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Morphic fields also extend beyond the body. I think that when a person looks at something or somebody else, the image that they’re seeing is not located in their brain, but in the place where it seems to be. For example, if I looked at you, then my image of you would not be inside my head, but where you actually are. So I think that in perception we project our fields of perception, which are one kind of morphic field, which link the person who’s doing the looking to what is being looked at. This, I think, means that people can affect other people or things just by looking at them through these fields. This is what underlies my current interest in the sense of being stared at, the feeling many people have of being looked at from behind. I discuss this in Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, and since that book was published we’ve done further experiments that convince me this is indeed a real phenomenon. So, that’s not one of the things that parapsychologists usually talk about, but it follows quite naturally from the idea of morphic fields.

Some of the other phenomena of parapsychology are hard to explain from the point of view of morphic fields and morphic resonance. For example, anything to do with precognition or premonition doesn’t fit into an idea of influences just coming in from the past. So, I don’t think my ideas are going to give a blanket explanation of all parapsychological phenomena, but they are going to make some of it, at least, seem normal rather than paranormal.

InSeven Experiments you also point out that the expectations of experimenters can greatly affect the outcome of their experiments. And you even suggest that researchers might influence their experiments through psychokinesis or telepathy.

Yes, it’s well-known in psychology and medicine that the experimenter’s expectations can and do influence the outcome of experiments, which is why people use blind experimental techniques to minimize the effect. The second point is a new one that I discovered by surveying the literature and lab practices from different branches of science. I found that in the physical sciences and in most of biology, people never do blind experiments. There’s no protection against possible experimenter effects. It seems quite possible that experimenters could be biasing the way they record their data. I would be very surprised if that doesn’t happen in conventional science.

But I think something more surprising and alarming might be happening, as you suggest: namely, a possible psychokinetic influence over the actual experimental system. Scientists would be completely unprepared for this if it were happening; they’d take no precautions against it. The culture of institutional science dismisses it as impossible, so there would be a great vulnerability to this effect, if it’s going on, and it might be quite common in science.

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