Communication seems to be a bit of a theme just at present!

About 18 months ago, I wrote a piece on Learning from Dogs about Rupert Sheldrake’s fascinating book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. The reason that this has come up again (and, as it happens, I’m rereading Sheldrake’s book just now) is a recent item on the Big Think website called Can We Have Brain-to-Brain Communication?  Here’s what was written.

Dr. Michio Kaku addresses the question of Collective Intelligence. Some people think that the next big innovation in the coming decades is not going to involve the Internet because we can already connect computers to the human mind. Therefore, Dr. Kaku says this brain-to-brain communication would involve not just the exchange of information, but also the transmission of emotions and feelings, “because these are also part of the fabric of our thoughts.”

There’s also an interesting 4-minute video by Dr. Kaku that may be accessed here.

But then again, many pet owners would probably take it for granted that our cats and dogs can read our mind, as Dr. Sheldrake rather entertainingly explains below.

Before closing today’s post, the research that Dr. Sheldrake has undertaken is very impressive.  His website is here, from which one learns that,

Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers, is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory.

He worked in developmental biology at Cambridge University, where he was a Fellow of Clare College. He was then Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), in Hyderabad, India. From 2005 to 2010 he was Director of the Perrott-Warrick project. , funded from Trinity College, Cambridge.

Rupert Sheldrake … Biography 
A Guide to the Website Rupert’s Science and Philosophy

The website is a very useful resource, as this section underlines,

Unexplained Powers of Animals

by Rupert Sheldrake

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I explored a variety of experimental approaches for the investigation of unexplained phenomena that might help to enlarge our scientific view of the world, summarised in my book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (1994).

One of the seven experiments concerned unexplained abilities of animals, and I published a series of papers on the unexplained powers of animals, see Papers on animals .

I summarised much of this research in my book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999).

My research with Aimée Morgana into the telepathic powers of her African Grey Parrot, Nkisi, led to the celebrated debate at the London RSA with Prof Lewis Wolpert, which is featured on this website The Telepathy Debate 

More information is available on Nkisi, including a tape of one of his conversations with Aimée in The Nkisi project

So if your pet is looking at you as though they know what you are thinking – they probably are!