The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (39 page)

‘So, you got nine right,’ he says.

Christ, I have it. I really do: the sense of being stared at.

‘Wow,’ I say.

‘That’s pretty close to chance,’ says the scientist.

‘Oh,’ I say, my cheeks warming. ‘Nine out of twenty. Oh, yes. Right. Of course.’

The man whose library this is has
compiled the data from more than thirty thousand trials like this
. The conclusion that it points to, if it is correct, proves that this
mysterious ‘sense of being stared at’
is a genuine phenomenon, and that many of our fundamental theories of neuroscience are flawed. It shows that minds can extend out of the brain and communicate with other minds. It shows that extra-sensory perception (ESP) is real.

If it is correct.

*

It began, for Rupert Sheldrake, when he was five. He was at his grandmother’s farm in the Nottinghamshire countryside, when he saw a row of fence posts that had sprouted branches and leaves. He was astonished. ‘We made a fence and it came to life,’ said his uncle Frank. Rupert stared at them, thinking, ‘That’s amazing!’ The posts were made from willow – which is known to root easily – but for the boy this was a fantastic revelation; a vision of the power of nature.

Sheldrake grew up in a herbalist’s shop
near his grandparents’ home. He was surrounded by pets and his father’s brass microscopes were ranged in a laboratory next to his bedroom. They kept homing pigeons, whose mysterious abilities obsessed the boy. He loved science and studied at Cambridge University, where he won a double first in biochemistry, the university Botany Prize, a major scholarship and a general reputation for brilliance. Science, he was sure, held the answers to life. But, as he worked, he began to have terrible doubts. The young scholar found himself asking forbidden questions; ones that, since the dawn of modern thinking, have been thought of as heretical.

The world as we know it began in the eighteenth century. It was during the Enlightenment that radical thinkers began to use reason and evidence to take on the supernatural forces of religion. Since then,
the sciences have been predicated on a truth that’s still held in a kind of reverence. Everything – you, me and all the stars – is made from stuff. There is nothing else – no magic, no soul, no God, no afterlife. Human beings are machines, built by physics and chemistry. Reality itself is merely matter, held together by fields. This understanding – what is known as materialism – has built our civilisation. We have cities, computers, medicine and spacecraft because the idea of materialism works.

But as he killed animals and plants and ground them up for study, Sheldrake began to wonder, ‘Can we really discover all that we want by reducing everything down to ever smaller parts? Can life
really
be just a matter of molecular pulleys and gearwheels? Is materialism enough to explain the mysteries of reality?’ Something, he believed, was missing from science – something that no amount of pulleys and gearwheels could surely generate. It was what his childhood love of nature had been surrounded by.
Life
was missing.

By the time he was twenty-eight, Sheldrake was a Cambridge don. For eight years, he had been developing a theory that sought to answer some of nature’s most stubborn mysteries. How do pigeons home? How do spiders know how to spin webs without learning from other spiders? How do shoals of fish behave as one? What, he wondered, if there was some undiscovered force that every living thing tapped into? Something not material, exactly – more like a field that somehow carried information?

One evening, after dinner, Sheldrake was drinking port with Professor Albert Chibnall, an elderly but brilliant biochemist who had served in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, and who had taken a fatherly interest in him.

‘This idea of yours is going to get you into trouble,’ Chibnall warned him. ‘You’re perfectly positioned for a brilliant career. If you pursue this, you’ll throw it all away. Take my advice. Wait until you retire.’

‘But that’s thirty-seven years away,’ complained Sheldrake.

‘It’s dangerous,’ said Chibnall. ‘It’ll ruin your career.’

Sheldrake ignored him and, in 1981, published his theory in a book,
A New Science of Life
.

One Saturday following its publication, Sheldrake was eating a breakfast of toast, marmalade and coffee. He had been pleased by his book’s reception –
the
Observer
had called it ‘fascinating and far-reaching,’
the
Biologist
‘well-written, provocative and entertaining’ and
New Scientist
had said it was ‘an important scientific enquiry into the nature of biological and physical reality,’ elsewhere calling Sheldrake ‘an excellent scientist; the proper, imaginative kind that in an earlier age discovered continents and mirrored the world in sonnets.’ He was happily looking forward to the game of tennis he had planned for the morning when the post arrived, with the latest edition of the famous journal
Nature
. Sitting down, he gasped at the editorial’s sensational headline:
‘A Book for Burning?’

Good heavens!
he thought.
What’s this about? I’ve never seen anything like it.

He read on. He felt winded. It was about
his
book. He had been denounced in one of the world’s most prestigious academic journals. His idea had been called irrational; dangerous. He had become a heretic.

‘So, you see – my idea did get me into trouble,’ he tells me, having recounted his story. ‘It did ruin my career. I was no longer able to get a job or a grant. Chibnall had been right.’

But there was more to come from Sheldrake. Grander theories and worse trouble. If it was true that these information fields existed, and that all living things tapped into them, then perhaps humans and animals could communicate non-verbally? Maybe telepathy could be real.

This is an outrageous postulation. It produces a violent species of contempt in many mainstream academics because it strikes at the very roots of science. The idea that the mind could function
outside
of the brain had been dispensed with hundreds of years ago, a cornerstone victory in the battle between reason and religion. The mind is
of
the brain and it is
in
the brain. If you accept that it might be able to function outside of it – that personalities might be able to exist beyond the boundaries of their physical selves – then what next? Ghosts? The afterlife?
God?

‘Materialists are afraid that as soon as you allow anything beyond the comfortable terrain of established science, you’ll get religion and
civilisation will crumble,’ Sheldrake says with a dry smile. ‘They think if you allow people to believe in telepathy you’ll have the Pope flying in any minute. Compulsory Catholicism. They can’t bear any questioning of science’s basic dogmas.’

Materialists, of course, say that the mind is the product of nerve activity in the brain. This is the view that was summed up famously by a genius pioneer of the twentieth century,
Nobel Prize–winner Francis Crick, who wrote that
: ‘“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’

‘Crick was a fundamentalist,’ says Sheldrake. ‘He was desperate to have science confirm a materialist worldview and to expel mystery as much as possible.’

Sheldrake’s explorations into telepathy
in its various forms eventually led him to his trials of what he calls ‘the sense of being stared at’. Using a variety of different protocols, he found that people answered correctly 55 per cent of the time. This may not seem dramatically significant, but he conducted so many trials that the odds of this score arising by chance became, he says,
one in ten thousand billion billion
. Proof, he believed, that the mind didn’t rely wholly on the five senses. Proof that it extended outside the confines of the brain. Proof that materialism is wrong.

Next, he studied a psychic terrier from Ramsbottom
. Jaytee would run to the porch window occasionally, when a cat walked past or a delivery man or who-knows-what-else. But he seemed to have a particular preponderance for being there when his owner Pam was coming home – even when she arrived unexpectedly. It was almost as if Jaytee
knew
. So Sheldrake tested the dog. In over one hundred tests Sheldrake found that Jaytee spent an average of 4 per cent of his time at the window when Pam wasn’t coming home and 55 per cent of his time there when she was. (If you’re like me, you’ll be wondering why these numbers don’t add up to 100. The study was carried out in blocks of time, so that if, during a ten-minute period in which Pam wasn’t coming home, the dog was at the window for 0.4 minutes, that’s four per cent. If, during a ten-minute period when she
was
coming home, the dog was at the window for 5.5 minutes, that’s 55 per cent.)

He published his studies in academic journals. He wrote books. He became a practising Christian. And the world didn’t listen. Instead, things became worse for him. His dog studies were ridiculed in newspapers. He was treated with contempt by his colleagues in academia. In 2004 he took part in a debate with Professor of Biology
Lewis Wolpert, who described telepathy research as ‘pathological science’
and remarked that ‘an open mind is a very bad thing – everything falls out.’ As Sheldrake described his studies, he claims Wolpert sat with his back to the projector screen,
tapping his pencil, ‘looking bored
.’ When Sheldrake was
asked to speak at the 2006 Festival of Science, his presence was denounced
by Oxford Professor of Physical Chemistry Peter Atkins, who said: ‘there’s absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan’s fantasy.’ On a subsequent BBC Radio debate, Sheldrake asked Atkins if he had studied any of his work. Atkins said,
‘No, but I would be very suspicious of it.’
When Professor Richard Dawkins filmed Sheldrake for a segment in a documentary, the polemicist accused Sheldrake of being ‘prepared to believe almost anything.’ When asked if he’d actually read any of his evidence Sheldrake says that Dawkins replied, ‘I don’t want to discuss evidence.’ (Dawkins denies this. In an email, sent to me via an intermediary, he called this claim ‘outrageous and defamatory’ and insisted that he had read ‘several’ of Sheldrake’s papers.)

But perhaps the most damage has been caused by the tireless work of one man – a talented and famous speaker, author, lifelong conjuror, psychologist and adviser to the James Randi Educational Foundation. He is doggedly sceptical of all things paranormal. On national television he has successfully and amusingly debunked hauntings of castles and walkers on fire. His name is Professor Richard Wiseman.

‘Wiseman tried to replicate your experiments with staring, and with Jaytee the dog,’ I say to Sheldrake. ‘He’s convinced you’re wrong.’

‘Wiseman’s a stage magician. A conjuror. A skilled deceiver,’ he replies. ‘He’s a huge asset to the materialist movement. He’s their hitman.’

The first paragraph of Wiseman’s bestseller
Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There
recounts what happened when he studied the psychic dog. ‘As I gazed deep into the eyes of Jaytee, several thoughts passed through my mind. Was this cute little terrier really psychic? If not, how had he managed to make headlines across the world? At that precise moment, Jaytee gave a small cough, leaned forward and vomited on my shoes.’

‘To understand materialists like Wiseman,’ says Sheldrake, ‘one has to realise that they totally believe these things are impossible. If someone comes up with positive evidence, either the experiment is flawed or I’ve cheated. Those are the only options on the menu: foolish or fraudulent. I’ve been through this argument with Skeptics again and again. They go through their various objections and I show them how I’ve accounted for them all. And then they say, “Oh, well, there must be some other flaw.” I say, “Well, what is it?” and they say, “We haven’t thought of it yet, but there must be one.” The point is, you can’t win. No evidence will ever be good enough. That’s just one of the problems of doing research in this area. One has to deal with this level of arrogance and ignorance that purports to be objective, scientific and reasonable, but which is deeply unscientific and unreasonable.’

In 2006 Rupert Sheldrake was given a ‘Pigasus’ award
by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), for ‘the scientist who said or did the silliest thing’ during the previous year. ‘This man’s delusions increase as time goes by,’ they said, on announcing the prize, ‘and he comes up with sillier ideas every year.’ Like all practitioners of what he calls ‘woo woo’, Randi points to Sheldrake’s failure to apply for his ‘Million Dollar Challenge’ as evidence that he secretly knows that he is wrong. On his website,
Randi writes, somewhat cryptically:
‘Sheldrake is still clinging to some strange story he relates about a previous encounter with me, a tale that fails to make its point. He’ll depend upon this to avoid becoming involved with any testing process related to the Million Dollar Challenge, of course. I find it not at all strange that these folks fear involvement with the JREF more than they fear Hell itself!’

‘Randi is a liar,’ says Sheldrake. ‘He’s a man of very doubtful character indeed – a rude, aggressive, dogmatic Skeptic who knows nothing
about science. He’s taken seriously by people like Dawkins – they worship him – because they see themselves as engaged in a war against unreason and religion. And if you’re in a war, you want to have thugs on your side.’

People such as Dawkins, Randi and Wiseman are suffering, says Sheldrake, from an acute sensitivity to doubt. ‘Fundamentalists, whether religious, materialist or atheist, are people who need certainty,’ he says. ‘They’re not prepared to live in a place with doubts. It’s very similar to creationism. Some creationists will look at scientific evidence but only so that they can try and find some flaw. That’s also true of the denialists about psychic phenomena.’