and animals.In short, energetic communication via the heart field facilitates development of an expanded consciousness in relation to our social world.The Hearts Field and IntuitionThere are also new data suggesting that the hearts field is directly involved in intuitive perception, through its coupling to an energetic information field outside the bounds of space and time. Using a rigorous experimental design, we found compelling evidence that both the heart and brain receive and respond to information about a future event before the event actually happens. Even more surprising was our finding that the heart appears to receive this intuitive information before the brain. This suggests that the hearts field may be linked to a more subtle energetic field that contains information on objects and events remote in space or ahead in time. Called by Karl Pribram and others the spectral domain, this is a fundamental order of potential energy that enfolds space and time, and is thought to be the basis for our consciousness of the whole. (See heartmath.org for further detail.)Social FieldsIn the same way that the heart generates energy in the body, we propose that the social collective is the activator and regulator of the energy in social systems.A body of groundbreaking work shows how the field of socioemotional interaction between a mother and her infant is essential to brain development, the emergence of consciousness, and the formation of a healthy self-concept. These interactions are organized along two relational dimensionsstimulation of the babys emotions, and regulation of shared emotional energy. Together they form a socioemotional field through which enormous quantities of psychobiological and psychosocial information are exchanged. Coherent organization of the mother-child relations that make up this field is critical. This occurs when interactions are charged, most importantly, with positive emotions (love, joy, happiness, excitement, appreciation, etc.), and are patterned as highly synchronized, reciprocal exchanges between these two individuals. These patterns are imprinted in the childs brain and thus influence psychosocial function throughout life. (See Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self.)Moreover in a longitudinal study of 46 social groups, one of us (RTB) documented how information about the global organization of a groupthe groups collective consciousnessappears to be transmitted to all members by an energetic field of socio-emotional connection. Data on the relationships between each pair of members was found to provide an accurate image of the social structure of the group as a whole. Coherent organization of the groups social structure is associated with a network of positively charged emotions (love, excitement, and optimism) connecting all members. This network of positive emotions appears to constitute a field of energetic connection into which information about the groups social structure is encoded and distributed throughout the group. Remarkably, an accurate picture of the groups overall social structure was obtained from information only about relationships between pairs of individuals. We believe the only way this is possible is if information about the organization of the whole group is distributed to all members of the group via an energetic field. Such correspondence in information between parts and the whole is