Documentary: Seven Experiments that could Change the World

these eyes have been staring at the woman at the next table for over a minute will she sense it will she turn around to find out where it's coming from this dog is always in the doorway and his owner gets home how does it know when to go there these pigeons out for a meal will soon try to get back to the loft will they be able to find it even though it was moved just after they flew the coop these common everyday experiences raised profound questions about the ties that bind all living creatures and about why science has been unable to explain these age-old mysteries seven experiments that could change the world they do it yourself guide to revolutionary science the quest and work of dr. Rupert Sheldrake science now gets blamed for many of the problems of the modern world whereas twenty or thirty years ago scientists were heroes who everyone admired they were the pioneers of the future but now science is seen not as the solution that is part of the problem and I think this has led to a decline in faith in mechanistic science and a search for other ways of looking at the world the official doctrine of life and nature the mechanistic theory says that we're machines that animals and plants are machines - and that we can't do anything a machine can't do of course we can do lots of things machines can't do so then they say well that's because we haven't yet made machines that are smart enough to do all these things but we're working on artificial intelligence and computers but the doctrine that everything we do or that happens in nature should fit in with the known laws of physics and chemistry is nothing but a dogma if something doesn't fit in with those laws then the response is to ignore it or to deny it dr. Rupert Sheldrake is a double first scholar at Clare College in Cambridge England he was also a Frank Knox fellow at Harvard in Cambridge Massachusetts back in Cambridge England he became a director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology at an unusually early age he was named a research fellow of Great Britain's Royal Society and has always been known as an advocate of unconventional thinking dr. Sheldrake has spent his life articulating his complex ideas in the familiar terms of every man's experience he believes that a curiosity about nature starts early and remembers how one particular experience shaped his future ideas when I was a child I suppose about five I saw a fence made out of willow snakes they were just dead pieces of wood but the amazing thing is that some of them had come to life these dead bits of matter had sprouted this made a deep impression on me it gave me a sense of the regenerative power of life and then I saw it underlay a lot of my interest in the powers of nature the spontaneous organizing abilities of the natural world and this really has dominated my thinking for as long as I can remember convinced the too many phenomena defy the explanations of conventional biology in 1981 dr. Sheldrake's speculated the existence of a force he called morphic resonance he suggested that the past forms and behaviors of organisms influence organisms in the present through direct connections across time and space the old guard scientific community greeted this with outrage the new scientists with hearty Cheers undaunted in 1988 Sheldrake raised the stakes by proposing that all natural systems from crystals to human society inherit a collective memory that influences their form and behavior in 1991 dr. Sheldrake made yet one more attempt to convince the scientific establishment with a treatise showing how the machine theory of the universe just didn't work he reminded modern scientists of ancient wisdom which treated the earth and its creatures as a living feeling thinking whole not just as a soul this machine could it be Sheldrake ask that we really are connected across time and space in ways that modern science can't explain Sir John Maddox editor of the highly respected journal Nature denounced Sheldrake in a dramatic editorial entitled a book for burning it's unnecessary to introduce magic into the explanation from physical and biological phenomena when in fact there's every likelihood that the continuation of such a research as it's now practiced will indeed fill all the gaps that Sheldrake draws attention to if she fell breaks is not a scientific theory Sheldrick is putting forward magic instead of science and that could be condemned but in exactly the language that the perps use to can condemn Galileo and for the same reasons it is heresy not all the scientific establishment however has been opposed to dr. Sheldrake's ideas michael Kenward of the New Scientist magazine questions nature's approach by asking does this mean that Nature has abandoned the scientific method whereby ideas are launched onto the world to be tested by the scientific community or are we to have trial by editorial having failed to entirely win over the scientific community dr. Sheldrake began making his case directly to the public I started on this kind of search because I was convinced that there was more to life than biology seemed to have dreamt of and it doesn't take much really to come to that conclusion I mean everyone in this room could probably come to the same conclusion but for me the conflict was sharpened by the fact that as a child I was very interested in animals and plants and they kept a lot of pets and was very keen on plants as well and it was precisely because I had such a strong connection with animals and plants that I wanted to do biology but the more biology I did school and university the more I was drawn into this kind of mechanistic way of thinking the first thing you did to study an animal or plant in the laboratory is to kill it and then cut it up and later on in more advanced stages then you got into vivisection and you had to develop a way of distancing yourself emotionally from what you were doing if you thought too hard about what you were doing you wouldn't do it you see but yet you had to do this to be qualified as a biologist is an initiation rite that forces this emotional distancing on biology students so I felt this conflict in a particularly strong way and it was actually it was homing pigeons that was the first thing that got me interested in trying to go beyond existing science because I then I thought about this idea of moving the home and saw that you could actually begin to deal with some of these mysteries by finding simple experiments it wasn't that everything had been tried and had failed it was that in most of these areas no one had even tried to investigate these things when I realized that then I saw that around around us all there are mysteries about which we all know but which science hadn't looked at and then I over the years have been thinking about ways of tackling them experimentally as a matter of necessity I tried to think of very cheap ways of doing these experiments where you could avoid the lack of funding problem by not needing it or needing very little so really it was that conflict between my own experience and the official doctrines of mechanistic biology that triggered off this question mean Sheldrake's book seven experiments that can change the world is a direct challenge to the scientific establishment its subtitle a do-it-yourself guide to revolutionary science makes it clear that Sheldrake wants to be sure that everyone especially non scientists join in the debate he likes to say that you can do most of the experiments in the book for less than $20 most of the experiments focus on familiar real-life events pets and their masters the sense of being stared at how pigeons home the variability of fundamental constants how termites organize the reality of phantom lives the effect of experimenters expectations will focus here on the first three which have generated the most excitement [Music] well many people have dogs or cats that seem to know when they're coming home and the question I'm asking is is this a paranormal phenomenon or not nobody knows because nobody has investigated it's been totally ignored by scientists even though thousands of scientists must have dogs or cats that know when they're coming home from the laboratory I mean this is a common phenomenon apparently so mm-hmm I'm really asking the question is it a paranormal phenomenon or not now if it's not a paranormal phenomenon then you should be able to explain it in terms of familiar sounds or smells or the dog responding to a person at home knowing when the person's coming so the test the real experiment here is to come home at an unexpected time and to come home in an unusual way so that the dog or cat can't learn anything from the people at home it can't learn anything from routine expectation and it can't smell or hear a familiar car because the person's not coming in a familiar car or by any familiar means if under those conditions the dog or cat still responds this would suggest to me a paranormal inference something rather like telepathy most households in North America and in Western Europe have pets in them most people have a lot of experience of animals through their pets there's an incredible body of knowledge and information about pets because after all people are watching their pets seven days a week 365 days a year usually and they know them pretty well yet oddly enough this incredible amount of information about pet animals has been totally disregarded by established science and the studies we have of animal behavior in science are either based on things like rats kept in uniform laboratory cages or animals in the wild like chimpanzees in Burundi or gorillas in the Congo but there's something much closer to home namely our pets which tells us a great deal about animal behavior as soon as I started talking to pet owners about their pet stories I found there was an incredible wealth of information most pet owners have got really interesting stories to tell about their animals and they're usually only too willing to tell them if anyone's prepared to listen I have a dog for eight years and every morning I take that dog for a walk the dog gets excited can't wait except for those morning's where I'm gonna take the dog to a vet the dog senses the dog knows this is not going to be a walk and the dog hides the dog is not excited and the dog knows that he is going to spend it not for long when I found out that my grandfather had died this was unexpected I was in the middle of making a trip to go and see him I knew he was sick but he was supposed to have much more time and from out of nowhere he's at my feet and he's trying to eat fine he's wake up me and it's actually when he got to me it was applying his way up me I'm kind of that's when I started to cry I didn't call for him I didn't scream I didn't he just knew and I just knew he knew there was something really wrong I have a special connection with my Fox Terrier Toby who's eight years old six years ago my sister had a very large home when I was with a group of people at a cocktail party my dog loves water she loves to swim I was in a group of people and I suddenly was swept with a sense of dread and terror and I shouted out her name it wasn't even a content of this was conscious I shouted out her name I ran from the downstairs of this house through the house through the backyard to the pool and Toby was in the middle of the pool surrounded wrapped up in the pool hose and couldn't get out and I jumped in fished her out she was fine and then a year later the same thing happened I got to the edge of the pool and where Toby would normally get out the to exit areas had been filled with pool floats and she was floundering at the edge and really going down for the last time this is a connection of not just me to my dog but the dog speaking to me the only other person I've ever met who's been interested in this phenomenon who's been researching it namely Miriam Rothschild who's one of Britain's leading natural ists has been investigating the behavior of the dog of a friend of hers the Marchioness of Salisbury lady Salisbury who lives in one of Britain's grandest houses Hatfield hearse a huge Elizabethan mansion in Hertfordshire she'd been investigating this and has been keeping a log of the behavior of Lady Salisbury dog chassis servants that work for Lady Salisbury loved the little dog because they get fair warning of her ladyship's return hours before it happens giving them ample time to clean and prepare the house to her satisfaction if she gets Restless she does get restless even if I gave her a weekend you know she gets Restless by the time I'm coming back and she's left with our you met our Head Gardener he stays with him and he she jumps down wherever she's sitting you know engaged at the front goes to his front door and then he's very difficult to move away from the door we never know exactly when her ladyship's coming home but we normally have noticed that she starts getting restless sometimes we make a small barking noise but she constantly goes to the front door and then sits there and if you open the front door she then runs to the gate and if the gate happens to be opened she'll actually go straight down to the house and then stay stay at the house and of course we've we've done all the thing that doctor of Sheldrake of eyes which is to note to go in a different car for instance to the airport because he says that she can recognize the sound of the wheels of our own car and and and all there it's somewhere away from the gardener's house where she is that she would note this I've gone in in in a stranger's car as it were to the airport and we rarely eliminated the possibility that she should hear our she has a sound of wheels must be something and there must be some kind of communication now or I don't know what you call it to let the day or how she how she since it's not that they I'm thinking of her or I one wonders whether it isn't something like I I don't know it must be some extra sense that we don't understand about we don't know much about in other cases it was possible to do even more detailed observations and the person who was most helpful was an unemployed secretary called Pam smart who lives near men who lives near Manchester in the north of England and her dog her parents had noticed always seemed to know when she was on the way home [Music] she kept a very careful log and over 35 occasions that she studied the dog always responded when she was coming home except for three these three occasions there was no response I asked her if there was anything special about those occasions she's it on two of them the dog was very preoccupied with the on heat and the adjacent apartment and none one of them there was a dog visiting the flat and so she thought that perhaps these might have distracted it a reasonable hypothesis on the other occasions the dog went to the door at the time she was leaving to come home doctor Sheldrake asked Pam to participate in his project and she agreed for the experiment a camera crew arrived with two cameras one would stay with JT and the other would travel miles away with Pam the timecodes on both cameras were coordinated so that both were in sync accompanied by a researcher Pam left JT at home with her parents [Music] JT stayed in his favorite spot for hours [Music] Pam spent the day walking through the streets window shopping a cup of tea in a scone at Bailey's tea shop JT just stayed by her mother's feet after she had been out for over three hours Pam was told it's time to go home sorry for interrupting it's time you choose yeah so I'm gonna say you have to get a pixie watch the timecode figures at the bottom of the screen and see what happens [Music] almost exactly how could the moment that Pam got up to go home send JT to the window [Music] we're going home now and real think of JT now at the moment now you said that yes I'm thinking about them I wasn't really thinking too much about it before but it doesn't seem to matter what I'm thinking about remember she's still ten minutes away and the van she is riding in his strange to both Pam JT's [Music] once again as it happens hundreds of times a day all over the world pet and owner are reunited at the front door [Music] [Music] well here's another example completely independent there's an actual photograph of this one this person is called David wait and his cats called Godzilla there's gone David wait is a public relations consultant and works from home and this is his story in the halcyon days before the recession my telephone used to ring many times each day when I went away several times per year my parents came to mind the house and the cat and to monitor the phone it was my practice to call home from North Africa the Middle East and Europe to check that all was well and to get any messages it seems that whenever I called my cat would run and sit beside the telephone as it was ringing and before it was picked up where as she ignored the other calls which my parents took on my behalf and the calls were made at random times well you see this is a very very fascinating phenomenon it would be very easy to do to have video cameras that switched on automatically every time the telephone began ringing again a clock beside the telephone and monitor this phenomena you could do statistical tests ask people to bring home at randomized times and so forth so I'm keenly pursuing cats that can do this unfortunately Godzilla's a little bit senile and [Laughter] doesn't seem up to it anymore the only one I've been able to find that's still alive and compos mentis is one that unfortunately lives in the country and roams far and wide during the summer and so is unable to come to the telephone this is one active field of research and as you can see the prospects for really interesting results with pets are very bright I mean already the results are absolutely fascinating skeptics won't like this of course and we'll try to think of arguments why it may not be a real phenomenon but I thing to do is to listen to their arguments and if they can think of good objections to tighten up the conditions of the experiments now this research plus quite many more cases has made me pretty sure that we're dealing here with the real phenomenon that a great deal of the this behavior of dogs and cats does seem to depend on something more akin to telepathy than to anything within the inventory of scientific explanation within Orthodox science [Music] the conventional view in the West knows that the mind is inside the head this is a very peculiar theory in historical terms it's only existed in Europe about 300 years I think that when we see things outside ourselves as for example when people see me that in some sense their mind is reaching out to touch what they're looking at we don't experience what we're seeing as being inside our head I'm simply entertaining the very simple possibility that our experience is telling us something true is it possible that something really does go out of the eyes is it possible that there really is something coming out of your eyes to where I am as you see me now and coming out of my eyes to where you are as I see you would it be possible for example for somebody to tell when they were being looked at from behind even though they didn't know when they were being looked at so we asked a young friend to participate he picked out a subject [Music] unaware that he had stopped his dare she continued reading [Music] a minute later sensing something she turn look directly into his eyes [Music] I think that amateurs and students can be more innovative than professionals as they've got nothing to do as they can do things without fear professionals are better at sustained work over long periods and I see a complementary relationship such as existed in the past between amateurs and professionals [Music] in search of recruits Sheldrake found some of the students involved in staring experiments of their own for different reasons several members of the senior class were interested in what dr. Sheldrake had to say and volunteered their services just after 9:00 a.m. on a gray english morning they crossed the courtyard headed for the Headmaster's chambers consider what happens when you see me sitting here the official theory is that light goes from me through the electromagnetic field through your lens inverted image on the retina electrical and chemical changes in retinal cells impulses up the optic nerve and a complex electrochemical pattern of activity in the brain particularly the optical cortex so far so good and that can be studied and has been studied by neurophysiologists the next bits much more mysterious you form a subjective image of me as a result of these changes in your brain that's totally unexplained by anybody and then more mysterious still are they're never considered or discussed is the fact that your experience of me which is supposed to be inside your head is probably experienced by you not as inside your head but as being where I'm actually sitting in other words your image of me as a mental image it's produced by your mind it's in your mind but I imagine that you experience that image of me as being located right here not inside your head no if it's located right here it means that your mind is reaching out beyond your brain through your eyes filling the perceptual environment in which you are so that even if you're outside looking at a distant place your mind is reaching out that far if you're looking at a star at night your mind is reaching out over literally astronomical distances to touch that star now if I'm not just playing with words it should be possible to detect the influence of the eyes upon something if we touch things with our mind when we look at them if our minds reach out in some sense to touch them then we might affect what we're looking at just by looking at it so then we think well how could you actually examine this experimentally well think of another person could another person tell if you're looking at them just because you're looking at them it's a common everyday experience many people have actually experienced this feeling of being looked at from behind in surveys that have been done to find out how many people have expect it's about 80 to 90% of her normal populations I imagine most of you have had this experience and surveys have also been done to look at it from both points of view more women than men had the experience of being looked at and more men than women have had the experience of doing the looking and finding but say it has it has everyone here had that feeling at one stage or another basically what happens in this experiment is that one person looks at the back of the other person they flip the coin to decide whether to look or not to look if it's heads you look at the other person if its tail's you look away and think of something else and to indicate to the other person when the trials begins you make a sound this mechanical device gives a standard click this comes from a coat hanger in one of the department stores and it's effectively free if you buy enough coats so now I'm going to do the click and I'm gazing at the back of your neck yes so that's right and I then say right and I score it [Music] so now what we want to do is change over so the person who's doing the looking is now looked at so we're staying with the same partners [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] maybe take off yes the philosophy class next door wondered what the commotion was I was invited in to participate in a group stair look correct [Music] not looking correct dr. Sheldrake's tallied the results of this day's experimentation and when added to previous statistics the odds against it occurring by chance in thousands of trials are over 10 billion to 1 now most people aren't terribly good at this under the artificial conditions of experiments but some people are and these experiments help to find out people are unusually sensitive I'm told even in standard British commando training they tell people if they're going to attack somebody from behind and they're creeping up not to look at them because they're more likely to pick up that they're being approached if they do so that's one category of people who probably be very good subjects for this the other category would of course be paranoid but of course they'd be very hard to work with [Laughter] [Music] firstly all the known theories smell magnetism sound son landmarks and so on or all these theories have been ruled out so the conventional senses are not the explanation I mean of course pigeons use conventional senses but these alone can't explain their homing ability so I think the only conclusion left is that the pigeons have a direct connection with their home of a kind unknown to science a sixth sense if you like of where their home ears or a directional sense and I think this may depend on a field because fields are what connect things together at a distance and I think of it is like an invisible elastic band connecting the pigeon to its home every conceivable theory has been tested to destruction the first Theory suggested by Charles Darwin was that they remembered their way home by remembering the twists and turns of the art word journey well that theory has been refuted by anesthetizing pigeons putting them in rotating drums in the back of sealed vans in the darkness and driving them by devious roots to the point of release when these poor birds come round and are released they fly straight home the second theory is the smell theory they sniff the lost from hundreds of miles away even if the winds blowing the wrong way well that's been tested by sealing up their nostrils with sealing wax and other methods of preventing any information from the nose from the olfactory sense and they still get home pigeon homing has been investigated quite extensively for a hundred years and all this research has so far drawn a blank no one knows how they do it and this is the tip of the iceberg of the vastly larger phenomenon of homing behavior and many other kinds of animals there are many stories about dogs and cats that can home when they're left somewhere away from home and many other animals and birds can home and this in turn is part of the larger problem of understanding migration of animals how do monarch butterflies fly up from Mexico for example to the Great Lakes region breed and after a couple of generations in the summer their grandchildren the ones that have flown up fly back to Mexico and overwinter in exactly the same areas sometimes the very same trees that their grandparents had come from a year before and in the case of pigeons you will often hear from people well I'm sure it's all been explained in terms of magnetism but I can't remember the details that's the usual response you get if you talk to scientists about it a magnetic coil is placed on the pigeons head but the results are the same well the evidence for magnetism is very weak the evidence that they respond to the magnetic field is ambiguous highly disputed and the experiments that seemed to share to prove to be are repeatable and I'm simply putting forward the hypothesis that pigeons are connected to their home by something we could compare I'd think of it as a field that links them to their home what I'm concerned with at the moment is to find out whether there is an unknown field so the way to test this theory is to do the opposite of all the experiments done so far all these experiments have involved taking the pigeon from the home and seeing if it can find the home this experiment is the opposite involves taking the home from the pigeons and seeing if they can find the home when it's been taken away and for this purpose one needs a mobile pigeon loft I bought one of the other upmarket ones from an advertisement in racing pigeon weekly the whole range of products advertised in that magazine and this is then mounted on the back of an old farm trailer so that it's mobile Land Rover or a tractor or something and I was fairly confident we'd be able to work with mobile laughs because I started reading up the history of the subject and soon found that considerable amount of work had been done with mobile laughed during the First World War the British pigeon Corps had a hundred and fifty mobile lofts during the First World War which were converted London buses and were used to move the communications headquarters based on pigeons around as the front line move during the war and this information I've got from a little-known but fascinating volume called pigeons in the great wall by Colonel Osman who was Officer Commanding pigeons and so they were used in the Second World War as well the British used them in Burma and India there was a special Indian pigeon Corps and I've been in correspondence with the commanding officer of it who's still alive in retirement in Britain so far and what I've shown with this research is that you can train pigeons to home to mobile us dr. Sheldrake travelled to Holland for the experiment on pigeon homing doctor wim niebuhr from the University of Utrecht and Dutch filmmaker Lewis von gastrin initiated their project based on Sheldrake's hypothesis that pigeons could find their loft even if it was moved and partially hidden at 9:25 on a gray and slightly cloudy Dutch morning the team was assembled and the experiment was launched that way the team could monitor the paths of the pigeons and would know how many of them had made their way back to the loft successfully the pigeons were boxed and placed at Point a the researchers started the mobile loft on its journey from point A [Music] charting a course with some impediments so that the loft would be removed from the line of sight leads the team in the loft to point-b [Music] the campus of the university has natural impediments trees roads buildings observers mark the loft and speculated to themselves on their chance of success dr. nibor will show the research team the spot which has been chosen and then he waits patiently for the loft to arrive dr. nibor notes the exact location of the loft on a GPS the pigeons home is prepared its opening placed in a southward direction finally 15 pigeons are released at Point a and they begin their flight in search of the warmth and the comfort of their law [Music] the flight is magnificent as they circle point a they realize that something is wrong their loft has been moved the team watches intently as the pigeons check things out sometime later all 15 pigeons land on the exact spot where they had been released from the loft their loft 900 meters away just sits there and waits the pigeons take off and begin their search in earnest the earliest mobile loft experiment we know about is described in book of Genesis Noah's Ark was among other things and mobile pigeon loft when Noah released the pigeon or dove to see if there was dry land from one occasion that came back with an olive twig in its beak saying that there was dry land in order to come back to the ark it must have been able to find a mobile loft let's see [Music] they settle down for a brief rest and use the time to talk things over food and companionship in the loft is there for them all they have to do is find it finally the pigeons zero in on the location but during their flyover they realize that three of the original 15 are missing and they set off in search of them and then two of the three catch up and now only one is still missing dr. nibor is concerned as he searches for the missing pigeon [Music] there it is the last of the missing pigeons and once more the full group of gypsies is reunited pigeons are doing it by an unknown force sense ability power faculty sixth sense call it what you will there's something unknown at work here was not on the current scientific map of reality again I think it could be due to a morphic field that links them to their home connecting the pigeons to their home and the morphic field acting like a if you like a kind of invisible elastic band connecting you into their home position the pigeons glide down through the airwaves and land on their loft [Music] happy to be home again after it's happened four or five times they get used to it and they realized they're now gypsy pigeons they don't seem to mind and so far we've moved the laughed out to five miles taken some of them that moved the loft release them at the place where the loft used to be then driven back to the place where the loft knows and found them more waiting on the roof it flown straight there takes them hours before they'll go in and I think you can easily see that that's fairly easy to understand if you think of what would happen when you went home [Laughter] [Applause] if your home had moved about 100 yards you wouldn't just go straight in the door as if nothing happened you probably behave just like these pigeons did the big experiment is to move the LA 50 miles a hundred miles or more I'm happy to say this experiments now being taken up in Holland at the University of Utrecht and at this very moment the loft is being moved around Holland and the pigeons are trying to find it I think there's a reasonable chance that this could work because there are many stories of dogs and cats that have been able to find owners who've moved away from the home this is not homing dogs and cats that come back home but those are dogs that are cats that have been left at home their owner goes away and then they find him or her even though they've never been to that place before the other four experiments which will only summarize here raise significant and unanswered questions about how much we really know and even about the vaunted scientific method itself how constant are the so called fundamental constants of nature the speed of light for example is assumed to be completely constant in science yet if you look at the actual measurements over the years it varies oddly enough between 1928 and 1945 the speed of light dropped by 20 kilometres per second all over the world then it went up again in 1972 the speed of light was fixed by definition by an international panel of experts but the other constants like the so called universal gravitational constant have continued to vary termites present a dramatic example of the problem posed by animal societies how are the activities of the different individuals coordinated so they all work together for the good of the whole if you drive a steel sheet vertically into a termite mound the termites on both sides of the sheet repair the damaged building arches and when you take the sheet out you find the arches match up perfectly on both sides there seems to be an invisible plan or blueprint I think that's due to the morphic field of the whole termite colony when people have had a limb amputated they usually feel as if it's still there they can move it around and sometimes they feel pain in it what kind of reality to these phantom limbs have everyone's heard of wishful thinking in self-fulfilling prophecy in medical research blank pills that doctors and patients think of wonder drugs can have dramatic effects I think much mainstream science may be less objective than we usually suppose and experiments may turn out to be influenced by what researchers believe ought to be happening dr. Sheldrake lives and rights at home near London's Hampstead he [Music] how it got interesting since I suddenly remembered on a windy afternoon dr. Sheldrake met with John Roach chairman of Wellspring media to discuss his concepts cuttings take root [Music] [Applause] [Music] are you suggesting that modern science is on the wrong track well modern science since 1620 or thereabouts has been based on the idea that nature's just a machine the cosmos is a machine animals and plants and machines and that we're machines and I don't think it's exactly wrong it's just a very limited way of looking at things it's particularly good for making machines we've got technology the Industrial Revolution I don't think it applies very well to plants and animals to Gaia the planet Earth or indeed to the cosmos before the 17th century everyone agreed that we were living organisms even that the earth was a living organism the universe a living organism we've had this machine theory of nature right up until now and I think we're finally outgrowing it are all of the advances that were made in the machine theory era to be lost or are these two things in any way compatible I see what's happening now is a broadening of science it doesn't mean the machine theory was totally wrong it means it was a limited metaphor just a way of looking at nature a model of the world what people often call a paradigm and we're shifting into a new paradigm a new model of the world where we see the world is alive again so it's not that the machine theory is wrong is to narrow it gave a kind of tunnel vision looking at one aspect of things I think what's happening now is we're getting a broader picture what was right about the machine theory stays right as justif we look at things that we ignored would you talk a little bit about morphic resonance and what the concept means in layman's terms morphic resonance is the idea that similar things influence subsequent similar things it's the basis of the memory in nature the habits of nature so as a plant grows as one of these trees grows it's tuning in to the form of previous trees of the same species and this memory transfer across space and time is what I takes place by morphic resonance each species has a kind of collective memory each individual draws on the collective and contributes to it I'm told sir John Maddox has suggested that maybe your books might be burned sir John Maddox the editor of Nature sees himself as a kind of Pope of the side of the scientific establishment and in many ways scientists like him behave as if science is the Church of the modern world it's like the Catholic Church before the Reformation but aren't the heretics always the ones who take us the next step I mean Galileo in the long term was right Galileo was right in the long term not all heretics are right though I mean a lot of heretics are wrong in fizzle out but the fact is it's the heresy of today maybe the orthodoxy of tomorrow it's the way that science progresses but I must say that that's one of the things that I read in your book that I found terribly exciting which is that you you feel that science in the establishment sense tends to sweep under the rug anything that it cannot explain is that a fair characterization of your view yes I mean it's happens all the way through the history of science if something doesn't fit in then it tends to get ignored and there's a lot that doesn't fit into the present official scientific worldview and it's been ignored and it's precisely through paying attention to what's being neglected or ignored that we can open our view of things and that's exactly what I am trying to do so every member of a Rupert Sheldrake lecture audience has a potential role as a member of the field research team yes I mean some of these experiments are things that literally anybody can do and I think that's a very empowering thought for people I find it empowering that that science doesn't have to be confined to a tiny coterie of professionals who get grants and are approved by committees that it's something anyone can participate in I think by paying attention to experience by building on what are the problems and the curiosities of everyday life that a bridge can be built between our experience curiosity and professional sons wellspring Media hopes every one of you will now go into the world with a new sense of curiosity and a new spirit of scientific inquiry sand wellspring the results of any experiment dr. Sheldrake's work has suggested and will send you a certificate of participation welcoming you to his cause science is an adventure anyone can undertake and should your experiment capture his interest you may even get a call from dr. Sheldrake himself thank you very much [Music]

Channel: Rupert Sheldrake

Views: 24,948

Keywords: Rupert Sheldrake, Homing pigeons, psychic dogs, scopesthesia, the sense of being stared at

Id: L0nXJpTJx-A

Length: 56min 19sec (3379 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019