He saw the handle, but he didn’t see the bolts. He saw ‘extirpate’, but he didn’t see ‘exterminate’. In the gas chamber and in the dictionary, David Irving appeared to suffer from an eerie and mysterious mode of cognitive blindness. He has been judged a liar, a historian who knowingly misleads. But to me, his behaviour suggests that he is genuinely and sincerely convinced of Hitler’s innocence. That is where his thinking begins. And so any information that seems to dispute his thesis cannot be true. He sees it, but he knows his eyes are wrong. He reads it, but there must be an honest reason, somewhere, to justify its dismissal. Instead of new unwelcome information, he trusts his feelings, just like the paralysed stroke victim who believed that she was in bed with an old man. Just like all of us.
It is as if no evidence could ever be good enough to persuade Irving that the idea of his life has been a terrible mistake. That it is a mistake is proved by the facts, but that other sign is also loitering in the background, squinting nervously from one eye, hoping that nobody notices it. There is too much coherence; too much certainty. There has been a telling ausrotten of doubt.
Irving is proud of the empire and of his family who served it. He shares this admiration with Hitler. And so the fight of his life becomes one of defending the man who recognised the achievements and moral eminence of his ancestors, of battling those whom he battled. He identifies with Hitler emotionally. He is his ambassador, and more.
Irving denies being anti-Semitic because that implies mistake and he, presumably, feels blameless. That is the illusion, and we all fall for it. We believe that we are not prejudiced, that we have arrived at our conclusions through a rational process of objective thought. Our biases disguise themselves as truth. We cannot see them, because the trick takes place behind our eyes. When he thinks of empire, he feels joy. When he thinks of Jews, he feels … well, something else. All the rest is confabulation.
This is, to be sure, a speculative and simplistic theory of the origins of one man’s journey into forbidden beliefs. Even Irving himself does not have access to causes of the emotional impulses that unconsciously drive him. But in considering it, I believe we are closer to the truth than those who suggest that he is an evil and straightforwardly calculating liar.
Above all of this, though, what remains with me about my time with Irving are the moods and manners of the man. The ego, the stubbornness, the hunt for puddles to stamp in. ‘The further their jaws will drop, the better job he thinks he’s done,’ Jaenelle told me, before hurriedly adding that that wasn’t the aim of his work. But how can she know? How can any of us know? In that strange, chemical and alchemical moment when an unconscious decision is made about what to believe, how much is genetic, how much is rational, how much is concerned solely with reinforcing our dearly held models of the world? And how does personality collide with all of this? How does the character of the decider – all that complex emotionality, the calculation of possible outcomes, the current state of mind, the kaleidoscope of motives, the autobiographical hero-mission – pollute the process?
With these questions, we have struck rock. There is no answer. We cannot examine the neurons and synaptic patterns of David Irving and discover why or how he has made the decisions that he has. The mind remains, to a tantalising degree, a realm of secrets and wonder. Precisely how mysterious it is, though, is the matter of much dispute. It is, in fact, the schism that lies beneath a fight that has been taking place between two famous scientists for more than twenty years now, and it is one that I have travelled to an upstairs room on the fringes of London’s Hampstead Heath to hear all about – just as soon as I have had my psychic powers tested.
*
I sit in a wooden chair, facing a wall of books, on subjects such as the nature of time, Chinese medicine, cosmology, quantum theory and the philosophy of mind. Behind me, a large sash window looks out on to a huge and glorious tree, its branches and leaves a triumphal fountain of green and shimmering sunlight that fills the panes. The tree is a living portrait of nature and its energies and personality flood the room. On the sill beneath it sits a tray of sprouting fungi and a porcelain brain on a stem.
A man in his late sixties wearing corduroy trousers, a loose shirt and black socks and sandals walks up behind me and passes me a blindfold, which I place over my eyes.
‘I’m going to either stare at the back of your neck or look away at something else,’ he says. ‘There are twenty trials in all, and the beginning of each trial is indicated by a mechanical click. Thus.’ Click. ‘And after a few seconds you tell me whether you think I’m looking at you or not.’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Great.’
‘This works best if you just rely on feelings. The more you think about it, the less well you’ll do.’
And so, we begin.
Click.
‘Yes.’
Click.
‘Yes.’
Click.
‘No.’
It is surprisingly difficult not to think about your emotions. Despite the fact that I am getting no feedback on my success or failure, I quickly become convinced that I am getting it all wrong, and that starts me worrying, analysing even where there is nothing to analyse, gnashing on thin air.
When it is finally over I remove my blindfold and approach the scientist nervously. He has been marking me on a strip of white paper. And I can hardly believe the number of ticks.
‘So, you got nine right,’ he says.
Christ, I have it. I really do: the sense of being stared at.
‘Wow,’ I say.
‘That’s pretty close to chance,’ says the scientist.
‘Oh,’ I say, my cheeks warming. ‘Nine out of twenty. Oh, yes. Right. Of course.’
The man whose library this is has compiled the data from more than thirty thousand trials like this. The conclusion that it points to, if it is correct, proves that this mysterious ‘sense of being stared at’ is a genuine phenomenon, and that many of our fundamental theories of neuroscience are flawed. It shows that minds can extend out of the brain and communicate with other minds. It shows that extra-sensory perception (ESP) is real.
If it is correct.
*
It began, for Rupert Sheldrake, when he was five. He was at his grandmother’s farm in the Nottinghamshire countryside, when he saw a row of fence posts that had sprouted branches and leaves. He was astonished. ‘We made a fence and it came to life,’ said his uncle Frank. Rupert stared at them, thinking, ‘That’s amazing!’ The posts were made from willow – which is known to root easily – but for the boy this was a fantastic revelation; a vision of the power of nature.
Sheldrake grew up in a herbalist’s shop near his grandparents’ home. He was surrounded by pets and his father’s brass microscopes were ranged in a laboratory next to his bedroom. They kept homing pigeons, whose mysterious abilities obsessed the boy. He loved science and studied at Cambridge University, where he won a double first in biochemistry, the university Botany Prize, a major scholarship and a general reputation for brilliance. Science, he was sure, held the answers to life. But, as he worked, he began to have terrible doubts. The young scholar found himself asking forbidden questions; ones that, since the dawn of modern thinking, have been thought of as heretical.
The world as we know it began in the eighteenth century. It was during the Enlightenment that radical thinkers began to use reason and evidence to take on the supernatural forces of religion. Since then, the sciences have been predicated on a truth that’s still held in a kind of reverence. Everything – you, me and all the stars – is made from stuff. There is nothing else – no magic, no soul, no God, no afterlife. Human beings are machines, built by physics and chemistry. Reality itself is merely matter, held together by fields. This understanding – what is known as materialism – has built our civilisation. We have cities, computers, medicine and spacecraft because the idea of materialism works.
But as he killed animals and plants and ground them up for study, Sheldrake began to wonder, ‘Can we really discover all that we want by reducing everything down to ever smaller parts? Can life really be just a matter of molecular pulleys and gearwheels? Is materialism enough to explain the mysteries of reality?’ Something, he believed, was missing from science – something that no amount of pulleys and gearwheels could surely generate. It was what his childhood love of nature had been surrounded by. Life was missing.
By the time he was twenty-eight, Sheldrake was a Cambridge don. For eight years, he had been developing a theory that sought to answer some of nature’s most stubborn mysteries. How do pigeons home? How do spiders know how to spin webs without learning from other spiders? How do shoals of fish behave as one? What, he wondered, if there was some undiscovered force that every living thing tapped into? Something not material, exactly – more like a field that somehow carried information?
One evening, after dinner, Sheldrake was drinking port with Professor Albert Chibnall, an elderly but brilliant biochemist who had served in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, and who had taken a fatherly interest in him.
‘This idea of yours is going to get you into trouble,’ Chibnall warned him. ‘You’re perfectly positioned for a brilliant career. If you pursue this, you’ll throw it all away. Take my advice. Wait until you retire.’
‘But that’s thirty-seven years away,’ complained Sheldrake.
‘It’s dangerous,’ said Chibnall. ‘It’ll ruin your career.’
Sheldrake ignored him and, in 1981, published his theory in a book, A New Science of Life.
One Saturday following its publication, Sheldrake was eating a breakfast of toast, marmalade and coffee. He had been pleased by his book’s reception – the Observer had called it ‘fascinating and far-reaching,’ the Biologist ‘well-written, provocative and entertaining’ and New Scientist had said it was ‘an important scientific enquiry into the nature of biological and physical reality,’ elsewhere calling Sheldrake ‘an excellent scientist; the proper, imaginative kind that in an earlier age discovered continents and mirrored the world in sonnets.’ He was happily looking forward to the game of tennis he had planned for the morning when the post arrived, with the latest edition of the famous journal Nature. Sitting down, he gasped at the editorial’s sensational headline: ‘A Book for Burning?’
Good heavens! he thought. What’s this about? I’ve never seen anything like it.
He read on. He felt winded. It was about his book. He had been denounced in one of the world’s most prestigious academic journals. His idea had been called irrational; dangerous. He had become a heretic.
‘So, you see – my idea did get me into trouble,’ he tells me, having recounted his story. ‘It did ruin my career. I was no longer able to get a job or a grant. Chibnall had been right.’
But there was more to come from Sheldrake. Grander theories and worse trouble. If it was true that these information fields existed, and that all living things tapped into them, then perhaps humans and animals could communicate non-verbally? Maybe telepathy could be real.
This is an outrageous postulation. It produces a violent species of contempt in many mainstream academics because it strikes at the very roots of science. The idea that the mind could function outside of the brain had been dispensed with hundreds of years ago, a cornerstone victory in the battle between reason and religion. The mind is of the brain and it is in the brain. If you accept that it might be able to function outside of it – that personalities might be able to exist beyond the boundaries of their physical selves – then what next? Ghosts? The afterlife? God?
‘Materialists are afraid that as soon as you allow anything beyond the comfortable terrain of established science, you’ll get religion and civilisation will crumble,’ Sheldrake says with a dry smile. ‘They think if you allow people to believe in telepathy you’ll have the Pope flying in any minute. Compulsory Catholicism. They can’t bear any questioning of science’s basic dogmas.’
Materialists, of course, say that the mind is the product of nerve activity in the brain. This is the view that was summed up famously by a genius pioneer of the twentieth century, Nobel Prize–winner Francis Crick, who wrote that: ‘“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’
‘Crick was a fundamentalist,’ says Sheldrake. ‘He was desperate to have science confirm a materialist worldview and to expel mystery as much as possible.’
Sheldrake’s explorations into telepathy in its various forms eventually led him to his trials of what he calls ‘the sense of being stared at’. Using a variety of different protocols, he found that people answered correctly 55 per cent of the time. This may not seem dramatically significant, but he conducted so many trials that the odds of this score arising by chance became, he says, one in ten thousand billion billion. Proof, he believed, that the mind didn’t rely wholly on the five senses. Proof that it extended outside the confines of the brain. Proof that materialism is wrong.
Next, he studied a psychic terrier from Ramsbottom. Jaytee would run to the porch window occasionally, when a cat walked past or a delivery man or who-knows-what-else. But he seemed to have a particular preponderance for being there when his owner Pam was coming home – even when she arrived unexpectedly. It was almost as if Jaytee knew. So Sheldrake tested the dog. In over one hundred tests Sheldrake found that Jaytee spent an average of 4 per cent of his time at the window when Pam wasn’t coming home and 55 per cent of his time there when she was. (If you’re like me, you’ll be wondering why these numbers don’t add up to 100. The study was carried out in blocks of time, so that if, during a ten-minute period in which Pam wasn’t coming home, the dog was at the window for 0.4 minutes, that’s four per cent. If, during a ten-minute period when she was coming home, the dog was at the window for 5.5 minutes, that’s 55 per cent.)
He published his studies in academic journals. He wrote books. He became a practising Christian. And the world didn’t listen. Instead, things became worse for him. His dog studies were ridiculed in newspapers. He was treated with contempt by his colleagues in academia. In 2004 he took part in a debate with Professor of Biology Lewis Wolpert, who described telepathy research as ‘pathological science’ and remarked that ‘an open mind is a very bad thing – everything falls out.’ As Sheldrake described his studies, he claims Wolpert sat with his back to the projector screen, tapping his pencil, ‘looking bored.’ When Sheldrake was asked to speak at the 2006 Festival of Science, his presence was denounced by Oxford Professor of Physical Chemistry Peter Atkins, who said: ‘there’s absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan’s fantasy.’ On a subsequent BBC Radio debate, Sheldrake asked Atkins if he had studied any of his work. Atkins said, ‘No, but I would be very suspicious of it.’ When Professor Richard Dawkins filmed Sheldrake for a segment in a documentary, the polemicist accused Sheldrake of being ‘prepared to believe almost anything.’ When asked if he’d actually read any of his evidence Sheldrake says that Dawkins replied, ‘I don’t want to discuss evidence.’ (Dawkins denies this. In an email, sent to me via an intermediary, he called this claim ‘outrageous and defamatory’ and insisted that he had read ‘several’ of Sheldrake’s papers.)
But perhaps the most damage has been caused by the tireless work of one man – a talented and famous speaker, author, lifelong conjuror, psychologist and adviser to the James Randi Educational Foundation. He is doggedly sceptical of all things paranormal. On national television he has successfully and amusingly debunked hauntings of castles and walkers on fire. His name is Professor Richard Wiseman.
‘Wiseman tried to replicate your experiments with staring, and with Jaytee the dog,’ I say to Sheldrake. ‘He’s convinced you’re wrong.’
‘Wiseman’s a stage magician. A conjuror. A skilled deceiver,’ he replies. ‘He’s a huge asset to the materialist movement. He’s their hitman.’
The first paragraph of Wiseman’s bestseller Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There recounts what happened when he studied the psychic dog. ‘As I gazed deep into the eyes of Jaytee, several thoughts passed through my mind. Was this cute little terrier really psychic? If not, how had he managed to make headlines across the world? At that precise moment, Jaytee gave a small cough, leaned forward and vomited on my shoes.’
‘To understand materialists like Wiseman,’ says Sheldrake, ‘one has to realise that they totally believe these things are impossible. If someone comes up with positive evidence, either the experiment is flawed or I’ve cheated. Those are the only options on the menu: foolish or fraudulent. I’ve been through this argument with Skeptics again and again. They go through their various objections and I show them how I’ve accounted for them all. And then they say, “Oh, well, there must be some other flaw.” I say, “Well, what is it?” and they say, “We haven’t thought of it yet, but there must be one.” The point is, you can’t win. No evidence will ever be good enough. That’s just one of the problems of doing research in this area. One has to deal with this level of arrogance and ignorance that purports to be objective, scientific and reasonable, but which is deeply unscientific and unreasonable.’
In 2006 Rupert Sheldrake was given a ‘Pigasus’ award by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), for ‘the scientist who said or did the silliest thing’ during the previous year. ‘This man’s delusions increase as time goes by,’ they said, on announcing the prize, ‘and he comes up with sillier ideas every year.’ Like all practitioners of what he calls ‘woo woo’, Randi points to Sheldrake’s failure to apply for his ‘Million Dollar Challenge’ as evidence that he secretly knows that he is wrong. On his website, Randi writes, somewhat cryptically: ‘Sheldrake is still clinging to some strange story he relates about a previous encounter with me, a tale that fails to make its point. He’ll depend upon this to avoid becoming involved with any testing process related to the Million Dollar Challenge, of course. I find it not at all strange that these folks fear involvement with the JREF more than they fear Hell itself!’
‘Randi is a liar,’ says Sheldrake. ‘He’s a man of very doubtful character indeed – a rude, aggressive, dogmatic Skeptic who knows nothing about science. He’s taken seriously by people like Dawkins – they worship him – because they see themselves as engaged in a war against unreason and religion. And if you’re in a war, you want to have thugs on your side.’
People such as Dawkins, Randi and Wiseman are suffering, says Sheldrake, from an acute sensitivity to doubt. ‘Fundamentalists, whether religious, materialist or atheist, are people who need certainty,’ he says. ‘They’re not prepared to live in a place with doubts. It’s very similar to creationism. Some creationists will look at scientific evidence but only so that they can try and find some flaw. That’s also true of the denialists about psychic phenomena.’
When I tell Sheldrake that I am going to be interviewing Richard Wiseman, I sense a moment of tension and then resignation. ‘You’ll probably find him very convincing,’ he sighs.
*
It began, for Richard Wiseman, when he was eight. He was at his grandad’s house in Luton when the old man asked him to write his name on a coin. With the wave of a handkerchief, the coin disappeared. Then his grandad produced a tobacco tin, whose lid was held fast with elastic bands. Inside that was another tin with more bands. Inside that, a cloth bag. And inside that, Richard’s coin.
But the moment that truly ignited Richard’s curiosity came weeks later, when his grandad revealed how the trick worked. Richard was aghast. How easy it was to fool the mind! How simple, to conjure the appearance of magic when, in fact, there was only illusion! For the boy, it was a fantastic revelation; a vision of the fallibility of humans.
Richard began studying tricks, digging through second-hand bookshops for guides to magic and debunking accounts of the silly mysteries believed by his classmates: spontaneous combustion, stigmata, the Bermuda Triangle. At the age of twelve, he had his own touring show. At university, he earned a PhD in the psychology of deception. When he heard about the work of ‘parapsychologists’ – actual scientists who studied subjects like telepathy – he became fascinated. In a universe that is constructed from simple matter, these things are impossible. So why do people persist in believing in them? How have they been fooled?
I meet Wiseman outside Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road in central London, where he is appearing later as part of his Paranormality publicity tour. After he has baffled my demonstrably faulty brain with a coin trick in a nearby greasy spoon, I tell him that I want to write about his fights with Sheldrake, because they seem to represent a fascinating battle of ideas. He greets this suggestion with a contemptuous laugh.
‘I’ve got a few problems with Rupert. If you look at the mainstream body of parapsychology, he’s not very well represented. He’s rarely even discussed. The reason is that there are often errors in his work.’
Wiseman tells me that a German academic named Stefan Schmidt conducted a meta-analysis of Sheldrake-inspired staring studies. And Sheldrake’s work wasn’t included. ‘It’s not even mentioned,’ he says. ‘And the reason for that is that it’s just not good enough quality.’
The criticisms go on. To ensure that the person being stared at isn’t somehow unconsciously ‘learning’ the right answer, you need a random mechanism to tell the starer when to look and when to look away. In some of his tests, Rupert used a coin toss. ‘And that hasn’t been an acceptable way of doing it since the 1930s. You only need a small bias in the coin to completely throw your data. Why wouldn’t you just use any of the more sophisticated random number systems?’
He goes on to say that, even with the staree blindfolded and sitting behind a one-way mirror, there is no guarantee he couldn’t somehow ‘hear’ when he was being stared at. When I respond with a doubtful face, Wiseman smiles. ‘You’ve got better hearing than you realise. We know people hear below the conscious threshold.’
He then provides a study by academics at the University of Amsterdam who largely failed to replicate Sheldrake’s tests. They think he might have got his 55 per cent score because people have a natural bias both towards saying ‘yes’ and changing their answer between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – and, with bad randomisation, these alterations could affect the outcome.
Wiseman tried to replicate Sheldrake’s staring tests with parapsychologist Marilyn Schlitz. On the first test, when Wiseman was the starer, they didn’t get a positive result. But when Marilyn stared, they did. It happened on the second test, too. ‘I never published that study because I’m not happy with it,’ says Wiseman. ‘We messed it up. But I can see proponents arguing that it was positive.’
‘But you wouldn’t agree with that?’ I ask.
‘No, but I wouldn’t disagree with it either. That one, you just go, “Eeerrrr.”’
Wiseman went on to conduct four tests on Jaytee the dog, at Sheldrake’s invitation. His conclusions led to scathing newspaper headlines, such as ‘Psychic dog is no more than a chancer’ (The Times) and ‘Psychic pets are exposed as a myth’ (Daily Telegraph). All of this enraged Sheldrake. His first complaint was obvious – that he had carried out more than a hundred tests on Jaytee, while Wiseman had done just four, and yet the psychologist’s claims were taken as superior. He also objected that Wiseman didn’t even test his claim, that Jaytee was at the window more when Pam was on the way home. Rather, he tested to see if Jaytee’s first visit of more than two minutes corresponded with the beginning of Pam’s return. That was a different claim. And it didn’t correspond. Well, it might have done on the final test, if Jaytee hadn’t been sick.
Then there was a dramatic twist. Sheldrake requested Wiseman’s data. When he analysed it, he found that they actually confirmed his claim. According to Wiseman’s own figures, Jaytee was at the window 4 per cent of the time when Pam wasn’t coming home and 78 per cent when she was. While Wiseman admits this is true, he attacks both this and the best of Sheldrake’s evidence on the basis that Jaytee might have just been going to the window more frequently as time went on because he was missing his owner.
He explains that he tested his different claim because he had seen it on The Paul McKenna Show, because it was what Pam had told him and because his work took place at the beginning, before Sheldrake’s claim existed.
‘Our work was very, very early on,’ he tells me.
‘But I thought you came in after Sheldrake’s work?’ I say, slightly confused.
‘No, at the same time as Rupert is doing his work,’ he says.
‘I thought he invited you in?’
‘No. Rupert was doing it concurrently. So I don’t know at what point he came up with this notion of plotting how long the dog is at the window for. It was not around when we were doing our work. It emerged after we had done it. And certainly our paper was published way before his.’
All of this is rather confusing. But it is important, because Sheldrake tells the story as if Wiseman was engaged in a kind of cynical, sceptical drive-by shooting. He says that he invited Wiseman to test Jaytee, only for Wiseman to come along and test a different claim, which was then used to slate him and his work – even though the data actually confirmed it. So I called Sheldrake and told him what Wiseman had said.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘That is such a distortion.’
Sheldrake insists that his claim was there from the start, but Wiseman never asked him about it, instead seeking information from Pam (who, incidentally, wouldn’t know how her dog was behaving because – obviously – she was out when he was doing it). He says that he began his work a year before The Paul McKenna Show reported on it. ‘I arranged Wiseman’s test and invited him to do it,’ Sheldrake says. ‘I even lent him my video camera.’
‘He also said that his paper was published before yours,’ I told him.
‘Well, that’s a simple fact,’ says Sheldrake. ‘And it’s an outrage that it was. When he told me he was going to publish it, I said, “Well, look, Richard, it means you’re cutting in ahead of me. I’m not publishing my data because I haven’t finished the studies yet. I’m doing a whole series of controls, I’m doing repeated tests.” But he cut in. I’d done more than a hundred observations on this dog. He’d done four. Then I said to him, “Why haven’t you referred to all the experiments I did in your paper?” He said, “I couldn’t refer to them because they’re unpublished.” But I’d already shown him all the data. I mean, this is rather shocking. Very shocking. But the point is, in his own eyes, he’s probably completely guiltless. It’s a level of self-deception that I’m astonished by.’
Later I come across a paper that Wiseman had sent me following our meeting co-written by him in reply to some of Sheldrake’s criticisms. It confirms that Sheldrake ‘kindly invited [Wiseman] to conduct his own investigations of Jaytee,’ and that they took a month after Sheldrake started his video tests and more than a year after his studies of Jaytee’s purported psychic abilities actually began.
I decide to look up the Schmidt meta-analysis that Wiseman talked about, which he said excluded Sheldrake’s work because ‘it’s just not good enough quality.’ I am surprised to find it concludes that there is a ‘small but significant effect’ of the sense of being stared at. But I am more surprised yet when Sheldrake tells me that he was excluded from it, not because his work was deemed sloppy, but because it is an analysis of experiments that separated starer from staree using CCTV – something that Sheldrake has never done. He addresses more of Wiseman’s concerns, explaining that he has used three different kinds of randomisation – including one ‘which I got a professor of statistics in Holland to supply and to check, so those are completely pukka’ – and another that was proposed by Wiseman himself – and still his results were positive.
Meanwhile, the authors of the University of Amsterdam study that Wiseman sent me admit their criticisms only count when the staree was given feedback on how well he was doing. They concede that Sheldrake also carried out trials without feedback (as he did on me) and found smaller, but still significant effects. Sheldrake says that his different randomisation methods dispense with their other complaints. But then Wiseman sends more concerns. And Sheldrake counters them, adding a meta-analysis that confirms his view.
It goes on like this for some time.
So what is the ordinary human to do? What am I to do? When do I stop going back and forth between them? Is it even possible to find a truth to these matters? The answer, perhaps, is to step back. I ask Wiseman if he is one hundred per cent convinced that the claims of parapsychology – often shortened to ‘psi’ – are wrong.
‘No,’ he says. ‘But I’m convinced enough.’
‘Give it a percentage.’
‘Ninety per cent.’
Wiseman’s career as a celebrity Skeptic is predicated on there being no such thing as paranormal phenomena. He admits to never having had any ‘interest in investigating if it’s true because I’ve always thought it isn’t.’ So is it surprising that he is only ‘90 per cent’ certain about this? Actually, it isn’t. Many academics are prepared to admit that parapsychologists have proven psi phenomena by the standards usually demanded by science. Computer pioneer Alan Turing once said, ‘How we should like to discredit [psi]! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.’ The New Scientist has reported that, ‘For years, well-designed studies carried out by researchers at respected institutions have produced evidence for the reality of ESP. The results are often more impressive than the outcome of clinical drug trials because they show a more pronounced effect and have greater statistical significance. What’s more, ESP experiments have been replicated and their results are as consistent as many medical trials – and even more so in some cases.’ As far back as 1951, pioneering neuroscientist Donald Hebb admitted that we have been ‘offered enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue,’ and admitted that his rejection of it ‘is – in the literal sense – prejudice.’ And far more recently, in 2008, a famously sceptical psychologist said, ‘I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that [psi] is proven.’ That was Professor Richard Wiseman.
They reject psi for the same reason that many scientists and Skeptics feel that they can dismiss Sheldrake’s work without first having studied it. Because, what is more likely? That parapsychologists are mistaken or fraudulent? Or that a psychic terrier from Ramsbottom has proved that a foundational principle of science is wrong? A common materialist slogan, often attributed to Carl Sagan, says, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ As Wiseman tells me, ‘A lot of physics and psychology will be called into question the moment you accept psi. Therefore, it’s reasonable to say that the weight of evidence for it must be much greater.’
I tell Wiseman that Sheldrake thinks science doesn’t have to be overturned to accept his proposed new ‘information field’. Rather, it would just need to expand, as it did when we discovered electricity, quantum theory and the electro-magnetic field.
‘But you could go the other way,’ Wiseman replies, ‘which is just assume there’s no problem. That the mind is simply a by-product of the brain.’
But that is the thing. There is a problem. How is the conscious function of the ‘mind’ created? We look in the brain and see the hemispheres, the regions, the neurons, the glia, the synapses and all the highly complex feedback loops. We know that certain neural activity correlates with certain experiences – which areas of the brain are involved with seeing yellow, for example, or eating hummus. We have a good idea how we make decisions. We know that visual information is processed in around thirty different areas of the brain. But we don’t even begin to see how all of that might come together – to coalesce into that incredible sensation of singularity – that feeling of ‘I’, of agency, that sits on top of the stew of emotions and urges and sensations and memories that we feel at any one moment. How do all these cells create private, subjective experience? Where do all these disparate brain regions unite in order to generate the illusion that you are the ‘invisible actor at the centre of the world’, the one who is seeing, hearing, smelling, remembering, talking and feeling sad or hopeful or brave?
And why? If our sole living purpose is the propagation of our selfish genes, then why shouldn’t we just be zombies – unconscious decision-engines roaming the earth, maximising our chances of survival by making simple decisions, beating each other up and procreating as much as possible? Nobody knows. In fact, this is such a hard problem that it is actually known among philosophers and neuroscientists as ‘the hard problem’.
A small number of academics believe that searching the brain for consciousness is akin to watching a television show and then hunting in its circuit boards for the presenters. For them, consciousness exists on an external field and our brains interact with it, a little like how the eye and our various visual processing areas interact with electrical impulses that are out there to create vision. That is why ‘the hard problem’ is proving to be so hard: because we have been looking in the wrong place.
If there is even a remote chance that this is true, then there is also a chance that Sheldrake and his fellow parapsychologists might be right. Because if such a crucial component of mind can be out there, then it theoretically might be able to interact with other minds that are also out there.
What is required is a referee. Someone who knows brains, is widely recognised as brilliant and yet has a foot in neither the Sheldrake nor the Wiseman camp. I decide to contact American neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman. Well known for his research into how the brain processes time, he has been profiled in the New Yorker and described as a ‘genius’ by the Observer; he calls himself a ‘Possibilian’, rejecting certainty in science as an ‘absurd’ position. But this is no anti-materialist. On the contrary, Eagleman is a disciple of Sheldrake’s arch-materialist foe Francis Crick, and says that he spent all of his ‘intellectual time’ with him during his postdoctoral studies.
When I phone Eagleman, he is airport-bound, in the back of a New York taxi. After a quick preamble, and entirely without warning, I ask him this most dangerous of questions, the one on whose answer hangs our very concept of what a human being actually is. Is it possible that consciousness might exist outside the brain, perhaps as a kind of field?
There’s a long, tantalising pause. ‘Um … Ah …’ Another silence. ‘Here’s what I think. I think it’s … I think … I have to be very careful what I say. Okay. It’s absolutely poss— er … let me back up a minute.’
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘I understand that this is a controversial area.’
‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘Well, the idea of materialism is that we’re nothing but pieces and parts. So if you put all those pieces and parts together, then you get consciousness. But we don’t actually know that that’s the right answer. We just assume it is. And it’s probably an okay strategy to burn up a generation doing that because you have to get all the way to the end of a problem to see if you get stuck or if there’s a solution. But it is perfectly possible that materialism will not be a solution and that our science is too young to recognise something else that’s going on. So I think it’s appropriate to have some intellectual humility and scepticism about whether our current physics and biology are sufficient.’
‘Wow,’ I say. ‘I really didn’t think you were going to say that.’
‘I wouldn’t want to get quoted saying that I support Sheldrake’s theories, because I’m not familiar with them,’ he says. ‘But I’m a supporter of people proposing wacky ideas because every single major advance started off as a wacky idea. We’re at a very young period in our science right now. We need ideas. What doesn’t make sense is to pretend that we know the answers and to act as if we’re certain that materialism is going to bring us all the way home, because we have no guarantee of that.’
Of course, we must remember that Eagleman’s admission doesn’t mean that Sheldrake is right. Science still moves slowly, carefully and by a unique mode of bickering and begrudging nearly-consensus, as it should. And Sheldrake has his own coherence problem – his results tend to be far more significant than those of other parapsychologists, and they are not consistently replicated.
By the end of it all, though, I am reminded of the way that I felt about UFOs. Back then, no matter how powerful the arguments I heard, no matter how much I realised, rationally, that I should at least accept the possibility of alien space travel, I could not. My unconscious had made a decision. It would not be shifted. And once again, on the question of telepathy, it is broadcasting a great, dark lump of no. I am no less prejudiced than David Irving and the materialist Skeptics: no evidence could ever be good enough. My position is surely deeply unfair. But, still. There it is.
But I am less sure. A new grey space has been nudged between the black and the white. And it is invigorating to have some mystery back. It feels wonderful to have doubt.
And I have new doubts, too, that lie beyond the slender limits of telepathy. Sheldrake defended himself easily against many of Wiseman’s attacks. It was the opposite experience from that which I had been led to expect.
So, what about this James Randi? Could Sheldrake’s criticisms of him also be worth hearing? I have had a long-suppressed intuition, bulging and pleading to be noticed, that says there is something unsavoury about the so-called ‘patron saint of the Skeptics.’ Back at the anti-homeopathy gathering in Manchester, though, I had decided that my feelings on this matter were not to be trusted. They were emotional, not based on evidence, irrational. I accepted this in the spirit that I tend to accept most criticism; my scolders are right because of course they are right. The naughty boy, the thief, the failure, the terrified, obsessive lover. Wrongness is the story of my life.
But since then, I have learned that hunches can be the result of intelligent calculations. Often, they can be right. I begin to wonder about this ‘strange story’ about ‘a previous encounter’ with Sheldrake that Randi wrote of on his website. Could there actually be grounds for Sheldrake’s calling this icon of reason ‘a liar?’ What happened between them? Could the silent warning song of my unconscious actually, for once, be true?