The Cartesian mechanistic view is, in many ways, still
the predominant paradigm today, especially in biology and
medicine. Ninety percent of biologists would be proud to
tell you that they are mechanistic biologists. Although
physics has moved beyond the mechanistic view, much of our
thinking about physical reality is still shaped by it-even
in those of us who would like to believe that we have moved
beyond this frame of thought. Therefore, I will briefly
examine some of the fundamental assumptions of the mechanistic
world view in order to show how it is still deeply embedded
in the way that most of us think.
MECHANISM'S ROOTS IN NEO-PLATONIC MYSTICISM
It is interesting that the roots of the 17th-century mechanistic
world view can be found in ancient mystical religion. Indeed,
the mechanistic view was a synthesis of two traditions of
thought, both of which were based on the mystical insight
that reality is timeless and changeless. One of these traditions
stems from Pythagoras and Plato, who were both fascinated
by the eternal truths of mathematics. In the 17th century,
this evolved into a view that nature was governed by timeless
ideas, proportions, principles, or laws that existed within
the mind of God. This world view became dominant and, through
philosophers and scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler,
Descartes, Galileo and Newton, it was incorporated into
the foundations of modern physics.
Basically, they expressed the idea that numbers, proportions,
equations, and mathematical principles are more real than
the physical world we experience. Even today, many mathematicians
incline toward this kind of Pythagorean or Platonic mysticism.
They think of the physical world as a reification of mathematical
principles, as a reflection of eternal numerical mathematical
laws. This view is alien to the thinking of most of us,
who the physical world as the "real" world and consider
mathematical equations a man-made, and possibly inaccurate,
description of that "real" world. Nevertheless, this mystical
view has evolved into the currently predominant scientific
viewpoint that nature is governed by eternal, changeless,
immutable, omnipresent laws. The laws of nature are everywhere
and always.
MATERIALISM'S ROOTS IN ATOMISM
The second view of changelessness which emerged in the
17th century stemmed from the atomistic tradition of materialism,
which addressed an issue which, even then, was already deep-rooted
in Greek thought: namely, the concept of a changeless reality.
Parmenides, a pre-Socratic philosopher, had the idea that
only being is; not-being is not. If something is, it can't
change because, in order to change, it would have to combine
being and not-being, which was impossible. Therefore,. he
concluded that reality is a homogenous, changeless sphere.
Unfortunately for Parmenides, the world we experience is
not homogenous, changeless, or spherical. In order to preserve
his theory, Parmenides claimed that the world we experience
is a delusion. This wasn't a very satisfactory solution,
and thinkers of the time tried to find a way to resolve
this dilemma.
The atomists' solution was to claim that reality consists
of a large number of homogenous, changeless spheres (or
particles): the atoms. Instead of one big changeless sphere,
there are a great many small, changeless spheres moving
in the void. The changing appearances of the world could
then be explained in terms of the movements, permutations,
and combinations of the atoms. This is the original insight
of materialism: that reality consisted of eternal atomic
matter and the movement of matter.
The combination of this materialistic tradition with the
Platonic tradition finally gave rise to the mechanical philosophy
which emerged in the 17th century and produced a cosmic
dualism that has been with us ever since. On the one hand
we have eternal atoms of inert matter; and on the other
hand, we have changeless, non-material laws which are more
like ideas than physical, material things. In this kind
of dualism, both sides are changeless-a belief that does
not readily suggest the idea of an evolutionary universe.
In fact, physicists have been very adverse to accepting
the idea of evolution precisely because it fits so poorly
with the notion of eternal matter and changeless laws. In
modern physics, matter is now seen as a form of energy;
eternal energy has replaced eternal matter, but little else
has changed.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE EVOLUTIONARY PARADIGM
Nevertheless, the evolutionary paradigm has been gaining
ground steadily for the past two centuries. In the 18th
century, social, artistic, and scientific developments were
generally viewed as a progressive and evolutionary process.
The Industrial Revolution made this viewpoint an economic
reality in parts of Europe and America. By the early 19th
century there were a number of evolutionary philosophies
and, by the 1840's, the evolutionary social theory of Marxism
had been publicized. In this context of social and cultural
evolutionary theory, Darwin proposed his biological theory
of evolution which extended the evolutionary vision to the
whole of life. Yet this vision was not extended to the entire
universe: Darwin and the neo-Darwinians ironically tried
to fit the evolution of life on earth into a static universe,
or even worse, a universe which was actually thought to
be "running down" thermodynamically, heading toward a "heat
death."
Everything changed in 1966 when physics finally accepted
an evolutionary cosmology in which the universe was no longer
eternal. Instead, the universe originated in a Big Bang
about 15 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. So
we now have an evolutionary physics. But we have to remember
that this evolutionary physics is only just over 20 years
old, and the implications and consequences of the Big Bang
discovery are not yet fully known.
Physics is only just beginning to adapt itself to this
new view, which, as we have seen, challenges the most fundamental
assumption of physics since the time of Pythagoras: the
idea of eternal laws. As soon as we have an evolving universe,
we are confronted with the question: what about the eternal
laws of nature? Where were the laws of nature before the
Big Bang? If the laws of nature existed before the Big Bang,
then it's clear that they are nonphysical; in fact, they
are metaphysical. This forces out into the open the metaphysical
assumption that underlay the idea of eternal laws all along.
LAWS OF NATURE, OR JUST HABITS?
There is an alternative, however. The alternative is that
the universe is more like an organism than a machine. The
Big Bang recalls the mythic stories of the hatching of the
cosmic egg: it grows, and as it grows it undergoes an internal
differentiation that is more like a gigantic cosmic embryo
than the huge eternal machine of mechanistic theory. With
this organic alternative, it might make sense to think of
the laws of nature as more like habits; perhaps the laws
of nature are habits of the universe, and perhaps the universe
has an in-built memory.
About 100 years ago the American philosopher, C. S. Pierce,
said that if we took evolution seriously, if we thought
of the entire universe as evolving, then we would have to
think of the laws of nature as somehow likened to habits.
This idea was actually quite common, especially in America;
it was espoused by William James and other American philosophers,
and was quite widely discussed at the end of the last century.
In Germany, Nietzsche went so far as to suggest that the
laws of nature underwent natural selection: perhaps there
were many laws of nature at the beginning, but only the
successful laws survived; therefore, the universe we see
has laws which have evolved through natural selection.
Biologists also moved toward interpreting phenomena in
terms of habit. The most interesting such theorist was English
writer Samuel Butler, whose most important books on this
theme were Life and Habit (1878) and Unconscious Memory
(1881). Butler contended that the whole of life involved
inherent unconscious memory; habits, the instincts of animals,
the way in which embryos develop, all reflected a basic
principle of inherent memory within life. He even proposed
that there must be an inherent memory in atoms, molecules,
and crystals. Thus, there was this period of time at the
end of the last century when biology was viewed in evolutionary
terms. It is only since the 1920's that mechanistic thinking
has come to have a stranglehold upon biological thought.
HOW DOES FORM ARISE?
The hypothesis of formative causation, which is the basis
of my own work, starts from the problem of biological form.
Within biology, there has been a long-standing discussion
of how to understand the way embryos and organisms develop.
How do plants grow from seeds? How do embryos develop from
fertilized eggs? This is a problem for biologists; it's
not really a problem for embryos and trees, which just do
it! However, biologists rind it difficult to find a causal
explanation for form. In physics, in some sense the cause
equals the effect. The amount of energy, matter, and momentum
before a given change equals the amount afterwards. The
cause is contained in the effect and the effect in the cause.
However, when we are considering the growth of an oak tree
from an acorn, there seems to be no such equivalence of
cause and effect in any obvious way.
In the 17th century, the main mechanistic theory of embryology
was simply that the oak tree was contained within the acorn:
inside each acorn there was a miniature oak tree which inflated
as the oak tree grew. This theory was quite widely accepted,
and it was the one most consistent with the mechanistic
approach, as understood at that time. However, as critics
rapidly pointed out, if the oak tree is inflated and that
oak tree itself produces acorns, the inflatable oak tree
must contain inflatable acorns which contain inflatable
oak trees, ad infinitum.
If, on the other hand, more form came from less form (the
technical name for which is epigenesis), then where does
the more form come from?
How did structures appear that weren't there before? Neither
Platonists nor Aristotelians had any problem with this question.
The Platonists said that the form comes from the Platonic
archetype: if there is an oak tree, then there is an archetypal
form of an oak tree, and all actual oak trees are simply
reflections of this archetype. Since this archetype is beyond
space and time, there is no need to have it embedded in
the physical form of the acorn. The Aristotelians said that
every species has its own kind of soul, and the soul is
the form of the body. The body is in the soul, not the soul
in the body. The soul is the form of the body and is around
the body and contains the goal of development (which is
formally called entelechy). An oak tree soul contains the
eventual oak tree.
IS DNA A GENETIC PROGRAM?
However, a mechanistic world view denies animism in all
its forms; it denies the existence of the soul and of any
non-material organizing principles. Therefore, mechanists
have to have some kind of preformationism. At the end of
the 19th century, German biologist August Weismann's theory
of the germ-plasm revived the idea of preformationism; Weissman's
theory placed "determinants," which supposedly gave rise
to the organism, inside the embryo. This is the ancestor
of the present idea of genetic programming, which constitutes
another resurgence of preformationism in a modern guise.
As we will see, this model does not work very well. The
genetic program is assumed to be identical with DNA, the
genetic chemical. The genetic information is coded in DNA
and this code forms the genetic program. But such a leap
requires projecting onto DNA properties that it does not
actually possess. We know what, DNA does: it codes for proteins;
it codes for the sequence of amino acids which form proteins.
However, there is a big difference between coding for the
structure of a protein-a chemical constituent of the organism-and
programming the development of an entire organism. It is
the difference between making bricks and building a house
out of the bricks. You need the bricks to build the house.
If you have defective bricks, the house will be defective.
But the plan of the house is not contained in the bricks,
or the wires, or the beams, or cement.
Analogously, DNA only codes for the materials from which
the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins,
and so forth. There is no evidence that it also codes for
the plan, the form, the morphology of the body. To see this
more clearly, think of your arms and legs. The form of the
arms and legs is different; it's obvious that they have
a different shape from each other. Yet the chemicals in
the arms and legs are identical. The muscles are the same,
the nerve cells are the same, the skin cells are the same,
and the DNA is the same in all the cells of the arms and
legs. In fact, the DNA is the same in all the cells of the
body. DNA alone cannot explain the difference inform; something
else is necessary to explain form.
In current mechanistic biology, this is usually assumed
to depend on what are called "complex patterns of physio-chemical
interaction not yet fully understood." Thus the current
mechanistic theory is not an explanation but merely the
promise of an explanation. It is what Sir Karl Popper has
called a "promissory mechanism"; it involves issuing promissory
notes against future explanations that do not yet exist.
As such, it is not really an objective argument; it is merely
a statement of faith.
WHAT ARE MORPHIC FIELDS?
The question of biological development, of morphogenesis,
is actually quite open and is the subject of much debate
within biology itself. An alternative to the mechanist/reductionist
approach, which has been around since the 1920s, is the
idea of morphogenetic (form-shaping) fields. In this model,
growing organisms are shaped by fields which are both within
and around them, fields which contain, as it were, the form
of the organism. This is closer to the Aristotelian tradition
than to any of the other traditional approaches. As an oak
tree develops, the acorn is associated with an oak tree
field, an invisible organizing structure which organizes
the oak tree's development; it is like an oak tree mold,
within which the developing organism grows.
One fact which led to the development of this theory is
the remarkable ability organisms have to repair damage.
If you cut an oak tree into little pieces, each little piece,
properly treated, can grow into a new tree. So from a tiny
fragment, you can get a whole. Machines do not do that;
they do not have this power of remaining whole if you remove
parts of them. Chop a computer up into small pieces and
all you get is a broken computer. It does not regenerate
into lots of little computers. But if you chop a flatworm
into small pieces, each piece can grow into a new flatworm.
Another analogy is a magnet. If you chop a magnet into small
pieces, you do have lots of small magnets, each with a complete
magnetic field. This is a wholistic property that fields
have that mechanical systems do not have unless they are
associated with fields. Still another example is the hologram,
any part of which contains the whole. A hologram is based
on interference patterns within the electromagnetic field.
Fields thus have a wholistic property which was very attractive
to the biologists who developed this concept of morphogenetic
fields.
Each species has its own fields, and within each organism
there are fields within fields. Within each of us is the
field of the whole body; fields for arms and legs and fields
for kidneys and livers; within are fields for the different
tissues inside these organs, and then fields for the cells,
and fields for the sub-cellular structures, and fields for
the molecules, and so on. There is a whole series of fields
within fields. The essence of the hypothesis I am proposing
is that these fields, which are already accepted quite widely
within biology, have a kind of in-built memory derived from
previous forms of a similar kind. The liver field is shaped
by the forms of previous livers and the oak tree field by
the forms and organization of previous oak trees. Through
the fields, by a process called morphic resonance, the influence
of like upon like, there is a connection among similar fields.
That means that the field's structure has a cumulative memory,
based on what has happened to the species in the past. This
idea applies not only to living organisms but also to protein
molecules, crystals, even to atoms. In the realm of crystals,
for example, the theory would say that the form a crystal
takes depends on its characteristic morphic field. Morphic
field is a broader term which includes the fields of both
form and behavior; hereafter, I shall use the word morphic
field rather than morphogenetic.
MIGRANT BEARDED CHEMISTS
If you make a new compound and crystallize it, there won't
be a morphic field for it the first time. Therefore, it
may be very difficult to crystallize; you have to wait for
a morphic field to emerge. The second time, however, even
if you do this somewhere else in the world, there will be
an influence from the first crystallization, and it should
crystallize a bit more easily. The third time there will
be an influence from the first and second, and so on. There
will be a cumulative influence from previous crystals, so
it should get easier and easier to crystallize the more
often you crystallize it. And, in fact, this is exactly
what does happen. Synthetic chemists find that new compounds
are generally very difficult to crystallize. As time goes
on, they generally get easier to crystallize all over the
world. The conventional explanation is that this occurs
because fragments of previous crystals are carried from
laboratory to laboratory on beards of migrant chemists.
When there have not been any migrant chemists, it is assumed
that the fragments wafted through the atmosphere as microscopic
dust particles.
Perhaps migrant chemists do carry fragments on their beards
and perhaps dust particles do get blown around in the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, if one measures the rate of crystallization
under rigorously controlled conditions in sealed vessels
in different parts of the world, one should still observe
an accelerated rate of crystallization. This experiment
has not yet been done. But a related experiment involving
chemical reaction rates of new synthetic processes is at
present being considered by a major chemical company in
Britain because, if these things happen, they have quite
important implications for the chemical industry.
A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE
There are quite a number of experiments that can be done
in the realm of biological form and the development of form.
Correspondingly, the same principles apply to behavior,
forms of behavior and patterns of behavior. Consider the
hypothesis that if you train rats to learn a new trick in
Santa Barbara, then rats all over the world should be able
to learn to do the same trick more quickly, just because
the rats in Santa Barbara have learned it. This new pattern
of learning will be, as it were, in the rat collective memory-in
the morphic fields of rats, to which other rats can tune
in, just because they are rats and just because they are
in similar circumstances, by morphic resonance. This may
seem a bit improbable, but either this sort of thing happens
or it doesn't.
Among the vast number of papers in the archives of experiments
on rat psychology, there are a number of examples of experiments
in which people have actually monitored rates of learning
over time and discovered mysterious increases. In my book,
A New Science of Life, I describe one such series of experiments
which extended over a 50-year period. Begun at Harvard and
then carried on in Scotland and Australia, the experiment
demonstrated that rats increased their rate of learning
more than tenfold. This was a huge effect-not some marginal
statistically significant result. This improved rate of
learning in identical learning situations occurred in these
three separate locations and in all rats of the breed, not
just in rats descended from trained parents.
There are other examples of the spontaneous spread of new
habits in animals and birds which provide at least circumstantial
evidence for the theory of morphic resonance. The best documented
of these is the behavior of bluetits, a rather small bird
with a blue head, that is common throughout Britain. Fresh
milk is still delivered to the door each morning in Britain.
Until about the 1950s, the caps on the milk bottles were
made of cardboard. In 1921 in Southampton, a strange phenomenon
was observed. When people came out in the morning to get
their milk bottles, they found little shreds of cardboard
all around the bottom of the bottle, and the cream from
the top of the bottle had disappeared. Close observation
revealed that this was being done by bluetits, who sat on
top of the bottle, pulled off the cardboard with their beaks,
and then drank the cream. Several tragic cases were found
in which bluetits were discovered drowned head first in
the milk!
This incident caused considerable interest; then the event
turned up somewhere else in Britain, about 50 miles away,
and then somewhere about 100 miles away. Whenever the bluetit
phenomenon turned up, it started spreading locally, presumably
by imitation. However, bluetits are very home-loving creatures,
and they don't normally travel more than four or five miles.
Therefore, the dissemination of the behavior over large
distances could only be accounted for in terms of an independent
discovery of the habit. The bluetit habit was mapped throughout
Britain until 1947, by which time it had become more or
less universal. The people who did the study came to the
conclusion that it must have been "invented" independently
at least 50 times. Moreover, the rate of spread of the habit
accelerated as time went on. In other parts of Europe where
milk bottles are delivered to doorsteps, such as Scandinavia
and Holland, the habit also cropped up during the 1930s
and spread in a similar manner. Here is an example of a
pattern of behavior which was spread in a way which seemed
to speed up with time, and which might provide an example
of morphic resonance.
But there is still stronger evidence for morphic resonance.
Because of the German occupation of Holland, milk delivery
ceased during 1939-40. Milk deliveries did not resume until
1948. Since bluetits usually live only two to three years,
there probably were no bluetits alive in 1948 who had been
alive when milk was last delivered. Yet when milk deliveries
resumed in 1948, the opening of milk bottles by bluetits
sprang up rapidly in quite separate places in Holland and
spread extremely rapidly until, within a year or two, it
was once again universal. The behavior spread much more
rapidly and cropped up independently much more frequently
the second time round than the first time. This example
demonstrates the evolutionary spread of a new habit which
is probably not genetic but rather depends on a kind of
collective memory due to morphic resonance.
I am suggesting that heredity depends not only on DNA,
which enables organisms to build the right chemical building
blocks-the proteins-but also on morphic resonance. Heredity
thus has two aspects: one a genetic heredity, which accounts
for the inheritance of proteins through DNA's control of
protein synthesis; the second a form of heredity based on
morphic fields and morphic resonance, which is nongenetic
and which is inherited directly from past members of the
species. This latter form of heredity deals with the organization
of form and behavior.
THE ALLEGORY OF THE TELEVISION SET
The differences and connections between these two forms
of heredity become easier to understand if we consider an
analogy to television. Think of the pictures on the screen
as the form that we are interested in. If you didn't know
how the form arose, the most obvious explanation would be
that there were little people inside the set whose shadows
you were seeing on the screen. Children sometimes think
in this manner. If you take the back off the set, however,
and look inside, you find that there are no little people.
Then you might get more subtle and speculate that the little
people are microscopic and are actually inside the wires
of the TV set. But if you look at the wires through a microscope,
you can't find any little people there either.
You might get still more subtle and propose that the little
people on the screen actually arise through "complex interactions
among the parts of the set which are not yet fully understood."
You might think this theory was proved if you chopped out
a few transistors from the set. The people would disappear.
If you put the transistors back, they would reappear. This
might provide convincing evidence that they arose from within
the set entirely on the basis of internal interaction.
Suppose that someone suggested that the pictures of little
people come from outside the set, and the set picks up the
pictures as a result of invisible vibrations to which the
set is attuned. This would probably sound like a very occult
and mystical explanation. You might deny that anything is
coming into the set. You could even "prove it" by weighing
the set switched off and switched on; it would weigh the
same. Therefore, you could conclude that nothing is coming
into the set.
I think that is the position of modern biology, trying
to explain everything in terms of what happens inside. The
more explanations for form are looked for inside, the more
elusive the explanations prove to be, and the more they
are ascribed to ever more subtle and complex interactions,
which always elude investigation. As I am suggesting, the
forms and patterns of behavior are actually being tuned
into by invisible connections arising outside the organism.
The development of form is a result of both the internal
organization of the organism and the interaction of the
morphic fields to which it is tuned.
Genetic mutations can affect this development. Again think
of the TV set. If we mutate a transistor or a condenser
inside the set, you may get distorted pictures or sound.
But this does not prove that the pictures and sound are
programmed by these components. Nor does it prove that form
and behavior are programmed by genes, if we find there are
alterations in form and behavior as a result of genetic
mutation.
There is another kind of mutation which is particularly
interesting. Imagine a mutation in the tuning circuit of
your set, such that it alters the resonant frequency of
the tuning circuit. Tuning your TV depends on a resonant
phenomenon; the tuner resonates at the same frequency as
the frequency of the signal transmitted by the different
stations. Thus tuning dials are measured in hertz, which
is a measure of frequency. Imagine a mutation in the tuning
system such that you tune to one channel and a different
channel actually appears. You might trace this back to a
single condenser or a single resistor which had undergone
a mutation. But it would not be valid to conclude that the
new programs you are seeing, the different people, the different
films and advertisements, are programmed inside the component
that has changed. Nor does it prove that form and behavior
are programmed in the DNA when genetic mutations lead to
changes in form and behavior. The usual assumption is that
if you can show something alters as a result of a mutation,
then that must be programmed by, or controlled by, or determined
by, the gene. I hope this TV analogy makes it clear that
that is not the only conclusion. It could be that it is
simply affecting the tuning system.
A NEW THEORY OF EVOLUTION
A great deal of work is being done in contemporary biological
research on such "tuning" mutations (formally called homoeotic
mutations). The animal most used in the investigations is
Drosophila, the fruitfly. A whole range of these mutations
have been found which produce various monstrosities. One
kind, called antennapedia, leads to the antennae being transformed
into legs. The unfortunate flies, which contain just one
altered gene, produce legs instead of antennae growing out
of their heads. There is another mutation which leads to
the second of the three pairs of legs in the Drosophila
being transformed into antennae. Normally flies have one
pair of wings and, on the segment behind the wings, are
small balancing organs called halteres. Still another mutation
leads to the transformation of the segment normally bearing
the halteres into a duplicate of the first segment, so that
these flies have four wings instead of two. These are called
bithorax mutants.
All of these mutations depend on single genes. I propose
that somehow these single gene mutations are changing the
tuning of a part of the embryonic tissue, such that it tunes
into a different morphic field than it normally does, and
so a different set of structures arise, just like tuning
into a different channel on TV.
One can see from these analogies how both genetics and
morphic resonance are involved in heredity. Of course, a
new theory of heredity leads to a new theory of evolution.
Present-day evolutionary theory is based on the assumption
that virtually all heredity is genetic. Sociobiology and
neo-Darwinism in all their various forms are based on gene
selection, gene frequencies, and so forth. The theory of
morphic resonance leads to a much broader view which allows
one of the great heresies of biology once more to be taken
seriously: namely, the idea of the inheritance of acquired
characteristics. Behaviors which organisms learn, or forms
which they develop, can be inherited by others even if they
are not descended from the original organisms-by morphic
resonance.
A NEW CONCEPT OF MEMORY
When we consider memory, this hypothesis leads to a very
different approach from the traditional one. The key concept
of morphic resonance is that similar things influence similar
things across both space and time. The amount of influence
depends on the degree of similarity. Most organisms are
more similar to themselves in the past than they are to
any other organism. I am more like me five minutes ago than
I am like any of you; all of us are more like ourselves
in the past than like anyone else. The same is true of any
organism. This self-resonance with past states of the same
organism in the realm of form helps to stabilize the morphogenetic
fields, to stabilize the form of the organism, even though
the chemical constituents in the cells are turning over
and changing. Habitual patterns of behavior are also tuned
into by the self-resonance process. If I start riding a
bicycle, for example, the pattern of activity of my nervous
system and my muscles, in response to balancing on the bicycle,
immediately tunes me in by similarity to all the previous
occasions on which I have ridden a bicycle. The experience
of bicycle riding is given by cumulative morphic resonance
to all those past occasions. It is not a verbal or intellectual
memory; it is a body memory of riding a bicycle.
This would also apply to my memory of actual events: what
I did yesterday in Los Angeles or last year in England.
When, I think of these particular events, I am tuning into
the occasions on which these events happened. There is a
direct causal connection through a tuning process. If this
hypothesis is correct, it is not necessary to assume that
memories are stored inside the brain.
THE MYSTERY OF MIND
All of us have been brought up on the idea that memories
are stored in the brain; we use the word brain interchangeably
with mind or memory. I am suggesting that the brain is more
like a tuning system than a memory storage device. One of
the main arguments for the localization of memory in the
brain is the fact that certain kinds of brain damage can
lead to loss of memory. If the brain is damaged in a car
accident and someone loses memory, then the obvious assumption
is that memory tissue must have been destroyed. But this
is not necessarily so.
Consider the TV analogy again. If I damaged your TV set
so that you were unable to receive certain channels, or
if I made the TV set aphasic by destroying the part of it
concerned with the production of sound so that you could
still get the pictures but could not get the sound, this
would not prove that the sound or the pictures were stored
inside the TV set. It would merely show that I had affected
the tuning system so you could not pick up the correct signal
any longer. No more does memory loss due to brain damage
prove that memory is stored inside the brain. In fact, most
memory loss is temporary: amnesia following concussion,
for example, is often temporary. This recovery of memory
is very difficult to explain in terms of conventional theories:
if the memories have been destroyed because the memory tissue
has been destroyed, they ought not to come back again; yet
they often do.
Another argument for the localization of memory inside
the brain is suggested by the experiments on electrical
stimulation of the brain by Wilder Penfield and others.
Penfield stimulated the temporal lobes of the brains of
epileptic patients and found that some of these stimuli
could elicit vivid responses, which the patients interpreted
as memories of things they had done in the past. Penfield
assumed that he was actually stimulating memories which
were stored in the cortex. Again returning to the TV analogy,
if I stimulated the tuning circuit of your TV set and it
jumped onto another channel, this wouldn't prove the information
was stored inside the tuning circuit. It is interesting
that, in his last book, The Mystery of the Mind, Penfield
himself abandoned the idea that the experiments proved that
memory was inside the brain. He came to the conclusion that
memory was not stored inside the cortex at all.
There have been many attempts to locate memory traces within
the brain, the best known of which were by Karl Lashley,
the great American neurophysiologist. He trained rats to
learn tricks, then chopped bits of their brains out to determine
whether the rats could still do the tricks. To his amazement,
he found that he could remove over fifty percent of the
brain-any 50%-and there would be virtually no effect on
the retention of this learning. When he removed all the
brain, the rats could no longer perform the tricks, so he
concluded that the brain was necessary in some way to the
performance of the task-which is hardly a very surprising
conclusion. What was surprising was how much of the brain
he could remove without affecting the memory.
Similar results have been found by other investigators,
even with invertebrates such as the octopus. This led one
experimenter to speculate that memory was both everywhere
and nowhere in particular. Lashley himself concluded that
memories are stored in a distributed manner throughout the
brain, since he could not find the memory traces which classical
theory required. His student, Karl Pribram, extended this
idea with the holographic theory of memory storage: memory
is like a holographic image, stored as an interference pattern
throughout the brain.
What Lashley and Pribram (at least in some of his writing)
do not seem to have considered is the possibility that memories
may not be stored inside the brain at all. The idea that
they are not stored inside the brain is more consistent
with the available data than either the conventional theories
or the holographic theory. Many difficulties have arisen
in trying to localize memory storage in the brain, in part
because the brain is much more dynamic than previously thought.
If the brain is to serve as a memory storehouse, then the
storage system would have to remain stable; yet it is now
known that nerve cells turn over much more rapidly than
was previously thought. All the chemicals in synapses and
nerve structures and molecules are turning over and changing
all the time. With a very dynamic brain, it is difficult
to see how memories are stored.
There is also a logical problem about conventional theories
of memory storage, which various philosophers have pointed
out. All conventional theories assume that memories are
somehow coded and located in a memory store in the brain.
When they are needed they are recovered by a retrieval system.
This is called the coding, storage, and retrieval model.
However, for a retrieval system to retrieve anything, it
has to know what it wants to retrieve; a memory retrieval
system has to know what memory it is looking for. It thus
must be able to recognize the memory that it is trying to
retrieve. In order to recognize it, the retrieval system
itself must have some kind of memory. Therefore, the retrieval
system must have a sub-retrieval system to retrieve its
memories from its store. This leads to an infinite regress.
Several philosophers argue that this is a fatal, logical
flaw in any conventional theory of memory storage. However,
on the whole, memory theoreticians are not very interested
in what philosophers say, so they do not bother to reply
to this argument. But it does seem to me quite a powerful
one.
In considering the morphic resonance theory of memory,
we might ask: if we tune into our own memories, then why
don't we tune into other people's as well? I think we do,
and the whole basis of the approach I am suggesting is that
there is a collective memory to which we are all tuned which
forms a background against which our own experience develops
and against which our own individual memories develop. This
concept is very similar to the notion of the collective
unconscious.
Jung thought of the collective unconscious as a collective
memory, the collective memory of humanity. He thought that
people would be more tuned into members of their own family
and race and social and cultural group, but that nevertheless
there would be a background resonance from all humanity:
a pooled or averaged experience of basic things that all
people experience (e.g., maternal behavior and various social
patterns and structures of experience and thought). It would
not be a memory from particular persons in the past so much
as an average of the basic forms of memory structures; these
are the archetypes. Jung's notion of the collective unconscious
makes extremely good sense in the context of the general
approach that I am putting forward. Morphic resonance theory
would lead to a radical reaffirmation of Jung's concept
of the collective unconscious.
It needs reaffirmation because the current mechanistic
context of conventional biology, medicine, and psychology
denies that there can be any such thing as the collective
unconscious; the concept of a collective memory of a race
or species has been excluded as even a theoretical possibility.
You cannot have any inheritance of acquired characteristics
according to conventional theory; you can only have an inheritance
of genetic mutations. Under the premises of conventional
biology, there would be no way that the experiences and
myths of, for example, African tribes, would have any influence
on the dreams of someone in Switzerland of non-African descent,
which is the sort of thing Jung thought did happen. That
is quite impossible from the conventional point of view,
which is why most biologists and others within mainstream
science do not take the idea of the collective unconscious
seriously. It is considered a flaky, fringe idea that may
have some poetic value as a kind of metaphor, but has no
relevance to proper science because it is a completely untenable
concept from the point of view of normal biology.
The approach I am putting forward is very similar to Jung's
idea of the collective unconscious. The main difference
is that Jung's idea was applied primarily to human experience
and human collective memory. What I am suggesting is that
a very similar principle operates throughout the entire
universe, not just in human beings. If the kind of radical
paradigm shift I am talking about goes on within biology-if
the hypothesis of morphic resonance is even approximately
correct-then Jung's idea of the collective unconscious would
become a mainstream idea: Morphogenic fields and the concept
of the collective unconscious would completely change the
context of modern psychology.