Neuroscientist says she communicates daily with her dead husband via '34 senses'

Dr. Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and former medical doctor, said she communicates with her deceased husband every day by attending to what she described as her "34 senses." She made the remarks on the podcast Diary of a CEO, saying that subtle signals from the dead can be detected if one cultivates awareness of expanded sensory inputs.

"It's possible to communicate with someone who has passed away," Dr. Swart told the podcast. "It's taboo because we are afraid that people will think we're going insane." She added that her experiences have at times been similar to reports that have led others to be institutionalized: "I've been part of teams that have locked people up and had them injected with stuff against their will because of things they were saying that are not that dissimilar to things I've experienced."

Dr. Swart framed her ability as an extension of human perception. She said the traditional five-sense framework is incomplete and that a broader set of sensory faculties allows her to pick up faint signs that she interprets as messages from her late husband. She did not present empirical data on the podcast to corroborate the mechanism or the number she asserted.

Mainstream neuroscience recognizes more sensory modalities than sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch — for example, proprioception (body position) and the vestibular sense (balance) — but it does not recognize a standard taxonomy of 34 senses or endorse the notion that the living can reliably receive information from the dead. Claims of communication with deceased persons are generally treated as anecdotal and remain outside the scope of established empirical evidence.

Experts who study bereavement and grief note that continued perceived connections to a lost loved one are common and can take many forms, from mental imagery and dreams to sensed presences. Psychologists have described these experiences as part of a continuing bond between the bereaved and the deceased. Clinicians caution that such experiences, when distressing or accompanied by impaired reality testing, should be assessed for mental-health conditions, but many professionals also acknowledge that nonpathological continuing bonds are widespread and can be a normal part of adaptation to loss.

Dr. Swart's comments touch on longer-standing debates about how to classify subjective experiences that fall outside conventional explanation. They also raise ethical questions about how medical and psychiatric systems respond when people report unusual perceptions. Historically, some people who reported anomalous experiences were subject to coercive treatment; contemporary practice emphasizes careful assessment, informed consent and distinguishing between distressing psychopathology and culturally or personally meaningful experiences.

Public discussion of post-mortem communication spans religious beliefs, cultural traditions and individual accounts. While such reports remain a topic of interest in popular media and among some researchers, they have not produced reproducible scientific evidence that information can be transmitted from deceased individuals to living persons. As with other extraordinary claims, scientific attention requires documented, repeatable observations and methods that can be independently verified.