For many years animal trainers, pet owners and naturalists have reported various kinds of perceptiveness in animals that suggest the existence of psychic powers. Surprisingly little research has been done on these phenomena. Biologists have been inhibited by the taboo against "the paranormal", and psychical researchers and parapsychologists have (with few exceptions) confined their attention to human beings.
According to random household surveys in England and the United States, many pet owners believe their animals are sometimes telepathic with them. An average of 48 per cent of dog owners and 33 per cent of cat owners said that their pets responded to their thoughts or silent commands. Many horse trainers and riders believe that their horse can pick up their intentions telepathically.
Some companion animals even seem able to tell when a particular person is on the telephone before the receiver has been picked up. For example, when the telephone rang in the household of a noted professor at the University of California at Berkeley, his wife knew when her husband was on the other end of the line because Whiskins, their silver tabby cat, rushed to the telephone and pawed at the receiver. "Many times he succeeds in taking it off the hook and makes appreciative meows that are clearly audible to my husband at the other end", she said. "If someone else telephones, Whiskins takes no notice." The cat responded even when he telephoned home from field trips in Africa or South America.
Since 1994, with the help of hundreds of animal trainers, shepherds, blind people with guide dogs, veterinarians and pet owners, I have been investigating some of these unexplained powers of animals. There are three major categories of seemingly mysterious perceptiveness: namely telepathy, the sense of direction and premonition.
Animal telepathy
The commonest kinds of seemingly telepathic response are the anticipation by dogs and cats of their owners coming home; the anticipation of owners going away; the anticipation of being fed; cats disappearing when their owners intend to take them to the vet; dogs knowing when their owners are planning to take them for a walk; and animals that get excited when their owner is on the telephone, even before the telephone has been answered.
As skeptics rightly point out, some of these responses could be explained in terms of routine expectations, subtle sensory cues, chance coincidence and selective memory, or put down to the imaginations of doting pet owners. These are reasonable hypotheses, but they should not be accepted in the absence of any evidence. To test these possibilities, it is necessary to do experiments.
The Unexplained Powers of Animals
Rupert Sheldrake Ph.D.
The pets typically wait at a door, window or gate. In random household surveys in Britain and America, an average of 51 per cent of dog owners and 30 per cent of cat owners said they had noticed such anticipatory behavior. The dog I investigated in most detail was a terrier called Jaytee, who belonged to Pam Smart, in Ramsbottom, near Manchester, England. Pam adopted Jaytee from Manchester Dogs' Home in 1989 when he was still a puppy, and soon formed a close bond with him.
In 1991, when Pam was working as a secretary at a school in Manchester, she left Jaytee with her parents, who noticed that the dog went to the French window almost every weekday at about 4:30 pm, around the time she set off, and waited there until she arrived some 45 minutes later. She worked routine office hours, so the family assumed that Jaytee's behavior depended on some kind of time sense.
Pam was laid off 1993 and was subsequently unemployed, no longer tied to any regular pattern of activity. Her parents did not usually know when she would be coming home, but Jaytee still anticipated her return.
In 1994 Pam read an article about my research and volunteered to take part. In more than 100 experiments, we videotaped the area by the window where Jaytee waited during Pam's absences, providing a continuous, time-coded record of his behavior which was scored "blind" by a third party who did not know the details of the experiments. To check that Jaytee was not reacting to the sound of Pam's car or other familiar vehicles, we investigated whether he still anticipated her arrival when she travelled by unusual means: by bicycle, by train and by taxi. He did.
We also carried out experiments in which Pam set off at times selected at random after she had left home, communicated to her by means of a telephone pager. In these experiments, Jaytee still started waiting at the window around the time Pam set off, even though no one at home knew when she would be coming. The odds against this being a chance effect were more than 100,000 to one. Jaytee behaved in a very similar way when he was tested repeatedly by skeptics anxious to debunk his abilities.
The evidence indicates that Jaytee was reacting to Pam's intention to come home even when she was many miles away. Telepathy seems the only hypothesis that can account for the facts. All our published papers on Jaytee, and on another return-anticipating dog, Kane, can be found on my web site.
Currently, Alex Tsakiris is replicating this research with dogs in the US. Details of his investigations are at Skeptiko.
Other kinds of animal telepathy can also be investigated experimentally, for example the apparent ability of dogs to know when they are going to be taken for walks. In these experiments the dogs are kept in a separate room or outbuilding and videotaped continuously. Meanwhile their owner, at a randomly selected time, thinks about taking them for a walk and then five minutes later does so. Our preliminary experiments have shown dogs exhibiting obvious excitement when their owner is thinking about taking them out, although they could not have known this by normal sensory means. They did not manifest such excitement at other times.
The most remarkable case of animal telepathy that I have encountered is with an African grey parrot, N’kisi, who has the largest vocabulary of any animal in the world, currently more than 1,400 words. N’kisi uses language in a meaningful way and speaks in sentences. His owner, Aimee Morgana, is primarily concerned with exploring his linguistic abilities, but noticed that he often responds to what she is thinking by saying out loud what her thoughts are. Aimee and I carried out a controlled tests with randomized photographs in sealed envelopes. In a series of videotaped trials, Aimee opened an envelope and silently looked at the picture for 2 minutes, while N’kisi, in another room, on another floor, was filmed. In many of the trials he said words corresponding to the image Aimee was looking at. This effect was highly significant statistically, and the data can be seen in details here.
There is much potential for further research on animal telepathy. And if domestic animals are telepathic with their human owners, then it seems very likely that animals are telepathic with each other, and that this may play an important part in the wild. Some naturalists have already suggested that the coordination of flocks of birds and herds of animals may involve something like telepathy, as may communication between members of a pack of wolves.
The sense of direction
Homing pigeons can find their way back to their loft over hundreds of miles of unfamiliar terrain. Migrating European swallows travel thousands of miles to their feeding grounds in Africa, and in the spring return to their native place, even to the very same building where they nested before. Some dogs, cats, horses and other domesticated animals also have a good sense of direction and can make their way home from unfamiliar places many miles away.
Most research on animal navigation has been carried out with homing pigeons, and this research over many decades has served only to deepen the problem of understanding their direction-finding ability. Navigation is goal-directed, and implies that the animals know where their home is even when they are in an unfamiliar place, and have to cross unfamiliar terrain.
Pigeons do not know their way home by remembering the twists and turns of the outward journey, because birds taken in closed vans by devious routes find their way home perfectly well, as do birds that have been anaesthetized on the outward journey, or transported in rotating drums. They do not navigate by the sun, because pigeons can home on cloudy days and can even be trained to navigate at night. However, they may use the sun as a simple compass to keep their bearings. Although they use landmarks in familiar terrain, they can home from unfamiliar places hundreds of kilometres from their home, where no familiar landmarks are visible. They cannot smell their home from hundreds of miles away, especially when it is downwind, although smell may play a part in their homing ability when they are close to familiar territory. Pigeons deprived of their sense of smell by researchers were still able to find their homes.
Some biologists hope that the homing of pigeons might turn out to be explicable in terms of a magnetic sense. But even if pigeons have a compass-sense, this could not explain their ability to navigate. If you were taken blindfold to an unknown destination and given a compass, you would know where north was, but not the direction of your home.
The failure of conventional attempts to explain pigeon homing and many other kinds of animal navigation implies the existence of a sense of direction as yet unrecognized by institutional science. This could have major implications for the understanding of animal migrations, and would shed light on the human sense of direction, much better developed in traditional peoples, such as the bushmen of the Kalahari or Polynesian navigators, than in modern urban people.
Premonitions
Very little research has been done on animal premonitions, even in the case of earthquakes and tsunamis where such warnings could prove every useful.
Some forewarnings might be explicable in terms of physical clues, such as electrical changes before earthquakes and storms. Other premonitions are more mysterious, as in the case of animals that anticipated air raids during the Second World War long before they could have heard enemy planes approaching, or animals that become agitated before unforeseeable accidents. Here precognition or presentiment may be involved, implying either an influence passing backwards in time, or a blurring of the distinction between future, present and past.
All three types of perceptiveness—telepathy, the sense of direction and premonitions—seem better developed in non-human species like dogs than they are in people. We have much to learn from our companion animals about animal nature, and about our own.
Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D is the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, and lives in London. Much of his research on unexplained powers of animals and of people is summarized in his books Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, and The Sense of Being Stared At, and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind. His web site is www.sheldrake.org.
Reflections on Psi and Sheldrake's Morphogenetic Fields by Mark A. Schroll, Ph.D.
All my life (since my first psi experience at age six in 1964) I have sought to both personally and professionally understand the mystery of psi. In addition to my depth of inquiry into understanding the modus operandi of psi, the psychological or personality orientation of people who claim to experience psi has also been of interest to me. I will in future articles provide a more detailed account of my 1964 psi experience, its assessment and significance; whereas the focus of the present article is a reflection on the conceptual pathways and theoretical insights that have contributed to my overall understanding of psi.
Sheldrake's Morphogenetic Fields: A Concept That Is Still on the Fringes of Psi Research
Over the last three months I have been reflecting on the work of Rupert Sheldrake and Charles T. Tart. I first became aware of Sheldrake's work during a two-day conference on “Science and Mysticism: Exploring the New Realities,” September 29-30, 1984, held at the Harvard Science Center, Harvard University. Aside from Sheldrake this conference included David Bohm, Huston Smith, and Renee` Weber. Three months after this conference I wrote to Tart asking if he felt there was any relationship between his concept of mind/life, and what Sheldrake was calling morphogenetic fields or M-fields?
Tart replied to my letter on February 14, 1985, saying:
The conceptual framework sketched out in my States of Consciousness (1975) book also dovetails nicely with the emergent interactionist approach, although I didn't get specific about some aspects of it in that book. At the time I wrote it I didn't think the scientific community was ready to think about all aspects of consciousness. Yes, Sheldrake's ideas do fit in. His morphogenetic fields are a biologically sound way of talking about psi influences, and this terminology got attention where resistance might have automatically excluded material that talked about psi (Tart, 1985, February 14).
In addition to asking Tart about Sheldrake's ideas, I was also reminded of a marginal note I made (after reading Tart's paper) “Transpersonal Realities or Neurophysiological Illusions? Toward an Empirically Testable Dualism” (Tart, 1981), that prompted me to define consciousness as:
The immediacy of the continually emerging effort to establish an awareness of the reciprocal interaction taking place between the person, the environment, and the fundamental unifying principle bonding this relationship together at any given moment [which is always now--an endless process of unfolding and enfolding] (Schroll 2001) (Schroll: 57, 2005).
The “person” and “environment” are fairly self-evident terms that do not require (I hope) any additional definition, yet what is it that I mean by the “fundamental unifying principle?”
In a letter to Sheldrake dated February 8, 1989, I wrote:
Thank you for your kind letter of encouragement of my article, “Scientific Controversies Shaping the Worldview of the 21st Century,” dated Nov. 8, 1988. I completed my review of your book The Presence of the Past (1988), and found particularly interesting your concept of morphic fields (pp. 106-114, 173, 181, 201, 205, 236, and 302), as it reminded me of a similar “flash of insight” I had one afternoon in the spring of 1981, after hearing a lecture on the mind/body problem [by Dirk W. Mosig]. More specifically, my thoughts were directed to the process of perception, which I came to see as an act of forming together larger and larger patterns of associated “fields of meaning.” These “fields of meaning” constitute the center of our field of consciousness, whose integration forms the identity and continuity of our self-structure.
These “fields of meaning” can also be represented as “fields of information,” whose nested hierarchical configuration make up the whole of reality. The predicament we face as a human species is, of course, the difficulty of becoming consciousness and remaining conscious of these various fields of meaning. Undoubtedly if we could remain “fully conscious” of reality, all of us would be living the life of the sage or mystic.
Ram Dass reminded us about this in his talk, “Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path,” (1988), that neuroses' are an inescapable aspect of human existence. However, depending on the degree to which the person develops their ability to integrate the various hierarchical configurations of these nested fields of meaning, we can learn to become more conscious of how they manifest themselves in our behavior. All this helps and contributes to beginning the process of freeing ourselves from becoming attached to our daily self deceptions, as we learn to become aware of how neuroses become part of life's drama--thereby teaching us how to let go as they pass through our field of consciousness.
Moreover by employing your concept of morphic fields, in conjunction with [David] Bohm's physics, the existence (if you will)—of “chreodes of meaningful habitualized patterns of behavior” are more easily postulated—than when discussing this process merely in terms of the person learning to become increasingly more conscious by tuning into the collective unconscious (memory) of the species as a whole (Schroll, 1989, February 8).
A similar line of thought was raised in a conversation between Bohm and Renee Weber:
"Bohm: It's also very subtle levels of being, within the implicate order, which may not even be located in the body, in the sense that it may be affected, rather as Sheldrake is suggesting, by fields which are not local.
Weber: These fields affect us and we affect them; it's a mutual interpretation and exchange.
Bohm: Yes.
Weber: Are you proposing something like a meaning field?
Bohm: Yes, that's exactly it. You could say (and Sheldrake seems to agree with this) that the morphogenetic field or a field of active meaning--meaning in the signasomatic and somasignificant sense [is representative of this way of knowing"] (Bohm & Weber: 444, 1987).
Today, 21 years after I wrote these thoughts to Sheldrake, and 25 years since Tart and I first commented on the contribution of M-fields to our understanding of psi, the use of this concept is still rare. This includes the recent “Clever Beasts and Faithful Pets: A Critical Review of Animal Psi Research” by Diane Dutton and Carl Williams (2009). Instead of mentioning and discussing Sheldrake's concept of M-fields, they talk around it or give us partial clues like saying in their abstract: “. . . we argue that the evidence suggests that animal psi may function as an expression of relationship or 'resonance' between individuals” (Dutton & Williams: 43, 2009).
Moreover Dutton and Williams fail to repeat even this partial reference to Sheldrake's conceptual framework with their use of the word “resonance” in the body of their paper, referring instead to: “. . . the interpretive framework underlying much of this work is a model of psi as the anomalous transfer of information not obtainable by normal sensory means” (Dutton & Williams: 51, 2009).
It would have been my suggestion in the preparation of this article that after referring to “resonance” in their abstract there should have been a reference note that included a brief discussion and definition of Sheldrake's concept of M-fields and morphic resonance (See Note#1) We should be thankful at least that references to “nonlocal information” are starting to appear: “Radin (2002) has suggested that the ability of animals to track their owners' whereabouts may be due to a psi-mediated ability to process nonlocal orientation information” (Dutton & Williams: 61, 2009).
Likewise there is a glimmer of hope that Sheldrake's ideas too are finding increased acceptance, which is indicated by David Luke's review of Ornella Corazza's book Near-Death Experiences: Exploring the Mind-Body Connection (2008). Luke points out:
. . . in a rather zen manner, the definitions of concepts such as “dependent origination,” basho (literally “place”) and the “logic of place” became too minimalist and abstract, leaving me feeling somewhat disoriented. . . . Nevertheless, the connection to fields of consciousness brought me back to familiar ground once again when Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields were discussed” (Luke: 176, 2009).
I would also welcome seeing more of Ornella Corazza's work on NDE's and the use of Sheldrake's work to explain them, as Luke points out: “I get the feeling that this slim book has been rather too heavily edited and that the missing pieces of the jigsaw probably remain on the publisher's editing desk” (Luke: 180, 2009). We can only hope that as more scholars like Corazza and Luke continue to refer to Sheldrake's ideas, consciousness studies will begin to embrace this much needed conceptual language.
Note
1. For a brief discussion of Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields or M-fields concept see (Schroll, 2009). On the other hand, Sheldrake's concept of morphic resonance can be understood as follows:
Sheldrake proposes that M-fields are built up like habits; that is, M-fields are built up through a repetition of form. Such repetition can be built up at the physical-chemical level, affecting the structural development of atoms, genes, cells, etc. M-fields can also be built up through the repetition of behavior, demonstrated by the maze learning ability of McDougall's and Agar's rats. (Agar, et al, 1954) Once an M-field is built up through repetition, all forms of similar origin can “tune in” to this field through the process of morphic resonance. Morphic resonance works on the same basis as physical resonance. This invarient translation of an energy field into a physical system is the model Sheldrake uses to explain morphic resonance. [It needs to be pointed out, however, that M-fields and morphic resonance's modus operandi is producing its influence at a level of reality that is different from the use of signal transmission associated with the electromagnetic spectrum. The briefest and yet most conceptually clear way of summing up the concept of M-fields and morphic resonance is this]. . . . Besides referring to M-fields as “habits”, Sheldrake has called M-fields a kind of memory – a sort of species specific memory transcending the limitations of space-and-time and in fact operating non-locally according to the non-locality principle” (Schroll: 248, 1987). (See also Schroll, in press, for a more detailed discussion of M-fields and nonlocality).
References
Agar, W. E., Drummond, F. H., Tiegs, O.W. and Gunson, M. M. (1954). Fourth (final) report on a test of McDougall's Lamarckian experiment on the training of rats. Journal of Experimental Biology, 31, 307-321.
Bohm, D. & Weber, R. (1987). Meaning as Being in the Implicate Order Philosophy of David Bohm: A Conversation. In Quantum Implications: Essays in Honor of David Bohm. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 436-450, 1987.
Dutton, D. & Williams, C. (2009). Clever Beasts and Faithful Pets: A Critical Review of Animals Psi Research. Journal of Parapsychology, 73, Spring/Fall, 43-68.
Luke, D. (2009). Review of Near-Death Experiences: Exploring the Mind-Body Connection (2008) by Ornella Corazza. Journal of Parapsychology, 73 (Spring/Fall), 175-180.
Radin, D. (2002). A dog that seems to know when the owner is coming home: Effect of environmental variables. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 16, 579-582.
Ram Dass (1988, October 10). Promises and pitfalls of the spiritual path. Keynote presentation at the 1988 International Transpersonal Psychology confernce, El Rancho Tropicanna Hotel, Santa Rosa, California.
Schroll, M. A. (1987). Scientific controversies shaping the worldview of the 21st century. In Reports of the 11th International Wittgenstein-Symposium: Recent Developments in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. P. Weingartner & G. Schurz (Eds.), Pp. 244-252. Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky.
Schroll, M. A. (2001, December 2). Theory vs application: The positive and negative implications. Invited presentation Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Washington, DC.
Schroll, M. A. (2005). Toward a physical theory of the source of religion. Anthropology of Consciousness, 16 (1), 56-69.
Schroll, M. A. (2009). Editorial overview: A glimpse of science history and its consequences on psi research. Rhine Online, 1 (4), 2-3.
Schroll, M. A. (In press/2010). The physics of psi: An interview with Stanley Krippner. Transpersonal Psychology Review, 14 (1).
Sheldrake, R. (1988). The presence of the past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature. New York: Times Books/Random House.
Tart, C. T. (1975). States of consciousness. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, Inc.
Tart, C. T. (1981). Transpersonal realities or neurophysiological illusions?: Toward an empirically testable dualism. The Metaphors of Consciousness. R. S. Valle & R. von Eckartsberg (eds.), New York: Plenum Press, pp. 199-222.
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