The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  I asked Irving if any of his relatives served the empire. He smiled proudly. ‘Oh, yes. My uncles were with the Indian Army. One was a Bengal Lancer. They had a very good imperial life in India. And the other uncle was in Malaya and then on my mother’s side of the family, her sister married Peter, who was on the same ship as my father. My uncle Peter was on the ship Discovery. They made several trips to the Antarctic on that. In fact, there are two islands, one named after my father and one after my Uncle Peter …’

  This went on for some time.

  Just before I stood to leave, I asked him a question of a different nature.

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Very happy,’ he replied.

  ‘You don’t strike me as a happy man,’ I said. ‘A lot of the people around you feel you are rude.’

  ‘Well, let me explain,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an extremely painful right leg. Every day it fills my waking thoughts. It has crowded my horizon for the last four years. I find it very difficult indeed to be pleasant and jovial to people. I’ve been grumpy to you too and I’m sorry for that.’

  And he surprised me, in that moment, did David Irving. He surprised me because he is one of life’s devils. And when those who you demonise show a glimpse of vulnerability it can be shocking, because you were under the illusion that they weren’t human.

  EIGHT WEEKS LATER

  Finally, it has arrived. From a second-hand book dealer in America – my Cassell’s German–English dictionary. I can now know how listeners would have interpreted Hitler’s ‘prophecy’ about the ‘ausrotten’ of the Jews in 1939, because that is the year in which this dictionary was published. So what did the word imply back then? Emasculation? Or extermination?

  Ausrott -en, v.a. extirpate, exterminate, root out.

  Comp. -ungs-krieg, m. war of extermination.

  14

  ‘That one you just go, “Eeerrrr”’

  He saw the handle, but he didn’t see the bolts. He saw ‘extirpate’, but he didn’t see ‘exterminate’. In the gas chamber and in the dictionary, David Irving appeared to suffer from an eerie and mysterious mode of cognitive blindness. He has been judged a liar, a historian who knowingly misleads. But to me, his behaviour suggests that he is genuinely and sincerely convinced of Hitler’s innocence. That is where his thinking begins. And so any information that seems to dispute his thesis cannot be true. He sees it, but he knows his eyes are wrong. He reads it, but there must be an honest reason, somewhere, to justify its dismissal. Instead of new unwelcome information, he trusts his feelings, just like the paralysed stroke victim who believed that she was in bed with an old man. Just like all of us.

  It is as if no evidence could ever be good enough to persuade Irving that the idea of his life has been a terrible mistake. That it is a mistake is proved by the facts, but that other sign is also loitering in the background, squinting nervously from one eye, hoping that nobody notices it. There is too much coherence; too much certainty. There has been a telling ausrotten of doubt.

  Irving is proud of the empire and of his family who served it. He shares this admiration with Hitler. And so the fight of his life becomes one of defending the man who recognised the achievements and moral eminence of his ancestors, of battling those whom he battled. He identifies with Hitler emotionally. He is his ambassador, and more.

  Irving denies being anti-Semitic because that implies mistake and he, presumably, feels blameless. That is the illusion, and we all fall for it. We believe that we are not prejudiced, that we have arrived at our conclusions through a rational process of objective thought. Our biases disguise themselves as truth. We cannot see them, because the trick takes place behind our eyes. When he thinks of empire, he feels joy. When he thinks of Jews, he feels … well, something else. All the rest is confabulation.

  This is, to be sure, a speculative and simplistic theory of the origins of one man’s journey into forbidden beliefs. Even Irving himself does not have access to causes of the emotional impulses that unconsciously drive him. But in considering it, I believe we are closer to the truth than those who suggest that he is an evil and straightforwardly calculating liar.

  Above all of this, though, what remains with me about my time with Irving are the moods and manners of the man. The ego, the stubbornness, the hunt for puddles to stamp in. ‘The further their jaws will drop, the better job he thinks he’s done,’ Jaenelle told me, before hurriedly adding that that wasn’t the aim of his work. But how can she know? How can any of us know? In that strange, chemical and alchemical moment when an unconscious decision is made about what to believe, how much is genetic, how much is rational, how much is concerned solely with reinforcing our dearly held models of the world? And how does personality collide with all of this? How does the character of the decider – all that complex emotionality, the calculation of possible outcomes, the current state of mind, the kaleidoscope of motives, the autobiographical hero-mission – pollute the process?

  With these questions, we have struck rock. There is no answer. We cannot examine the neurons and synaptic patterns of David Irving and discover why or how he has made the decisions that he has. The mind remains, to a tantalising degree, a realm of secrets and wonder. Precisely how mysterious it is, though, is the matter of much dispute. It is, in fact, the schism that lies beneath a fight that has been taking place between two famous scientists for more than twenty years now, and it is one that I have travelled to an upstairs room on the fringes of London’s Hampstead Heath to hear all about – just as soon as I have had my psychic powers tested.

  *

  I sit in a wooden chair, facing a wall of books, on subjects such as the nature of time, Chinese medicine, cosmology, quantum theory and the philosophy of mind. Behind me, a large sash window looks out on to a huge and glorious tree, its branches and leaves a triumphal fountain of green and shimmering sunlight that fills the panes. The tree is a living portrait of nature and its energies and personality flood the room. On the sill beneath it sits a tray of sprouting fungi and a porcelain brain on a stem.

  A man in his late sixties wearing corduroy trousers, a loose shirt and black socks and sandals walks up behind me and passes me a blindfold, which I place over my eyes.

  ‘I’m going to either stare at the back of your neck or look away at something else,’ he says. ‘There are twenty trials in all, and the beginning of each trial is indicated by a mechanical click. Thus.’ Click. ‘And after a few seconds you tell me whether you think I’m looking at you or not.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Great.’

  ‘This works best if you just rely on feelings. The more you think about it, the less well you’ll do.’

  And so, we begin.

  Click.

  ‘Yes.’

  Click.

  ‘Yes.’

  Click.

  ‘No.’

  It is surprisingly difficult not to think about your emotions. Despite the fact that I am getting no feedback on my success or failure, I quickly become convinced that I am getting it all wrong, and that starts me worrying, analysing even where there is nothing to analyse, gnashing on thin air.

  When it is finally over I remove my blindfold and approach the scientist nervously. He has been marking me on a strip of white paper. And I can hardly believe the number of ticks.

  ‘So, you got nine right,’ he says.

  Christ, I have it. I really do: the sense of being stared at.

  ‘Wow,’ I say.

  ‘That’s pretty close to chance,’ says the scientist.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, my cheeks warming. ‘Nine out of twenty. Oh, yes. Right. Of course.’

  The man whose library this is has compiled the data from more than thirty thousand trials like this. The conclusion that it points to, if it is correct, proves that this mysterious ‘sense of being stared at’ is a genuine phenomenon, and that many of our fundamental theories of neuroscience are flawed. It shows that minds can extend out of the brain and communicate with other minds. It shows that ext
ra-sensory perception (ESP) is real.

  If it is correct.

  *

  It began, for Rupert Sheldrake, when he was five. He was at his grandmother’s farm in the Nottinghamshire countryside, when he saw a row of fence posts that had sprouted branches and leaves. He was astonished. ‘We made a fence and it came to life,’ said his uncle Frank. Rupert stared at them, thinking, ‘That’s amazing!’ The posts were made from willow – which is known to root easily – but for the boy this was a fantastic revelation; a vision of the power of nature.

  Sheldrake grew up in a herbalist’s shop near his grandparents’ home. He was surrounded by pets and his father’s brass microscopes were ranged in a laboratory next to his bedroom. They kept homing pigeons, whose mysterious abilities obsessed the boy. He loved science and studied at Cambridge University, where he won a double first in biochemistry, the university Botany Prize, a major scholarship and a general reputation for brilliance. Science, he was sure, held the answers to life. But, as he worked, he began to have terrible doubts. The young scholar found himself asking forbidden questions; ones that, since the dawn of modern thinking, have been thought of as heretical.

  The world as we know it began in the eighteenth century. It was during the Enlightenment that radical thinkers began to use reason and evidence to take on the supernatural forces of religion. Since then, the sciences have been predicated on a truth that’s still held in a kind of reverence. Everything – you, me and all the stars – is made from stuff. There is nothing else – no magic, no soul, no God, no afterlife. Human beings are machines, built by physics and chemistry. Reality itself is merely matter, held together by fields. This understanding – what is known as materialism – has built our civilisation. We have cities, computers, medicine and spacecraft because the idea of materialism works.

  But as he killed animals and plants and ground them up for study, Sheldrake began to wonder, ‘Can we really discover all that we want by reducing everything down to ever smaller parts? Can life really be just a matter of molecular pulleys and gearwheels? Is materialism enough to explain the mysteries of reality?’ Something, he believed, was missing from science – something that no amount of pulleys and gearwheels could surely generate. It was what his childhood love of nature had been surrounded by. Life was missing.

  By the time he was twenty-eight, Sheldrake was a Cambridge don. For eight years, he had been developing a theory that sought to answer some of nature’s most stubborn mysteries. How do pigeons home? How do spiders know how to spin webs without learning from other spiders? How do shoals of fish behave as one? What, he wondered, if there was some undiscovered force that every living thing tapped into? Something not material, exactly – more like a field that somehow carried information?

  One evening, after dinner, Sheldrake was drinking port with Professor Albert Chibnall, an elderly but brilliant biochemist who had served in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, and who had taken a fatherly interest in him.

  ‘This idea of yours is going to get you into trouble,’ Chibnall warned him. ‘You’re perfectly positioned for a brilliant career. If you pursue this, you’ll throw it all away. Take my advice. Wait until you retire.’

  ‘But that’s thirty-seven years away,’ complained Sheldrake.

  ‘It’s dangerous,’ said Chibnall. ‘It’ll ruin your career.’

  Sheldrake ignored him and, in 1981, published his theory in a book, A New Science of Life.

  One Saturday following its publication, Sheldrake was eating a breakfast of toast, marmalade and coffee. He had been pleased by his book’s reception – the Observer had called it ‘fascinating and far-reaching,’ the Biologist ‘well-written, provocative and entertaining’ and New Scientist had said it was ‘an important scientific enquiry into the nature of biological and physical reality,’ elsewhere calling Sheldrake ‘an excellent scientist; the proper, imaginative kind that in an earlier age discovered continents and mirrored the world in sonnets.’ He was happily looking forward to the game of tennis he had planned for the morning when the post arrived, with the latest edition of the famous journal Nature. Sitting down, he gasped at the editorial’s sensational headline: ‘A Book for Burning?’

  Good heavens! he thought. What’s this about? I’ve never seen anything like it.

  He read on. He felt winded. It was about his book. He had been denounced in one of the world’s most prestigious academic journals. His idea had been called irrational; dangerous. He had become a heretic.

  ‘So, you see – my idea did get me into trouble,’ he tells me, having recounted his story. ‘It did ruin my career. I was no longer able to get a job or a grant. Chibnall had been right.’

  But there was more to come from Sheldrake. Grander theories and worse trouble. If it was true that these information fields existed, and that all living things tapped into them, then perhaps humans and animals could communicate non-verbally? Maybe telepathy could be real.

  This is an outrageous postulation. It produces a violent species of contempt in many mainstream academics because it strikes at the very roots of science. The idea that the mind could function outside of the brain had been dispensed with hundreds of years ago, a cornerstone victory in the battle between reason and religion. The mind is of the brain and it is in the brain. If you accept that it might be able to function outside of it – that personalities might be able to exist beyond the boundaries of their physical selves – then what next? Ghosts? The afterlife? God?

  ‘Materialists are afraid that as soon as you allow anything beyond the comfortable terrain of established science, you’ll get religion and civilisation will crumble,’ Sheldrake says with a dry smile. ‘They think if you allow people to believe in telepathy you’ll have the Pope flying in any minute. Compulsory Catholicism. They can’t bear any questioning of science’s basic dogmas.’

  Materialists, of course, say that the mind is the product of nerve activity in the brain. This is the view that was summed up famously by a genius pioneer of the twentieth century, Nobel Prize–winner Francis Crick, who wrote that: ‘“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’

  ‘Crick was a fundamentalist,’ says Sheldrake. ‘He was desperate to have science confirm a materialist worldview and to expel mystery as much as possible.’

  Sheldrake’s explorations into telepathy in its various forms eventually led him to his trials of what he calls ‘the sense of being stared at’. Using a variety of different protocols, he found that people answered correctly 55 per cent of the time. This may not seem dramatically significant, but he conducted so many trials that the odds of this score arising by chance became, he says, one in ten thousand billion billion. Proof, he believed, that the mind didn’t rely wholly on the five senses. Proof that it extended outside the confines of the brain. Proof that materialism is wrong.

  Next, he studied a psychic terrier from Ramsbottom. Jaytee would run to the porch window occasionally, when a cat walked past or a delivery man or who-knows-what-else. But he seemed to have a particular preponderance for being there when his owner Pam was coming home – even when she arrived unexpectedly. It was almost as if Jaytee knew. So Sheldrake tested the dog. In over one hundred tests Sheldrake found that Jaytee spent an average of 4 per cent of his time at the window when Pam wasn’t coming home and 55 per cent of his time there when she was. (If you’re like me, you’ll be wondering why these numbers don’t add up to 100. The study was carried out in blocks of time, so that if, during a ten-minute period in which Pam wasn’t coming home, the dog was at the window for 0.4 minutes, that’s four per cent. If, during a ten-minute period when she was coming home, the dog was at the window for 5.5 minutes, that’s 55 per cent.)

  He published his studies in academic journals. He wrote books. He became a practising Christian. And the world didn’t listen. Instead, things became wors
e for him. His dog studies were ridiculed in newspapers. He was treated with contempt by his colleagues in academia. In 2004 he took part in a debate with Professor of Biology Lewis Wolpert, who described telepathy research as ‘pathological science’ and remarked that ‘an open mind is a very bad thing – everything falls out.’ As Sheldrake described his studies, he claims Wolpert sat with his back to the projector screen, tapping his pencil, ‘looking bored.’ When Sheldrake was asked to speak at the 2006 Festival of Science, his presence was denounced by Oxford Professor of Physical Chemistry Peter Atkins, who said: ‘there’s absolutely no reason to suppose that telepathy is anything more than a charlatan’s fantasy.’ On a subsequent BBC Radio debate, Sheldrake asked Atkins if he had studied any of his work. Atkins said, ‘No, but I would be very suspicious of it.’ When Professor Richard Dawkins filmed Sheldrake for a segment in a documentary, the polemicist accused Sheldrake of being ‘prepared to believe almost anything.’ When asked if he’d actually read any of his evidence Sheldrake says that Dawkins replied, ‘I don’t want to discuss evidence.’ (Dawkins denies this. In an email, sent to me via an intermediary, he called this claim ‘outrageous and defamatory’ and insisted that he had read ‘several’ of Sheldrake’s papers.)

  But perhaps the most damage has been caused by the tireless work of one man – a talented and famous speaker, author, lifelong conjuror, psychologist and adviser to the James Randi Educational Foundation. He is doggedly sceptical of all things paranormal. On national television he has successfully and amusingly debunked hauntings of castles and walkers on fire. His name is Professor Richard Wiseman.

  ‘Wiseman tried to replicate your experiments with staring, and with Jaytee the dog,’ I say to Sheldrake. ‘He’s convinced you’re wrong.’