Art and Science: The Truth Behind Telepathy

Art and Science: The Truth Behind Telepathy

08 July, 2009
by: Tom Jeffreys

Where am I? In the peeling mazy weirdness that is the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, I'm sitting alone in a near-pitch black cell of a room. In the dim half-light I can see in front of me a desk. The room is bare brick, with pipes exposed, and ceiling worryingly dilapidated. Periodically the silence is broken by the sound of a toilet flushing overhead or by the shrill piercing ring of a telephone, placed in front of me on the desk. My task is to guess who is calling.

Yesterday evening I went to see Terry Eagleton sticking it to Richard Dawkins at the ICA, and today I'm spending the morning helping out contemporary artist Graham Nicholls and controversial scientist Rupert Sheldrake, himself a staunch opponent of His Holiness the Dawkster. I first came across Sheldrake in January this year during another lecture at the ICA (God bless that place!). I was intrigued by his views on the dogmatism of mainstream science and have followed his activities with interest ever since. I even tried to read his recently updated book A New Science of Life. It's brilliant and fascinating, but I have to confess that, not being a scientist, I got rather bogged down in the biological nitty-gritty.

Sheldrake is something of a maverick – his interest in unusual phenomena like telepathy has drawn much criticism from the scientific establishment. At present he is investigating that strange feeling that apparently up to 80% of people claim to have experienced – namely, knowing (without the help of caller ID) who it is who is phoning before you pick up the phone. Sceptics, of course, dismiss the phenomenon because they believe it to be impossible. But it has never been tested scientifically, until now.

In order to take part, I have selected three friends – London-based publisher and writer Henry Castiglione, fellow Cricket Tragic Henry Capper and Spoonfed's very own Gemma Thomson. One of them is randomly sent a text message, asking them to call a number. This causes the phone in front of me to ring and I have to guess who it is before I can be put through. I guess correctly on two out of six occasions, which is precisely what probability dictates.

This result is exactly what sceptics would expect. But according to Sheldrake, the percentage of instants of people getting the caller right is closer to 45% – this is from 2000 tests having been carried out both in person like I'm doing and online. Now, there are three possibilities: either Sheldrake is a fraud (which I would challenge anyone to prove); the subjects are cheating – in an underground room with no mobile reception this seems unlikely; or these results are valid and we have to rethink the way mainstream science seeks to explain the relationship between the mind and the brain.

Chatting to Rupert afterwards he briefly outlines his theory of morphic resonance, first put forward in the aforementioned A New Science of Life. He cites wolf packs and the way they seem to be able to communicate with each other remotely as a means of suggesting animal social groups may be linked by fields that are not explicable in terms of the DNA-obsessed neo-Darwinism propagated by Dawkins et al. Perhaps, Sheldrake suggests, the situation is similar with humans, at least in terms of the communication of very basic feelings.

My views on this are ambivalent. On the one hand, as I've said several times, I'm no fan of Dawkins, and, in general, feel that dogmatic science of the kind Sheldrake continually challenges is just another self-sustaining system of belief that cannot ever truly see outside itself. And yet the idea of telepathy is still a very odd one to me. Either way, science is all about evidence and the evidence – for now at least –  is very much in Sheldrake's favour.

Anybody can take part in this experiment online by visiting Rupert Sheldrake's website: www.sheldrake.org.
Whatever your pre-existing opinion, we urge you to keep an open mind and take a look.

For more information, click here to see a filmed telepathy test or click here to read Sheldrake's papers on the subject.

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Tom Jeffreys