Itzhak Bentov and the Mechanics of Consciousness: From Pacemakers to the CIA’s Gateway Process

What if your heart wasn’t just pumping blood, but also helping tune your brain into the frequencies of the universe?

That was the audacious claim of Itzhak Bentov, an Israeli-American inventor who straddled the worlds of biomedical engineering and mystical speculation.

He designed medical devices that saved lives, yet he’s best remembered for arguing that consciousness itself is a kind of vibration — one that can stretch beyond the body and even into the cosmos.

It’s 2:17 a.m. in Boston. A college sophomore, already waitlisted for campus counseling, opens her laptop. She doesn’t write in her journal. She opens ChatGPT.

“Why do I hate myself so much?” she types.

The machine—tireless, polite, available—answers.

This is not science fiction. It’s American culture in 2025. Therapy is expensive, therapists are scarce, loneliness is epidemic, and the machines are always awake.

The question isn’t whether people are using ChatGPT as a therapist.

They are. The question is how, how often, how well—and what happens when they do.

Is ChatGPT Being Used as Therapy in America?

Why Texting After a Fight Feels Harder

Long-distance relationship fights land harder. There’s no softening hug, no shared silence to dissipate tension. All you have are words—digits on a screen that come without tone or presence.

That’s why your first message after a fight carries weight. It doesn’t need to resolve everything. It just needs to reopen the door.

Long-Distance Love Requires Extra Care

LDRs ask for more trust, more effort, and more emotional craftsmanship. According to research, long-distance couples often feel more anxiety around communication gaps—but those who succeed develop stronger connection habits (Jiang & Hancock, 2013).

In therapy, I've seen couples transform conflict into deeper intimacy by treating communication like a practiced skill, not a given.

After fights, that craft becomes everything.

The modern wellness industry promises a fix for everything—powders for your cortisol, books to “hack” your brain, apps to engineer happiness.

Neuroscience offers a humbler message: your brain is not a machine to be optimized, but a living system to be understood.

Treat it less like a gadget and more like a pet: it thrives on consistency, kindness, and patience.

When we ignore this, three forces often take hold—loneliness, chronic stress, and self-doubt. They do more than make us miserable; they change the brain itself.

But neuroscience also shows us how to push back—without buying miracle cures.

Social rejection neuroscience has revealed something many already suspect: exclusion doesn’t just bruise the ego, it activates the same brain regions as physical pain.

Research shows that being left out triggers cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, while also lowering a sense of belonging and sometimes sparking aggression (Blackhart et al., 2009).

Chronic rejection is even linked to long-term mental health struggles, including depression and anxiety, as well as physical health risks (Slavich et al., 2010).

Evolution offers an explanation.

For early humans, being excluded from the group meant danger. Without social bonds, survival chances plummeted. Today, the brain’s warning system still interprets rejection as a threat to well-being.

Functional MRI studies show that the anterior cingulate cortex—the same region active in physical pain—lights up when people are excluded from something as trivial as a virtual ball-tossing game (Eisenberger et al., 2003).

But newer findings complicate this picture. Follow-up research suggests the anterior cingulate also responds to surprise or expectation violation, not just social pain (Somerville et al., 2006).

In other words, rejection may hurt partly because it confounds predictions: you thought you belonged, but you were wrong.

Scene One: The Dinner Party

It happens in an instant. You’re sipping wine at a friend’s house when your partner leans over and says, almost casually, “Oh—my ex is here tonight.”

You nod, trying to appear calm.

But inside, your organs fall through the floor.

Every time your partner laughs, you notice who they’re laughing with. The food tastes like nothing. The room feels like it’s shrinking.

That’s jealousy. It barges in, uninvited, pulling a chair up at the table.

We’ve been told loneliness is just a feeling.

An ache you sleep off, or something cured by a night out with friends. But the research keeps contradicting that hopeful little story.

Loneliness, left unchecked, doesn’t just sting—it carves new grooves into our brains, reshapes our personalities, and even leaves fingerprints on our biology.

At this year’s American Psychological Association convention in Denver, researchers from the Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance (TASHRA) presented something bound to make headlines: nearly half of the 672 kink participants they surveyed said BDSM or fetish play gave them “emotional healing.”

That’s the kind of stat that makes reporters type faster and conservatives faint harder.

Trauma transformed into pleasure.

Shame turned into agency. Healing in leather and latex.

But let’s not confuse applause lines with hard data. Let’s slide in…

In Japan, there’s a word for disappearing without a trace: johatsu (蒸発). It means “to evaporate.”

Not evaporate in the mystical sense—no clouds of incense, no cherry blossoms floating down the Sumida River.

Just a person who walks away from their job, their marriage, their debts, their family—and never comes back.

One day they exist, the next they are gone. To their loved ones, it’s as if they’ve been swept from the face of the earth.

And here’s the unsettling part: in Japan, this isn’t an urban myth. It’s a recognized social phenomenon.

What Is Johatsu?

In the U.S., nearly one in five adults will experience an anxiety disorder this year (National Institute of Mental Health, 2024).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 30% of adults have felt anxious or depressed most or all of the time in the past two weeks.

That’s not an individual malfunction—it’s a national work order stamped “URGENT.”

We have meditation apps, employee wellness webinars, and self-help podcasts in every flavor—and still, anxiety rates climb.

Why? Because America has perfected the art of converting structural problems into personal defects, then monetizing the cure.

Office romance is back. The slow migration back to cubicles, open-plan spaces, and conference rooms has revived an ancient workplace tradition: people falling for each other between the coffee machine and the quarterly budget review.

In 2025, nearly half of workers aged 18–44 say they’ve started dating a coworker since returning to in-person work, with Gen Z and millennials leading the way (Business Insider).

They’re less likely than older generations to hide these relationships, less fearful of stigma, and more likely to see work as a legitimate place to meet a long-term partner.

For HR leaders, this means one thing: it’s time to stop pretending workplace romance doesn’t exist, and start managing it more intelligently.

Somewhere between the invention of fire and the invention of the photocopier, humans discovered two things:

1. Food tastes better when you know how to make it.

2. People are jerks about giving you that knowledge.

We like to think of recipes as acts of generosity—gifts, heirlooms, love letters in the language of butter and spice.

And yet, across cultures and centuries, there’s a long tradition of handing someone a recipe… and somehow making sure it won’t quite work.

It’s the culinary equivalent of giving someone driving directions that almost get them there.

Why Do Some Folks Sabotage Recipes?