Rupert Sheldrake | Extended Mind, January 19, 2012

Source: coasttocoastam.com, sheldrake.org



January 19, 2012–Rupert Sheldrake discussed his work on the extended mind and human intuitive abilities including telephone telepathy, and how dogs know their owners are coming home. His telephone telepathy experiment involved having a subject give the experimenters four different friends' phone numbers; then the experimenters randomly chose one of the people to call the subject, who tried to predict which one it would be. In repeated trials, the correct hits averaged around 45%, which was far higher than the 25% chance rate, he detailed. For more on the experiment, see this video report.

Sheldrake suggested that such phenomena may arise out of morphic fields-- intention, thoughts, and memories that extend out past the mind, and can be picked up by others, including animals. His study of dogs that know when their owner is coming home revealed that the pets wait by the window 4% of the time when the owner is not home, and 60% of the time when the owner is about to return. Further, he spoke about an African gray parrot named N'Kisi who seems to demonstrate telepathy, and has a 1,500 word vocabulary. Sheldrake also touched on a disturbing 2008 incident, when a Japanese man knifed him in the leg when he was speaking at a conference. It turned out that the man suffered from mental illness and thought Sheldrake was sending him telepathic messages to kill himself, so he attacked him out of "self defense."