Is Psychic Ability in Your DNA? The Strange Search for a Genetic Basis of Psi
For centuries, stories of unusual perception have shown a peculiar tendency to run in families.
A grandmother knows who is calling before the telephone rings. A parent dreams of an event that later seems to unfold. A child appears unusually sensitive to people, places or incidents that others do not notice. Depending on the culture, such experiences may be described as second sight, intuition, spiritual sensitivity or coincidence.
What if some part of that apparent inheritance has a biological explanation?
It is a provocative question, but not an entirely unscientific one. A small group of consciousness researchers has begun using modern genomic tools to ask whether particular variations in DNA are associated with people who report frequent experiences of telepathy, precognition or clairvoyance.
So far, the results are intriguing, controversial and very preliminary. They do not reveal a single “psychic gene.” They do, however, turn an ancient claim into a set of questions that can be tested.
What Psychic Ability Genetics Research Actually Tests
Psychic ability genetics is a young and controversial field, and its first studies have begun with modest, exploratory samples. Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), has spent decades investigating phenomena that remain on the margins of conventional science: telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis and the possibility that consciousness interacts with physical systems in ways not yet understood.
One of the most unusual branches of that work involves DNA.
In a pilot case-control study led by Helané Wahbeh and co-authored by Radin, the team screened more than 3,000 candidates. It ultimately selected 13 people who reported psychic ability and a family history of similar experiences, then compared them with ten people matched for age, sex and ethnicity who reported neither psychic ability nor such a family history.
The team used whole-exome sequencing. The obvious expectation might be that the psychic group would carry a distinctive change in a protein-coding region of the genome. The researchers found no coding variant that clearly separated the two groups.
The unusual result appeared instead in a noncoding intron adjacent to a gene called TNRC18. After one control sample failed quality checks, a GG-to-GA variation was present in seven of the nine remaining controls and absent from all 13 psychic cases.
That reversal encouraged a striking possibility: perhaps the relevant difference was not a mutation that created psychic ability, but a variation associated with its reduction.
There is an enormous caveat. The sample was tiny. The paper itself states that random population sampling is the most conservative interpretation. A result in 22 usable genomes can generate a hypothesis; it cannot establish a biological marker, much less demonstrate a mechanism.
This was not the discovery of a psychic gene. It was a clue that demanded a much larger test.
The 2026 Study and 212 Candidate Variants
In 2026, Wahbeh, Radin and colleagues published a larger exploratory genomic analysis involving 102 English-speaking adults who reported at least one psychic experience and had access to raw data from direct-to-consumer genetic tests.
The study did not compare verified psychics with a general population control group. Instead, participants completed measures of psychic experiences, paranormal belief, personality and mental health, and the researchers used a Random Forest classifier to distinguish relatively higher- and lower-scoring groups within that self-selected sample.
One finding stood out before the genomic result: 82 percent of participants reported relatives with similar experiences. That is consistent with the idea of familial clustering, but it is not proof of genetic inheritance. Families share stories, beliefs, expectations, environments and habits as well as DNA.
After quality control and false discovery rate correction, the analysis identified 212 single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, associated with psychic-experience scores. The strongest signal, rs10410488, mapped to ARHGEF18, a gene connected to calcium-dependent dendritic growth. Other candidate variants mapped to genes involved in calcium signalling, brain structure, microtubule dynamics, estrogen pathways and retinoic acid signalling.
That sounds dramatic. Yet it does not mean scientists have found 212 genes for psychic powers. The authors describe the study as exploratory and say larger, more diverse cohorts are essential. The sample was predominantly female, Caucasian, educated and based in the United States, which limits how confidently its results can be generalized.
The real outcome is a list of biological leads. Independent researchers would need to reproduce the associations in far larger populations before anyone could decide whether they reflect genuine signals, features of this particular group or statistical noise.
Why “The Psychic Gene” Is Probably the Wrong Idea
The phrase “psychic gene” suggests a biological switch: one version grants an ability, another withholds it. Most complex human characteristics do not work that way.
The National Human Genome Research Institute defines polygenic traits as characteristics influenced by two or more genes and notes that many are also shaped by the environment. Height, personality, cognition and vulnerability to common illnesses emerge from many small genetic effects interacting with development and experience.
If anomalous perception eventually proves to have a biological component, it may be more useful to think in terms of sensitivity than possession. Radin described psychic receptivity during his Strange & Mysterious World conversation as something closer to a talent: perhaps widely distributed, but expressed very differently from one person to another.
This reframes the question. Instead of asking, “Do you have the psychic gene?” researchers can ask whether some people possess combinations of biological traits that make them more sensitive to anomalous information.
That question connects with attempts to study remote viewing and the nature of apparently nonlocal information. It is still controversial, but at least it can be divided into measurable problems: Who reports the experiences? Who performs above chance under controlled conditions? Do results repeat? And are any consistent biological differences present?
Families Pass Down More Than DNA
The 82 percent family-history figure is compelling because it matches centuries of folklore. It is also easy to overinterpret.
A household in which dreams, intuitions and unusual coincidences are discussed openly will produce different memories and reports from one in which such subjects are ridiculed or ignored. Children learn which experiences deserve attention. Relatives reinforce interpretations. A shared vocabulary can make similar events appear to cluster even when no inherited mechanism is involved.
Then there is gene–environment interaction. NHGRI’s explanation of gene–environment effects emphasizes that genes do not act in isolation; physical and social environments can influence how traits are expressed. A rigorous study of psychic-experience reports would therefore need to separate inherited variation from family culture, personality, memory, expectation and exposure to anomalous belief systems.
It would also need objective performance measures. A genetic profile associated with reports of precognitive dreams might relate to dream recall, sleep architecture, pattern recognition, sensory sensitivity or a tendency to find meaning in coincidences. Genetics alone could not tell researchers whether information had genuinely arrived from the future.
The Stranger Inquisition Hypothesis
The story takes a much darker turn when population history enters the discussion.
In the episode, Radin considered whether centuries of persecution might have altered the prevalence of traits associated with unusual perception. If a heritable characteristic led its carriers to be identified as witches, seers or heretics and if those people were killed or prevented from having children negative selection could, in principle, change the frequency of relevant variants. Radin called the idea a form of “reverse eugenics.”
The mechanism is conceivable in the abstract. The evidence is nowhere near sufficient to show that it happened.
The pilot study contained 13 cases and nine usable controls. It did not establish that the TNRC18-adjacent variant suppresses psychic ability, that the variation was selected by religious persecution or that populations associated with Christianity possess less psychic sensitivity. Historical accusations of witchcraft were driven by complicated political, religious, economic and social forces; there is no reason to assume those accused represented a genetically distinct group.
The hypothesis therefore belongs in the realm of speculation. To move beyond that, researchers would first need replicable genetic markers linked to objective performance, then robust population-genetic evidence that their historical frequencies changed in a way consistent with selection. Neither condition has been met.
Its value, for now, is not as an explanation. It is as a reminder of how quickly a fragile association can acquire an enormous story.
Nature, Nurture—and Practice?
Even a genuine inherited predisposition would not make destiny inevitable. The IONS genetics programme frames the work as a continuing investigation into possible gene or gene-network differences, not a settled answer.
Radin has suggested that meditation, dreaming and other altered states may make people more aware of unusual experiences. Reports of synchronicity and psychic perception also appear in accounts of spiritual awakening and altered states. But the claim that meditation “switches on” psychic genes goes far beyond the available evidence.
The more defensible question is whether training attention changes measurable cognitive or neurobiological processes that influence how anomalous experiences are noticed, remembered or interpreted.
The same caution applies to methods explicitly designed to cultivate unusual capacities. The Bengston Method, including its Image Cycling practice, raises questions about training, healing intention and consciousness biology interactions. Those questions are scientifically separable from the claim that a specific DNA variant enables psi.
What Genetics Cannot Answer on Its Own
Even a perfectly replicated genetic association with reported psychic experiences would not establish telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition.
Genes might influence perception, imagination, attention, memory or belief. They might affect the probability that someone notices coincidences or interprets ambiguous events as meaningful. They could conceivably be associated with an information-processing capacity science has not recognized. Each explanation makes different predictions, and each would require a different experiment.
This is why the topic becomes more interesting when the claims are narrowed rather than inflated. Researchers can ask whether experiences cluster in families; whether particular variants recur in independent samples; whether carriers perform differently on preregistered, blinded tests; and whether any neurological signature accompanies successful trials.
Questions about consciousness affecting matter also raised in mysteries such as Coral Castle require their own controlled evidence. Genetics may identify who is more likely to report an experience. It cannot, by itself, determine what that experience ultimately was.
From Ancient Gift to Testable Question
Human cultures have described seers, diviners, prophets, shamans and people with “second sight” for millennia. For much of history, explanations were spiritual, fraudulent or pathological.
Modern genetics introduces a different possibility: some of the enormous variation in human subjective experience may have biological roots that researchers have barely begun to investigate.
The current evidence cannot tell us that psychic ability is encoded in DNA. It certainly does not justify a genetic test for psychic potential. The pilot finding may vanish with replication. Many or all of the 212 new candidate variants may do the same.
But the research has changed the shape of the mystery. Claims that once lived entirely in folklore can now be translated into hypotheses, datasets and experiments that other scientists can challenge.
If the associations disappear, that will be an answer. If some survive independent replication and also predict performance under controlled conditions, the question will become stranger still.
Watch the Full Conversation with Dean Radin
Dean Radin joined Strange & Mysterious World for an extensive discussion of psychic genetics, synchronicity, manifestation, retro causation, telepathy, consciousness and the possibility of enhancing unusual human capacities.
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