The Seven Experiments Project
In Seven Experiments That Could Change the World Riverhead Books 1995, Rupert Sheldrake turned his attention to the questions that science has traditionally ignored.
More than that, his Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science offered seven simple and inexpensive experiments which enabled non-scientists, the curious and the skeptical, to join in his voyage of discovery.
Amongst the subjects which readers were invited to investigate were:
Extraordinary powers of ordinary animals
Pets Who Know When Their Owners are Returning
and How Do Pigeons Home? .
Early in 2006, in his reply to the Reality Club, Rupert expressed his thoughts on the problem of animal navigation in My Dangerous Idea
The nest-building activities of social insects, which appear to remain coordinated even when sensory communication is blocked by means of a barrier was also a subject for study in Termite Colonies
The Extended Mind
After the publication of Seven Experiments, Rupert continued his research into our sense of being stared at, culminating in the publication of his The Sense of Being Stared At in 2003, and expanded into the whole field of Human Telepathy
A different aspect of the Extended Mind was raised in connection with the phenomenon of Phantom Limbs. When people lose a flesh-and-blood limb, they do not usually lose the sense of its presence. It feels as if it is really there, even though it is no longer materially real. What kind of reality does the phantom have?
Do Minds Reach Out From Brains?
Scientific Illusions
Mainstream Science itself was not spared from Rupert's investigations.
The so-called physical constants are supposed to be changeless. They are believed to reflect an underlying constancy of nature. However, close examination of the recent history of determinations of the fundamental constants of Physics raise the question of whether they are actually constants at all.
See The (so-called) Universal Gravitational Constant .
And to what extent are the investigations of scientists as impersonal as they would have us believe? Is it possible that "our beliefs, desires and expectations can influence, often subconsciously, how we observe and interpret things"?.
See Experimenter Effects in Mainstream Science
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