The Hindu Business Line : Listening to Rupert Sheldrake

How would you react if I told you that I saw a film last week featuring a parrot with a vocabulary of 1,200 English words, and that it could sense a picture that its owner, a young woman, was looking at in a different room in the house, invisible to the parrot? And that it could, at times, see the owner's dreams while she slept?

Yes, I know, you would probably say I was dreaming, or had had something disagreeable to drink or smoke. Well, hold on to your seats, this was no magic show, but part of a serious talk describing scientific experiments by world-renowned Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake. These were examples of how the mind of human beings as well as animals stretched far beyond what we conventionally understand as the brain.

Such a mind, according to Sheldrake, was much more than the walnut-like mass in our school biology textbooks, with various parts for different functions, that stores what we call `memory'.

This is but a small sample of the many startlingly counter-intuitive findings discussed by this lively and articulate scientist, who is a leader in evolutionary biology, during his two talks last week in Chennai (more on www.sheldrake.org if you wish).

Morphogenesis

Sheldrake is no stranger to India, having spent nearly ten years of his life doing field work on the biology of tropical crops in Hyderabad, and speaks with great affection and regard for the country. He was, of course, not surprised that many of his heretical ideas which broke new ground and challenged the mechanistic and materialistic foundations of Western science had a natural appeal to the Indian intellect.

According to his seminal theory, called morphogenesis or `formative causation' all shapes and forms that are commonly shared by a species endow them with a shared memory which enables them to communicate with other members of the same species. Thus, in a sense, Darwinian evolution is about the origin of shared habits and shapes (as much as species defined by them).

This is a testable theory, which has been proved after rigorous controlled experiments, yet sometimes evokes scepticism, and even ridicule, from mainstream scientists. The key to understanding Sheldrake's earth-shaking ideas is a holistic vision, not broken up by the artificial walls of disciplines of knowledge. This is especially valid in the natural sciences because the human being or animal is an organic whole, a complete system.

To consider it as an aggregation of parts, as Western scientific tradition has done for nearly three centuries, since the Enlightenment, is to reduce it to an analogy of a machine. This is why modern medicine, which splits itself increasingly into narrow specialisations and seldom looks at the total human being, fails in appreciating some of the unintended consequences of essentially specialist-driven and machine-oriented treatments.

This paradigm also leads to the notion of factory farms and genetic engineering and all its attendant effects. However, a way of looking at the human being or animal as a whole organism itself is a more truly scientific understanding, in keeping with its real nature as a vast interconnected network. But alas, this is unpopular as of now.

Remarkable insights

To return to the startling example of the parrot, Sheldrake postulates that even our vision and thinking (as intention) form a field of influence, as it were, that reaches out and touches the things we look at or even contemplate. This also explains the experience so many of us have had of knowing when someone is looking at us, even when our backs are turned to them; and receiving a phone call from a friend or close relation just when we ourselves want to phone them or are thinking of them.

Sheldrake's popular books Dogs that know when their owners are coming home and The sense of being stared at, and other aspects of the Extended Mind demonstrate in the very titles the author's remarkable insights and groundbreaking theories which, according to one commentator, might well confer on him a place alongside Darwin and Einstein someday.

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