Neuroscientist (Dr. Tara Swart): Evidence We Can Communicate After Death!
Steven Bartlett (host), Dr. Tara Swart (guest), Dr. Tara Swart (guest)
In this episode of The Diary of a CEO, featuring Steven Bartlett and Dr. Tara Swart, Neuroscientist (Dr. Tara Swart): Evidence We Can Communicate After Death! explores neuroscientist Claims Consciousness Survives Death And Sends Us Signs Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. Tara Swart shares how her husband's death led her into a scientific and personal exploration of whether consciousness can exist beyond the body and communicate with the living.
Neuroscientist Claims Consciousness Survives Death And Sends Us Signs
Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. Tara Swart shares how her husband's death led her into a scientific and personal exploration of whether consciousness can exist beyond the body and communicate with the living.
She describes years of subjective experiences—"signs," visions, and thought insertions—that she rigorously cross-examined using her psychiatric training, alongside research into near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, dark retreats, and the nature of consciousness.
Swart argues that the brain filters a much larger mind, that humans have far more than five senses, and that grief can open a psychosis-like but potentially transformative state of expanded awareness.
While host Steven Bartlett challenges her with skepticism, both ultimately land on the value of open-minded inquiry, the psychological benefits of believing in something transcendent, and practical ways to cultivate intuition, notice signs, and heal from grief.
Key Takeaways
Grief can mimic psychosis and open a vulnerable but transformative mental state.
After her husband Robin died, Swart experienced symptoms she’d previously associated with severe mental illness in patients—thought insertion, intense somatic pain, and altered perception. ...
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Humans likely have many more ‘senses’ than the traditional five, expanding what we can detect.
Swart cites literature suggesting humans have around 34 distinct senses, including non-conscious ones like sensing blood pH, CO₂/O₂ balance, and internal temperature, plus more subtle perceptual capacities. ...
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Somatic work is essential to resolving trauma that talk therapy can’t reach.
She describes delayed waves of intense body pain and freezing sensations around anniversaries and key dates tied to her husband’s illness, which she later linked to stored trauma. ...
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The ‘art of noticing’ can train your brain to pick up meaningful patterns or signs.
Borrowing from concepts like the reticular activating system, novelty salience, and low latent inhibition, Swart suggests we can consciously loosen the brain’s filters to notice more of what we usually ignore. ...
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Evidence from near-death experiences and terminal lucidity challenges a strictly brain-based model of mind.
Swart highlights cases of terminal lucidity—severely demented or non-verbal patients becoming fully coherent hours before death—and medically documented NDEs, especially accounts from physicians like Dr. ...
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Improving gut health may sharpen intuition by stabilizing the brain–body system.
Swart explains the three-way axis between brain, gut neurons, and gut microbiome, linked via the vagus nerve, hormones, cytokines, and immune-produced neurotransmitters. ...
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Engaging with beauty, nature, creativity, and community can both heal grief and amplify intuition.
Swart positions neuroaesthetics (noticing and creating beauty), time in nature, and genuine community as core "training" for receiving and interpreting signs. ...
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Notable Quotes
“In the past four years, I’ve had to ask myself if I was in clinical depression, if I was psychotic, if I was manic… because of things I was experiencing that weren’t that dissimilar to the people I used to lock up.”
— Dr. Tara Swart
“If it’s possible to communicate with someone that’s passed away, and I am all about optimizing my brain, then I should be able to do it myself.”
— Dr. Tara Swart
“The only explanation is that the mind, the thoughts, the emotions, the psyche, cannot be solely emerging from physical matter.”
— Dr. Tara Swart
“Grief in many ways is like psychosis. It’s changing the levels of neurotransmitters in your head; it’s changing the electric and chemical signaling in your head.”
— Dr. Tara Swart
“I can’t prove this is true, but you can’t prove it’s not. And as a scientist, you can’t believe that everything we know now is all there is.”
— Dr. Tara Swart
Questions Answered in This Episode
You described ‘thought insertion’ that you knew matched a psychotic symptom; how did you practically distinguish, in the moment, between a pathological hallucination and what you now interpret as communication from Robin?
Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. ...
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In your sign experiments (like the phoenix or infinity symbol), have you ever systematically tracked ‘misses’ as well as ‘hits’ to quantify how often requested signs don’t appear, and what would you accept as a falsifying result?
She describes years of subjective experiences—"signs," visions, and thought insertions—that she rigorously cross-examined using her psychiatric training, alongside research into near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, dark retreats, and the nature of consciousness.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
The near-death and terminal lucidity cases you cite are powerful, but often anecdotal; what specific study designs or technologies do you think could most convincingly test whether mind can operate independently of brain activity?
Swart argues that the brain filters a much larger mind, that humans have far more than five senses, and that grief can open a psychosis-like but potentially transformative state of expanded awareness.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You talk about using grief’s overlap with psychosis as a doorway to expanded awareness rather than breakdown; what concrete safeguards would you recommend so people experimenting with signs or altered states don’t tip into genuine psychiatric crisis?
While host Steven Bartlett challenges her with skepticism, both ultimately land on the value of open-minded inquiry, the psychological benefits of believing in something transcendent, and practical ways to cultivate intuition, notice signs, and heal from grief.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If society widely accepted your hypothesis that consciousness survives bodily death, how do you think that would change our medical, legal, or ethical decisions around end-of-life care, suicide, and risk-taking in everyday life?
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Transcript Preview
If what you're saying is true, then, I mean, this is a revelation.
Yeah. And I, I couldn't speak about it until now, that it's possible to communicate with someone that's passed away. And I'm saying it from the point of view of being a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist, and it's taboo because we are afraid that people will think we're going insane. I mean, I've been part of teams that have locked people up and had them injected with stuff against their will because of things they were saying that's not that dissimilar to things I've experienced. So I wanted to find out as much science as I could to try to back it up.
And do you think you've found the answer?
Yeah.
How sure are you?
100%. And the things I found out are going to shock you.
The floor is yours. (instrumental music plays)
Okay. So I'm Dr. Tara Swart. I'm a neuroscientist and a medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry, and I lost my beloved husband to leukemia almost four years ago, two days before our fourth wedding anniversary. And everything I believed in had gone wrong. I was just totally lost and broken, but then I started getting signs from my husband. And in my desperation, I did consult a couple of mediums, but not being impressed by them, I ended up thinking, "If it's possible to communicate with someone that's passed away, and I am all about optimizing my brain, then I should be able to do it myself." So I went down a rabbit hole, and what I've uncovered in this research is gonna have a really beneficial effect on a lot of people.
Why?
Because it means that we are capable of so much more than what we think the human mind is capable of.
So listen, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna try and ask the questions and challenge you in ways that I think the viewer might challenge you.
I want you to ask me those questions.
I see messages all the time in the comments section that some of you didn't realize you didn't subscribe, so if you could do me a favor and double check if you're a subscriber to this channel, that would be tremendously appreciated. It's the simple, it's the free thing that anybody that watches this show frequently can do to help us here to keep everything going in this show and the trajectory it's on. So please do double check if you've subscribed and, uh, thank you so much, because in a strange way, you are- you're part of our history and you're on this journey with us and I appreciate you for that. So yeah, thank you. (instrumental music plays) Dr. Tara Swart, good to see you again.
You too.
Thank you for coming back. You were our most viewed guest on the show of all time. Our last conversation did just over 20 million views and downloads, which is pretty staggering, but you're back to talk about something entirely different this time-
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