Such fields are thought by some to provide a scientific explanation for the experience of telepathy, coincidence and serendipity, but experimental evidence of this is inconclusive - Sheldrake's own experiments are disputed, with some claiming that his results are statistically not significant.
In A New Science of Life (1981, second edition 1985) and Presence of the Past: A Field Theory of Life (1988), his work on botany went public, and proved controversial. As he drifted away from interest in mainstream institutions, he later sought a list of Seven Experiments That Could Change The World, (1994) which included, among other things, the seed of his study of Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home (1999). Sheldrake's work poses some challenges to philosophy of science in that it tends to value broader based experiments conducted often by the lay person. His fundamentalist approach to the scientific method, based on Darwin's careful observations, took him further away from molecular biology and the focus on gene, enzyme, protein and cell functions. This is, he says, a challenge to the mechanistic paradigm that views biology as a function of chemistry and physics - part of 19th century materialism that has led to genetic engineering and to biotechnology in general, but away from an account of consciousness, which the field theories are seeking.
The Sense of Being Stared At (2003), about a sense reported widely by a great many people, was tested by blindfolding people with airline blindfolds designed to keep out light, and placing people behind them to stare either at their neck or off to another target - half of each, chosen by coin toss or random number tables. As of the sound of a loud click, the person being stared at (or not) must say whether they are or are not being stared at. If the guess is wrong, and they are told that, they get it wrong less often. Over tens of thousands of trials, the score is consistently above chance: 60% when the subject is being looked at, extremely significant, but only 50% when they are not - random chance. This suggests there may be a weak sense of being stared at, but no sense of not being stared at. Sheldrake claims that these experiments have been very widely repeated, in schools in Connecticut and Toronto and a science museum in Amsterdam, with consistent results.
Sheldrake proposes that predator-prey relations are the origin of this sense, which would have very clear selective advantage if it existed. Stress apparently increases the sensitivity - military personnel report anecdotally very often that they have direct experience of this sense activating and saving their lives - however it is difficult (and unethical) to put people into deadly stress in controlled experiments, so this cannot reliably be tested as part of a scientific hypothesis. The rhythmic time thesis of Peter Beamish proposes a structure for predator-prey communication, that would be far more effective if such a sense would exist.
Given his anti-institutional tendencies and unconcern with the dominant paradigm of strictly gene-driven biology, Sheldrake's theory is unpopular. In particular most scientists consider his view that the mind projects a field of attention or perception, to be pseudoscience. This view however is simply a way of stating an aspect of cognition, which is, light comes into the eye and stimulates rods and cones, but there is no account of how the conscious image in the so-called "mind" is formed and why one would so strongly believe that the object so formed is out in the world exactly as "seen". In effect, the idea that vision was a two-way process, was held by a great many minds in the past:
In the 5th century BC, the atomist philosophers believed that vision was in fact 'catching' particles let off by the objects. The Pythagorean school had similar theories. Plato proposed that a single extended medium existed between the eyes and the soul. Aristotle emphasized this 'transparent' medium but rejected both the intromission and extromission - no material passed in nor out of the eye. Light was to him a 'state of the transparent', not really a substance. Light required no time for propagation. These schools of thought coexisted for a thousand years. From the 9th century to the 13th century, there was a great interest in this in early Muslim philosophy. Al-Kindi adopted Euclid's theory of visual power, and like Ptolemy thought it was a continuous beam of radiation, some transformation of medium - this radiation of power or force: "It's manifest that everything in this world produces its own rays like a star... emits rays in every direction." This view is of course the modern view of fields. Even words, though, in his view, could extend beyond the mind and have the same kind of projected power. But Kepler first stated the view that the eye was merely a receiver of light rays, not in any sense a projector. This among other things simply fixed the status of human as observer without assuming effects on what was observed - a theory that, despite some ferocious challenges launched by George Berkeley, held to the 19th century only to fall apart with quantum physics in the 20th century - to not yet be replaced.
The proliferation of forms, cultures and technologies, in the view of some theorists such as Liane Gabora, is evidence of creative energies at work in both nature and man, negentropic process that, in the simplest analysis of thermodynamics, conserves energy by adapting form to the local conditions. In Sheldrake's view, the existence of a form is itself sufficient to make it easier for that form to come to exist somewhere else. In the 1920s, embryo regeneration and the capacity for willow shoots to grow whole new trees, were thought (before the emergence of the gene theory) to imply some such fields or knowledge or memory in the environment. This Sheldrake called in 1973 morphic resonance based on the view of Henri Bergson that there was no account of memory whatsoever based on biology. In this view, nature may be a set not of laws, but of habits.
Biochemistry has committed itself to a view of organic compounds as having strictly mechanical properties that are predictable. It may be fundamentally not compatible with these views. Genetics also has strongly committed itself to a view that puts the DNA and RNA sequences at the core of the form that emerges in the development of new life forms. However Dolly the Sheep, the first higher mammal to be cloned, not only suffered from premature aging, her cloned twin sisters all came out looking quite different despite their identical genome. This has yet to be accounted for fully.
The extended mind Sheldrake proposes is the inversion of Rene Descartes' notion of extended matter, wherein the mind is what extends itself, not the object. A subject-object problem within the study of cognition is thus resolved by assigning the human the perpetual role as object, not subject - uncomfortable as this may be for the notion of free will and the human desire not to perceive self as prey in any sense. And perhaps even more uncomfortable for the prevailing notion of science itself as practiced by highly trained and privileged subjects, objective and professional scientists, working on passive or controlled objects, which don't in themselves have the power to alter the cognition or even perception of the subject.
See also
Philosophy of perception