Friday, February 19, 2010

Rupert Sheldrake and the Extended Mind lecture



We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head. But there are good reasons for thinking that this view is too limited. Recent experimental results show that people can influence others at a distance just by looking at them, even if they look from behind and if all sensory clues are eliminated. And people's intentions can be detected by animals from miles away. The commonest kind of non-local interaction mental influence occurs in connection with telephone calls, where most people have had the experience of thinking of someone shortly before they ring. Controlled, randomized tests on telephone telepathy have given highly significant positive results. Research techniques have now been automated and experiments on telepathy are now being conducted through the internet and cell phones, enabling widespread participation.

In this conference, Rupert Sheldrake presents some of his lastest findings.

3 comments:

  1. I’ve discovered, after a dozen failures, how to post clickable links using html tags – i.e., tags inside angle brackets. There are two things to learn: the html “skeleton,” and the two spots within the skeleton where the URL and its visible representation should be pasted. Here’s the skeleton, with parentheses used in place of angle brackets:

    (a href=””)(/a)

    What you want to do is paste the actual URL in between the quotation marks. Then, between the two angle brackets, you can either place the URL again (in which case that is what will be visible to the reader), or a human-language description of the URL.

    If you find it hard to remember the skeleton, type it into a few Word files and copy and paste it into the comment box in the blog where you want to use it. Then copy and paste the URL (between the quotation marks). Then type in the description of the URL (between the angle brackets).

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  2. I liked the Sheldrake lecture very much, but one thing bothered me. He claimed a 45% hit rate in one of his charts on telephone telepathy, without making it clear that this was only achieved by "stars" like the Nolan sisters. From what I've read, the average hit rate he gets is 33%, against an expectation of 25%.

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  3. You're right Roger.

    I think that, in general, we can expect that the rate for "normal" people be lower that the rate of "stars", because we're dealing with human abilities and skills.

    It seems to apply both to psi as to sports and similar activities where human skills is a key factor.

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