Most of us have had the feeling. Suddenly, you are convinced someone is staring at you; you turn round and, sure enough, someone has their eyes fixed on you. If you make a point of asking, nearly everyone will admit they have experienced picking up a ringing phone to find the caller is someone they have just been thinking about calling.
However many of us have gone through these experiences, it is not the sort of information we tend to volunteer. Either we think it is so ordinary it is not worth mentioning or we fear being seen as irrational or suggestible. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, on the other hand, believes there is a scientific explanation and is convinced that these experiences are evidence the mind extends to fields of influence outside our bodies.
Sheldrake, who has already written about the ways humans and dogs communicate, believes we trample through life disregarding clues that our ancestors would recognise as essential for survival. He says unexplained human abilities, such as telepathy, the sense of being stared at, and premonition, are not paranormal, but part of our biological nature. As a biologist and a former director of studies in biochemistry at Clare College, Cambridge, he takes a scientific approach.
"The sense of being stared at is part of something bigger," he says. "Obviously, in the relationship between predator and prey it would have survival value.
"The sense of being stared at is something that operates between strangers, whereas telepathy works best with a family or circle of friends and before the telephone was invented it was something that was used to communicate need. It is still reported by breast-feeding mothers that they know when their baby needs them."
It seems likely that a similar survival mechanism is at work when people sense danger in advance. There are many examples of people who have paid attention to premonitions and lived to tell the tale. Such tales have taken on a new impetus in the aftermath of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre.
After the disaster, Sheldrake appealed for people who had dreams or premonitions that might be related to it. Of the accounts that seemed relevant, 38 involved dreams and 15 involved premonitions. About one-third of the dreams happened on the night before the disaster and another third in the five or six days beforehand.
Some of the dreamers were on planes that crashed, others were in terrifying situations inside skyscrapers, including the World Trade Centre specifically. One dreamed that Manhattan was hit by a blizzard and later recognised the falling ash as the image from her dream. People who had premonitions reported a sense of dread, eerie feelings, and intense panic and pain.
Sheldrake is well aware of the difficulties in using such reports as scientific evidence. "No doubt every night some people have nightmares about planes crashing or buildings falling down," he says. "The fears or nightmares followed by disasters will tend to be remembered more than those that are not.
"The idea that we often dream of things that have not yet happened is so contrary to our usual assumptions that it can easily seem impossible, or something we would rather dismiss - until it becomes a matter of personal experience."
Instead of dismissal, however, he wants to see such instances subjected to detailed research.
Since the late-1980s, when he realised that experiments could be conducted both simply and cheaply in this area, he has amassed data from thousands of tests on whether people could tell they were being stared at and could predict which of four people was about to phone them.
The results across a vast range of age groups and different cultures have consistently shown that people sense these things to a degree that is greater than random chance by a statistically significant amount.
"The implications are enormous, but the phenomenon is just dismissed because it does not fit into scientific theories," says Sheldrake, who freely admits that he's regarded by the scientific community as a heretic. However, Sheldrake's approach to unexplained phenomena and the nature of the mind is that of the biologist. "I am interested because it has much to teach us about animal nature and human nature, about the nature of the mind and, indeed, the nature of life itself.
"If I look at someone from behind, and she does not know I am there, sometimes she turns and looks straight at me. Sometimes I suddenly turn around and find someone staring at me. Most people have had experiences like this. The sense of being stared at should not occur if attention is inside the head. I suggest that through our attention we create fields of perception that stretch out around us, connecting us to what we are looking at."
He suggests that these "morphic fields" influence the behaviour of animals, plants, and humans, including telepathy and the synchronised flight patterns of large flocks of birds. The same phenomenon, therefore, allows wolves to hunt in scattered packs without losing one another and someone in Glasgow to expect Auntie Jean from Australia to be on the phone before hearing her voice.
Sheldrake makes no claim to understand this, but is determined to demonstrate that it exists in order, at least, to change the scientific response from one of embarrassed dismissal to one of serious inquiry.
If his hypothesis is right and the mind extends beyond the brain, it may liberate us from the straitjacket of the human condition.
"We are no longer imprisoned within the narrow compass of our skulls, our minds separated and isolated from each other," says Sheldrake. "We are no longer alienated from our bodies, alienated from our environment and alienated from other species. We are interconnected."
The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind by Rupert Sheldrake, is published by Hutchinson at £17.99. For more information on Rupert Sheldrake's ongoing experiments see
http://www.sheldrake.org
