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Morphic Resonance and Memory

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Editor's note: The following is from Dr. Sheldrake's book, "The Presence Of The Past."

The hypothesis of formative causation provides a radical reinterpretation of the nature of memory. It proposes that memory is inherent in all organisms in two related ways. First, all organisms inherit a collective memory of their species by morphic resonance from previous organisms. Second, individual organisms are subject to morphic resonance from themselves in the past, and this self-resonance provides the basis for their individual memories and habits.

… patterns of behavior are organized by nested hierarchies of behavioral fields, just as patterns of morphogenesis are organized by nested hierarchies of morphogenetic fields. These behavioral fields organize the activities of the nervous system by imposing spatiotemporal patterns on its inherently indeterminate or probabilistic functioning.

Just as appropriate genes are necessary for normal morphogenesis, an appropriate nervous system is necessary for normal behavior. Chemical or physical disturbances of the nerves can affect behavior, just as disturbances of genes and proteins can affect morphogenesis. But behavior is no more programmed in the nervous system than morphogenesis is programmed in the genes.

According to the hypothesis of formative causation, there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between inherited and learned behavior. Both depend of morphic fields stabilized by morphic resonance. In instinctive behavior, such as the building of nests by … wasps, the influence of many other insects predominates, whereas in learned behavior, such as learning a way out of a maze by a rat, resonance by an animal’s own past is more important. Usually, both play a part: instinctive behavior involves an element of adaptation to the animal’s particular circumstances, and learned behavior takes place within the framework of potentialities provided by the species’ morphic fields.

Learning inevitably involves memory; the influence of past experience on present behavior would not be possible if the experience were not in some way retained. There is of course no need for memory to involve consciousness; we ourselves are influenced by many unconscious memories that are expressed in our habits. We remember how to swim, write, or ride bicycles, but these habit memories are not conscious. There is no reason to assume that the habit memories we see at work in animals are any more conscious than our own.

the a priori assumption

Memory is conventionally believed to be explicable in terms of physicochemical modifications of the nervous system, the “traces” of past experiences. Attempts to locate such traces within the brain and to analyze them have so far been unsuccessful, but from the point of view of the mechanistic theory, memory must depend on material traces of some kind. This is an a priori assumption.

Editor’s note: “a priori” literally means “that which is before”; that is, before inductive reasoning, before a fact-gathering analysis. An “a priori assumption” is a judgment made without evidence or research; a good word as synonym for “a priori assumption” might be “prejudice.”

As Steven Rose, a [materialist] neuroscientist expressed it:

Memories are in some way “in” the mind, and therefore, for a biologist, also “in” the brain. But how? The term memory must include two separate processes. It must involve, on the one hand, that of learning something new about the world around us; and on the other, at some later date, recalling, or remembering that thing. We infer that what lies between the learning and the remembering must be some permanent record, a memory trace within the brain.

Editor’s note: In the sub-article, “Circular Reasoning and Promissory Notes: How the House of Darwin is built,” we discussed how materialistic evolution is constructed upon assumptions which have yet to be proved, but which, nevertheless, become foundation of a philosophical program. It’s a house of cards. Notice the declarative statement above: “Memories are in some way ‘in’ the mind … ‘in’ the brain” and "must be" so. Why must this be so? Materialists unashamedly engage in this sort of clumsy circular reasoning because “we already know we’re right, materialism is the only possible answer, and there’s no need even to investigate flim-flam ideas such as morphic resonance.”

By contrast, through formative causation, memory depends on morphic resonance between patterns of activity within the nervous system now and similar patterns of activity in the past. It need not depend on physiochemical modifications of the nerves. Memory need not be stored in material memory traces if it results from morphic resonance; the past can exert a direct influence on the present…

ARE MEMORIES STORED INSIDE THE BRAIN?

… Pavlov’s famous researches on conditioned reflexes greatly strengthened the traditional concept of memory traces. Pavlov himself was reluctant to claim that reflex arcs depended on specifically localized traces within the cerebral cortex because he found that the conditioning could survive considerable surgical damage to the brain. But some of those who followed him were less cautious…

Much effort has been expended in an attempt to locate memory traces within the brain… The classic investigations on the subject were made by Karl Lashley with rats, monkeys, and chimpanzees. For over thirty years he tried to trace conditioned reflex paths… Lashley first became skeptical of [memory traces within the brain] when he found that rats trained to respond in particular ways to light showed no reduction in accuracy of performance when nearly the entire motor cortex was cut out… Lashley then showed that learned habits were retained if associative areas of the brain were destroyed. Habits also survived a series of deep incisions into the cerebral cortex that destroyed cross-connections within it. Lashley started as an enthusiastic supporter of the reflex theory of learning but was forced to abandon it…

Analogous experiments have shown that even in invertebrates, such as the octopus, specific memory traces cannot be localized…

If memories are somehow stored in synapses, then the synapses themselves must remain stable over long periods of time… [however] it has long been known that there is a continuous process of cell death within the brain…

At the molecular level, too, as Francis Crick pointed out, the long term storage of memory traces is problematic. The time span of human memory is often years or tens of years. “Yet it is believed that almost all the molecules in our bodies, with the exception of DNA, turn over in a matter of days, weeks, or at most a few months. How then is memory stored in the brain so that its trace is relatively immune to molecular turnover?”  …

surgically removing much of the brain is one thing, but what about retained memory of learned response in simple animals without brains at all

In a unicellular organism … there are no nerves [and no brain, and yet these simple life forms do exhibit a memory of learned behavior, and] so this kind of learning does not depend on a nervous system…

it is popularly believed that electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain, producing memories, proves that these memories are stored in particular sections of the brain; but those working in this area do not believe this

Almost everyone has heard of electrical evocation of memories. However, the brain surgeon who virtually invented this concept came to deny that memories are stored in certain sections of the brain.

Dr. Wilder Penfield would electrically stimulate brain regions which evoked memories, it seemed, relative to a specific part of the brain. He later conceded the "mistake" of this hypothesis.

… the brain surgeon, Wilder Penfield … tested the effects of mild electrical stimulation on various regions of the brain… [When these regions were touched with an electrode] patients recalled specific memory sequences…

The electrical evocation of these memories might mean that they were stored in the stimulated tissue, as Penfield initially assumed, or it might mean stimulation of that region activated other parts of the brain involved in remembering the episode. But it could also mean that the stimulation resulted in a pattern of activity that tuned in to the memory by morphic resonance.

Significantly, Penfield himself, as a result of further reflection on these and other findings, abandoned his original interpretation that certain parts of the temporal cortex should be called the memory cortex: “This was a mistake … The record is not in the cortex.” …

Editor’s note: Both Penfield and Lashley gave up the idea of localized memory traces; however, since memories “must be” stored in the brain, each adopted a “distributed” memory-trace view, in which, as one researcher put it, memories are now “everywhere but nowhere.” This latter explanation was invented on-the-fly, without evidence, because “memories must be in the brain somewhere.”

In light of formative causation, the elusiveness of the memory traces has a very simple explanation: they do not exist. Rather, memory depends on morphic resonance from the patterns of activity of the brain in the past. We tune into ourselves in the past; we do not carry our memories around inside our brains...

An interpretation of memory in terms of morphic resonance offers a new approach to these problems. If memories depend on morphic fields, then they need not be stored within the brain at all but may be given by morphic resonance from the organism’s own past. After damage to parts of the brain, these fields may be capable of organizing the nerve cells in other regions to carry out the same functions as before. The ability of learned habits to survive substantial brain damage may be due to the self-organizing properties of the fields…