breast augmentation nz before and after

>> our speaker today is rupert sheldrake,an innovative and controversial biologist, author of over 75 technical papers and books--veryinteresting, i must say. most recently, "the sense of being stared at." he studied at cambridge,and is director of the perrott-warrick project there, funded by trinity college. and he isgoing to speak about some research he's doing on that project about extraordinary or unexplainedabilities of humans and animals. so, there's going to be a 45-minute talk, followed by15 minutes for questions and answers. let's welcome, rupert sheldrake.>> sheldrake: i just--five second onto then, sorry, just a moment. okay. thank you, i'mtalking about the extended mind, the mind beyond the brain. and i'm going to start witha few reflections on the nature of consciousness.

we don't know how consciousness works or whatit does, this is one of the things which in science is sometimes called "the hard problem",because there's no known obvious reason why we should be conscious at all, or exactlyhow the mind works. and consciousness study is one of the most exciting frontier areasof science today. what i'm going to suggest is that our minds are field-like, that they'renot confined to the inside of the head. they spread out into environment around us, becauseour minds are extended beyond our brains, they can--can have effect at a distance whichare surprising from the conventional point of view and helped to make sense of a rangeof controversial phenomena, like telepathy. so, the first point is that, the questionof "where is the mind located?" i'm suggesting

that minds are field-like can spread out beyondbrains in a similar way to the way that magnetic fields spread out beyond magnets, cellphonefields spread out beyond cellphones and the earth's gravitational field stretches outfar beyond the earth. these fields are within and around the material systems they organized,and i think the same is true of our brains. the place where this becomes easiest to understandis in terms of vision, and the question of how vision works. most people think they knowhow vision works, and science has told us a great deal about it, and what we know isthat when you see me standing here now for example, light is reflected from me, goesthrough the electromagnetic field of inverted images of pair on your retinas, changes happeningin the cone cells and then impulses travel

up the optic nerves and various bits of yourbrain become active. that's what happens during physical--physical--the physical side of perception.there are two problems here; first of all, there's no explanation in this as to why youshould be conscious at all, that's simply not explained by describing what happens inthe nervous system. and the second problem is that, according to the standard view, allthis is supposed to be happening inside your brain. if the mind is nothing but the brain,which is the usual assumption within the academic and medical worlds, mental activity is nothingbut brain activity, everything you're seeing is inside your head. somehow, miraculouslyin an unexplained way, changes in your nervous cells lead to a kind of virtual reality displayinside your head, by which you see what's

going on in the world. so, right now, forexample, somewhere inside your head, there's a little virtual rupert, somewhere in yourbrain and you think it's right out here, whereas i'm standing here talking. if you look atthe sky, the sky you're seeing is an image of the sky inside your head. so, your skullmust be beyond the sky. a recent paper in a leading consciousness journal was called,"is your skull beyond the sky?" because if the sky you see is inside your head, the skullmust be beyond the sky. the answer of the author was yes, my answer would be no. infact, i suggest the very common sense view. a view that is so simple, it's hard to graspthat when you're seeing something, the image you're seeing is where it seems to be. yourimage of me is located not inside your head

but right here. it's in your mind, producedby your mind but it's not in your brain. it's projected out. and i'm suggesting our wholevisual experience of the world is projected out to where it seems to be. our minds areprojecting out all that we see. so, vision's a two-way process, light coming in and theoutward projection of images. this i suggest happens through what i call the perceptualfield, which is a kind of morphic field, another category of field that is part of a theoryi've developed which i don't have time to explain today. but it's a field phenomenonand in a sense, your mind reaches out to touch what you're looking at. the image of whatyou are seeing is superimposed on what's really there. sometimes it's not, as in a mirrorreflection when you have a virtual image or

an illusion or a hallucination but usuallyit is. so what i'm suggesting is that you can, by looking at things, you mind touchesthem, there's a sense in which you might be able to affect things just by looking at them.is this true? can you affect anything by looking at it? think of another person, can you affectanother person by looking at them? of course if they see you looking at them, we all knowyou can. but what if you're looking at them from behind through a car window for example,no sun, no smell, they can't see you're there, they don't know you're there. can you affectthem just by looking at them? well, most people think that that does happen. ninety percentof the population have had the experience of feeling that sometimes when they're beinglooked at from behind, they turn around, someone's

looking at them. survey show that more womenthan men have had that experience. it's still a very large majority. more men than womenhave had the experience of looking at others and making them turn around. but most menand women have had both these experiences and, i guess, most people in this room haveexperienced these things personally. so the sense of being stared at is a well-known phenomena,it's found all over the world, children know about it, adults know about it. but it's notpart of the standard scientific map. you won't find any reference to it in psychology textbooks.there's virtually no research literature on this until about 15 years ago. and it's extraordinarilyunder research in spite of the fact it's very well known. the standard scientific educationthat most of us receive makes us think, "well,

this must be some kind of illusion." so probablymost people in this room are being trained to dismiss the phenomenon by saying, "oh,it's just a coincidence, you turn around all the time, if no one's looking at you, youforget about it. if they are, you think there's some mysterious sense involved but it's reallynothing but either coincidence or peripheral vision or something like that." that's thestandard way of explaining it away, but now many experiments have been done to test whetherthis is real. and the simplistic experiment involves people working in pairs. one sitswith a blindfold, with their back to another. the other person either looks or doesn't lookat them in a randomized sequence and in each trial the person has to guess if they arebeing looked at or not. hundreds of thousands

of these trials have been done. the overallresult show positive significantly--very significant effect. when things are repeated over hundredsof thousands of trials with many independent replications, they become very significant,even though as in this case the effect is fairly small. these results--these experimentshave also been done in amsterdam in the science museum in one of the largest experiments everconducted for more than 20 years. this experiment's been rounding more than 20,000 participantswho've taken part. the results again are overwhelmingly positive and significant. rather surprisingly,this phenomenon also occurs through close circuit television. various experiments havebeen done whereby people skin conductance is measured with electrodes on their fingers.this measures emotional arousal and it turns

out that there's a significant change in people'semotional arousal when they're being looked at through close circuit television by someoneon the monitor in a different room. this work's been replicated as well and one of the peoplewho's done it, marilyn schlitz, is right here in the bay area, indeed she's right here inthis room. and--so it is in our substantial body of work, showing that people can tellwhen they're being looked at even through close circuit television. this is somethingwhich has become of great interest to the security agencies and i can't divulge exactlywho or where. but i can tell you that security forces are very interested in this question:"could a potential terrorist, for example, tell when they're being watched through closecircuit television?" the answer to that is

probably yes, if they've trained their sensitivitya bit. this phenomenon is well known to security guards. most security guards are well awarethat if people are looked at from behind, they can tell when they're being look at.private detectives know that when they're shadowing people, when they're following themthey shouldn't stare at their back because the person is likely to turn around and catchtheir eye and blow their cover. people in the martial arts know about this and theyhave martial arts methods for training your sensitivity to feeling people's intentionor looks from behind. and in the close circuit television industry which now involves millionsof cctv cameras engaged in surveillance work. many operatives know that you can affect peopleby looking at them. i gave a talk about this

in washington, d.c. last year. and one ofthe guys in the audience told me afterwards that he was, in fact, a security guard andwhen he was trained by an fbi trainer, they told him, "if you see someone doing somethingthey shouldn't do, just stare at them hard on the screen and they'll probably stop it."and i said to him, "does that work?" and he said "sure, i do see almost everyday." hesaid, "we all know this stuff." he was amazed that this is a controversial issue withinthe academic, scientific world because in--people in the security industry take this for grantedand the british special services, the sas. when people are being trained how to stabothers in the back, they're trained that you don't stare at the person's back before youstab them because they're likely to feel it,

turn around and shoot you. so, these thingsare completely taken for granted yet they're a huge scientific anomaly. it shouldn't happenif the mind is all in the brain. but if our visual activity involves the outward projectionof images and even the kind of resonant projection when you see something on a computer screen,it's not a direct effect, in that case just seeing the image can affect the person. somethingelse is going on. i think our minds are in fact extended beyond our brains in every actof attention and perception. this is not a new view, it's a view put forth by plato andother greek philosophers. it's the view of perception in most hindu and british philosophers.it's the view taken for granted by traditional people all over the world, and it's the viewtaken for granted by western children under

the age of 10 or 11. studies on children'sintellectual development show that most children assume that vision involves this outward projection.that's why superman comics and things show rays coming out of the eyes of superheroes.it's a very popular childlike way of seeing or understanding. piaget, the developmentalpsychologist, who studied children's intellectual development said that, "by the age of about9--10 or 11, the average child learns the correct view which is that thoughts and imagesare invisible things located inside the head. we've all been brought up with the correctview in spite of the fact there's actually no evidence for it. no one's ever seen orthought of an image inside their head. and our own experience of seeing things outsideus directly contradicts this theory. so, we

bought into a theory that's totally at variancewith our most immediate experience. now i'm suggesting our minds reach out beyond ourbrains and the sense of being stared at is one aspect of this. animals feel it too. manyanimals can tell when they're being looked at. there's a lot of evidence for this fromwildlife photographers and hunters. and many people say that they can feel when animalsare looking at them. jim corbett who was a famous wild--tiger shooter in--during thebritish raj in india, author of books like, "man eaters of kumaon," said that his lifehad been saved on many occasion by feeling the look of a hidden tiger. the hair on theback of his neck stood up as he felt this tiger's presence and escaped. i think thatthis isn't just something that happens between

people and animals, and people and people.i think it happens between animals and other animals and it may well have evolved in apredator-prey situation. if prey animals could tell when predators were looking at them,they'd tend to escape better. and the natural history, this is virtually uninvestigatedbecause it's been a taboo area not really on the scientific map until quite recently.anyways, i say this is an area where the research going on actively at present. and it's onethe ways in which our mind seem to be extended beyond our brains and have effects which oughtnot to occur within the standard view of things. but which do seem to occur and which mostpeople have actually experience themselves. and this is one of the phenomena that i called,"a mystery of everyday life." it's something

almost everybody, even every child knows about,but most scientists have been trained not to think about it or to dismiss it becauseit doesn't fit the paradigm or the model. if we move to this extended mind model, itmakes good sense. there's another way in which the extended mind idea makes better senseof our experience than the idea that is all in the brain. and that's to do with the waythat social animals are coordinated with each other. all social animals have to work togetherby definition in a harmonious way for the society to hold together. this is shown mostgraphically in the case of flocks of birds. here you see a flock of starlings. the flockcan fly together, they can turn immensely quickly without bumping into each other. hereare some other pictures of flocks of birds

of starlings and the astonishing maneuversthat they make. some of you who are familiar with animation--computer animations of birdflocks like craig reynolds classic boids model from the '80s, which seem to show you--andjust to explain it by nearest neighbor sensations. actually you can't, those nobles--those modelsare biologically naive. they assumed that birds look at their nearest neighbor, processthe information, adjust their flight and change direction. that takes a lot of time, nervoussystems work slowly compared with computers. and the birds are reacting too fast for thatto happen. the best computer models are field models that treat the whole flock as a fieldphenomenon. and i think they are indeed field phenomena, that members of social groups arelinked through social fields or morphic fields

of the social group. the same applies, ofcourse, to schools of fish like this one. and especially when predators attack, theycan scatter in different directions very rapidly without bumping into each other. the wholegroup seems to move as a unit, as a kind of field and the individuals move in responseto the field, which is both produced by the individuals and acts back upon them. it'smore than the sum of the parts acting--it's a kind of emergent field phenomenon. i thinkall social animals have such fields joining them together even when they move apart. apack of wolves, for example, has a morphic field of the group. when some of them go awaylike adult wolves go hunting to fetch food for the young that are left in the den, thefield isn't broken, it stretches and i think

they remain connected at a distance throughthis stretched field. change--a change in one can affect the other through this fieldthat connects them. that i think is the basis of telepathy. i think it's a normal meansof communication among separated members of animal groups or even non-separated members.i don't think it's paranormal, i think it's normal, i don't think it's supernatural, ithink it's natural and i think it's essentially a form of animal communication within groups.another way of thinking about this is through quantum entanglement and dean radin, who gavea talk here at google sometime ago, a few months ago, has written a book called "entangledminds" suggesting that when people have close social relationships and interactions, theirminds become entangled. so that when they

separate, there's still an entanglement betweenthem so a change in one--is reflected by a change in another. quantum nonlocality, entanglementof quantum particles is well--well known, well documented and this in fact the basisof now technological applications in quantum cryptography and quantum computing. and whatthat shows is that particles that are part of the same system when they move apart, achange in one is immediately associated with the change in the other. this is independentof distance unlike many other physical phenomena. it doesn't matter if it's an inch apart ora mile apart. it's distance independent entanglement or non-local connection. i'm suggesting somethinglike that happens in the case of animal groups and in social groups in general includinghuman groups. and because i think it's basically

an animal phenomenon that we share in becausewe're animals, rather than some kind of spiritual phenomenon that any humans have. my firststudies on telepathy were with animals. and i started with the animals we know best likecats and dogs and other animals that people live with and get to know very well and whichform bonds with their human companions. the first stage in this research was natural history.every science begins with natural history and no one have ever done this. so, i collectedlots and lots of stories about people, about their pets. what did they see in their pet'sbehavior suggested something might be going on beyond normal sensory information? i sooncollected thousands of these stories that i classified in a whole series of differentcategories on a computer database. the fact

that people report this phenomenon doesn'tprove they're right about their reports. but for me, the plural of anecdote is data. andwhen you have hundreds of reports of the same kind of phenomenon from all over of the world,at least it shows lots of people observing or think they're observing the same kind ofthing. and that then has to be investigated further. for example, on our database, wehave hundreds of reports from cat owners saying their cat seems to read their mind and knowwhen they're planning to take it to the vet, the cat disappears. and after it's happeneda few times, people try to avoid giving the cats any clues. they don't let it see thecarrying basket, they try not to think of the word vet and some people even ring thevet from work so the cat doesn't overhear

the conversation and then they swing by homeon the way back from work to pick it up and it's still not there. so many of these storiesthat--we did a survey of all the veterinary clinics in the north london yellow pages,65 of them, rang them up and said, "do you ever have a problem with people missing appointmentswith cats?" sixty four out of sixty five said, "yes, it happens all the time." and the remainingone said, "it happens so often, we've given up the appointment system for cats." peoplejust have to turn up with them. and the--with dogs and cats, another very common phenomenonis the animals knowing when their owners are coming home. a lot of dogs and cats wait atthe door or window when the owner is on the way home, even if they come at non-routinetimes, even if they come by public transport,

even if they're in a friend's car and evenif the people at home don't know when they're coming. many--many of these stories, about800 of these stories with dogs in our database, about 500 with cats, also stories about lambsthat are raised by hand on milk that do it, a few rabbits, and guinea pigs and ferretsthat do it, parrots, parakeets, [indistinct] that do it. a range of animals do this. butall of them are mammals and birds. i haven't come across any cases of return anticipatingreptiles. and i've tried hard to find such cases and including launching appeals forinformation in journals like reptilian international. and i haven't come across any convincing casesof snakes, monitor lizards, or fish like gold fish or insects like stick insects seemingto feel this. it only seems to happen with

mammals and birds that form close bonds withtheir owners. well, is this just an illusion? when i discussed it with one of my skepticalcolleagues in cambridge, nicholas humphrey, who's a psychologist, to my surprise, he didn'tdeny the phenomenon. in fact he said, "well, my dog used to do that. my mother always knewwhen i was coming home. the dog would go to the door." and i said, "but surely the dogcouldn't have heard your car from the other side of cambridge, from many miles away againstall the traffic that's there, irrespective of the wind direction." and he said, "they'reon the country." it just shows what sharp-hearing they've got. and because he and i differ inmany respects, in our opinions, yet we share a belief in science and scientific method.this lead to the idea of--for an experiment

and the experiment is the person goes at leastfive miles from home. the place where the dog waits is filmed continuously on time codedvideo tape. the person comes home at a randomly chosen time communicated by a pager. theydon't know that in advance. the people at home, if any, don't know when they're comingand to avoid familiar car signs, they travel by unfamiliar vehicles like taxis. well, i'venow done hundreds of those kinds of experiments with dogs. and the results are pretty clearcut. the dogs go and start waiting over and over again when the person is coming home.in fact, in the--with the most sensitive dogs, when they form the intention to come homebefore they've even gotten into the taxi. this research is being written up, it's publishedin journals, you can see the full reports

on my website. and it's now being replicatedby an online open source science project where people are putting up pictures of their dogswaiting at the door on youtube. so, you can actually see ongoing experiments of this kind.the--this slide shows a survey of dogs and cats that do this, a random household surveydone in two locations in britain and two in california. you'll see that about 50% of dogsare reported by their owners to anticipate the arrival of a member of the family. anaverage of about 30% of cats, for some reason, the californian cats do it more than britishcats. we haven't worked out why. but even in los angeles, where the most impressiveanimals seem to live, cats do it less than dogs. and that doesn't necessarily prove catsare less sensitive than dogs, it may just

prove that some of them are less interested.in these experiments with dogs that know when their owners are coming home, we've done lotsof these experiments, you can read the details online if you--if you want to but basicallywhat this graph show is the number of seconds the dog stays at the window, and these are10-minute intervals, after the person leaves home. you see, the dog does sometimes go tothe window when they're not coming home, like here and here, and when you see the videos,in most of these cases, they're going to look at things going outside to bark at passingcats and so on, they're obviously not waiting, but we've included all the data so there'sno bias and introduced by any subjective judgment. what you see is the 10 minutes--the first10 minutes of the homeward journey, there,

there, and there, the dogs are at the windowmost. and they're there also before the person actually gets in the car and the car startsmoving, that's because people form the intention to go home before the car actually moves,you have to think about it before you get in the car. but the highest amount of timeat the window is when they're on the way home. these data were of course challenged by skeptics,as you know, anything to do with telepathy is immensely controversial. there are vigilanteorganizations that have been setup to try and discredit research of this kind, thereare active groups of highly motivated skeptics, they vastly outnumber researchers in thisfield, the total number of subscribers to skeptical magazines in the u.s. is about 100,000.the total number of full-time researchers

in parapsychology is about five, so they'reoutnumbered about 20,000 to 1 by well organized groups of skeptics. and so, of course andrightly so, this work was criticized by skeptics. one of them, richard wiseman, a british mediaskeptic and psychologist said that, "i must have made mistakes and the result; faultyrandomization, the wrong kind of vehicle to bring people home." so, i invited him to dohis own experiments with these--with one of the same dogs, the same dog i worked withhere. and these are the results of the three experiments he did on the same location. asyou see it's almost perfect--almost perfect replication, the most time the dog was atthe window was on the--the first 10 minutes of the homeward journey, and showed exactlythe same kind of pattern. at first, he argued

these refuted my results because the dog wentto the window before the owner set off, and the rest of the data could therefore be discarded,but in fact, most people don't think that's a valid approach, i certainly don't. he himselfnow admits that this is in fact a replication of the effect, he doesn't agree with my interpretationbut his own results clearly replicated the same pattern as my own. not only animals butpeople commonly show telepathic behavior or sensitivity, these things are wildly believein our society, the great majority of people in america, britain, germany, south america,india, in fact all over the world, think they've have telepathic experiences. skeptics dismissthis by saying "well, these are just uneducated people prone to illusions, and it's all justa delusion in their minds, a false interpretation

of what's happening to them, inadequate understandingof chance and statistics and so forth." you're all familiar with those arguments. but startingas a biologist, i wanted to look at the things where this happens most commonly and mostbiologically. one case in the human realm is with mothers and babies. many mothers claimthat they can feel when their baby needs them, a lot of nursing mothers have what's called"the milk let down reflex", that for the benefit of the men here, which is the majority, isa reflex that occurs with nursing mothers, normally when they hear the baby cry, there'sa release of oxytocin from the brain that causes the breast to prepare to feed the baby.these special changes occur in the breast; the nipple starts leaking, many women experiencea tingling sensation. some women experienced

that when they're away from their baby, theymay be shopping in a supermarket and suddenly their milk lets down and they feel their breaststingle. most women, when that happens, assume that the baby needs them, they used to justgo home, nowadays they call home on the cell phone and they're often right, not alwaysbut very often. and i've done detailed studies on breastfeeding mothers in london that showthat the odds against this happening by chance at the time the baby really does need themwhere--the odds are about a billion to one against chance in the study i did. so i thinkthere's something really going on there and this is a very good area to study telepathy,it's very biological, it's easy to see why natural selection might have favored thisability. a mother who knows when her absent

baby needs her is more likely to have a babythat survives than a mother that doesn't know. and so i think that natural selection favorsthese abilities, they have an evolutionary reason for being there. they're not just,sort of, curiosities on the very fringes of parapsychology. their central aspects of lifeand until the invention of modern telecommunications, the only way that a mother could know herbaby needed her immediately when she was--where--far away from it was through telepathy. it's theonly way people or animals could communicate at a distance until the invention of telegraphsand telephones. well, telephones are in fact one of the ways in which telepathy emergesmost strongly in the modern world. it's evolved along with technology and right now it's onthe increase because people use telephonic

communications so much. survey show that thegreat majority of people have had experiences of what i call "telephone telepathy", youthink of somebody for no apparent reason and then that person calls and you say, "that'sfunny, i was just thinking about you." surveys in a variety of countries have shown thatmore women than men claim this experience, about 95 and 96% of women, about 72% of men.there are some national differences in men, the most sensitive men in our survey werein argentina, the least sensitive in britain. with other kinds of telepathy, the figuresare still way above the 50% mark, the majority of people with much less common than telephonetelepathy. so what's going on here, it's very common, i imagined most people in this roomhave experienced it. is this just an illusion?

what do the skeptics say? well what the skepticsay and what most people in this room are probably being trained to say and probablyheard said very often is, "oh well, it's just a coincidence. you think of people all thetime. one of them rings, and you think it must have been telepathy but you forget themillions of time you were wrong." a reasonable hypothesis, chance coincidence and selectivememory, but where's the data? in science, it's not enough to put forward an armchairhypothesis, you need data. skeptics have been advancing that argument for 100 years sincethe invention of the telephone and there was not one shred of data to support it. nothingin science deserves a free ride and you need evidence. anyway, i've developed a test totry and find out what's really going on, is

it just coincidence or not? for that you needstatistical experiments, and how i've been doing these tests is as follows; imagine youare somebody who has this experience and you volunteered to be a subject in one of theseexperiments. you gave me the names of four people you might be telepathic with, typicallypeople you're closely related to, family members, girlfriends, boyfriends, close colleagues,people you know well. you give me their numbers and their names. you sit at home, you're videotapedcontinuously and while you sit by a landline telephone with no caller id system. we thenpick one of your four callers at random using a randomizing device. call them up asked themto phone you. they phone you. the phone rings. before you pick it up, you guess who it is."i think it's john." you pick it up, "hi john."

you're right or you're wrong. that's an objectivefact, it's on film and your chance by getting it right by just guessing is 25%, one in four.well, in these experiments, the chance rate--the 25% chance rate is there and the actual hitrate, 45% is what we found and this is with hundreds of test and the probability figurefor this is 1x10^-12. in other words, this is way beyond what you'd expect by chance.this is a highly significant statistic with significant result, it's not just chance,whatever it is, it's not just chance. we then did these tests with--where two of the fourcallers were strangers that people had never met but whose name they knew the other twowere people they knew well. and here we found with the un--with the unfamiliar callers,the success rate was at pretty well at the

chance level, just above. with the un--withthe familiar callers, it was way above chance, in this case, 52%. so these telephone telepathytests, a new way of testing for telepathy, they've given highly significant positiveresults. there's no effect of distance in accordance with other research on telepathy.we did some of our experiments with young australians and new zealanders who'd recentlyarrived in london who's nearest and dearest were at the antipodes, the other side of theworld. their hit rates were actually higher with people in australia or new zealand thanwith new acquaintances in england, at--showing that what matters is emotional proximity ratherthan physical proximity. and this is now being replicated in a number of place--studies atcape town university, at amsterdam university

by dick bierman and his colleagues and recentlyat freiburg university in germany. and it was also done as a replication for a tv showin britain under controlled conditions with the nolan sisters who are an '80s girl band,and that's now available on youtube, tube. you can actually see that there's a five minuteclip showing that experiment. you can get it through my website, www.sheldrake.org.if you're interested in seeing one of these tests, you can do that easily enough. thelatest evolution of telepathy is in connection with emails. the same kind of things now startedhappening with emails. lots of people think of someone then they get an email from themand say, "that's funny, i was just thinking about you." we've done very similar experimentswith emails, four emailers, random choice

of who's getting to email you. people haveto guess just before they get the email who's sending it. we have fixed times for this experiment.you know that you'll get an email, let say, four o'clock. so, at 3:59, you have to sendme an email with your guess then the person sends that email at four o'clock and witha cc to me. from the email themselves, we know to the exact second when the guess wassent and when the actual email was sent. and so, we can show that the guesses are madebefore the email has being sent, it's built in to the technology. we've done this alsowith people being filmed for security reasons to make sure they're not cheating by meansof mobile phones, regular phones, msn messenger or anything like that. and the results ofthe email experiments show a similar effect,

the chance level of 25%, the film test 47%is the hit rate. and again, we get a higher hit rate with the familiar than the unfamiliarcallers. we also found no effect to distance in this email telepathy test. well, thesetests lend themselves to automation and i've recently been in the last couple of yearsdeveloping a whole set of automated online test for telepathy. some of them are automatedemail test. the whole of this can be done online where you register online, you putin the names of your emailers, the computer selects an emailer at random, asks them tosend you an email by sending them an email. so, the whole thing is done by email and allthe results are recorded in an online database. i've also have a similar experiment workingwith text message test on mobile telephones.

and those--both email and the automated textmessage test are giving significant positive results. these are being done by anyone whowants to do them, it's completely open science. i don't know that some of those people couldn'thave been cheating, perhaps they were. there's not much incentive i think to cheat becausemost people are trying to find out how telepathic they are and there's no point doing it ifyou're cheating, but some of them could've been. the only way to deal with the cheatingthing is for anyone to do it themselves. if you do it, you'll know if you--you're cheatingor not. you could do it with a group of friends who you trust and see what the group resultscome up with. this can be set as classroom experiments in colleges and schools and someinstructors are already doing this. and when

you register for the test, you put in a groupname and people could then recover all the results from that group name online, on theonline database. so, in some universities, instructors have set these as homework assignments.as a--in a study in scientific methodology, it triggers of a very lively debate amongstudents. it gives results generally positive which bring in debates about the nature ofstatistics and also debate about could some people have been cheating and if so, who?thus, the only way you can really guard against cheating is either by trusting people, whichyou won't trust me if you're a skeptic or anyone else, but you can trust yourself andyour friends, hopefully. all by having the experiments done under oppressively at rigorousconditions where people have strip-searched,

search for hidden mobile phone devices, implantedtelephonic tooth implants, some spy type equipment. skeptics will go to any length to say thatpeople must have been cheating and actually, there's only a limited number of precautionsyou can take against it in practical terms. so, that's why by having these experimentswide open for anyone to do. at least you can organize your end group, do your end test.and this area--this area of research can now be participatory. you don't have to take myword for it or anyone else's word. these are all published in peer-reviewed journals. youcan read the text online on my website but you can do it yourself, as well. the latestexperiment which is only just become technically possible which is now being programmed inengland and should be ready soon is an automated

straight telephone telepathy test where youregister online. if you're picked to make the phone call, you'll get a text messageor an email telling you to call your friend, you call a landline number which is say, adedicate landline number. you get a message welcoming you to the test. you give your groupnumber, so it knows who you are, who the people are involved in the test. and then it turn--ringsthe subject and so as this one of your callers waiting on the phone to talk to you, who isit? press one for jim, press two for susan, press three for bill. and you make your guessand as soon as you made with your guess, the line opens up, you get to talk to them. theseexperiments, i think have the potential for being very popular participatory experiments.i've been talking to people in the mobile

telephone industry and some of them were interestin developing intuition test programmed into the phone. these won't be experiments butways of training your intuition. instead of a caller id when the call comes in, there'llbe a simple program, easy to do which says who is calling, you know, and then quick key,you can have a quick key thing. you press one for jane, two for jill, three for bill,etc. if you don't know who's calling and if you're in a hurry, you just answer it andyou pass. but if you do make a guess, that it will keep a record and you'll see how manyyou've got right. you can see if you're getting better with the time if you're training yourintuition. and this way, we could find more talented subjects for our more rigorous experiments.i have a variety of online experiments proceeding

right now. another one is a photo telepathytest and what that involves is you--two people do this test. one of you, when you register,you upload a photo of one of the people. there's a series of twenty ten-second trials. andin each trial, the subject just sits there, it says trial one begins and the ten secondspass. the other person either sees your photo or they see a photo something completely different.at the end of ten seconds, a box comes up whilst your partner looking at your photo,yes, no? you click, and you can have feedback or not as you choose at the beginning of thetest and the dates were all stored online, it's a fun experiment to do. and i'm--i'dlike any feedback you have about how best to spread these kinds of experiments but severalpeople have suggested this would work very

well on facebook or other social networkingsites because the problem i have is to get people to go to their computers at the sametime as other people to do experiments. most people are too busy, it's hard to arrange.in facebook, they're all online, you've got people online anyway waiting to interact andhere's a way they can interact in a way that's fun to do. can you tell if someone else islooking at your photo? the results so far, suggest that people can positive significantresults. i also have a joint attention test designed to answer the question, when you'relooking at the same thing as somebody else, do your minds come into a kind of resonance?can you tell when someone else is looking at the same thing as you? in that test, there'stwenty trials, each trial has two pictures.

by chance, you are looking at the same oneor a different one in each trial and after ten seconds, each of you has to guess, wasyour partner looking at the same picture? that again is giving positive above chanceresults. if joint attention works, so there's a kind of resonance you can actually feelwhen one other person's looking at it, what about real television? what about--so fiftymillion people watching obama's acceptance speech at the democratic convention. now,that's a bad example for doing the experiment because everyone knew it was happening. butwith regular tv, if you went into a room, the two rooms adjacent, two booths, each havetv running, one of them is showing live tv that's actually playing right now to millionsof people, the other one is showing a tivoed

or recorded program that was broadcast hoursor days ago that probably no one else but you is watching at this moment. can peopletell the difference? interesting experiment, huge relevance to modern media which involvemillions of people having their attention focused on the same thing at the same time.no one knows the answer because that experiment has not yet been done. but i mention it becausesome of these experiments are immensely relevant to modern media. many of them are very cheapto do, many of them very simple to do, many of them work through interactive websites.and i think this is an area of research which cannot only involve a lot of people but canalso involve a kind of public debate about the results. the results can be--the programmingcan be transparent or my test, anyone who

wants to, can see the codings, study the randomizationsystem and so forth. and in britain, i've recently been doing a project with one ofour leading skeptics, a very intelligent and reasonable skeptic, not some dogmatic, ideologicallymotivated and i think way beyond any limits of science and reason in bigotry and prejudice.but we have one in britain, the editor of the british skeptic magazine, professor chrisfrench, who's a friend of mine and he's been running some of my tests himself while i'vebeen here on the west coast over the last month or two. when i get back, i'm going tofind out just what he found. so far, looking online, the results he's got are coming outpositive and in line with the kinds of test i've been doing myself. but this is somethingwhere open-minded skeptics and proponents

can cooperate on research where the resultscan be easily obtainable and where there can be research going on way beyond the narrowlimits of academic laboratories with papers just in peer review journals that no readsanyway to participate through research which can engage large numbers of people. so, that'smore or less the state of the art and a few other people are engaged in this kind of thing.there are number of researchers in parapsychology and psychology doing this kind of research.one or two other people are doing online test, notably, dean radin who spoke here at googlerecently. but i'll just end by saying that the idea of the extended mind, the mind beyondthe brain, a mind that stretches out through fields, gives us a way of extending the frontiersof science. we're not leaving behind science

and reason and descending into a kind of blackmode of superstition as freud called it. we're extending the realm of science to phenomenawhich are widely known about which most people are really interested in and which may wellhave a perfectly good scientific explanation but which haven't being part of the rathernarrower kind of science that we are used to. so, i think that this is important becauseit makes science more relevant, not less. it expands science and it makes science moreinteresting to more people. so, i think this is a good thing. i think that some peoplethink it's a bad thing but anyway, that's my opinion. and i'd interested to take anyquestions or comments that you may have. yes? >> are you able to introduce noise in thesystem? noise, so for example, let's say you

had two callers and one that was being called,and one of the lines were cut and the caller didn't know whether the lines were cut. does--soboth people have the intension of calling, knowing one of us is actually maybe through?>> sheldrake: yes. >> have you performed that experiment andso does that affect the results? >> sheldrake: good question. i mean, couldwe actually interrupt these experiments randomly? i haven't tried doing that. it could be done.the trouble is, in the interest of full disclosure, when you get people's tape part in experiments,you have to tell them what they're going to do. you know, it's part--most committees,ethics committees require you to disclose the experiment. so, it would be hard top haverandom interruptions of tests without telling

people in advance that this might happen.in which case, you might change their intention. they might think, "well, maybe nobody is reallygoing to be answering the phone." so, i think it could interfere with it. but i think it'san interesting case--an interesting point. yes?>> ever since dean came here earlier this year, i've been telling a lot of people aboutpsi. and basically, the conversation usually ends as soon as the person i'm speaking withthinks of james randi. and again... >> sheldrake: yes.>> ...i put up with james randi's shield where they won't let anything get past...>> sheldrake: yes. >> ...and i was just wondering what your responseto that is?

>> sheldrake: well, for the benefit of thosewho don't know about him, there's like a hundred called james randi who often appears on tvand he's a very anti--he's one of these ideologically motivated skeptics who believes psi is possibleand he's offered a $1 million prize, or says he has. it's--there's lot of questions asto whether he actually has the million dollars or where it is for any successful test ofpsi. and people often say, "why don't you apply for the randi prize?" well, it's a verygood question and i can tell you my answer. first of all, this man is not a scientist.he has no--he has no scientific credentials or understanding. in his--on his website,it says the price must be won for people who produce an unequivocable--then--unequivocaldemonstration of psiabilities that requires

no expert analysis. that seems to rule outany statistical experiments. then he's later said, "oh, well, i will accept statisticsexperiments but the odds against chance have got to be a million to one to get the milliondollar price." so if the odds against chance are 900,000 to one, you fail the test. third,you sign over to randi all publicity rights. you have all legal waivers. so he has completecontrol of all publicity writing from this. and fourth, and most important for me, he'sa liar. he's a deceiver by profession and he's a deceiver by nature. and my reason forsaying this without being sued for libel is that he wrote an article in a magazine aboutmy dog research called, "dog world." probably a very few of you read dog world, but lotsof people do. and in this, he said that, "we,

at the james randi educational foundationhave repeated sheldrake's experiments. they fail." then he said, "we've also examinedall his video tape from his experiments and shown the dog goes to the window all the time,and it's not as he says it is." an unequivocal statement. i emailed him asking him to tell--giveme the details of the experiments he'd done, what journal were they published, where'sthe data? reasonable questions that a scientist would ask. he didn't reply. i emailed again,he didn't reply. so i emailed his scientific advisory board and they advised him to reply.so he then replied and he said, "well, actually these experiments were done many years agowhen i looked after a friend's dogs for a couple of weeks in new york, and i lost allthe data. they were lost in the floods so

i've got no data and they've never been writtenup." so what kind of evidence is that? if i produce evidence for science and say, "oh,i did them years ago, i've lost all the data, but just believe me," he wouldn't go for that,i'm sure. and then the examination of the video tapes, he had to admit he'd never seenthe video tapes. he'd simply made that up. now, with a man with such a low degree ofhonesty, i don't think he should be an arbiter of scientific credibility or truth. i do believe,however, that real skeptics, people with proper skeptic scientific training and who have trackrecords of honesty rather than dishonesty are worth engaging with, and that's why i'mdoing joint experiments with professor chris french right now.>> thank you for a great talk, as an open-minded

skeptic. so, you said--you mentioned you havea fondness for the scientific method, but there's a very key but subtle difference betweena scientific study and a statistical study. a scientific study has to include a falsifiabletheory of how this works. do you think that that's an unnecessary assumption and scienceshould expand beyond it? or do you think that these experiments actually do have some sortof a theory? >> sheldrake: it's a good point. and firstof all, i don't think that all science requires a theory. no one knew till recently how aspirinworked. no one knew till recently and they probably still don't know how super--hightemperature superconductivity worked. there's lots of--newton didn't know how gravity worked.we still don't. i mean, it's based--it's supposed

to happen on the base of gravitational particles,gravitons that no one has ever detected. so, lots of phenomena can be recognized as phenomenawithout a theory. however, i do have the theory. i didn't go into the theory today becausei was mostly talking about the phenomena. i have a theory of morphic fields and morphicresonance which i put forward in my first two books, "a new science of life" and "thepresence of the past". and when i did that, people said, "okay, you've got this theory.where is the evidence?" now i concentrate on evidence. people say, "okay, here's theevidence. where is the theory?" well, there is a theory and i think the theory of morphicfields of social groups, for example, make somber predictions. telepathy should occurbetween people you know well much more than

people you don't, for example. it should beindependent of distance. it makes a number of predictions which these experiments testand so far, support. so--and then there are other theories. some people have quantum theoriesof telepathy. you know, quantum entanglement theories, those make certain predictions toowhich are being tested. so, there's not just one theory. there are several--several so,i think this is a truly valid field of sciences based on experiments, data, theories, predictions,tests. i think it meets all the criteria far better actually than many orthodox areas ofscience like superstring theory which makes no testable predictions or multi-universetheories in cosmology which postulate quadrillions of unobserved universes for which there'snot a shred of evidence. you can say that

kind of thing and hold--done prestigious chairsin leading universities. so, you know, one has to be aware of double standards aboutthis kind of thing. >> thanks.>> actually, i'm not surprised at all. my mama always tells me that she thought aboutme when i was calling and she lives in europe. >> sheldrake: yes.>> but i have actually a different question. do you think that art and the media and ourtelevision and movies in fact exist to create this entanglement of society and these sharedintuitions? so, it's in a sense not very surprising because we are using this product of art andall these communications media. >> sheldrake: very interesting point. youknow the joint attention which i was talking

about is the basis of these...>> yes. >> sheldrake: ...minds, when you're all seeingthe same thing. in child development, by the age of about one, normal children developwhat's called joint attention. and that's why you see parents and their babies look--readingbooks together, walking along streets seeing--they see a dog and he would, "doggie," and everyonesay would--so, you know, it's just looking at the same thing, pointing, seeing things,is part of normal development. people who don't do that are often autistic. so partof our normal human consciousness throughout human histories involve the ability to formthis kind of mental resonance with other people. consciousness is a shared phenomenon in manyways. now, in traditional societies, you know,

a storyteller would have the attention ofa whole group sitting around the fire for example. so that's again is an old phenomenon.but what modern media have done is extended this to an unprecedented level through linkups,tv linkups, like the oscars or the olympic games, where literally billions of peopleare seeing the same thing at the same time. and i think this takes something that's anormal human phenomenon to a totally new level. and i think it does play a part in socialcohesion and in the way our societies work, but it's extraordinarily uninvestigated. andnobody has ever done an experiment to find out whether people can tell, whether they'reseeing the same thing as millions of others or not at the same time. and as i say, i thinkthese experiments can easily be done given

the media that we now have. let me just to--anopportunity to mention another experiment that may interest people here, because thisis people learning about computers. i set up a joint attention sound experiment on theinternet, but my coding--the programmer hasn't yet got it to work. but how that works is,you have samples of 10 clips--sound clips, five of them are real radio stations thatboth broadcast in real time and on the internet. so you've got sounds there, music is beinglistened to by millions of people. some of the ones we use for example--or talking, somewere chinese talk shows from shanghai. and we then have another five clips which arerecordings of similar radio stations, recorded days, weeks, hours before. and after listeningto each clip, you have to guess was this a

recording or was it live. so that's anotherform that's can be done using internet technologies. as i say, i haven't got it to work yet becausewe had un-buff--we had buffering problems and time lags. these were entirely technicalproblems we haven't solved, but this kind of thing is perfectly doable.>> thanks so much. >> thank you for your talk. and i have a quickquestion. if you start with the premise that the mind extends beyond the body through space,then i think there's a very little stretch to imagine that it also--it can extend throughtime. and i was wondering if, for instance, for your phone experiment, you've run suchan experiment where for instance you would have the subject try to predict who's gonnacall before a random number generator would

select the person who will--who will actuallyplace the call. >> sheldrake: yes, i've done that. i havea precognitive version of my text message test and also of the email test, where wechanged the programming so that we ask people to say who's going to email you shortly orwho's going to send you a text message. they send back their guess and the second theirguess is received by the computer, it does the randomization and gets the person to doit. those results have been coming out at chance level so far. we haven't done verymany of them. a few of them we've in the telepathy mode. but that it can be done with this kindof online programmed experiment, you can just flip the program to precognitive or telepathic.>> right. so you haven't received any significant

positive result?>> sheldrake: not in that case. no. not in those cases. but i think that the evidencefor what dean radin calls presentiment, feeling a few seconds in advance about getting a kindof pre-echo of an emotional arousal. the evidence for that is very strong. and so i think thereare ways in which there are future influences of a rather mysterious kind that can influenceus. and of course, the mind's extend in time in the past which is what memory is all about.so, memory and collective memory. i have a theory of collective memory called morphicresonance. this is another major part of my research that i haven't talked about at allthis afternoon. but i think the minds are extended in space and in time. they're extendedin time even through our intentions. every

intention we have--a future intention likei'm--where i'm going after i've been here, which train i'm going to catch on bart, allthese things are future intentions, where i'm going tomorrow. our minds stretch intothe future all the time through our intentions. we're connected to the past through our memories.and i think that some these depend on things that science doesn't, at present, have onits map of reality. but our minds, i would say, ensure--are extended in space and time.they're not just in our brains, no. >> thank you.>> i have a couple of possible questions here. the first one is, i had a lot of trouble withyour vision analogy and i wonder is that just an analogy or do you actually mean that tobe another manifestation of your theories

of morphic fields and the way our mind works?>> sheldrake: you mean vision being projected out?>> yes. >> sheldrake: it's not just an--well, theword projection is a kind of analogy or metaphor. but the idea that our vision is extended,i think that my image of you is where you are now. i don't think it's in my brain.>> yes. >> sheldrake: no. i really think that's notjust analogy and it's not just--as i say, it's not just my theory. if you take a sortof majority--a vote of people and theories through the ages, it would be the kind of99% of humanity's theory of vision. the theory is all in the brain, dates back to capularand descartes in the 17th century. and has

never really been terribly successful becauseit--the--in consciousness studies, one of the really big debates is; how does visualperception work? is there of actual reality display inside the head? if so, where is it?how does it work? and if it's virtual, why should it be stopped by the skull rather thango through it? >> how do you account for--you know, if youcut the optic nerve, a person's going to go blind or if you damage part of the brain,they're gonna go blind or if you damage another part of the brain, they're going to...>> sheldrake: yes. >> ...lose a lot of capacity.>> sheldrake: now that's certainly true. i'm saying it's a--light comes in, changes happenin the brain, projection goes out. so, cut

any part of that circuit and it's not goingto work. you know, it's like the tv set, or to take a somewhat different analogy; thepicture you see on your tv depends on the electric supply on the transistors, the condensers,the wiring, but also on a transmission coming from outside. the--i think the brain is actuallymore like a tv set or receiver. >> okay.>> and so, with inferences coming--if you cut the wire, pull the plug out, cut a fewwires on the tv set, the screen will go blank. but that doesn't prove it's all inside thetv set. >> okay. one other quick question, if youwill. this would seem to be enormously useful for survival, how come we aren't a lot betterat it than we seem to be?

>> sheldrake: for spying?>> for surviving. >> what?>> sheldrake: surviving, you say? surviving. >> for surviving, sure.>> sheldrake: it's a--it's a--it is an interesting question. you see, if you look at the useof these abilities in traditional societies--i used to live in india and i worked there.in india, most people took these things for granted, in africa, they take them for granted,and they used them in a way that is helping in surviving. people go to people who aredesperately ill and when they need them, not because they've got a phone call because theyjust feel this. mothers go to their babies. in our society--first of all, we've got technologythat works really well, probably better than

telepathy, you know, telephones, emails, andso forth. and secondly, we live in a society where educated people have been brought upto disbelieve in these things. we've all been taught, if not explicitly at least, implicitly.it's a kind of illusion only stupid people believe this kind of thing. if you're smart,you've got to be a skeptic and if you're a skeptic, you know it's just sort of faultystatistics. >> so do you think we're kind of de-evolvingourselves in this regard though? >> sheldrake: well, despite all attempts tosuppress it in our society, it's actually coming out more and more through modern technologies.telephone telepathy, as i say, is the commonest kind. and until telephones were invented,i think probably there was less of it around.

i think more people are experiencing telepathytoday than they did a couple of generations ago because so many people have phones andeven cell phones. so, it's a constant presence in their lives.>> thank you. >> hi. so i just had a question about--itseems like there's a couple of different kinds of social fields. i mean at the beginningof the talk, you showed these pictures of flocks of birds and schools of fish.>> sheldrake: yes >> and they had a very kind of specific geometryto them. >> sheldrake: yes.>> and then towards the end of the talk, you were talking about people interacting andyou were saying how these experiments don't

seem to depend much or the results don't dependmuch on the distance that separates them. so, i just wonder if we're seeing the effectsof two different kinds of fields or is it just the same kind of field and it's--i don't--idon't really. >> sheldrake: no. that's a very--no. the questionis an important one because the flocks and the schools of fish depend on position andexactly its coordinating positions of movement. and i think that's the kind of social fieldprimarily concerned with the coordination of movement. where we experience that is whenwe're walking along in the street, it's surprising how rarely you bump into people. and in countrieslike india, it's amazing when you see the chaos of the traffic system, how the wholething just keeps flowing and people weave

between each other. it's the same with trafficsystems here, which are a bit more regulated. i think this is something we almost take forgranted. but it's actually rather amazing how rarely we bump into people or things andpeople can flow through each other and so on. so i think that's one of the aspects ofsocial fields, which have to do with movement coordination. there's another kind which workat a distance, which are more to do with calls. and one kind of telepathy has to do with calls.you are in need--you desperately need help, you can sort of visit as it was and someonecan pick it up and come to you. that is the kind which i think has now evolved along--co-evolvedwith telephones and emails and things because they are actually calls. not necessarily alwayswith a high emotional need or content, but

sometimes. so, i think, yes, that it--it'snot just one kind of field that does all these things. they're all versions of the socialfield but carrying out sort of different functions; one movement coordination. and that's somethingwhich in termite nests, ants' nests, and bees' hives, when they're building structures together,you get cooperative architectural activities, that kind of field which coordinates movementin a special way. it must be very important. but the call ones are almost by definitionto do with relating to absent members of the group and trying to bring them back. so, it'sa kind of extension of that field but it's not exactly the same.>> so, i find the idea of entangled minds very interesting and plausible. but what--idon't see how the minds would manage to meet.

i feel intuitively it must be possible fortwo minds to meet each other in a sense without meeting physically or seeing each other orhaving any connection in a physical sense. do you have any ideas on how this might happen?>> sheldrake: i think minds get entangled through interactions. our minds meet throughinteractions and these don't have to be through physical meetings. they can be through emails,through, you know, social networking sites, through telephone, and so forth. but it'sinteresting, isn't it? that despite our incredible connectivity today, the airlines is stillfull of business passengers flying around the world to meetings. and you would thinkthat airlines would have gone out of business if minds could interact just through internationalcommunications systems. there seems to be

something more about the interaction thatoccurs in person, when there's a bodily presence, and that's, of course, much more a naturalform of interaction. your whole body interacts through implicit understanding of social bodylanguage, movements, gestures et cetera, et cetera. so, i think in personal meetings,there's a far more intense and varied level of interaction than in just conversationswhere it's only the voices that are interacting or in emails where's it's just the writtenwords that you're interacting. but, of course, you can interact in that way and people dobuild up quite close connections or relationships at a distance. and those--that would--thatinteraction would be enough, i think, to set up a field where you could still get telepathicconnections in those context. but the vast

majority of telepathy is that it occurs inthe ordinary world. it is between parents and children, best friends, lovers, husbandsand wives, close colleagues, and so forth. and i haven't actually studied in the contextof social networking, where you may have people who've become very close friends or closelylinked without ever having met physically. it would be interesting to find out how telepathicthey are. >> i'm back. i really like your tv analogy.so if you cut a wire inside the tv, it stops working. if you cut the optic nerve, thisperson stops seeing. if the tv station stops sending the field to the tv, the tv doesn'twork. >> sheldrake: yes.>> what fills in the whole?

>> sheldrake: pardon?>> what fills in the whole? so, what has to break for the person with a perfectly functionalbrain to stop seeing? >> sheldrake: well, i don't--i don't quitegot your point yet. >> so if there is really an analogy between...>> sheldrake: yes. >> ...a field that a tv is receiving...>> sheldrake: yes. >> ...as being something that some sort ofa field that the brain is receiving, in order to be able to project an image...>> sheldrake: yes. >> ...or to see, to have a vision. then sothe physical analogy, i understand. breaking something physical...>> sheldrake: yes.

>> ...inside a tv, i'm breaking somethingphysical inside the brain both break the vision. but it's easy to break the electromagneticfield and see the tv--how can this field that humans--human brains have, can break?>> sheldrake: well, there's several ways that happened. first of all, when we go to sleep,it all goes blank. so, it depends on our state of consciousness and much of the time, hoursa day, we're not seeing anything. when we are asleep, if we dream, then we have an interestingsituation where it's kind of projective activity of a brain and of our minds can go on whenwe're not actually seeing what we are seeing in the dream. and those who are more likehallucinatory images. some people, when they take hallucinogenic substances and close theireyes, would see all sorts of things that aren't

really there. and interestingly, people subjectto extreme sensory deprivation kept in darkness for weeks like in some tibetan meditationpractices, often experience very vivid hallucinations. there's also ways in which our attention isextremely selective and we see what we want to see and we don't notice lots of other things.and so, there's something that attention itself can lead to attentional blindness or whatpsychologists call inattentional blindness. things that you are not paying attention,you're blind to, even though they're there and affecting your field of vision. that mightbe more equivalent to the sort of whole in the mind, as well. there's a famous video,lots of people have seen where people are playing a ball game and someone in a gorillasuit walks through the room. and you tell

people to count how many times they bouncethe ball and most people count and tell you. and they never see this guy and then you say,"look again. do you see anyone in a gorilla suit?" and people can't believe that theyhaven't seen this. this is very clear demonstration of this form of inattentional blindness.>> and you think this cannot be explained by physical process in the brain?>> sheldrake: well, it can be explained by attention or inattention. and--but then, yousee we come back to the question of the nature of consciousness itself. what controls attentionand how does attention work? then we come to the vex question of how does consciousnesswork, what is the--how does the mind work? and in the world of consciousness studies,the scientific field in which do these things

are studied, there's no general agreementon what attention is, how the mind works, what the mind is, what its relation to thebrain is? this is really, truly i think one of the most exciting frontier areas of sciencewhere there's a variety of different theories. there's no consensus few. there is a consensusfew on what happens in the brain, you can measure it. but how that relates to the mind,to attention, and so forth, that's a realm of wild speculation at the moment with varyingschools of thought. and it's a paradox really the thing we know least about is our own mindsand their relationship to our bodies. and it's partly because science has ignored thisuntil about 20 years ago, consciousness was virtually ignored by most scientists, evenpsychologists. in the--in the 20th century,

behaviorism was the dominant school of psychologyin american and british universities. and that's said, "forget the consciousness. allwe're going to do is measure objective behavior. movements of muscles, secretions of glands,things you can measure, that's objective. the rest is subjective and it's no part ofscience." but now, we recognize subjectivity consciousness is part of science and we needto think about it scientifically. but it's a field of science that's quite new and we're--ina way we're on a new frontier here. >> thanks.>> i came towards the second half of your talk--later in the talk. so, i had these questionmight have already be an answer. most of the experiments seem to be proving or findingout whether a certain phenomena exist or not.

has there been any experiments conducted whichfind out the environment that is conducive to produce such effects?>> sheldrake: yes. i mean, in--among people who work in parapsychology, there've beena number of experiments that look at variables affecting the results. generally speaking,people do better if they're feeling relaxed and not under stress. the telepathy test workbetter with people you know well than with strangers. so, there are a variety of thingsthat affect how people respond in these tests. also, some people do better than others. andthis long line of research in parapsychology called the "sheep-goat studies" that showthe kinds of results you get depend on what you believe. skeptics sometimes get less successfulresults than people who believed they're possible.

sometimes indeed, skeptics get significantnegative results showing that there's something in the sort--they're somehow getting it butgiving the opposite answers as it were. so, a variety of factors personal, social, andenvironmental affect these results. this is a field of research in which relatively littlehas been done, i mean, the people are doing this work in the us. about 50% of the researcheffort is in this room with dean radin and marilyn schlitz and, you know, this is nota field where there's hundreds or thousands of people working, it's very, very few. inindia, i don't know of anyone. there was one narasi monroe in andrew university who didthis research but, like in india, there's probably one retired person doing it. in england,there's about 10 or 15 people in universities.

but this is a--there's a huge amount of researchcould be done in these areas that hasn't been done because--not because it's difficult,not even because it's very expensive but because the taboo has held back this field of research,hopefully it's breaking down now. and i think we'll see that, there's a great deal we couldfind out that we would be of great interest to a lot of people.>> thank you. being a street smart, that the--that hard to define skill. i have found many entrepreneursthat the reasons why they get ahead is because they know to whom to trust, which employeesto hire, which customers to extend more credit, is any way to identify that skill, and isany way to teach it? >> sheldrake: good question. the--i thinkthat the word that most people would use with

these abilities, the general word would beintuition. and intuition is a blanket term that covers a variety of these abilities,able to feel premonitions, pick up subtle cues, all sort of things are involved in intuition.and i think it's also very likely as you say that people who do well in business are peoplewho use intuitive skills. because business people are all--in fact, all of us are workingin an atmosphere of uncertainty where you can't be sure. in science, there's an attemptto try and pin things down and make them more certain but scientist have to be intuitivetoo because they have to hire people and know who to trust just like everyone else does.and also have intuitions about what kind of research is worth doing, what kind of experimentsare worth trusting. there are people who claim

to train intuition. there are lots of peoplegive workshops on training your intuition, whether they work or not, i don't know. i'dlike them to put their participants through some of my telepathy test before the workshopand after it and we could then quantify at whether people are at least getting betterat these kinds of test. but at the moment, there's a disconnection between people doscientific test in this area and people who claim to be able to train intuition in thisarea and it's not quite clear, you know, how well they're doing into how successful theyare. and i think they probably can train it and i think these are things that we can trainat. there's no reason in principle why we shouldn't be able to train our intuition inthese areas just as we can train our physical

skills and things like playing the piano ortrain our taste buds and noses and getting to know about why and then that kind of thing.everything in principle should be trainable. >> so, if the effect is so strong in a sensefrom all the experiments you conducted, then why after a long time of scientific skepticismand still is now the data becoming available? >> sheldrake: well, it's like a partly a questionof, you know, who sees the data. you know, the data are there. there's quite a lot ofdata and dean radin summarized it in his books very well, i think. the conscious universeand his recent book, entangled minds are very good review of the scientific experimentaldata. it doesn't get out there very much and this is partly a sociological question, it'sto do with the taboo. for example, i've submitted

several of my papers to lead--my work on thedogs, for example. i've submitted that to animal behavior which is the leading journalon animal behavior. this is animal behavior. and i got back a letter from the editor saying,"i'm rejecting your paper immediately without refereeing because no referee for this journalwould take seriously any paper that claimed that so called telepathy was in--it actuallyexisted." i just had another paper react--rejected on those grounds. the replication of my telephonetelepathy paper was rejected by perception magazine and the editor there said, "any experimentshows positive results for telepathy must be flawed." so, he was rejecting it withoutrefereeing. and when the author of the paper wrote to the editor saying, "well, surelyyou remember that galileo had a problem with

the cardinals who refuse to look through thetelescope, aren't you afraid you might be a bit like the cardinals?" the guy wrote backsaid, "that's the risk i'm prepared to take." at least he was honest. so, there is a verystrong prejudice and i've--anyone who works in this field encounters it. media reportsand series media like the new york times, scientific american are dominated by skepticalpoint of view. and if any positive report is there, they immediately wheel on a mediaskeptic like michael shermer to say, "it's all rubbish." they get the last word. so,there is--it's a sociological phenomenon i would say. the data is there and i think thatit's a taboo that mainly affect educated people who've had a scientific background becausethey feel they'll lose credibility. my own

view is that the way things would change isnot through piling up more data but by the equivalent of the gay liberation movementwithin science. i gave a talk at a unit in cambridge where there were six staff memberswho attended my seminar. i was talking about my work with dogs. and afterwards, each oneof the six came out to me and said, "you know, i'm really interested in this stuff. i thinkit happens. i've seen it with my own dog, you know, but i can't talk about it here becauseeveryone in this department is so straight." and when all six, including the professorhad said the same thing to me i said, "you know, why don't you guys come out. you'd haveso much more fun if you could actually talk freely." and i think science would be so muchmore fun if people talk freely. in every scientific

institute, there are people who've had theseexperiences who have dogs that know when they're coming home from the lab and that kind ofthing. but the social taboo means they don't feel they can talk about it. and i think ifwe let go of that, i'm not saying correct--blind belief is what we need, we certainly don't.we need rational scientific discussion but that's inhibited by prejudice and taboo andit--facilitated by free conversation. >> well, there had been other scientific theorieswhich have been not well received. but, you know, the scientific community was eventuallymade to see the light. why is this different? >> sheldrake: i ask myself that question.why is it that this field has so much taboo around it when others don't? for example,the astronomer royal in britain, president

of the royal society, master of trinity collegecambridge, lord rees, member of the house of lords, believes in multiple universes.he holds down the highest possessions you can possibly have in british scientific life.he hasn't shred of evidence for them. yet, that's acceptable where telepathy is not,why? i think the reason is that in the enlightenment of the end of the seventeenth century or eighteenthcentury, the movement of the enlightenment was a movement to liberate humanity from religionand superstition in favor of science and reason. that was the social movement. and i thinkat that time things like telepathy and what we call--what are called paranormal phenomenawere classified as superstition. and since then, there's been a sociological phenomenonwhere smart people defined as smart by not

believing these things, which is why newspaperswith the demographic of university graduates like the new york times can't write aboutthem. whereas once that where--with readers with no intellectual potentials--pretensionslike the national inquirer feel completely free to write about these things and exaggerateit in totally unreliable form. and that of course reinforces the social taboo and so,a self reinforcing sociological pattern. and i think it's so strong because it was embeddedin among educated people somewhere around 1800. you know, with the--there was a reactionagainst mesmerism and that kind of thing. and i think it's re-embedded in the intellectualworld ever since and it's become a deep-seated habit of thought. that's my own view.>> so, what then is a morphic field if it's

not, say, an electromagnetic field or gravitationalfield or, what is it? >> sheldrake: a morphic field.>> how do we actually measure it directly? >> sheldrake: we can't measure any field directly.we measure them through their effects. we measure electrical fields through electricaleffects, gravitational fields through gravitational effects.>> okay. measure it through, you know, an instrument rather than having to have a humansort of part of the equation it sound the receiving end, at least or on a sending, ineither way? >> sheldrake: well, this--you measure this--well,you measure them through their appropriate effects. there's no reason to suppose--a morphicfield might be measurable by an electrical

instrument if it interacts with electricalactivity in a way that's measurable by that instrument. it might do, it might not. i--it'san open question for me. but the first thing to do is to measure them by their actual biologicaleffects just as you measure gravity through gravitational effects like the swinging ofpendulums and things. you don't measure gravity with an electric meter. you measure with gravitationalthings like gravitational devices, pendulums, and what not.>> so, are you trying to characterize these fields? you know, things like, you know, gravityinverse-square law and, you know, electromagnetism as well, time delays...>> sheldrake: yes. or i am. i've left out the whole of...>> [indistinct]

>> sheldrake: ...the theory--yes, i've--imean, i've spent ten years developing this theory, written two books on it, et cetera,of how these fields work and what they are. and it's not really fair on this audiencethat i haven't actually gone into the theory. there's a lot more in there than i've said.but that's partly because it was all meant to take on, you know, 45 minutes for the talkand 15 for the questions. we are actually 25 minutes overtime.>> male: sorry about that. >> sheldrake: but these were my instructions.yes. the--very, very briefly, morphic fields organize self-organizing systems. they havea kind of built-in memory. they work by passioning indeterminate systems that would otherwisenot have a pattern. they impose restrictions

on otherwise chaotic or indeterminate systems.there are a lot of things you can say about the fields and ways in which you can testfor them. but i can't at 5:26 p.m. tell you what they are right now.>> male: sure, and i think these people behind me.>> sheldrake: there's a summary on my website of the morphic field theory which you mightlike to look at. >> male: yeah. i'm intrigued by this notionof skepticism of telepathy because there's so much acceptance of other things like homeopathyand all the things that are skewed in the bad science called [indistinct]. so how comethey get up, they get more play than they shouldn't be, we'll take, you know, scientificbullshit from homeopathy vendors but they

won't accept physical results from you?>> sheldrake: i think a lot of--i mean, it depends who i'm talking to. i give seminars,i'm giving one in a couple month's time at chris france's department at goldsmiths college,london, which is--he's the main professor of skepticism in britain, he's professor ofanomalous psychology. and this is one of the main academic hotbeds of skepticism. i givetalks there. people listen. they quite--we have reasonable discussions, and they knowabout the results. and very few of the people there exhibit this kind of prejudiced skepticismthat i encounter all too often, a kind of ignorant bigoted type of skepticism. i thinkone of the reasons that there are so much of that is the people who are really skepticalhave such a strong belief that they should--they

know in advance the evidence must be wrong.you say if you believe it's impossible, then if i come along and say, "here's results thatshows it's possible," either it proves i'm a fool, i've done the experiments so badlyor incompetently; i've got false positive results and haven't been smart enough to seeit, or i'm a fraud. i'm trying to deceive you and the world. and so, the instant reactionis one of hostility and accusing people of being fools or frauds. richard dawkins, who'sa very smart man and is, in this area, not very smart at all, he's a very bigoted skeptic,and he came to interview me for his most recent tv series in britain. he had one against religion,a two-part polemic called "the root of all evil." and his most recent series was called"enemies of reason." it was about research

in parapsychology and alternative medicine.they didn't tell me it was called "enemies of reason" beforehand when they asked me totake part, but i had enough experience of these negative media treatments. and i'd seenhis previous series. the title is very suspicious and i said i only agree to take part if it'sa genuine scientific discussion about evidence and if he's really open to discussing theevidence, otherwise, there's no point. and they gave me a writ--and i said i want inwriting. they gave me a written assurance that this was the case. so, i agreed to meethim and he came to see me. and he's--we started off. there was a handheld camera they putus facing each other. and he started off by saying--he said, "i dare say we agree aboutquite a number of things, rupert," he said,

"but let me tell you what worries me aboutyou." and i said, "okay, what worries you about me." and he said, "what worries me aboutyou is you're prepared to believe almost anything and science should be base on the minimumnumber of beliefs." so, i said, "well, okay. well, let me tell you what worries me aboutyou." i said, "you come across as prejudiced and bigoted and i think you give science abad name." so, we didn't get much very far with that conversation. so, then he said,"the trouble with telepathy is that people are--" then he said, "extraordinary claimsrequire extraordinary proof. it's a standard skeptical slogan." so i said, "well, what'sthe extraordinary claim?" i said, "the majority of saying normal people in britain believedthey've had telepathic experiences." in that

sense, it's not extraordinary, it's ordinary.most people had it. you're making the claim that most people are deluded about their ownexperience. where's your extraordinary evidence for that." and he couldn't produce any atall, you know, he just, "oh, people have a very false sense of statistics and probabilityand such generic arguments." then i said, "well, look, okay. why don't we get down tothe evidence and actually discuss the evidence, which is why we've met." he said, "i didn'twant to talk about the evidence." and i said, "well, why not?" and he said, "there isn'ttime." and i said, "well, we've got plenty of time." he said, "it's too complicated."and i said, "no, it isn't." he said, "anyway, it's not what this program is about." andso, i said, "well, i am--he didn't--i'd sent

him my papers, three or four papers two weeksbefore so he could look at them." he hadn't looked at me. and he's just trying to trapme into saying something silly and then put that on tv.>> right. >> sheldrake: so i said, "okay. well, thenthere's been a misunderstanding because i said i didn't want to take part in yet anotherlow-grade debunking program." he said, "it's not a low-grade debunking program, it's ahigh-grade debunking program." so, then the producer said cut and the cameras stoppedrolling. and so--then i said to the director, "is this a debunking program or not?" he said,"yes. it's another richard dawkins' polemic." and i said, "then you're here under falsepretenses because you told me it was about

evidence." he said, "i didn't." i said, "well,your assistant did." he said, "can you prove it?" and i said, "yes." and i produced theemail with this." and i said, "i'm afraid there's been a serious misunderstanding."he said, "well, i'm afraid i have to agree with you that she should never have told youthat. that's not what it's about. it's a polemic." and i said, "well, i'm going to have to askyou to leave my house." and i didn't sign the release. i wouldn't actually mind if allthat was put on the tv. and i've written up on account of those, it's on my website. it'sbeen published in several british journals. if you want to read the detail, it's on theaccount called richard dawkins comes to call. but that's an example you see if someone witha huge media presence, an enormous intellectual

prestige because a lot of people thing he'san incredibly smart guy who speaks for science. in this area, whatever his virtues, his geneticist,he doesn't have anything about it. he's speaking from prejudice and ignorance. and that's avery bad thing to do if you are as he is, a professor of public understanding of science.it doesn't further the public understanding of science. and that i'm afraid is why thedebate on this is not often based on evidence and they often based on prejudice, stereotypesand ignorance. >> so, the other thing that strikes me isthat here at google, we run hundreds of thousands supposed to be millions of experiments everydaywhich are based on perceptions because we do present our testing on results and so on.>> sheldrake: yes.

>> like recently we change the color of theresults from one [indistinct] to another because we found empirically that we prefer that.>> sheldrake: yes. >> so, i'm wondering if your theories andmodels of this could be potentially tainting our results because once we've shown it to1% of people that will change how the rest of them behave. is there something we couldmeasure in that? >> sheldrake: well, you could set up morphicresonance type experiments, which one--the one kind of experiment is which of the actualis being done where you have some new kind of puzzle. you get people to solve it andthen you see other if people who haven't seen it can solve it more easily after one lasthave done it. and a version of it--this is

more in reference of the memory theory i didn'ttalk about today. i think it could possibly influence your results actually. i mean aform in which i'd like to test it was thought out by my son and when he was taking the nationalschool exam at the age of 16 in england. we have a national exam called gcse, generalcertificate of secondary education as you knew. and he came to me day and said i andmy friends have thought of the way of getting higher marks without doing extra work. andi said that sounds good. how's that going to happen? and he said by morphic resonance.and i said, "well, how would that work?" he said, "well, in the physics and mass papers,we're going to do questions 15 and 16 first then go back to question one, two, three,et cetera. we'll be 10 minutes behind everyone

else in britain." and we had to boost by morphicresonance from their answers. and--because all the exams are done simultaneously, ofcourse, to avoid cheating. so i said to him well, that's really a clever idea. and i saidbut some of your friends must be morphic resonance skeptics and he said yes, they are. and--and--andi said, what do they say? they said what if morphic resonance doesn't exist? and he saidwe discussed it. we came to a conclusion if it doesn't exist, we wouldn't lose any marksbut if it does, we'd gain them. so we're all going to do it. they all did it. they allgot a stars but they're probably smart in the first place to think of that because thatprovides a perfect example. the test you see--i tried to persuade the head of science examsin the oxford and cambridge examination board,

an old classmate of mine to turn our entirenational education--exam system into a test where have several--several of questions ina different order. so you could see if--and they'd be randomly assigned to thousands--tensof thousands of candidates to see where the people who did questions after others weregetting higher scores. he thought it was a really good idea for few days then he calledme and said, you know, i'm going to be retiring soon and i want to have a full pension andi just don't think i can run this test. so anyway, in google, you probably could andit would be that certain kinds of test like that would be influenced by what other peoplehave done. i don't know how it would relate to what you do--google would be a wonderfularena for this kind of research.

>> we always test [indistinct] that run continuouslyto try our adwords and stuff. >> sheldrake: yes.>> yes. >> sheldrake: yes. i can't--i mean i don'tknow enough about how things work here to suggest simple, easy to do, low cost experimentsthat could be done using existing google technologies but i'm sure they could be done.>> anything. >> sheldrake: yeah. so now we've reached 5:35.is there a cut-off, isaac or i mean i'm happy to go on in a few more minutes but perhaps,we should draw things... >> yeah, sure.>> sheldrake: yes, one more question. yes. >> had there been any experiments of peoplewith known special abilities like being able

to guess things so?>> sheldrake: not special abilities. >> known special abilities.>> sheldrake: oh, known special abilities. i haven't myself worked with people with knownspecial abilities because i prefer to work with ordinary people because i'm interestedin what i call the mysteries of everyday life. you know, the--the things that ordinary peopleknow about. if you work with people who are professional psychics then the skeptics areparticularly active. they say oh, they're cheating. they've learned how to cheat becausethey're constantly cheating people out of money and stuff. and it's very hard to getbeyond that kind of argument when you're dealing with say, [indistinct] materializing withthe booty or something like that. it's very

hard to--hard to replicate too because really,people with special abilities don't particularly want to be treated as frauds and tested repeatedlyby aggressive and hostile skeptics so i prefer to work with ordinary people testing ordinaryabilities. but it doesn't mean to say that it wouldn't be interesting to test peoplewho do have extraordinary abilities or who are usually sensitive. and the intuition teston mobile phones that i was talking about earlier. if people did these intuition tests,a lot of people would be able to identify themselves as being unusually good at telephonetelepathy and they would then be very good people to test in a more rigorous way so,hopefully, that kind of test could make all people to identify their inabilities and thenneed to improve them by training and experience.

good. okay, thank you.