The topic of my last post on genetic memory in mice found big mental illness thinkers jostling over the ideas of evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake.

Sheldrake tells No Family Madder that the new mice study is “very exciting” and “could be both epigenetics and morphic resonance at work.”

One of the brightest Darwinians of our day, Sheldrake’s mind gleams like a searchlight in the night sky. His theories of how the past influences the present through direct immaterial connections across time and space puts his work on the shelf next to Newton and Darwin.

But as a scientific parapsychologist, essentially, the towering British intellect isn’t everyone’s cuppa. Then again, as an intellectual noble savage attacking the most fundamental assumption about the human mind–that consciousness is localized within the human brain–the bloke was bound to stir debate.

No Family Madder his keen on the Sheldrake show because schizophrenia itself is so far off the time space compass.

Sheldrake tells No Family Madder that the remarkable experiments with mice, in which they have been shown to inherit their fathers’ fears even when they’ve never met their fathers or grandfathers, might just defy the conventional belief that behavioral traits cannot be inherited, an argument that, he insists, has never been settled.

How could this aversion have been inherited?

“Perhaps it involved some new kind of epigenetic inheritance, based on modified gene expression, or perhaps it was transmitted by morphic resonance,” Sheldrake said in an email reply.

He referenced an experiment with mice in the 1920s by Ivan Pavlov, he of the Pavlov dog fame. “Pavlov trained white mice to run to a feeding place when an electric bell was rung. The first generation required an average of 300 trials to learn, the second only 100, the third 30, and the fourth 10. His last statement on the subject was that ‘the question of the hereditary transmission of conditioned reflexes and of the hereditary facilitation of their acquirement must be left completely open.'”

It’s All in the Extended Mind

Much of Sheldrake’s theories are based on his ideas of what he calls the extended mind, itself a morphogenetic field. In this view, hallucinations are seen by Sheldrake as part of a phenomenon that occurs when images projected from inside of us do not match what’s seen outside of us in this extended mind.

In Sheldrake’s estimation, these images are not separate, except in hallucination. In his view, all images, even those of the distant stars, originate inside our minds.

This seems to square with the Buddhist principle of reality being an outside projection of an inward condition, but it’s not just a matter of spiritual speculation.

Sheldrake believes our minds–hang on to your hat here!–actually reach out and “touch” whatever it is we’re looking at or thinking about. The implication here is the idea that we may affect people just by thinking about them.

I had two thoughts when I heard this. The first was, I’d better think good thoughts about people. The second was, I hope they’re thinking good thoughts about me.

To Jung, who heard voices himself, and drew on traditional cultures to understand them, auditory hallucination was a projection of our collective unconscious.

Sheldrake comes at the collective consciousness through long-running experiments on how dogs “know” when their masters are coming home, and other tests of the human capacity to sense being stared at from a distance.

He insists that there’s a good deal of evidence to suggest that what we’re seeing is actually inside our heads, and extends outward across astronomical distances, a hot topic of debate in consciousness studies these days.

No Family Madder might have a bias that favors old dogma busters, if only because conventional thinking has failed us so miserably so far.

If Sheldrake’s far-out theories of epigentics and morphic resonance are shaking up an overly orthodox viewpoint, then so be it. They just might need shaking up.

Besides, it just make psychiatry interesting again.

Check out Sheldrake‘s talk from London. It isn’t laced with arcane jargon. The jaunty, smiling British scientist may be a fellow of the Royal Society with a double first and PhD from Cambridge, but he’s a real person nonetheless.

By a quirk of fate, the lecturer was stabbed leaving a New Mexico podium five years ago by a diagnosed schizophrenic, and was very gracious about it.

Ding, ding . . . Sheldrake vs. Dawkins

I think he aggravates the old guard for many reasons, but notably because, as a scientist, he’s not afraid to utter the word “love.” He feels no need to hide his sense of spirituality. In fact he embraces it.

Controversially, his latest TED Talk in London, which ran under the banner “Challenging Existing Paradigms,” was yanked allegedly for taking on the materialist scientific worldview itself.

The default paradigm of the educated classes, Newtonian materialism holds that only that which is observable with the five senses can be said to be real under the fixed laws of nature.

It has been the sacrosanct basis of all Western philosophy since John Locke published his Essay on Human Understanding about 500 years ago.

And it survives perfectly intact today in Richard Dawkins’ phrase that we are all “lumbering robots,” with brains that are genetically programmed.

Sheldrake believes there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s fascinating stuff, intellectually seductive food for thought. While hidebound psychiatry cleaves to crude descriptors like “schizophrenia” and “bipolar manic depression,” Sheldrake probes the great mysteries of this otherworldly, non-ordinary state of mind.

This is a welcomed change. Clunky diagnostic labels seem no better than a game of paint-by-numbers in describing mental states. Their chief use seems to be in connecting the dots laid out in the pseudo scientific document known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) V. And as the head of the NIMH archly observed earlier this year,“Biology has never read the DSM.”

Mainstream psychiatry can be forgiven for limping along. No shrink worth his sheepskin’s gonna go up against Newtonian materialism. That’s Sheldrake’s job, and in this he’s by no means alone. As he points out, quantum physicists are finding other, non-linear rules of nature governing reality all over the place at the subatomic level.

It’s a line of inquiry that appeals to me. Because when it comes to schizophrenia, let’s face it, there’s a whole lot more than meets the eye.