How Dan Brown's Latest Thriller Has Shaken Up The Great

Dan Brown's bestseller Secret of Secrets has reignited an argument that's been simmering for decades: is your consciousness created by your brain, or is your brain tuning into something “out there” in the Universe that’s feeding you information?

In Brown's thriller, consciousness isn't some manifestation of the brain. It's a fundamental property of the Universe itself - a vast, non-local field that your mind receives from, and transmits to, like a two-way radio. Die, and the radio breaks. But the signal? That carries on broadcasting. This theory has profound implications asking: Do we cease to exist when our bodies perish or does a part of us continue? Is there really life after death?

It's a seductive idea, and this globally popular author isn’t the first to champion it. The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell after his consciousness-expanding experience in space, has been exploring this territory for half a century. Their director of research, Dean Radin, has spent decades investigating whether human consciousness can operate beyond the confines of the skull.

But here's where things get interesting - and contentious.

The mainstream scientific position, championed by neuroscientist Christof Koch, is unambiguous: consciousness is what the brain does. Full stop. Koch argues that our subjective experience emerges from the electrochemical activity of 86 billion neurons. No brain activity, no consciousness. Death of the brain equals death of consciousness.

It's a position that makes perfect sense if you're wedded to materialism - the idea that only physical matter is real. Koch and his colleagues can show you brain scans that light up when you're thinking about your grandmother or contemplating lunch. They can demonstrate how damage to certain brain regions eliminates specific mental functions. Case closed, they say.

But there is another hypothesis.

That’s the non-local consciousness theory, which turns the conventional on its head (pun intended). Think of your brain not as creator of consciousness but as a filter that narrows down an infinite field of awareness so that you’re never overwhelmed by tsunamis of information. In Secret of Secrets, Brown uses GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) as the filtering mechanism: when GABA levels drop - say, during meditation or under the effects of hallucinogens - the filter lifts, and you're accessing a reality that was always there.

This explains, proponents argue, why people report remarkably similar occurrences during Near Death Experiences: the sense of leaving the body, encountering deceased relatives, feeling profound peace and expanded awareness. If consciousness were merely brain chemistry gone haywire, why would these accounts be so consistent across cultures and throughout history?

Radin's research at IONS has documented phenomena that conventional neuroscience struggles to explain, for instance precognition experiments where subjects' bodies react to disturbing images before they're shown; double-slit experiments suggesting consciousness creates reality; studies on distant intention where one person's focused thought appears to influence another person's physiology (healing).

However, Koch and his allies explain precognition as a statistical anomaly, quantum consciousness experiments as misapplied physics, and remote affects as co-incidence and wishful thinking.

But the materialist position, that consciousness dies when the brain dies, suffers from a fatal flaw: it can't explain consciousness in the first place! How do neurons create the technicolour richness of subjective experience? Where does genius come from? How do savants make mathematical calculations faster than a computer? Why did Mozart assert “music just walks into my head.”  Neuroscience can map correlations, but correlation isn't an adequate explanation.

The non-local theory, imperfect as it may be, at least takes seriously the consistent reports of humans throughout history whose consciousness seemed to operate beyond the brain's usual boundaries - Out of Body Experiences for instance. And what about terminal lucidity - those mysterious cases where Alzheimer's patients, their brains ravaged by disease, suddenly regain perfect clarity hours before death? 

Is non-local consciousness proven? No. But neither is the materialist position. Both are working hypotheses attempting to explain a phenomenon - consciousness - that nobody truly understands.

What Brown's novel does brilliantly is dramatise the stakes. If consciousness is non-local, if we're all tapping into a unified field of awareness, then death isn't the end - it’s but a transformation. Our minds – us – somehow continue. We're not isolated computers but interconnected nodes in a cosmic network. 

The scientific establishment will continue insisting that consciousness is purely biological. IONS and similar organisations will keep producing evidence of phenomena that don't fit that model. And novels like Secret of Secrets will keep pushing these ideas into the mainstream, asking uncomfortable questions that deserve serious answers.

About Anthony Talmage: Anthony Talmage is author of 7 books in his Psychic Mind series: Dowse Your Way to Psychic Power, In Tune with the Infinite Mind, Unlock the Psychic Powers of Your Unconscious Mind, How to Crack the Cosmic Code, Mindfulness and the Pendulum, I’m Running On Empty – What Now? and his latest The Miracle Inside Your Head are all available in Kindle, printed and audio versions from Amazon and all good online bookstores. 

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