Rupert Sheldrake on The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence (Full Transcript)

These fields are within and around the material systems they organize, and I think the same is true of our brains.

Vision

The place where this becomes easiest to understand is in terms of vision, and the question of how vision works. Most people think they know how vision works, and science has told us a great deal about it. And what we know is that when you see me standing here now for example, light is reflected from me, goes through the electromagnetic field of inverted images of pair on your retinas, changes happen in the cone cells and then impulses travel up the optic nerves and various bits of your brain become active. That’s what happens during physical side of perception.

There are two problems here. First of all, there’s no explanation in this as to why you should be conscious at all, that’s simply not explained by describing what happens in the nervous system. And the second problem is that, according to the standard view, all this is supposed to be happening inside your brain. If the mind is nothing but the brain, which is the usual assumption within the academic and medical worlds, mental activity is nothing but brain activity, everything you’re seeing is inside your head. Somehow, miraculously in an unexplained way, changes in your nervous cells lead to a kind of virtual reality display inside your head, by which you see what’s going on in the world.

So, right now, for example, somewhere inside your head, there’s a little virtual Rupert, somewhere in your brain and you think it’s right out here, whereas I’m standing here talking. If you look at the sky, the sky you’re seeing is an image of the sky inside your head. So, your skull must be beyond the sky. A recent paper in a leading consciousness journal was called, “Is your skull beyond the sky?” Because if the sky you see is inside your head, the skull must be beyond the sky. The answer of the author was yes, my answer would be no. In fact, I suggest the very common sense view. A view that is so simple, it’s hard to grasp that when you’re seeing something, the image you’re seeing is where it seems to be. Your image of me is located not inside your head but right here. It’s in your mind, produced by your mind but it’s not in your brain. It’s projected out. And I’m suggesting our whole visual experience of the world is projected out to where it seems to be. Our minds are projecting out all that we see.

So, vision is a two-way process, light coming in and the outward projection of images. This, I suggest, happens through what I call the perceptual field, which is a kind of morphic field, another category of field that is part of a theory I’ve developed which I don’t have time to explain today. But it’s a field phenomenon and in a sense, your mind reaches out to touch what you’re looking at. The image of what you are seeing is superimposed on what’s really there. Sometimes it’s not, as in a mirror reflection when you have a virtual image or an illusion or a hallucination but usually it is.

So what I’m suggesting is that you can, by looking at things, you mind touches them, there’s a sense in which you might be able to affect things just by looking at them. Is this true? Can you affect anything by looking at it? Think of another person, can you affect another person by looking at them? Of course if they see you looking at them, we all know you can. But what if you’re looking at them from behind through a car window, for example, no sun, no smell, they can’t see you’re there, they don’t know you’re there. Can you affect them just by looking at them?

Well, most people think that that does happen. 90% of the population have had the experience of feeling that sometimes when they’re being looked at from behind, they turn around, someone’s looking at them. Survey show that more women than men have had that experience. It’s still a very large majority. More men than women have had the experience of looking at others and making them turn around. But most men and women have had both these experiences and, I guess, most people in this room have experienced these things personally.

So the sense of being stared at is a well-known phenomena, it’s found all over the world, children know about it, adults know about it. But it’s not part of the standard scientific map. You won’t find any reference to it in psychology textbooks. There’s virtually no research literature on this until about 15 years ago. And it’s extraordinarily under research in spite of the fact it’s very well known.

The standard scientific education that most of us receive makes us think, “Well, this must be some kind of illusion.” So probably most people in this room are being trained to dismiss the phenomenon by saying, “Oh, it’s just a coincidence, you turn around all the time, if no one’s looking at you, you forget about it. If they are, you think there’s some mysterious sense involved but it’s really nothing but either coincidence or peripheral vision or something like that.” That’s the standard way of explaining it away.

But now many experiments have been done to test whether this is real. And the simplest experiment involves people working in pairs. One sits with a blindfold, with their back to another. The other person either looks or doesn’t look at them in a randomized sequence and in each trial the person has to guess if they are being looked at or not. Hundreds of thousands of these trials have been done. The overall results show positive significantly — very significant effect. When things are repeated over hundreds of thousands of trials with many independent replications, they become very significant, even though as in this case the effect is fairly small. These results — these experiments have also been done in Amsterdam in the science museum in one of the largest experiments ever conducted for more than 20 years. This experiment’s been running more than 20,000 participants who’ve taken part. The results again are overwhelmingly positive and significant.

Rather surprisingly, this phenomenon also occurs through close circuit television. Various experiments have been done whereby people skin conductance is measured with electrodes on their fingers. This measures emotional arousal and it turns out that there’s a significant change in people’s emotional arousal when they’re being looked at through close circuit television by someone on the monitor in a different room. This work’s been replicated as well and one of the people who’s done it, Marilyn Schlitz, is right here in the Bay Area, indeed she’s right here in this room. And so it is in our substantial body of work, showing that people can tell when they’re being looked at even through close circuit television. This is something which has become of great interest to the security agencies and I can’t divulge exactly who or where. But I can tell you that security forces are very interested in this question: “Could a potential terrorist, for example, tell when they’re being watched through close circuit television?” The answer to that is probably yes, if they’ve trained their sensitivity a bit.

This phenomenon is well known to security guards. Most security guards are well aware that if people are looked at from behind, they can tell when they’re being look at. Private detectives know that when they’re shadowing people, when they’re following them they shouldn’t stare at their back because the person is likely to turn around and catch their eye and blow their cover. People in the martial arts know about this and they have martial arts methods for training your sensitivity to feeling people’s intention or looks from behind. And in the close circuit television industry which now involves millions of CCTV cameras engaged in surveillance work. Many operatives know that you can affect people by looking at them.

I gave a talk about this in Washington, D.C. last year. And one of the guys in the audience told me afterwards that he was, in fact, a security guard and when he was trained by an FBI trainer, they told him, “If you see someone doing something they shouldn’t do, just stare at them hard on the screen and they’ll probably stop it.” And I said to him, “Does that work?” And he said “Sure, I do see almost everyday.” He said, “We all know this stuff.” He was amazed that this is a controversial issue within the academic, scientific world because people in the security industry take this for granted and the British Special Services, the SAS. When people are being trained how to stab others in the back, they’re trained that you don’t stare at the person’s back before you stab them because they’re likely to feel it, turn around and shoot you. So, these things are completely taken for granted yet they’re a huge scientific anomaly. It shouldn’t happen if the mind is all in the brain. But if our visual activity involves the outward projection of images and even the kind of resonant projection when you see something on a computer screen, it’s not a direct effect, in that case just seeing the image can affect the person something else is going on.

Minds are extended beyond brains

I think our minds are, in fact, extended beyond our brains in every act of attention and perception. This is not a new view, it’s a view put forth by Plato and other Greek philosophers. It’s the view of perception in most Hindu and British philosophers. It’s the view taken for granted by traditional people all over the world, and it’s the view taken for granted by Western children under the age of 10 or 11. Studies on children’s intellectual development show that most children assume that vision involves this outward projection. That’s why Superman comics and things show rays coming out of the eyes of superheroes. It’s a very popular childlike way of seeing or understanding.

Piaget, the developmental psychologist, who studied children’s intellectual development said that by the age of about 10 or 11, the average child learns the correct view which is that thoughts and images are invisible things located inside the head. We’ve all been brought up with the correct view in spite of the fact there’s actually no evidence for it. No one’s ever seen or thought of an image inside their head. And our own experience of seeing things outside us directly contradicts this theory. So, we bought into a theory that’s totally at variance with our most immediate experience.

Now I’m suggesting our minds reach out beyond our brains and the sense of being stared at is one aspect of this. Animals feel it too. Many animals can tell when they’re being looked at. There’s a lot of evidence for this from wildlife photographers and hunters. And many people say that they can feel when animals are looking at them. Jim Corbett who was a famous tiger shooter during the British Raj in India, author of books like, “Man Eaters of Kumaon,” said that his life had been saved on many occasion by feeling the look of a hidden tiger. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as he felt this tiger’s presence and escaped.

I think that this isn’t just something that happens between people and animals, and people and people. I think it happens between animals and other animals and it may well have evolved in a predator-prey situation. If prey animals could tell when predators were looking at them, they’d tend to escape better. And the natural history, this is virtually uninvestigated because it’s been a taboo area not really on the scientific map until quite recently.

Anyways, I say this is an area where the research is going on actively at present. And it’s one of the ways in which our minds seem to be extended beyond our brains and have effects which ought not to occur within the standard view of things, but which do seem to occur and which most people have actually experienced themselves. And this is one of the phenomena that I called a mystery of everyday life. It’s something almost everybody, even every child knows about, but most scientists have been trained not to think about it or to dismiss it because it doesn’t fit the paradigm or the model. If we move to this extended mind model, it makes good sense.

There is another way in which the extended mind idea makes better sense of our experience than the idea that is all in the brain. And that’s to do with the way that social animals are coordinated with each other. All social animals have to work together by definition in a harmonious way for the society to hold together. This is shown most graphically in the case of flocks of birds.

Here you see a flock of starlings. The flock can fly together, they can turn immensely quickly without bumping into each other. Here are some other pictures of flocks of birds of starlings and the astonishing maneuvers that they make. Some of you who are familiar with computer animations of bird flocks like Craig Reynolds’ classic Boids model from the ’80s, which seem to show you — and just to explain it by Nearest Neighbor Sensations. Actually you can’t, those models are biologically naive. They assumed that birds look at their nearest neighbor, process the information, adjust their flight and change direction. That takes a lot of time, nervous systems work slowly compared with computers. And the birds are reacting too fast for that to happen. The best computer models are field models that treat the whole flock as a field phenomenon. And I think they are indeed field phenomena, that members of social groups are linked through social fields or morphic fields of the social group.

The same applies, of course, to schools of fish like this one. And especially when predators attack, they can scatter in different directions very rapidly without bumping into each other. The whole group seems to move as a unit, as a kind of field and the individuals move in response to the field, which is both produced by the individuals and acts back upon them. It’s more than the sum of the parts acting — it’s a kind of emergent field phenomenon.

I think all social animals have such fields joining them together even when they move apart. A pack of wolves, for example, has a morphic field of the group. When some of them go away like adult wolves go hunting to fetch food for the young that are left in the den, the field isn’t broken, it stretches and I think they remain connected at a distance through this stretched field. A change in one can affect the other through this field that connects them. That I think is the basis of telepathy. I think it’s a normal means of communication among separated members of animal groups or even non-separated members. I don’t think it’s paranormal, I think it’s normal, I don’t think it’s supernatural, I think it’s natural and I think it’s essentially a form of animal communication within groups.

Another way of thinking about this is through Quantum Entanglement and Dean Radin, who gave a talk here at Google sometime ago, a few months ago, has written a book called “Entangled Minds” suggesting that when people have close social relationships and interactions, their minds become entangled. So that when they separate, there’s still an entanglement between them so a change in one is reflected by a change in another. Quantum nonlocality, entanglement of quantum particles is well known, well documented and this is in fact the basis of now technological applications in quantum cryptography and quantum computing. And what that shows is that particles that are part of the same system when they move apart, a change in one is immediately associated with the change in the other. This is independent of distance unlike many other physical phenomena. It doesn’t matter if it’s an inch apart or a mile apart. It’s distance independent entanglement or non-local connection.

I’m suggesting something like that happens in the case of animal groups and in social groups in general including human groups. And because I think it’s basically an animal phenomenon that we share in because we’re animals, rather than some kind of spiritual phenomenon that any humans have. My first studies on telepathy were with animals. And I started with the animals we know best like cats and dogs and other animals that people live with and get to know very well and which form bonds with their human companions.

The first stage in this research was natural history. Every science begins with natural history and no one had ever done this. So, I collected lots and lots of stories about people, about their pets. What did they see in their pet’s behavior suggested something might be going on beyond normal sensory information? I soon collected thousands of these stories that I classified in a whole series of different categories on a computer database. The fact that people report this phenomenon doesn’t prove they’re right about their reports. But for me, the plural of anecdote is data. And when you have hundreds of reports of the same kind of phenomenon from all over of the world, at least it shows lots of people observing or think they’re observing the same kind of thing.

And that then has to be investigated further. For example, on our database, we have hundreds of reports from cat owners saying their cat seems to read their mind and know when they’re planning to take it to the vet, the cat disappears. And after it’s happened a few times, people try to avoid giving the cats any clues. They don’t let it see the carrying basket, they try not to think of the word vet and some people even ring the vet from work so the cat doesn’t overhear the conversation and then they swing by home on the way back from work to pick it up and it’s still not there. So many of these stories that — we did a survey of all the veterinary clinics in the North London Yellow Pages, 65 of them, rang them up and said, “Do you ever have a problem with people missing appointments with cats?” 64 out of 65 said, “Yes, it happens all the time.” And the remaining one said, “It happens so often, we’ve given up the appointment system for cats.” People just have to turn up with them.

And with dogs and cats, another very common phenomenon is the animals knowing when their owners are coming home. A lot of dogs and cats wait at the door or window when the owner is on the way home, even if they come at non-routine times, even if they come by public transport, even if they’re in a friend’s car and even if the people at home don’t know when they’re coming. Many of these stories, about 800 of these stories with dogs in our database, about 500 with cats, also stories about lambs that are raised by hand on milk that do it, a few rabbits, and guinea pigs and ferrets that do it, parrots, parakeets that do it. A range of animals do this. But all of them are mammals and birds. I haven’t come across any cases of return anticipating reptiles. And I’ve tried hard to find such cases and including launching appeals for information in journals like Reptilian International. And I haven’t come across any convincing cases of snakes, monitor lizards, or fish like gold fish or insects like stick insects seeming to feel this. It only seems to happen with mammals and birds that form close bonds with their owners.

An Illusion?

Well, is this just an illusion? When I discussed it with one of my skeptical colleagues in Cambridge, Nicholas Humphrey, who’s a psychologist, to my surprise, he didn’t deny the phenomenon. In fact he said, “Well, my dog used to do that. My mother always knew when I was coming home. The dog would go to the door.”

And I said, “But surely the dog couldn’t have heard your car from the other side of Cambridge, from many miles away against all the traffic that’s there, irrespective of the wind direction.”

And he said, “They’re on the country.” It just shows what sharp-hearing they’ve got. And because he and I differ in many respects, in our opinions, yet we share a belief in science and scientific method. This led to the idea for an experiment and the experiment is the person goes at least five miles from home. The place where the dog waits is filmed continuously on time coded video tape. The person comes home at a randomly chosen time communicated by a pager. They don’t know that in advance. The people at home, if any, don’t know when they’re coming and to avoid familiar car signs, they travel by unfamiliar vehicles like taxis. Well, I’ve now done hundreds of those kinds of experiments with dogs. And the results are pretty clear cut. The dogs go and start waiting over and over again when the person is coming home. In fact, with the most sensitive dogs, when they form the intention to come home before they’ve even gotten into the taxi.

This research is being written up, it’s published in journals, you can see the full reports on my website. And it’s now being replicated by an online open source science project where people are putting up pictures of their dogs waiting at the door on YouTube. So, you can actually see ongoing experiments of this kind.

This slide shows a survey of dogs and cats that do this, a random household survey done in two locations in Britain and two in California. You’ll see that about 50% of dogs are reported by their owners to anticipate the arrival of a member of the family. An average of about 30% of cats, for some reason, the Californian cats do it more than British cats. We haven’t worked out why. But even in Los Angeles, where the most impressive animals seem to live, cats do it less than dogs. And that doesn’t necessarily prove cats are less sensitive than dogs, it may just prove that some of them are less interested.

In these experiments with dogs that know when their owners are coming home, we’ve done lots of these experiments, you can read the details online if you want to but basically what this graph show is the number of seconds the dog stays at the window, and these are 10-minute intervals, after the person leaves home. You see, the dog does sometimes go to the window when they’re not coming home, like here and here, and when you see the videos, in most of these cases, they’re going to look at things going outside to bark at passing cats and so on, they’re obviously not waiting, but we’ve included all the data so there’s no bias and introduced by any subjective judgment.

What you see is the 10 minutes — the first 10 minutes of the homeward journey, there, there, and there, the dogs are at the window most. And they’re there also before the person actually gets in the car and the car starts moving, that’s because people form the intention to go home before the car actually moves, you have to think about it before you get in the car. But the highest amount of time at the window is when they’re on the way home.

These data were of course challenged by skeptics. As you know, anything to do with telepathy is immensely controversial. There are vigilante organizations that have been set up to try and discredit research of this kind. There are active groups of highly motivated skeptics. They vastly outnumber researchers in this field. The total number of subscribers to skeptical magazines in the U.S. is about 100,000. The total number of full-time researchers in parapsychology is about five, so they’re outnumbered about 20,000 to 1 by well organized groups of skeptics. And so, of course and rightly so, this work was criticized by skeptics.

One of them, Richard Wiseman, a British media skeptic and psychologist said that I must have made mistakes and the result; faulty randomization, the wrong kind of vehicle to bring people home. So, I invited him to do his own experiments with these — with one of the same dogs, the same dog I worked with here. And these are the results of the three experiments he did on the same location. As you see it’s almost perfect — almost perfect replication, the most time the dog was at the window was on the first 10 minutes of the homeward journey, and showed exactly the same kind of pattern. At first, he argued these refuted my results because the dog went to the window before the owner set off, and the rest of the data could therefore be discarded. But in fact, most people don’t think that’s a valid approach, I certainly don’t. He himself now admits that this is in fact a replication of the effect, he doesn’t agree with my interpretation but his own results clearly replicated the same pattern as my own.

Telepathic behavior in humans?

Not only animals but people commonly show telepathic behavior or sensitivity, these things are wildly believed in our society, the great majority of people in America, Britain, Germany, South America, India, in fact all over the world, think they’ve have telepathic experiences. Skeptics dismiss this by saying “Well, these are just uneducated people prone to illusions, and it’s all just a delusion in their minds, a false interpretation of what’s happening to them, inadequate understanding of chance and statistics and so forth.” You’re all familiar with those arguments.

But starting as a biologist, I wanted to look at the things where this happens most commonly and most biologically. One case in the human realm is with mothers and babies. Many mothers claim that they can feel when their baby needs them, a lot of nursing mothers have what’s called “The milk let down reflex”, that for the benefit of the men here, which is the majority, is a reflex that occurs with nursing mothers. Normally when they hear the baby cry, there’s a release of oxytocin from the brain that causes the breast to prepare to feed the baby. These special changes occur in the breast; the nipple starts leaking, many women experience a tingling sensation. Some women experience that when they’re away from their baby, they may be shopping in a supermarket and suddenly their milk lets down and they feel their breasts tingle.

Most women, when that happens, assume that the baby needs them, they used to just go home, nowadays they call home on the cell phone and they’re often right, not always but very often. And I’ve done detailed studies on breastfeeding mothers in London that show that the odds against this happening by chance at the time the baby really does need them where — the odds are about a billion to one against chance in the study I did. So I think there’s something really going on there and this is a very good area to study telepathy, it’s very biological, it’s easy to see why natural selection might have favored this ability. A mother who knows when her absent baby needs her is more likely to have a baby that survives than a mother that doesn’t know. And so I think that natural selection favors these abilities, they have an evolutionary reason for being there. They’re not just, sort of, curiosities on the very fringes of parapsychology. Their central aspects of life and until the invention of modern telecommunications, the only way that a mother could know her baby needed her immediately when she was far away from it was through telepathy. It’s the only way people or animals could communicate at a distance until the invention of telegraphs and telephones.

Well, telephones are in fact one of the ways in which telepathy emerges most strongly in the modern world. It’s evolved along with technology and right now it’s on the increase because people use telephonic communications so much. Survey show that the great majority of people have had experiences of what I call “telephone telepathy”, you think of somebody for no apparent reason and then that person calls and you say, “That’s funny, I was just thinking about you.” Surveys in a variety of countries have shown that more women than men claim this experience, about 95% and 96% of women, about 72% of men. There are some national differences in men, the most sensitive men in our survey were in Argentina, the least sensitive in Britain. With other kinds of telepathy, the figures are still way above the 50% mark, the majority of people with much less common than telephone telepathy.

So what’s going on here? It’s very common, I imagine most people in this room have experienced it. Is this just an illusion? What do the skeptics say? Well what the skeptic say and what most people in this room have probably been trained to say and probably heard said very often is, “Oh well, it’s just a coincidence. You think of people all the time. One of them rings, and then you think it must have been telepathy but you forget the millions of time you were wrong.”

A reasonable hypothesis, chance coincidence and selective memory, but where’s the data? In science, it’s not enough to put forward an armchair hypothesis, you need data. Skeptics have been advancing that argument for 100 years since the invention of the telephone and there was not one shred of data to support it. Nothing in science deserves a free ride and you need evidence. Anyway, I’ve developed a test to try and find out what’s really going on, is it just coincidence or not? For that you need statistical experiments, and how I’ve been doing these tests is as follows: Imagine you are somebody who has this experience and you volunteered to be a subject in one of these experiments. You gave me the names of four people you might be telepathic with, typically people you’re closely related to, family members, girlfriends, boyfriends, close colleagues, people you know well. You give me their numbers and their names. You sit at home, you’re videotaped continuously and while you sit by a landline telephone with no caller ID system.

We then pick one of your four callers at random using a randomizing device. Call them up and ask them to phone you. They phone you. The phone rings. Before you pick it up, you guess who it is. “I think it’s John.” You pick it up, “Hi John.” You’re right or you’re wrong. That’s an objective fact, it’s on film and your chance by getting it right by just guessing is 25%, one in four.

Well, in these experiments, the chance rate – the 25% chance rate is there and the actual hit rate, 45% is what we found and this is with hundreds of tests and the probability figure for this is 1×10^-12. In other words, this is way beyond what you’d expect by chance. This is a highly significant statistic with significant result, it’s not just chance, whatever it is, it’s not just chance.

We then did these tests with — where two of the four callers were strangers that people had never met but whose names they knew, the other two were people they knew well. And here we found with the unfamiliar callers, the success rate was pretty well at the chance level, just above — with the familiar callers, it was way above chance, in this case, 52%.

So these telephone telepathy tests, a new way of testing for telepathy, they’ve given highly significant positive results. There’s no effect of distance in accordance with other research on telepathy. We did some of our experiments with young Australians and New Zealanders who’d recently arrived in London whose nearest and dearest were at the antipodes, the other side of the world. Their hit rates were actually higher with people in Australia or New Zealand than with new acquaintances in England, showing that what matters is emotional proximity rather than physical proximity. And this is now being replicated in a number of studies at Cape Town University, at Amsterdam University by Dick Bierman and his colleagues and recently at Freiburg University in Germany. And it was also done as a replication for a TV show in Britain under controlled conditions with the Nolan sisters who are an ’80s girl band, and that’s now available on YouTube. You can actually see there’s a five minute clip showing that experiment. You can get it through my website, www.sheldrake.org. If you’re interested in seeing one of these tests, you can do that easily enough.

The latest evolution of telepathy is in connection with emails. The same kind of things now started happening with emails. Lots of people think of someone, then they get an email from them and say, “That’s funny, I was just thinking about you.” We’ve done very similar experiments with emails, four emailers, random choice of who’s getting to email you. People have to guess just before they get the email who’s sending it. We have fixed times for this experiment. You know that you’ll get an email, let say, four o’clock. So, at 3:59, you have to send me an email with your guess, then the person sends that email at four o’clock and with a CC to me. From the email themselves, we know to the exact second when the guess was sent and when the actual email was sent. And so, we can show that the guesses are made before the email has been sent, it’s built into the technology.

We’ve done this also with people being filmed for security reasons to make sure they’re not cheating by means of mobile phones, regular phones, MSN Messenger or anything like that. And the results of the email experiments show a similar effect, the chance level of 25%, the film test 47% is the hit rate. And again, we get a higher hit rate with the familiar than the unfamiliar callers. We also found no effect to distance in this email telepathy test.

Well, these tests lend themselves to automation and I’ve recently been in the last couple of years developing a whole set of automated online test for telepathy. Some of them are automated email tests. The whole of this can be done online where you register online, you put in the names of your emailers, the computer selects an emailer at random, asks them to send you an email by sending them an email. So, the whole thing is done by email and all the results are recorded in an online database.

I also have a similar experiment working with text message test on mobile telephones. And both email and the automated text message tests are giving significant positive results. These are being done by anyone who wants to do them, it’s completely open science. I don’t know that some of those people couldn’t have been cheating, perhaps they were. There’s not much incentive I think to cheat because most people are trying to find out how telepathic they are and there’s no point doing it if you’re cheating, but some of them could’ve been. The only way to deal with the cheating thing is for anyone to do it themselves. If you do it, you’ll know if you’re cheating or not. You could do it with a group of friends who you trust and see what the group results come up with. This can be set as classroom experiments in colleges and schools and some instructors are already doing this. And when you register for the test, you put in a group name and people could then recover all the results from that group name online, on the online database.

So, in some universities, instructors have set these as homework assignments. As in a study in scientific methodology, it triggers off a very lively debate among students. It gives results generally positive which bring in debates about the nature of statistics and also debate about could some people have been cheating and if so, who? Thus, the only way you can really guard against cheating is either by trusting people, which you won’t trust me if you’re a skeptic or anyone else, but you can trust yourself and your friends, hopefully. All by having the experiments done under oppressively rigorous conditions where people have strip-searched, search for hidden mobile phone devices, implanted telephonic tooth implants, some spy type equipment. Skeptics will go to any length to say that people must have been cheating and actually, there’s only a limited number of precautions you can take against it in practical terms. So, that’s why by having these experiments wide open for anyone to do. At least you can organize your own group, do your own test. And this area area of research can now be participatory. You don’t have to take my word for it or anyone else’s word. These are all published in peer-reviewed journals. You can read the text online on my website but you can do it yourself, as well.

The latest experiment which has only just become technically possible which is now being programmed in England and should be ready soon is an automated straight telephone telepathy test where you register online. If you’re picked to make the phone call, you’ll get a text message or an email telling you to call your friend, you call a landline number which is say, a dedicate landline number. You get a message welcoming you to the test. You give your group number, so it knows who you are, who the people are involved in the test. And then it rings the subject and so as this one of your callers waiting on the phone to talk to you, who is it? Press one for Jim, press two for Susan, press three for Bill. And you make your guess and as soon as you made with your guess, the line opens up, you get to talk to them. These experiments, I think have the potential for being very popular participatory experiments. I’ve been talking to people in the mobile telephone industry and some of them were interested in developing intuition test programmed into the phone. These won’t be experiments but ways of training your intuition. Instead of a caller ID when the call comes in, there’ll be a simple program, easy to do which says who is calling, you know, and then quick key, you can have a quick key thing. You press one for Jane, two for Jill, three for Bill, etc. If you don’t know who’s calling and if you’re in a hurry, you just answer it and you pass. But if you do make a guess, that it will keep a record and you’ll see how many you’ve got right. You can see if you’re getting better with the time if you’re training your intuition. And this way, we could find more talented subjects for our more rigorous experiments.

I have a variety of online experiments proceeding right now. Another one is a photo telepathy test and what that involves is two people do this test. One of you, when you register, you upload a photo of one of the people. There’s a series of twenty ten-second trials. And in each trial, the subject just sits there, it says trial one begins and the ten seconds pass. The other person either sees your photo or they see a photo something completely different. At the end of ten seconds, a box comes up whilst your partner looking at your photo, yes, no? You click, and you can have feedback or not as you choose at the beginning of the test and the dates were all stored online, it’s a fun experiment to do. And I’d like any feedback you have about how best to spread these kinds of experiments but several people have suggested this would work very well on Facebook or other social networking sites because the problem I have is to get people to go to their computers at the same time as other people to do experiments. Most people are too busy, it’s hard to arrange. In Facebook, they’re all online, you’ve got people online anyway waiting to interact and here’s a way they can interact in a way that’s fun to do. Can you tell if someone else is looking at your photo? The results so far suggest that people can, positive significant results.

I also have a joint attention test designed to answer the question: when you’re looking at the same thing as somebody else, do your minds come into a kind of resonance? Can you tell when someone else is looking at the same thing as you? In that test, there’s twenty trials, each trial has two pictures. By chance, you are looking at the same one or a different one in each trial and after ten seconds, each of you has to guess, whilst your partner looking at the same picture? That again is giving positive above chance results.

If joint attention works, so there’s a kind of resonance you can actually feel when one other person’s looking at it, what about real television? What about — so 50 million people watching Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. Now, that’s a bad example for doing the experiment because everyone knew it was happening. But with regular TV, if you went into a room, the two rooms adjacent, two booths, each have TV running, one of them is showing live TV that’s actually playing right now to millions of people, the other one is showing a TiVoed or recorded program that was broadcast hours or days ago that probably no one else but you is watching at this moment. Can people tell the difference? Interesting experiment, huge relevance to modern media which involve millions of people having their attention focused on the same thing at the same time. No one knows the answer because that experiment has not yet been done.

But I mention it because some of these experiments are immensely relevant to modern media. Many of them are very cheap to do, many of them very simple to do, many of them work through interactive websites. And I think this is an area of research which cannot only involve a lot of people but can also involve a kind of public debate about the results. The results can be — the programming can be transparent or my test, anyone who wants to, can see the codings, study the randomization system and so forth.

And in Britain, I’ve recently been doing a project with one of our leading skeptics, a very intelligent and reasonable skeptic, not some dogmatic, ideologically motivated and I think way beyond any limits of science and reason in bigotry and prejudice. But we have one in Britain, the editor of the British Skeptic Magazine, Professor Chris French, who’s a friend of mine and he’s been running some of my tests himself while I’ve been here on the West Coast over the last month or two. When I get back, I’m going to find out just what he found. So far, looking online, the results he’s got are coming out positive and in line with the kinds of test I’ve been doing myself. But this is something where open-minded skeptics and proponents can cooperate on research where the results can be easily obtainable and where there can be research going on way beyond the narrow limits of academic laboratories with papers just in peer reviewed journals that no one reads anyway to participatory research which can engage large numbers of people.

So, that’s more or less the state of the art and a few other people are engaged in this kind of thing. There are number of researchers in parapsychology and psychology doing this kind of research. One or two other people are doing online test, notably, Dean Radin who spoke here at Google recently.

But I’ll just end by saying that the idea of the extended mind, the mind beyond the brain, a mind that stretches out through fields, gives us a way of extending the frontiers of science. We’re not leaving behind science and reason and descending into a kind of black mode of superstition as Freud called it. We’re extending the realm of science to phenomena which are widely known about which most people are really interested in and which may well have a perfectly good scientific explanation but which haven’t been part of the rather narrower kind of science that we are used to. So, I think that this is important because it makes science more relevant, not less. It expands science and it makes science more interesting to more people. So, I think this is a good thing. I think that some people think it’s a bad thing but anyway, that’s my opinion. And I’d interested to take any questions or comments that you may have. Yes?

Question-and-answer session

Audience: Are you able to introduce noise in the system? Noise, so for example, let’s say you had two callers and one that was being called, and one of the lines were cut and the caller didn’t know whether the lines were cut. Does — so both people have the intention of calling, knowing one of us is actually maybe through?

Rupert Sheldrake: Yes.

Audience: Have you performed that experiment and so does that affect the results?

Rupert Sheldrake: Good question. I mean, could we actually interrupt these experiments randomly? I haven’t tried doing that. It could be done. The trouble is, in the interest of full disclosure, when you get people take part in experiments, you have to tell them what they’re going to do. You know, most committees, ethics committees require you to disclose the experiment. So, it would be hard to have random interruptions of tests without telling people in advance that this might happen. In which case, you might change their intention. They might think, “Well, maybe nobody is really going to be answering the phone.” So, I think it could interfere with it. But I think it’s an interesting point. Yes?

Audience: Ever since Dean came here earlier this year, I’ve been telling a lot of people about psi. And basically, the conversation usually ends as soon as the person I’m speaking with thinks of James Randi. And again I put up with James Randi’s shield where they won’t let anything get past. I was just wondering what your response to that is.

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, for the benefit of those who don’t know about him, there’s like a person called James Randi who often appears on TV and he’s a very anti — he’s one of these ideologically motivated skeptics who believes psi is impossible and he’s offered a $1 million prize, or said he has. There’s lot of questions as to whether he actually has the million dollars or where it is for any successful test of psi. And people often say, “Why don’t you apply for the Randi prize?” Well, it’s a very good question and I can tell you my answer.

First of all, this man is not a scientist. He has no scientific credentials or understanding. On his website, it says the prize must be won for people who produce an unequivocal demonstration of psiabilities that requires no expert analysis. That seems to rule out any statistical experiments. Then he’s later said, “Oh, well, I will accept statistical experiments but the odds against chance have got to be a million to one to get the million dollar price.” So if the odds against chance are 900,000 to one, you fail the test. Third, you sign over to Randi all publicity rights. You have all legal waivers. So he has complete control of all publicity arising from this. And fourth, and most important for me, he’s a liar. He’s a deceiver by profession and he’s a deceiver by nature. And my reason for saying this without being sued for libel is that he wrote an article in a magazine about my dog research called, “Dog World.” Probably a very few of you read Dog World, but lots of people do. And in this, he said that, “We, at the James Randi Educational Foundation have repeated Sheldrake’s experiments. They fail.” Then he said, “We’ve also examined all his video tape from his experiments and shown the dog goes to the window all the time, and it’s not as he says it is.” An unequivocal statement. I emailed him asking him to tell — give me the details of the experiments he’d done, what journal were they published in, where’s the data? Reasonable questions that a scientist would ask. He didn’t reply. I emailed again, he didn’t reply. So I emailed his scientific advisory board and they advised him to reply. So he then replied and he said, “Well, actually these experiments were done many years ago when I looked after a friend’s dogs for a couple of weeks in New York, and I lost all the data. They were lost in the floods so I’ve got no data and they’ve never been written up.”

So what kind of evidence is that? If I produce evidence for science and say, “Oh, I did them years ago, I’ve lost all the data, but just believe me,” he wouldn’t go for that, I’m sure. And then the examination of the video tapes, he had to admit he’d never seen the video tapes. He’d simply made that up. Now, with a man with such a low degree of honesty, I don’t think he should be an arbiter of scientific credibility or truth. I do believe, however, that real skeptics, people with proper skeptic scientific training and who have track records of honesty rather than dishonesty are worth engaging with, and that’s why I’m doing joint experiments with Professor Chris French right now.

Audience: Thank you for a great talk, as an open-minded skeptic. So you said — you mentioned you have a fondness for the scientific method, but there’s a very key but subtle difference between a scientific study and a statistical study. A scientific study has to include a falsifiable theory of how this works. Do you think that that’s an unnecessary assumption and science should expand beyond it? Or do you think that these experiments actually do have some sort of a theory?

Rupert Sheldrake: It’s a good point. And first of all, I don’t think that all science requires a theory. No one knew till recently how aspirin worked. No one knew till recently and they probably still don’t know how high temperature superconductivity worked. There’s lots of –Newton didn’t know how gravity worked. We still don’t. I mean, it’s based — it’s supposed to happen on the base of gravitational particles, gravitons that no one has ever detected. So, lots of phenomena can be recognized as phenomena without a theory. However, I do have the theory. I didn’t go into the theory today because I was mostly talking about the phenomena.

I have a theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance which I put forward in my first two books, “A New Science of Life” and “The Presence of the Past”. And when I did that, people said, “Okay, you’ve got this theory. Where is the evidence?” Now I concentrate on evidence. People say, “Okay, here’s the evidence. Where is the theory?” Well, there is a theory and I think the theory of morphic fields of social groups, for example, make certain predictions. Telepathy should occur between people you know well much more than people you don’t, for example. It should be independent of distance. It makes a number of predictions which these experiments test and so far, support. And then there are other theories. Some people have quantum theories of telepathy. You know, quantum entanglement theories, those make certain predictions too which are being tested. So, there’s not just one theory. There are several so, I think this is a truly valid field of sciences based on experiments, data, theories, predictions, tests. I think it meets all the criteria far better actually than many orthodox areas of science like superstring theory which makes no testable predictions or multi-universe theories in cosmology which postulate quadrillions of unobserved universes for which there’s not a shred of evidence. You can say that kind of thing and hold — done prestigious chairs in leading universities. So, one has to be aware of double standards about this kind of thing.

Audience: Actually, I’m not surprised at all. My mama always tells me that she thought about me when I was calling and she lives in Europe. But I have actually a different question. Do you think that art and the media and our television and movies in fact exist to create this entanglement of society and these shared intuitions? So, it’s in a sense not very surprising because we are using this product of art and all these communications media.

Rupert Sheldrake: Very interesting point. The joint attention which I was talking about is the basis of these minds, when you’re all seeing the same thing. In child development, by the age of about one, normal children develop what’s called Joint Attention. And that’s why you see parents and their babies look — reading books together, walking along streets seeing – they see a dog and he would, “Doggie,” and everyone would say, it’s just looking at the same thing, pointing, seeing things, is part of normal development. People who don’t do that are often autistic. So part of our normal human consciousness throughout human histories involved the ability to form this kind of mental resonance with other people. Consciousness is a shared phenomenon in many ways.

Now, in traditional societies, a storyteller would have the attention of a whole group sitting around the fire for example. So that’s again an old phenomenon. But what modern media have done is extended this to an unprecedented level through linkups, TV linkups, like the Oscars or the Olympic games, where literally billions of people are seeing the same thing at the same time. And I think this takes something that’s a normal human phenomenon to a totally new level. And I think it does play a part in social cohesion and in the way our societies work, but it’s extraordinarily uninvestigated. And nobody has ever done an experiment to find out whether people can tell, whether they’re seeing the same thing as millions of others or not at the same time. And as I say, I think these experiments can easily be done given the media that we now have.

Let me just — an opportunity to mention another experiment that may interest people here, because this is people learning about computers. I set up a joint attention sound experiment on the Internet, but my coding — the programmer hasn’t yet got it to work. But how that works is, you have samples of 10 clips — sound clips, five of them are real radio stations that both broadcast in real time and on the Internet. So you’ve got sounds there, music is being listened to by millions of people. Some of the ones we use for example — or talking, some were Chinese talk shows from Shanghai. And we then have another five clips which are recordings of similar radio stations, recorded days, weeks, hours before. And after listening to each clip, you have to guess was this a recording or was it live. So that’s another form that can be done using Internet technologies. As I say, I haven’t got it to work yet because we had buffering problems and time lags. These were entirely technical problems we haven’t solved, but this kind of thing is perfectly doable.

Audience: Thank you for your talk. And I have a quick question. If you start with the premise that the mind extends beyond the body through space, then I think there’s a very little stretch to imagine that also it can extend through time. And I was wondering if, for instance, for your phone experiment, you’ve run such an experiment where for instance you would have the subject try to predict who’s going to call before a random number generator would select the person who will actually place the call.

Rupert Sheldrake: Yes, I’ve done that. I have a precognitive version of my text message test and also the email test, where we changed the programming so that we ask people to say who’s going to email you shortly or who’s going to send you a text message. They send back their guess and the second their guess is received by the computer, it does the randomization and gets the person to do it. Those results have been coming out at chance level so far. We haven’t done very many of them. A few of them we’ve done in the telepathy mode. But that it can be done with this kind of online programmed experiment, you can just flip the program to precognitive or telepathic –

Audience: Right. So you haven’t received any significant positive result?

Rupert Sheldrake: Not in that case. No. Not in those cases. But I think that the evidence for what Dean Radin calls presentiment, feeling a few seconds in advance about getting a kind of pre-echo of an emotional arousal. The evidence for that is very strong. And so I think there are ways in which there are future influences of a rather mysterious kind that can influence us. And of course, the minds extend in time in the past which is what memory is all about. So, memory and collective memory. I have a theory of collective memory called morphic resonance. This is another major part of my research that I haven’t talked about at all this afternoon. But I think the minds are extended in space and in time. They’re extended in time even through our intentions. Every intention we have — a future intention like where I’m going after I’ve been here, which train I’m going to catch on BART, all these things are future intentions, where I’m going tomorrow. Our minds stretch into the future all the time through our intentions. We’re connected to the past through our memories. And I think that some of these depend on things that Science doesn’t, at present, have on its map of reality. But our minds, I would say, in short are extended in space and time. They’re not just in our brains, no.

Audience: I have a couple of possible questions here. The first one is, I had a lot of trouble with your vision analogy and I wonder is that just an analogy or do you actually mean that to be another manifestation of your theories of morphic fields and the way our mind works?

Rupert Sheldrake: You mean vision being projected out?

Audience: Yes.

Rupert Sheldrake: It’s not just an — well, the word projection is a kind of analogy or metaphor. But the idea that our vision is extended, I think that my image of you is where you are now. I don’t think it’s in my brain. No, I really think that’s not just analogy and it’s not just — as I say, it’s not just my theory. If you take a sort of majority vote of people and theories through the ages, it would be the kind of 99% of humanity’s theory of vision. The theory is all in the brain, dates back to Kepler and Descartes in the 17th century and has never really been terribly successful because in consciousness studies, one of the really big debates is, how does visual perception work? Is there a virtual reality display inside the head? If so, where is it? How does it work? And if it’s virtual, why should it be stopped by the skull rather than go through it?

Audience: How do you account for — if you cut the optic nerve, a person’s going to go blind or if you damage a part of the brain, they’re going to go blind or if you damage another part of the brain, they’re going to lose a lot of capacity.

Rupert Sheldrake: Yes. Now that’s certainly true. I’m saying light comes in, changes happen in the brain, projection goes out. So, cut any part of that circuit and it’s not going to work. You know, it’s like the TV set, or to take a somewhat different analogy; the picture you see on your TV depends on the electric supply on the transistors, the condensers, the wiring, but also on a transmission coming from outside. I think the brain is actually more like a TV set or receiver. And so, with inferences coming — if you cut the wire, pull the plug out, cut a few wires on the TV set, the screen will go blank. But that doesn’t prove it’s all inside the TV set.

Audience: Okay. One other quick question, if you will. This would seem to be enormously useful for survival, how come we aren’t a lot better at it than we seem to be?

Rupert Sheldrake: For spying? Surviving, you say? For surviving, sure. It is an interesting question. You see, if you look at the use of these abilities in traditional societies – I used to live in India and I worked there. In India, most people took these things for granted, in Africa, they take them for granted, and they use them in a way that is helping in surviving. People go to people who are desperately ill and when they need them, not because they’ve got a phone call because they just feel this. Mothers go to their babies. In our society — first of all, we’ve got technology that works really well, probably better than telepathy, you know, telephones, emails, and so forth. And secondly, we live in a society where educated people have been brought up to disbelieve in these things. We’ve all been taught, if not explicitly at least, implicitly. It’s a kind of illusion only stupid people believe this kind of thing. If you’re smart, you’ve got to be a skeptic and if you’re a skeptic, you know it’s just sort of faulty statistics.

Audience: So do you think we’re kind of de-evolving ourselves in this regard then?

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, despite all attempts to suppress it in our society, it’s actually coming out more and more through modern technologies. Telephone telepathy, as I say, is the commonest kind. And until telephones were invented, I think probably there was less of it around. I think more people are experiencing telepathy today than they did a couple of generations ago because so many people have phones and even cell phones. So, it’s a constant presence in their lives.

Audience: Hi. So I just had a question about — it seems like there’s a couple of different kinds of social fields. I mean at the beginning of the talk, you showed these pictures of flocks of birds and schools of fish. And they had a very kind of specific geometry to them. And then towards the end of the talk, you were talking about people interacting and you were saying how these experiments don’t seem to depend much or the results don’t depend much on the distance that separates them. So, I just wonder if we’re seeing the effects of two different kinds of fields or is it just the same kind of field and it’s — I don’t really —

Rupert Sheldrake: No. That’s a very – no, the question is an important one because the flocks and the schools of fish depend on position and exactly its coordinating positions of movement. And I think that’s the kind of social field primarily concerned with the coordination of movement. Where we experience that is when we’re walking along in the street, it’s surprising how rarely you bump into people. And in countries like India, it’s amazing when you see the chaos of the traffic system, how the whole thing just keeps flowing and people weave between each other. It’s the same with traffic systems here, which are a bit more regulated. I think this is something we almost take for granted. But it’s actually rather amazing how rarely we bump into people or things and people can flow through each other and so on. So I think that’s one of the aspects of social fields, which have to do with movement coordination.

There’s another kind which work at a distance, which are more to do with calls. And one kind of telepathy has to do with calls. You are in need — you desperately need help, you can sort of visit and someone can pick it up and come to you. That is the kind which I think has now evolved along — co-evolved with telephones and emails and things because they are actually calls. Not necessarily always with a high emotional need or content, but sometimes. So, I think, yes, it’s not just one kind of field that does all these things. They’re all versions of the social field but carrying out sort of different functions, one movement coordination. And that’s something which in termite nests, ants’ nests, and bees’ hives, when they’re building structures together, you get cooperative architectural activities, that kind of field which coordinates movement in a special way. It must be very important. But the call ones are almost by definition to do with relating to absent members of the group and trying to bring them back. So, it’s a kind of extension of that field but it’s not exactly the same.

Audience: So, I find the idea of entangled minds very interesting and plausible. But what — I don’t see how the minds would manage to meet. I feel intuitively it must be possible for two minds to meet each other in a sense without meeting physically or seeing each other or having any connection in a physical sense. Do you have any ideas on how this might happen?

Rupert Sheldrake: I think minds get entangled through interactions. Our minds meet through interactions and these don’t have to be through physical meetings. They can be through emails, through social networking sites, through telephone, and so forth. But it’s interesting, isn’t it? That despite our incredible connectivity today, the airlines is still full of business passengers flying around the world to meetings. And you would think that airlines would have gone out of business if minds could interact just through international communications systems. There seems to be something more about the interaction that occurs in person, when there’s a bodily presence, and that’s, of course, much more a natural form of interaction. Your whole body interacts through implicit understanding of social body language, movements, gestures et cetera, et cetera. So, I think in personal meetings, there’s a far more intense and varied level of interaction than in just conversations where it’s only the voices that are interacting or in emails where’s it’s just the written words that you’re interacting. But, of course, you can interact in that way and people do build up quite close connections or relationships at a distance. And that interaction would be enough, I think, to set up a field where you could still get telepathic connections in those contexts. But the vast majority of telepathy that occurs in the ordinary world is between parents and children, best friends, lovers, husbands and wives, close colleagues, and so forth. And I haven’t actually studied in the context of social networking, where you may have people who’ve become very close friends or closely linked without ever having met physically. It would be interesting to find out how telepathic they are.

Audience: I’m back. I really like your TV analogy. So if you cut a wire inside the TV, it stops working. If you cut the optic nerve, this person stops seeing. If the TV station stops sending the field to the TV, the TV doesn’t work. What fills in the whole? What fills in the whole? So, what has to break for the person with a perfectly functional brain to stop seeing?

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, I haven’t quite got your point yet.

Audience: So if there is really an analogy between a field that a TV is receiving as being something that some sort of a field that the brain is receiving, in order to be able to project an image or to see, to have a vision. Then so the physical analogy, I understand. Breaking something physical inside a TV, and breaking something physical inside the brain, both break the vision. But it’s easy to break the electromagnetic field and see the TV — how can this field that humans brains have, can break?

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, there are several ways that happen. First of all, when we go to sleep, it all goes blank. So, it depends on our state of consciousness and much of the time, hours a day, we’re not seeing anything. When we are asleep, if we dream, then we have an interesting situation where it’s kind of projective activity of the brain and of our minds can go on when we’re not actually seeing what we are seeing in the dream. And those who are more like hallucinatory images. Some people, when they take hallucinogenic substances and close their eyes, would see all sorts of things that aren’t really there. And interestingly, people subject to extreme sensory deprivation kept in darkness for weeks like in some Tibetan meditation practices, often experience very vivid hallucinations.

There’s also ways in which our attention is extremely selective and we see what we want to see and we don’t notice lots of other things. And so, there’s something that attention itself can lead to attentional blindness or what psychologists call inattentional blindness. Things that you are not paying attention, you’re blind to, even though they’re there and affecting your field of vision. That might be more equivalent to the sort of hole in the mind, as well. There’s a famous video, lots of people have seen where people are playing a ball game and someone in a gorilla suit walks through the room. And you tell people to count how many times they bounce the ball and most people count and tell you. And they never see this guy and then you say, “Look again. Do you see anyone in a gorilla suit?” And people can’t believe that they haven’t seen this. This is a very clear demonstration of this form of inattentional blindness.

Audience: And you think this cannot be explained by physical process in the brain?

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, it can be explained by attention or inattention. But then, you see we come back to the question of the nature of consciousness itself. What controls attention and how does attention work? Then we come to the vexed question of how does consciousness work, how does the mind work? And in the world of consciousness studies, the scientific field in which these things are studied, there’s no general agreement on what attention is, how the mind works, what the mind is, what its relation to the brain is? This is really, truly I think one of the most exciting frontier areas of science where there’s a variety of different theories. There’s no consensus few. There is a consensus few on what happens in the brain, you can measure it. But how that relates to the mind, to attention, and so forth, that’s a realm of wild speculation at the moment with varying schools of thought. And it’s a paradox really the thing we know least about is our own minds and their relationship to our bodies. And it’s partly because science has ignored this until about 20 years ago, consciousness was virtually ignored by most scientists, even psychologists. In the 20th century, behaviorism was the dominant school of psychology in American and British Universities. And that’s said, “Forget the consciousness. All we’re going to do is measure objective behavior. Movements of muscles, secretions of glands, things you can measure, that’s objective. The rest is subjective and it’s no part of science.” But now, we recognize subjectivity consciousness is part of science and we need to think about it scientifically. But it’s a field of science that’s quite new and in a way we’re on a new frontier here.

Audience: I came towards the second half of your talk — later in the talk. So, this question might have already been answered. Most of the experiments seem to be proving or finding out whether a certain phenomena exist or not. Has there been any experiments conducted which find out the environment that is conducive to produce such effects?

Rupert Sheldrake: Yes. I mean, among people who work in parapsychology, there’ve been a number of experiments that looked at variables affecting the results. Generally speaking, people do better if they’re feeling relaxed and not under stress. The telepathy test worked better with people you know well than with strangers. So, there are a variety of things that affect how people respond in these tests. Also, some people do better than others. And there is a long line of research in Parapsychology called the “Sheep-Goat Studies” that show the kinds of results you get depend on what you believe. Skeptics sometimes get less successful results than people who believed they’re possible. Sometimes indeed, skeptics get significant negative results showing that there’s something — they’re somehow getting it but giving the opposite answers as it were. So, a variety of factors personal, social, and environmental affect these results. This is a field of research in which relatively little has been done, I mean, the people who are doing this work in the US, about 50% of the research effort is in this room with Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlitz and, you know, this is not a field where there’s hundreds or thousands of people working, it’s very, very few. In India, I don’t know of anyone. There was one Narasi Monroe in Andrew University who did this research but, like in India, there’s probably one retired person doing it. In England, there’s about 10 or 15 people in Universities. But there’s a huge amount of research could be done in these areas that hasn’t been done because — not because it’s difficult, not even because it’s very expensive but because the taboo has held back this field of research, hopefully it’s breaking down now. And I think we’ll see that, there’s a great deal we could find out that would be of great interest to a lot of people.

Audience: Thank you. Being a street smart, that hard to define skill, I have found many entrepreneurs the reasons why they get ahead is because they know to whom to trust, which employees to hire, which customers to extend more credit, is there any way to identify that skill, and is there any way to teach it?

Rupert Sheldrake: Good question. I think that the word that most people would use with these abilities, the general word would be intuition. And intuition is a blanket term that covers a variety of these abilities, able to feel premonitions, pick up subtle cues, all sort of things are involved in intuition. And I think it’s also very likely as you say that people who do well in business are people who use intuitive skills. Because business people are all — in fact, all of us are working in an atmosphere of uncertainty where you can’t be sure. In science, there’s an attempt to try and pin things down and make them more certain but scientists have to be intuitive too because they have to hire people and know who to trust just like everyone else does. And also have intuitions about what kind of research is worth doing, what kind of experiments are worth trusting. There are people who claim to train intuition. There are lots of people who give workshops on training your intuition, whether they work or not, I don’t know. I’d like them to put their participants through some of my telepathy test before the workshop and after it and we could then quantify at whether people are at least getting better at these kinds of tests.

But at the moment, there’s a disconnection between people do scientific tests in this area and people who claim to be able to train intuition in this area and it’s not quite clear, you know, how well they’re doing to how successful they are. And I think they probably can train it and I think these are things that we can train. There’s no reason in principle why we shouldn’t be able to train our intuition in these areas just as we can train our physical skills and things like playing the piano or train our taste buds and noses and getting to know about why and that kind of thing. Everything in principle should be trainable.

Audience: So, if the effect is so strong in a sense from all the experiments you conducted, then why after a long time of scientific skepticism and still is now the data becoming available?

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, it’s partly a question of, you know, who sees the data. You know, the data are there. There’s quite a lot of data and Dean Radin summarized it in his books very well, I think, The Conscious Universe and his recent book, Entangled Minds are very good review of the scientific experimental data. It doesn’t get out there very much and this is partly a sociological question, it’s to do with the taboo. For example, I’ve submitted several of my papers to — my work on the dogs, for example. I’ve submitted that to Animal Behavior which is the leading journal on animal behavior. This is animal behavior. And I got back a letter from the editor saying, “I’m rejecting your paper immediately without refereeing because no referee for this journal would take seriously any paper that claimed that so called telepathy actually existed.” I just had another paper rejected on those grounds. The replication of my telephone telepathy paper was rejected by Perception Magazine and the editor there said, “Any experiment that shows positive results for telepathy must be flawed.” So, he was rejecting it without refereeing. And when the author of the paper wrote to the editor saying, “Well, surely you remember that Galileo had a problem with the Cardinals who refused to look through the telescope, aren’t you afraid you might be a bit like the Cardinals?” The guy wrote back said, “That’s the risk I’m prepared to take.” At least he was honest. So, there is a very strong prejudice and anyone who works in this field encounters it. Media reports and serious media like the New York Times, Scientific American are dominated by skeptical point of view. And if any positive report is there, they immediately wheel on a media skeptic like Michael Shermer to say, “It’s all rubbish.” They get the last word.

So, there is — it’s a sociological phenomenon I would say. The data is there and I think that it’s a taboo that mainly affects educated people who’ve had a scientific background because they feel they’ll lose credibility. My own view is that the way things would change is not through piling up more data but by the equivalent of the Gay liberation movement within science. I gave a talk at a unit in Cambridge where there were six staff members who attended my seminar. I was talking about my work with dogs. And afterwards, each one of the six came out to me and said, “You know, I’m really interested in this stuff. I think it happens. I’ve seen it with my own dog, but I can’t talk about it here because everyone in this department is so straight.” And when all six, including the professor had said the same thing to me I said, “You know, why don’t you guys come out. You’d have so much more fun if you could actually talk freely.” And I think science would be so much more fun if people talk freely. In every scientific institute, there are people who’ve had these experiences who have dogs that know when they’re coming home from the lab and that kind of thing. But the social taboo means they don’t feel they can talk about it. And I think if we let go of that, I’m not saying blind belief is what we need, we certainly don’t. We need rational scientific discussion but that’s inhibited by prejudice and taboo and facilitated by free conversation.

Audience: Well, there had been other scientific theories which have been not well received. But the scientific community was eventually made to see the light. Why is this different?

Rupert Sheldrake: I ask myself that question. Why is it that this field has so much taboo around it when others don’t? For example, the Astronomer Royal in Britain, President of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College Cambridge, Lord Rees, member of the House of Lords, believes in multiple universes. He holds down the highest positions you can possibly have in British scientific life. He hasn’t shred of evidence for them. Yet, that’s acceptable where telepathy is not, why? I think the reason is that in the enlightenment the end of the seventeenth century or eighteenth century, the movement of the enlightenment was a movement to liberate humanity from religion and superstition in favor of science and reason. That was the social movement. And I think at that time things like telepathy and what we call — what are called paranormal phenomena were classified as superstition. And since then there’s been a sociological phenomenon where smart people defined as smart by not believing these things, which is why newspapers with the demographic of university graduates like the New York Times can’t write about them. Whereas ones that — where readers with no intellectual pretensions like the National Inquirer feel completely free to write about these things and exaggerate it in totally unreliable form. And that of course reinforces the social taboo and so, a self reinforcing sociological pattern. And I think it’s so strong because it was embedded in among educated people somewhere around 1800. There was a reaction against mesmerism and that kind of thing. And I think it’s re-embedded in the intellectual world ever since and it’s become a deep-seated habit of thought. That’s my own view.

Audience: So, what then is a Morphic field if it’s not, say, an electromagnetic field or gravitational field or, what is it?

Rupert Sheldrake: A Morphic field.

Audience: How do we actually measure it directly?

Rupert Sheldrake: We can’t measure any field directly. We measure them through their effects. We measure electrical fields through electrical effects, gravitational fields through gravitational effects.

Audience: Okay. Measure it through an instrument rather than having to have a human sort of part of the equation on the receiving end, at least or on a sending, in either way?

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, you measure this — well, you measure them through their appropriate effects. There’s no reason to suppose — a Morphic field might be measurable by an electrical instrument if it interacts with electrical activity in a way that’s measurable by that instrument. It might do, it might not. It’s an open question for me. But the first thing to do is to measure them by their actual biological effects just as you measure gravity through gravitational effects like the swinging of pendulums and things. You don’t measure gravity with an electric meter. You measure with gravitational things like gravitational devices, pendulums, and what not.

Audience: So, are you trying to characterize these fields? You know, things like Gravity Inverse-Square Law and, electromagnetism as well, time delays.

Rupert Sheldrake: Yes. I’ve left out the whole of theory. Yes, I mean, I’ve spent ten years developing this theory, written two books on it, et cetera, of how these fields work and what they are. And it’s not really fair on this audience that I haven’t actually gone into the theory. There’s a lot more in there than I’ve said. But that’s partly because it was all meant to take 45 minutes for the talk and 15 for the questions. We are actually 25 minutes overtime. But those were my instructions. Yes. Very, very briefly, morphic fields, organized, self-organizing systems, they have a kind of built-in memory. They work by passioning indeterminate systems that would otherwise not have a pattern. They impose restrictions on otherwise chaotic or indeterminate systems. There are a lot of things you can say about the fields and ways in which you can test for them. But I can’t at 5:26 P.M. tell you what they are right now. There’s a summary on my website of the Morphic Field Theory which you might like to look at.

Audience: I’m intrigued by this notion of skepticism of telepathy because there’s so much acceptance of other things like homeopathy and all the things that are skewed in the bad science calling [weak]. So how come they get more play than they shouldn’t be, we’ll take, you know, scientific bullshit from homeopathy vendors but they won’t accept physical results from you?

Rupert Sheldrake: I think a lot of — I mean, it depends who I’m talking to. I give seminars, I’m giving one in a couple month’s time at Chris France’s department at Goldsmiths College, London, which is — he’s the main professor of skepticism in Britain, he’s professor of anomalous psychology. And this is one of the main academic hotbeds of skepticism. I give talks there. People listen. They quite – we have reasonable discussions, and they know about the results. And very few of the people there exhibit this kind of prejudiced skepticism that I encounter all too often, a kind of ignorant bigoted type of skepticism. I think one of the reasons that there are so much of that is the people who are really skeptical have such a strong belief that they should – they know in advance the evidence must be wrong. You say if you believe it’s impossible, then if I come along and say, “Here’s results that shows it’s possible,” either it proves I’m a fool, I’ve done the experiments so badly or incompetently; I’ve got false positive results and haven’t been smart enough to see it, or I’m a fraud. I’m trying to deceive you and the world. And so, the instant reaction is one of hostility and accusing people of being fools or frauds.

Richard Dawkins, who’s a very smart man and is, in this area, not very smart at all, he’s a very bigoted skeptic, and he came to interview me for his most recent TV series in Britain. He had one against religion, a two-part polemic called “The Root of All Evil.” And his most recent series was called “Enemies of Reason.” It was about research in parapsychology and alternative medicine. They didn’t tell me it was called “Enemies of Reason” beforehand when they asked me to take part, but I had enough experience of these negative media treatments. And I’d seen his previous series. The title is very suspicious and I said I only agree to take part if it’s a genuine scientific discussion about evidence and if he’s really open to discussing the evidence, otherwise, there’s no point. And they gave me a writ and I said I want in writing. They gave me a written assurance that this was the case. So, I agreed to meet him and he came to see me. And we started off. There was a handheld camera they put us facing each other. And he started off by saying — he said, “I dare say we agree about quite a number of things, Rupert,” he said, “But let me tell you what worries me about you.” And I said, “Okay, what worries you about me.” And he said, “What worries me about you is you’re prepared to believe almost anything and science should be base on the minimum number of beliefs.”

So, I said, “Well, okay. Well, let me tell you what worries me about you.” I said, “You come across as prejudiced and bigoted and I think you give science a bad name.” So, we didn’t get much very far with that conversation. So, then he said, “The trouble with telepathy is that people are –” then he said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. It’s a standard skeptical slogan.” So I said, “Well, what’s the extraordinary claim?” I said, “The majority of saying normal people in Britain believed they’ve had telepathic experiences.” In that sense, it’s not extraordinary, it’s ordinary. Most people had it. You’re making the claim that most people are deluded about their own experience. Where’s your extraordinary evidence for that.” And he couldn’t produce any at all, you know, he just, “Oh, people have a very false sense of statistics and probability and such generic arguments.”

Then I said, “Well, look, okay. Why don’t we get down to the evidence and actually discuss the evidence, which is why we’ve met.” He said, “I didn’t want to talk about the evidence.” And I said, “Well, why not?” And he said, “There isn’t time.” And I said, “Well, we’ve got plenty of time.” He said, “It’s too complicated.” And I said, “No, it isn’t.” He said, “Anyway, it’s not what this program is about.” And so, I said, “Well, he didn’t — I’d sent him my papers, three or four papers two weeks before so he could look at them.” He hadn’t looked at me. And he’s just trying to trap me into saying something silly and then put that on TV.

So I said, “Okay. Well, then there’s been a misunderstanding because I said I didn’t want to take part in yet another low-grade debunking program.” He said, “It’s not a low-grade debunking program, it’s a high-grade debunking program.” So, then the producer said cut and the cameras stopped rolling. And then I said to the director, “Is this a debunking program or not?” He said, “Yes. It’s another Richard Dawkins’ polemic.” And I said, “Then you’re here under false pretenses because you told me it was about evidence.” He said, “I didn’t.” I said, “Well, your assistant did.” He said, “Can you prove it?” And I said, “Yes.” And I produced the email with this.” And I said, “I’m afraid there’s been a serious misunderstanding.” He said, “Well, I’m afraid I have to agree with you that she should never have told you that. That’s not what it’s about. It’s a polemic.” And I said, “Well, I’m going to have to ask you to leave my house.” And I didn’t sign the release. I wouldn’t actually mind if all that was put on the TV. And I’ve written up on account of those, it’s on my website. It’s been published in several British journals. If you want to read the detail, it’s on the account called Richard Dawkins Comes to Call. But that’s an example you see if someone with a huge media presence, an enormous intellectual prestige because a lot of people thing he’s an incredibly smart guy who speaks for science. In this area, whatever his virtues, his geneticist, he doesn’t have anything about it. He’s speaking from prejudice and ignorance. And that’s a very bad thing to do if you are as he is, a professor of public understanding of science. It doesn’t further the public understanding of science. And that I’m afraid is why the debate on this is not often based on evidence and they often based on prejudice, stereotypes and ignorance.

Audience: So, the other thing that strikes me is that here at Google, we run hundreds of thousands supposed to be millions of experiments everyday which are based on perceptions because we do present our testing on results and so on. Like recently we changed the color of the results from one [blue] to another because we found empirically that we prefer that. So, I’m wondering if your theories and models of this could be potentially tainting our results because once we’ve shown it to 1% of people that will change how the rest of them behave. Is there something we could measure in that?

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, you could set up Morphic resonance type experiments, which – the one kind of experiment is which of the actual is being done where you have some new kind of puzzle. You get people to solve it and then you see other people who haven’t seen it can solve it more easily after one last have done it. And a version of it — this is Morphic resonance in memory theory I didn’t talk about today. I think it could possibly influence your results actually. I mean a form in which I’d like to test it was thought out by my son when he was taking the national school exam at the age of 16 in England. We have a national exam called GCSE, General Certificate of Secondary Education as you know. And he came to me one day and said I and my friends have thought of the way of getting higher marks without doing extra work. And I said that sounds good. How’s that going to happen? And he said by morphic resonance. And I said, “Well, how will that work?” He said, “Well, in the physics and mass papers, we’re going to do questions 15 and 16 first, then go back to question one, two, three, et cetera. We’ll be 10 minutes behind everyone else in Britain.” And we had to boost by morphic resonance from their answers. And – because all the exams are done simultaneously, of course, to avoid cheating.

So I said to him well, that’s really a clever idea. And I said but some of your friends must be morphic resonance skeptics and he said yes, they are. And I said, what do they say? They said what if morphic resonance doesn’t exist? And he said we discussed it. We came to a conclusion if it doesn’t exist, we wouldn’t lose any marks but if it does, we’d gain them. So we’re all going to do it. They all did it. They all got A stars but they’re probably smart in the first place to think of that because that provides a perfect example. The test you see – I tried to persuade the head of Science exams in the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board, an old classmate of mine to turn our entire national education — exam system into a test where have several of the questions in a different order. So you could see if – and they’d be randomly assigned to thousands — tens of thousands of candidates to see where the people who did questions after others were getting higher scores. He thought it was a really good idea for few days, then he called me and said, you know, I’m going to be retiring soon and I want to have a full pension and I just don’t think I can run this test. So anyway, in Google, you probably could and it would be that certain kinds of test like that would be influenced by what other people have done. I don’t know how it would relate to what you do — Google would be a wonderful arena for this kind of research.

Audience: We always test some of these that run continuously to try our AdWords and stuff.

Rupert Sheldrake: Yes. I can’t — I mean I don’t know enough about how things work here to suggest simple, easy to do, low cost experiments that could be done using existing Google technologies but I’m sure they could be done.

Yeah. So now we’ve reached 5:35. Is there a cut-off, Isaac or I mean I’m happy to go on in a few more minutes but perhaps, we should draw things. Yes, one more question.

Audience: Had there been any experiments of people with known special abilities like being able to guess things so?

Rupert Sheldrake: Not special abilities.

Audience: Known special abilities.

Rupert Sheldrake: Oh, known special abilities. I haven’t myself worked with people with known special abilities because I prefer to work with ordinary people because I’m interested in what I call the mysteries of everyday life. The things that ordinary people know about. If you work with people who are professional psychics, then the skeptics are particularly active. They say oh, they’re cheating. They’ve learned how to cheat because they’re constantly cheating people out of money and stuff. And it’s very hard to get beyond that kind of argument when you’re dealing with say, Sai Baba materializing the booty or something like that. It’s very hard to replicate too because really, people with special abilities don’t particularly want to be treated as frauds and tested repeatedly by aggressive and hostile skeptics so I prefer to work with ordinary people testing ordinary abilities. But it doesn’t mean to say that it wouldn’t be interesting to test people who do have extraordinary abilities or who are unusually sensitive.

And the intuition test on mobile phones that I was talking about earlier. If people did these intuition tests, a lot of people would be able to identify themselves as being unusually good at telephone telepathy and they would then be very good people to test in a more rigorous way so, hopefully, that kind of test could enable people to identify their own abilities and indeed improve them by training and experience.

Good. Okay, thank you.

 

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