Transcript

Dispelling the Dogmas of Science, Episode 11

Is Mechanistic Medicine the Only Kind That Really Works?

According to the mechanistic materialist orthodoxy, the belief system or worldview that we’ve been discussing in this series, the body is a machine. Your body, my body: it’s just inanimate, a machine, and we’re “lumbering robots,” to use Richard Dawkins’s phrase. The body, therefore, as a machine, can be treated by medicine chemically or physically. If you leave the mind out of it, then you get mechanistic medicine.

Of course, it’s impossible for mechanistic medicine to ignore minds totally, because there are a lot of people who are mentally ill, a lot of people suffering from depression, and so on. But the mind is ignored as much as possible, in favour of chemical and physical methods of curing people.

There’s no doubt that these work, and there’s also no doubt that mechanistic medicine, modern medicine, has been extraordinarily effective. Over the last century or so there’s been a tremendous reduction in infant mortality, an enormous increase in life expectancy, a reduction in epidemic diseases, the development of antibiotics, enormous improvements in surgery, and, of course, the triumphs of modern dentistry. I don’t know anyone who would want to go back to 19th-century or medieval dentistry.

I got some sense of this when I was living in India in the 1970s, in the bazaars of Hyderabad. You could see dentists plying their trade using time-tested methods. They had pairs of pliers, they had a system, they had things to strap people onto the chairs so they couldn’t move or writhe in agony.

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Piglet the Jack Russell seemed to be fading away. He was half blind, barely able to walk and spent most of his days asleep.

But one morning, as his loving owner steeled herself to have him euthanised, Piglet seemed to be rejuvenated. He ran around the garden with the family’s other dogs, wagging his tail, then settled on the sofa to be brushed, his favourite activity.

As his owner placed the brush back in its box, Piglet suffered a seizure and died in her arms. His brief recovery was a little-understood occurrence seen in both humans and animals, sometimes called ‘the last rally’ and known in Spanish as ‘mejoría de la muerte’ (literally, ‘the improvement of death’).

The grief of losing a beloved pet can be as intense as the loss of any dear friend—and the experience of witnessing an animal’s death can be deeply painful.

For nearly 25 years, as part of my studies into unexplained phenomena in animal psychology, I have collected case studies about pet deaths, stories shared with me by their owners and human friends.

Often, people will say how grateful they are that someone is taking an interest, and taking them seriously. As a biologist, I believe there’s an enormous amount to be learned about the nature of death from observing animals.

My German colleague Michael Nahm, the world’s leading authority on ‘terminal lucidity’ in humans, has helped me to recognise the importance of similar end-of-life experiences in pets. Terminal lucidity is well documented in care homes and hospices, but rarely studied: it’s a burst of mental and physical energy, often accompanied by unusual clarity, soon before death. And it appears equally common in animals.

One vet told me, ‘In my practice, experiencing the last rally in dogs isn’t unusual. Called to put a dog down, I ring the bell of a house and a barking canine greets me, jumping around. When I ask its owners where the sick dog is, they inform me this is the moribund dog in question.’

My tentative theory is that the last rally has an evolutionary benefit. In the wild, an animal that instinctively knows it is dying can detach itself from the pack and take itself away, to go somewhere its corpse won’t spread disease.

Sudden mental lucidity, when full consciousness and memory return to a dying animal, is fascinating because of the light it could shed on human dementia.

Nahm’s research suggests many people with Alzheimer’s disease, long after they have apparently lost the ability to remember family members, can experience a burst of clear memory just before death. This suggests the memories themselves were never lost—only the ability to retrieve them.

But end-of-life phenomena take many forms. Correspondents have told me about what appear to be psychic premonitions of a disaster; extraordinary journeys pets have undertaken to see old masters one last time; and touching goodbyes made by an animal to its human family.

One of the first recorded instances of a pet bidding goodbye to its people was noted by writers Vincent and Margaret Gaddis in 1970.

Tomcat Pussy was taught by the couple who kept him to hold out a paw to shake hands. Pussy had to be put down, but when the vet arrived, the cat dragged himself out of his basket, walked straight to his sorrowful keepers, and held out his paw to each of them in turn. He then crept back into his basket, buried his head in his paws, and awaited his fate.

The following accounts are just a few from my database. If you have a story to share, I’d be pleased to hear from you, at sheldrake@sheldrake.org

Farewell visits

BRUCE

I had a mongrel dog called Bruce. After my mother died, my father decided to move to a house three miles away. What to do with Bruce was a problem, which was resolved when my friend said she would love to have him. Five years later, on a lovely summer’s evening, I heard scratching outside the bedroom window.

Looking down, I saw the white-haired face of Bruce. You can imagine the excitement in the household. We made such a fuss over him. At last, he turned to leave, and I can still see him walking away over the field, stopping and looking back.

A few weeks later, my friend told me Bruce had gone missing one night, returning early the next day—and passed away three days later. It is especially remarkable that Bruce had never been to our new address.

ORIO

We lived next door to a family who had a female black lab called Orio. She was such a gentle dog, and when her people were away, my husband would go over, feed her, and take her for walks.

One afternoon about two years ago, she came and stood at our front door by herself, then walked all over the house and finally came to me in the kitchen and laid down by my feet. It was very unusual, and her owner could not explain how Orio had managed to escape from their yard.

Later the same day, she turned up at the neighbour across the street. He, too, from time to time, looked after her. The next day, Orio became very sick and that night she died. I am convinced the dog knew that she was about to die and came to say goodbye to the people who were kind to her.

Premonitions of death

THE HOUFFALIZE SHEEP

During World War II in Houffalize, Belgium, in 1944, an old man who owned sheep died. He had no family so my grandfather decided to lead the sheep into a kind of greenhouse in his garden.

One evening, they all began to bleat very loudly, all night long. The eight children who lived in the house (and my mother) found it difficult, if not impossible, to sleep.

Early in the morning, a bomb hit the greenhouse and killed all the sheep. My mother told me this story. It was impossible for her to forget it. [Note: The little town of Houffalize suffered an intense bombardment in December 1944.]

THE LAB RATS

In the summer of 1997, my daughter was working on a grant at a university in California. Part of her duties was to retrieve the cage with the lab rats. They were part of a cancer research programme and, as such, had been injected with live cancer tumours and then different medicines.

Every so often, the rats would be ‘sacrificed’ so the cancer and the organs could be studied. My daughter, not really sympathetic to lab rats, became concerned when she noticed a regular phenomenon.

On the day the rats were to be sacrificed, unlike days when they were being weighed and measured, the rats would all gather in a corner, heads facing the centre of a circle, squeaking and showing signs of alarm. As my daughter said to me, ‘Mom, they know. Somehow, they know.’

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The last farewell

PETIE

A few years ago, our Staffordshire bulldog Petie fell terminally ill. One hour before he died, he came to each member of the family and spent a little time with everybody, one at a time. We thought this behaviour odd as he didn’t usually do this, at least not to each individual person at one time.

He seemed alive and much more energetic than he had been being so ill. After spending a bit of time with each of us, he made his way downstairs to his bed and died peacefully.

FOXI

We all loved Foxi. He was so friendly, devoted, and loyal, as well as very watchful and clever. When the dog became old, he could not hear well any more, ate less, and became weaker until, at the age of 14, he could barely move.

But one day, the whole family were at the dinner table when Foxi struggled to his feet, went around from one person to the next, sadly looked at everybody, and gave his paw to each member of the family. Then he trudged back, slowly lay down—and died. You can believe me, we had tears in our eyes.

BAKER

Baker, the cat our son and daughter-in-law adopted, was sociable on his own terms. Knowing we were family, he was affectionate with us, but briefly. The last time we saw him, as he was clearly dying, he came in as usual. But this time, he made the rounds, sitting in each of our four laps for 15 minutes or so and then moving to the next lap as if saying goodbye. When he died very soon afterward, each of us said they had sensed he was aware of his imminent death and was saying goodbye.

EMILIA

We adopted my first cat Emilia when she was three months old. She had Feline leukaemia that took her life three years later, despite all our efforts to help her. The day she was dying, around 5am, I sat her on my legs and told her we could watch the sunrise. She stood up, raised her head and licked my hand. An hour later, as the sun came up and touched our window, she looked at me, leaned back on my legs, and exhaled deeply. That was her last breath.

I am a nurse of critical patients in Chile, and it is common for us to observe the famous ‘mejoría de la muerte’ in terminally ill people, but I had never before observed it in animals.

The last rally

OLLIE and BARNEY

We lost our dog Ollie after nine years. The few hours before she passed, she sat watching the sunrise... transfixed, then walked round slowly, looking at all parts of the house, garden, etc. This may not seem unusual. But to us, it was very distinctive and different behaviour. The day before, she had an amazing longer walk, something she had not been able to do for quite some time.

That reminded us of our other dog, Barney, who passed away at the age of 18. He also had an astonishingly long walk on the day he died. He was virtually blind and previously unable to walk a few yards without stopping.

BALOU

On November 2021, my beloved Balou was a happy, lively cat until his health deteriorated rapidly, aged ten, and his hind legs became unstable. When an inoperable tumour was found, we scheduled euthanasia for the next day. That evening, he sought my company and we fell asleep together, holding hands side by side (he stretched out his paw to my hand—he had never done that before).

The next morning, Balou was vital again. He cleaned himself a lot, and even climbed stairs. We went to the garden together and watched birds there like so often before. The contrast with his behaviour during the weeks before was so obvious that it must be a case of ‘the last rally’. He knew he was going to die.

Near-death visions

SNOWY

Our dog Snowy slipped into a coma for several hours and then suddenly sat upright. She stared very intensely as if she was looking at an object, and followed that object with her eyes, her head moved slightly from side to side.

If a dog could smile, she would smile. You could see a certain happiness radiating from her. She started wagging her tail for a few seconds, then collapsed and fell back into a coma.

I interpreted this as a possible near-death vision. All four members of my family witnessed it and voiced our amazement out loud at the same time.

PRINCE MOONSHADOW

Our family dog, Prince Moonshadow, seemed to achieve something akin to a state of joyful enlightenment before he died, following a series of mini-strokes. He smiled every moment he was awake for the last weeks of his life.

I felt when looking at him, smiling in the garden, that he was seeing heaven. And when I said the same thing I’d said to him every day for 14 years, ‘I’ll love you for ever,’ he met my gaze with a look that showed he knew I meant it.

For more details about this research see my paper, co-authored with Pam Smart and Michael Nahm, on ‘Experience of dying animals: parallels with end-of-life experiences in humans’ in the Journal of Scientific Exploration 37, 42-58 (2023)

Related…

Below you will find a full, human-friendly transcript of the talk, along with a list of references linking to the peer-reviewed papers, all of which are freely available.

This video and essay are part of my Findings series, designed to take you deeper into the actual science behind my worldview. Whether discussing the biochemistry of auxin or the evolution of consciousness, my goal is to share the rigorous research—both past and present—that often goes unseen. While I continue to publish in peer-reviewed journals (sheldrake.org/research), this platform allows me to connect specific discoveries to the bigger picture.

Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for this kind of exploration, so the generosity of people who support my work makes this research possible. Thank you!

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Transcript

Telephone Telepathy

I’m talking about telephone telepathy, by which I mean the phenomenon whereby you think of someone for no apparent reason, and then they ring, and you may say, “That’s funny. I was just thinking about you.” Or you just know who it is when the phone rings, before you look at the caller ID or answer the phone.

Is it really telepathic? Is it just a coincidence? Do you just know people’s habits unconsciously and know when to expect a ring? Well, these are questions I’ve been looking into for 25 years, and there’s now been a great deal of research on this by myself and by a lot of people, which I’m going to summarize now.

How it began: cats that knew

My interest in this started, funnily enough, with cats, when I was doing research for my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. I was doing a lot of research on unexplained abilities of animals, and people wrote in with their stories. I have a collection of about 6,000 stories of dogs, cats, and people with unexplained abilities. And many of these stories were, of course, about dogs and cats that knew when their owners were coming home. But to my surprise, some of them were about telephone calls.

One of them, for example, was about a cat called Godzilla. And the owner of Godzilla, David Waite, wrote to me saying that he used to go away several times a year and his parents would come and watch the house, looking after the cat and answering the many telephone calls. He would call home from North Africa, the Middle East, and continental Europe to check that all was well and pick up any messages. He said:

Whenever I called, my cat would run and sit beside the telephone as it was ringing, whereas she ignored the other calls my parents took on my behalf. And the calls were made at random times.

Godzilla responded this way before the telephone had been answered, so he couldn’t have been reacting to David’s voice.

Well, I heard quite a few other stories, and one of them, one of the most impressive, was about a telephone-answering cat that belonged to a professor at the University of California and his wife. She told me that she always knew when her husband was calling, because Whiskins, a silver tabby, would rush to the telephone and pull at the receiver. She said:

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The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science. Many scientists have already made this change, but some teachers in schools and universities do not realise that they and their students are free to write more naturally.

The idealized objectivity of science is reflected in the use of the passive voice in many science reports: “A test tube was taken...” instead of “I took a test tube.” All research scientists know that writing in the passive voice is artificial; they are not disembodied observers, but people doing research. Technocrats also use the passive voice to give their reports an air of scientific authority, dressing up opinions as objective facts.

The passive style did not become fashionable in science until the end of the nineteenth century. Earlier scientists like Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin used the active voice. The passive was introduced to make science seem more objective, impersonal and professional. Its heyday in the scientific literature was from 1920 to 1970. But times are changing. Many scientists abandoned this convention in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1999, I was astonished to read in my 11-year-old son’s science notebook, “The test tube was heated and carefully smelt.” At primary school his science reports had been lively and vivid, but when he moved to secondary school they became stilted and artificial. His teachers told him to write that way, and gave him a style sheet to copy.

I thought that schools has abandoned this practice years ago, and was curious to find out how widespread it still was. In 2000, I carried out a survey of 172 secondary schools in Britain to find out how many insisted on the passive style. Overall, 42 per cent of the schools still promoted the passive voice, 45 per cent the active, and 13 per cent had no preference.

Most of the teachers enforcing the use of passive voice said they were simply following convention. No one was enthusiastic about it. They taught it out of a sense of duty because they believed that leading scientists and journals required it. Some thought that examination boards insisted on it, but this was not true. I found that all the UK examination boards accepted reports in the active or the passive voice.

I also found that most scientific journals accepted papers in the active voice; some, including Nature, positively encouraged it. I surveyed 55 journals in the physical and biological sciences, and found only two that required passive constructions.

When Lord May was President of the Royal Society, he read the results of my survey of school science teaching and was “horrified” that so many favoured the passive: “I would put my own view so strongly as to say that, these days, the use of the passive voice in a research paper is the hallmark of second-rate work,” he said. “In the long run, more authority is conferred by the direct approach than by the pedantic pretence that some impersonal force is performing the research.” May’s views were shared by many other eminent scientists, including the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, who succeeded Lord May as President of the Royal Society, and Bruce Alberts, then President of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Nevertheless, old habits die hard, and science teachers in many schools still insist that their pupils write in the passive voice. In a recent survey I carried out, science teachers in 30 percent of British secondary schools were still insisting on the passive voice. This is an outdated practice. “Primary and secondary teachers should, without any reservation, be encouraging all their students to be writing in the active voice,” said Lord May.

Switching from the passive to the active voice in science reports is a simple reform that costs nothing and makes science writing more truthful and more readable.

Most of my time is dedicated to scientific research, regularly published in peer-reviewed journals, and free to read on sheldrake.org. Since exploratory research of this kind rarely attracts traditional funding, your support makes all the difference, bringing more essays and videos to you and the public. Thank you!

Rupert Sheldrake

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Why are telepathy, precognition, and other psychic phenomena so often dismissed? If they’re real, what does that mean for our understanding of minds and the universe? Could rejecting them be science’s greatest blind spot?

Transcript

Dispelling the Dogmas of Science, Episode 10

Are Psychic Phenomena Illusory?

The standard materialist dogma is that all psychic phenomena, or so-called psychic phenomena, are illusory. They don’t happen, they can’t happen, they’re impossible. If the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain, as materialists assume, and it’s all confined to the inside of the head, as materialists assume and as we just discussed in the previous session, then it’s impossible for my thoughts or needs or desires to influence somebody at a distance, many miles away. It’s impossible for a dog to know when its owner’s coming home by picking up their intentions from 10 miles away or even hundreds of miles away if they’re flying home by plane. It’s impossible for somebody to see what’s happening in a different place in the world by remote viewing or clairvoyance. It’s impossible for someone to dream of something that hasn’t yet happened, as in so-called precognitive dreams. It’s impossible for animals to know when earthquakes or tsunamis are going to happen several days in advance when seismologists who are studying tremors in the earth don’t know when they’re going to happen.

All these things are impossible. Therefore, they can’t happen. Therefore, they don’t happen. Therefore, anyone who thinks they do happen is a charlatan, a fraud or a fool. This is the standard mentality of committed materialists. And in fact, this is the best litmus paper for someone who’s really committed to a dogmatic materialist worldview. If you mention a topic like telepathy, most people are mildly interested or curious or tell you about experiences they’ve had themselves. But for dogmatic materialists, it’s like a red rag to a bull. They’ll dismiss it, sneer at it, deny it, ridicule it, call it woo-woo, and try to denigrate anyone who believes in it, either as being stupid or uneducated or unscientific.

This is probably the most controversial of all the areas that I’ve discussed because it’s the one that touches our own lives so much more closely and about which so many people have their own experiences as they do indeed of the sense of being stared at. So what’s actually going on?

A history of psychical research

In 1882, in London, the Society for Psychical Research was founded as an attempt to investigate scientifically these seemingly unexplained phenomena. And ever since then, there have been a handful of researchers around the world who’ve done research on these subjects. Very often they’ve done so subject to enormous adversity, criticism, attacks from their colleagues. It’s destroyed many people’s careers to take an interest in these subjects because they’re very, very strongly taboo. And yet, psychic researchers and parapsychologists have accumulated an enormous body of evidence now.

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On February 24, I wrote a Substack on The Spiritual Side of Sports about sports as a way of feeling a sense of connection, or being in the flow. They can lead to spiritual experiences, which may be one of the reasons that sports are now so popular.

Until the twentieth century, most people worked physically and had the chance to be in the flow through their work, as blacksmiths, weavers, sailors, messengers on horseback, farmers, labourers, masons, builders, bakers, nurses and in many other ways. Modern desk-bound jobs may allow for mental states of flow through engaging work, but they lose the full-bodied engagement of physical work, especially skilful work. In this context, sports and other physical ‘leisure’ activities are increasingly important.

I carried out an online survey to find out more about people’s experiences and I am grateful that so many people – over 1,000 – took the time to respond.

The question and responses were as follows:

How often have you experienced a sense of transcendence, deep connection, or altered awareness during intense physical activity (e.g. sports, dance, martial arts)?

• Often 38%

• Sometimes 33%

• Rarely 15%

• Never 14%

Of course, all such surveys are biased by the non-random sample of respondents, but the fact that a substantial majority – 71% – of people answered ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ suggests that transcendent experiences in connection with physical activities are indeed widespread, whether people think of them as spiritual or not.

Some forms of spiritual activity, like meditation, involve sitting still, doing very little from the point of view of an external observer. Sports seem to be the opposite, but this does not make them non-spiritual; they can be crypto-spiritual, spiritual practices in disguise. Spirituality is about connection with ways of being or forms of consciousness greater than our own. Sports can help us to experience the flow of life itself, the movement of the spirit. All this happens without our even thinking about it—indeed, precisely because we are not thinking about it.

The Original Survey is still available on YouTube

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Wood is dead tissue. Every xylem vessel that carries water up a trunk is a cell that has emptied itself out and died to become a hollow tube. According to the hypothesis I’ve developed over many years, it is precisely in this act of dying that the plant hormone auxin is made, through the breakdown of proteins, the release of tryptophan, and its conversion to indole-3-acetic acid.

This ran against the orthodoxy when I started work on it as a PhD student at Cambridge in the 1960s, and it still does today. Most textbooks locate auxin production in young, dividing cells. I think they have it backwards.

In this talk I lay out the evidence: tobacco stems turned upside down in culture that go on producing auxin for months; experiments with transport inhibitors that cause such wild overproduction of wood that the stems grow “serried ranks” of new xylem; direct measurements from felled poplar, ash and sycamore trees; and recent work in Arabidopsis where genetically engineered reporters light up blue at exactly the places my hypothesis predicts.

What emerges is a positive feedback loop in which death feeds growth feeds more death feeds more growth. It is, I suspect, the quiet engine of why plants, unlike animals, never really stop.

This video and essay are part of my Findings series, designed to take you deeper into the actual science behind my worldview. Whether discussing the biochemistry of auxin or the evolution of consciousness, my goal is to share the rigorous research—both past and present—that often goes unseen. While I continue to publish in peer-reviewed journals (sheldrake.org/research), this platform allows me to connect specific discoveries to the bigger picture.

Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for this kind of exploration, so the generosity of people who support my work makes this research possible. Thank you!

References

The Production of Auxin by Dying Cells

Journal of Experimental Botany (2021) Vol. 72, 2288-2300
https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb%2Ferab009
Rupert Sheldrake

Physiological Plant Anatomy

Gottlieb Haberlandt

An Introduction to Structural Botony

D.H. Scott

The Production of Auxin by Tobacco Internode Tissues

New Phytologist (1968) Vol. 67, 1-13
https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1469-8137.1968.TB05449.X
Rupert Sheldrake and D. Northcote

Auxin in the Cambium and its Differentiating Derivatives

Journal of Experimental Botany (1971) Vol. 22, 735-740
https://doi.org/10.1093/JXB%2F22.3.735
Rupert Sheldrake

High levels of auxin signalling define the stem-cell organizer of the vascular cambium

Nature 565, 485–489 (2019)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0837-0
Smetana, O., Mäkilä, R., Lyu, M. et al.

Transcript

How Dying Wood Cells Stimulate the Growth of Plants

This short video is about the production of the plant hormone auxin by developing wood cells. This is really part of a larger picture that I discussed in my video on the production of auxin by dying cells. And that work was summed up in my Darwin review in the Journal of Experimental Botany, which you can see here.

How Dying Cells Produce Auxin

Dying cells produce the plant hormone auxin, indoleacetic acid, because as they die, the proteins break down. As the proteins break down, they release all the amino acids that are in them, including tryptophan, which is one of the 20 amino acids, and that is then broken down. First, by losing its amine group, it becomes indolepyruvic acid, then by a process called oxidative decarboxylation, which gives indoleacetic acid or auxin, which is the plant hormone. I discussed this in my previous video, and you can find the details in my paper.

Wood Cells as a Source of Auxin

In this talk, I’m focusing on the production of auxin by wood cells. Wood cells are dead, empty cells. They conduct water from the roots — or sap rather, water with minerals and other things dissolved in it — from the roots up through the stems and to the leaves, the flowers and the fruits. So they’re essentially tubes.

And in this slide here, you see the wood cells of poplar. This is a poplar tree. Going directly across it, there’s a kind of line, almost like a line, with smaller cells on the left and bigger ones on the right. This is an annual ring. The ones on the right were formed in the spring. The ones on the left were formed in the autumn of the year before. They form bigger xylem vessels or wood vessels in the spring. There are a lot of smaller ones too called tracheids. So wood cells are these tubes formed in the trunk and elsewhere, dead and empty.

And the next slide pine, a cross section of a pine trunk. Again, there’s a kind of annual ring. At the bottom you see the xylem cells formed in the previous year, and then the bigger ones at the top are formed in the spring.

The Cambium

And here’s a slide showing the cambium, which is the soft dividing cells between the bark and the trunk and the wood. You can often pull the bark off trees in the spring or in the summer when they’re growing, and when the cambium cells are thin-walled dividing cells.

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In our daily lives, we take the reliability of memory for granted, only truly noticing its profound importance when we witness the tragedy of its loss through injury or dementia. Within a materialist framework, the fact that brain damage can impair memory seems like open-and-shut evidence that the brain is the storage site. But is it really that straightforward?

I have long found this “trace theory” to be deeply problematic, both logically and experimentally. If we search for where these memories are actually located, we find a century of failed attempts to pin them down. From Pavlov’s dogs to Lashley’s rats, and even to the remarkable survival of memory in moths that have undergone a total “meltdown” of their nervous system during pupation, the physical evidence for localized storage is surprisingly elusive.

In this exploration, I want to invite you to look at the evidence—and the lack of it—from a different perspective. Is it possible that the brain is not a video recorder storing images within itself, but rather something more like a radio receiver, tuning into a resonance across time?

Join me as we examine why the search for the “engram” has proved so difficult, and discover that “where” isn’t even the right question to ask.

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Transcript

Dispelling the Dogmas of Science, Episode 9

Are Memories Stored as Material Traces?

One of the dogmas of materialist science is that memories are stored in our brains as material structures or traces; all memory is basically material. For materialists, everything is physical, so it seems obvious that memories must be stored inside the brain. We all take memory for granted in our normal lives, but we become aware of how important it is when we see someone suffering from memory loss as a result of concussion, an accident, a stroke, or Alzheimer’s. The fact that memory loss is caused by brain damage seems to support the idea that memories are stored inside the brain as material traces.

This idea goes back a long way. In Ancient Greece, people compared it to the impression on wax seals. In the early 20th century, people thought of memories like connections in telephone exchanges, where neurons were like wires joining together to make a memory circuit. A more sophisticated view, which remains the predominant theory, is synaptic modification: the modification of the junctions where synapses connect one cell to another. They usually do so by passing a neurotransmitter like acetylcholine, gamma-aminobutyric acid, or serotonin. Others suggest memory depends on modified proteins, phosphorylated proteins, DNA, or RNA. While nobody knows exactly how it works, the assumption within neuroscience is that it must be because of material traces; there is no alternative conceivable from within a materialist framework.

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In many cultures there are festivals around the time of the March equinox. In some cases, as in Northern Europe and Iran, with the Nowruz festival, they are associated with themes of new life as the growing season begins. In others, as in India, they are associated with the harvest of crops that have grown through the winter season.

The God who revealed himself to Moses and who guided the Jewish people on their journey through wilderness to the Promised Land was a desert god. But his character changed after the people settled in Palestine, and Yahweh took over the role and functions of the indigenous vegetation gods. The agricultural festivals were reinterpreted in terms of Jewish history. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel put it,

The festivals of ancient peoples were intimately linked with nature’s seasons. They celebrated what happened in the life of nature in the respective seasons… In Judaism, Passover, originally a spring festival, became a celebration of the Exodus from Egypt; the Feast of Weeks, an old harvest festival at the end of the wheat harvest (Exodus 23:16; 34:22), became the celebration of the day on which the Torah was given at Sinai; the Feast of the Booths, an old festival of vintage (Exodus 23:16), commemorates the dwelling of the Israelites in booths during their sojourn in the wilderness (Leviticus 23: 42-3). To Israel the unique events of historic time were spiritually more significant than the repetitive processes in the cycle of nature even though physical sustenance depended on the latter. While the deities of other peoples were associated with places or things, the god of Israel was the god of events: the Redeemer from slavery, the Revealer of the Torah, manifesting Himself in events of history rather than in things or places.

Christianity inherited from Judaism this historical transformation of seasonal festivals. Jesus’ last supper with his disciples took place at Passover, on the eve of his crucifixion. His death on the cross on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday are the central events that Christians commemorate in the festival of Easter. Like Passover, the timing of this festival depends on the full moon and the vernal equinox, but whereas Passover happens on the first full moon after the vernal equinox, the celebration of the Resurrection must be on a Sunday. Thus, Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The date of Easter Sunday can be as early as March 22 and as late as April 25. Because Easter is a moveable feast, so are all the feast days associated with it. The fasting period of Lent begins forty-six days before Easter Sunday, on Ash Wednesday, which can be as early as February 4^th or as late as March 10^th. The day before Ash Wednesday is Shrove Tuesday, or Carnival, the last chance for feasting, singing and dancing before Easter, celebrated most spectacularly in Brazil. The feast of the Ascension, when Christ’s resurrected body rose into the sky, is forty days after Easter, and Pentecost, or Whitsun, the festival of the Holy Spirit falls on the seventh Sunday after Easter Sunday. Trinity Sunday is a week later.

Thus, Easter has several aspects or levels. It is a spring festival, a time of regeneration and rebirth, with presents of eggs and images of rabbits - which breed like rabbits. As a commemoration of Jesus’ death and resurrection, it also inherits archetypal images of dying and resurrected gods, like the ancient Egyptian god Osiris, a god of death and resurrection, and of sprouting vegetation. All around the eastern Mediterranean there were annual celebrations of the death and resurrection of a god associated with crops. As the anthropologist James Frazer put it, ‘Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of life, especially of vegetable life, which they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the dead.’ In his book The Golden Bough Frazer pointed out that in many cultures the first fruits, the newly harvested crops, were eaten sacramentally as the body of the vegetation spirit. In a chapter called ‘Eating the God’ he compiled numerous examples from all around the world. Frazer also drew attention to many example of sacrificial kingship, in which kings, who were believed to be endowed with divine powers, were violently sacrificed so that they did not grow old and feeble, and endanger the life of the group.

Yet another element in the Easter story is that of the sacrificial animal whose death ensures the safety of others. In the context of the Jewish tradition, this took place in three ways. First, the sacrifice of a ram by Abraham instead of his own son Isaac involved a substitution of animal for human sacrifice. Second, the sacrifice a lamb at Passover protected the people of Israel from the death and destruction visited on the Egyptians. And third, in an annual Jewish ceremony, the sins of the people were laid upon a goat, the scapegoat, which was driven away into the wilderness, where it perished, taking away the sins of the people with it. The death of Jesus on the cross was like that of a sacrificial animal, taking away the sins of the world. He was the Lamb of God, Agnus Dei. The old pattern was reversed: instead of an animal being substituted for a human sacrifice, a human was substituted for an animal in this full and final sacrifice.

Frazer believed in an evolutionary ideology that saw primitive humanity as engaged in magical practices, which gradually gave way to religious belief, and then finally reached the highest level of human development in scientific thought. When I was a teenager, one of my science teachers introduced me to Frazer’s ideas, which had their intended effect. I recognized that there were many elements in the Christian religion that were rooted in ancient mythologies, pre-Christian fertility cults and magical rituals. These seemed like good reasons for rejecting Christianity in favour of science and reason.

I am still in favour of science and reason, though no longer a believer in the ideologies of scientism and rationalism. But as a practising Christian and as a participant in the Christian festivals and sacraments, I now see these deep archetypal elements as a strength, not a weakness. The continuity of the seasonal festivals of Christianity with pre-Christian festivals and myths makes them more powerful, not less powerful, and gives them greater meaning and depth.

For a more extended discussion of holy days and festivals, see Chapter 6 of my book Ways To Go Beyond and Why They Work. Also available as an Audio Book.

I suggest that minds are not confined to the insides of heads. I think they extend beyond brains in at least seven different ways. I start with the obvious and undeniable extension of minds through culture.

1. Culture

All cultures and languages, all arts, all technology, all science, all buildings and furniture, all cities, all temples and churches, all tools and machines, all clothes and all meals are in minds before they become objective, external realities. Books, smartphones, social media, the buildings around us, gardens and the landscape shaped by farming are all products of minds and extensions of minds, and in turn affect our minds. Our minds dwell in a cultural world which is an externalisation of many minds, within which we all exist like fish in the sea. This is all so obvious we usually take it for granted.

We are not the only animals that modify the world around us through our minds, or in a mindlike way. Beavers build dams, weaverbirds nests, termite colonies mounds and spiders webs. But we do it on the largest possible scale. Our minds affect all life on Earth.

2. In bodies

Our minds extend throughout our bodies.

Materialists assume that all our experiences are inside our brains; they think that if you feel a pain in your big toe, the pain is not really in your big toe but in your brain, which produces a sensation of pain which is, in some mysterious way, “referred” to the toe.

By contrast, I am suggesting that our body image is where it seems to be, in our bodies. A pain in my big toe is in my big toe. The mind pervades the body.

The contrast between these views is thrown into sharp relief in the case of phantom limbs. Amputees feel their phantom arm where their arm used to be, and they can move it around. After an amputation they have to remember that it is indeed a phantom. Some amputees say that soon after their operation when they heard the phone ring, they reached out to pick it up, and then realised they could not. Their phantom arm felt so real. However, a phantom arm can do things that an ordinary arm cannot; it can be pushed through solid objects like walls and doors.

I suggest that the body image is the morphic field of the body experienced from within. Morphic fields are form-shaping fields with and inherent memory. In the case of a phantom arm, the field of the arm remains even when the material limb has gone, and this arm field is where the amputee experiences the arm as being, even though there is no longer a physical arm in that place.

The conventional view is that the phantom arm is a phantom in the brain; the phantom arm is not where it seems to be but is “referred” to that place.

This question can be explored experimentally. In my own tests, I had an amputee with a phantom arm behind a closed door. On the door there were six different regions numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, marked on the door on both sides. By a throw of a dice, one of these regions was selected at random, say 4, and the amputee was asked to push his phantom arm through this panel; thus on the other side of the door there was an invisible phantom arm sticking out of panel 4. One at a time, we invited people who practice “subtle energy” therapies to tell us where the phantom arm was. They felt all six regions to try and find where the phantom arm was protruding. There was a 1 in 6 chance of getting it right by mere guessing, but in the experiments we have done so far, the responses were very significantly above chance, suggesting that it was possible to detect the phantom arm. I think the subtle energy practitioners were detecting is the field of the missing arm. This body field, which we experience from within, pervades the whole body and continues to exist even after an amputation. The mind pervades the body field and is not confined to the brain.

Interestingly, when amputees are fitted with a false arm or leg to replace the missing limb, in the medical world it is commonly said that the phantom “animates” the prosthesis. If a phantom limb shrinks over time, as they tend to, and then the amputee starts wearing a prosthesis, the phantom expands again to fill the prosthesis, like a hand filling a glove. Phantoms help people control their prosthetic limbs.

The body can be extended through prostheses in other ways as well. Gregory Bateson in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind gives the example of a blind person with a stick. When the blind people walk along using a stick, it becomes a kind of extension of their body, enabling them to feel what is in their environment; they experience it as if it were an extension of their body. In fact, this is a general principle. When we use tools or machines, they can become like a prosthesis; a sculptor with a chisel, a painter with a brush, a skier with skis, a driver with a car, or a pianist with a piano.

In summary, minds extend throughout our bodies and through prosthetic extensions of our bodies, and are not confined to our heads.

3. Vision

Minds extend beyond our brains through vision. When I look at a tree, my image of the tree seems to be outside me, where the tree is. But according to the materialist theory, everything I see is in my head. The image of the tree is not out there where it seems to be; it is a “representation” in my brain.

I suggest that vision involves the extension of our minds outwards, just as it seems to. Light comes into the eyes, inverted images form on both retinas, changes occur in the rod or cone cells, impulses travel up the optic nerves, and changes happen in the brain. All these processes have been studied scientifically in great detail. Materialists assume that the brain then produces a kind of virtual reality display inside the brain in three dimensions and full colour which we somehow experience inside our heads. Instead, I think these images are projected outwards to where they seem to be.

This is not an original theory, it’s what practically every culture in the world takes for granted and so do children in our own culture, until they are educated to believe it is all inside the brain. But despite this education, most people still take it for granted the images are outside them where they seem to be. This is our immediate experience. It takes persistent intellectual contortions to persuade yourself that everything you see is inside your head.

If I project out an image when I look at something, my mind in some sense touches what I am looking at and therefore might affect it. This is not a metaphysical speculation; it is a testable scientific theory. If I look at you from behind and if you do not know I am there, can you feel me looking? This is a common experience. About 95% of people, including children, have felt when they were being looked at from behind. Most people just turn round without thinking about it and find someone staring at them. Most people have also had the converse experience of staring at someone from behind who turned around and looked straight back. The scientific name for this sense of being stared at is scopaesthesia, scop as in microscope, to do with looking, and aesthesia to do with feeling, as in anaesthesia and synaesthesia. The existence of scopaesthesia is now supported by a large body of experimental research. Nevertheless, its existence is controversial; materialists regard it as impossible because of their belief that minds are confined to brains.

Scopaesthesia is widespread in the animal kingdom. Many wildlife photographers have found that even if they are in a hide (called a blind in North America) and invisible to an animal, when they look through a telephoto lens, mammals and birds can often detect when they are being watched. Photographers learn by experience to take the shot quickly because the animal will run or fly away. Many people have experienced scopaesthesia with wild and domesticated animals, in both directions: they respond to the stare of an animal, or an animal responds to their looks.

Scopaesthesia may have evolved in prey animals in response to predation. An animal that could feel when a hidden predator was looking at it would have a better chance of escaping than one that could not. Even today the sense of being stared at seems to work best when people are in situations of potential danger.

It is now possible to train yourself to become more sensitive to looks through an app, called eyesense.training This is research that anyone can do, and it raises a very profound question: how does vision work? What is it that our minds project out? Is the projection of the image in some sense closely coupled to light itself, is it as it were the reverse of a photon? Does light go one way and is there a flow of virtual images in the opposite direction?

One school of quantum physics proposes that there are indeed flows in both directions when light is emitted and absorbed. The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics due to John Cramer, further developed by Ruth Kastner, proposes that when light is absorbed, there is a reverse process going in the opposite direction in space and time. The light comes in from the past towards the future, while the outward projection is from the future towards the past, going backwards in time. This is called a “handshake” across space and time. The regular light goes out from the emitter to the absorber, while the absorber sends an influence going in the opposite direction to the emitter. Seers and seen are reciprocally linked together.

4. Social bonds and telepathy

Minds extend around us is through our social bonds. We are social animals, linked to other people in social groups. We are embedded in families, societies, associations, work colleagues, football teams, religious communities, educational institutions, and so on. There are all sorts of social groups to which we belong and through which we are linked.

I hope the essays and talks I share through Substack will help to stimulate fresh thinking and encourage a more holistic approach to science. However, this is by no means my full-time job. I am mainly engaged in scientific research across several fronts, some of which I have yet to discuss publicly, and I regularly publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals (see the Research section on sheldrake.org for details). I also summarise my research findings in an ongoing series of videos called Findings, which I publish here on Substack.

Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for these kinds of exploration, so the generosity of people who support my work makes this research possible. But if you can’t contribute financially, don’t worry. I am happy to share ideas, and much of my content will remain free and open-access.

Rupert Sheldrake

Read more

I think telepathy has evolved, like other biological abilities, subject to natural selection, which is what I argued in this Cambridge University lecture on the evolution of telepathy, which I produced as Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project. This research is summarised in my book The Sense of Being Stared At And Other Aspects of The Extended Mind.

Links to all my research papers are listed below, and on my website.

If you prefer reading to watching, the full transcript of the lecture is below as well.

I hope the essays and talks I share through Substack will help to stimulate fresh thinking and encourage a more holistic approach to science. However, this is by no means my full-time job. I am mainly engaged in scientific research across several fronts, some of which I have yet to discuss publicly, and I regularly publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals (see the Research section on sheldrake.org for details). I also summarise my research findings in an ongoing series of videos called Findings, which I publish here on Substack.

Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for these kinds of exploration, so the generosity of people who support my work makes this research possible. But if you can’t contribute financially, don’t worry. I am happy to share ideas, and much of my content will remain free and open-access.

Subscribe now

My Telepathy Research

Telecommunication Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis

Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (2025), Vol. 5, No. 1, 47-69
https://doi.org/10.31156/jaex.25934
by Rupert Sheldrake, Tom Stedall and Patrizio Tressoldi

A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests

Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (2024), Vol. 4, No. 1, 122-141
https://doi.org/10.31156/jaex.25250
by Rupert Sheldrake and Tom Stedall

Automated Tests for Telephone Telepathy Using Mobile Phones

Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing (2015) Vol. 11, No. 4, 310-319
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2015.04.001
by Rupert Sheldrake, Pamela Smart and Leonidas Avraamides

Telepathy in Connection with Telephone Calls, Text Messages and Emails

Journal of International Society of Life Information Science (2014) Vol. 32, No. 1, 7-15
https://doi.org/10.18936/islis.32.1_7
by Rupert Sheldrake

An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails

Journal of Scientific Exploration (2009) Vol. 23, No. 1, 29-36
by Rupert Sheldrake and Leonidas Avraamides

Sensing the Sending of SMS Messages: an automated test

Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing (2009) Vol. 5, 272-276
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2009.06.004
by Rupert Sheldrake, Leonidas Avraamides, and Matous Novák

A Rapid Online Telepathy Test

Psychological Reports (2009) Vol. 104, 957-970
http://dx.doi.org/10.2466/PR0.104.3.957-970
by Rupert Sheldrake and Ashwin Beharee

An Automated Online Telepathy Test

Journal of Scientific Exploration (2007) Vol. 21, No. 3, 511-522
by Rupert Sheldrake and Michael Lambert

Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-Mails

Perceptual and Motor Skills (2005) Vol. 101, 771-786
https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.101.3.771-786
by Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart

A Filmed Experiment on Telephone Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters

Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (2004) Vol. 68, , 168-172
by Rupert Sheldrake, Hugo Godwin and Simon Rockell

Investigaciones Experimentales En Telepatía Por Teléfono (Spanish)

Revista Argentina de Psicología Paranormal (2004 Julio-Octubre) Vol. 15, No.3-4
by Rupert Sheldrake

Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy

Journal of Parapsychology (2003) Vol. 67, 147-166
by Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart

Experimental Tests for Telephone Telepathy

Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (July 2003) Vol. 67, 184-199
by Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart

Apparent Telepathy Between Babies and Nursing Mothers: A Survey

Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (2002) Vol. 66, 181-185

The Anticipation of Telephone Calls: A Survey in California

Journal of Parapsychology (2001) Vol. 65, 145-156
by David Jay Brown and Rupert Sheldrake

Telepathic Telephone Calls: Two Surveys

Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (2000) Vol. 64, 224-232

Full Transcript

The Evolution of Telepathy

Perrott-Warrick Public Lecture — Feb 9, 2011

Trinity College, University of Cambridge

The theme of telepathy is particularly appropriate because the Perrott-Warrick Fund was set up in memory of Frederic Myers, a fellow of Trinity College and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. And it was Myers who coined the word telepathy. He was a Greek scholar. And, of course, telepathy means tele, 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 Myers himself was very interested in. I think partly because telepathy was associated with this quest for evidence for survival, the focus was on telepathy in human beings. Now, this made it more controversial than it needed to be, 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 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 tea 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 I think there might be something in it.

And he then told me about an investigation he’d done. A friend of his called E.G. Recordon was an ophthalmologist in Cambridge. He was treating a boy who was severely disabled, who was almost blind, and who was mentally retarded. 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 Babraham in a laboratory six miles away. They showed the mother cards, a random 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 Rudolf Peters was convinced that something was really going on. The only possible clues could have been subtle sound cues. 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 totally 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 a 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 C. H. Waddington, who was professor of genetics in Edinburgh. And it was the idea that living organisms are shaped by invisible fields that mould 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, that 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. The 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 is 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… everything in nature 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 that 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, and this huge termite mound is constructed by millions of insects, building elaborate architectural structures coordinated in a way that no one yet understands. Part of it’s 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, say—the entire flock moves in a coordinated way. The animals change direction without bumping into each other. They must anticipate where their neighbours 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, as it were, a magnetic domain within a magnetic field, combined with the hydrodynamics of flow. And 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, of course, 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.

And, of course, 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, there’s been almost no follow-up. What Long 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. And 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. And he became convinced that animals in groups in the wild are communicating telepathically with each other. And this is how they stay in touch. 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. And 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 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’d 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 have 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. Now, 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’d 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.

And what happened is that when the cat disappeared, people couldn’t find it. It would hide under a bed or in the garden if it could get out. And 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. And 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.

So we heard so many of these. 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 ones said, it happens so often we’ve given up the appointment system for cats. People just have to show up with their animals.

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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 Perrott-Warrick Post. And 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. And I said to him, well, Nick, surely that shows it couldn’t be any of the normal senses. The car 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. And 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, no familiar sounds at all until 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, we then asked them about their animal behavior. 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. Now, 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.

But I also found this behavior with horses, with parrots, with tame Myna 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. So all of them are mammals or birds. I’ve got very few convincing cases of reptiles doing this. I did try and find out if pet reptiles did it—lizards, snakes and so on—by appealing for information in the leading reptile magazines like Reptiles International. But I’ve only got two or three cases and slightly questionable ones. So 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.

Anyway, there are many, many anecdotal reports, and I should be pretty sure that there’d be at least 20 people in this room who have or have had dogs or cats that do this. It’s quite common. There are tens of thousands of cases in Cambridgeshire alone, I’m sure.

Now, what do we make of this scientifically? Well, 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. Anyway, I started doing the experiments that I’d thought of in this conversation with Nick Humphrey.

And what we found was that with dogs that do it fairly reliably, they could do it over and over and over again, start waiting not just when the person gets in the car to come home, but when they decide to come home. When we ask 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 five 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. Of course, they don’t make very interesting viewing; many, many hours of front doormats with the dog going there usually quite a lot just before the person comes home.

These are some of the quantitative results from the dog Jaytee 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. And the final point, the filled-in circle, is the first 10 minutes of her homeward journey. As you see, the dog was at the door most in the first 10 minutes of the homeward journey, but it was already waiting there before she came home, when she decided to come home, but before the car had actually started moving. The dog did go to the window a little bit when she was out, usually when you see it on the film, to bark at passing cats or to look at other dogs or to see people arriving in the street. It’s clearly not waiting. But 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. And 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, skeptics and skeptic organizations attacked the research immediately, 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, and I’d simply been taken in. So I’d done the wrong kind of randomization, I’d used the wrong kind of taxi, and so forth. So I heard so many of these, it was pointless arguing because people weren’t interested in the actual facts. They just wanted to score points, and this happened in the forum of the media. And 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 for the same dog in the same location. As you see, 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. Now, he now admits that these data are virtually identical to my own. But people want to hear a skeptical message in the serious media. And a lot of science journalists amplify that message, and they’re not too concerned with the facts. These are the facts. And what they show is that this has actually been independently replicated.

Now, there have been other tests of dogs and so on. And 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. And in some cases, they do it at non-routine times. The advantage of this compared with many parapsychology experiments, which are often quite boring, is that dogs never get bored with their owners coming home. They do it over and over again. The most reliable dog I found, Jaytee, 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 Jaytee could be distracted.

The most extraordinary case of all that I’ve come across is a telepathic parrot called Nkisi. I was going to show you a video of the parrot doing some extraordinary tests. This is the parrot with the largest vocabulary in the world, currently 1,500 words. The Guinness Book of Records is 800 words. And 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.

And we set up tests where we had sealed envelopes containing photographs corresponding to objects the parrot knows the name for. And the owner, Aimée, sat in a room on camera, opened a package, looked at the picture for two minutes. The parrot in another room, completely isolated from her, filmed continuously, spoke. And 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:

When she looks at a picture of someone on the phone, it says, what are you doing on the phone? And it makes phone dialing noises and says, that’s a phone. In another one where the 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. And 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. And 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.

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. 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. There… 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. 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. There’s a fairly small, weak effect, but with 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 are 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, and 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. And 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 and especially their needs when they’re at a distance.

One of the categories of behavior I heard about from many people, from 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 three or four months old, and when they’re away from the baby, feeling their milk let down. Now, the milk let-down reflex is an oxytocin-mediated reflex that causes the breasts to start expressing milk. The nipples leak. It’s normally caused by the baby crying, and mothers feel it gets the breast ready to feed the baby. It’s a well-known physiological response. And when mothers felt their milk letting down, often through feeling their breasts tingle, when they were away from the baby, most mothers just assumed their baby needed them. And until recently, they simply went home. Now they ring home on a mobile phone. And 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 out away from the baby and monitored the baby. And we found the milk let-downs were synchronized with the baby’s need in an extraordinarily significant way; odds against chance of a billion to one. And it wasn’t just routine times. We could control for that because we knew when all these things were happening. So here again is a huge potential area for research, completely untouched, virgin territory. No one has looked at it. It would be a great PhD project for a midwife, for example, or people who work with nursing mothers.

There again, you can see that 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. It would play a useful role. And many mothers go on with a bond 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. And there are dozens of examples of this, really dramatic examples of mothers knowing when they need it.

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. It turns out that more than 80% of people have had the experience of thinking of someone for no apparent reason, who then rings. And 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, and telephone telepathy is much commoner than any other kind. And 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, and I think that’s why people pick up this intention before the call actually happens in many cases.

Women report this experience much more than men. Even 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. So here’s a well-known phenomenon, and I’d be pretty sure that most people in this room would have experienced it.

So, here’s a very common phenomenon. What does science have to tell us about it? Well, the answer is, until recently, absolutely nothing. Every scientist I discussed it with came up with the identical skeptical argument. Everyone in this room has 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 you know. 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. And 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? There’s no evidence at all. There’d been no studies of any kind on the subject. So it was an evidence-free hypothesis. Now in science, it’s fine to have a hypothesis, but you need evidence as well. And 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, 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 two 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. So they say, as 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%.

Well, in these experiments, it turns out the hit rate is considerably higher than that. These are from more than 400 filmed telephone telepathy tests. The chance level is 25%. The actual hit rate was 45%. This was highly significant, P is 1 × 10⁻¹². We then did some further tests where two of the callers were familiar people, the other two were strangers who the people had never met. With the unfamiliar people, the hit rate was only just above chance. With the familiar people, it was more than twice the chance level, 52%, showing that telepathy occurs much more between people who are bonded, who have emotional or social bonds, than between 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 is a summary of some of the features of this kind of telepathy. It’s 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 Earl’s Court area of London. And two of their callers were new acquaintances in Britain. The other two were family members or girlfriends or boyfriends down under. And they actually do better with the people down under than with their new acquaintances, showing that what matters is emotional closeness, not physical proximity. Of course, with telephone telepathy, you can do experiments over any distance you like up to the Antipodes.

Now, 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. But 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, twelve o’clock. And at twelve o’clock the person was writing them that email, and they didn’t send it till twelve-oh-one, after we’d received the guess. And 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.

And the results of the email tests show, again, a 25% chance level. The actual hit rate was 47%. Again, a highly significant result. We did more than 200 of these tests. Again, we compared familiar and unfamiliar callers with very similar results to the telephone experiment.

And I’ve developed an automated email telepathy test where the whole procedure was automated. People entered the names. The computer did the picking of the people at random, sending them the messages, and coordinated the whole test. We did it with three senders, not four, so the hit rate by chance is 33%. The actual hit rate is 42%. And again, it’s a quite significant result. So this works with emails, it works with telephone calls.

I tried to develop a really rapid telepathy test that would be automatic, that worked on the Internet. For that test, people had to have four people online at the same time. One of the four would then get a message to write a message to the subject. The subject would have a minute to think about who was writing it. They’d have to guess, then they’d get the message. That gave statistically significant results as well, and it worked reasonably well. Then I thought I’d try speeding it up to 30 seconds and 12 trials. My idea was to try and get a method that would work with instant telepathy testing that could be done using new technologies. That didn’t work as well. The results were still significant, but it was a smaller effect.

Now, why did this instant internet-based test not work very well? I think one reason was that it was too fast. People simply didn’t have time to recover from one guess. And the other thing is that the four senders all had to be at their computers thinking about the person all the time, because they had to wait and see if they got a signal to send a message. That meant that instead of detaching themselves from the subject, they couldn’t avoid thinking about the subject to some extent, because they were after all doing an experiment. So if all four were sort of connected to the subject, this would create a high noise level which would make the signal harder to detect. The beauty of the telephone and email tests is that between the experiments, which were paced at least 10 minutes apart, people didn’t have to do anything to do with the experiment. They could get on with their lives, do something else.

I then set up automated tests that work on text messages and telepathy on mobile telephones. The SMS test showed a significant positive effect. These were the three senders, so the chance level’s 33%. That’s 37.9%. With the automated telephone test, it’s 42%, and very significantly above the chance level.

These tests make telepathy very easy to do for anybody. 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, sends 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, which you do. And then as soon as you’ve guessed, the line opens up and you get instant feedback. You can hear whether you’re right or not. Then after talking for a minute, it cuts off because I’m paying for the call. And after a random time delay, it does the same thing again.

Well, this automated test has been working very well, and this is with unselected participants. With our earlier tests, we select people who said it happened to them in real life. A lot of people who are doing this are people who’ve never actually experienced it in real life, or who experience it only infrequently. So this is a very simple-to-do test. Anyone can do it anywhere, and it gets telepathy research out of the laboratory.

I should just mention one thing. This is a point raised, and very rightly so, by Horace Barlow, who is the chairman of the Perrott-Warrick Committee: in these telephone tests, if some of the people are slow in responding—if there’s a delay of an hour or two, and you know that one of your three friends is at a lecture or at an important meeting—you could work out who it was just from that delay. That didn’t apply to our earlier tests, the telephone test, because people did them right when they were asked to. There was no delay. And indeed, in some of these tests, there was a delay. But what we did was look at the subset of experiments where every single one of the six trials in the test happened in less than 12 minutes, which is the minimum time they could happen in, given that the random time delay was up to 10 minutes, and it takes about two minutes for the system to operate. So you couldn’t get any information from this delay because there were random delays between 3 minutes and 12 minutes in these experiments. And indeed, the hit rate is somewhat lower, but it’s still immensely significant statistically.

Now, one of the questions that parapsychologists ask (most people don’t, but parapsychologists do) is ‘How do you know it’s really telepathy?’ because precognition is another form of psychic activity, and I think there’s good evidence it can happen. And 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. So if people 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. So 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. And 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 apps, applications, that do these kinds of tests. If that were the case, if there were standard features, options 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.

How they’re thinking of marketing it is as intuition training apps. Because if you know when you’re right and when you’re wrong, as you do with these tests, you could then practice so that you got better at doing it. That could then lead to national competitions for the most telepathic person in Britain. I’ve had TV companies approach me wanting to do this, and the next level would be the International Telepathy Olympics. Now, if that occurred, with telepathy on mobile phones and international contests and that kind of thing, 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 that Bernard Carr referred to at the beginning of this gathering, 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 pseudo-scientific topic. And then I was asked to take part in an interview with him on BBC Radio 5. He said in The Times:

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, he said, I’d be very, very suspicious of it. And I said, there’s a word for that. It’s called prejudice. And he simply didn’t know. He was prepared to stand up in public to the entire nation and announce that it was a fantasy, that there was nothing in it, in complete ignorance.

How is that possible? Not one 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 in the lecture, while I was showing the evidence on the screen, he sat at a table tapping a pencil, looking bored, staring into the distance, and didn’t turn around to look at the evidence behind him.

And 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. And 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. So they said, yes, it was about evidence. It would be completely fair. He was really interested in hearing the evidence and so forth. 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. And 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. And I said, oh, really? I said, I thought I’d made it clear I didn’t want to take part in another low-grade debunking program. He said, it’s not a low-grade debunking program. It’s a high-grade debunking program.

The director then said, cut, and I asked him if it was true. He said, yes, it was another Dawkins polemic. He didn’t tell me when they asked me to take part that I was going to be portrayed as an enemy of reason for doing research in this field. But 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’m sure everybody in this room has encountered skeptics of that kind.

I think one of the reasons for the fear, as I said at the beginning, is that if telepathy exists, it would lead to an overthrow of science as we know it, turn the laws of nature upside down, and so forth. I don’t think it would. The development of Faraday’s work on electromagnetism and Maxwell’s equations didn’t destroy the whole of Newtonian physics. It added to it. And 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. And 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 decimal places. It’s not like that. We don’t understand how the mind works. I think if we take on board these phenomena, then it would lead to an enhanced understanding of the mind, which is exactly what Frederic Myers thought when he started his research on telepathy here at 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 Lawrence 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. And he says…

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 where we Bushman have a wire here,” tapping his chest, “that brings us news.” He was comparing their means of communication with the white man’s telegram.

And 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, I think that 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 actually would have been some of the most fascinating things to observe and look at.

So I think one of the things we can do if we admit that this is a normal, natural kind of phenomenon, is to look at its incidence in other societies, which hasn’t been done. Almost all telepathic research has been done in European countries and in America. So, I think that this is a field of research that is just at the beginning. It’s extraordinary. In the 21st century, as I said, 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 a 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. And 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.

And I’d like to end by saying I feel very grateful to Trinity College and to the Perrott-Warrick Bequest for enabling me to do research in this area for five years, which I think is, as the bequest was intended, something that can help and continue to help the legacy that Myers founded while he was here at Trinity.

Thank you.

Q&A

Q: Have you had experiences of people who started off skeptical, but then were willing to look at the evidence and then change their mind in conversation with you?

Well, there are certainly... the point is, it depends what kind of skeptic. There’s the kind of conventional skeptic, like I was myself… people who just mouth these skeptical opinions and believe them because it’s part of their scientific conditioning. There are other people who feel very, very strongly about it and belong to skeptical organizations. There are quite a lot of sort of self-appointed vigilante groups, like the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in America. And the skeptic magazines in America have about 100,000 subscribers. The total number of active researchers in parapsychology in America is about 10. So you can see they’re enormously outnumbered by these highly motivated skeptics. They’re usually militant atheists, and they feel that their whole worldview would be threatened by the existence of psychic phenomena.

Now, most people who are not part of those organizations—I think most people in the world of science—don’t have those extreme views and are indeed open to evidence.

I’ve often given talks in scientific institutions and university departments, and I find that the majority of people are actually open to it, largely because they’ve experienced it themselves. A lot of scientists have dogs waiting for them at the door when they get home from the lab, and many have had the experience with telephone calls. So, for people like that, the evidence is of interest, and I think they’re the majority. It’s only the extreme skeptics who I think will never change their minds. I think most scientists are trained in a skeptical attitude as part of science. I mean, I have it myself. All peer review processes involve skepticism in every branch of science. It’s only this dogmatic form of skepticism that’s evidence-free that’s a big problem. But people who believe that are often very vociferous.

Q: But you’ve had experiences of people who don’t have any personal connection, just looking at the evidence, they started off skeptical, but the evidence itself was enough to change their mind?

Well, I don’t know how many people have fit into that category, probably not very many. And when it comes to an issue like this, most people’s opinions are based largely on their own experience or the experience of people they know. If they think these phenomena are real, it’s largely on the basis of personal experience. The evidence then helps to give them permission, as it were, to take their experience seriously, because normally they don’t feel they have that permission. I gave a talk in the Department of Animal Behavior, not a thousand miles from here, and there were six key members of staff at the talk. And afterwards, in the tea break, all six came up and said:

When all six, including the professor, had said the same thing to me, I said, you know, why don’t you guys come out? You’d have so much more fun. [Laughter]

So there’s a very big difference between what people in the scientific world say in public and what they think in private. And the openness to the evidence is actually quite great. And I think a lot of scientists would be very pleased if these were permitted subjects of research within scientific institutions, as they are indeed in several British universities, and indeed right here in Trinity College. The Perrott-Warrick Fund here is one of the biggest funds for this research in Britain, if not in the world. So this is in fact a key center for this, and Trinity was one of the key places where the Society for Psychical Research began from.

Image Credits

Great Court, Trinity College, by John Mason, CC BY 2.0, flickr

Cambridge Trinity College Neviles Court, Cmglee, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

Giraffe by a Termite Mound by Simon Greig, Dreamstime.com

Termite video by Steve Dylan De Sousa Noleto, Pixabay

Starlings video by gekkodigitalmedia, Pixabay

School of Fish video by Angel Perez, Pixabay

School of Fish Jack Drafahl, Pixabay

Wolves video by Zethian, Pixabay

Wolves video by Nicky, Pixabay

Nicholas Humphrey, Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies interview

Cat video, NickyPe, Pixabay

Particles Video by Tomislav Jakupec, Pixabay

Jaytee and Pam Smart, a filmed experiment, by Orban Wallace

Dr Richard Wiseman at QED 2016, AlasdhairJohnston, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Demonstration - Zener Card Testing for Telepathy, Rhine Research Center - Classic,

Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters, filmed for Channel 5 TV and aired in Britain in 2004

The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence, Google TechTalks,

The real obstacle to scientific progress with Rupert Sheldrake, Peter Atkins, IAI,

Richard Dawkins, Facebook/The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science

Kalahari Bushman video,

J. Krishnamurti - Madras 1982 - Seminar 1,

Last year there was a widespread revival of patronal festivals in Anglican parish churches in England and Wales centred on the service of choral evensong. Eighty churches celebrated the feast day of their patron saint or feast of title. These festivals were very successful, with a renewed sense of local community. I wrote about this project in a previous Substack essay.

The festivals were facilitated by grants from the Choral Evensong Trust, of which I am a trustee: a £500 grant helped cover the cost of a visiting choir to sing choral evensong, followed by a reception with free food and drink and other festivities, including bell-ringing, village fêtes and children’s activities.

These one-off grants were made not simply to fund an isolated event, but to help churches establish a tradition they could sustain locally in subsequent years. Encouragingly, most parishes who participated in 2025 are planning to continue their patronal festivals annually, funding it through local giving and support.

In England, but not in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, there is still an ancient system whereby each church has a Patron, a person or institution who has a special relationship with the church. Some patronages date back to the medieval period. In 453 parishes the Patron is the King, in others the local landowner, usually an aristocrat like a Duke, Marquis or Earl, who role is hereditary, in some an Oxford or Cambridge college, in some a Bishop or other ecclesiastical body, in some a City of London livery company, like the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, and in some a committee.

This year the Choral Evensong Trust has had 115 applications, 45% more than last year, and is unable to fund them all from its limited resources and has therefore asked the Patrons of English churches to help fund the patronal festivals in churches under their patronage. Some have been happy to do so, including the King, the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, the Duke of Rutland, the Earl of Plymouth, Eton College and the Goldsmiths Company. Others have been unable to help, usually because they have insufficient funds or no provision for making grants.

The result is that about 50 parishes remain unfunded, scattered throughout the country, including one in Cornwall, one in Dorset, two in Yorkshire, two in Somerset, one in Warwickshire, two in Lincolnshire, four in Herefordshire, one in Staffordshire, two in Gloucestershire, one in Liverpool, one in South London, one in Kent, one in Hampshire, four in Nottinghamshire, and one in Cambridgeshire. Fortunately, the Scottish and Northern Irish festivals have been funded through the generosity of Eton College, and the Welsh festivals through a charitable trust based in South Wales, the Baroness Windsor Fund.

If you would like to support one or more parishes, as I have done myself, it’s quite easy to do, and if you live in the UK, your donation will be increased by 25% if you are eligible for Gift Aid- in other words, if you are a UK taxpayer. You can donate through this portal using a credit or debit card, and also add Gift Aid if applicable.

Unless you prefer to remain anonymous, we will tell parishes you support that you have sponsored them and ask them to invite you to their festivals. I went to several myself last year and they were joyful and heartwarming occasions. For £500 you can support one parish, for £1,000 two, for £2,000 four and so on.

This is one of the most cost-effective ways in which you can make a real difference to a community, with effects that may continue for years. And it’s a great way to commemorate a loved one. If you do not live in England but have English ancestry, you can reconnect with your roots by helping support one or more parish festivals and be invited to attend them. Even if you cannot go, you will feel included.

If you have made a donation and have a preference for a particular region of England, please email me at sheldrake@sheldrake.org and we will try to match you up with a parish or parishes in that area.

Become a Patron

The Choral Evensong Trust is a UK Registered Charity (number 1190208) and more details can be found on their website.

I hope the essays and talks I share through Substack will help to stimulate fresh thinking and encourage a more holistic approach to science. However, this is by no means my full-time job. I am mainly engaged in scientific research across several fronts, some of which I have yet to discuss publicly, and I regularly publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals (see the Research section in sheldrake.org for details). I also summarise my research findings in an ongoing series of videos called Findings, which I publish here on Substack.

Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for these kinds of exploration, so the generosity of people who support my work makes this research possible. But if you can’t contribute financially, don’t worry. I am happy to share ideas, and much of my content will remain free and open-access.

Rupert Sheldrake

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This video and essay are part of my Findings series, designed to take you deeper into the actual science I’ve conducted. Whether discussing the biochemistry of auxin or the evolution of consciousness, my goal is to share the rigorous research, past and present, that often goes unnoticed. While I continue to publish in peer-reviewed journals (see sheldrake.org/research), this platform allows me to connect specific discoveries to the bigger picture.

Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for this kind of exploration, so the generosity of people like you who support my work makes this research possible. Thank you!

Published Research

Comparisons of Earlier- and Later-formed Pods of Chickpeas (Cicer arietinum)

Annals of Botany (1979) Vol. 43, 467-473
https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDJOURNALS.AOB.A085657
by R. Sheldrake, N.P. Saxena

Comparisons of Earlier- and Later-formed Pods of Pigeonpeas (Cajanus cajan)

Annals of Botany (1979) Vol. 43, 459-466
by R. Sheldrake, A. Narayanan

A Hydrodynamical Model of Pod-Set in Pigeonpea (Cajunus Cajan)

Indian Journal of Plant Physiology (1979) Vol. 22, 137-143
by Rupert Sheldrake

Read the Full Talk

I’m talking about a fundamental difference between annual and perennial plants. Obviously, the fact they’re annual and perennial means they’re different. The difference is not actually annuality per se, but the fact that annual plants are monocarpic. That means they flower and fruit just once.

And there are some other plants that do that, like century plants, which are a kind of agave, or sago palms, which live for years and then have a vast final flowering and fruiting, and then they die. Well, I worked on an annual and a perennial plant when I was doing research in the International Crops Research Institute for the semi-arid tropics in India, in Hyderabad. I was the principal plant physiologist and I was working on two crops, chickpeas and pigeon peas.

Chickpea is an annual and pigeon peas are potentially perennial, although in India they’re usually grown as annuals, harvested every year and planted again the next year. Chickpeas are small plants. You can see some here. They’re about a foot to one foot six inches high. And in India they’re planted usually after the monsoon and they grow during the cooler winter period, the rabi season it’s called, mainly on residual moisture in the soil. They’re also grown around the Mediterranean and they’re eaten either as split peas as dal, or chickpea flour is used for making papadums in India, or in the Middle East they are used for hummus.

Pigeon peas, by contrast, are shrubs. They’re bushy shrubs. You can see some here with me looking at them. And they can grow about six feet tall. Some of them grow even taller. And as I said, they continue for years if they’re allowed to grow into small trees. There is now a perennial cropping system that we helped develop at ICRISAT, and it’s mainly being used in China and is proving very effective.

But my point here is to look at the difference between the patterns of flowering and fruiting in these crops. And how we did this was by comparing fruits that are formed earlier in the season with those that are formed later. And in both crops, in most branches, in most varieties, what happens is there’s a branch, and as the branch grows, it forms more flowers, and as the flowers are fertilized and set seed, they form pods. So the oldest part on a branch is the one nearest the stem at the base of the branch, and then the next one is the next oldest, and so on. So you can actually look at the sequence of pods by looking up the branch and counting away from the stem, and compare the pods that are formed early and late in the flowering process.

Now, I did a study on this pattern in chickpeas with my colleague Dr. Saxena, published in Annals of Botany. You can see it here. And what we found was that as the pods were formed later, they got smaller. And you can see here in this graph, the weight per pod declines. That’s the top graph. The bottom axis shows the oldest pods on the left and the youngest pods on the right. These pods have all matured and dried, so we’re not comparing ones that are half dry with ones that are dry. They’re all fully dry.

And what you see is that the weight per pod declines. These are two varieties, the black and the open circles, each different varieties of chickpea. And then the number of seeds per pod declines; it’s in the middle graph. And the weight per seed declines. So there are fewer seeds and the seeds are getting smaller.

What’s happening in chickpeas, as in other annual plants like ordinary peas that you can grow in the garden, is that they’re giving everything they’ve got to the fruiting process. All their reserves go into the fruit and they go on doing this until they run out and the plant dies. So it’s using up everything until it finally dies with the last gasp, and the seeds in the pods are getting smaller and the production is getting less as it runs out of goodies, things to fill the pods with: nutrients, sugars and proteins and so forth. So this is a typical pattern in annuals. And it’s not surprising; it’s the very nature of these plants to flower once and then to die.

And it’s the seeds that make them die, the formation of the seeds. If you keep taking the flowers off them, removing flowers, then it’s stopping the seeds from forming, and then they go on flowering and they go on living until you let them form seeds.

Now, we did a similar study with pigeon peas, which I published a paper about with my colleague Dr. Narayanan, which you can see here. With pigeon peas, as with chickpeas, the flowers go on forming and the earlier formed pods are nearer the stem. The later formed pods are further out along the branch. And you can see in this picture how the flowers are ahead of the pods and the branch keeps growing, the twig, the side branch, forming new flowers and new pods.

So once again, it’s possible to look at the earlier and the later formed pods and compare them. And in this graph, you can see the results of that comparison. On the left are the oldest pods, on the right are the youngest pods. And you can see that the number of seeds per pod on the top graph remains more or less the same, until we get right to the end when the number of plants with that number of pods, that number of nodes, is quite small, so there’s a lot of random variation. And the weight per seed remains more or less the same. The black line represents this particular pigeon pea variety, ICP1, grown on black soil, deep, moisture-retaining soil. And the open circles are the same variety grown on red soil, which retains less moisture. But the pattern’s more or less the same in both cases.

Now, again, this isn’t very surprising, but this is a very clear way of seeing it. A perennial plant has to hold back some of its reserves for next year. If it threw everything it had got into its seeds, there’d be no reserves for coming back. In the case of pigeon pea, they go more or less dormant during the very hot, dry period of India, the summer period, and then they come back to life and start growing vigorously with the monsoon rains. So if they’re growing perennially, they have to hold back reserves, which would mean they can’t put everything they’ve got into the seeds.

Now, it’s possible to model this, and I like analog models. I made an analog model, and I published the results in this paper here in the Indian Journal of Plant Physiology, a hydrodynamical model of pod set in pigeon pea. And this was an actual model, not a computer model. And you can see me making the model here. It’s made out of rubber tubes, bicycle inner tubes, and very simple laboratory equipment that was easily available in India.

And the model is represented in this diagram. There’s a reservoir which represents the nutrients that are produced by the plant by photosynthesis, the sugars, and also the other nutrients, the nitrogen and other things that pods need to grow. The horizontal tube represents a branch and there’s a series of siphons leading to containers which represent pods.

And what happens when you open the tap and let the fluid from the reservoir go into the tube, the horizontal tube, the first siphon kicks in and water flows into the first pod and fills it up, and then the second one starts doing this and the third one, and so the pods fill up.

But when the level in the reservoir drops below the level of the siphon, no more pods fill up at all, so either you get full pods or you get no pods that are full. And this is more or less what happens in the pigeon pea. There must be a physiological threshold that stops pod formation if the level of nutrients falls below a certain level, which here is represented or modeled by these siphons.

Now, if you remove the siphon, if instead of it going up you just let the tube be at the same level as the horizontal pipe, so there’s no siphon, no barrier, then you have something actually rather like the chickpea. The first pods fill up fully, but as the volume of fluid goes down, as the pressure goes down, later ones only fill up partially. And so you end up with pods that are quite sparsely filled towards the end, whereas the earlier ones are full. And this is exactly, of course, what happens in chickpeas.

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We checked a whole range of varieties of pigeon pea and chickpea and found a very similar pattern in practically all of them, which is what you’d expect. And I think that this pattern that we found, that shows up so clearly, may be quite general for annual and perennial plants. I looked at a range of species when I was working in India, a range of other species, and found this pattern seemed to be pretty general for annuals and perennials.

But I don’t know anyone who’s done a systematic study of this, and it’s something that could be done, and it’s something you can do informally yourself, by just looking at the fruiting patterns of plants in your garden or crops in fields or wildflowers, and just look and see whether in annuals the later formed seeds are smaller than the early formed seeds, and in perennials whether they’re more or less the same. There could be reasons why in perennials the later ones get smaller. For example, if there’s a drought, or if the weather suddenly turns very cold, there are factors like that that can influence it. But I think physiologically, what we’d see is a similar pattern to what was observed in our experience with chickpea and pigeon pea.

It’s all fairly obvious when you think about it, but it changes the way that I look at plants, and it changes the way that I look at wild plants and plants in the garden and crops in fields when I have this pattern in mind, and I hope you’ll find it illuminating too.

Most people do not think of sports as spiritual practices; they seem supremely secular. Yet in modern secular societies, sports may be one of the most common ways in which people experience the self-transcendence that can come through being in the present. Meditators may find their minds wandering and only occasionally come back into a full sense of presence, but football players in important matches are completely in the present, or else they are out of the game. Someone skiing downhill at sixty miles an hour has to be completely focused, as does a surfer on a gigantic wave, or a free climber on a rock face with no ropes, or a hunter stalking a deer when the slightest noise or visible movement might cause the quarry to run away.

Humans hone their physical abilities and take delight in exercising them. This definition explains why many sports are not games, like skiing or shooting pheasants, while some sporting skills exist only within games, like topspin tennis backhands. Other sports are based on skills that already occur in everyday life, like running, jumping, rowing, shooting, lifting and throwing. They become sports when they are pursued for their own sakes.

Some sports, especially spectator sports, are competitive, like wrestling and cricket. Competition enables people to measure themselves against others. But some sports are not directly competitive. Mountaineers may seek to scale a particularly difficult peak as a challenge to themselves.

Although sports are not normally undertaken as spiritual exercises, they can have a range of spiritual effects which include being intensely present and feeling part of something greater than oneself.

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The evolutionary background

In his book, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin emphasised the importance of sexual selection in a wide range of animals. Among birds, he pointed out that most males are ‘highly pugnacious’ in the breeding season, but even the most aggressive rarely depend solely on their ability to drive away rivals; they have a range of ways of ‘charming the females’. Some depend on the power of song, others on courtship dances, and yet others on ‘ornaments of many kinds, the most brilliant tints, combs and wattles, beautiful plumes, elongated feathers, top-knots, and so forth.’

By contrast, among mammals, force is more important: ‘The male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms. The most timid animals, not provided with any special weapons for fighting, engage in desperate conflicts during the season of love . . . male squirrels engage in frequent contests, and often wound each other severely, as do male beavers, so that hardly a skin is without scars.’

In most mammalian species, males are larger than females; and the difference is greatest in species where males fight most. In a polygamous seal species, the males are about six times heavier than the females, while in monogamous species there is little difference between the sexes. Similarly, male right whales, which do not fight each other, are the same size as females; male sperm whales, which fight for mates, are double the size of females.

Darwin also showed that in many mammalian species, only males have tusks or horns, and they use them for fighting and defence. In some species where females also have tusks or horns, they are smaller and less developed than in males. Similarly, defensive features are much more pronounced in males than females, as in the manes of male lions, which protect their necks from being bitten by other male lions in fights.

It was a short step for Darwin to point out that similar forms of sexual selection are widespread in human societies. He quoted a report by Samuel Hearne, who explored remote parts of Northern Canada in the late eighteenth century. Hearne wrote:

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In this talk, I explore a simple but radical possibility: that minds are not confined to brains at all. Like magnetic or gravitational fields, they extend beyond the body, reaching out in every act of attention and perception. Vision, on this view, is not something that happens entirely inside the head, but a two-way process that links us directly with the world around us.

This idea may sound unconventional, but it’s grounded in everyday experience, from the sense of being stared at, to what happens when you look in a mirror, to the way animals respond to attention. It also connects with growing movements in philosophy and cognitive science that challenge the old materialist dogma.

If you’ve ever wondered whether consciousness fits comfortably into the machinery of the brain… or felt that your own experience of the world doesn’t match what you’ve been told by neuroscience… this exploration may help you see the mind, and yourself, in a very different light.

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Transcript

Dispelling the Dogmas of Science, Episode 8

Are Minds Confined to Brains?

The materialist dogma is that matter is the only reality, and that matter is unconscious. The whole universe is made of unconscious matter; our brains are made of matter; and therefore they ought to be unconscious like everything else.

Unfortunately for the materialist theory, we’re conscious. That’s a very big problem. In fact, it’s called the hard problem in the philosophy of mind, because, according to materialism, we ought not to be conscious at all.

So materialist philosophers have either to argue that we’re not really conscious, that consciousness is an illusion, or that we are conscious, but consciousness doesn’t do anything. It’s just another way of talking about the physical activity of the brain. Or else consciousness is said to be an epiphenomenon, a kind of shadow that accompanies brain activity but is functionless.

In other cases, the mind is supposed to be a product of the brain and confined to the inside of the head. So the question is: is your mind really all inside your head? That’s the question I’m going to be discussing.

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Every Roman Catholic and Anglican parish church, chapel and cathedral has a patron saint or angel, for example St. John the Baptist, St Mary Magdalene or St Michael and All Angels, or else is named after an aspect of Christ, as in Holy Redeemer and Christ Church, or dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Each saint or title has its feast day, and some, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, have several. Traditionally, parish communities celebrated the feast day of their patron saint, their patronal festival, in a way that involved the wider community. In Roman Catholic countries like Spain and Italy whole villages or towns still take part in patronal festivities that often include processions, feasting and fun.

In Britain, cathedrals and a few churches celebrate their patronal festivals, but in many, especially rural churches, the tradition has died out. However, in 2025 there was a remarkable revival of patronal festivals. In 80 parishes these festivals were celebrated after a lapse of many years. The celebrations included a service of choral evensong, sung either by the church’s own choir or by a visiting choir, followed by a reception with food and drink, open to all, and free of charge.

These festivals were supported by grants from the Choral Evensong Trust, of which I am a trustee. The full patronal festival grant of £500 helped to cover the cost of a visiting choir and the reception after the service, and for churches with their own choir, there was a £250 grant for the reception and other festivities.

These grants unleashed much creativity and enthusiasm in parishes throughout the land. Some combined the patronal festival with village fêtes or community barbeques. In many the bells were ringing out before the service; some parishes formed community choirs especially for the event and some welcomed local school choirs to sing part of the service. In some, the reception was in the church itself, or in the churchyard if the weather was good, and some were in village halls or nearby barns. Practically all were great successes, You can read the reports from the churches themselves, and see photographs of the services and festivities HERE. A selection from some of the reports is below.

The Trustees of the Choral Evensong Trust have chosen the patronal festival of St Nicholas, Kittisford, the smallest village in Somerset, as the Patronal Festival of the Year for 2025. It was also the last of the year – St Nicholas’ Day is on December 6^th. The report by Annie Musgrove, Churchwarden, is HERE, together with photographs. The award itself consists of financial support for a series of ongoing choral evensong services.

Applications for grants for patronal festivals in 2026 are now open. The closing date is February 2^nd. Details and application forms are HERE.

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A Selection from the Patronal Festival Reports for 2025

St Mark, Newport, Gwent

The service was a huge success, we pulled in a congregation of 67 people, so I was pleased with that, and there was much discussion about repeating it again next year. We had buffet style refreshments after the service, which went down really well too. We are going to be doing a final choral evensong to mark the newly formed resident choir’s last service before we break for the summer. Thank you again to the Choral Evensong Trust for enabling us to hold this very special event, we could not have done it without the funding.

– Richard Craig-Langley, Director of Music

St George, Benenden, Kent

On Sunday 27 April, for the first time in over 20 years, St. George’s Church, Benenden celebrated a Patronal Choral Evensong. With the sound of twelve bell ringers welcoming worshippers, a robed four-part choir of fourteen voices (including singers from across the Weald Deanery) led a beautiful and moving service attended by over 70 people from the village and beyond.

– Revd David Commander, Rector

St John of Beverley, Whatton-in-the-Vale, Nottinghamshire

Paul Hale, the retired Director of Music from Southwell Minster, played and Deborah Davies, Director of Music of the Cranmer Company of Singers, conducted. The Cranmer Company of Singers was the guest choir and we welcomed other local singers, turning this into a Come & Sing Evensong. The church had been beautifully decorated by our new team and the refreshments afterwards, including wine, savoury and sweet nibbles was in abundance, which is what we are used to from the Whatton-in-the-Vale folk. It was wonderful to see a full church and to see so many people who normally do not come to church, people from all walks of life and of all ages, mingling together afterwards, all with happy smiles on their faces. It truly was a wonderful occasion.

– Janet Greasley, PCC Treasurer

St Collen’s, Llangollen, Denbighshire

As one attendee expressed, “It was a really beautiful service, supported by an excellent choir and followed by a lovely reception in the community hall.” Another worshipper reflected, “What a moving service. It was truly a wonderful evening.” The reception served as a vital opportunity for community engagement and conversation. It complemented the contemplative tone of the service with joyful, neighbourly celebration.

– Neil Barrett, Facilities Manager

St Petrock, Timberscombe, Somerset

This was a very successful service, the likes of which was out of any villager’s memory. It would be wonderful to support more Choral Evensongs at the church, and we will do everything we can to at least make this a focal point of future patronal festivals and keep the flame burning on this part of Exmoor. We have had fantastic feedback from the evening, with people enthralled by the music and the service. I was delighted it was so well attended; we were able to attract people from beyond our Parish that have a love for liturgical music as well as a huge amount of local support. None of it would have been possible without the Choral Evensong Trust and for that we offer heartfelt thanks to all Trustees. The reception post Evensong was also very enjoyable and there is no doubt this service has had quite an impact on all who attended, whether familiar with Choral Evensong, or experiencing it for the first time. Our typical service attracts an average of 20 people, so to have 100 squeezed into the church was a delight and there was clearly a celebratory air with the prosecco we served and the canapes provided by our team of brilliant helpers, whether on the PCC (Parochial Church Council) or simply happy to contribute to the event. The plate collection was a magnificent £340 which can also be gift aided so our Treasurer is thrilled to add this to a day where we hosted a village BBQ, licensed bar with music and family entertainment in the field behind the church.

– Marion Jeffrey, Churchwarden

St Mary the Virgin, Bishop’s Frome, Herefordshire

On Sunday 1 June, the church of St Mary the Virgin hosted a special choral evensong to celebrate the Visitation of the blessed Virgin Mary. Due to the support of the Choral Evensong Trust, we were able to ask members of the Cambrian singers to sing for us. The choir very well directed by Stephen Yeo, whilst the organ was played by Paul Trepte. The choir was comprised of various local singers all of whom are or were professional musicians. The service was very well attended; we had 68 people, many of whom are not regular members of our congregation. The service was followed by a lasagne dinner over in our village centre. The food was very generously made and, in part, donated by members of the parish. It made the evening really special and just in the first 24 hours since the service I have had lots of positive comments. Thank you very much to the Choral Evensong Trust for making it possible.

– James Wall, Director of Music

St Boniface, Woodgreen, Hampshire

Our Patronal Festival ended on a high, with a lovely Festal Evensong led by Rev Ruth Crosland. We were fortunate enough to have a visiting choir from Salisbury, QPM - who sung some wonderful harmonies throughout, making for a truly joyous service with a healthy congregation singing alongside!

– Christine Calder, Churchwarden

Holy Trinity, Kendal, Cumbria

This magnificent occasion was hosted by Kendal Choristers and Kendal Parish Church Choir. We were extremely lucky to be joined by Yorkshire Evening Post Brass Band from Leeds - 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, horn, tuba and timpani/percussion. Together with organ this was an incredible line-up! Choir and clergy, led by cross and lights, processed in to Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, played by the brass group. Then a single unaccompanied female voice sang the introit Praise to the Trinity by the 12th century mystic, Hildegard of Bingen. There were more fanfares as we all joined in the Old 100th in the familiar arrangement by Vaughan Williams. The Choristers sang The Grace specially written for them. Choir and clergy processed out as the band played Cortege from Mlada by Rimsky-Korsakov. As the last chord ended we were aware of the bells in full pelt being rung by the Bellringers of Holy Trinity, Kendal Parish Church. The Mayor and Mayoress of Kendal attended the service. Well-wishers, church folk, tourists and visitors (about 40 in all), together with choir, choristers and brass enjoyed the wine reception after the service.

– Janet Henderson, Church Administrator

Holy Trinity, Godmanstone, Dorset

The church was full! People came from much further afield than they normally would, the choral evensong called them in. But also people came from the village that never normally come to church. They brought their children (who really loved the balloons) and there were couples who had been married in the church but have since moved away and children who have been christened there. It felt like a proper party and celebration. In fact I knew it was a really great party when, after quite some time of festivity in the sunlit church yard I went back into the church to clear up and found a happy group of patronal festival revellers settled deeply into some of the pews, glasses in hand, smiles on faces, hearts alight. And the church has somehow been smiling ever since. There seems to be a softness emanating from the ancient walls. As if a certain resonance has been reawakened. It is very beautiful.

– Will Best, Churchwarden

St Martin, Eglwysbach, Clwyd

It was with great anticipation that we gathered on the 15th of June to celebrate the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity with Evensong & Benediction. It has been many years since Evensong was held here. Our usual congregation of 15 was supplemented by visitors from near and far who had come to experience Evensong. For some it was like greeting an old friend, for others it was a brand new experience, but for all the 50 people who gathered it was something to be remembered. The Voci Chamber Choir, conducted by Deborah Catterall, enriched the worship, assisting the congregation in learning the ferial responses and the hymns. The refreshments afterwards were well received and allowed people to talk to the choir and each other about the experience and it was wonderful to hear people saying how much they wished to do it again.

– Huw Bryant, Priest

St John the Baptist, Ystrad Meurig, Ceredigion

We invited the choir of Holy Trinity Church, Aberystwyth to sing the service for us, and as their student members were on their summer break, they invited Motje Wolf and Tim Lee to join the choir for the service. Motje and Tim kindly also provided entertainment during our community Strawberry Tea which took place before the service in Canolfan Edward Richard. It was wonderful to see our rural church so full, and particularly to welcome people we do not usually see in church who were curious about the special service. The coming together of the community in preparing the tea and contributing to the service was a particular pleasure.

– Morag Sutherland, Secretary

St Botolph, Swyncombe, Oxfordshire

Over 60 people attended the service at 6 pm which I always think is a very good time to be in church – the work of the day done, late sunshine streaming through the windows, among truly wonderful garden grown cut seasonal flowers. We publicised it in our benefice of Icknield with a parish email and website entry, and a Facebook posting as well as informal emails and the Benefice email. We drew regular attendees and a few friends of the church who might not normally come. We then had a very good party in the churchyard. The PCC were really encouraged by the turnout and the enthusiasm for a sung service so we were re-energised to plan future events based in the church, both services and social events.

– Felicity Bazell, Choir Coordinator

St Peter, Shepton Montague, Somerset

There was a congregation which swelled to 45. Several regular congregants were on holiday so the numbers could have exceeded 50. After the service drinks and canapes provided by members of the PCC were served in the church grounds. Everyone had a wonderful time and the Evensong achieved the objective of bringing the community together.

– Robert Mitchell, Churchwarden

St Peter, Cattistock, Dorset

We held such a happy and successful Choral Evensong on Sunday 29th June thanks in great part to the welcome grant of £500. Our eight bells were run for 30 minutes prior to the service which was attended by 109 parishioners and friends from all the 13 parishes in the Melbury Team Benefice, plus 15 members of choir & conductor from Salisbury Cathedral and an organist who played our 1868 organ mostly sensitively. Following the service and a fine evening, refreshments for all were served from a gazebo in the churchyard.

– Susan Orr, Churchwarden

St Peter and St Paul, Muchelney, Somerset

Our bell ringing team welcomed us all to the service beforehand. It was wonderful to see our village church so full with many people coming from distant parishes and it was so moving when the first crescendo of sound exploded. Afterwards, we celebrated with Pimms and substantial nibbles.

– Elizabeth Nightingale, Treasurer

St Peter, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex

The service was enhanced by the presence of Bexhill’s famous resident trumpeter Crispian Steele-Perkins who with Mark started Evensong with a Trumpet Voluntary by William Boyce and by the expert and sensitive playing of our wonderful but ageing and occasionally temperamental organ from our choir’s great friend John Ross. By the time the service started the nave of the church was full with civic dignitaries; members of the Prayer Book Society, who had advertised this service nationally, members of other churches’ congregations from Bexhill, and many members of our own congregation and particularly the increasing number of worshippers who attend Choral Evensong which currently takes place most weeks in the year. The service was followed by a most convivial and festive reception at the back of the church to which most attending the service stayed until almost 8 o’clock tempted by a fine bubbly White Pinot from the Carr Taylor Vineyards at Westfield and a wonderful selection of tasty titbits and canapes provided by members of our congregation and friends of St. Peter’s.

– Mark Shepherd, Director of Music

St Peter ad Vincula, Folkington, East Sussex

In a tiny village that long since lost its school, its post office, its village green and its pub, the festival has quickly become a rare and valued occasion for bringing people together.

The afternoon’s fête offered a variety of attractions: a lively tombola, an abundant plant market, and a used book sale which drew considerable interest, with visitors arriving from all over the county and beyond. Refreshments included beer on tap from the Long Man Brewery in Litlington and freshly baked sausage rolls from Brains Butchers Ltd of Willingdon. The Guess the Weight of the Fruitcake competition was won this year by Dr and Mrs Sheldrake of London.

– Alan Best, Churchwarden

St Thomas-at-Cliffe, Lewes, East Sussex:

St Thomas a Becket

This was a new venture for us which was a great success. Just over 70 people attended the service, and we had refreshments afterwards for everyone with a history talk on our church. We kept 6th July as the 7th July marks the anniversary of Archbishop Thomas Becket’s remains being reinstated within Canterbury Cathedral and I preached on this.

We do not have a choir at St Thomas’ so a special choir was formed from members of the other two churches in our benefice and that was also marvellous both for supporting the service and for uniting our benefice. I have received many lovely comments following the service.

– Revd Herbert Bennett, Vicar

St Thomas the Apostle, Groombridge, East Sussex

The first part of the afternoon for the village and congregation was a church service at 4.30, a celebration for all ages of music, prayer and reflection on St Thomas. Some of those invited to the party for their community service also joined the more regular attendees for the service. There was a local group of musicians and local singers leading the singing of traditional and modern hymns and metrical psalms. Meanwhile it was raining again and the outlook looked unpromising for a garden party with the start time at 5.15 pm. Arrangements were made to have everyone in the vicarage. As the last items of food were being cooked the garden gate between the church and the vicarage opened and the sun came out as the children from the service ran in to enjoy pizza and cake! With help of the older children the tables were dried off, the food and drink put out on the tables and the party began. It was a busy and happy time in which friendships were renewed, thanks given to all the volunteers by our vicar, Rev Nicholas Henshall. There was a real sense of community, particularly when it started to rain briefly and heavily in the middle of the festivities. There is nothing like a greenhouse to provide shelter! The smiles say it all!

– Mary Symes, Churchwarden

St Alban, Oxford

We are pleased to report that the St Alban’s Day service held on Saturday 6th July was a great success and very well attended. A total of 74 people participated in the celebration, including 55 adults, 7 teenagers, and 12 children. This marks a significant increase from our usual attendance of around 15 for this service, highlighting the impact of this special event in bringing the community together. Following the service, refreshments were served, during which the children and teenagers presented a short drama telling the story of St Alban. This performance was enthusiastically received and warmly appreciated by all those present. It was a joyful and memorable way to engage people of all ages in the life and witness of our patron saint. We received excellent feedback from attendees regarding both the service and the community atmosphere it fostered. Many commented on the beauty of the liturgy, the warmth of the welcome, and the delight of seeing young people involved so actively in the celebration. Given the success of this year’s event, we are now planning to make the St Alban’s Day celebration an annual tradition in the life of our church and community with acting, celebration and participation. This has also led to an interest in the annual St Alban’s pilgrimage to the St Alban’s Cathedral which the parish plans to organise.

- Revd Martha Weatherill, Vicar

St Mary Magdalene, Taunton, Somerset

The service at Taunton Minster was well received and considered a great success. Grant support enabled the provision of celebratory refreshments after the service, tea and cake for the choir between rehearsal and service, as well as assistance with publicity and other practical elements. These contributions were vital in ensuring the event could take place at a high standard and be enjoyed by the congregation and choir alike. The initiative has not only enhanced the festival celebrations locally but has also demonstrated how such support can enable churches to mark important occasions with fitting music and community engagement.

– Miles Quick, Director of Music

St James, Cameley, Somerset

We have just had the most amazing choral evensong. Everyone helped towards making it a memorable evening service and really pulled out all the stops. We had a local choir singing for us, organist and, by chance, a professional singer from Germany who was staying nearby who agreed to sing before and after the service. Refreshments were arranged for after the service which meant nearly everyone stayed on afterwards and it became a real community get together. Our rector - who is young and very enthusiastic - was delighted as we had one of the biggest congregations since Christmas. A successful event all round which we hope to repeat next year.

– Fiona Medland, Churchwarden

St Anne, East Wittering, West Sussex

We celebrated our patronal festival with an evening of reflective and inspiring singing centred around the theme of finding rest, refreshment and light in Jesus. We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Choral Evensong Society and its benefactors for supporting our inaugural patronal festival choral evensong. It has been a delight to see our choir grow in number and go from strength to strength during the build-up to this event. We are delighted to welcome new singers of a range of ages, genders and levels of experience, and very much look forward to making this service an annual event!

– Chris West, Choirmaster

St Laurence, Falmer, East Sussex

Patronal Choral Evensong was the climax of a series of monthly evensongs which we introduced during the summer this year. The event was a tremendous success, the choir totalling 18 experienced singers. It was very well attended, with many new faces in the pews, and the feedback after the service was highly positive. Not only the congregation, but also some of the singers have asked when the next evensong can take place with this “super-choir” of singers! After the service, celebrations continued at the barn at The Swan Inn, the village pub, which had been decorated with appropriate items, including a grid iron - the emblem of St. Laurence. There was a free welcome drink for all those attending and a spread of excellent savoury and sweet refreshments. This was also very well attended and the good weather meant that those who wished could sit outside.

– Sue Mileham-Paine, Churchwarden

St Laurence, Guestling, East Sussex

It was a joy to celebrate St Laurence’s Patronal Festival with a sung service of Evensong. Sung Evensong hasn’t taken place for many years, and the choir and congregation were enthusiastic to make this happen. Afternoon teas with prosecco were served from 1pm and very much enjoyed. Many visitors who popped in while walking along the 1066 footpath which runs through the churchyard were delighted to share some celebration bubbles. Stephen Page, an excellent local organist, played for the service and led two rehearsals for the choir. Our dear friends the Searcy family, who love Book of Common Prayer services, helpfully sourced music copies for us and sang with the choir. We were a little rusty to begin with but the sung versicles, responses and Psalm pointing soon became familiar again and the choir gave a good strong lead to the congregation. We were very pleased to be joined by family and friends from other local churches. The flower arrangers put on a colourful display and Elisabeth’s hand-painted banner took pride of place. Everyone very much enjoyed sung worship in this ‘little, lost, Sussex church’ and we certainly won’t leave it so long before another Evensong!

– Revd Sandi Wickens, Priest in Charge

St Mary, Storrington, West Sussex

The moving service, supported by the church’s talented choir and organists, was followed by a delicious Festival of Puddings and a drinks reception in the church. Homemade puddings helped to raise funds to support the projects of the Mothers’ Union in the Diocese of Chichester, helping families and communities both locally and further afield. The day was a special celebration of worship, community, and generosity.

– Stephen Bloxham, Director of Music

St Mary, Chepstow, Monmouthshire

We were delighted to welcome Cardiff Chamber Choir who, together with the Revd John, led the liturgy beautifully. The Revd Zoe preached on the Magnificat, highlighting Mary’s radical and transformative witness. Approximately 70 people attended, with almost everyone staying afterwards for refreshments and fellowship. Feedback was warm and enthusiastic, with many asking whether this could become an annual fixture.

– Fr Barnabas Pimentel, Priest

Bartlemas Chapel, Oxford

We are delighted to share with you a positive update on the continuing life and ministry at Bartlemas Chapel. Thanks to your generous support, we were able to host the annual Patronal Service in honour of St Bartholomew, which continues to grow as a special moment of worship, community, and heritage celebration. We welcomed 35 people, which again shows steady engagement and the enduring interest in the chapel’s life. Each service has been marked by a real sense of reverence, thanksgiving, and appreciation for the unique heritage of Bartlemas, which next year celebrates an extraordinary 900 years since its foundation. Your support has not only ensured the continuation of annual worship but has also given us the confidence to plan more ambitious, inclusive, and celebratory events that will draw in a wide range of people from East Oxford and beyond. As we prepare for the 900th anniversary in 2026, our vision is to ensure that Bartlemas Chapel continues to stand as a beacon of healing, retreat, hospitality, faith, and heritage for generations to come.

– Revd Martha Weatherill, Vicar

St Aidans, Carlisle

More than 60 people attended and were treated to an evening of outstanding music.

We were honoured by the presence of the Mayor of Carlisle, Jeanette Whalen, who read the Old Testament lesson. The highlight for us, alongside the sublime music filling our beautiful church, was the response of our guests. Many were experiencing Choral Evensong for the first time, and their delight and wonder at the power of the worship was heartening to hear. The service was followed by a delicious buffet.

– Jean Hill, Churchwarden

St Mary, Slaugham, West Sussex

St Mary’s Patronal Festival became a true village celebration thanks to its happy alignment with the annual hamlet street party. Blue and white flower displays and cupcakes, prepared for village competitions, were donated to the church for the Evensong gathering. The sense of anticipation was evident, and the congregation grew from its usual thirty-five to more than one hundred, remarkable for a parish that had not held Evensong for decades. Coro Nuovo sang superbly, their voices revealing how beautifully the church’s architecture suits choral music. The rector preached on sainthood in the modern age, and both visitors and choir members valued the reminder that this was an act of worship rather than a concert. Parishioners spoke of the comfort and depth they found in the liturgy. Creative Expressions, the local art group, contributed works on the theme of St Mary’s, displayed in the chapel during refreshments, and the evening concluded with a well-received historical tour led by Brian Funnel. The parish expressed heartfelt thanks for the grant and for the inspiration behind the initiative. The festival strengthened village ties and drew many who would not ordinarily attend church, making it a joyful and hopeful occasion.

– Liz Cox, PCC Member

St Mary, Bitton, Bristol

On Sunday 7^th September, we at St Mary’s Bitton celebrated our patronal festival with a very special choral evensong. This is always a special weekend for St Mary’s, as we hold our annual fete on the Saturday, which is always a hugely popular event involving the whole local community. So it was very fitting to complete the weekend with a special service. Our choir was NotaBene, a renowned Bristol based a capella ensemble who are in great demand locally, giving concerts and appearing at other events. The evening began with a lovely peal of bells by our bell ringing group, and people began to arrive early, to enjoy our beautiful church which was candlelit for the occasion and looked wonderful. After extensive advertising, the local community did us proud and turned out in force; the final number attending was over 70! The service was most uplifting and inspiring, after which a prosecco and canape reception was held at the back of the church. This was greatly enjoyed by all. It was enjoyed so much that we are hoping it may now become an annual event.

– Anne Carrington, Churchwarden

Holy Cross Church, Goodnestone, Kent

We started the day with bulb planting in the Churchyard. The Church path has recently been restored and it was felt that it would be good to have snowdrops and crocuses growing in the grass alongside the path, to give some spring colour and early pollen for bees. The choir with a number of singing friends which enabled us to take on a more challenging repertoire. There were 23 singers on the day. We had a congregation of around 30, and there were a lot of positive comments from both the congregation and the choir afterwards, and certainly a lot of enthusiasm for more Choral Evensongs in the future. After Evensong we all walked the short distance down the Street to the village hall, where refreshments had been organised and set up by villagers and members of the choir.

– Denyer Kittle, Choirmaster

St Denys, Goadby Marwood, Leicestershire

Our celebrations built to a joyful climax with a Choral Evensong that truly brought the community together. In the days leading up to the service, the local primary school children created beautiful butterfly decorations for the church, while villagers contributed flower arrangements to enhance the setting. The day itself began with an Open Church and Ploughman’s Lunch, supported by generous donations of produce from local growers and bakers. The highlight came in the evening, when St Wulfram’s Choir from Grantham filled the church with glorious music. Their singing “raised the roof” and brought a sense of reverence and celebration to the occasion. For many in the congregation, it was their first experience of Choral Evensong—and for some, even their first time inside the church.

Altogether, it was a wonderful occasion: a church beautifully decorated, a community gathered in fellowship, and music of the highest standard leading us in worship and thanksgiving.

– Colette Stein, PCC Member

Holy Trinity, Forest Row, East Sussex

Around 100 people were in church and, thanks to the generosity of the Choral Evensong Trust we were able to offer generous hospitality which made guests from across our community feel welcome. It was lovely to hear the hustle and bustle of new connections being made, with guests committing to supporting the developing programme of music being offered in the parish. There is a buzz of excitement in our parish and it has come in large part, from the wonderful service of Evensong which the Choral Evensong Trust gave us the impetus to put on.

– Revd Jamie Gater, Vicar

St Mary, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire

St Mary’s Patronal Festival began with a lively all-age Eucharist at which the new Youth Link Chaplain was dedicated by the new Rector. The church was full, helped by the concurrent art festival that brought many additional visitors through the doors. Coffee and cake followed, setting a cheerful tone for the day. The evening Choral Evensong was quieter and more reflective, giving the choir space to present a thoughtful musical offering. The programme included Bruckner’s Locus Iste, Oxley’s Responses, Brewer in D and Carter’s A Maiden Most Gentle, supported by hymns chosen for the feast. The service concluded with fizz and a celebratory cake. Although the bells could not be rung owing to structural concerns with a pinnacle near the steeple, the festival was warmly received and well supported. The patronal celebrations proved uplifting and strengthened community life.

– Jane Rothery, PCC Member

St Michael & All Angels, East Coker, Somerset

St Michael and All Angels Church in East Coker was filled with glorious music and joyful parishioners on the evening of Sunday 28th September for a magnificent service of Choral Evensong capping of the celebration of Michaelmas – our patronal festival. The music was provided the superb Sherborne Chamber Choir, accompanied on the organ by Stephen Taylor-Davies. The 20 strong choir overflowed the choir stalls and the congregation, numbering about 120, made for a decidedly bustling and lively reception where a dizzying array of canapés prepared by friends of the church were enjoyed with affordable wine. The occasion was a truly memorable way to conclude our patronal festival.

– Toffer Beattie, Churchwarden

St Michael & All Angels, Dinder, Somerset

The patronal celebration began with a woodland walk through St Michael’s Wood, joined by thirty walkers including a British Pilgrimage Trust group who had walked from Wells, led by Dr Guy Hayward. The church was full to capacity for Choral Evensong, taken by the Rev Claire Towns, who preached on Jacob’s vision of angels linking heaven and earth. Wells Cathedral Chamber Choir, conducted by Carolyn Craig, with Edward Marshall on the organ, sang Clucas’s responses, Sumsion in G, Psalm 91 and Bullock’s Give us the Wings of Faith, supported by strong congregational hymn singing. More than one hundred people attended; the church was full, with standing room only. The service was followed by a well-supported reception in the Village Hall, catered by the George Inn. When the service ended, a crescent moon was rising over the church, adding to the sense of occasion.

– Rupert Sheldrake, Volunteer

St Michael & All Angels, Michaelston-y-Fedw, Glamorgan

St Michael’s marked the Feast of St Michael and All Angels with a packed Festal Evensong attended by villagers and visitors from across the Ministry Area. A choir of fifteen, directed by David Leggett and accompanied by David Geoffrey Thomas, offered a distinguished musical setting that included Stanford in C, Britten’s Hymn to the Virgin and the hymn Ye Holy Angels Bright. The Rt Revd Dr Barry Morgan preached with insight and gentle humour, reflecting on angelic encounters in scripture and drawing on writers such as R. S. Thomas and Chesterton. His sermon set a thoughtful tone for an uplifting service. Afterwards, the congregation gathered in the Village Hall for drinks and nibbles, creating an atmosphere of generous hospitality. Feedback was very positive, and enough was raised to secure the choir’s return visit next year. Further sponsorship will be sought to support the reception, which proved a particularly valuable moment of community connection. The generous grant was central to the event’s success and helped showcase the depth of the Anglican choral tradition.

– Revd Ross Maidment, Vicar

St Margaret, Burnham Norton, Norfolk

At St Margaret’s, around forty-five people attended a festive afternoon tea before the service, creating a warm, communal atmosphere. The service was well received and highlighted renewed local interest in marking the patronal feasts. The parish hopes to continue celebrating St Margaret’s next year and may also explore holding a Patronal Evensong for St Clement. The grant provided essential support and gave the confidence needed to reintroduce these valued traditions.

– Revd Malcolm Rogers, Vicar

St Nicholas, Islip, Oxfordshire

St Nicholas, Islip marked the Patronal Festival of St Edward the Confessor with a well-attended Choral Evensong led by Canon Brian Mountford. The parish chose to honour St Edward owing to his long association with Islip as his birthplace. Thirty-one local singers formed the choir, directed by Camilla Stephenson with Richard Briggs at the organ. The bells rang beforehand and wine was shared afterwards. Attendance reached sixty-three, making it one of the strongest gatherings in the Ray Valley Benefice. Regular monthly Evensong has become firmly established, supported by consistent publicity through parish communication channels and local social media. The grant has been a real catalyst, enabling the choir to grow in number and confidence, expand its repertoire, and enhance its contribution to worship throughout the year.

– Justin Stead, Choir Director

St Nicholas, Bishop’s Sutton, Hampshire

St Nicholas, Bishop’s Sutton celebrated its Patronal Festival with a richly atmospheric Choral Evensong that drew around seventy worshippers into the twelfth century church. Bells rang from mid afternoon, and the building was simply but evocatively decorated with candles, ivy and symbolic gold coins to reflect St Nicholas’s generosity. The service was made possible through a grant and created a joyful sense of anticipation and welcome. The guest choir, Index Cantorum, directed by Mark Williams and accompanied by Alison Benton, sang the introit, psalm, Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, and Byrd’s Vigilate, with the congregation joining confidently in three hymns. In her address, The Revd Amber Beresford reflected on the strength, depth and breadth of St Nicholas’s faith, linking his witness to generosity and courage in Christian life today. A lively reception followed, with wine, mince pies enjoyed amid a crowded aisle, a happy sign of success. The evening was widely described as glorious, combining sublime music with sincere worship. Encouraged by the response, the parish now hopes to make the Patronal Evensong an annual highlight and to establish Bishop’s Sutton as a centre for evening worship within the benefice.

– Amanda Caldwell, PCC Secretary

My Findings series takes you into the actual science behind my worldview. Whether discussing the biochemistry of auxin or the evolution of consciousness, my goal is to share the rigorous research—both past and present—that often goes unseen. While I continue to publish in peer-reviewed journals (sheldrake.org/research), this platform allows me to connect specific discoveries to the bigger picture.

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Upcoming Live Dialogue:

HARMONY - The 100th Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogue

February 15th, Sunday, 6:15-7:45 PM
The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead, NW3 6UU

I hope the essays and talks I share through Substack will help to stimulate fresh thinking and encourage a more holistic approach to science. However, this is by no means my full-time job. I am mainly engaged in scientific research across several fronts, some of which I have yet to discuss publicly, and I regularly publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals (see the Research section in sheldrake.org for details). I also summarise my research findings in an ongoing series of videos called Findings, which I publish here on Substack.

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Is the universe a machine governed by blind laws, or is it a living system with a memory? In this dialogue, Dr. Rowan Williams and I explore the limitations of the mechanistic worldview and the profound implications of seeing nature as alive.

Amongst other things, we look at the paradox of a materialist age obsessed with the disembodied intelligence of AI. Rowan warns against "franchising our own thinking" to machines and losing the embodied wisdom that comes from lived practice. We discuss how true intelligence is not just processing data but remaining open to connection, and why we must safeguard the intuitive parts of the human mind.

Dr. Rowan Williams served as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. He is a master theologian and a celebrated poet who brings a rigorous philosophical grasp of the mystical tradition. His insights into St. Augustine and the “divine memory” offer a perfect counterpoint to the scientific questions we explore.

Our conversation took place at the St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in the City of London. A medieval church that survived the Blitz only to be devastated by a bomb in 1993, St Ethelburga’s was rebuilt with a vital new mission. It now stands as a beacon for healing divisions across culture, conflict, and faith. It was a privilege to discuss the resilience of memory in a place that so powerfully embodies it.

I hope the essays and talks I share through Substack will help to stimulate fresh thinking and encourage a more holistic approach to science. However, this is by no means my full-time job. I am mainly engaged in scientific research across several fronts, some of which I have yet to discuss publicly, and I regularly publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals (see the research section of sheldrake.org for details). I also summarise my research findings in an ongoing series of videos called Findings, which I publish here on Substack.

Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for these kinds of exploration, so the generosity of people who support my work makes this research possible. But if you can’t contribute financially, don’t worry. I am happy to share ideas, and much of my content will remain free and open-access.

Rupert Sheldrake

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