The Evolution Of Telepathy Rupert Sheldrake

TITLE: The Evolution of Telepathy | Trinity College, Cambridge CHANNEL: Rupert Sheldrake DATE: 2026-04-21 URL: https://youtu.be/b6LNceIaz1Q

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The theme of telepathy is particularly appropriate because the Perro Warick fund was set up in memory of Frederick Meyers, a fellow of Trinity College and one of the founders of the society for psychical research in 1882. And it was Meyers who coined the word telepathy. He was a Greek scholar and of course telepathy means telly as in distant as in television telephone and feeling as in empathy sympathy. So telepathy literally means distant feeling.

In the early days of the society for psychical research, one of the big issues was the survival of bodily death. And that was one of the topics Meyers himself was very interested in. I think partly because telepathy was associated with this quest for evidence for survival and the focus was on telepathy in human beings. Now this made it more controversial than it needed because the people who opposed telepathy were people who saw themselves as heirs of enlightenment rationalism who saw an opposition between what they thought of as the advance of science and reason as opposed to religion and superstition which they thought were holding humanity back. Telepathy got classified as superstition because so many people believe in it. This meant that telepathy has always been controversial. It’s always been something that people who believe in a kind of materialist worldview feel that they need to oppose.

Now I’m going to talk this evening about the evolution of telepathy. My point is that it’s not actually a supernormal or supernatural or paranormal. It’s natural normal and a part of animal nature. It occurs in many different species of animals and human telepathy is simply one aspect of a much more widespread phenomenon.

I might say just one or two words about why I got interested in this subject. I was educated in a normal scientific way at school and at Cambridge and I absorbed the standard scientific mindset which involved at least when I was being educated atheism, materialism and total skepticism to all psychic phenomena. This was just part of the standard issue mindset that people of my generation grew up with and still many young scientists today follow that same way of thinking.

So I thought telepathy was absolute rubbish that it couldn’t possibly happen because the mind’s nothing but the activity of the brain. It’s all inside the head. And so telepathy must be rubbish. Therefore all evidence for it must either be fraudulent or flawed. There are many people who still think that today of course. But what stopped me thinking like that was an experience in Cambridge in the biochemistry department. One time in the TA room someone brought up the topic of telepathy and along with several other research students I said, “Oh, it’s absolute rubbish.” And said all the standard skeptical things. But sitting nearby was one of the older members of the department, Sir Rudolph Peters, previously professor of biochemistry at Oxford, who in his retirement was working in our lab here in Cambridge. And Sir Rudolph said to me, “Have you ever looked at the evidence for it?” And I said, “No, I don’t need to.” He said, “Well, I have.” And he said, “I think there might be something in it.” And he then told me about an investigation he’d done. A friend of his called EG Recordon was an opthamologist in Cambridge. He was treating a boy who was severely disabled who was almost blind and who was mentally handicapped. And when he was doing standard eye tests, he was astonished that this boy could actually read all the letters on the eye charts. And he knew he couldn’t possibly read them. And at first he thought it was lucky guesswork. Then he thought maybe it was happening through the mother, and he asked the mother to leave the room and the boy couldn’t do it. He told Sir Rudolph Peters and they set up some simple tests with the boy and the mother separated by a screen and they showed her letters and numbers and the boy immediately said what they were. They then set up an experiment over the telephone with the boy at home in Cambridge and the mother in Braham in a laboratory six miles away. They showed the mother cards — a random number of sequence of letters and numbers which were pre-randomized. She looked at them and the boy would then say what she was looking at. With the letters he should have been right one time in 26 on average, 3.8%. He was actually right 38% of the time in more than 100 trials. These were massively significant results. And Sir Rudolph Peters was convinced that something was really going on. The only possible clues could have been by subtle sound clues. They had magicians listen to the tape to see if there was any fraud. I listened to them myself and Peters convinced me that this research showed something was really going on. He was an honest man. He had no axe to grind. And I was very impressed by the fact that here was a piece of research that showed something was really happening. When I discussed it with my colleagues, they reacted exactly as I’d reacted myself, saying, “Oh, it must be flawed.” They weren’t interested in looking at the evidence. And I realized this is a diagnostic feature of skepticism about psychic phenomena — an unwillingness to look at the evidence because of firm belief it must be untrue.

Well, I didn’t drop everything and start working on telepathy because I was working on other things. I was working on plant morphogenesis and in the course of my work on plant development here in Cambridge and then later in India in an agricultural institute I got interested in the concept of morphogenetic fields. This is a widespread concept within developmental biology. The idea was promoted principally here in Britain by CH Waddington who was professor of genetics in Edinburgh, and it was the idea that living organisms are shaped by invisible fields that mold the way they develop and that these fields are needed to explain how development occurs in animals and plants. I won’t go into the details of morphogenesis and its unsolved problems, but I got interested in these fields and I came to the conclusion there must be some new kind of field at work in living organisms that wasn’t just the standard fields of physics. It wasn’t just chemical diffusions. I worked on the chemistry of the main plant hormone auxin and I knew more than anyone I think at the time about plant hormones that affected plant development and yet it simply didn’t answer. Chemical answer wasn’t going to work and it still hasn’t worked.

As I got interested in morphogenetic fields, I read Waddington’s books and those of others and what they were part of was a holistic view of nature. Nature’s organized in a series of nested hierarchies. The little circles could be subatomic particles in atoms, in molecules, in crystals or they could be organelles, in cells, in tissues, in organs — that everything in nature is organized in this nested hierarchy. At each level, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Now, when it comes to social organization, the fields are the organization of termite societies, of flocks of birds, of packs of wolves. If the three inner circles represent individual animals, the outer one could represent the whole social group. So from this theory, I arrived at the idea social groups must have organizing fields. These must coordinate the individual members even when they’re at a distance. And then I realized that if that were the case, it could give rise to forms of communication at a distance which would show up as telepathy. It seemed to follow from this theory.

So I started looking at social animals and my aim was to see whether if telepathy existed it was part of social organization in animals and that it must have evolved along with social groups.

One kind of animal society are termites. This huge termite mound is constructed by millions of insects building elaborate architectural structures coordinated in a way that no one still yet understands. Part of it by smell, part of it’s by tapping sounds. It’s not by sight because they’re blind. And yet they can make these huge structures in a way that’s still not understood. In the 1920s, a South African biologist, Eugene Marais, found that if you damage termite mounds, they can repair them. And he put a steel plate into a damaged mound in such a way that there was no communication across it. And yet, on both sides, the termites built tunnels and arches that corresponded with those on the other side, as if there was an invisible blueprint. He thought that there must be a group soul in the termite colony. I would think of it as a field, a kind of morphogenetic field of animal architecture.

Now, in flocks of birds — a flock of starlings over Brighton West Pier — the entire flock moves in a coordinated way. The animals change direction without bumping into each other, and they must anticipate where their neighbors are moving extremely fast. In the 80s, people modeled bird flocks using a simple form of computer modeling based on nearest neighbor analysis. But that simply won’t work. They do it too fast. And the best modern computer models of flocks treat them as fields — as if each bird is a magnetic domain within a magnetic field combined with the hydrodynamics of flow. These models which are field models give the best representations of flock behavior. These two I think are field phenomena. The kind of field they are is what I call a morphic field — a field that’s concerned with form or shape.

The same applies to schools of fish. They can change direction almost instantly when a predator approaches and move apart in what’s called a flash expansion without bumping into each other. So, they not only know where the others are, but they know where the others are going to go. So, how is this coordinated? Nobody yet knows. And these were things that made me think that perhaps there are indeed features at work in social groups which lead to forms of communication we don’t yet understand but which are part of biology. They’re not supernatural. They’re not paranormal. They’re normal. They’re part of the ordinary coordination of animal groups.

Now the same should apply to animal groups like packs of wolves. When they’re together, they can see each other and communicate by sound, sight, and all the normal senses. But when adult wolves go hunting, they often range over hundreds of miles. They leave the young, the cubs, in the den with a babysitter. The idea here would be that the field that joins them stretches like a kind of invisible elastic band that continues to connect them at a distance and could be a channel for telepathic communication.

This was a kind of rather vague metaphoric theory. But what it did was made me look into the literature on wolves and wild animals. In recent years there’s been very little research. This is such a taboo topic that nobody within biology will touch it if they want to get a grant or a job. And of course, most people want grants and jobs. So it’s so taboo, it’s so forbidden, that despite a fascinating beginning to this field of research by William Long, summarized in his book, “How Animals Talk,” first published in 1919, what he shows is that he tracked wolves for months in Canada, months on end over many years, and he was convinced they were communicating at a distance without the use of sound. Of course he knew they howled and so forth but without howling they could still tell not only what the others were doing but where they were. Through tracking them he could show how they were able to join up over many miles suggesting an invisible form of communication. He found a similar thing in groups of birds when they were feeding apart from the rest of the flock. He became convinced that animals in groups in the wild are communicating telepathically with each other. The only way the group can stay in touch at a distance would be by telepathy when they’re beyond the range of the senses. This would have survival value and would be part of their normal way of life.

Incidentally, the wolf example reminds us of a physical analogy. In physics, if two particles have been part of the same system and they move apart, they can remain non-locally connected or entangled so that a change in one instantly affects the other. When Einstein realized this implication of quantum theory, he thought quantum theory must be wrong because it would allow for what he called a spooky action at a distance. Experiments show that quantum theory is right. Einstein was wrong. And quantum entanglement is now being applied in quantum computing and in quantum cryptography. There’s a mysterious connection to distance. And it’s not distance dependent. It’s just as strong over a mile as over a centimeter. It’s particularly interesting because in telepathy that appears to be the case too. I’m not saying these phenomena are quantum entanglement. I’m saying that quantum entanglement provides us with an interesting analogy within physics.

Well, all this is simply background really to the question of does telepathy really happen in animals? And when I decided to start working on this when I realized that nobody had ever really addressed this question after Long’s book in 1919, there had been virtually complete silence on this front. A few amateur naturalists had explored the idea, but they knew if they wanted to get papers published in scientific journals, you shouldn’t mention it. So I decided to start looking at this by looking at the animals we know best, namely domesticated animals, dogs, cats, horses, parrots, and other animals that are widely known and known well to many people. I started appealing for information about anything people had noticed in their animals that suggested powers that were currently unexplained.

And I was soon deluged with letters and accounts from people who were only too willing to tell me about what their animals did. Some of my friends said, “You shouldn’t pay any attention to what ordinary people tell you about their animals because they’re just anecdotes. They’re the product of wishful thinking and so forth.” But actually most people who wrote to me seemed perfectly sensible. The anecdotes were very interesting stories. And what’s more, I got the same kinds of stories, hundreds and hundreds of them, from all over the world.

So at least they added up to a kind of natural history of what people believed about their pets — not necessarily true, but certainly what people had observed or believed they observed. For example, we have more than 200 accounts from cat owners saying that their cat picks up their intention to take it to the vet and disappears. Cats hate going to vets. What happens is that when the cat disappeared, people couldn’t find it — would hide under a bed or in the garden if it could get out. After this happened a few times, people desperately tried not to let the cat know when they were planning to take it to the vet. They wouldn’t get out the carrying basket, they wouldn’t mention the word vet. Some people desperately tried not to think about the vet. “I mustn’t think about the vet. I mustn’t think about the vet.” But still the cat knew and disappeared. Some people, it happened so often and they were so desperate they took to ringing up the vet from work so the cat couldn’t overhear the conversation and then swing by home on the way back to take it to the vet. Still wasn’t there.

The next stage in this research is to do surveys. How common is this? So we did a survey of all 65 veterinary clinics in the North London yellow pages. We asked them whether they ever had a problem with people missing appointments with their 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 had to show up with their animals.

One of the most testable of these claims of animals picking up their owners’ intentions was with dogs and cats that know when their owners are coming home. I now have more than a thousand cases of dogs doing this and 600 of cats doing it on my database. In most of these cases, the obvious explanations like routine or hearing the car wheels crunching on the gravel outside the house don’t apply because they do it too long in advance and when people come home at non-routine times. I discussed this with one of my oldest friends in the scientific world, Nicholas Humphrey, a previous holder of the Perro War Post. To my surprise, he didn’t dispute the phenomenon. He’s a fairly hardcore skeptic. What he said was, “Oh, well, my mother always knew when I was coming home to our house in Ashwell, because the dog would start waiting about half an hour in advance.”

I said to him, “Well, Nick, surely that shows it couldn’t be any of the normal senses. The dog couldn’t possibly have heard you 20 miles away, the other side of Cambridge.” He said, “Oh, on the contrary, it just shows what sharp hearing they’ve got.” Well, Nick and I have spent many years arguing about these things, and we try and resolve our disputes by thinking of experiments. That’s what gave me the idea for this research. I said to him, “What would happen if you came home by train and you cycled from Ashwell station on a borrowed bicycle?” So there were no familiar car sounds at all till you were almost home. He said, “Oh, well, obviously the dog wouldn’t know.” I said, “Well, perhaps it would.” And that’s the basis for the experiments I’ve done on a large scale now with dogs that know when their owners are coming home.

First of all, we did surveys to find out how common this was. Random household surveys in Britain and in California. We rang up people at random if they had pets. About 50% of dog owners on average said their animals anticipated the return of an absent member of the family. On average, about 30% of cats. Even in Los Angeles, where the cats seem to do far better than any British cats or even cats in Santa Cruz, they still didn’t do as well as dogs. Does this mean cats are less sensitive? Well, I think it just means that many of them are less interested. But those who do know do the same kind of thing as dogs, usually not quite as long in advance. I also found this behavior happens with horses, with parrots, with tame mynah birds, to some degree with ferrets, pet rabbits, guinea pigs — I’ve got a few cases of lambs raised on the bottle and treated as pets who do it, geese and chickens. All of them are mammals or birds. I’ve got very few convincing cases of reptiles doing this. Reptiles on the whole are solitary anyway. So they don’t have strong social bonds with each other. So you wouldn’t expect them to form them with people.

So what do we make of this scientifically? The great majority of people, my scientific friends who I discussed it with showed no curiosity whatever. They just said, “Oh, well, it’s obviously just routine or the people at home give subtle cues or they must be hearing or smelling the people from a long distance away.” The case studies showed that that was not an adequate explanation. I started doing the experiments that I thought of in this conversation with Nick Humphrey and what we found was that the dogs that do it fairly reliably could do it over and over and over again — start waiting not just when the person gets in the car to come home, when they decide to come home. When we asked them to come home by taxi to avoid familiar car sounds, then the dog reacted when they rang for the taxi, not when they got into it. I set up a whole series of controlled experiments where people went at least 5 miles from home. They came home in taxis at randomly chosen times. I chose the times at random. They didn’t know them in advance. I told them with a pager when to go home. And then we filmed the place the dog waited continuously the whole time they were out. These films can be independently evaluated by third parties and give an objective record of the animal’s behavior.

The quantitative results from the dog JT that I’ve worked with most: the bottom axis shows 10-minute intervals after the owner went out. The vertical axis shows the number of seconds the dog was at the window or door when she was out. The dog was at the door most in the first 10 minutes of the homeward journey. It was already waiting there before she came home, when she decided to come home, but before the car had actually started moving. Quantitatively in these experiments, the time it was at the door for most of her absence, right up until the 10 minutes before she leaves, was about 4% of the time. It was over 50% of the time when she was on the way home. It was highly significant statistically.

When there was a report about this in the press, immediately skeptics and skeptic organizations attacked the research saying that it must be flawed, telepathy was impossible. I’d been duped by the dog owners who’d been communicating by secret phone calls and then activating the dog with high-pitched whistles that I couldn’t hear. So I’d simply been taken in. One of the people who raised these objections was Richard Wiseman, a previous holder of this post. So I invited him to do his own experiments with this dog, which he did. He did three tests with his colleague, Matthew Smith. These are the results of his three tests with the same dog in the same location. They parallel my own results very closely. But that’s not how he saw it. He announced to the waiting world that he’d refuted this dog’s abilities because it had been to the window before the owner had set off to come home and therefore given a false alarm and all the rest of the data could therefore be discarded since it had failed the test. He now admits that these data are virtually identical to my own. But the skeptical people want to hear a skeptical message in the serious media. A lot of science journalists amplify that message. They’re not too concerned with the facts.

There have been other tests with other dogs. I think this is now a fairly well-established fact that dogs really do know when their owners are coming home, or at least some of them do, not all. The most reliable dog I found, JT, did it about 85% of the time. There were occasions he didn’t respond. Most of those turned out to be when there was a bitch on heat in the next flat, showing that JT could be distracted.

The most extraordinary case of all that I’ve come across is a telepathic parrot called N’kisi. This is the parrot with the largest vocabulary in the world — currently 1,500 words. The Guinness Book of Records is 800 words. This parrot picks up his owner’s thoughts and intentions and actually says them. People often say of dogs and cats, “If only they could speak.” Well, here’s a parrot that can and does. We set up tests where we had sealed envelopes containing photographs corresponding to objects the parrot knows the name for. The owner Aimee sat in a room on camera, opened a package, looked at the picture for 2 minutes. The parrot in another room completely isolated from her, filmed continuously, spoke. We later had the tapes transcribed independently by three different independent transcribers, the words analyzed, and it turned out the parrot did indeed say what she was looking at way above what you’d expect by chance. When she looks at a picture of flowers, the parrot says, “That’s a flower. That’s a pic of flowers. They’re little flowers.” When she looks at a picture of someone on the phone, it says, “What are you doing on the phone?” and makes phone dialing noises and says, “That’s a phone.” When people are hugging, it says, “That’s a hug. That’s my hug” and talks about hugs. It’s quite extraordinary. It speaks in sentences. That alone is extraordinary. This bird is two generations away from the wild. It’s an African grey. In terms of evolutionary bonds, humans have had tens of thousands of years to evolve with dogs. But parrots, most parrots that people keep are either wild caught or only one or two generations into captivity. They can not only speak but use language meaningfully as Irene Pepperberg showed with her famous parrot Alex and pick up people’s thoughts and utter them in English words. It’s a totally astonishing phenomenon.

Well these experiments with animals showed that telepathy seems to occur quite widely in the animal kingdom. There are many other ways in which pet owners, dog trainers, blind people with guide dogs, police dog handlers, horse trainers told me that their animals picked up thoughts or intentions. Usually to do with things that affect the animal themselves. They know when people are going away. They know when they’re coming back. The dogs often know when people are planning to take them for an otherwise non-routine walk even if they’re in another room. Blind people with guide dogs often find that the dog picks up their intention and takes them where they want to go without them actually having said anything about it. Of course there is a physical contact through the harness, so there could be subtle cues, but there’s a huge field of research here virtually unexplored. This is virgin scientific territory. It’s remarkable that in the early 21st century there’s a vast field of science both with domestic and wild animals that’s virtually unexplored. The reason it’s unexplored is because it’s a taboo that people within the scientific world have not felt free to explore this area and still don’t. Yet there could be dozens of really fascinating PhD projects in this area and we’d find out a great deal more about the way animal behavior is coordinated in the wild.

Now I came to work on human telepathy only after I’d done a lot of research with animals and I tried to approach it in the same spirit by looking first of all at the natural history of the phenomenon. Of course, parapsychologists have worked on telepathy ever since the founding of the society for psychical research, but they’ve usually used very artificial tests to start with — card guessing experiments which gave significant positive results. If you do a meta-analysis of all the experiments, something was going on. But it was a fairly small weak effect, but with thousands, hundreds of thousands of trials statistically significant. Dream telepathy experiments were very successful in the 60s when people were doing that research showing people could pick up images in dreams that someone else was looking at. The most recent research is the Ganzfeld telepathy tests where subjects lie in a reclining chair with halved ping-pong balls over their eyes in dim red light with white noise through earphones — a state of mild sensory deprivation — and able to pick up successfully images that other people are looking at in another soundproofed room way above chance. They haven’t all worked, but most have. All the recent meta-analyses show significant positive effects. But this is rather an artificial situation. Not many people in real life sit in reclining chairs in dim red light with ping-pong balls over their eyes. I was more interested to see what might have evolved under conditions of natural selection with humans before the invention of telephones. Before telephones, the only way people could communicate at a distance would have been telepathy. If it exists, it would have been probably quite useful to know other people’s needs, especially their needs when they’re at a distance.

One of the categories of behavior I heard about from many people — women — was about mothers who feel they could pick up telepathically when their baby needed them. Many nursing mothers have had the experience of going back to work or starting to leave the baby when it’s 3 or 4 months old, and when they’re away from the baby feeling their milk let down. The milk let down reflex is an oxytocin mediated reflex that causes the breast to start expressing milk. The nipples leak. It’s normally caused by the baby crying and mothers feel it. It gets the breast ready to feed the baby. It’s a well-known physiological response. When mothers felt their milk letting down, often through feeling their breast tingle when they were away from the baby, most mothers just assumed their baby needed them. Until recently, they simply went home. Now they ring home on a mobile phone. They’re usually right. I did a study with 20 nursing mothers over a two-month period in North London where we monitored the mothers every time they were away from the baby and monitored the baby and we found the milk letdowns were synchronized with the baby’s need in an extraordinarily significant way — odds against chance of a billion to one. It wasn’t just routine times; we could control for that because we knew when all these things were happening.

If this is indeed true as I think it is, then it would be useful. Mothers who could tell when their baby needed them when they were at a distance from the baby would tend to have babies that survived better than mothers that couldn’t tell. There’d be selective pressures in favor of this ability. Many mothers go on being bonded to their children even when they’ve grown up. I have many cases on my database of mothers who say they knew when their son or daughter was in distress or had had an accident — they just rang up because they just felt something was wrong. These bonds continue throughout many people’s lives.

One of the things that this survey of natural history showed was that by far the commonest kind of telepathy in the modern world, or apparent telepathy, occurs in connection with telephone calls. More than 80% of people have had the experience of thinking of someone for no apparent reason who then rings. When that person rings they say “Oh, it’s funny, I was just thinking about you.” We’ve done surveys in a variety of countries about this. Telephone telepathy is much commoner than any other kind. It shows that telepathy has evolved along with modern technology. When people intend to call somebody — which is a pretty basic human thing, you want somebody, you want to call them — the intention precedes the phone call. You have to intend to call them before you make the call. That’s why people pick up this intention before the call actually happens. Women report this experience much more than men. Even in men, it’s over 70% compared with more than 95% of women. There were national differences in our survey between men in this response. The most sensitive were in Argentina and the least sensitive in Britain.

What does science have to tell us about it? Until recently, absolutely nothing. Every scientist I discussed it with came up with the identical skeptical argument. Everyone in this room’s probably been schooled in skepticism. All educated people are supposed to in public at least pretend they don’t believe in telepathy because otherwise you lose your credibility as an educated person. In private many people believe in it, talk about it to their friends and family. But in public almost everybody feels the need to say, “Well, how do you know it’s really telepathy? Surely you think about people all the time and if one of them then rings up, you might think it’s telepathy, but you forget the millions of times you’re wrong. So it’s just coincidence and selective memory.” Or else they say, “Well, if you know someone well, you have an unconscious expectation of when they’re going to ring and that’s why.” The trouble with unconscious expectations is that they’re not necessarily an alternative to telepathy. They could be just another way of talking about it. Anyway, this kind of abstract theoretical argument gets one nowhere. What I found was that the skeptics who so confidently put forward these arguments to me — when I said, “Well, where’s your evidence? Where are the studies on how often people think of other people? How selective is their memory?” — it was no evidence at all. There had been no studies of any kind on this subject. So it was an evidence-free hypothesis. In science it’s fine to have a hypothesis but you need evidence as well. So I decided to test that hypothesis by finding ways of doing experiments where you could actually evaluate the chance coincidence theory and see whether this happened more than chance coincidence.

The basic experiment involves finding people who say this happens to them and then they give me the names and phone numbers of four friends — people they know well or family members. They sit at home with a landline telephone, no caller ID system, being filmed on videotape. We then pick one of the four callers at random by the throw of a die or with a random number table and ring them up and ask them to ring the subject. Within 2 minutes they do so. So the subject’s sitting there, the phone rings and they have to guess who it is before they pick it up. They say “It rings, I think it’s John.” They pick it up. “Hello John.” They’re right or they’re wrong. A one in four chance of being right by pure guesswork, 25%.

In these experiments, it turns out the hit rate is considerably higher than that. From more than 400 filmed telephone telepathy tests: chance level 25%. The actual hit rate was 45%. This was highly significant — P is 1 x 10^-12. We then did some further tests where two of the callers were familiar people and the other two were strangers who the people had never met. With the two unfamiliar people, the hit rate was only just above chance. With the familiar people it was more than twice the chance level, 52%. This shows that telepathy occurs much more between people who are bonded — who have emotional or social bonds with each other — than strangers.

Unfortunately, many parapsychology experiments have involved getting total strangers into the laboratory and testing them on card guessing and Ganzfeld experiments. When they have had people who know each other well, the results are much stronger. The effect is much bigger.

This research has been replicated at Amsterdam and Freiburg universities. It doesn’t depend on distance. We’ve done experiments up to and including Australia and New Zealand with young Australians and New Zealanders we recruited from the Earls Court area of London. Two of their callers were new acquaintances in Britain. The other two were family members or girlfriends or boyfriends down under. They actually did better with the people down under than with their new acquaintances, showing that what matters is emotional clusters not physical proximity.

Very similar things occur with emails. Exactly the same kind of phenomenon is reported by many people with emails. They think of someone and then they get an email from them. It’s one of the ways in which this ability to pick up people’s intentions is evolving along with technology. Telephones came first. Emails are much later. We did very similar experiments with emails. People had four emailers. They had to guess who was sending them an email out of these four people at say 12:00. At 12:00 the person was writing them that email and they didn’t send it till 12:01 after we’d received the guess. The beauty of emails is the time is actually printed into the email. The technology gives you the exact time to the second. So you can be sure the guess was made before the email was received. We filmed people doing these to make sure they weren’t cheating with phone calls or instant messages. The results: the 25% chance level. The actual hit rate was 47%. Again a highly significant result. We did more than 200 of these tests.

I’ve developed automated email telepathy tests and automated mobile telephone telepathy tests. You log on through my website. You put in the names and mobile phone numbers of three friends and the test works by the computer picking one of the three at random, sending them a text message asking them to ring you at a landline number which is the computer. They ring you. They’re put on hold. The computer then rings you. So if you’re the subject, your phone rings, the caller ID says “telepathy test.” You answer, it says, “Hello, this is the telepathy test. One of your three callers is on the line right now waiting to speak to you. Please guess who it is by pressing one, two, or three.” You do. As soon as you’ve guessed, the line opens up and you get instant feedback. Then after talking for a minute, it cuts off because I’m paying for the call. After a random time delay, it does the same thing again. This automated test has been working very well, and this is with unselected participants.

One of the questions that parapsychologists ask is how do you know it’s really telepathy? Because precognition is another form of psychic activity that I think there’s good evidence can happen. If precognition, it could be that you precognize who you’re going to speak to. You know in advance who you’re going to speak to rather than picking up their intention telepathically. Well, I created a modified version of the telephone telepathy test where you had to guess who was going to call you before the computer had selected the caller and before they’d made the call. There’s no way you could have known. If they had got it right above chance, it would have been a precognition result, not a telepathy result. In fact, somewhat to my surprise, the precognition results came out exactly at the chance level compared with the telepathy test very significantly above it. It does seem that at least in these conditions, we’re looking at a telepathy effect rather than a precognition effect.

This research has aroused a great deal of interest in the world of new media. I gave a seminar on this research at the request of the Google technical group a couple of years ago and my Google technical seminar is online on the Google website. Many people in Silicon Valley and also in phone companies like Nokia have got very interested in this because they think it should be possible to develop applications that do these kinds of tests. If there were standard features that you could install on mobile telephones, the number of people doing these tests could rise to the millions. It could generate data on an unprecedented level. It would also enable people to train their intuition. If you know when you’re right and when you’re wrong as you do with these tests, you could practice so that you got better at doing it. That could lead to national competitions for the most telepathic person in Britain. The next level would be the international telepathy Olympics. If that occurred with telepathy on mobile phones and international contests, the question of does it exist or not would become a non-question.

I have to say that most skeptics — there are some very reasonable skeptics and well-informed skeptics, one of them is Chris French who’s also been supported by the Perrott-Warrick fund — but some of them are not very well informed. During the controversy in The Times and elsewhere that occurred after the British Association meeting, I was denounced by Professor Peter Atkins who’s a leading skeptic at Oxford, a chemist, saying that the British Association should never have allowed anyone to talk about this pseudoscientific topic. Then I was asked to take part in an interview with him on BBC radio 5. He said in The Times “no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything other than the charlatan’s fantasy.” In the discussion on radio 5 I said to him, “Professor Atkins, have you actually looked at the evidence?” He said, “No, of course not.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “Well, if I did, I’d be very suspicious of it.” And I said, “There’s a word for that. It’s called prejudice.” He simply didn’t know. He was prepared to stand up in public to the entire nation and announce that it was a fantasy in complete ignorance. None of us could stand up and denounce modern research in quantum physics or radio astronomy with complete absence of any information at all. But when it comes to telepathy, a surprisingly large number of otherwise intelligent people feel that they have the right to pronounce in a state of ignorance.

Professor Lewis Wolpert appeared denouncing my research on a TV show. The people asked him in advance if he’d like to see the tapes of the experiments before he commented on them. He said, “No, absolutely no need.” And then said, “There’s no evidence for any person, animal, or thing being telepathic.” I challenged him to a public debate at the Royal Society of Arts, which happened a few years ago with a judge in the chair. It was written up in Nature and it was perfectly clear he knew nothing of the evidence and he didn’t want to know it either — because while I was showing the evidence on the screen he sat at the table tapping a pencil looking bored, staring into the distance and didn’t turn around to look at the evidence behind him.

Professor Richard Dawkins who until recently was professor of public understanding of science came to interview me for his recent TV series called “Enemies of Reason,” a sequel to his program on religion called “The Root of All Evil.” I made it a condition of seeing him for this program that it was a discussion about evidence. I said I wasn’t interested in taking part in another of his low-grade debunking programs. They said yes, it was about evidence. It would be completely fair. He was really interested in hearing the evidence. So I agreed to it. He came to see me and when he arrived, after a bit of preliminary banter and him saying how this was just wishful thinking I said, “Well look, we’ve met to discuss the evidence, why don’t we do that?” He said, “I don’t want to discuss the evidence.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “It’s too hard, it’s too difficult.” I said, “Most people can understand it.” He said, “We haven’t time.” I said, “It only takes a few minutes.” He said, “Anyway, it’s not what this program is about.” I said, “Oh really, I thought I had made it clear I didn’t want to take part in another low-grade debunking program.” “It’s not a low-grade debunking program. It’s a high-grade debunking program.” The director then said “Cut.” I asked him if it was true. He said, “Yes, it was another Dawkins polemic.”

It is extraordinary the passions that this subject can arouse in the minds of people who claim to be on the side of science, reason, and evidence. I think one of the reasons for the fear is that if telepathy exists, it would lead to an overthrow of science as we know it, turn the laws of nature upside down. I don’t think it would. The development of Max Faraday’s work on electromagnetism and Maxwell’s equations didn’t destroy the whole of Newtonian physics. It added to it. I think that admitting the existence of telepathy as a natural feature of animal communication would enlarge our view of animal nature and human nature. Consciousness studies is one of the most exciting areas of science at the moment. Within consciousness studies there’s no agreed model of the nature of the mind. By philosophers of mind it’s called the hard problem. No one knows how consciousness relates to the brain or the mind. It’s not as if we have a certain totally correct understanding of the nature of minds with predictions to seven places in decimals. We don’t understand how the mind works. If we take on board these phenomena then I think it would lead to an enhanced understanding of the mind — which is exactly what Frederick Meyers thought when he started his research on telepathy here in Trinity.

The final point I’d like to make is this. All around the world telepathic phenomena and other psychic phenomena like premonitions are taken for granted in traditional societies. For example, Sir Laurens van der Post, when he was living with the bushmen of the Kalahari, told the story of how when they went out hunting, the bushmen he was with were convinced that the people back in the village would know when they’d shot a deer. As we were heading back in Land Rovers laden with meat, I asked one of the bushmen how the people would react when they learned of our success. He replied, “They already know. They know by wire. We bushmen have a wire here” — tapping his chest — “that brings us news.” He was comparing their means of communication with the white men’s telegram or wire. Sure enough, when we approached the camp, the people were singing the eland song and preparing to give the hunters the greatest of welcomes.

This kind of story from people who’ve lived in Africa is very common. When I lived in India, I found that most people completely take these phenomena for granted in traditional societies. They’re extremely well known and used and developed and cultivated. Unfortunately, many anthropologists who are the people who study these societies have gone into the field with the mindset that these things are impossible and have not studied what would have been some of the most fascinating things to observe and look at. If we admit that this is a normal natural kind of phenomenon, we can look at its incidence in other societies. Almost all telepathic research has been done in European countries and in America.

I think that this is a field of research that is just at the beginning. It’s extraordinary in the 21st century we have a field of inquiry that’s hardly explored. It’s hardly been explored because of the power of the taboos that have restrained exploration in this area. But I think if we just forget about those taboos and treat this as rational scientific inquiry into natural phenomena, I think science will benefit. It will become much more powerful if science investigates these phenomena than if scientists feel they have to pretend they don’t exist and deny them in the face of evidence that most people know is real. It gives scientists an image of being prejudiced and dogmatic and even fanatical. I just think it’d be better for science and better for our understanding of nature if we can approach these things in a rational spirit of inquiry.

[Q&A follows — Sheldrake discusses the spectrum of skeptics: conventional skeptics who’ve absorbed scientific conditioning, militant atheists in self-appointed skeptic organizations who see telepathy as threatening their worldview, and the silent majority of working scientists who are privately open to the evidence — often because they’ve experienced it themselves — but publicly feel they can’t discuss it. He notes the Perrott-Warrick fund at Trinity College as one of the largest funders of this research in Britain.]