• Mary Madeiras
    Nov 10 2025

    Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of Crowscupboard.com sits with three-time Emmy Award winning director and Akashic Records practitioner Mary Madeiras to explore how the soul communicates, remembers, and unfolds through lived experience. This conversation moves through identity, intuition, trauma as material for transformation, and the quiet inner voice that guides the shape of a life.

    This is not a discussion of belief. It is a listening for recognition.

    Show More Show Less
    52 mins
  • Jack R. Bialik
    Nov 2 2025

    In this illuminating conversation, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com explores the paradox of human knowledge: how civilizations accumulate, then discard, their greatest insights. Author Jack R. Bialik examines the patterns of erasure in his new book, "Lost In Time" - from ancient cataract surgery to the fragility of our digital archives - and posits that forgetting may be as essential as remembering. With over 30 years in technology and biblical studies, Bialik bridges the empirical and the esoteric, asking whether the next frontier of wisdom lies not in new discovery but in re-remembering what we once lost. Join us as we traverse the margins of memory and ask: If knowledge disappears fast enough, does it still matter? This interview invites you to reconsider what it means to remember - individually, collectively, and globally.

    Keywords: collective memory, civilizational forgetting, digital impermanence, knowledge vs wisdom, Jack R. Bialik interview, human archives, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey, The Observable Unknown, science & spirituality, historiography of science.

    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Mailbag Episode 8 - The Fasting Instinct: The Ancient Science of Stillness
    Nov 1 2025

    In this Mailbag installment of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com responds to listener Priya A. of Seattle, who asks whether ancient fasting rituals were early, intuitive ways of shaping the gut–brain connection.

    Drawing from modern neurogastroenterology, nutritional neuroscience, and microbiome research, Dr. Rey traces fasting through time - from Upanishadic austerity and monastic silence to the cellular ecologies within us. He revisits the verified work of Mark Mattson (National Institute on Aging), Valter Longo (University of Southern California), and Satchidananda Panda (Salk Institute), alongside cross-cultural rites that discovered metabolic renewal long before molecular biology.

    Listeners learn how temporary abstinence activates brain-derived neurotrophic factor, regenerates immune function, recalibrates circadian genes, and modulates the microbiome’s chemical symphony of serotonin, dopamine, and GABA. Ancient seekers may have lacked microscopes - but they possessed an embodied intuition that consciousness and digestion are one continuum of rhythm and light.

    Fasting emerges here not as deprivation but as dialogue - a physiological prayer aligning metabolism, mood, and meaning. Dr. Rey invites the audience to consider hunger as a form of listening: an emptiness through which the body remembers its original harmony.

    Email reflections or questions to TheObservableUnknown@gmail.com, or text 336-675-5836. Reviews and ratings on Podbean or Apple Podcasts help sustain this global conversation between science, soul, and the unseen.

    Keywords: fasting, gut-brain axis, microbiome, neuroplasticity, BDNF, circadian rhythm, Valter Longo, Mark Mattson, Satchidananda Panda, psychobiotics, neuroscience, spirituality, The Observable Unknown, Dr Juan Carlos Rey, crowscupboard.

    Show More Show Less
    Not Yet Known
  • Interlude XXI – The Quantum Synapse: Consciousness at the Edge of Physics
    Oct 31 2025

    In this interlude of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com steps into the shimmer between matter and meaning – the quantum frontier of consciousness. Could awareness itself arise from sub-atomic events inside the brain?

    Mathematician Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed the Orch-OR Theory, suggesting that quantum coherence within neuronal microtubules gives birth to conscious experience. Though Max Tegmark argued that such coherence would vanish in trillionths of a second, new findings challenge that dismissal.

    At Oxford, quantum effects in photosynthesis and avian navigation imply that biology itself sustains quantum order. At the University of Tokyo, Anirban Bandyopadhyay demonstrated microtubule vibrations that behave like coherent quantum systems, while Matthew Fisher at UC Santa Barbara proposed that phosphorus atoms might store quantum information within the brain’s chemistry.

    Dr. Rey explores how these discoveries reshape our understanding of decision, memory, and perception - each thought a potential collapse of probability. If so, consciousness may not emerge from the universe; the universe may awaken through us.

    This interlude traverses the philosophical and empirical: quantum tunneling in enzymes, coherence in bird migration, and the mystery of awareness as cosmic feedback. The observable unknown is this - that every act of perception might be the universe observing itself.

    Connect with Dr. Rey directly at TheObservableUnknown@gmail.com or (336) 675-5836.

    Show More Show Less
    4 mins
  • Interlude XX – The Whispering Cells: Astrocytes and the Secret Mind
    Oct 30 2025

    In this quietly radical interlude, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com invites you into the hidden orchestra of the brain - the immense realm of glial cells: astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and microglia. We have long worshipped the bright-firing neurons, but these non-neuronal cells may in fact hold the deeper language of consciousness. Pioneering work by Dr. R. Douglas Fields at the National Institutes of Health revealed that experience-driven myelination - the wrapping and reshaping of axons by oligodendrocytes - is guided by neural activity rather than passive development. Meanwhile, Dr. Maiken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester and the University of Copenhagen uncovered the glymphatic system - a glia-driven clearing network that operates primarily during sleep, suggesting that astrocytes oversee brain detoxification and restoration. This episode explores how these whispering cells sculpt learning, mood, intuition, and memory via calcium-wave signalling rather than rapid electrical spikes. We traverse from deep sleep to white matter, from silent structural rearrangement to the possible biological roots of insight. The observable unknown here is profound: perhaps the true architecture of mind is not in the fire of neurons, but in the hush of glia - the vast cellular grid that conducts all thought, emotion, and awareness without a single visible spark. Join Dr. Rey and discover what your brain keeps whispering beneath your everyday consciousness.

    Show More Show Less
    5 mins
  • Interlude XIX - Neural Mirroring: The Science of Shared Feeling
    Oct 29 2025

    In this interlude, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com examines the hidden choreography of empathy - the mirror mechanism that allows one human brain to echo another’s joy, sorrow, and intent. First identified in the early 1990s by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese at the University of Parma, mirror neurons revealed a startling truth: our brains rehearse the actions and emotions we witness in others. To see is to enact; to feel is to participate.

    Drawing upon research from Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute on compassion fatigue, Marco Iacoboni at UCLA on social context and empathy, and Jean Decety at the University of Chicago on psychopathy and volitional empathy, Dr. Rey explores how imitation becomes the architecture of morality itself. Empathy, he suggests, is not a moral ornament - it is a neurological duet.

    Listeners will journey from the original macaque experiments to contemporary insights in social neuroscience, learning how oxytocin, dopamine, and neural oscillations create the subtle harmonics of connection. The episode also addresses how virtual life and digital mediation fracture our natural resonance, and how ritual, music, and collective rhythm can restore it.

    In the end, Neural Mirroring invites reflection on the deep biochemistry of belonging.

    Meaning, it turns out, is not imagined - it is synchronized.

    We do not think each other into being; we fire together into awareness.

    Show More Show Less
    6 mins
  • Mailbag Episode 7 – “The Science of Spirit and the Mechanics of Mediumship”
    Oct 27 2025

    In this special Mailbag installment, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com answers a letter from Clara W of Asheville, North Carolina, who asks about the ancient practice of spirit communication. Drawing on his thirty-year body of research and teaching, Dr. Rey explains how conditioning Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area - the brain’s language centers - can strengthen intuitive speech and symbolic translation, while regulation of the limbic system allows practitioners to access altered states of consciousness safely and consistently.

    The episode bridges anthropology, neurolinguistics, and transpersonal psychology to show how mediumship arises from measurable biological processes rather than mystical abstraction. Listeners will learn how respiratory entrainment, micro-movement, and hemispheric synchronization transform intuition into reliable perception - and how emotion, chemistry, and attention converge to form the neural architecture of faith itself.

    Across cultures and centuries, every form of trance, prophecy, and divination has relied on the same physiological symphony: breath, rhythm, and meaning. This conversation reveals why mediumship is not supernatural - it is super-biological.

    Key topics: mediumship science, Broca’s Area training, Wernicke’s Area integration, limbic resonance, neuro-somatic conditioning, intuitive cognition, spiritual neuroscience, transpersonal psychology, anthropology of ritual, scientific mediumship.

    To learn more or to enroll in Mediumship Coursework, visit crowscupboard.com. Connect with Dr. Rey on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter), and please rate and review The Observable Unknown - your reflections help others discover the bridge between science and soul.

    Show More Show Less
    5 mins
  • Richard M. Anderson
    Oct 27 2025

    In this episode of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of Crowscupboard.com sits down with molecular biologist and award-winning author Richard M. Anderson - a visionary whose work unites hard science, humanism, and speculative imagination.

    A former clinical laboratory director and bioanalyst, Anderson built a distinguished scientific career before turning to writing. His nonfiction landmark The Evolution of Life: Big Bang to Space Colonies traces existence from cosmic birth to post-terrestrial civilization, arguing that empathy and reason are our most essential survival traits. His acclaimed Outbound series - beginning with Islands in the Void and continuing with Meta Mars - extends this inquiry into the 23rd century, when humankind and sentient machines must decide whether coexistence or conflict defines evolution.

    In conversation, Anderson reflects on how curiosity became his compass - from laboratory benches to literary worlds. He discusses the ethics of AI, the fragility of ecosystems, and why emotional intelligence may be the only true technology capable of saving us. With clarity and compassion, he paints a future where scientific realism meets moral responsibility, where “the Pandora’s Box of artificial intelligence” forces us to re-evaluate what it means to be alive.

    Listeners will come away with a deeper understanding of how data, imagination, and conscience converge to form our collective destiny.

    Join us for a far-reaching dialogue about the origins of life, the future of consciousness, and the hope that still lies between the molecules and the stars.

    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 26 mins