The evidence indicates that Jaytee was reacting to Pam’s intention to come home even when she was many miles away. Telepathy seems the only hypothesis that can account for the facts. (Our published papers on Jaytee, and on another return-anticipating dog, Kane, can be found on my website: http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/animals/index.html)
The most remarkable case of animal telepathy that I have encountered is with an African grey parrot, N’kisi, who has the largest vocabulary of any animal in the world, currently more than fourteen hundred words. N’kisi uses language in a meaningful way and speaks in sentences. His owner, Aimee Morgana, is primarily concerned with exploring his linguistic abilities, but noticed that he often responds to what she is thinking by saying aloud what her thoughts are.
Aimee and I carried out a controlled test with randomized photographs in sealed envelopes. In a series of videotaped trials, Aimee opened an envelope and silently looked at the picture for two minutes, while N’kisi, in another room, on another floor, was filmed. In many of the trials he said words corresponding to the image Aimee was viewing. The data can be seen in detail here: http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/animals/parrot_telepathy_abs.html .
There is much potential for further research on animal telepathy. If domestic animals are telepathic with their human owners, it seems very likely that animals are telepathic with each other, and that this may play an important part in the wild. Some naturalists have already suggested that the coordination of flocks of birds and herds of animals may involve something like telepathy, as may communication between members of wolf packs. In fact, my own research into what I call “morphic fields” sheds some powerful light on these phenomena.
Invisible connections between us
My theory of morphic fields postulates that all self-organizing systems – including societies, people, cats, plants, crystals and molecules – contain an inherent memory, and are linked by the field into a coherent whole.
My interest in morphic fields developed out of research I was conducting at Cambridge University on the development of plants. I was pondering how plants grow from seeds or spores into the characteristic form of their species. These are questions to do with what biologists call morphogenesis, the coming-into-being of form (Greek: morphe = form; genesis = coming into being), one of the great unsolved problems of biology.
The naive approach is simply to say that morphogenesis is genetically programmed. Different species follow the instructions in their genes. But a few moments’ reflection invalidates this reply. All the cells of the body contain the same genes. The same genetic program is present in your eyes, kidneys and fingers. If they are all programmed identically, how do they develop so differently?
Thanks to the triumphs of molecular biology, we know what genes actually do. Some code for the sequence of amino acids in proteins; others are involved in the control of protein synthesis: they enable organisms to make particular proteins. But these alone cannot account for form. Your arms and your legs are chemically identical. If ground up and analyzed biochemically, they would be indistinguishable. Yet they have different shapes. Something other than the genes and the proteins they code for is needed to explain their form.
Biologists who study the development of form in plants and animals have long been aware of these problems, and since the 1920s many have adopted the idea that developing organisms are shaped by fields called morphogenetic fields. These are rather like invisible blueprints that underlie the form of the growing organism. But they are not, of course, designed by an architect, any more than a “genetic program” is designed by a computer programmer. They are self-organizing regions of influence, analogous to magnetic fields and other recognized fields of nature.
The fields responsible for the development and maintenance of bodily form in plants and animals are called morphogenetic fields. In animals, the organization of behavior and mental activity depends on behavioral and mental fields. The organization of societies and cultures depends on social and cultural fields. [i] All these kinds of organizing fields are morphic fields. [ii]
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