Day 1588
The Soviets Tried to Reach Into Your Head. We Put the Receiver in Our Pockets.
Brian Roemmele’s latest Read Multiplex article sent me down one of those rabbit holes where the rabbits were literally wired to machines seven kilometers apart.
The article covers decades of Soviet and post-Soviet research into directed consciousness, bioenergy, telepathy, and what researchers called a “high-penetrating” emission. Across three major cycles of work stretching from 1917 to 2003, researchers reportedly used lead screens, mirrors, diffraction gratings, Faraday cages, plants, water, animals, human subjects, and eventually hardware generators. They were trying to determine whether a living system could influence another system at a distance through some carrier that conventional instruments did not understand.
The rabbit experiments are the kind of detail that sticks with you. A sender and receiver were separated by seven kilometers while physiological responses were monitored. Other researchers reported changes in seed growth, water chemistry, biophoton emissions, and animal physiology. Later theories tried to explain the results through torsion fields, spin systems, Qi, or macroscopic quantum entanglement. I think Brian is pointing toward something real.
An easy version of this essay would use Brian’s article as a setup, dismiss the physics because it was a lot to read compared to a social media feed (so I used a speed reader to help me), and pivot to a clever point about smartphones & I plan on doing so to some degree! But the honest conclusion I got was even more interesting.
I cannot tell you whether the carrier is a field we have not discovered, a large-scale quantum effect, a biological signal we do not know how to measure, or something that our current vocabulary cannot describe. I also do not think government funding proves a phenomenon is real. Governments can spend extraordinary amounts of money being wrong. (Especially when they can print their own currency out of debt to do so)
What moves me is the convergence. Soviet laboratories, Chinese external qi research, Japanese biophoton studies, and Western intention experiments approached similar questions through different traditions and instruments. They repeatedly tested whether focused human intention could produce measurable changes in plants, water, light emissions, cells, animals, or another person’s physiology.
Some of those findings may fail under better replication. Some mechanisms will probably turn out to be wrong. That is how science works at the edge of the map. Still, nearly a century of strange results deserves disciplined curiosity. Dismissing all of it because the proposed explanation sounds unfamiliar is not skepticism. It is refusing to look.
Brian’s larger point is that consciousness may participate in physical and biological reality more actively than our standard models allow. I believe that possibility is real. I think attention, intention, prayer, expectation, and the state of a human nervous system may affect far more than we currently know how to measure.
Then one word in the article made me think: directed.
All of this research depends on a person being able to hold an intention and aim it. The operator cannot be mentally checking five apps, half-writing an email, remembering a text, and wondering what happened on X. Whatever the underlying mechanism turns out to be, the instrument begins with sustained attention.
That realization made the article feel much less like Cold War history and much more like an indictment of how I spend an ordinary Tuesday.
The receiver in my pocket
The Soviets were trying to push a signal through metal and across kilometers. Meanwhile, I carry a device that gets into my head through a much simpler channel. I paid for it. I keep it within arm’s reach. I often check it before my eyes have fully focused, which means the first thing entering my mind that day was selected by a system optimizing for a number that has nothing to do with the life I want to build.
There is no secret weapon required. The business model is enough.
My phone is an incredible tool. It gives me a camera, map, library, studio, bank, and communication network in one object. The problem is that every tool inside it shares a door with an infinite amount of novelty. I can open it to answer one useful message and emerge twenty minutes later carrying six new ideas, three minor anxieties, and no memory of why I picked it up.
The Cold War researchers needed a Faraday cage to block the signal they imagined. The current intervention is walking into another room, and I still resist doing it for an hour.
A 2017 study by Ward and colleagues put participants’ phones in one of three places: on the desk, in a pocket or bag, or in another room. On tests of available cognitive capacity, the other-room group performed best and the desk group performed worst, even though the phones were silenced. Later replications have been mixed, and a larger meta-analysis found its clearest negative effect in working memory. The other cognitive measures did not show the same consistent pooled effect.
That nuance matters. One study should never become scripture. The practical experiment is still nearly free: put the phone in another room and see what happens.
I already know what happens to me. My mind settles. The impulse to check still appears for a while, which is useful because it reveals how often I was obeying it without noticing. Then the static fades and the thing in front of me starts to become interesting again.
One great thing now
I have published something every day for 1,588 days. That streak has taught me that a wide-open calendar does not guarantee good work. Plenty of weak pieces came from days when I had hours available. The pieces I would still stand behind usually came from one clean block where I decided what I was making and refused to let anything else enter.
Get Chep’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
My calendar often contains enough time. What it lacks is undivided time.
I need to get much better at honing my attention and allocating that time on purpose. My problem is rarely a shortage of ideas. I want to write, build, learn, answer, improve, and begin the next thing. That energy is one of my strengths, and it can turn into context switching so quickly that I barely notice. Ten worthwhile things compete for my attention, I touch all ten, and I finish the day busy without having made any of them great.
Allocation requires exclusion. Choosing one thing means allowing nine good things to remain undone for the next ninety minutes. That is uncomfortable. It is also the price.
So the practice I want is simple:
Put the phone in another room. Decide the target before the block begins. Give one thing ninety undivided minutes (it’s okay to take a 5 minute break 45 minutes in).
Make something great. Something I love. Like writing a good essay :)
I do not need another focus system, a more advanced productivity app, or a piece of equipment that gives my nervous system a score out of 100. Those can become sophisticated ways to delay the moment when I sit down and face the work. The lever is attention, and the annoying thing about that lever is that I have to pull it myself.
Movement helps too. Running, walking, lifting, anything that lets the mental tabs close one by one. I rarely enjoy every minute of a run while I am doing it, but I have never regretted finishing one. It clears enough internal noise for one thought to occupy the whole screen again.
So does boredom. Standing in line without reaching for my phone is a repetition. Sitting through the first ten restless minutes of a work block is a repetition. Letting an idea stay unresolved instead of escaping into novelty is a repetition. The ability to remain under stimulated long enough for depth to arrive has to be trained.
The most powerful instrument in the room
My kids do not care whether the Soviet experiments eventually produce a new model of physics. They cannot tell the difference between a day when I wrote something brilliant and a day when I wrote something forgettable.
They can tell whether I am actually there. And I am not proud to admit all the moments where I have been on X, or Insta, or whatever other B.S is distracting me via a lil glass box full of silicon.
Twenty minutes on the floor with my full attention registers differently from an hour on the couch while part of me is somewhere else. The kids know immediately. They knew before they could talk. No quantity of partial presence adds up to the real thing.
Maybe directed consciousness can affect another nervous system across seven kilometers. I am open to that. I know with certainty that it changes the people sitting three feet away from me. My attention tells them whether they matter. It changes what I notice in their faces, what I remember, how patiently I respond, and what kind of father I am in that moment.
The same capacity powers my work, my relationships, my prayer, and my ability to make something that did not exist yesterday. I spend from one account all day. The balance falls whether I allocate it deliberately or let a feed allocate it for me.
Brian ends his article with a commitment to follow the empirical evidence wherever it leads. I respect that compass deeply. His work has me convinced there is something here, and I want to see what better instruments and honest replication uncover.
My immediate test is simpler. At the end of the day, can I point to one thing I made with my full attention and one person who received my full presence?
If I cannot, I was everywhere a little and nowhere enough.
Phone in another room. Ninety minutes. One thing.
Let’s get this bread Conor.
(Bread for me = Creating Value Via Flow State)
Can’t achieve that state without focus.
7/27/26
Conor Jay Chepenik
