In this episode we’re going to be examining the assumptions of Western Science. All science is based on assumptions. In order to isolate systems in experiments and standardise measurements of the target data, other variables need to be pinned down so scientists can form precise mathematical models, that can then be repeated accurately in the peer review process. Today we’re going to look at these assumptions, and establish if they indeed have become standard, fixed and unquestioned as some critics claim.

David Lorimer's Guest today is Dr Diane Hennacy Powell, who is a Johns Hopkins-trained neuropsychiatrist and neuroscientist, former Harvard faculty member, and an award-winning author and clinician. She began studying autism in 1987, when she spent six months with Sir Michael Rutter at the Institute for Psychiatry in London. She has served as a member of a think tank on the evolution of human consciousness at the Salk Institute, and as the Director of Research for the John E. Mack Institute. Her experimental research focuses on investigating reports of telepathy in autistic children and has been presented at international science conferences in the US and abroad. She is a polymath whose theoretical work bridges multiple scientific disciplines in its analysis of case studies in neuropsychiatry that challenge materialism’s neuro-centric model. Her 2008 book, The ESP Enigma: A Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena, presents a rational argument for a new paradigm, which is elaborated upon further in her chapter entitled Beyond Materialism and Madness in the first volume published by the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences: Is Consciousness Primary?