Strange Things That Happened to Me
How a neuroscientist learned to stop dismissing her own anomalous experiences and started taking them seriously.
Strange Things That Happened to Me
A frank conversation about anomalous experience, the science that might explain it, and an open invitation to compare notes
Belinda Bailey | BioStellar LLC | Duvall, Washington
I want to start by telling you something I almost talked myself out of believing.
In my early twenties, I was part of the New Age community taking root in Capitol Hill and downtown Seattle. This would have been in the early days of what people were starting to call the movement, before it got commodified into crystals at airport gift shops. It was genuinely exciting. There were workshops, gatherings, study circles, and women who took the investigation of anomalous experience as seriously as any scientist takes their field—maybe more seriously, because these women were working without institutional support or peer-reviewed legitimacy, purely out of the conviction that something real was being pointed at.
Those gatherings had a particular quality I've rarely found since. Nobody was performing skepticism to seem smart. Nobody was performing belief to seem spiritual. We were just comparing notes—here's what happened to me, what do you think it means, has this happened to you—with the same matter-of-fact curiosity you'd bring to any phenomenon that showed up consistently enough to warrant attention.
I learned things in those rooms that I've spent the following decades trying to understand properly. This is my attempt to lay them out, alongside the science that has slowly caught up to some of what we were discussing. And at the end, I genuinely want to hear from you.
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The Instruction That Turned Out to Be Neuroscience
The woman who taught me to do psychic readings made her living at it. Real clients, real appointments, real reputation on the line. She wasn't theatrical about it. When I asked her how she did it, she thought for a moment and said: blank your brain. Be ditzy.
I was maybe twenty-two. I was in awe of the older woman and poured myself into emulating her.
What I understand now is that she was describing, with casual precision, a specific neurological state. The brain produces distinct oscillating rhythms depending on what it's doing. In the focused, analytical, am I being judged mode most of us run in public, beta waves dominate—fast, busy, excellent for solving problems and terrible for receiving anything subtle.
What she was prescribing was alpha: the 8–12 Hz oscillation associated with relaxed, unfocused attention. Not sleep. Not analysis. The quiet, receptive middle state you touch in meditation, or in the moments just before sleep when thinking slows but consciousness stays lit.
In that state, something changes about what gets through. The brain's default mode network—the set of regions that activate during internally directed attention, pattern recognition, and what researchers cautiously call associative processing—becomes more active, not less. The prefrontal cortex, which normally acts as an aggressive editorial filter on incoming information, quiets down. And whatever was beneath the editorial threshold gets a moment at the surface.
I tried it. I gave a reading to a woman I had never met, with no questions asked and no cards turned. I told her she was connected to firefighting in a significant way.
As it turned out, she was in the process of becoming one of the first female firefighters in Washington State. Not a general impression about fire. Not a vague association with emergency work. That specific.
I had no information pathway to that fact. I had blanked my brain, as instructed, and something else had filled the space.
“Blank your brain. Be ditzy.” She was describing, with casual precision, a specific neurological state—and it worked.
I want to be scrupulously honest here: I cannot tell you with certainty whether what I accessed was genuine anomalous perception or an extraordinarily rapid, unconscious integration of micro expressions, posture, vocal quality, breath patterns, and subtle olfactory cues—all processed below the threshold of deliberate attention precisely because that attention had been quieted.
Both explanations are consistent with the experience.
What I can tell you is that something was running that I was not consciously operating, and that it produced accurate, specific information.
The card test was harder to explain either way.
The setup: a shuffled deck of 52 cards, a group of us attempting to guess which card the tester would pick next. Seven rounds.
I consistently called not the card she was holding—the one we were meant to guess—but the card she was about to pick next.
The one still face-down in the deck. Not yet chosen. Not yet seen by anyone in the room, including her.
All seven times.
The probability of doing that by chance is approximately 1 in 674 billion.
To put that in perspective, if every person alive on Earth today had been running this experiment continuously since the Roman Empire, we would not yet have expected a single run of seven correct guesses by chance.
So whatever happened, it wasn't chance.
But here is the detail that interests me most scientifically: I wasn't wrong about the card. I was consistently displaced forward by exactly one step.
I wasn't failing to read the present—I was reading one step into the future with reliable accuracy.
That systematic offset is not what random error looks like. Random error is scattered. This had a structure.
A structure implies a mechanism.
My best working hypothesis, decades later, is that I was running a predictive model of the entire physical system—the card stack's configuration, her attentional orientation, the micro-signals of what her hand was about to do—and resolving it one step ahead of the conscious framing of the task.
Not clairvoyance in any mystical sense. Something more like a very deep, very fast physics calculation running beneath deliberate awareness, outputting a confident spatial sense of what was about to become relevant.
Which raises the obvious question: why can't I do it on command?
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The Doubt Part of the Brain Is Real, and It Has a Name
I have another experience in this category that I've never quite made sense of.
Once, in my twenties, I instantaneously calculated a four-digit number multiplied by a four-digit number. Not approximately—exactly, with full confidence, in the time it takes to blink.
I had not done this before.
I have not done it since.
And lately—this one is more recent and more repeatable—I sometimes guess film dialogue in real time, a beat before the actor speaks.
Not one line.
Sometimes the whole movie.
A character's next sentence arrives in my head in their voice, in their register, and then the screen confirms it a second later.
These feel related to the card test. They feel like the same mechanism operating in different domains: a predictive system that runs faster and deeper than conscious thought, surfaces a correct answer, and then—usually—gets immediately suppressed by something that doesn't trust it.
That suppressing something has a name: the prefrontal cortex.
It is the brain's executive editor—the region responsible for rational evaluation, social conformity, inhibition of impulsive responses, and the enforcement of what the surrounding consensus considers real and reasonable.
It is also, fascinatingly, the last region of the brain to fully myelinate—the process by which neural pathways acquire their insulating sheath and become fast, stable, and reliable.
This doesn't complete until the mid-twenties.
What that means in practice is this: below roughly age 25, the prefrontal cortex's ability to resist social conformity pressure is genuinely, measurably reduced.
The brain in that period is more plastic, more open, more capable of incorporating new models of reality—and more vulnerable to having those models overwritten by the confident consensus of the people around it.
You are not weak at 22.
You are literally more neurologically susceptible to peer pressure than you will be at 30, by simple developmental biology.
The prefrontal cortex doesn't fully myelinate until the mid-twenties. Below that age, resistance to social conformity pressure is measurably reduced.
You weren't weak.
You were young.
I watched this happen to myself in real time, and I watched it happen in slow motion without knowing what I was watching.
I was having genuine, repeatable, inexplicable experiences.
I was in a community that took those experiences seriously and had frameworks—however imperfect—for investigating them.
And then I spent years around people who had decided that the correct epistemic posture toward anomalous experience was immediate dismissal.
I found my own certainty bending toward their certainty—not because they had better evidence, but because they were louder, more confident, and my prefrontal cortex was still under construction.
Some women from those Capitol Hill workshops kept going.
They didn't have that particular social pressure, or they were old enough that it didn't take hold as easily, or they were constitutionally more stubborn than I was at twenty-two.
They built lives of what I can only describe as strange wisdom—an accumulated, practiced relationship with their own anomalous perceptions that became a genuine skill, a navigational tool, something they could deploy with increasing reliability.
I think about them sometimes.
I think about the fork in the road that looked like a choice about rationality but was actually a choice about which version of myself I was going to trust.
The doubt part of the brain is real.
It has survival value—it filters noise, enforces consistency, and prevents you from making decisions based on spurious pattern matching.
But it also suppresses things that aren't noise.
The question of how to develop the discernment to tell the difference is one I don't think any institution is seriously asking yet.
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