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If there’s one lesson history keeps trying to teach us, it’s this: Human beings are remarkably bad at recognizing important discoveries while they’re happening.
Again and again, ideas that later became foundational to our societies were first met with ridicule and fear, then quietly dismissed. Not because they were disproven, but because they didn’t fit what most people already believed was possible.
These ideas fell victim to what psychologists call structural stigma: the embedding of doubt and dismissal into social, institutional, and policy-level systems that determine which questions are considered legitimate long before evidence can fully emerge (1).
Structural stigma isn’t just about individual skepticism. It’s what happens when organizations, industries, and professional communities quietly decide which lines of inquiry are acceptable and which are not. When that happens, curiosity disappears not because an idea is wrong, but because it is risky.
A Familiar Pattern in Human Discovery
Many of the technologies we now consider indispensable followed this same path. Electricity, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, radio, television, computers, and the internet were all initially dismissed or restricted by institutions that viewed them as impractical, unsafe, or unnecessary. Legitimacy arrived only after years of persistence by people willing to continue doing the research despite resistance.
What these breakthroughs shared was not immediate proof, but disruption. Each challenged existing frameworks, threatened established industries, and forced a reconsideration of what was believed to be possible. In response, stigma discouraged curiosity, made serious inquiry professionally risky, reduced investment, and slowed progress.
The Modern Topics We’re Treating the Same Way
This pattern didn’t end with electricity or airplanes. It’s happening again right now.
Several areas of inquiry are being sidelined, not because they’ve been disproven, but because they strain current models of reality and carry reputational risk. Among them are unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), telepathy in the autistic community, externalized consciousness, and psychedelic research.
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)
UAPs are often dismissed as fringe speculation, despite documented reports from trained observers and repeated acknowledgments by U.S. government and military institutions that many incidents remain unexplained.
In recent televised congressional hearings, multiple current and former U.S. military and intelligence officials testified under oath to firsthand knowledge of secret UAP programs, including claims involving non-human intelligence and the recovery of non-human biologics (3, 4). At the same time, the official position of the U.S. government, as stated by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), continues to deny verified evidence of a non-human origin.
Within academia, interest appears far greater than public dismissal suggests. A large-scale survey of tenured and tenure-track faculty across 14 disciplines at 144 major U.S. research universities (N = 1,460) found that curiosity outweighed skepticism or indifference, with broad support for academic evaluation of UAP data and further research (2). Most faculty were aware of reports but unfamiliar with related legislation—underscoring how stigma limits discourse. What people won’t talk about can’t be studied.
The stigma surrounding UAPs is not primarily about evidence. It is about implication. Taking the topic seriously raises uncomfortable questions about technology, physics, and humanity’s place in the universe. As a result, inquiry has often been discouraged, underfunded, or treated as professionally risky.
Telepathy in the Autistic Community
The Telepathy Tapes reached the number-one spot on U.S. podcast charts in January 2025, drawing widespread attention to reports of telepathic communication among some non-speaking autistic individuals (5, 10).
The documentary-style series explores these claims through interviews with families, clinicians, and researchers, while also engaging skepticism and ethical concerns. Yet such reports are often dismissed outright—not because they have been rigorously studied and disproven, but because they challenge prevailing assumptions about communication, cognition, and intelligence (7, 9).
This response echoes earlier eras when autism itself was widely misunderstood. Institutional stigma once defined what autistic individuals were believed capable of, long before evidence contradicted those limits. Once again, stigma risks closing the door before inquiry can begin.
Externalized Consciousness
An aggressive debate exists within neuroscience about the origin of consciousness. Materialism has been the dominant model for decades, framing consciousness as something fully produced by the brain. Its dominance has shaped which questions are considered legitimate, privileging research that assumes consciousness must be entirely brain-based while sidelining alternative models before they can be rigorously tested.
This has contributed to the stigmatization of phenomena such as telepathy, near-death experiences, precognition, and remote viewing—experiences that cannot be explained within a materialist framework.
Research exploring these phenomena has given rise to theories of externalized consciousness, in which mind-like properties may extend beyond the physical brain, and the brain functions less as a generator and more as a receptive or mediating system (11, 12).
Because this possibility challenges the prevailing brain-only model, it has often been sidelined rather than examined, limiting investigation to researchers willing to step outside conventional boundaries. The controversy surrounding perspectives such as those advanced by physicist and neuroscientist Alex Gómez-Marín, who declared materialism “dead” in a widely circulated address at the 2025 Science of Consciousness Conference, highlights the structural barriers that continue to constrain theoretical growth in this field (13).
Psychedelics
Psychedelics offer one of the clearest examples of institutional stigma slowing progress. For decades, research into their therapeutic and neurological effects was effectively frozen, not because early findings were negative, but because cultural and political stigma made investigation unacceptable.
Only recently, as stigma has lifted, has research resumed, revealing therapeutic potential that was inaccessible for generations. In this case, the science did not change; the stigma did.
Despite the burgeoning research, at the federal level in the United States, most classic psychedelics, including psilocybin and MDMA, remain classified as Schedule I substances, legally defined as having no accepted medical use, high abuse potential, and no accepted safety even under medical supervision. (15, 16).
As a result, regulatory classifications rooted in past stigma continue to influence access and acceptance, even as emerging evidence challenges the assumptions on which those restrictions were built.
Why This Matters
The reaction to ideas that challenge current paradigms is familiar:
- “That’s not real.”
- “That’s unscientific.”
- “Talking about that will hurt credibility.”
But science advances by exploring the unknown, not by declaring it off-limits.
Some of these modern topics may eventually be explained within existing models. Others may require new ones. Some may turn out to be wrong. That’s how progress works.
But when stigma decides in advance which questions are acceptable, we don’t protect science. We impoverish it.
The real danger isn’t investigating ideas that feel strange. It’s assuming that because something feels strange, it should be ignored.
History suggests we’ve made that mistake before. It’s worth asking whether we’re doing it again.
Stigma is not skepticism. True skepticism asks questions. Stigma shuts inquiry down before evidence has a chance to emerge.
When a topic becomes stigmatized, researchers avoid it, funding disappears, data goes uncollected, and the absence of evidence is then used as proof that the topic never deserved attention.
That’s not how science advances.
That’s how we slow the progress of humankind.
