The Observable Unknown

What happens when individuality dissolves into the crowd? From Durkheim’s collective effervescence to Tarde’s contagion of imitation, from Canetti’s swarm psychology to Girard’s scapegoat mechanism, and from Zimbardo’s situational power to Arendt’s banality of evil, this interlude explores the hidden dynamics of group mind.

The observable unknown here is the collective itself: a force that shapes choice, obedience, and even violenc...

"What is history but a fable agreed upon?” Napoleon once asked. From collective recollection to sacred ritual, from covert interpersonal dramas to the unconscious resonance of color, from emotional imprints to memetic replication - this interlude explores the hidden architectures shaping what we call freedom.

Join Dr. Juan Carlos Rey as he traces Halbwachs, Eliade, Campbell, Berne, Damasio, Lüscher, and Blackmore, revealing how con...

In this interlude, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey steps into the hidden architectures shaping what we call “personal choice.” Drawing on Durkheim, Halbwachs, Berger, Bourdieu, Foucault, Elias, Geertz, Butler, Gramsci, and Meloni, he unpacks how collective memory, power, ritual, and even biology create the stage on which our decisions are performed.

Listeners are invited to explore the observable unknown of their own choices - what is inherite...

Can memory be inherited? Can trauma echo across generations? And do our most private choices carry the weight of ancestral shadows?

In this interlude, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey explores the mysteries of phylogenetic inertia, epigenetic conditioning, and genetic memory - tracing how our biology remembers more than we realize. From Darwin to Jung, Holocaust studies to modern neuroscience, we uncover how memory may stretch not only backward...

In this solo interlude, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey traces how culture, persuasion, ritual, and engineered messaging shape what we take to be “our” decisions. From classic lab findings on conformity and obedience to modern persuasion tactics and the neuroscience of suggestion, this episode maps how choice is constructed long before it reaches consciousness. If you’ve ever wondered why you clicked, said yes, or changed your mind without kno...

Tonight’s Interlude IV of The Observable Unknown traces the living tension between free will, agency, and the brain’s hidden predictive machinery. Drawing on Libet’s timing experiments, Wegner’s critique, Friston’s predictive-processing, the comparator model, and mirror-neuron research, this episode shows how agency is constructed across layered neural processes: pre-reflective feeling, reflective judgment, and social resonance. We...

The guest for this episode is Dr. Daniel Jorgensen, a distinguished scholar of Religious Studies whose work has illuminated the esoteric scene, the cultic milieu, and the occult Tarot. His research has expanded the sociology of religion beyond institutional boundaries, into the rich and often misunderstood margins where seekers continually redefine meaning and identity.

Our conversation will explore not on...

In this Interlude, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey traces how three great thinkers sought the Observable Unknown in their own fields. Max Müller uncovered forgotten meanings buried in language, Konrad Lorenz revealed the instinctual patterns beneath human behavior, and Claude Lévi-Strauss exposed the hidden structures shaping myth. Together, their work shows that mystery is not distant - it lives in the words we speak, the instincts we carry, ...

In this interlude, host Dr. Juan Carlos Rey explores how the observable unknown reveals itself in the hidden life of the mind and the shared structures of society. Drawing on the insights of Freud, Jung, Julian Jaynes, Adler, and Peter Berger, this interlude traces how unconscious drives, archetypes, inner voices, human striving, and cultural meaning-shields shape our lives.

What emerges is a portrait of mystery not as something to...

In this special Interlude of The Observable Unknown, host Dr. Juan Carlos Rey steps away from dialogue to offer a sustained philosophical reflection on the very title of the show.

Through the lenses of Kant’s tension between phenomena and noumena, Heidegger’s play of truth as both revealing and concealing, Aristotle’s vision of wonder as the root of philosophy, and the profound wisdom of Taoist, Vedantic, and Buddhist traditions, t...

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Robin Hager - a clinician whose path began in the labs and lecture halls of the University of Arizona, and was forever changed when she stepped into her first healing-touch class.

Her journey is a story of integration: from writing medical protocols that saved lives, to guiding patients and families through plant medicine ceremonies with shamans in Peru. From the hal...

In this episode, we welcome a woman whose life’s work has bridged journalism, cinema, and memory. From the anchor desk at BBC World News to the frontlines of conflict, from digitizing the testimonies of Armenian genocide survivors to directing films that confront the darkest truths of our history - Dr. Carla Garapedian has carried voices the world tried to silence back into the light.

Her new project, Nemesis 1921, re...

There are people who do not simply work in the world… they bend it, ever so gently, toward growth.  They design experiences that don’t just inform but awaken. They educate, they mold, they transform whatever they hold.  They leave behind no statue, no symphony, no temple of stone—  and yet they build invisible cathedrals in the lives of those they touch.

My guest today is one of those people.

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