The Extended Mind: Consciousness Beyond the Brain

Rupert Sheldrake’s Research on Telepathy, the Sense of Being Stared At, and the Reach of Awareness

You are sitting in a cafe, reading a book. The back of your neck prickles. You look up. Someone across the room is staring at you. Your eyes meet. They look away.

This experience is so common that most people have had it dozens of times without thinking much about it. Surveys consistently show that between 70% and 97% of people report having experienced the sense of being stared at — the feeling of being watched by someone they cannot see. In most cultures, it is taken for granted as a normal part of human experience.

But for mainstream neuroscience, this experience should be impossible. If consciousness is produced entirely by the brain, and if the brain is sealed inside the skull with no way to reach out beyond the body except through the known senses, then there is no mechanism by which you could detect someone else’s gaze. You would need to see them (vision), hear them (audition), or perhaps detect some subtle chemical signal (olfaction). But you cannot detect the direction of someone’s gaze through the back of your skull while absorbed in a book. There is no physical channel.

Unless consciousness extends beyond the brain. Unless your mind is not confined to the inside of your skull but reaches out into the world, touching what you attend to, connecting you to the objects of your perception. Unless the standard model of consciousness — the view that your mind is nothing more than neural activity locked inside a bone box — is fundamentally incomplete.

This is Rupert Sheldrake’s hypothesis of the extended mind. And unlike many ideas at the edges of science, this one comes with a substantial body of experimental data.

Scopesthesia: The Sense of Being Stared At

Sheldrake began formally researching the sense of being stared at — which he terms “scopesthesia” (from the Greek skopein, to look, and aisthesis, sensation) — in the late 1980s. His approach was empirical and systematic.

The basic experiment is beautifully simple. Two participants sit with one behind the other. In a randomized sequence of trials, the person behind either stares at the back of the other person’s head (looking trials) or looks away and thinks of something else (not-looking trials). After each trial, the person in front guesses: “looking” or “not looking.” With 50% as the chance baseline, any consistent deviation above 50% would indicate a genuine ability to detect being stared at.

Sheldrake and his collaborators conducted thousands of these trials. The overall results, published in peer-reviewed journals, showed a hit rate of approximately 56.9% in looking trials — significantly above the 50% chance level, with a probability of this being due to chance of about 3 in a million (p = 3 x 10^-6). Crucially, the effect showed a characteristic asymmetry: scores in looking trials were significantly above chance, while scores in not-looking trials were not significantly different from chance. This suggests that participants were detecting something real during looking trials rather than simply being biased toward guessing “looking.”

In internet-based experiments with 498 test sessions of 20 trials each, the average hit rate was 53.0%, still significantly above chance (p < 1 x 10^-6). The strongest effects appeared between participants with close personal relationships — parent and child, close friends, romantic partners.

The results drew on more than 5,000 case histories, 4,000 questionnaire responses, and experimental data from over 20,000 participants. This is not a fringe experiment conducted once in a basement. It is a research program spanning decades, involving thousands of people, producing results that are statistically robust by any conventional standard.

CCTV Experiments: Indirect Staring

One of the most interesting extensions of this research involved closed-circuit television. Can you detect being stared at when the person watching you is in a different room, observing you through a camera?

In these experiments, participants were monitored using galvanic skin response (GSR) — the same technology used in lie detectors. Changes in skin conductance reflect changes in the autonomic nervous system, providing an objective, physiological measure that does not depend on the participant’s conscious guesses.

The results showed that remote observation through CCTV produced detectable physiological changes in the person being watched — changes in electrodermal activity that correlated with staring periods. A meta-analysis of 15 CCTV staring studies confirmed a statistically significant overall effect. However, unlike direct staring, the CCTV effect appeared to operate below the level of conscious awareness. Participants could not reliably guess when they were being watched through a camera, but their bodies knew.

This distinction — between a physiological response that is present and a conscious awareness that is absent — is fascinating. It suggests that the mechanism underlying scopesthesia may be more fundamental than conscious perception. The body responds to remote attention even when the mind does not register it.

Telephone Telepathy

Perhaps Sheldrake’s most widely known research involves what he calls “telephone telepathy” — the common experience of thinking of someone moments before they call. Again, surveys show that most people report this experience frequently. And again, mainstream science dismisses it as selective memory: you remember the times your thought was followed by a call and forget the hundreds of times you thought of someone and they did not call.

Sheldrake designed experiments to test this rigorously. In a typical trial, a participant is told that one of four pre-selected callers will phone them at a specific time. The participant does not know which of the four has been selected. Before answering the phone, the participant guesses which of the four callers is on the line. By chance alone, the success rate should be 25%.

Across all experiments, including data from Sam Bloomfield’s independent trials, 63 participants made 231 correct guesses out of 571 trials — a success rate of 40%. This is 15 percentage points above the chance level of 25%, and the statistical significance is overwhelming: p = 4 x 10^-16. That is a probability of four in ten quadrillion of this result occurring by chance.

To address the possibility that participants were simply using precognition rather than telepathy — that they were sensing the future rather than connecting with the caller — Sheldrake designed control experiments using automated calls. In these versions, a computer randomly selected and dialed the caller, eliminating any period during which the caller “intended” to phone the participant. The results of these precognition controls were at chance level, suggesting that the above-chance results in the standard experiments were indeed due to some form of connection between the caller and the participant — not prediction of the future.

A meta-analysis published in 2024 brought together results from 15 published papers describing 26 telecommunication telepathy experiments conducted between 2003 and 2024, confirming the overall statistical significance of the effect.

Animal Telepathy: Jaytee the Terrier

Some of Sheldrake’s most compelling and contested research involves animal telepathy — specifically, the widespread observation that pets seem to know when their owners are coming home.

The most extensively studied case involved a mongrel terrier named Jaytee, owned by Pamela Smart of Ramsbottom, Lancashire, England. Smart acquired Jaytee as a puppy in 1989. When she worked as a secretary, she would leave Jaytee with her parents, who lived next door. Her parents noticed that Jaytee would go to the window and wait before Smart arrived home — often well before she was close enough for the dog to hear her car or detect any physical cue.

In 1994, Sheldrake had proposed this type of research in his book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. Smart read about it, contacted Sheldrake, and volunteered. What followed was one of the most rigorous studies of animal behavior ever conducted in this domain.

Sheldrake and his team filmed Jaytee continuously over more than 100 experiments. The key variable was whether Smart’s return time was randomly selected — eliminating the possibility that the dog had learned her routine. In experiments where Smart returned at randomly chosen times, Jaytee was at the window only 4% of the time during the main period of her absence, but 55% of the time when she was on her way home. The probability of this difference occurring by chance was less than 1 in 10,000 (p < 0.0001).

The results were not without controversy. In 1995, psychologist Richard Wiseman conducted four experiments with Jaytee using his own protocol. Wiseman concluded that his results did not support the telepathy hypothesis. But when the two data sets were compared, they turned out to be remarkably similar. Both showed that Jaytee would go to the window briefly and intermittently throughout the day, but would sustain his vigil only when Smart was actually on her way home. The disagreement was not about the data but about the interpretation — what counted as “significant” window-waiting behavior.

Sheldrake also documented telepathic-seeming behavior in other animals. N’kisi, an African Grey parrot owned by Aimee Morgana in New York City, appeared to respond to Morgana’s thoughts and intentions, producing relevant words and phrases that matched images Morgana was viewing in another room. Controlled tests with randomized images showed a hit rate significantly above chance.

The Extended Mind Hypothesis

All of these findings — scopesthesia, telephone telepathy, animal telepathy — point toward a single radical conclusion: the mind extends beyond the brain.

This is not as exotic as it sounds. Philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed the “extended mind” thesis in 1998, arguing that cognitive processes can extend beyond the brain to include tools, environments, and other people. When you use a notebook to remember things, the notebook becomes part of your cognitive system. When you navigate using a smartphone, the phone is part of your navigational mind.

Sheldrake takes this further. He proposes that consciousness literally reaches out through perception and attention. When you look at a tree, your visual system does not merely create an internal representation of the tree inside your skull. Your mind extends outward to the tree. The image you see is not inside your brain — it is where it appears to be: out there, at the location of the tree.

This runs directly counter to the standard neuroscience model, which holds that all conscious experience takes place inside the brain. The tree you see is, on this model, a neural simulation — an internal movie projected by your visual cortex. You never perceive the tree directly. You perceive your brain’s model of the tree.

Sheldrake argues that this standard model is not based on evidence but on an assumption — the assumption of materialism. There is no experiment that proves consciousness is located inside the skull. Brain scans show neural correlates of consciousness — brain activity that accompanies conscious experience — but correlation is not causation. The fact that brain activity accompanies consciousness does not prove that brain activity produces consciousness, any more than the fact that radio activity accompanies a broadcast proves that the radio produces the program.

The Implications

If the mind truly extends beyond the brain, the implications cascade across every field of human inquiry.

For medicine, it would mean that the placebo effect, the therapeutic alliance between doctor and patient, and the power of prayer and intention are not anomalies to be explained away but expressions of a fundamental feature of consciousness — its ability to influence matter at a distance.

For education, it would mean that learning is not just an individual cognitive process but a collective one — that the accumulated learning of previous students literally makes new material easier for subsequent students to master.

For ecology, it would mean that the relationship between humans and the natural world is not merely physical but deeply interpersonal — that we are connected to animals, plants, and ecosystems through fields of mutual awareness.

And for our understanding of what it means to be human, it would mean that we are not isolated brains piloting bone-and-meat robots through an indifferent universe. We are fields of awareness, reaching out and interconnecting, contributing to and drawing from a collective reservoir of experience that spans the living world.

Sheldrake’s experiments do not prove any of this beyond doubt. They are contested, criticized, and far from universally accepted. But they raise a question that mainstream science has been remarkably reluctant to ask: is the mind really confined to the brain? And if it is not, what else might be possible?

If your attention is not trapped inside your skull but reaches out to touch what you perceive, then the quality of your attention — what you look at, how you look at it, what you bring to the act of seeing — is not a private matter. It is an act of connection. Every gaze is a bridge.

What are you building with yours?