A non-speaking autistic student used a word that dropped out of the English language in the 1600s and said he learned it by “thought sharing” with a Catholic magistrate from 1345, opening a conversation about remote viewing through time that neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge and psychologist Mike Shapiro have been researching for years. Their work on presentiment, precognition, and time travel therapy suggests that the mind’s relationship with time is far less linear than we assume, and that healing may be possible by sending your present self back to the moments where your younger self was most alone.
A Word Nobody Has Used Since the 1600s
During a spelling session with his teacher Maria, a non-speaking autistic student named Ryan was working through a lesson on Benedictine art when he typed out something unexpected. The word was “ephorize,” and neither Maria nor Ryan’s mother, who was present in the room, recognised it. When they looked it up, they discovered it was a real English word meaning to have absolute control or influence over something, but it had dropped out of use in the 1600s. It does not appear in any modern dictionary. Maria had to go deep into historical databases to find it at all, and even then only by being extremely specific with her search terms.
When Maria asked Ryan how he knew the word, he spelled out his answer: he had “thought shared” with a Catholic magistrate from 1345.
Maria then checked whether magistrates existed in 1345. They did, but they were in Rome. Ryan spelt the word a second time to confirm it was not a mistake. His mother watched the whole thing unfold and corroborated the account independently. The word, the date, the specificity of “magistrate” rather than priest or monk or scholar; none of it came from anywhere in Ryan’s lesson material or anything he could have encountered through conventional means.
This story sits at one of the more provocative intersections in consciousness research: the question of whether information can be accessed across time, and whether certain people may be doing this routinely without formal training or even conscious effort.
Remote Viewing Through Time
Ryan was not the only student in Maria’s classroom to describe accessing information from outside the present moment. Another student told Maria and her classroom assistant, Dan, exactly where they had gone for lunch and what they had each eaten, despite not being present. When asked how he knew, he said he had remote viewed. When asked how he knew when to look, given that he did not know where they were or what time they went, he responded simply: “I went back in time. It’s easy remote viewing when you go back in time.”
The same student made a distinction that researchers found significant. Though he described telepathic communication as effortless and generally preferred it to spoken language, he said remote viewing takes considerably more energy and is more difficult. He wanted to keep working with Maria, presenting questions aloud rather than switching to remote viewing for academic content. This is not a child making grandiose claims about limitless powers. It is someone describing a capacity with clear boundaries and costs.
Remote viewing itself has been studied extensively since the 1970s, including through programmes funded by the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency. What these non-speaking students describe goes further: they say they can remote view across time as well as space, accessing events in the past (and potentially the future) rather than simply perceiving distant locations in the present.
Why Non-Speakers May Experience Time Differently
Cognitive neuroscientist Dr Julia Mossbridge, chief science officer at the Applied Love Labs and a senior distinguished fellow at Florida Atlantic University, offers a framework for understanding why non-speaking autistic individuals might have a fundamentally different relationship with time.
Her reasoning begins with the body. Non-speakers with severe apraxia (the inability to reliably control voluntary movement) cannot plan for the future in the way most people do unconsciously. The brain, as neuroscientist Dean Buonomano has argued in “The Brain Is a Time Machine,” is fundamentally a prediction engine: it constantly models what will happen next and updates when those predictions fail. For someone who cannot control their body, those predictions fail constantly. The future feels unreliable. And because the future becomes the past, the past feels different too. The entire architecture of temporal experience shifts.
Mossbridge draws a further connection to speech. Spoken language is, by its nature, time-locked: it unfolds sequentially, word by word, in a fixed temporal direction. It organises thought along a line. When speech is not your primary or reliable tool, your mind may operate with much looser temporal boundaries. What neurotypical people can access only through trance states, meditation, or deliberate remote viewing practice, these individuals may inhabit as their baseline experience.
Naoki Higashida, a Japanese non-speaking autistic author, described this directly in “The Reason I Jump“: for him, one second can feel infinitely long while 24 hours can pass in a flash. Time, he wrote, can only be fixed in memory as visual scenes, and there is little felt difference between a second and a day. What the next moment holds never stops being a source of worry, because it can never be reliably predicted.
Five Decades of Evidence
Mossbridge’s own research on what she calls “informational time travel” (more commonly known as precognition) provides a scientific framework for taking the non-speakers’ claims seriously. Her meta-analysis of presentiment studies, since independently replicated, demonstrates a statistically significant physiological response to future events that should, by conventional reasoning, be unpredictable. The body responds before the stimulus arrives. She describes this using the metaphor of a finger held under a running tap: below the finger, there is a gap in the water, but above it, a small bubble forms. That bubble is the body detecting a fold in the space-time fabric before conscious awareness catches on.
Her research into pre-cognitive remote viewing (consciously describing a future event or stimulus before it has been determined) shows that accuracy improves significantly when the viewer is in a state of unconditional love. Non-speakers, Mossbridge notes, often operate from precisely this state, a right-hemisphere, self-transcendent orientation that many neurotypical people only reach through sustained practice.
By 1995, the evidence for precognition was strong enough that when Congress commissioned a statistical review of the intelligence community’s remote viewing research, the independent statisticians concluded that precognition was real and statistically significant. They had been hired to find faults in the methodology. They could not.
Trauma, Psi, and a Crucial Distinction
Mossbridge also addresses a pattern that many practitioners and researchers have observed anecdotally: people who have experienced childhood trauma appear more likely to exhibit psi abilities such as telepathy, precognition, and mediumship. A study by the Windbridge Research Centre found that practising mediums tended to have a greater-than-average history of trauma. Research by Kristen Cameron at the California Institute of Integral Studies showed a similar correlation specifically for precognition.
Mossbridge’s explanation is grounded in necessity rather than mysticism. If you come home every day after school to a household that is chaotic, abusive, or neglectful, your survival may depend on developing an early warning system. A child who begins to sense what is coming before they walk through the door is not performing a trick. They are coping. Just as non-speakers may develop telepathic abilities because speech is unavailable to them, traumatised children may develop precognitive sensitivity because knowing what is coming next is the difference between safety and harm.
The crucial point, and Mossbridge is emphatic about this, is that healing the trauma does not remove the ability. People who address their childhood wounds through therapy and move forward with compassion keep their capacities. In fact, unconditional love turns out to be a more reliable and sustainable gateway to psi abilities than trauma ever was. The door stays open. What changes is the suffering that first pushed it open.
Healing Across Time
Psychologist Dr Mike Shapiro, a clinical psychologist, ordained Zen Buddhist monk, and fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (recently profiled by the New York Times for his work with veterans through ketamine therapy), has been developing a clinical practice built around what he and Mossbridge call time travel therapy. The principle is direct: if you can access other points in time through consciousness, you can bring the resources of your present self (its wisdom, its stability, its compassion) back to the moments where your younger self was most alone.
Mossbridge’s own experience is the case study that brought them together. As a child, she endured nightly sessions in which her father, who suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, would floss her teeth for 45 minutes to an hour at a time, from the ages of roughly three to ten. (He recorded these sessions on audio tape; Mossbridge later found one that had not ended by the end of a 90-minute cassette.) During those sessions, she perceived a woman in her fifties sitting in a rocking chair beside the bed, saying things like: “This sucks. It’s okay to be angry. But you’re going to thrive.” Decades later, during therapy in her forties, she was guided through a time travel meditation to revisit those childhood moments. That was when she recognised the woman in the chair. It was her.
Shapiro described a parallel case: a client who had been tortured as a child and kept in a closet for days remembered a comforting presence visiting her during those moments. During a time travel meditation, the client went back, offered compassion to her younger self, and emerged in tears, recognising that she had been that presence all along.
“The more we do time travel this way,” Shapiro said, “the more we realise how our own presence is the thing we’ve been waiting for.”
The Long Body
Shapiro frames his work through the Iroquois concept of the “long body,” the understanding that we exist not only in the present moment but are connected backwards through our ancestors (via epigenetics and inherited experience) and forward to future generations. In altered states of consciousness, whether through meditation, psychedelics, drumming, or deep presence, time expands, contracts, and sometimes disappears entirely.
He also practises what he calls “time bending,” techniques for deliberately slowing the experience of time so that sensory awareness opens fully. This is not about productivity or cramming more into a day. It is about richness, about actually smelling, hearing, and feeling what is happening rather than rushing past it on the way to the next task. When time slows, life becomes denser with experience rather than thinner.
For Shapiro and Mossbridge, none of this represents a distortion of time. It represents a more complete picture of what time actually is. The linear model, one moment following the next in a fixed sequence, may be a useful organisational tool (particularly one reinforced by speech), but it is not the whole story. What non-speakers, meditators, trauma survivors, and remote viewers all seem to be pointing toward, from very different directions, is the same thing: time is not a line. And the mind, under the right conditions, can move through it.
A clinically validated self-guided version of the time travel therapy protocol developed by Mossbridge and Shapiro is available at timemachine.love.
Original Article: Prepare for Change
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Have you ever experienced a moment where time seemed to fold, where information arrived from somewhere that should not have been accessible? And what would it mean if your future self could reach back and offer comfort to the version of you that needed it most? Share your experiences and insights below.
