To brush aside what people have actually experienced is not to be scientific

 Rupert Sheldrake’s Seven Senses

A Candid Conversation with a Scientific Iconoclast

Cynthia Logan

Ever looked up at a gaggle of geese and marveled at their exquisite, coordinated unity? Ever felt the urge to turn around and find that when you do, someone’s eyes have been fixed on you? Both are common experiences that illustrate what cutting-edge biologist Rupert Sheldrake considers the “seventh sense.” Unlike the sixth sense—which he says has already been laid claim to by biologists working on the electrical and magnetic senses of animals and is rooted in time and space—the term seventh sense “expresses the idea that telepathy, the sense of being stared at, and premonition seem to be in a different category both from the five normal senses and from so-called sixth senses based on known physical principles.” Though the geese we gaze at have a built-in biological compass that enables them to respond to the earth’s magnetic field, Sheldrake thinks there’s more than magnetism afoot to keep them aloft and aligned.

The Cambridge-educated “heretical” scientist has, besides a love of plants and animals, a way with words, and has authored a number of award-winning books with subjects as intriguing as their titles. Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) won the British Scientific and Medical Network Book of the Year Award, and Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994) was voted Book of the Year by the British Institute for Social Inventions. Sheldrake is also the author of The Presence of the Past (1988), The Rebirth of Nature (1990), and, with Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna, Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992) and The Evolutionary Mind (1998). His latest book, The Sense of Being Stared At (Crown, 2003), delves into just such senses—phenomena he asserts are worthy of investigation. “I argue that unexplained human abilities such as telepathy, the sense of being stared at, and premonition are not paranormal, but a normal part of our biological nature,” he writes.

Sheldrake feels that prejudices rooted in the thinking of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers have inhibited research and inquiry: “If we only open our minds and make an effort to understand, we will be vastly rewarded with our new knowledge.”

Not only does Sheldrake think we should be looking at heretofore unexamined phenomena but—and he feels strongly about this—we should bring science back to the people, to amateurs like you and me. Explaining that science is founded on the empirical method (on experience and observation), he turns to words again: “Billions of personal experiences of seemingly unexplained phenomena are conventionally dismissed within institutional science as ‘anecdotal.’ What does this actually mean? The word anecdote comes from the Greek roots an and ekdotos, meaning ‘not published.’ Thus an anecdote is an unpublished story.” He points out that courts of law take anecdotal evidence seriously, often convicting or acquitting defendants because of it. He also cites its role in medical research, stating that “when patients’ stories are published they are then elevated to the status of ‘case histories.’ To brush aside what people have actually experienced is not to be scientific, but to be unscientific.”

For the past fifteen years, Sheldrake has focused his scientific interest on how systems are organized, pioneering what he calls the “Hypothesis of Formative Causation,” consisting of “morphic fields” and “morphic resonance.” Thanks to the Power Rangers and other kids toys, most of us casually use the word morph to mean “change into” or evolve. Precisely, says Sheldrake, whose work takes off from where the now widely adopted biological concept of “morphogenetic fields” (used to explain, for example, how arms and legs can have different shapes even though they contain the same genes and proteins) left off.

Sheldrake surmises that the fields evolve along with the systems they organize and coordinate. Since a field is a “sphere of influence,” morphic fields would be those that can change or evolve their spheres of influence. He says there are morphic fields within and around individual cells, tissues, organs, organisms, societies, ecosystems, and so on—fields that are shaped by past events and patterns through an in-built memory called “morphic resonance.” This is how, he reasons, instincts and “species specific” abilities develop; the enviable coherence of birds in flight is due to the morphic field that links them and the resonant memory that has evolved through millennia.

“‘Instinct’ is a vague term for an inherited pattern of behavior—conventional biology holds that instincts are programmed into the genes—I argue that genes are grossly overrated and don’t do half the things they’re cracked up to do,” he quips. “What they do is code for the sequence of amino acids and proteins—they make the right chemicals.” In Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Sheldrake examines how termites structure their colonies and build arches, noting: “Of course the insects have genetic coding that prompts them to behave in certain ways, but the actual forming of the nest and the coordinating of the colony is accomplished with morphic fields.” For those who find the concept hard to fathom, he offers an analogy: “Just as a magnetic field can influence the pattern of iron filings within it, so a morphic field can influence the behavior and movements of cells within a body or members within a group.” He also maintains that such fields underlie the bonds that form between pets and their owners. And here is his love: pets and people learning from and helping each other.

With research assistants posted in a number of places around the world (London, Zurich, California, New York, Moscow, and Athens among them), Sheldrake maintains a large database of pet owners who have participated in “do-it-yourself” experiments that are simple but rigorous enough to produce evidence he can support. “Hundreds of videotaped experiments have shown that dogs are indeed able to anticipate their owners’ return in a way that seems telepathic,” he claims. Other results indicate that cats, parrots, homing pigeons, and horses are also highly telepathic.

Though some dismiss his views and conclusions as nonsense, Sheldrake certainly has the academic credentials to command serious consideration of his theories. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. Having earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967, he was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and was director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology there until 1973. As a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied the development of plants (with an emphasis on the hormones within them) and the aging of cells, while enjoying seven years of stimulating academic conversation and luxurious accommodations.

“I lived in seventeenth-century rooms in a beautiful courtyard. At the ring of a bell, I would walk across the courtyard, put on my academic gown, and sit down at a table furnished with a delicious meal and vintage wine. After dinner we drank port in a paneled ‘common’ room and talked for hours,” he recalls, adding that “since the fellows of the colleges are from different subjects, I had many valuable opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion.”

The blend of academics and conviviality has served Sheldrake well: As the author of more than fifty papers published in scientific journals, he accepts criticism without defensiveness, stating that “healthy skepticism plays an important part in science, and stimulates research and creative thinking.” He differentiates an open-minded, healthy skeptic who is interested in evidence from a “skeptic,” whom he defines as someone committed to the belief that paranormal phenomena are impossible. His extensive website (www.sheldrake.org) addresses specific comments from several skeptics. “Click on their names if you want to know what they said about my research on the unexplained powers of animals and to read my replies,” he suggests. Though he’s been ridiculed by some and teased by others (“some of my peers have suggested using telepathy instead of a telephone when I mention I’m going to make a call”), many other scientists find his conclusions fascinating and plausible. Quantum physicist David Bohm sees similarities in Sheldrake’s “Formative Causation” and his own theory of an invisible “Implicate Order” behind the “explicate” material world.

From the book: Forbidden Science