Your Brain Is Not the Source of Consciousness… It’s the Receiver

What science, stories, and strange experiments are starting to reveal about the signal we call “you.”

** Note: this is an original piece edited with the help of chatGPT… Enjoy & thanks for being here— Jade

Imagine for a moment that your brain is a radio.
Billions of neurons humming in synchrony, catching an invisible broadcast. Every thought, emotion, or flash of intuition, not generated but received.

Now picture what happens when the radio breaks. The static increases, the music distorts, and eventually… silence. The untrained mind assumes the song has died. But the song never stopped. The signal is still broadcasting, the receiver just can’t translate it anymore.

We’ve been conditioned to believe consciousness emerges from the machinery of the brain, as if awareness were a side effect of neurons firing. But what if that story is backward? What if the brain is not the source of consciousness, but its filter, a receiver, tuner, and modulator of a signal that already exists everywhere?

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The Big Idea

For decades, mainstream neuroscience has treated consciousness like smoke rising from the fire of brain activity. When the neurons stop firing, the smoke dissipates. But an emerging body of evidence, from near-death experiences to random number generator anomalies to cellular “information field” studies, is starting to whisper something radically different.

It’s suggesting that consciousness might be fundamental, not born of matter, but the ground from which matter arises.

The “filter” or “receiver” model isn’t new. Philosophers like William James and Henri Bergson proposed it a century ago: the brain doesn’t create consciousness, it tunes it. Like a stained-glass window refracting sunlight into form, the brain limits and shapes the infinite into an experience small enough to live inside a human body.

Modern science, reluctantly, awkwardly, sometimes even accidentally, keeps stumbling into evidence that fits this picture better than the materialist one.

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The Breakdown

1. When the brain flatlines… and awareness doesn’t.

In 2001, cardiologist Pim van Lommel published a landmark study in The Lancet examining patients who had been clinically dead, no heartbeat, no brain activity, yet reported vivid, structured experiences: awareness of the surgical team, light phenomena, conversations later verified as accurate.

These weren’t hallucinations; they were perceptions occurring when the brain, by every known measure, was offline.

Later replication attempts, like Sam Parnia’s AWARE studies (2014), found similar accounts, even verifiable recall of events during EEG silence. If the radio was broken, how was the song still playing?

2. The universe’s randomness… isn’t so random.

At Princeton, the Global Consciousness Project has run random number generators around the world for over two decades. During major collective emotional events, September 11th, mass meditations, natural disasters, the randomness deviated significantly from chance.

It was as if the collective human field bent statistical reality itself.
Critics argue these deviations are artifacts of data-mining or coincidence. Yet the pattern has held across years and datasets. The consistent timing of these deviations around large-scale emotional coherence suggests, at minimum, that consciousness interacts with the physical world in subtle, measurable ways.

3. Words that heal cells.

In 2023, Feng et al. published a remarkable double-blind study in Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. They placed sealed envelopes containing written words, Chinese characters meaning love, compassion, joy, good health, positive energy, and the single word “Buddha”, under Petri dishes of human kidney cells damaged by oxidative stress. No one handling the dishes knew which envelope held what.

The result? The cells “exposed” to positive words showed 17–22% higher ATP levels, faster growth rates, and lower oxidative stress. The cells healed faster, without chemicals, without light, without direct contact.

Meaning itself seemed to have biological consequence, as if consciousness were encoded in the structure of words and the cells could feel it.

4. When stories become biology.

In psychoneuroimmunology, researchers have shown that the stories we tell ourselves, the internal narrative loops of meaning and identity, directly change gene expression and immune function. Trauma stories suppress antiviral response. Integration stories enhance it. The narrative is the neurology.

In one study, expressive writing interventions increased immunoglobulin A (IgA) and reduced doctor visits for months afterward (Pennebaker, 1997). What we say about ourselves changes what our cells do. In other words, consciousness writes the code of biology from the top down.

5. The tuning function of the brain.

Even mainstream neuroscience, often the most reductionist field, now describes the brain less as a generator and more as a filter or tuning network. Research on the thalamus and default mode network shows these regions function like gatekeepers, deciding what enters awareness and what stays subconscious.

Loosen or “down-regulate” these filters (via psychedelics, trauma, or meditation), and consciousness doesn’t disappear, it expands, sometimes overwhelmingly. When the filter loosens, the signal widens.

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Some Science

Key Evidence Suggesting Consciousness Is Primary

• Near-Death Experiences: Conscious recall and verified perception during EEG-flat states (van Lommel, 2001; Parnia et al., 2014).

• Random Number Generator Studies: Global deviations during high-coherence events, implying nonlocal mind-field influence (Nelson et al., 2002).

• Feng et al. (2023): Written positive words enhanced ATP production and cell repair in vitro, an “information field” effect on biology.

• Psychoneuroimmunology & Narrative Studies: Emotional storytelling shifts immune gene expression and stress markers (Pennebaker, 1997; Kross, 2014).

• Neuroscience of Filtering: Thalamus and cortical gating research supports “conscious bandwidth” limitation rather than creation (Dehaene, 2014).

(All references listed in full below.)

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A Necessary Acknowledgment

Much of this research is controversial. Some studies are difficult to replicate, others challenge deeply entrenched assumptions about matter, mind, and measurement. Filter or receiver models are often critiqued for being hard to falsify, since proving that consciousness exists outside the brain is methodologically complex.

Yet the consistency across multiple domains, clinical (NDEs), parapsychological (RNG anomalies), biological (Feng et al.’s information-field study), psychological (narrative biology), and even theoretical physics (quantum nonlocality and observer effects), creates a compelling pattern.

When so many independent lines of evidence converge on the same possibility, that consciousness influences or precedes material systems, it demands curiosity, not dismissal.

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So What Does This Mean?

If consciousness is the broadcast and the brain is the receiver, then what we call “death” may be more like changing frequencies than ending the song. It also means our thoughts, emotions, and stories don’t just reflect reality, they modulate it.

Your cells are listening. Your environment is listening. The field is always listening.

And this is where the Next Level Human philosophy lands squarely in the middle of hard science and ancient knowing: the biology of belief isn’t a metaphor. It’s literal.

You are both the radio and the broadcaster. Your state of consciousness, your signal quality, influences everything: your health, relationships, even the statistical fabric of your reality.

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Practical Takeaway

If the brain is a receiver, then the quality of what it receives depends on how you tune it.

• Meditation sharpens the signal-to-noise ratio.

• Breathwork and embodiment quiet static from stress hormones.

• Storywork (like DEEP or BRN) clears the unconscious programming that distorts the signal.

• Community and compassion amplify coherence, collective resonance strengthens the broadcast.

You don’t have to “manifest” harder. You have to tune cleaner.
The more you align your story, breath, and emotion, the more the universe stops sounding like static and starts playing your song.

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Closing Thought

One day, neuroscience will catch up with what mystics and near-death experiencers have been saying all along, that consciousness doesn’t live inside us. We live inside it.

The brain is a miraculous instrument, but it’s not the orchestra.
It’s the radio through which infinity speaks in first person.
And when the radio goes silent, the music continues.

The question is: are you living as static… or as the signal?

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PS Call-to-Action

PS: If you’re ready to break free of the static of unconscious conditioning and become the kind of person who naturally lives in alignment with the higher signal of your purpose, explore my Next Level Human Coaching Program today. Spots are limited… don’t wait. 👉 www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching

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References:

Byrd, R. C. (1988). Positive therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in a coronary care unit population. Southern Medical Journal, 81(7), 826–829.
Dehaene, S. (2014). Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. Viking.
Feng, Q., Chen, Y., Teng, J., Wang, L., Cai, Z., Li, M., Rein, G., & Bai, X. (2023). Information fields of written texts protect cells from oxidative damage and accelerate repair. Explore, 19(3), 223–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2022.08.003
Kross, E., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-distancing: Theory, research, and current directions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 50, 81–136.
Nelson, R. D., et al. (2002). Correlations of continuous random data with major world events. Foundations of Physics Letters, 15(6), 537–550.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166.
Parnia, S., et al. (2014). AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation: A prospective study. Resuscitation, 85(12), 1799–1805.
van Lommel,P., et al. (2001). Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: A prospective study in the Netherlands. The Lancet, 358(9298), 2039–2045.