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The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind
By Rupert Sheldrake
Crown, 362 pages, $38
Does your dog know when it is time for walkies, even if you are in a different room when you decide to take it out? Can you sometimes tell that you are being stared at, even when your kibitzer is some distance away and completely hidden? If so, Rupert Sheldrake (http://www.sheldrake.org) would like to hear from you. He has compiled a database of more than 5,000 such cases, and would be glad to learn of more.
Many of the stories from Sheldrake's database are recounted in The Sense of Being Stared At. In one, a family's cat woke up and started meowing pitifully just after their son had suffered serious injuries in a road accident. In another, a feeling of impending disaster persuaded a mother to move her baby's cot just seconds before a heavy curtain rail would have collapsed on it. A soldier's powerful sense of being watched in the Malayan jungle made him turn just as a stalking terrorist was raising his rifle. A horse prevented its owner from walking under a wattle tree that was about to fall down. And so on.
Sheldrake has been in this business for some time. Thirty years ago, he was an orthodox scientist researching the biochemistry of plant development in Cambridge, England. But he had doubts about the orthodox materialist theory of plant growth. Then, one of his professors introduced him to research on telepathy. He has never looked back. This is his fifth book since his original The Science of Life (1981), not to mention four other co-authored volumes. Precognition, telepathy and clairvoyance provide the regular themes. Sheldrake also has a theory about the genesis of these phenomena, hinging on the possibility of "morphic resonance" in "morphogenetic fields."
While he does not spare the arresting anecdotes, Sheldrake is enough of a scientist to know that you can't prove anything by stories alone. After all, a few surprising coincidences will always happen by chance, and no doubt some of these will find their way to www.sheldrake.org. So Sheldrake adds plenty of hard experimental data to back up his stories.
For example, he describes a series of experiments in which "lookers" stare at subjects at randomly determined times, and the subjects have to judge when they are being stared at. Sheldrake reports a consistent pattern of positive scores, even in trials where the subjects were blindfolded and separated from the lookers by closed windows. The subjects achieved a proportion of correct answers that would have been overwhelmingly unlikely if they had merely been guessing at random.
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