What if your ability to bend spoons, read minds, or dream tomorrow’s headlines wasn’t supernatural at all — just biological? What if “the sixth sense” wasn’t a mystical whisper from the beyond, but a forgotten instruction in your genome, dormant and waiting to switch on?
That’s the question American parapsychologist Dr Dean Radin has been asking — and, more daringly, testing in the lab.
Radin is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in California, a research centre founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a mystical epiphany on the way back from the Moon. Mitchell looked out the window, saw the Earth hanging in the void, and decided that consciousness was the next great frontier. Radin picked up that baton — and ran straight into the genetic code.
From Bell Labs to the Edge of Reality
Radin’s CV looks reassuringly respectable at first glance. Electrical engineering degrees, a PhD in educational psychology, a stint at Bell Labs. But somewhere along the line, he took a left turn out of mainstream science and into the rabbit hole of psi research — telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition, all the juicy things that get you laughed out of faculty meetings.
In books like Supernormal and The Conscious Universe, he’s argued that psychic phenomena are real, measurable, and even compatible with quantum physics. Critics call it pseudoscience; believers call it pioneering. Radin himself seems to thrive in that liminal zone where data meets disbelief.
But his most audacious project yet doesn’t involve random-number generators or meditation experiments. It involves spit — your spit, to be precise.
The Psychic Genome Project
In 2021, Radin and colleagues published a pilot study titled “Genetics of Psychic Ability: A Case-Control Exome Sequencing Study.” The name sounds dry, but the idea is positively radioactive.
They started with a global online survey of over 3,000 people who claimed psychic experiences or family histories of such. From this pool, they hand-picked 13 “psychics” — people who said they could perceive things beyond normal senses and had passed some basic screening tests — and compared them to 10 control participants who did not report such abilities. Everyone spat into tubes, and the team sequenced the DNA.
If the results had shown a glaring genetic signature for psychic power, the world might have changed overnight. Alas, reality was less cinematic.
Radin’s group found no major genetic differences in the coding regions of DNA — the stretches that tell your cells which proteins to build. But in a tiny non-coding section near a gene called TNRC18, they noticed a difference in one DNA letter between the two groups.
The “psychic” participants all had one version of the sequence. The non-psychics mostly had another. It was a blip — statistically weak, biologically opaque, and, in scientific terms, about as far from proof as you can get. The authors admitted the result could easily be random noise.
And yet.
The Glimmer in the Code
The study’s critics point to its minuscule sample size — thirteen “cases” isn’t even enough for a proper poker night — and to the fuzzy definition of what counts as psychic. (Are tarot readers psychic? Lucid dreamers? People who get a bad feeling before an email from their ex?) The skeptics have a point.
But even a null result can be tantalising. Because what Radin’s team actually attempted was unprecedented: the first genetic scan of psychic ability. Whether or not the TNRC18 blip means anything, the concept itself throws open a new door.
It dares to ask: if psychic phenomena exist at all, might they run in families? Is there a heritable component — a molecular echo of intuition passed down the generations like eye colour or musical talent?
Radin’s camp says maybe. Critics say absolutely not. The truth, as ever, hangs in the murky middle.
The DNA of the Unknown
To understand why this matters, it helps to know that most of our DNA — over 98% — doesn’t code for proteins. For decades it was dismissed as “junk DNA,” but that label now looks premature. Non-coding regions are teeming with regulatory sequences, switches, silencers, and mysterious bits of “dark genome” that may influence how and when genes express.
Radin’s speculative leap is to wonder if some of these hidden regions could be linked to consciousness — or even to the faint whispers of psi. It’s a wild idea, but not wholly alien to modern science.
Neuroscientists already know that perception, intuition, and sensitivity vary genetically. Variants in dopamine and serotonin receptors shape how people process risk and reward. Certain gene clusters affect empathy, emotional contagion, even susceptibility to hypnosis. So why not — in some far-out, as-yet-unproven way — to extrasensory sensitivity too?
It’s a question that makes geneticists groan and mystics grin.
The Critics Circle
Mainstream scientists tend to roll their collective eyes at Radin’s work. They argue that decades of parapsychological experiments have failed to produce reliable, replicable evidence of psychic phenomena. The “file-drawer problem” — positive results published, null results quietly forgotten — looms large.
James Randi once called psi research “a beautiful case study in self-deception.” Neuroscientist Steven Novella has said Radin’s studies rely on “bad statistics and confirmation bias.”
Radin counters that skeptics cling to dogma just as tightly as believers, and that their refusal to engage with anomalous data is itself unscientific. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he agrees, “but that doesn’t mean we stop looking.”
To his credit, Radin doesn’t claim he’s found the psychic gene. He claims only that it’s worth checking whether such a thing exists. Science, he argues, advances by daring to ask questions that sound ridiculous — until they don’t.
Consciousness, Entanglement, and the Human Mystery
Behind the DNA study lies a bigger question: what is consciousness? Physics still can’t explain how subjective experience arises from firing neurons. Some researchers now toy with quantum explanations — entanglement, coherence, non-locality — all ideas that sound suspiciously like the language of mystics.
Radin has long argued that psi effects might be small quantum ripples made visible through consciousness. Critics dismiss this as metaphor, but Radin’s point is philosophical: maybe we’ve built science on a materialist model too narrow to include the full strangeness of being human.
If mind and matter are more entangled than we think, perhaps psychic ability is not supernatural but simply unrecognised physics.
The Ethics of a Psychic Genome
Suppose, for a deliciously freaky moment, that Radin’s intuition is right — that certain gene variants do correlate with heightened intuition, precognition, or telepathic resonance. Then what?
Would employers test job candidates for “psi potential”? Would militaries breed psychic soldiers? Would dating apps rank users by empathic compatibility? It sounds absurd — until you remember that twenty years ago, direct-to-consumer DNA kits sounded absurd too.
As Radin himself warns, “If it’s real and it’s biological, it can be enhanced — or suppressed.” In other words: be careful what you wish for.
Science or Storytelling?
Perhaps the most useful way to see Radin’s work is as a bridge between two worldviews. On one side: the hard-edged empiricism of modern genetics. On the other: the timeless human belief that we are more than meat and molecules.
His pilot study doesn’t prove that psychic powers exist, but it does reframe the question. It says: let’s not decide what’s impossible until we’ve looked everywhere — even in the genome.
And there’s something oddly beautiful about that. Because whether or not TNRC18 turns out to be the gene for telepathy, the act of asking keeps the mystery alive.
Maybe that’s the real point. Science needs its radicals, its heretics, its poets of the improbable. Without them, the frontier goes dark.