The Hindu : Sheldrake plans Kerala-based study on telepathy

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 22, 2004

Kerala

Kerala

Sheldrake plans Kerala-based study on telepathy

By K. Santhosh

THRISSUR, FEB. 21. The internationally-renowned scientist and writer, Rupert Sheldrake, plans to do a study on telepathy, based in Kerala.

The first phase of the project, funded by an American agency, will be done in and around Thrissur.

Mr. Sheldrake is in the State to film `Pet powers', a TV series for Animal Planet, based on his research on animal behaviour.

The series portrays, among other things, the relationship between the mahout, Vezhakkad Narayanan Nair, and elephants. Perumbavoor Kannan, an elephant owned by the actor, Jayaram, was hired for the shooting.

According to the coordinator of the project, P. R. Suresh, the shooting was held in different parts of Painkulam and Koottanad.

``For generations, the men in Mr. Narayanan Nair's family have been mahouts. The way he communicated with the elephants was amazing,'' Mr. Sheldrake says.

The scientist claims that animals share ``a kind of telepathic bond with their masters''.

``About half of the dogs, and one in three cats seem to know when a member of the household is coming home. The figures are the result of

detailed research in England and the U.S. I have found by experiment that the phenomenon cannot be explained by routine timing, familiar sounds, or clues given by people at home. I attribute it to a morphic field connecting pet to owner, through which the owner's intentions to come home are transmitted to the pet,'' Mr. Sheldrake says.

His works include the best-selling, `Seven Experiments That Could Change the World' (1994), which was voted the Book of the Year by the British Institute for Social Inventions, `Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals', which won the British Scientific and Medical Network Book of the Year Award, and `The Sense of being Stared at, and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind' (2003).

Mr. Sheldrake studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow.

He took a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967 and was a Fellow of the Clare College, where he was the director of studies in Biochemistry and Cell Biology till 1973.

As a Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied the development of plants and the ageing of cells, at Cambridge.

Between 1974 and 1978, he was principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics

(ICRISAT) in Hyderabad. He worked on the physiology of tropical legume crops, and was consultant physiologist at the Institute till 1985. ``I am familiar with life in India. It's like a second home to me," he says.

He lived for a year and a half at the Indian ashram of Fr. Bede Griffiths, where he wrote 'A New Science of Life' (1981).

Mr. Sheldrake is also the author of `The Presence of the Past' (1988), `The Rebirth of Nature' (1990), `Trialogues at the Edge of the West with Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna', (1992), `The Evolutionary Mind' (1998) and `Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality (co-authored with Matthew Fox; 1996) and `The Physics of Angels' (1996).

Mr. Sheldrake claims that telepathy exists.

``In January, I took part in a public debate on telepathy at the Royal Society of Arts in London. My opponent was Prof. Lewis Wolpert, a pillar of the science establishment. He claimed that telepathy did not exist, but provided no evidence. About 80 per cent of the audience disagreed, saying they had experienced telepathy, particularly in relation to phone calls. They cited instances when they were called up by people they had thought about.

Telepathy implies that we are connected with the people and animals we feel close to,'' Mr. Sheldrake says.

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