In an interview on Premonitions

I’ll give it a go. OK, your next book is Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. I love that title!

Yes, it is very playful. What Rupert has tapped into is a belief that is very common among pet owners, which is this idea that their pets, particularly dogs, have some sense of what their owners are doing at the end of the day, returning home from work. They always meet the puppy who is at the door or window greeting them. What he did was he took this piece of folk belief and put it on a scientific basis by actually videoing the dogs when their owners were absent, to show that you can’t fool them. Even though you come home at different times of day in different kinds of conveyances – walking, driving, driving different cars – you can’t fake them out! The video camera shows that they have some uncanny sense of knowing when the owner is returning. 

So, what we’re looking at with all these books is a different view of consciousness and the fact that people and animals can be conscious outside their particular locale and time. They can apprehend information in the world that can be useful. I have written a book on premonitions which explains that people can sense things outside the present – that’s what a premonition is – and this serves a purpose. I call this a survival value: in our long history it would be very handy if you knew ahead of time where danger lay. You would be more likely to survive and you would then pass on this quality to your offspring.

So you are saying that maybe we will find out what it is one day, and it will lose the mystical, spiritual suggestion and will be understood as one of the things that helps us survive, like our other senses?

Exactly. Sometimes new ideas are so strange and surprising that we want to put them in some kind of transcendental or spiritual category, only later to find that there is a physiological explanation for these things. This is Radin’s point. He relies on quantum physics with its concept of quantum entanglement to explain some of these things.

Is that where an atom is in two places at once if you’re not looking at it?

Precisely. Then if you have quantum particles separated at a distance and you change one of those quantum particles, the other one changes instantly too, to the same degree, as if they were a single particle even though they are widely separated. This is the notion of entanglement.

Like twins who think the same thing at enormous distance?

Well, I happen to be a twin and my brother and I have this kind of thing happen all the time. My wife is also a twin and has the same experience. My brother and I seem to be able to know when the other is going to call and I can anticipate the topic of conversation before it happens. My wife gets actual physical symptoms in her body that correspond to physical pains and discomforts in her twin.