Le Monde spoke with American author Dan Brown by phone on the occasion of the worldwide release of his new novel, The Secret of Secrets. In the sixth installment of the Robert Langdon novel series, the eponymous professor of symbology, while traveling in Prague with his girlfriend, Katherine, faces a plot that targets her manuscript, a text which explores the limitless powers of human consciousness. Brown's esoteric thriller, which is already being adapted by Netflix, reprises the elements that made his previous books so successful. However, as the interview revealed, it also represents a turning point: The author of The Da Vinci Code is no longer simply content to rewrite legends and fictionalize paranormal phenomena, and he now seems to embrace the pseudoscientific theories described in his novels.

Noetics comes from the Greek noetikos, which means "perception." It is the study of human consciousness and our perception of the real world. And in addition, it is the study of the human mind's ability to affect the physical world. And examples would be, for example, the power of prayer. Can we change the nature of someone's cells by getting enough people to think about them? And those are the sorts of things that noetics studies.

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