[Music] I think that the idea that it's all in the brain is an unnecessary limitation materialist thinking about the brain is extraordinarily local it localizes all these things actually inside the head but within the Sciences since the 19th century we now have a much broader view of M and the way that nature is organized and this is broadened through the concept of fields first introduced into science by Michael Faraday uh in relation to electric and magnetic fields then through Einstein's general theory of relativity taken to include the gravitational field and there are many fields in in science now fields are defined as regions of influence they're usually invisible the gravitational field of the earth is in the Earth but EX extends far beyond it the reason we're not floating in the air at the moment is because it's holding us down to the ground it's invisible this room is full of it but we can't see it it holds the moon in its orbit it stretches far beyond the Earth the gravitational field of the Moon affects the tides on the earth so these are invisible Fields with enormous effects at a distance even though you can't see them uh electrical and magnetic fields also stretch out Beyond physical objects a magnetic field stretches out far beyond the magnet you can reveal its lines of force through sprinkling iron filings around it but the field itself is invisible and the electromagnetic fields of your mobile telephone uh within the mobile telephone but stretch invisibly Beyond it this room is full of radio Transmissions from mobile phones from radio and television programs the the world is full of invisible Fields this is a revelation of 19th and 20th Century science which I don't think has been taken on board by people thinking about materialist theories of the brain and what I'd like to suggest is that our fields of our mind stretch out far beyond our bodies they stretch out invisibly and our Consciousness is related to and based on these fields that if we're going to solve the heart problem taking into account fields of the Mind may be a very important in ingredient as well as studying processes within the brain the easiest way to see what I'm talking about is indeed through vision what's going on when you see something um well everybody knows that light comes into the eyes ever since Johan Kepler in 16004 worked out that there were inverted images on the retina we know that the lens focuses the light in each eye you have a small inverted image on your retina changes happen in the Cod cells and the rod cells impulses travel up the optic nerve changes happen in various regions of the brain all this has been mapped and scanned in Greater detail than ever before but the mysterious part is then what happens next how do you create images three-dimensional full color images they're all supposed to be inside your head representations of the outer world so I can see you sitting there you can see me here but all of you are supposed to be inside my head as lots of faces and and the whole of this room is meant to be and inside your head is supposed to be a little ret um somewhere inside your brain that's not what we actually experience what we actually experience is that our images are out there your image of me I'm imagining is where I'm actually standing right now and my image of you is where you are so this oneway theory of Vision which we've all grown up with and which comes from Kepler the intromission theory of vision sending in intromission is taken to be the standard scientific view but there's another and older theory of vision the extramission theory that says not only does light come in but the images we see are projected out so my images of you are where they seem to be they're in my mind they're in my Consciousness but they're not inside my head they're where you're sitting now this idea is familiar to the ancient Greeks it's familiar to people all over the world the developmental psychologist Jean P showed that young European children in his book the child's conception of the world think that they're projecting out images that they take it for granted so this is in fact a very deep-seated way of thinking about vision and uid the great geometer used it to explain in the first a really clear way how mirrors work what happens when you look at something in a mirror is the light is reflected from the mirror the angle of incidence the angle of reflection are the same but what happens then is you project out the images uh which go straight through the mirror being virtual mental projections and you see virtual images behind the mirror and ID's theory is still there in school textbooks to explain mirrors all of you no doubt have seen these diagrams they involve little dotted lines behind the mirror that go to What's called a virtual image behind the mirror a projection of the Mind behind the mirror and so this extra mission a sending out theory of vision is actually taught to all school children even though within most of science it's regarded as a total heresy intromission is the only permissible theory in biology and psychology whereas in Optics which comes under physics extra is the standard Theory and no wonder it's confusing people are taught two completely different theories of vision at Ohio State University Gerald Wier who's a professor of Psychology was shocked to find that most adults and children he interviewed believed in visual extramission something going out of the eyes even his own psychology undergraduates believed it so heall this a fundamental misunderstanding of visual perception and he decided to re-educate them and he and his colleagues told them forcefully over and over again nothing goes out of the eyes when you look at something and after repeated drilling with this into the students when they were tested immediately after this denial of extramission uh teaching they gave the correct answers but when they tested them 3 to 5 months later almost all of them had reverted to their previous views they were dismayed at this failure of scientific education much more recently in fact just in the last few years arid gutam uh at working first at Princeton University now at the kinska institute in Stockholm has shown that uh by some very ingenious experiments that people attribute a gental force to the Gaze as it goes out of the eyes and they've even shown using fmri that regions of the brain involved in tracking movement are activated and as he puts it the results this is a quote strongly suggests that when people view a face looking at an object the brain treats that gaze as if a movement were present passing from the face to the object and they found that this occurred even in people who didn't believe in visual extramission it's deep hardwired in the way we see and they tried to explain this by saying there must be an evolutionary reason for it that in uh it's important to track people's gaze in social situations and this leads to the illusion that something's going out of the eyes when you look at things it it make much better sense in evolutionary terms if it's not an illusion but if it's real and so is it real well you're not meant to think it's real because that goes against the Dogma that the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain and the perceptions are inside the head but is it testable well I think it is if when I look at you a projection from my mind that touches you my mind in a sense reaches out to touch you if I look at you from behind and you don't know I'm there could you feel that I'm looking at you well as soon as you ask that question you realize that the sense of being stared at is very common it's now called scop athesia the scientific name for it scop as in microscope seeing aesthesia feeling as in synesthesia anesthesia scop athesia is extremely common most people have experence experienced it I'm sure most people in this room have experienced it you turn around you find someone's looking at you or you stare at someone and they turn around and look back doesn't happen all the time but it's very common most people have experienced it including most children it's usually directional you turn and look straight at the person you don't just feel uneasy and search around I I have a recent paper on directional scof athesia showing that on the basis of 960 case studies the directionality is just a basic feature of this and the way people experience it I've investigated the Natural History we've interviewed uh We've dealt with through questionnaires we found it typically happens uh most powerfully with strangers often with male strangers in situations that could be vaguely threatening we've done interviews with more than 50 surveillance officers celebrity photographers and private detectives practically all of whom just take this for granted if you've ever trained to be a private detective and I'm guessing that most of you haven't uh you you will have learned that um when you're following someone shadowing somebody you don't stare at their back cuz if you do they'll turn around catch your eyes and your cover's blown you have to look at them a little bit otherwise you lose them but you look at their feet so among practical people these things are completely taken for granted in the martial arts it's taken for granted and they have methods of training people to become more sensitive because if you can feel when someone's approaching from behind who might attack you you'll survive better than if you didn't feel it they train this ability people get better at it well many experiments have already been done on the sense of being stared at they've been done in at least 37 different schools and colleges have been replicated in many parts of the world the statistical significance is astronomical the Nemo science museum in Amsterdam an experiment on the sense of being stared at was running for more than 20 years more than 20,000 people took part it was called have you got eyes in the back of your head and people had to guess whether they were being looked at or not in a randomized sequence of Trials the results were astronomically significant statistically I mean I didn't run this experiment myself it was run by the Dutch Museum the results were analyzed by Dutch statisticians and it showed a massively significant effect the most sensitive subjects in incidentally were children under the Agee of nine so here we have something which is extremely well known it's well known all over the world the scientific evidence suggests it really happens the scientific teaching of how mirror's work assumes that there's an extem mission of influences it seems to be deep receit in biology it happens with animals animals can tell when they're being looked at and people can tell when animals are looking at them so here we have a very very well-known phenomenon very deep-seated biologically many different species of animals have shown this ability I think it's evolved in the context of Predator prey relationships a prey animal that could tell when a predator was looking at it a hidden Predator was looking at it would survive better than one that didn't and I think it has enormous implications for our understanding of the mind because if our minds are not just about what happens in brains and if our conscious experience is extended through electromagnetic fields which is what light is it suggests that Minds have an interface with electromagnetism we know they do in the brain a lot of brain activity that correlates with Consciousness is electromagnetic activity there seems to be an interface between electromagnetism and Consciousness and why it should be confined to the inside of the head is a purely arbitrary assumption it comes from Ren deart originally I suppose um or from the ancient Greek materialists but deart made a division between extended things rise extensor matter is extended in space whereas mind re cutans was not extended in space it was defined by being unextended so the idea was the mind was unextended but interacted with the brain somewhere inside the head so I'm suggesting that actually when we let go of that assumption which has been so limiting for for so long we can broaden our view of the mind and uh go further than we've gone so far in a way that will help solve the real problems leading towards the hard problem finally I just want to say that I think the extended mind doesn't just extend out into the world it extends throughout the body when someone has say a phantom limb after an amputation I think that that Phantom limb is part of the extended mind and that people feel the limb uh to be really there and I think what they're ex doing is projecting that image of the limb and feeling it from within as to where the limb actually is the official view is it's all inside the brain but I don't think it is and so I think once we Liberate the Mind from the brain more generally and Consciousness from the brain more more particularly we have a much wider context for discussing this naughty problem the hard problem of the relation between mind and brain when we take into account the extended mind instead of just arbitrarily confining to the inside of the head we're much more likely to make progress in understanding how minds are related to our bodies and to the physical Fields through which we see and through which we have our experiences thank you thank you for watching this video produced by after skool I'm Rupert sheldrake if you want to learn more about my work you can can go to my website sheldrake.org or my YouTube channel the links are below I'm also continuing this research on the feeling of being stared at I now have an app that works on cell phones where you can train yourself to get better at it I don't know how easy it is to train yourself to get better at it because this is a new project but please do have a go if you can if you can get better at it and if you have any suggestions as to how others might be able to to become more sensitive do please email me and let me know how you've been getting on thank you for watching and I hope you're watch the next production that I do with after skool