Rupert Sheldrake - The Extended Mind

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has made a career out of gathering scientific data on precisely those aspects of the nature of mind that the mainstream scientific community derides or simply ignores. Is telepathy real? Do animals possess consciousness? Are we enveloped by a vast “morphic” field in which we communicate with each other instantaneously over vast distances? Sheldrake is dedicated to exploring unusual theories, and as a serious scientist, he is endeavoring to collect the data to prove them.

In this talk recorded in London, Rupert Sheldrake presents his latest experimental evidence in support of his explorations and new theories of mind and consciousness.

BIO

Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and the author of more than 75 technical papers and nine books. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge, and was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. He was also a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1974 to 1978 he was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he worked on the physiology of tropical legume crops, and remained Consultant Physiologist until 1985.

His most recent book is The Sense of Being Stared At and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (Hutchinson, 2003). This was voted Book of the Year by the British Institute for Social Inventions. In 1999, his book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, was the winner of the British Scientific and Medical Network Book of the Year Award. He lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Father Bede Griffiths in southern India, where he wrote his groundbreaking book, A New Science of Life (Blond and Briggs, 1981).

He is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, San Francisco, and lives in London with his wife and two sons.