Extended Mind & Human Intuitive Abilities ~ Rupert Sheldrake

Date: 01-2012

Biography:
Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He took a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967 and was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology until 1973. As a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research at Cambridge on the development of plants and the aging of cells. In addition to his numerous books, he is the author of more than fifty papers in scientific journals.

His experiments into unusual and unexplained perceptiveness in humans make a compelling case that intuition, precognition, and telepathy are not paranormal, but are, in fact, normal functions drawn from our biological past.

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.