The Observable Unknown

In this episode of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com invites you into an exploration of consciousness not only as electrical patterns but as radiance itself. We trace the emergence of biophotons -ultra-weak light emissions from living cells -through the pioneering work of biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp, whose research at the University of Marburg in the 1970s uncovered coherent photon emissions in DNA...

In this grounded and intimate episode of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com explores the silent symphony within the chest - the electromagnetic rhythm that links body, brain, and emotion.

Neurophysiologist J. Andrew Armour of McGill University first described the heart’s intrinsic nervous system - tens of thousands of neurons that sense, process, and send information independently of the brain. Psychop...

There are artists who photograph the world, and then there are rare souls who seem to listen to it. Pen Densham is the latter.

He has lived at the intersection of myth, cinema, and the ineffable since childhood - when, at the age of four, he rode a live alligator for one of his parents’ 35mm theatrical shorts. It was perhaps the earliest sign that he would spend a lifetime courting the miraculous. Cameras, he says, “seemed like mag...

Interlude XXII - The Cosmic Self: Consciousness Beyond the Brain

In this enlightening interlude of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com traces the frontier where neuroscience meets metaphysics – where consciousness ceases to be a human trait and becomes a cosmic condition.

Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin introduced Integrated Information Theory (IIT), proposing that consciousn...

 Today I’m joined by someone whose work has moved fluidly between stage, screen, and self-examination - actor and producer Jordan Feldman.

Jordan’s career has unfolded at the intersection of visibility and vulnerability. He has brought humor and humanity to complex stories, while also speaking candidly about his journey through anxiety, recovery, and rediscovery.

In this conversation, we look beneath the spotlight - into the quiete...

 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 r...

 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 t...

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 cellu...

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 experi...

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 ...

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; ...

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 ...

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 ...

 In this edition of The Observable Unknown: Mailbag, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of Crowscupboard.com explores how social media operates not merely as communication, but as ritual space. When acts of attention shift online, every repost, “like,” and scroll becomes a litany of belonging, performance, and belief. Drawing on innovative scholarship in digital religion and media anthropology, this episode asks how our feeds mirror ancient altar...

In this episode, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of Crowscupboard.com invites listeners into a meditation on memory - no longer a candle passed from mind to mind, but a circuitry of data and desire. Drawing on the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), Dr. Rey examines how collective memory has migrated from the oral to the algorithmic, shaping what humanity remembers - and what it forgets.

From the neural encoding of emotion to the digita...

In this episode of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of CrowsCupboard.com uncovers the hidden clockwork of the living body - the molecular rhythms that measure dawn, dusk, and everything between. Drawing on the Nobel-winning research of Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young, whose fruit-fly experiments at Brandeis University and Rockefeller University revealed the PER gene and its feedback loop, Dr. Rey s...

Before temples were built of stone, the body already knew how to worship. In this episode, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of CrowsCupboard.com explores how the brain’s own narcotic chemistry - endorphins, enkephalins, and dynorphins - shapes the experience of love, faith, music, and transcendence.

Drawing on the work of Candace Pert (1973), who first identified the brain’s opiate receptors, Jaak Panksepp (1998), who revealed the primal circui...

Before language, before heartbeat, there was rhythm - the pulse that shaped both cosmos and consciousness. In this episode of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com explores the hidden architecture of the mind’s music: the neural oscillations and neurochemical cadences that give rise to awareness itself.

Drawing on research by György Buzsáki (New York University), Earl Miller (MIT), Christof Koch (Allen In...

A listener writes from Toronto:

“I’ve always felt intuitive - but I don’t know how to trust or strengthen it. Is intuition a gift or a skill?”

In this episode of The Observable Unknown, I respond with both rigour and heart. Drawing on over two decades of research and training - from neuroscience to somatic practice to symbolic language - I share the system I’ve developed to help intuition become usable intelligence. We explore how ...