Mind Bending; So, you say, ESP is for New Age wackos? Go talk to your parrot.

Byline: Michael Meyer

Years ago, when I was a boy, I used to dream of finding a trilobite, the fossilized remains of a 300 million-year-old Cambrian creepy-crawly. One sunny day I happened to be walking across a field full of small, flat stones--thousands of them, all the same. It had been years since I last went fossil hunting, and the furthest thing from my mind was trilobites. Yet suddenly I knew that if I bent down to turn over a particular stone, there one would be. So I did. And sure enough, it was a specimen so perfect you could see its antennae and delicate feet.

How did I know ? Why did I pick up that stone, rather than another, in a field larger than a football pitch? In "The Sense of Being Stared At" (362 pages. Crown) , the renowned Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake explores such mysteries of human perception and argues persuasively that ESP, telepathy and the "sixth sense" are not only real and empirical phenomena but utterly normal. He thus eschews such labels as "paranormal," which by definition suggests something otherworldly. For Sheldrake, the sense of being stared at--a sometimes uncanny instinct for events happening outside the ken of ordinary sight, sound or smell--is hard-wired into our biological construction.

So begins this well-researched yet amiable and remarkably fresh excursion into the meaning of consciousness and worldly connectedness. We hear from pairs of Olympic skaters who ascribe their "moving as one" to nothing less than "telepathy," as well as World War II-era RAF flight instructors who advised their pilots not to stare too hard at an enemy they were about to attack for fear that "the intensity of their gaze" might alert him to turn around and shoot at them instead. We meet dogs who arise to await their owners at ...