Snapshot · The Mel Robbins Podcast
The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon, who had a consciousness epiphany on his return journey to Earth.
Where this was said
At 1:04:50 · chapter starts 1:04:00
The conversation zooms out to consciousness itself — the biggest umbrella under which imagination, visualization, and manifestation all sit. Dr. Vieten defines it at two levels: small-c consciousness is everything you're aware of; big-C consciousness encompasses the beliefs, values, and assumptions you don't even know you hold. Becoming more conscious means moving from autopilot to intentional — arriving at a meeting with a clear intention rather than just showing up. She then shares how she spent 18 years at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon. On his way back to Earth, Mitchell saw the sun, moon, stars, and Earth simultaneously, and had an epiphany: the molecules in his body were the same as those in the stars and the space capsule — he was not separate from the universe but part of it. This deeper sense of interconnectedness is what the Institute was founded to study: the relationship between the inner world of consciousness and the outer world of observable reality.
Consciousness isn't just what you're aware of — it's your beliefs, intentions, intuitions, and worldview. Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell realized in space that his consciousness was connected to the molecules of the stars. Your inner world is as real as the outer one, and it shapes everything.
Dr. Vieten spent approximately 18 years at the Institute of Noetic Sciences studying consciousness and human experience before her work at UC San Diego.
Astronauts who see Earth from space consistently lose their sense of national separation and feel compelled to protect the planet. Dr. Vieten recreated that perspective shift through VR — and Mel described feeling simultaneously tiny and limitless.
Animals first sensed light 540 million years ago, triggering an evolutionary acceleration known as the Cambrian explosion within 10 million years.
It is estimated that half of all cortical activity in the human brain is involved in visual function, underscoring vision's central role in intelligence.
Cognitive neuroscience literature shows that by age 6, humans can recognize tens of thousands of different object categories — far more data than early AI systems were trained on.
Only about 3% of FDA-approved drugs have genuinely unclear mechanisms of action, making an unknown mechanism a meaningful early red flag for any compound.
Even compounds that clear preclinical testing often fail in humans: 30 to 50% of drugs entering phase 1 trials do not advance to phase 2, frequently because human behavior differs from animal models.
More than 80% of published BPC-157 research comes from a single academic group whose researchers have IP and commercial interests connected to the molecule, limiting independent replication.
Roughly 100 peptide drugs are already FDA-approved, about 150 more are in clinical trials, and 600–700 are in preclinical development, underscoring the legitimacy of peptide science broadly.
The scientist who discovered BPC-157 refused to disclose the screening method used to identify the compound and has never fully published the parent protein sequence — what Peter Attia calls 'scientific trust me, bro.'
The brain's visual, auditory, and motor cortices light up nearly identically whether an experience is real or imagined, making visualization a form of actual neural training.
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