The Most Controversial Biologist Alive Breaks Down Telepathy

Summary

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake argues that nature is shaped by invisible 'morphic fields' carrying a collective memory, which he believes can explain everything from how spiders know how to spin webs to telepathy between mothers and babies. He walks through experiments on dogs that know when their owners are coming home, the sense of being stared at, waking just before alarms, and rats that learned mazes faster across unrelated populations. The conversation also ranges into conscious plasma and a possibly conscious sun, the physics of angels, David Bohm's banished physics, and why mainstream science refuses to look at the evidence.

Key takeaways

• 1Sheldrake cites the Harvard rat water-maze experiments, where learning dropped from about 250 trials to about 25 over generations, and a Melbourne replication in which untrained control lineages also improved, as evidence for morphic resonance.
• 2He claims filmed experiments show dogs going to wait at the window when owners head home at random times in unfamiliar vehicles, and that Michael Shermer dismissed this without reading the research.
• 3He says officials from the UK Ministry of Defence and MI5 asked him whether terrorists could train themselves to sense when they are being watched on CCTV.
• 4He says physicist David Bohm's pilot-wave and implicate order ideas predicted morphic-resonance-like effects, and that Oppenheimer said that if Bohm couldn't be refuted, he should be ignored.
• 5Robert Temple's book 'The New Science of Heaven' proposes that plasma may be alive, links long-delay radio echoes to intelligent plasma clouds near Lagrangian points, and suggests Moses's burning bush may have been a plasmoid.
• 6Sheldrake co-wrote 'The Physics of Angels' with Matthew Fox, drawing on Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen and Dionysius the Areopagite. Fred Hoyle's novel 'The Black Cloud' inspired his idea that plasma, and even the sun, could be conscious.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

There are many mysteries in biology. The shaping of animals and plants as they grow and the shaping of self-organizing systems depends on a new kind of field of physics which I call morphic fields. These morphic fields have a kind of memory given by morphic resonance. Fields that enable telepathy from the past to the present. A handshake across space and time. Fields are structures in space, but it's not made of matter. Rupert Chelre, if you're doing experiments that show learned behaviors moving between totally unrelated animals within the same species, that shows that there's something more at play than even epigenetics and fields influencing us and larger minds operating smaller minds. I think our minds extend beyond our brains through fields. And the idea that consciousness has to be in brains, that's much more counterintuitive. It's a conscious world out there that we tap into. Can we say how morphic fields actually interact with the everyday fields we work with in science? The idea of morphic resonance is that there's a memory in each species, each kind of thing. When a baby spider starts spinning a web, it doesn't have to go to spider school. It's tuning into the experience of spiders in the past. So, you can test this. Starting at Harvard, they trained rats to escape from a water maze. One exit was lit up and the other one wasn't. And they had to learn to go out of the dim exit or they got an electric shock. And the first generation of rats took about 250 trials until after 20 or 30 generations, they got down to about 25 trials. People tried replicating it at Melbourne University in Australia. ...

Excerpt from American Alchemy, Oct 31, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.