My research on telepathy in animals, summarized in my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and published in detail in a series of papers (listed below), led me to see telepathy as a normal, rather than a paranormal phenomenon, an aspect of communication between members of animal social groups. I see psychic phenomena as an extension of biology, which is why I, as a biologist, am interested in them. The same principles apply to human telepathy, and I have investigated little explored aspects of human telepathy, such as telepathy between mothers and babies, telephone telepathy (thinking of someone who soon afterwards calls) and email telepathy. I have designed several automated telepathy tests, some of which can be carried out through this website.
I think telepathy has evolved, like other biological abilities, subject to natural selection, which is what I argued in this Cambridge University lecture on the evolution of telepathy, which I produced as Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project. This research is summarised in my book The Sense of Being Stared At And Other Aspects of The Extended Mind.
Links to all my research papers are listed below, and on my website.
If you prefer reading to watching, the full transcript of the lecture is below as well.
I hope the essays and talks I share through Substack will help to stimulate fresh thinking and encourage a more holistic approach to science. However, this is by no means my full-time job. I am mainly engaged in scientific research across several fronts, some of which I have yet to discuss publicly, and I regularly publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals (see the Research section on sheldrake.org for details). I also summarise my research findings in an ongoing series of videos called Findings, which I publish here on Substack.
Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for these kinds of exploration, so the generosity of people who support my work makes this research possible. But if you can’t contribute financially, don’t worry. I am happy to share ideas, and much of my content will remain free and open-access.
My Telepathy Research
Telecommunication Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis
Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (2025), Vol. 5, No. 1, 47-69
https://doi.org/10.31156/jaex.25934
by Rupert Sheldrake, Tom Stedall and Patrizio Tressoldi
A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests
Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (2024), Vol. 4, No. 1, 122-141
https://doi.org/10.31156/jaex.25250
by Rupert Sheldrake and Tom Stedall
Automated Tests for Telephone Telepathy Using Mobile Phones
Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing (2015) Vol. 11, No. 4, 310-319
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2015.04.001
by Rupert Sheldrake, Pamela Smart and Leonidas Avraamides
Telepathy in Connection with Telephone Calls, Text Messages and Emails
Journal of International Society of Life Information Science (2014) Vol. 32, No. 1, 7-15
https://doi.org/10.18936/islis.32.1_7
by Rupert Sheldrake
An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails
Journal of Scientific Exploration (2009) Vol. 23, No. 1, 29-36
by Rupert Sheldrake and Leonidas Avraamides
Sensing the Sending of SMS Messages: an automated test
Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing (2009) Vol. 5, 272-276
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2009.06.004
by Rupert Sheldrake, Leonidas Avraamides, and Matous Novák
A Rapid Online Telepathy Test
Psychological Reports (2009) Vol. 104, 957-970
http://dx.doi.org/10.2466/PR0.104.3.957-970
by Rupert Sheldrake and Ashwin Beharee
An Automated Online Telepathy Test
Journal of Scientific Exploration (2007) Vol. 21, No. 3, 511-522
by Rupert Sheldrake and Michael Lambert
Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-Mails
Perceptual and Motor Skills (2005) Vol. 101, 771-786
https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.101.3.771-786
by Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart
A Filmed Experiment on Telephone Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (2004) Vol. 68, , 168-172
by Rupert Sheldrake, Hugo Godwin and Simon Rockell
Investigaciones Experimentales En Telepatía Por Teléfono (Spanish)
Revista Argentina de Psicología Paranormal (2004 Julio-Octubre) Vol. 15, No.3-4
by Rupert Sheldrake
Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy
Journal of Parapsychology (2003) Vol. 67, 147-166
by Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart
Experimental Tests for Telephone Telepathy
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (July 2003) Vol. 67, 184-199
by Rupert Sheldrake and Pamela Smart
Apparent Telepathy Between Babies and Nursing Mothers: A Survey
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (2002) Vol. 66, 181-185
The Anticipation of Telephone Calls: A Survey in California
Journal of Parapsychology (2001) Vol. 65, 145-156
by David Jay Brown and Rupert Sheldrake
Telepathic Telephone Calls: Two Surveys
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (2000) Vol. 64, 224-232
Full Transcript
The Evolution of Telepathy
Perrott-Warrick Public Lecture — Feb 9, 2011
Trinity College, University of Cambridge
The theme of telepathy is particularly appropriate because the Perrott-Warrick Fund was set up in memory of Frederic Myers, a fellow of Trinity College and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. And it was Myers who coined the word telepathy. He was a Greek scholar. And, of course, telepathy means tele, as in distant, as in television, telephone, and feeling, as in empathy, sympathy. So telepathy literally means distant feeling.
In the early days of the Society for Psychical Research, one of the big issues was the survival of bodily death, and that was one of the topics Myers himself was very interested in. I think partly because telepathy was associated with this quest for evidence for survival, the focus was on telepathy in human beings. Now, this made it more controversial than it needed to be, because the people who opposed telepathy were people who saw themselves as heirs of Enlightenment rationalism who saw an opposition between what they thought of as the advance of science and reason, as opposed to religion and superstition, which they thought were holding humanity back. Telepathy got classified as superstition because so many people believe in it. This meant that telepathy has always been controversial. It’s always been something that people who believe in a kind of materialist worldview feel that they need to oppose.
Now, I’m going to talk this evening about the evolution of telepathy. My point is that it’s not actually supernormal or supernatural, or paranormal. It’s natural, normal, and a part of animal nature. It occurs in many different species of animals, and human telepathy is simply one aspect of a much more widespread phenomenon.
I might say just one or two words about why I got interested in this subject. I was educated in a normal scientific way at school and at Cambridge, and I absorbed the standard scientific mindset, which involved, at least when I was being educated, atheism, materialism, and total skepticism to all psychic phenomena. This was just part of the standard issue mindset that people of my generation grew up with, and still many young scientists today follow that same way of thinking. So I thought telepathy was absolute rubbish, that it couldn’t possibly happen because the mind’s nothing but the activity of the brain, it’s all inside the head. And so telepathy must be rubbish, therefore all evidence for it must either be fraudulent or flawed. There are many people who still think that today, of course.
But what stopped me thinking like that was an experience in Cambridge in the biochemistry department. One time in the tea room, someone brought up the topic of telepathy, and along with several other research students, I said, oh, it’s absolute rubbish, and said all the standard skeptical things. But sitting nearby was one of the older members of the department, Sir Rudolph Peters, previously professor of biochemistry at Oxford, who in his retirement was working in our lab here in Cambridge. And Sir Rudolph said to me, have you ever looked at the evidence for it? And I said, no, I don’t need to. He said, well, I have, and I think there might be something in it.
And he then told me about an investigation he’d done. A friend of his called E.G. Recordon was an ophthalmologist in Cambridge. He was treating a boy who was severely disabled, who was almost blind, and who was mentally retarded. And when he was doing standard eye tests, he was astonished that this boy could actually read all the letters on the eye charts. And he knew he couldn’t possibly read them, and at first he thought it was lucky guesswork.
Then he thought maybe it was happening through the mother, and he asked the mother to leave the room, and the boy couldn’t do it. He told Sir Rudolph Peters, and they set up some simple tests with the boy and the mother separated by a screen, and they showed her letters and numbers, and the boy immediately said what they were. They then set up an experiment over the telephone with the boy at home in Cambridge and the mother in Babraham in a laboratory six miles away. They showed the mother cards, a random sequence of letters and numbers, which were pre-randomized. She looked at them and the boy would then say what she was looking at.
With the letters, he should have been right one time in 26 on average, 3.8%. He was actually right 38% of the time in more than 100 trials. These were massively significant results. And Sir Rudolf Peters was convinced that something was really going on. The only possible clues could have been subtle sound cues. They had magicians listen to the tape to see if there was any fraud. I listened to them myself. And Peters convinced me that this research showed something was really going on. He was an honest man, he totally had no axe to grind, and I was very impressed by the fact that here was a piece of research that showed something was really happening.
When I discussed it with my colleagues, they reacted exactly as I’d reacted myself, saying, oh, it must be flawed. They weren’t interested in looking at the evidence. And I realized this is a diagnostic feature of skepticism about psychic phenomena, an unwillingness to look at the evidence because of a firm belief it must be untrue.
