Morphic Fields and Morphic Resonance

6th

Ok rather than take the time to look into this properly I'm just gonna post the article and see how it goes here. No doubt I'll be picking up at least one of Rupert Sheldrake's books to get a better idea of what he's talking about:

Many people claim expertise on psychic phenomena such as telepathy. But few can boast top-notch scientific credentials.
That's what separates Rupert Sheldrake from the New Age pack. A botanist who earned a doctorate in biochemistry from Cambridge University and later studied at Harvard University, Mr. Sheldrake has earned an international reputation for applying scientific method to quasi-scientific subjects.
Mr. Sheldrake spoke over the weekend at the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology conference at the Westfields Conference Center in Chantilly, winning a standing ovation from the crowd of 350 and demonstrating why he's the world's foremost go-to guy on all things paranormal.
Mr. Sheldrake, 60, abandoned a successful career in plant biology to advance a theory he calls "morphic fields and morphic resonance," which holds that living beings inhabit unseen fields through which they can unconsciously transmit and receive information.
He says that's why so many people say they can sometimes tell who's calling before they pick up the phone or why dogs seem to know when their masters are coming home. He cited interviews with hunters who say they never look directly at their prey for fear that the animal will sense their stares and flee.
Rather than rely on anecdotal evidence, Mr. Sheldrake has conducted thousands of experiments aimed at testing the validity of such phenomena. In one trial involving two subjects, one of whom was blindfolded, he found that people successfully say whether they're being stared at 60 percent of the time, higher than the 50 percent accuracy that would be expected if they merely guessed.
In an experiment on telephone telepathy, he had subjects decide who was calling from a list of four prospective callers. The rate if it were random chance would be 25 percent, but his subjects averaged an accuracy rate of 40 percent.
The experiment works best, he said, when the subjects have a close emotional tie. In a special aired on British TV, he conducted the trial with five sisters. Their accuracy rate was 50 percent.
"I think what this shows is that we're much more interconnected with our environment than we think we are," Mr. Sheldrake said.
His detractors, led by members of the British scientific community, are legion. An article in Salon referred to him as "a heretic in the church of science." A Canadian blog, the Tyee (http://thetyee.ca), likened his theory to that of the Force in "Star Wars."
His most prominent critic, John Maddox, editor emeritus of Nature magazine, called one of Mr. Sheldrake's books "the best candidate there has been for book burning in many years."
Mr. Sheldrake has challenged his critics to repeat the experiments on their own. "It's extraordinary how this huge, rich body of experience has been excluded from science just because it doesn't fit with the accepted theory of vision," Mr. Sheldrake said.
The skeptics, as he calls them, haven't slowed him down. His speaking calendar is full, and his research is now being funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. He has published 10 books, the latest being "The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind."
His latest experiment involves e-mail telepathy. He said he's now in discussions with Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google about developing a test that would be easily accessible from their Web sites.
The idea would be to bill the experiment as a way to " 'find out how telepathic you are -- take this easy test,' " said Mr. Sheldrake. "I think it's something that could catch on in a big way."

Aisling&M

I'm really excited to hear when professionally accredited research is undertaken. Sure it may not be accepted straight away, but it's one great leap towards a more open-minded future. And we all know Rome wasn't built in a day.
It is something that should be taken out of the realms of myth and legend and explored intelligently and respectfully. Only through genuine questioning do genuine answers be found.

6th

This stuff is mind blowing when you start getting into it:

The morphic fields of mental activity are not confined to the insides of our heads. They extend far beyond our brain though intention and attention. We are already familiar with the idea of fields extending beyond the material objects in which they are rooted: for example magnetic fields extend beyond the surfaces of magnets; the earth’s gravitational field extends far beyond the surface of the earth, keeping the moon in its orbit; and the fields of a cell phone stretch out far beyond the phone itself. Likewise the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains.

stormkeeper

6th wrote:

This stuff is mind blowing when you start getting into it:

The morphic fields of mental activity are not confined to the insides of our heads. They extend far beyond our brain though intention and attention. We are already familiar with the idea of fields extending beyond the material objects in which they are rooted: for example magnetic fields extend beyond the surfaces of magnets; the earth’s gravitational field extends far beyond the surface of the earth, keeping the moon in its orbit; and the fields of a cell phone stretch out far beyond the phone itself. Likewise the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains.

Perhaps a silly question, but is it possible that Morphic Fields are related to Auras in some way? The lines "The morphic fields of mental activity are not confined to the insides of our heads. They extend far beyond our brain though intention and attention." made me think of a possible relation between the two, especially when you consider the concept of psychic shields, or actually being able to manipulate energy around us, but yeah... I'm willing to concede I could be completely wrong on this!