Rupert Sheldrake has found statistical evidence that there is a psychic connection between all members of every species that evolves and grows.

Ever have the feeling that you know you’re being watched? Or that feeling when you’re thinking about someone right before they call you? These feelings are sometimes thought to be merely coincidental or just happenstance. But the fact that these are common incidences and something that everyone can relate to, leaves open the possibility that there could be something metaphysical happening. Rupert Sheldrake says he believes that these occurrences are psychic phenomena that is evidence of an interconnected consciousness between all humans and he’s tested this theory with statistical significance.

Sheldrake is most famous for a concept called morphic resonance, a theory that revolves around psychic capability, which he believes is innate in humans and animals. Morphic resonance essentially states that processes and behavior in nature, particularly learned behavior, can be inherited and transmitted psychically. This theory has made him a pariah in the scientific community that has labelled him a heretic for entertaining such a nebulous concept. Nevertheless, he embraces the criticism and continues to pursue his research.

Telephone Telepathy

Among Sheldrake’s experiments to develop his theory of psychic connectedness, one consisted of testing subjects on whether they would be able to accurately predict who is calling them on the phone. The test was run with two groups of callers – one group who were familiar to the subject and one group who were complete strangers. The two groups were tested against each other to see if there was a notable link between people with an emotional connection.

Sheldrake’s subjects in each test group consisted of four callers, providing for a one-in-four probabilty. In the group that consisted of callers with a strong personal connection to the subject, out of 332 trials among 37 participants, there was a 53 percent success rate in guessing who was calling. Obviously, this is significantly better than mere chance. In the group where there was no familiarity, the subject predicted callers with a 25 percent likelihood – the same as chance.

Sheldrake did notice an area of the experiment that could have been flawed in that callers were given a schedule of when they would be calling and could subsequently divulge when they’d be contacting the subject next. But when he looked at the results and controlled for this, he found no spikes in successful guessing. Does this hint at a psychic connection between people with a personal bond?

Sheldrake took the experiment a step further and decided to ask his subjects to give their level of confidence that they would be right each time they took a call. They could either say they felt confident, not confident or just giving a guess. With this factor, results changed dramatically. When subjects felt confident, they responded correctly 82 percent of the time. When they were not confident they were correct 35 percent of the time and when they were just guessing, well, they basically hit the chance likelihood of one in four.

An interesting factor in the experiment is that the subjects were sometimes thousands of miles away from a caller. Sheldrake found similar results when conducting tests regarding premonitions with reception of email and text messages. He also says he believes that while there could have been numerous factors skewing the results, which he attempted to control for or correct, intuition could have affected subjects who were told how they were doing. Overthinking can inhibit intuition and therefore in a scenario where a subject wasn’t being tested or didn’t know they were being tested, they would have possibly had a greater likelihood of knowing who was calling.

Psychic Animals

Sheldrake has conducted similar experiments testing the psychic intuition of dogs and whether they know when their owner is coming home – another phenomenon that many people have probably experienced when their pup exhibits spontaneous bouts of anxiety. During one experiment to test this hypothesis, Sheldrake found that a dog went to the window looking for its owner four percent of the time she was out of the house, not intending to come home. However, once she started to make her way back home, the dog was at the window 55 percent of the time.

Sheldrake’s original theory of morphic resonance came from an experiment involving mice. The mice were put through a water maze and progressively learned how to escape quicker. Their progeny, when put in the same maze, learned how to escape in fewer trials and subsequently, mice on the other side of the world learned how to escape quicker. The experiment showed evidence that a group of mice could genetically pass down learned behavior and that this behavior could also be transmitted psychically throughout an entire species; almost as if it was being uploaded to the cloud and individual members could collectively download it. This is one premise of Sheldrake’s theory and he says he believes it to be inherent in all species.

A commonly known theory that sounds similar to Sheldrake’s is the 100^th monkey theory. It was anecdotal evidence of psychic learning among monkeys on different islands in the Pacific Ocean. Monkeys on one island purportedly learned behavior from monkeys on another island, once the 100^th monkey learned the behavior. Sheldrake says this scenario is evidence of morphic resonance, but it is based on an idea of having to reach a critical threshold. He says he sees the process as more gradual; the greater the number of individuals learn, the easier a task becomes for the species.

Sheldrake’s theory has some basis in Carl Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious. Jung’s collective unconscious is essentially a foundation of archetypes and psychological motifs that are inherent in humans. It differs from our personal psyches and complexes that are developed individually. Jung even referred to it as a, “psychic system of a collective, universal and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.” Sheldrake expanded on this theory, by postulating that this collective psychic system is growing and learning in real time. Is there evidence that as a species we are getting collectively smarter and that the collective consciousness is evolving? Or is technology and the internet a physical extension of what Sheldrake is describing?

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