well. You don't have to be believing into this or that. Just watching this child playing this incredible piece of music. You could feel and see the energy going through them."

— Speaker in the episode's opening, Take Back Your Mind [0:00]

What makes this passage useful is the caveat built into it. The observation does not require the viewer to adopt a belief system first. It asks the viewer to notice what is in front of them. That is a demanding kind of openness, and it is the same stance Cory brings to the laboratory: observe, measure, and let the data speak even when the result is inconvenient for the framework you began with.

What should a curious reader take from this?

The conversation can be read as a mystical story, and Cory's five-year-old experience certainly has that texture. But the more useful thread is methodological. She moved from private experience to self-study, from self-study to healing methods, and from healing methods to controlled experiments with scientists and with participants who are blind. Each step asked a harder question of the previous one. The step into the lab was not a retreat from spiritual experience. It was an attempt to make that experience something other people could test for themselves.

Where to go from here

If this conversation has you asking how consciousness and perception might be studied rather than merely believed, start with the full episode of Take Back Your Mind, where Michael Beckwith and Caroline Cory go deeper into the healing experiences and the film's methods than this excerpt allows. Then look at Superhuman 2: The Rebirth itself, since the blind-participant experiments are where the claims become concrete and where you can judge the evidence for yourself. For the earlier work, Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible and A Tear in the Sky provide the background to Cory's approach. Read each claim with the same question she applied to her own experiences: what would you need to see to be convinced, and how would you check?