Jeff Tarrant, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and certified neurofeedback specialist. He founded the Neuro Meditation Institute in Eugene about five years ago, in part as a reflection of his long-standing fascination with healing practices and a range of subjects related to brain function. More specifically, Tarrant is known for using applications of technology as “power tools” in conjunction with teaching meditation approaches effective for treating, for example, anxiety or depression.
For the moment, though, let’s set much of Tarrant’s 20 years of meditation studies aside. Since coming to Oregon, he has combined his personal interest in “pushing the brain” with experiments that measure, scale, and stimulate the kinds of mental processes often associated with psychic mediums. Tarrant’s recent work includes quantitative EEG testing (aka “brain mapping”) as an approach for studying skills practiced by locally and nationally respected psychic mediums.
His bold interest in brain-mapping studies is partly an upshot of an inspiring experience he had collaborating with an Oregon peer working with a group of super-telepathic autistic youth savants wired to his EEG tracking tools. The youths lacked speech abilities but were trained to communicate with their birth mothers by use of spelling boards. They were able to accurately “mind read” and spell out, with 100% accuracy, the answers to a series of number, color, and word tests provided to their mothers.
Tarrant confesses that part of his fascination with folding a more scientific understanding of psychic abilities into his research portfolio is rooted in his desire to better understand and navigate his own psychic talents. “We are all born with these abilities,” suggests Tarrant, “but as we go to school, as we learn, as we are taught how to think and get more oriented to language, our brain starts to inhibit those natural psychic abilities. Part of this,” he admits, “is about my simply having enough evidence for myself that I can convince the skeptical part of my brain that it is real.” Another part, he says, is the sheer scope of the undiscovered knowledge. “This field is massive. There is so much to do.”
