The most potent evidence to date, according to Radin, surrounds what are known as “the ganzfeld experiments.” Hypothesizing that reduced sensory input would place subjects in a more receptive state, in the 1970s researchers developed a basic, easily replicable experiment in which one subject, a “sender,” views a single image for a period of time and attempts to send it telepathically to another subject, a “receiver,” who has been “prepared” by spending ten to twenty minutes in a state of sensory deprivation. After this, the receiver is then shown a series of four images and attempts to identify the sent image from among them. If chance were the only factor involved, this would predictably lead, upon multiple trials, to a twenty-five percent success rate. But in the thirty years since its inception, this experiment has been replicated in over thirty-one hundred sessions across dozens of laboratories, producing an average success rate of thirty-two percent. For those not familiar with statistics, that might sound only mildly interesting. By the standards of science, however, it is nothing short of astonishing, showing odds against chance of over a trillion to one. “The magnitude of the effect is small, but it's stronger than the experiments that convinced the medical establishment that aspirin reduces the risk of heart attacks,” Radin explained. “And telepathy is only one of many areas of successful psi research. This is why I'm saying that no amount of evidence alone is going to be enough. The implications for the current scientific paradigm are just too great.”

For Radin, who has been battling skeptics for over twenty years, the accumulation of more data has, at this point, become a side issue. “This evidence, evaluated by the same standards as used in the behavioral, social, and medical sciences, establishes that psi effects are real,” he explained. “The only reason that it's not accepted by the mainstream is that there is no clear, theoretical reason to accept it. It's not accepted because people don't know how to explain it.”

When I spoke with Radin last winter, he was hard at work on his next book, Entangled Minds, in which, in addition to updating the results of psi research over the past seven years, he plans to present a new theory that he hopes will open the door for the scientific establishment to begin to take psi seriously. Like many theorists attempting to explain the unexplainable, he is looking to the mysterious world of quantum physics for answers. “Ultimately the mystery in psi is a mystery about physics,” Radin told me. “The mystery is that something somehow got inside your head that didn't come through the ordinary senses, and that transcends time and space in some strange way. That mystery is about physics. It's not about biology, and it's not about psychology or neuroscience.”

Drawing on the well-established idea of “quantum entanglement,” Radin is proposing the existence of what he calls “bioentanglement.” In a nutshell, quantum entanglement is the notion that seemingly separate subatomic particles, once they've been in contact with one another, will, in fact, remain connected even across space and time. This connectedness, or “nonlocality,” was first demonstrated experimentally in 1972, and in the three decades since, Radin explains, physicists have been learning more and more about how widespread the phenomenon is. “It is far more pervasive and robust than anyone had imagined even a few years ago. And for me, the question is: What does that mean about the fabric of the world that we live in? What I think it means is that if in fact things are entangled, and if all that is required for two things to become entangled is some contact at some point in their history, then everything in our universe ought to be entangled, because cosmologists tell us that it all came from one source, the big bang.”

Extending this idea of quantum entanglement out of the subatomic and into the “macro” realm is a controversial move, and one that, so far, most mainstream physicists are not yet ready to make. But for Radin, the notion of bioentanglement may provide a way of understanding phenomena that seem impossible to explain within a classical materialist worldview:

The view from above

In their quest to counter the reductionist tendencies of materialism, frontier scientists like Radin and Sheldrake are by no means fighting a solitary battle. In recent years, philosophers, theologians, cosmologists, and even mainstream cognitive scientists have joined the fray, developing powerful critiques and alternative theories that attempt to expand the frame of our thinking about the mind and brain.

Philosophically speaking, one of the more intriguing ways around materialism—and indeed around the mind/body problem itself—is the increasingly popular, albeit ancient, theory of panpsychism. Advocated by a diverse range of thinkers from David Chalmers to theologian David Ray Griffin, this idea, and its close bedfellow panexperientialism, navigates the mind/body conundrum by asserting that consciousness, or experience, is a fundamental property of the universe that can in some form be found everywhere—all the way down to the most elementary particles. According to panpsychism, there is no need to try to figure out how consciousness arises from the complex human brain, because consciousness has been interwoven with matter from the beginning. But before you start imagining rocks having late night talks, note that the idea is not that pebbles and molecules and quarks are conscious in the way that we are, but that they would have some form of what Chalmers would call “protoconsciousness” or what Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as “interiority.”

One advantage of this way of thinking is that it allows for the notion that consciousness is something that develops along a continuum of increasing depth and complexity. Instead of seeking for that magical circuit in the animal or human brain that suddenly gave birth to consciousness, panpsychists argue that consciousness has been developing steadily as an inherent part of the process of evolution. The more complex the organization of matter has become, the more complex the level of consciousness it has been able to sustain. Since the human nervous system is the most complex piece of hardware on the planet, it's no surprise that it is accompanied by the most complex form of consciousness. Though still eschewed by most mainstream philosophers and scientists, this view is gaining ground, particularly among the alternative intelligentsia, in large part because it provides a potentially nonreductionistic framework for understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain (even if some of its proponents, like Chalmers, use it as an argument for the possibility of conscious machines—if all matter is conscious, after all, why couldn't a supercomplex computer be as conscious as you or me?).

But probably the weightiest attempt to counter reductionism—and the one closest to the mainstream—comes from a broad category of theorists who look to the relatively new science of complexity, or emergence, to explain the brain's relation to the mind. For these scientists and philosophers, the notion that consciousness emerges from the activities of the brain is not in question. To say that consciousness can be reduced to the brain, however, is another matter. As Rita Carter describes it, emergence, simply put is “the idea that a complex system can produce something that is more than the sum of its parts.” How exactly that happens is, well, complex. The basic idea is that interactions between lower-order phenomena can give birth to higher-order phenomena with properties that cannot themselves be reduced to the lower-order interactions. Just as the wetness of water cannot be found in the hydrogen and oxygen molecules that make it up, so the complex qualities of mind, like reason, decision making, reflection, and emotion, cannot be found in the behavior of our neurons. The appeal of this approach is that while it does not deny the biological roots of mind, it nonetheless acknowledges the validity of higher orders of human experience as having a reality of their own.

Among proponents of emergence theory are many religious thinkers seeking a philosophically and scientifically respectable way to preserve the sanctity of our higher human faculties. But it has also found adherents among materially inclined philosophers and scientists who are not satisfied with reductionist explanations. As philosopher John Searle writes: “Consciousness is irreducible not because it is ineffable or mysterious, but because it has an essentially subjective first-person mode of existence and therefore cannot be reduced to third-person phenomena. The traditional mistake that people have made in both science and philosophy has been to suppose that if we reject dualism . . . then we have to embrace materialism. But . . . materialism is just as confused as dualism because it denies the existence of subjective consciousness as a thing in its own right.”

What the panpsychists and emergence theorists share is a conviction that materialism's failure to adequately account for the actual complexities of human experience is itself reason to leave it behind. In this sense, they can be seen as part of a larger movement of holistic thinkers for whom partial, compartmentalized explanations of the phenomena of life and consciousness are no longer satisfying. Insisting that the only satisfactory theory will be one that addresses the multiple levels and dimensions of our humanity—from neuronal firing to cosmic consciousness—these new, more integral theorists are attempting to forge a science that while remaining true to the results from the laboratory is equally true to the realities of our lived experience. As Templeton prize–winning cosmologist George Ellis told me:

Taken together, these alternative theories seem to present a formidable case for the scientific establishment to reckon with. But the materialistic bias in Western science runs deep. And just how exactly it might be overturned remains anybody's guess. With approaches ranging from Radin's theory-making to Fenwick's search for more evidence to Sheldrake's parapsychology-for-the-masses, there is certainly no shortage of good ideas. Yet some feel that one of the more intriguing candidates for the proverbial back-breaking straw lies in the nature of the mind/body problem itself. As futurist and popular science author Peter Russell suggests in From Science to God, “I now believe this is not so much a hard problem as an impossible problem—impossible, that is, within the current scientific worldview. Our inability to account for consciousness is the trigger that will, in time, push Western science into what the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a 'paradigm shift.' ”

Is it possible that it will be science's failure to solve the mind/body problem that will ultimately lead to materialism's undoing? Could neuroscience's bold attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the human psyche be that one step too far that brings the entire edifice crashing to the ground? It is of course far too early to say, but if such an eventuality were to unfold, given the mythic implications, it would no doubt give the gods—and perhaps even Icarus—a good chuckle.