A cognitive engineer renowned for helping astronauts use their extrasensory perception for problem solving in space now helps babies develop a similar, innate pre-verbal knowing.
Research shows that an infant can be born with up to 150 types of synaesthesia, the ability “to experience the world as a unified field, sound and color and texture and emotion, all woven together, all arriving at once,” according to cognitive system engineer and astronaut psychologist Iya Whiteley. This is similar to the mystical, unitive experiences of some astronauts, triggered perhaps by the unique conditions of outer space, Whiteley says. The most well known may be that of Edgar Mitchell, who founded in the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
Whiteley was the director of the University College London Centre for Space Medicine, and an astronaut instructor at the European Astronaut Centre. She helped design the best flight decks, training, and other components for space missions.
Then she became a mom. Through her mothering and reading, she realized babies have pre-verbal cognitive abilities similar to the extraordinary intuition she observed in top astronauts and pilots.
She decided to use her cognitive engineering skills to design an educational program that would preserve and even augment infant intuition. The result was the “Earth Design” book series and “Cosmic Baby Books” that use shapes and sounds similar to patterns found in nature (“golden section” and Fibonacci Sequence) as a sort of pre-verbal, symbolic stimulation. She also is doing a sort of open-sourced study of extra-sensory perception among babies and mothers.
“I want to collect descriptions of visions and extra-sensory experiences for research publication. I am interested in learning about themes that emerge during this unique human experience and how they effect an individual’s life,” Whiteley says. “I am fascinated by what our collective human experience will tell us about the transitional space before babies arrive ‘Earth-side.'”
As an engineer, Whiteley is careful in discussing possible metaphysical underpinnings of her work, but in the past year she has appeared in a host of podcasts dealing with telepathy, soul, UFOs, and non-dual awareness. She was featured in “Encounters,” a book about experts at the edge of human understanding who are working to connect humanity to non-human intelligences by religious studies professor Diana Walsh Pasulka at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She spoke in June at a conference on post-materialist education.
On Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast recently, Whitely said multiple astronauts experienced synesthesia, spherical awareness, psi abilities, and other heightened perceptions. They also claimed to have seen UAPs, previously called UFOs.
The trouble, Whiteley noticed, is this alternative cognition is not valued in astronauts or babies. One of her accomplishments as a space psychologist was to help the aeronautics industry appreciate and operationalize these skills. She also made it safe for astronauts and pilots to report their UAP encounters.
Similarly, children grow up and develop other parts of their cognitive toolbox, losing their pre-verbal abilities, Whiteley says.
Indigenous cultures may have developed heightened intuition, and their enchanted worldview, precisely by connecting with the natural world in a similar way, Whiteley said on podcast The UFO Rabbit Hole.
Written by Tom Zolper
Edited by Anders Bolling
