Our Inner GPS

On October 6, 2014, a Nobel prize in medicine was awarded to John O’Keefe, May-Brit Moser, and Edvard I Moser for their discovery of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. This inner GPS makes it possible for us to orient ourselves in space, to navigate from one location to another.

The grid cells that constitute this inner GPS are located in the hippocampus and may also be located in the anterior cingulate part of the brain, which plays an important role in human emotion. Could this inner GPS help in other ways? Dr. Bernard Beitman, who has written a book on coincidences- not published yet – Connecting with Coincidence, thinks so.

In an article in Epoch Times, the Yale-educated psychiatrist, now teaching at the University of Virginia, said that “the emotional aspect of grid cell mapping could make particular locations more highly charged in our brain-based map. Like the maps used in GPS navigation, these maps could then help us find pathways to emotionally important people, things, and situations.”

Beitman says the connection to emotions is speculative, but his research has made it clear to him that some people are able to map their location in relation to emotionally significant people or places. He had such an experience himself when he was eight and his dog, Snapper, was lost. Beitman went out looking for his dog and made a wrong turn in a familiar neighborhood – and found his dog.

In his book, Beitman speculates about how the physical existence of human consciousness may be mapped and theorizes there may be a conduit of information that he calls the psychesphere. I emailed him and asked if he could explain what this is.

“We are fish-like, immersed in the ethereal waters of the psychesphere. Currents move through it. Some currents passing through us contain information about who we are, where we have been and where we’re going. Tunnels, the only word I can think of that expresses the connection that occurs, open and close, extend and shorten. Through these tunnels, places and objects at a distance can be known. This out-of-awareness medium carries vibrating patterns of energy – information in the same way that air the conducts sound. These patterns can engage similar patters with which to resonate, amplifying the lifespan of the original pattern.”

He noted that researcher Frederick Myers called the energy-information sphere the subliminal self – that part of each of us below the threshold of awareness. It has layers or strata. “They are strata…not of immovable rock, but of imperfectly miscible fluids of various densities and subject to currents and ebullitions which often bring to the surface a stream or bubble from a strata far below.”

This energy-information sphere sounds a lot like what physicist David Bohm called the implicate or enfolded order, a kind of primal soup that births everything in the universe. Bohm believed that even time unfolds from the implicate order. He referred to our external reality as the explicate order. Synchronicity, then, is where the implicate and the explicate, the inner and the outer, coincide.