In a recent interview with the New York Times, David Byrne said, “It’s a hard thing for us to intuitively accept the idea of ‘self is an illusion.’ It’s very Buddhist, but it’s also increasingly more scientific. It’s not just a spiritual concept. It’s also a kind of neural concept.”

This overlap between scientific evidence and spiritual, occult, paranormal, and otherwise decidedly non-rational beliefs, experiences, and tools has been happening more and more. Let’s take a closer look at what is happening across a variety of scientific disciplines that support—along with new evidence to contradict, in some cases!—the uncanny aspects of life.

This winter, join practicing medium Tiffany Hopkins for a reading group that will investigate how science is beginning to align with the spiritual. Each month, we’ll read a cutting-edge sciencey book (yes, it’s going to be a lot!) from a different discipline, transversing cognitive science, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, ecopsychology, and of course, physics, to get a better understanding of current research on the mysteries of life (and death). Then we’ll meet to dive deeper into the content, talk about what we read, and make more sense out of it all than we could alone.

Get ready to nerd out and blow your own mind! Please note that some of the later books may change based on our conversations and interest.