The Observable Unknown

 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 ...

In this profound installment of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com explores the ancient and often misunderstood intersection of erotic performance and spirituality. Responding to a listener’s question from San Antonio, Dr. Rey traces how the language of desire has always mirrored the language of the divine.

From Plato’s Symposium to modern neuroscience, Eros emerges not as indulgence but as a way of kn...

What if faith were simply the nervous system daring to trust its own prediction?

In this Mailbag installment, Dr. Rey of crowscupboard.com responds to listener DeShawn Carter of Atlanta, Georgia, whose question probes the hidden alliance between free will, intuition, and the brain’s comparator model – that quiet circuit which measures intention against outcome, authorship against experience.

From Chris Frith’s neuroscience of agenc...

What if evolution is not a finished act, but an ongoing collaboration between ancestry and awareness?

In this interlude of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey of crowscupboard.com explores the profound intersection between phylogenetic inertia - the evolutionary gravity that preserves our biological past - and epigenetic rewriting, the molecular poetry of adaptation that lets life edit its own script.

Through studies by Dr....

What if memory is not only electrical - but molecular?

In this new interlude, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey explores how experience, stress, and nurture inscribe themselves directly into the genome of the brain. Through the pioneering studies of Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf, we learn that the nervous system is not a fixed circuit but a living manuscript - continuously edited by love, fear, and time.

From the first experiments at McGill Univ...

What if emotion were an immune response? What if the dialogue between inflammation and thought shaped not only how we heal—but how we hope?

In this interlude, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey explores the emerging science of neuroimmunology, where the immune and nervous systems reveal themselves as co-authors of consciousness. Through the work of Ronald Duman (Yale University), Harry Male (University of Illinois), and Jonathan Kipnis (Washingto...