The Most Controversial Biologist Alive Breaks Down Telepathy

Host Jesse Michels opens by asking what remains distinctive or sacred about an individual human as AI increasingly appears to pass the Turing test and larger organizing systems may influence smaller ones. Rupert Sheldrake answers that AI is modeled on the brain as a computer, so it can perform computational and “left-brain” tasks but cannot do embodied work. He recalls being stabbed in the leg by a paranoid schizophrenic while giving a speech: AI might coordinate an ambulance, but it could not carry him to it, treat the injury, or replace the surgeon who helped him. Similarly, AI might diagnose a plumbing failure but cannot physically repair the pipes. Sheldrake adds that the computer model also excludes minds extending beyond brains through fields, including telepathy and mystical or spiritual experience. He proposes that a more demanding successor to the Turing test might involve telepathy, noting that Alan Turing himself was interested in ESP and survival after bodily death. Jesse agrees that the question is difficult to discuss within conventional science, because skepticism may itself affect the sort of experiments being proposed.

Sheldrake says telepathy is usually a weak effect in laboratory settings because it occurs most naturally under emotionally charged conditions. He is studying nursing mothers who experience milk let-down or breast tingling when their distant babies become distressed, even outside normal feeding times. In his account, filming mothers and babies can test whether the physical response coincides with the baby’s distress, although mothers generally should not be asked to wake babies randomly for controlled trials. He considers dogs and cats better experimental subjects. In studies of dogs that know when their owners are returning, owners came home at randomized times in unfamiliar vehicles, while cameras recorded the dogs and people at home were kept unaware. Sheldrake says the dogs repeatedly began waiting at the door or window at highly significant rates; one example involved the dog JT going to the window 11 seconds after the owner’s distant departure. He criticizes skeptic Michael Shermer for dismissing the research without reading the published papers and saying only that his own dog did not behave this way. Sheldrake argues that telepathy generally operates between emotionally bonded people or animals, which explains why it is poorly suited to commercial spying or making money. He says it is common among parents and children, lovers, close friends, and animal groups such as wolf packs.

Sheldrake argues that Western education trains people to dismiss experiences that may be ordinary human abilities. He cites surveys in which roughly 85% of people report thinking of someone just before that person calls, and about 95% report sensing when they are being stared at from behind. He contrasts the conventional “intromission” model—light enters the eyes, the brain processes it, and an internal image is generated—with “extramission,” the older view that the mind projects an image or influence outward toward the object being seen. In his account, the image of Jesse is in Sheldrake’s mind but located where Jesse actually is, rather than being a picture inside the skull. Studies of people who feel watched, he says, show that they turn precisely toward the observer rather than merely feeling vague unease. Jesse asks what could physically leave the eyes. Sheldrake says he does not know, but points to the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, associated with John Cramer and developed by Ruth Kastner. In that model, a photon absorbed by the eye is accompanied by a reverse process—a “handshake across space and time”—that resonates back toward the source. Sheldrake speculates that a field around the body could detect such influence: the heart’s electromagnetic field is stronger than the brain’s and can be measured from several feet away. However, randomized experiments using computer cameras found that most people could not tell when someone was looking at them through Zoom or FaceTime, though Sheldrake leaves open the possibility that unusually skilled people could train the ability.

The conversation turns to whether ordinary electromagnetism can explain telepathy, animal navigation, biological development, and Michael Levin’s work on bioelectric fields. Sheldrake says bioelectric fields are real and may serve as an interface, but he does not think they alone contain the information needed to shape an organism. He proposes “morphic fields”—fields of form, from the Greek root morphē—as an additional category of field that shapes leaves, flowers, organisms, self-organizing systems, and perhaps even quantum matter structures. These fields would possess memory through “morphic resonance,” meaning similar forms influence one another across space and time. Sheldrake distinguishes morphic fields from the historical ether. The ether was imagined as a subtle material through which other fields moved, whereas morphic fields would themselves be structures in space with formative effects. Jesse presses him on whether this simply adds a higher-level field to physics, and Sheldrake answers that physics already recognizes different fields associated with the same particle, such as an electron’s electric field and quantum matter field, without offering a fully clear account of how they relate. He says his broader disagreement with materialist science is that it omits formative fields, extended perception, telepathy, and consciousness, and that unexplained anomalies may be clues rather than evidence that the phenomena are impossible.

Sheldrake uses Faraday’s conception of fields to challenge the assumption that all causation requires energetic pushing or pulling. A gravitational field can cause a meteor to fall toward Earth without the field expending energy, and a magnet can hold paper to a refrigerator without becoming weaker. He connects this to Aristotle’s four causes: material cause, efficient or moving cause, formal cause, and final cause. The mechanistic revolution retained matter and energy but largely discarded formal and final causes, leaving science poorly equipped to explain how biological forms arise. He demonstrates the distinction with a Galton board. Without magnets, steel balls bounce left or right over pegs and produce a normal distribution curve. Placing magnets between the pegs changes the distribution by biasing the balls, yet the magnets do not lose energy. Sheldrake presents this as a simple model of a field shaping an otherwise random process. He suggests morphic fields could similarly bias quantum, biological, or behavioral randomness without acting through brute-force energy. Jesse links this idea to David Bohm’s pilot-wave interpretation, which treats quantum events as guided by an invisible potential wave rather than being wholly random. Sheldrake says Bohm’s “implicate order” and his own morphic resonance both imply that present events may be shaped by organizing patterns accumulated from the past.

Sheldrake explains morphic resonance as the hypothesis that nature’s regularities are habits rather than immutable laws fixed at the Big Bang. An oak seedling would tune into the form of past oaks, and a spider does not need schooling to spin a web because it resonates with the experience of previous spiders. He discusses a rat water-maze experiment that began at Harvard: rats learned to escape through the dim exit rather than receive an electric shock. The first generation needed about 250 trials, but after 20 or 30 generations the number fell to about 25. Experiments at Edinburgh and Melbourne used similar rats and mazes. Melbourne included controls descended from parents that had never been trained; both trained-line and control-line rats improved, suggesting the result was not simply genetic or epigenetic inheritance. Sheldrake interprets this as morphic resonance. He also points to conditioned-fear experiments in which male mice trained to fear acetophenone appeared to pass the fear to offspring and grandchildren, though conventional researchers attribute this to molecular epigenetic changes in sperm. He says Darwin himself believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and might have accepted morphic resonance. Jesse raises examples such as faster crystal growth, crossword-solving improvements, and the “Bannister effect,” in which many runners broke the four-minute mile soon after Roger Bannister did in 1952. Sheldrake rejects a single central knowledge server, preferring direct resonance between similar systems across space and time.

Sheldrake says his current work examines people who wake shortly before an alarm. He doubts this is simply an evolved biological clock, since ancestral humans did not need to wake at precisely 4:30 a.m. for a flight. He suspects presentiment: the mind may respond to an emotionally arousing future event. He is surveying firefighters, paramedics, and emergency responders, many of whom report waking seconds before an unpredictable station alarm. He also cites precognitive dreams, including dreams associated with the September 11 attacks, while emphasizing that emotionally significant events produce the strongest effects. He says synchronicities may have different causes. Thinking of someone who then calls may be telepathy; thinking of an absent acquaintance and encountering that person moments later may be precognition, which he calls “pro-apentesia”; and more meaningful coincidences may involve a higher organizing pattern or morphic field. Sheldrake argues that thermodynamic entropy does not explain the increasing complexity of atoms, stars, life, and culture, because thermodynamics mainly describes heat and energy flows rather than the emergence of form. He proposes an app through which people could report unusual animal behavior, allowing clusters to be compared with later earthquakes. He says Chinese authorities used animal behavior to predict earthquakes in the 1970s, while Western scientists often dismiss the evidence as folklore. A global reporting map could test the idea cheaply without relying on unverified anecdotes.

Sheldrake entertains the possibility that organized plasma structures such as the Sun and stars are conscious, distinguishing them from random plasma. He discusses the “electric universe” view that galaxies may be organized primarily by electric currents and magnetic fields rather than gravity, noting that dark matter remains an undetected explanation for gravitational anomalies. He recalls Fred Hoyle’s science-fiction novel The Black Cloud, in which scientists discover an intelligent plasma cloud, and connects it to Robert Temple’s ideas about plasma, long-delayed echoes, ball lightning, and the possibility that Moses’s burning bush was a plasmoid. Sheldrake says his book The Physics of Angels examined Christian traditions in which angels move from place to place with no elapsed time from their own perspective but finite time to an observer, somewhat like photons. He regards angels as potentially real beings in an imaginal realm, not merely private fantasies, and says “bad angels” resemble the temptations now amplified by advertising. On AI, Sheldrake says it is useful for finding and combining existing literature but has generated an avalanche of speculative theories about morphic resonance without supplying decisive experiments. He expects personal experience or practical applications—such as animal earthquake warnings or presentiment-based trading—to change minds more than peer-reviewed statistical arguments. He closes by recommending gratitude and saying grace before meals. Studies cited in the conversation associate gratitude with greater happiness and popularity; Sheldrake practices it daily and says spiritual practices can remove barriers to experiencing God’s presence, although that experience ultimately depends on grace.