Do you sense that we have a "sixth sense" - or do you reject such an idea as senseless nonsense?

John Philips, a behavioural biologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the US, feels certain animals do have a "sixth sense" - but defines it as reactions to the Earth's magnetic field. Philips has undertaken numerous experiments that indicate most creatures - from insects and frogs to lobsters and sparrows - respond to the magnetic field, reported NOVA science on PBS.

Could wild animals' swift reaction to last month's tsunami in Sri Lanka have resulted from a similar ability? The floodwaters surged up to two miles inland to the island's largest nature reserve, but not even the smallest creature was hurt, according to media reports.

Rupert Sheldrake, a former biochemist and plant physiologist at the University of Cambridge who took up parapsychology, has investigated various "sixth sense" phenomena, and does not believe the magnetic field provides a full explanation. Writing before the tsunami disaster, he noted that "some seeming premonitions may be explicable in terms of physical stimuli: for example, animals that become disturbed before earthquakes may be reacting to electrical changes in the atmosphere... but there are other kinds of mysterious forebodings for which there is at present no convincing scientific explanation".

He points to surveys showing pet owners believe their animals respond to their thoughts. Is this science - or wishful thinking? Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist at University College, London, argued the latter case during a debate with Sheldrake, staged at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London last year. "There is not in the whole of scientific literature... a single paper that is persuasive with regard to the ability of thoughts to be transferred," he said.

Wolpert's line of reasoning is that the scientific study of ESP dates back a long way. Yet despite attracting such heavyweights as the British marine biologist Alister Hardy, we have witnessed few revelations.

Furthermore, parapsychology attracted the interest of the US and Soviet Union during their years of rivalry. Arthur Koestler, who founded a chair in parapsychology at Edinburgh University, noted that research in the USSR into ESP took off in a big way in the early sixties, including "experiments in telepathic communication between distant towns, such as Moscow and Leningrad, carried out en masse with thousands of subjects". Koestler believed Moscow backed the ESP experiments in the hope of uncovering "important strategic uses as a method of direct communication".

One factor working against the paranormal may be the very success of technology. All the reports of the tsunami disaster suggested that few showed any intuition of an impending catastrophe. Could the march of progress have impaired our gift of a sixth sense?

"Telephones and television have superseded telepathy; maps and global positioning systems have replaced the sense of direction," wrote Sheldrake. "And perceptiveness is not cultivated in our educational system. Indeed the existence of unexplained powers is not only ignored but often denied."

In the early 1980s, I recorded several accounts by elderly people in rural England who recalled "vague feelings" that relatives were coming to pay a visit. They had felt certain although never receiving a telephone call. Some scientists would label these cases as possible "telepathic experiences", sceptics as coincidences.

The recollections of these people went back to the First World War - some four decades after Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone. At that time, private fixed-line subscribers remained a minority in Britain. "After the war, the cost of a telephone at home was still out of reach for many people but the fast-growing number of payphones meant the service was at least available to all in an emergency," noted BT.

Was the ESP gift more widespread in the past? And has the era of the cell phone and Internet impaired our "sixth sense"? If such perceptions do exist, the tsunami disaster would tend to suggest that they are more acute in wild animals. And then the question arises of how to define a "sixth sense". If you believe Philips, it is linked to the strength of the Earth's magnetic field. The NOVA report pointed out that while research has produced no evidence of humans being responsive to the magnetic field, "our brains do contain magnetite, the mineral thought to aid other animals' brains in detecting" this force of the Earth.

Sheldrake says surprisingly little research has been undertaken on such animal phenomena, blaming biologists for being "inhibited by the taboo against 'the paranormal'." And he believes the human "sixth sense" has not gone away. He says it looks more natural, more biological, when seen in the light of animal behaviour. He argues that the "paranormal" could look normal if we expanded our ideas of normality and "of physics as well as of biology if these phenomena are to be explained at a more fundamental level".

(HK Edition 01/31/2005 page12)