Transcript for:
Rupert Sheldrake: Morphic Resonance

I was really happy to be introducing Rupert tonight um he's some I've known for a long time and has been really an inspiration to be in lots of people around me so it's fantastic that Rupert's here the title for the talk tonight is morphic resonance which is an idea that Rupert I'm sure he'll unpack it more as uh as the talk goes on but it's an idea that Rupert started to look at in his early career when he was studying microbiology in Cambridge and doing research and he started to understand that some of the Orthodox models of science that he had been handed down maybe weren't enough to explain what he was observing in the laboratory and outside the laboratory so follow that he went to India where he lived and worked I believe on the the ashram of bead Griffiths for some time to try and look for other models that he could use to explain some of the things he was seeing and it was there that he wrote his first book on book on morphic resonance um which I'm going to try to summarize very briefly as being essentially the idea that there are fields of influence that start to have an impact on us and and the natural world around us so fields of influence that for example affect the way that things grow affect things like Evolution and even consciousness I was having a conversation with the student a few years ago and this subject came up she was doing a project on what she called the architectural exposome so the exposome as some of you will know is this sort of body that sits outside of the body that starts to affect it and that we in return can start to affect back again the way she did this was by looking at the facade of buildings and we think of facades traditionally as being the element that encloses that keeps things out or allows things in but in fact of course when you start looking at them more closely we start to recognize that the facade of the building is much more porous than we might first think so we know that it lets light in and it lets light out temperature in and out uh different various sounds as well move across the side of the building so immediately she started to define the architectural bodies being something that was far more porous and less isolated it was something that was under the influence of things Beyond it um she then did a wonderful flip in the project where she started rather like a biologist looking at the architectural body not at the scale of one to one but at the scale of ten thousand to one where in fact you start to see all sorts of other living entities that start to interact with buildings so the microbial the bacterial the fungal and in fact with that what you end up with is ending up a much sort of fuzzier edge to the building that in fact the idea of a hard delineated Edge was was rather sort of fake construct that we might uh we might perceive she did something very nice as well she then flipped this round in the other direction and started looking at buildings at the scale of one to ten thousand or one to one hundred thousand so maybe on the scale of the city on the scale of the territory on the scale of the biosphere and in doing that you again you start to realize that there are these fields of influence that start to play out in the architectural body so whether this is legislation or whether it's to do with material extraction where you're taking large bodies of material from different places in the world and putting back together in the form of buildings whether it's the energy required to do that in the extraction and the production of architecture and of course also at the other end of the death of a building when the materials then start to return back into the world and get placed back out there so I'm very aware that a lot of what I've just described in that example are definitely belong to the sort of mechanistic view of of the world however this notion of fields of influence that Rupert talks about with morphe resonance I think is something that we can all relate to and when you start looking for it it's absolutely everywhere Rupert's work has then gone on to continue looking at morphic resonance in different contexts and I think it manifests itself in many different ways through numerous books and papers lots of very rigorous research dialogues and trialogs for people from many different disciplines um and very often formulated around uh playful and provocative questions so how can we communicate with our non-human kin is the sun conscious these are the types of questions that I'm hoping we're going to hear a little bit more about tonight in in the talk so um without much further Ado over to Rupert thank you very much [Applause] thank you [Applause] well thank you can you all hear me is it working oh good um I'm going to talk about morphic resonance um which is an idea about memory in nature um it's in its most general form it suggests that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits um instead of the universe being governed by a kind of cosmic Napoleonic Code that was present at the moment of the Big Bang it's governed by evolving habits and once things have been repeated many times they behave as if they're governed by Eternal laws but where we see the differences with new phenomena you can actually see the habits build up I suggest the hypothesis suggests that every species has a kind of collective memory um every giraffe draws upon a giraffe Collective memory both a form shaping the embryonic development of the baby giraffe and of instinct and we too I think draw on a collective human memory similar to what the psychologist Jung called the collective unconscious um so this is a rather radical idea and perhaps its most radical implication the one that's most shocking and controversial uh within science is that even our own memories uh depend on morphic resonance they're not stored inside our brains we've all been brought up with the idea that memories are stored somewhere inside the head everything you remember about what you did last year on holiday or all the skills you've learned everything you've learned somehow supposed to be coded in some molecular or cellular form inside the brain despite a hundred years of research no one's been able to find these memory traces and I think the reason is that they're not there I think the Rebrand Works in a completely different way so I'll come on to that but needless to say this is a controversial hypothesis it's a hypothesis which means it's a guess about the way things might be and within science the procedure is to have a guess about the way things might be and then to test it to see whether the evidence supports or refutes the hypothesis the idea of memory in nature is very unfamiliar in the west because our philosophy has been shaped very much by the Greek tradition and especially by Plato the idea that there are Eternal forms or ideas outside space and time which govern everything in nature and this took root in the foundations of Science in the 17th century with the idea of nature being governed by Eternal laws which were originally thought of as ideas in the mind of a mathematical God most scientists know at least in Western countries have rubbed out God from their world view but they're left with free-floating eternal laws transcending space and time a legacy of the 17th century theology that's the the main reason there's a deep opposition to morphic Resonance people are so used to have got into the habit of thinking in terms of Eternal laws and this is most scientists don't think about this question at all in fact they just take it for granted but it underlies the basic Assumption of the scientific method that any experiment should be repeatable at any time anywhere because the laws of nature everywhere and always the same this is the cast of mind that we've all grown up with here in the west but in Oriental philosophies particularly in Hinduism and in many schools of Buddhism it's been taken for granted for thousands of years that there's a kind of memory in nature and this became particularly clear to me when uh when I was living in India I thought of the idea of morphic resonance first of all when I was at dawn in Cambridge in fact I thought of it incredibly enough in 1973 exactly 50 years ago and when I discussed it with my colleagues in Cambridge especially those in the biochemistry Department it met with incredulity and and then mockery but when I discussed it with my colleagues in India where I worked in an international agricultural Institute most of my Indian colleagues Hindu colleagues at least said of course there is nothing new in this idea ancient rishis have said all this thousands of years ago and they were completely blase about it so I realized what a huge cultural difference in this most fundamental world view there is anyway it's a testable hypothesis rather than philosophy and that means you can do experiments to find out whether it fits uh the way nature is or not and it applies not only to living organisms but also to crystals and molecules so the theory predicts for example that if you make a new compound for the very first time and crystallize it the crystal form will not have existed before so there won't be morphic resonance from past crystals of that type that govern its crystallization um a new form will have to come into being it may take time but the next time you crystallize the same compound it will be influenced by the first crystals and should crystallize somewhat more easily the third time easier still because of influences from the first and second crystals and so on so things should get easier to crystallize all around the world in fact they do a new compounds get easier to crystallize or run the world's well-known to chemists but they don't explain it in terms of morphic resonance they usually explain it or explain it away in terms of the transfer of little bits of previous crystals from Lab to lab on the Beards or clothing of Migrant chemists or else in terms of invisible dust particles that have been wafted around in the atmosphere so but the the facts are there and the theory also predicts that the melting points of new crystals should go up though more often they're crystallized the more stable they'll become the harder to disrupt and the melting point of new crystals new compounds does amazingly go up um I summarized this evidence in the appendix to my book a new science of Life the Third Edition where I give the the details I'm not giving a technical seminar this evening so I'm not going to go into all the technical evidence um it says here he also applies to the development of animals and plants the more often they develop in a particular way the easier it should become for them to develop that way again and applies to learning if you train rats to learn a new trick in London rats all over the world should be able to learn the same trait more quickly just because they've learned it here um now there is actually evidence for that from experiments with rats in a famous series of experiments began at Harvard um a psychologist called McDougall trained rats to escape from a water Maze and measured how many errors they took before they got it right they made a large number of Errors to start with you can see that there's a screen over there and with subsequent Generations the number of Errors got less and less and less until it was down to about 25 from over 200. now you could say that this was an epigenetic fact it was the children of the trained rats that got better but this was still very very surprising result at the time because it shows an inheritance of acquired characters which in 20th century biology was completely taboo parents children couldn't inherit what parents had learned according to the neo-darwinist theory um so his results were very controversial and people tried replicating them in Melbourne Australia and in Edinburgh um and they use the same Rats the same water made same kind of rats and their rats started off more or less where the Harvard rats left off um and much quicker than the Harvard rats had been to start with and moreover the researchers in Australia did a control line and they found that this Improvement was not just in the descendants of trained rats but all Rats of that breed were showing this Improvement even if their parents had never been trained so this is just the kind of effect you would expect with morphic resonance this should be applying in the human realm as well and um the uh oh let me first say that there's evidence that this actually works in animal evolution there's one well-known example is a blue tits small birds that many of you will be familiar with from your garden that in the 1920s developed a habit of stealing the cream from the top of milk bottles this habit first appeared in Southampton and it then it spread and started popping up in other places and some scientists at Cambridge documented the spread by enlisting thousands and thousands of amateur bird watchers and what they found was that they have it spread when it's when it's turned up more than 60 miles from a previous occurrence they worked out it was an independent invention because blue tits are home loving birds and don't move very far so and the rate of Independence in invention increased as you shall received from these Maps um so what was happening was that they'd learned to tear off the top of the milk bottle and steal the cream and then more and more blue tits all over the country started doing it uh when cream deliver when milk deliveries stop during the war um they couldn't do it anymore and after the war the earlier pre-war generation of blue tips that remembered the Golden Age of free cream had died out um and but when milk deliveries started again um blue tits very quickly cottoned on and it happened all over the country much faster than it had the first time around it also showed up in Holland and again after the war resumed very quickly interestingly this pattern of spread of behavior is now undergone further change because when I first was living in London we got full cream milk delivered to our doorstep by the Milkman we still have milk deliveries every day in Hampstead but no not every day but twice a week no but we switched to semi-skimmed milk like lots of other people and there was no free cream at the top of the bottle and this habit simply died out and it now hardly exists because so many people have switched to semi-skimmed milk so you can't actually see this going on anymore anyway I think that's an example of morphic resonance in an evolutionary context and in the human realm I think it's happening all the time it should be getting easier to learn when surfing snowboarding computer programming Etc all these various skills that we have and indeed most of them are getting easier to learn but of course as you'll instantly think well that could be because of improved training methods more videos showing you how to do it etc etc cultural factors which also change and that's true so it's very hard to disentangle morphic Resonance from all the other things that are going on well to do that you really need to have standardized tests that have been done the same way for long periods of time and when I was first thinking about these ideas I realized that IQ tests would be ideal for this because they involve standard puzzle solving problems that have been done over many decades and so I worked out that IQ tests should be getting easier to do not because people are getting smarter more intelligent but because so many people have already done the tests and the tests should be getting easier and in fact in the late 1980s a psychologist called James Flynn discovered that exactly that had been going on here you see a graph showing average IQs in the United States um from 1918 onwards um there was a something like a 30 percent increase in IQ it's called the Flynn effect after Flynn but no independent evidence that Americans had got 30 percent smarter and similar effects occurred in at least 14 other countries so it wasn't just the us so I think that's an example of morphic resonance um it's not difficult to develop a design experiments to test it and in fact my older son Merlin when he was 16 inadvertently designed one because he came to me one day and said that he and his friends he was very excited he said my friends and I have thought of a way of getting extra marks in GCSE exams without doing extra work so I thought that sounds very good how are you going to do that and he said bimorphic resonance he said in say in the physics paper there are 12 questions he said we're going to do questions 11 and 12 first and then we'll be about 10 minutes behind everyone else in Britain for all the other questions so we should get a boost by morphic resonance well they all got a stars um I mean it was smart anyway so again it wasn't a conclusive proof but it turned out that an old friend of mine from Cambridge was in charge of the RSA GCSE Science exams so I pointed out to him just by changing the order of questions in a subset of papers he could turn our entire national science exam system into a massive test of morphic resonance he showed a flickering of interest and enthusiasm to start with but a couple of days later he got in touch with me and said roof and I just can't do it and I said why not he said well I'm due to retire soon and I want to make sure I get a full pension he said he said if I turn our science exam system into a giant morphic resonance experiment that's not going to happen so um unfortunately it didn't happen but a wonderful opportunity has recently cropped up with the five-letter word game called Wordle that many of you will be familiar with I'm familiar with it because my wife is very addicted to it and um every day there's a new five-letter puzzle and you you have five attempts I'm sure many of you have done it but the the point is that there's a new puzzle every single day bimorphic resonance I would expect that people would find the puzzle easier to do in the evening than in the morning and I've carried out online surveys of people who do Wordle and that seems to be the case um this follows on from work I did earlier with crossword puzzles because this theory predicts that many people who do the Times crossword positive told me this that they find it easier to do the next day than if they do it the morning it comes out because so many people have already done it so the Wordle is owned by the New York Times I wrote The New York Times games Department asking if I could have access to their daily wordal data to see if there's a trend every day for the people to solve it quicker as time goes on and I thought that would be a very simple and interesting thing but they wrote now terrible spoil Sports and they wrote back saying that at this time we're not interested in this project um I think the head of games has got an easy life a comfortable job it goes on routinely but if suddenly New York Times word puzzle became the center of a scientific storm of controversy about morphic resonance her life would no longer be to follow a predictable and easy course and I think she was just taking the easy way out anyway it's frustrating there's all this data not only from Wordle but from art total and cordial and so on and just lying there in the archives which could reveal morphic resonance in daily life going on right now anyway the point of all this is to um suggest to show you that this is a testable hypothesis um and the idea of morphic resonance is that four patterns of activity um in living systems are all rhythmic all living systems indeed non-living systems atoms and molecules they're all rhythmically vibratory patterns matter is no longer thought of as stuff as it used to be in the 19th century but as a process an electron is whizzing around a nucleus in an atom the nucleus itself is pulsating with activity as the various particles oscillate within it and molecules are vibratory structures so everything is vibratory we we ourselves have many different rhythms heartbeats breathing rates brain waves all sorts of very quick rhythms in our cells biochemical rhythms daily rhythms of sleeping and waking that everything in nature is self-organizing this doesn't apply to machines it applies to self-organizing systems atoms molecules um cells tissues organs organisms societies of organisms like flocks of birds solar systems galaxies all self-organizing systems I'm suggesting have rhythmic or activities which are organized by what I call morphic fields and morphic resonance is based on similarity from the past to the present there's an influence from similar past systems on present systems across time morphic resonance is a resonance across time it doesn't have to go it's restored in a material form in between that's why you don't need memory traces we're very used to memory being stored in books in computer disks and magnetic tapes and so forth so we think of memory being in a place but what I'm suggesting is the fundamental nature of memories not to be in a place memory is a relationship in time and morphic resonance is a connection direct connection across time well this has many implications in many areas of Science and life one of them is in inheritance we inherit many characteristics from our ancestors so do plants and animals and microbes and fungi and in the 1960s and 70s it was and 80s it was almost universally assumed that all of inheritance could be explained in terms of genes and genes acquired an enormously High status in science and molecular biology and particularly molecular genetics became the dominant force in biology and this tied in with the neo-darwinian theory of evolution which is all about the selection of genes and of course the the whole of this idea was very persuasively popularized by Richard Dawkins in his famous book The Selfish Gene um so the gene-centered theory of inheritance was completely dominant when I put forward these ideas of morphic resonance it was very hard to make any impact on people's thinking because everyone thought it's all in the genes and we'll soon have figured out every single detail of it within 10 or 20 years um whereas what I'm saying is that Gene's code for the sequence of amino acids in proteins this is what we naturally know they actually do and some are involved in controlling um the switching on and switching off other genes some are involved in producing RNA molecules that can have various effects in the cell but they don't code for shapes forms and instincts genes don't directly code for the shape of your arm or your legs in fact your arms and your legs contain exactly the same genes in exactly the same chemicals but they're arranged in a different way just as all the buildings in Bedford Square are made of similar building materials bricks mortar steel or reinforcing bars roofing materials Etc but their architectural structures are somewhat different and if you go to a suburb then the house the different houses are very different from each other even though the building materials are the same so that's why Architects exist to have architectural plans for buildings and I think that the fields morphic Fields the form shaping fields of organisms are giving them their form and that's inherited by morphic resonance so the shape of your arms and legs is given by the amorphic fields for arms and legs not by the genes or the proteins which are the same in both they're chemically identical so I I would I don't think instincts or forms are inherited through genes well it was very hard to get that quote view across in in the 80s because genes I thought were grossly overrated but most people didn't think that um well when the Human Genome Project was finally completed in the year 2000 people thought they'd have now through the human genome knowing every single Gene complete knowledge of human nature at the molecular level it didn't turn out quite like that in fact the um the whole Genome Project although technically an impressive achievement was very disappointing to investors who put billions and billions of dollars into it it was very disappointing indeed the head of cellular genomics the private genome company the sequenced The genome Craig Venter um saw the share price collapse from about sixty dollars a share to about 15 cents in fact when interviewed soon after this he said I'm a guy who's made a million dollars the hard way by working my way down from a billion um and and the so the Genome Project was very disappointing and when people then sequenced tens of thousands of genomes and did what are called genome-wide Association studies it turned out that the genes actually explained very little of inheritance studies on the inherence of height for example showed that about 50 genes were involved together they explained about 10 percent of the inheritance of height rather than 80 or 90 percent which is what people would expect did they've now found more genes that are involved with height and made it somewhat more accurate but even so there's a big gap between what the genes explain and what is inherited and this is called in biology it's called The Missing heritability problem and it's a massive crisis within biology that the genetic explanation of inheritance simply hasn't worked out the way people thought it would nor have the total number of genes worked out as people thought it turns out that sea urchins have about twice as many genes as we do and rice plants about three times as many fruit flies only have we've got about 20 000 fruit flies have about 17 000. so the idea we'd really have the most genes of any other organism people had expected a hundred thousand also turned out not to be true and our genome is about 99 identical to that of chimpanzees so whatever makes us different from chimpanzees isn't very adequately explained by genes so this was a huge shock um and inheritance then the study of inheritance took another turn around the year 2000 when the ban or taboo on the inheritance of acquired characters lemakian inheritance was transcended through the recognition that acquired characters can be inherited organisms can inherit adaptations from their parents in plants and animals it's been rebranded epigenetic inheritance and this is now a major area of research in biology over and above the genes so everyone now agrees that the genes were grossly overrated and that epigenetic inheritance plays A Part modifications of the genes switching them on and off in a way that can be inherited um but even that still leaves a large amount unexplained and that I think is what morphic resonance is doing there are some experiments going on right now um to look at epigenetic inheritance in nematode worms with morphic resonance controls to see how much of this epigenetic inheritance is actually morphic resonance rather than molecular changes and it's been assumed that it can all be explained by molecular modifications of genes but actually a lot of it may involve morphic resonance and for the first time those experiments are going on right now with promising results so anyway these these are a testable aspects these are in relation to inheritance morphic resonance also applies to twins because it depends on similarity the hypothesis predicts that identical twins should be very resonant with each other even if they're brought up in adopted by different families separated soon after birth and adopted by separate families and as you know a lot of the foundations of the study of genetics has been based on identical twin studies if the nature of the of the nature of the twins is determined primarily by environment then they should be very different if they're adopted raised by very different adoptive families if it's by genetics they should be very similar and the results show they're very similar and they have similar characteristics similar pronenes to diseases even similar hobbies and similar favorite colors much more similar than anyone would have expected actually and so the usual conclusion from nurses aha well that just shows it's all in the genes and that's the normal that that evidence from identical twins has done a great deal to boost the whole ideology of genes and genetic genetic determinism however the debate so far has simply ignored morphic resonance and with morphic resonance you would actually expect twins because they're similar to share many characteristics in common which are not in the genes they'd be resonating with each other across time and space even in separate families even if they don't know if the other one's existence and so I think that provides a new way of understanding the identical twin data which also makes a lot of sense of the missing heritability problem because the reason people expected so much inheritance so much heritability to be in the genes was because of these identical twin studies and if it turns out they're actually more about morphic resonance than genes then the whole thing becomes much easier to understand if you ask the question who in the past was most similar to me then the answer is me we're almost similar to ourselves in the past than to anyone else so on the basis of morphic resonance we should be specifically influenced by morphic resonance from our own past and that's how I think our memory works I think the reason that we have our own memories rather than other peoples is because we're so similar to ourselves in the past but we're also similar to a whole range of other people as well and that is then the collective memory that Jung was talking about so individual memory and Collective memory both depend on resonance but one is more specific than the other so there's a difference a degree not of kind now as I mentioned at the beginning there have been numerous attempts to find memory traces physical traces of memory and they've been foiled over and over and over again the latest iteration of that is a debate there is evidence that came out in the last nine months where people found that when rodents like mice remembered a particular task there was a very particular pattern of wave activity in their brain which could be measured with very fine electrodes and this wave wave pattern was characteristic of what they were remembering and then when the rodents remember the same thing again you got the same wave pattern so people at first said well there you are this proves there are memory traces that underlie the wave pattern but actually when they looked in more detail although it was the same wave pattern it wasn't on the same but part of the brain it had moved to a different part of the brain and every time they measured it it could sort of shift around What mattered was the wave pattern which I would say is the basis of the Resonance of memory not the actual cells and this phenomenon which is very puzzling from the point of view of conventional memory theory is called representational Drift um the the representation which is given by these waves seems to drift around the brain um so this is these are hot areas of debate within science and I personally think that the uh seeing memory in terms of morphic resonance would make so much better sense of the available data but it's not something you can talk about within regular Neuroscience institutes except after dark or in private um because the taboos in science are very very strong um so anyway so now let's come on to how morphic resonance in more detail as to how it interfaces with form um I started all this not through Reading Oriental philosophy or anything like that but through working on developmental biology at Cambridge where I was working on the development of plant form um and we still don't understand how a leaf or a flower takes off its particular shape we know everyone agrees that genes are involved in making the right proteins and enzymes that make cellulose cell walls and so forth there are certain hormones in plants that have a major influence on development like the plant hormone auction which I used to work on myself um uh but since the 1920s there's been the idea that living organisms are shaped by invisible Fields called morphogenetic Fields form shaping Fields Morpho from the Greek word morphe form Genesis from the Greek word coming into being Fields concerned with the coming into being of form um molecular biologists aren't very interested in morphogenetic fields because theirs is an attempt to have a bottom-up gene up molecular up theory of explanation whereas morphogenetic fields are top down there's a field for the whole system a holistic field that governs what happens it's like the difference between trying to understand a building by analyzing the bricks and cement and building materials thinking that if you do enough of that you'll understand the building or looking at the plan of the building and which would of course give you an immediate overview of why it is this is his and I think that you need these field this field approach because you'll never arrive at the understanding the whole through just analyzing the parts uh fields are a well-established Concept in science and just to remind you here's a magnetic field Faraday first named Fields here in London in the 1840s and what he meant by field was a region of influence the region of influence of the magnetic field is is around the magnuses within the magnet and around the magnet in empty or invisible space you have fields which are shapes or structures invisible they're not Material matters made of fields fields are not made of matter at first in the 19th century people thought Fields were made of matter a subtle matter called The Ether but in Einstein's theory of special theory of relativity he showed The Ether doesn't exist fields are just free-floating forms as I Faraday and Einstein quoting him said they are modifications of mere space um now you may think this is a kind of occult or peculiar notion but actually it's totally mainstream in science the gravitational field is why where it's holding us down to the floor right now is why we're not floating around in this room and it's invisible it stretches out far beyond the Earth keeps the moon in its orbit the electromagnetic fields which underlie light which is an electromagnetic vibration and travels through the electromagnetic field from the most distance parts of the universe that's why we can see distant stars and galaxies with powerful telescopes um this is an electromagnetic field it's invisible this room is full of invisible mobile phone Transmissions TV and radio Transmissions you can't see any of them they're invisible so the idea of invisible Fields may have sounded really peculiar in the 18th century but in the 21st century the whole of Science is based on the idea of invisible fields in fact one could argue that modern Sciences in the business of explaining the visible in terms of the invisible so um the idea of morphogenetic fields as proposed in the 1920s by developmental biologists and as I think Still Remains true is that their invisible shapes or patterns which influence developing organisms shaping how they develop um and they I think that the fields contain or work through vibratory patterns that how they do it through vibrations um as you may know um vibration can induce form these are some patterns in a small about two centimeter wide cylindrical container of water excited at different frequencies which show different patterns the the one on the left shows a six at the top left six-fold Eightfold tenfold twelve fold 14 16 18 and 20-fold patterns just add vibration and the water takes up these very different forms these are some patterns that produced by myself and my son Merlin we have a laboratory at home where we look at vibratory forms and the and and these are some of our results from our sinuscope which is the device for vibrating fluids at different frequencies these are very simple models but they show you that form can come about through vibration almost instantly form doesn't have to be caused as most biologists still think of it in terms of molecules trundling along diffusion Pathways and slowly setting up interfering patterns of chemical diffusion and so on they're terribly clunky these biological models they leave out vibration almost entirely and yet vibration is an enormously powerful formative principle and I think it's homomorphic Fields work the word morphic field is a generic term that applies to form shaping Fields more for genetic Fields the fields that affect Behavior through the brain and nervous system behavioral Fields the fields that affect social organization like flocks of birds all of these are morphic fields of which morphogenetic fields that one species as it were so what I'm suggesting is that these morphic fields shape organisms and they shape even single-celled organisms where genes can't possibly explain it if you switch on and off genes then they'd be the same in a single-celled organism they wouldn't explain the form many biologists try to explain form by saying well these cells have this Gene switched on and these have a different Gene switched on but there's much much more to it than that because the fields are organized in a hierarchical structure here we have the Outer Circle could be a tissue these smaller ones could be cells within those organelles or the same would apply this pattern of organization to subatomic particles in atoms in molecules in crystals the whole of nature is organized through a nested level of hierarchies Each of which has its own morphic field um according to this hypothesis it's a part of a general holistic philosophy of nature if we look at single-celled organisms like radiolarians each of these has a silication skeleton which you can see in the picture but different species have completely different shapes um and somehow a single cell has to be able to make those different shapes um it no doubt requires genes the right genes to be switched on but the genes themselves can't explain why these have different shapes and that I think is because they have different morphic fields shaping the vibratory pattern of the developing cells here's a famous picture of regularians by Ernst Heckle the 19th century biologist who produced some really beautiful pictures of biological systems these are pollen grains which again single cells different species have different shaped pollen grains showing the range of morphogenetic forms in single cells this is an alga called acetambilaria each of these is a single cell with a cap and a stalk they're about two inches big there's enormous cells and these again are single cells which take on these complex forms even though the genes and the proteins are the same throughout the cell and this is the embryo of a bat showing you how as multicellular organisms develop you know all the different structures and organs form within them and I think that's because of the morphogenetic fields of the organs within those the fields of the tissues uh the field of the whole organism coordinating them all now these fields um have a capacity that mechanical systems don't have which is a holistic property which enables them to regenerate um here you see a dragonfly egg the one on the right was tied with a thread and the top half was killed the bottom half of it which would normally give rise to the posterior of the embryo now gives rise to a small but complete embryo showing a holistic property you would never get this with any kind of machine if you cut a computer in half all you get is a broken computer whereas these field phenomena are intrinsically holistic if you cut a magnet in half you don't get one North Pole and one South Pole you get two magnets each with a North and the South Pole so there's a feature of fields as this holistic property which organizes self-organizing systems this shows flatworms planaria cut into different bits and each bit can regenerate into a new worm this shows that legs of a salamander which were amputated on the left they are amputated in the for limb and in the on the right in the uh in the lower the part of the limb nearest the body but wherever you amputate it they're able to regrow the rest of the leg and regenerate leg and this shows some experiments done with a newt in this case the lens was artificially sagically removed from the eye and the eye then regenerates a new lens from the edge of the iris but in normal new development the eye develops by folding in on skin from the outside it doesn't develop from the iris at all so there's an ability to adapt in a seemingly intelligent way to regenerate forms it would be very very difficult to explain this without a field Theory both to account for the wholeness of it and also for the um the way in which it can move towards a finals goal or an attractor which these field models include but which rather clunky mechanistic models of molecular interactions don't so um anyway um this is just a few words about morphogenetic Fields um and uh I think that similar Fields organize the activity of brains um I I think similar Fields organize the activity of social groups like flocks of birds or termite colonies that all of these fields are organizing Fields spread out in space working on the parts within them coordinating them together and giving them their form shape and structure and enabling them to regenerate in the case of injury of course not all injury can be followed by regeneration but even in our own bodies we can regenerate quite a lot our skin regenerates after damage our liver regenerates our blood cells are continually being regenerated um so these are some of the ways in which morphic resonance and morphic Fields I think apply in biology and also in the formation of molecules and crystals now these ideas I think have a wider relevance and I'll just talk about a few of the implications the the main bridge between this way of thinking and architecture which I know at least some of you here are Architects or budding Architects um is is clearly there's an overlap in talking about form and the nature of form and the architectural theorists that I myself found the closest Affinity with you may or may not learn about in your courses here is Christopher Alexander who wrote a book called a pattern language where he shows that many architectural motifs like the frames around windows um the way that you have a kind of reiteration of forms of lines and moldings and things which you see in traditional architectural forms are common in many different cultures and they're aware of marking out boundaries by marking them out through over and over again so that it's unmistakable that we're dealing with a boundary he deals with some of these archetypal patterns found in buildings all around the world which are I think like morphic forms of in our minds I take them there the window itself Has a morphic Field it's not self-organizing but in our minds the archetypal forms which are expressed through architecture um I think are basic forms or morphic fields in our minds um he also wrote a four volume work called the nature of order which is a very remarkable work and shows a very deep understanding of the nature of form and Order not just in architecture but also in biology and in natural phenomena so there may have been other theories since Alexander who've done this but of all the ones I've come across he's the one who makes the the closest bridge between this way of thinking about architecture and morphic Fields morphic resonance he and I met once in Berkeley where he was teaching and we got on really well and I I think there was a really good overlap there now um morphic resonance may also apply to buildings not because buildings are self-organizing and have their own life the very fact that they're organized by Builders and Architects it shows that they don't just grow by themselves if they did there wouldn't be any need for the architectural Association um so but I think buildings can have a kind of memory because when I enter a particular room or when you enter a particular room say this room everyone who's been in this room has the same set of stimuli to their sensory system the same Windows the same patterns the same shapes the same proportions and so I think we'd come into morphic resonance with those who've been in the same space before and I think this has noticeable effects I think if it comes out in ordinary everyday life when people go looking at houses they want to buy a house and they're going around different houses and people say oh I didn't like that when it had a terribly gloomy atmosphere or that same Touch of sunny and cheerful home and and so on so people when it actually comes to the crunch do pay attention to these things and in extreme cases where really bad things have happened you may even get hauntings almost all stories of hauntings are associated with stories of something bad that's happened there and the converse is also the case when you have places that have been visited particularly holy places that have been visited by people on spiritual Journeys like pilgrimages then you often have a really powerful atmosphere in that place which is added to by further pilgrims um and and is where where I think when you enter one of these holy places you can feel the something about the atmosphere of that place which I think is coming through tuning into the memory of those who've been there in the past um and this of course is is true not of any particular religion it's true in general I mean I've been to many Hindu temples I've been to Great mosques wonderful Islamic tombs um here in England I'm particularly keen on Cathedrals and um on and part of the the Revival of pilgrimage which is going on at the present in a big way all through Europe is very much about reconnecting with the archetype of the pilgrim Journey the the journey with the purpose and arriving in a holy place it's a very deep archetype it's found in all religions and all cultures and I think it's rooted in the activities of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who were always moving and moving in annual Cycles towards places of great significance with their own stories like in the Australian song lines of the uh our Aborigines so I think that pilgrimage is a modern expression of this both the archetypal journey and also the coming to the holy place which has this particular power through the fact it's been treated as a holy place by so many people for so long and of course some of these places had special qualities to start with um so those people who are into geomancy or feng shui would say that many of them have uh the place itself has a particular property it could be a Mountaintop that might be underground Rivers there and so on there might be qualities in the place where the building is built so you get both the power of the place geographically and and of the history and historically morphic resonance also applies to rituals I discussed this in my book science and spiritual practices because there are many spiritual practices and um now they've been investigated scientifically many of them um it turns out they have measurable effects all spiritual practices have measurable effects scientifically measurable effects and if you look at the thousands of studies that have now been conducted the overall conclusion is that generally speaking they make people happier healthier and live longer but one of the ways in which sound can affect us for example which is literal vibration I think involves morphic resonance as well my wife Joe Pass teaches singing and chanting and has done this for many years and I've learned a lot from her about it and what she points out is that when you chant a particular sound if it's just a syllable like ah there's then there's a vibration in particular parts of the body the literal vibration in the body not some fanciful metaphysical vibration but actual vibration you can hear it when you block her ears and and make different vowel sounds I won't suggest you do it no but you can try this at home and different so there's different parts of the body vibrate then when you're chanting with other people then you're chanting together so you're taking a breath at the same time or singing together the same thing implies chanting is like a very simple song um so you're chanting together and making the same sounds as other people you come into resonance with other people which has a connecting effect and it usually makes people feel much more connected and much happier I've seen this with Joel's workshops who people arrive as strangers at the beginning of the workshop and by the end of the workshop they're sort of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as a result of chanting together for two days it has a remarkable effect and that's of course why it's used in all religious Traditions uh you know Gregorian chants singing in churches Sufi chanting Hindu chants I mean there's Badger and singing it's used in all Traditions including in secular settings too of course um so but there's another dimension to this that if you chant a particular Mantra or sacred syllable or word then by chanting it you'll enter into morphic resonance with all those who've chanted the same Mantra before and there'd be a transmission across time and in some Hindu and Buddhist Traditions like in Tibet some of the mantras are very secret people are transmitted this Mantra by the guru the teacher and they're told not to tell anyone about it because it would weaken its power because if you chant it if the only people who do it are chanting it within that particular tradition you tune in by chanting it not only to yourself doing it in the past but to other practitioners in that tradition right back to the first time the Mantra was chanted so the chanting of of liturgical chanting the chanting of mantras involves literal physical resonance but also I think morphic resonance and this is one of the things that gives these practices their power and I think the same applies to rituals all societies have rituals and many rituals are reenactments of some primordial event in that culture for example the Jewish feast of the Passover is a reenactment of the original Passover dinner in Egypt when the angel of Destruction passed over and killed the firstborn of the Egyptian and their cattle the Jewish people were spared because they'd sacrificed a lamb and smeared Blood on the doorway and so they were passed over and this event the reenactment of that first Passover dinner happens at Passover every year and the story is told to those who participate in it and by taking part in this ritual people are not only connected with other people in the ritual at the same time the group that's doing it together but with all those who've done it before them and so there's a connection across time right back through past generations of Jewish people to the fast Passover the Christian holy communion itself a Passover dinner is very similar people who take holy communion in a ritual setting are connected with the other participants in that particular church or ceremony but also connected bimorphic resonance with all those who've done it before right back to the first time and this applies not only to religious rituals but to secular ones the American Thanksgiving dinner for example is a reenactment of the original Thanksgiving dinner of the settlers in North America around 1619 when they survived their first year and gave thanks in a kind of harvest Thanksgiving in their first Thanksgiving dinner this is reenacted every year by Americans people become American by taking part in this ceremony and identifying with this tradition so the ritual gives identity that connects you beyond yourself to something much greater than yourself a whole tradition and this is true of rituals in all cultures and I think that they only make sense really in the light of morphic resonance otherwise from a kind of rationalistic point of view you know people are just wasting time doing mumbo jumbo repetitive actions and so forth but it if you uh that's to see if you see it through the lens of kind of mechanistic rationalism that's how you'd see it I dare say it's how Richard Dawkins would see it but if you see it through the lens of morphic resonance it makes great sense and these different cultures evolve independently arrived at this principle are doing so because it works they're not doing it because there's a universal Dogma applying to all cultures it's because cultures have independently discovered this and is found all over the world these patterns of ritual chanting and rituals then of course ceremonies festivals annual festivals are similar to rituals it's a repetitive pattern that connects the whole Community to Nature into previous participants in those ceremonies over the years finally um I just want to say a few words about Evolution Copic resonance gives the idea of habits and the repetition of habits but that alone won't explain evolution something new has to happen in evolution so I think evolution is an interplay between habit and creativity the creativity occurs we don't know how there's many theories of creativity but creativity happens at every level the molecular level the the genetic level the organism adapting level the human level technical inventions patents new ideas new Tunes new architectural forms there are many kinds of creativity and creativity is often prodigious when organisms mutate because of radiation for example they may produce hundreds of different forms mutant forms but most of about viable they die out only a few survive and through repetition they become more habitual by morphic resonance so there's a creativity happening all through nature and all through human life then there's a kind of natural selection of what works in that context what is repeated and everything's repeated will be repeated more by morphic resonance and become more probable and more likely to more often it's repeated so I think to understand the evolutionary process morphic resonance alone isn't enough there has to be a creative Principle as well and as I say there are a range of theories of creativity I won't go into them now because time's up but um I could go into it later if you're interested but it the the they're inconclusive because you can't actually prove any of these theories morphic resonance could be proved and people with different creativity theories could agree on morphic resonance but might have different theories of creativity is it just chance is it because of some Divine creative principle and everything in between anyway that's an overview of the idea of morphic resonance and as you see it has many implications it fits into a view of the universe as being holistically organized with different levels each level more than the sum of the parts um morphic resonance is underlies the activity of minds and mental Fields underlie our mental habits but it doesn't explain everything and as I just said one thing it doesn't explain is creativity anyway I'll leave it at that just as a summary to give you a taste of these ideas thank you [Applause] I've heard you talk about um also in a more concrete way of explaining some of these fields and these phenomena and morphe resonances you as you as you coined it you also talked about um pregnant pregnant women with their babies I thought this was quite an amazing study that you took out could you tell us a little bit about that well that that was positive is this working yes that was yeah it's good okay um well that was part of research on telepathy I didn't talk about my work on television this evening going to the limits of time but I can Briefly summarize some of it um the members of social groups like flocks of birds I think are coordinated through a field of the whole group when you look at a memoration of Starlings they can hundreds of thousands of birds in these flocks can change direction almost simultaneously without bumping into each other how do they do it even if they were able to see their neighbors and observe their movements in enormous detail it wouldn't tell them where their neighbors are going to go and they might Collide otherwise but they don't so I think that social groups have morphic fields which coordinate the members of the group and it's most obvious in flocks of birds and schools of fish but when you have packs of animals like wolves or social animals I think these fields continue to coordinate them even when they move apart so when the adult wolves go hunting ranging over hundreds of miles leave the Cubs in the den with a babysitter the Barnsley between them caused by this ergonomorphic field that links them together the bonds are not broken they remain connected and so a change in one can affect the others at a distance and I think that's the basis of telepathy I think it works by a resonance through the morphic field of the social group and telepathy is it literally means distant feeling and I think it's very very widespread in the animal realm my when I got interest in telepathy because of its relation to morphic Fields um I started with animals because I thought well if it exists it's not some higher faculty of the advanced human mind it's some basic biological faculty that animals might be better at so I started asking people with dogs and cats and thinking about my own animals so that I've kept over the years and realize this countless examples on every side the phenomenon I concentrated on most because it's easiest to do experiments on is dogs that know when their owners are coming home about 50 percent of dogs go and wait at the door or window when the person they're most bonded to is on the way home and the people at home know when they're coming as a result and this happens even if people have jobs that irregular times and no one's very surprised if it's the same time every day it's a routine but when many people have irregular return times dogs still do it it gets more interesting and when it happens when dogs still do it when people are in taxes or in a friend's car or other unfamiliar vehicles or traveling by public transport it gets even more interesting and I think it's an example of telepathy so I've done experiments where we film the dog the whole time the person's out we have them come home at random times in unfamiliar vehicles and you can from the objective measurement to observing the film you can show that the dog still anticipates their return 20 minutes half an hour in advance in some cases um you can find as described in my book dogs that know when their owners are coming home and all the peer-reviewed papers on this on my website under the heading called animal power so all this is published in peer-reviewed journals so now coming back to when I was giving a talk on dogs that know when their owners are coming home in New York years ago a woman in the audience said um well do you think something like that would happen between mothers and babies that mothers would know when the baby needs them um and I then started asking them obviously I've not had the experience of being a nursing mother myself but so I started asking women who knows children including my own wife and I found this was a common experience that people when they've go back to work or start leaving a baby after two or three months they're still breastfeeding they may be miles away and women feel their milk let down their breasts start squeezing out milk many women experience the breast tingling and so I've just been obvious case of a very biological form of telepathy because in the course of evolution until the invention of phones in the last 100 years any mother who could feel when her baby needed her and would go to the baby would have a baby that had a better chance of surviving that her mother than a mother who couldn't feel it so um I I then carried out a study in North London with nursing mothers recruited 20 nursing mothers and this was done about 20 years ago we had notebooks so the babysitter wrote down whenever the baby cried and showed signs of distress the mother wrote down whenever her milk let down when she was at work or shopping or away from home and we then had an independent statistical analysis showing that this was hugely significantly coincidence the mother's milk let down coincided with the baby's distress about a billion times more often than you'd expect by pure chance and it wasn't just a matter of routine feeding times either so that was a study I did then and since I'm always on the lookout for a way of repeating it today I'll mention it here now since you give me this opportunity for to plug my new experiment which is I'm looking for people who have nursing mothers with babies who are going back to work and starting to leave the baby because nowadays many people have video baby monitors so instead of people writing down in pencil in the notebook you could have a video baby monitor that actually records when the baby shows signs of distress with the time code built in most mothers now have smartphones and when they feel their milk let down they could do a selfie saying my milk's letting down no and then if you put them split screen and you see the baby waking up and starting to cry and the mother at the same time miles away saying my milk's letting down no put that on YouTube and it would go viral very very quickly and um and that no one's done this study I've tried to persuade people at colleges of Midwifery and nursing to do this study but telepathy like morphic resonance is so taboo that people are worried about their careers or their grants or their reputation by doing any research on it's really frustrating to find so many areas of science that are really interesting where it's almost impossible to get the research done because of social barriers um the other experiment on Celebrity I might mention is with telephone telepathy this is by far the commonest kind in the modern world 85 percent of people according to surveys have had the experience of thinking of someone from an apparent reason then they ring and they say it's funny I was just thinking of you or knowing who it is when the phone rings before looking at caller ID or picking it up and answering it very very common and for a hundred years the so-called Skeptics have dismissed this by saying oh well there's nothing but coincidence and wishful thinking people think about others all the time occasionally one of them rings and they imagine its telepathy but they just forget the millions of times they're wrong well they got away with that argument for a hundred years preventing research by saying oh there's nothing to investigate but when we actually did experiments on this it turns out that it's real how we do the experiments is we find people who say this happens quite often they sit in a room at home with a landline phone and no caller ID we filmed them they give us the names of four people they know well who they might be telepathic with um because telepathy happens mostly with people who know very well that you're socially bonded with and we pick one of the four at random about the three of a die or a random number generator ring them up and ask them to call the subject and the the phone rings the person then has to say to the camera who they think is ringing I think it's Tim hi Tim are they right or wrong by chance they'd be right 25 of the time one in four guessing in in these experiments with hundreds of Trials they're right about 45 of the time is massively significant statistically about as significant as the existence of the Higgs boson but it it it's it's um so I think I now have apps that were developing new one at the moment that work on smartphones where you can do these tests just as part of ordinary everyday life so I think these the the thing is that with telepathy it's almost everyone's experienced it with mobile phones most people have experienced it in other contexts many women have experienced it most people have experienced it with their dogs and if you talk to most people they all have their own stories if you any of you who doubt this can try it by bringing up with friends bring it up with friends or family members and I predict that most people will tell you stories about their own experiences and yet within the academic and scientific world there's a complete taboo on this a complete denial that this is possible and most so-called Skeptics won't look at the evidence because they think it's impossible it's impossible because the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain and is therefore confined to the inside of the head therefore my thoughts can't possibly influence someone hundreds of miles away and so they literally refuse to look at the evidence because they are so convinced it's impossible so the evidence must be flawed so it's an extraordinary cultural divide that all of us experience actually because if you talk to normal friends or family members in an informal setting you'll find most people completely accept these things exist yet enter an academic institution especially a scientific one and you'll find you can't talk about it at least during working hours without attracting what you might it might be just imaginary disapproval people actually pretend to disapprove even though they've had these experiences themselves and whenever I give talks in scientific institutions about these things afterwards I almost always have the experience of one-time personal come up and they look to see no one's listening over the drinks or the tea and they'll say well I've had these experiences myself I always know my wife's ringing on my dog always knows when I'm coming home from the lab and stuff but I can't tell my colleagues they're also straight and then a minute or two later another one comes up it says almost the same thing and so well as I say someone actually I know that all your colleagues aren't so straight and because because four or five already told me this evening that they have these experiences and so sometimes I just say to the whole group why don't you guys come out because you'd have so much more fun I mean that's just one more because I'm I don't know I'm just aware that this time and there's probably some questions in the room but um you talk a lot about this you know this resonance being based off of similarity so you know we're able to resonate with our past self um through this Collective memory um but I wonder does that resonance also occur on an inter-species basis I know you've done this work with you know us being telepathic with dogs as well but I wonder how far you think that that actually extends this uh this similarity and what are we actually similar with um what can we resonate across and if this is resonating across time and this is a collective memory and we're not just resonating with the past are we also able to resonate with the future how does how does the Future come in contact with this this idea of collective memory okay well there's two questions here really um the similarity one I see as a kind of empirical question now if you train Rats of one's variety to learn a new trick and you get amorphic resonance effect then try other varieties of rat more or less closely related and see how far it spreads over I think that it's it's fairly it's certain things like if you look at breeds of dogs for example um many young Sheepdogs try herding other animals without any training at all it's so deeply instinctive but that doesn't happen with poodles for example so there seems to be a more specific tuning and Gun Dogs which have been trained to retrieve pheasants and things on shoots um behave completely different from dogs of other breeds most dogs when they hear a gun go off near them are terrified not surprisingly however Young Gun Dogs some of them at least even if they've never heard a gun before when they hear a gun go go off they race ahead excitedly you know they don't know quite what they're looking for but it would be a fallen pheasant or something so though it must be quite specific within dogs um so for me that's just an empirical question what how similar is similar You could argue about it sort of academically for for a long time but really the question is what matters for morphic resonance it may not be the same as what matters for us when we're classifying things or observing them and then resonance the hypothesis is based on the idea that time is asymmetrical there's an asymmetry between the past and the future which we all of course experience and which is also true in the whole cosmology that we have the big bang at the Big Bang the universe was very small and very hot and it's been expanding and cooling down ever since so there's an arrow of time in the whole universe it's not like some Physics models like Einstein's block Universe where time makes no difference the reason they some physicists get the idea time makes no differences because they're so platonic they believe in Eternal laws of nature which never change and therefore it's more or less irrelevant what really what all the things happen in the real reality for them is laws of nature that don't change but if we have a radical asymmetry of time in the universe and of course in our own experience we all grow up from being embryos and fertilized eggs embryos and then we grow up we don't grow down and become younger and younger and finally end up as a fertilized egg um so there's a built in asymmetry and I think morphic resonance is from the past and um I don't think it happens from the future it would be almost impossible to test if because you'd never know how what's going to happen in the future so it's a postulate however I do think that there can be influences from the future I mean our precognitive dreams are a reality there are influences from the future but I don't think they're in the same category as morphic resonance I think they're working within Consciousness um if they're over a period of several days or weeks through dreams and things like that which I think is part of the realm of possibility that morphic resonance doesn't cover Consciousness is a realm of possibility and morphic resonance is a realm of unconscious habit and so I think in that Realm Of Consciousness which is also the where creativity can happen I think there is there are links with the future but they're not terribly reliable because we don't have precognitive dreams about everything that's going to happen they're exceptional and and even if you pay real attention to them they're not about everything all the time it's um so I think there are these connections with the future um but they're not morphic resonance cool well I'll open up the floor um quite a few questions already I think Harriet's going to help me out with the mic so um yeah let's take one over here I think there's a mic behind you if you need he actually managed to to uh hypnotize uh more than 50 percent of the thousand people in the audience uh almost instantaneously and I was one of them and it made me completely forget an episode which I must have seen because they played it on a film afterwards so my question is um is hypnosis a amorphic resonance or telepathy it's a really difficult question because no one really knows how hypnosis Works despite the fact it's been known about ever since Mesmer and probably before um it's it's very mysterious how hypnosis works and and I don't know of any satisfactory Theory various people have tried to explain it um but there is some kinds of some of the very earliest experiments on telepathy were done under hypnosis by a surgeon in the East India company called esdale who found that he could hypnotize patients before doing operations and Carry Out operations in the 1850s 40s and 50s before anesthetics were invented um he was doing operations in Bengal with patients under NRC under hypnotic anesthesia and he said that when people came to thank him as they did he then asked them to take part in the experiment he hypnotized them and then he was behind a screen and a servant gave him in a random order a series of flavors chocolate banana salt different tastes of chili which he put in his mouth and then he'd ask the hypnotized person what they what flavors they felt and they reported feeling the flavors that he was actually experiencing at the tastes and he called it community of sensation and I think that could be amorphic resonance effect under hypnosis and so I think there is a relationship I don't think hypnosis itself is amorphic resonance effect or it could be who could say that the hypnotized people fall into account resonance with previously hypnotized people doesn't whole field of hypnosis that's quite possible um but asdale's experiments on community of sensation are the ones that strike me as being closest to morphic Resonance because there as it were resonating with his experience uh when they couldn't have known by any other means I've been trying to persuade people to repeat that experiment in fact I once got Paul McKenna to hypnotize various people and persuaded him to put bits of banana and chocolate in his mouth and see if they felt it didn't work very well partly because he hadn't got long he was rushing off to some other show and um so it was all done in a very horrid and unsatisfactory way but it would be really good to repeat as sales experiments at some time at some stage the frustrating thing about this field of research is so many things that you can do that would be really interesting which don't get done because of these taboos one of the reasons I wrote my book The Science delusion about the ten dogmas of contemporary science is that I think in many areas of science free inquiry is inhibited by dogmatic taboos and at science had been regenerated and become so much more interesting if we could just get on with looking at things empirically and testing hypotheses instead of sticking to an ideological line and so and if and hypnosis is under a shadow it's not exactly denied because it's undeniable but it's not something that any ambitious scientist would do research on if they value their career it's one of those what you do if you value your career is is brain scanning and molecular studies on nerve cells and that kind of thing um so I I wish there were a clear answer but there isn't thanks okay so maybe we'll take one over here just to kind of balance up oh no we've got a mic already today I was very interested to read about how in in Ancient India the the temple Architects would be very much tested on their spiritual stability emotional stability and mental stability before they were allowed to actually create anything and I feel it's very relevant to this topic of morphic resonance and wondering if you can speak a little about the responsibility you feel we hold as Architects and designers in in the morphic resonances we create through the work that we do in in what we impregnate as part of ourselves into what is created through us well I suppose that people building sacred buildings in the past took this task very seriously including the people who built the Great Cathedrals you know the uh in in in Europe um we live in a completely secularized world now where lots of people have no religious beliefs or followings and if they're spiritual but not religiously they keep it quiet it's like a private hobby um so I suppose it's not really very much part of the culture of any profession today including the architectural profession um but I I and I certainly think that it would we might see better and more harmonious buildings if this were part of the training but that would probably involve lengthening the course of the AAA by a year or two and um and the Practical difficulties might be um I'm not in architectural education citing I can't imagine what they are I'm sure there would be some um but I I think it's true of any Walk of Life in any profession that if people are doing it from a spiritual point of view seeing it as part of service to others and in connection with the greater whole and the greater good the results are more likely to be harmonious and helpful to others than if they're just doing it for ego-based reasons or greed or fame or whatever um so anyways I can't say anything specifically about Architects but I think these general principles that apply to Architects as well as to others thank you uh could we get a mic over to this oh sorry could we come to Green share artists as well just you can ask a question but maybe just say second one yeah thanks um hi thank you for the lecture um I wanted to ask what you make of Lin margulis's symbiogenesis with regards to evolution by association and um with secondly with regards to vipassana as a meditative practice that in in practice revolves around um developing awareness of your own form which has multiple mental and physical implications which are complicated to go over well I like I'm certain marvelous for those who are not familiar with her Theory um pointed out years ago I've forgotten how many years ago at least 30 or 40 years ago that if you look at the organelles these little structures inside cells mitochondria which we have they produce energy inside our cells and chloroplasts in plant cells the bits that do the photosynthesis these exist inside membranes or they're semi-autonomous they have their own DNA and she suggested that these were originally Free Living bacteria or microbes that were engulfed by larger cells but instead of being digested which they normally are mean amoeba for example goes around engulfing bacteria and digesting them but some of them avoided being digested and went on living symbiotically we within the cell and the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts according to Lynn margulis was through this symbiotic Evolution I find that completely persuasive particularly in view of the molecular evidence that they're more like microbes than they are like higher plant or animal cells and it doesn't present any problem for amorphic resonance Theory because as I showed that model of holistic organization holes at all levels contain Parts which are themselves autonomous to some degree and which themselves contain parts so it's holes within holes within holes and so including mitochondria or chloroplasts originally symbiotic microorganisms within a cell would fit very well with that model of how cells work um so that was part one there was a second part to the question remind me concerning a form of meditation meditation yeah well um there are the various there are two main kinds of meditation one is the mindfulness or type of which philosopher passenger is one the other is mantra-based meditation um and I think that what's happening there is that by having a focus for attention other than our normal ruminative Thoughts by focusing either on the Mantra or on the breathing or Sensations in and around the body um we provide another Focus for attention and that takes away some of the power of we will detach ourselves from the normal train of thoughts that are going on in our minds which are now known to be connected with What's called the default mode Network a series of brain activities that linked up together that are involved in this default ruminative thought or just sort of chatter of the mind that goes on when we're not doing anything in particular um so um I think one of the one what's powerful about these meditation techniques is that it detaches us from being completely sucked into these thoughts which we identify as being ourselves and we see that actually there's other our minds are not totally under our own control there's a level at which the minds are deeper than the thoughts going through them and I think that's a key part of Many religious understandings of the world as well because the model of divine Consciousness that we find in in the Hindu tradition and the Buddhist ones slightly trickier but in the Hindu tradition in the Christian tradition have the idea the ultimate Consciousness has three main aspects there's the ground of Consciousness itself which Hindus called sat um being conscious being in the present then there's chit which is the contents of Consciousness which the Hindus call names and forms namarupa what goes through our minds and names and forms we see as we look around as Ender's forms that we recognize and can give names to and the world is full of forms and those are the contents of Consciousness without a mind we couldn't see or recognize them but they're separable from the mind that's doing the recognizing just as a mirror is not the same it's a famous image in Tibetan Buddhism the mirror is not the same as all the things that you can see in it so the fundamental nature of the mind is to be conscious being in the present and we come closer to that through meditation when we let go of these various thoughts that are constantly again through our minds so um I'd see meditation as as it's a spiritual practice which gives us a sense of of the nature of our own Consciousness and although many people in the modern world do meditation to stop them being frazzled after A Hard Day's work or A Hard Day's shopping it's done it's been completely secularized in many modern presentations the reason it exists in the Christian contemplative tradition with monks and nuns and in the Tibetan and the theravada Buddhist and in the Hindu traditions and in the Sufi tradition is because the idea is that our mind is of the same nature as the Divine or ultimate mind and by experiencing the nature of our own minds we become closer to the ultimate mind from which all minds are ultimately derived um now for a secular meditator it would for some it's just things going on inside their head that don't relate to anything out there because there is nothing out there in terms of Consciousness but I think for most people who practice meditation there's a sense in which you're connecting with something greater than yourself and that's what all spiritual practices are about really connecting with something graceful in yourself a Consciousness greater than your own thanks I think there's another one here hi Rupert thank you very much um really interesting talk I was just wondering if it's just because it's quite a simple question but um if you could elaborate more on the difference between how certain species or even particular organisms within a particular species group might be more susceptible or more inclined to um these kind of abilities to communicate with each other um you know like how 50 percent of the audience were able to be hypnotized for example in this chaps story um yeah well I think that within social species the telepathic abilities play a very important role in connecting members of the group at a distance but there are some species that aren't social most reptiles are not very social um you know turtles will swim to an island like Ascension Island in the middle of the ocean lay their eggs and then just swim off again and the baby turtles when they hatch out from the egg you have no parent to look after them or feed them or protect them and and in so in many um species of reptile I wouldn't expect there to be very much telepathy and in fact um when I was doing my research on telepathy and animals I tried to identify good cases of reptile telepathy and I found it very hard to find any nearly all the cases I have with mammals dogs cats some with sheep lot with horses or birds parrots parakeets badri Gars magpies Jack doors other animals kept a domestic domesticated form but very very few was reptiles and I did try I mean I I had appeals for information in the various journals that I thought would reach the right target audience like reptilian International and despite these appeals for information I had very very few cases the only really convincing case is from an American burlesque dancer who dances with a broken restrictor and she has formed as tight bond with this and it's enjoys it literally um and she said that when she traveled without the snake she left it with a friend and said the snake always seemed to back up and know when she was coming home so um I just wanted very few cases and I haven't got any convincing cases of psychic goldfish either despite trying to to find examples um so I think it's mainly social animals that do this and if you look at humans we're of course social animals we live in a society in a secularized world where these phenomena are not studied by most scientists they're taboo within the educational system you know if you ask a science teacher at school about these things they'll probably just say oh they're non-existent or they're not being proved or not enough evidence yet if they want to be neutral sounding but not encouraged whereas in traditional societies it's taken for granted that these skills exist and people pay attention to them and cultivate them when I lived in India I just found that almost all Indians took these things for granted it wasn't a matter of as soon as someone told the story of this kind someone would sit back and say aha but are you sure it wasn't just a coincidence or how do you know it wasn't a subtle cue or outside you know all the standard off-the-shelf skeptical objections we've been uh trained to bring up in these situations and so in many parts of the world Africa India Brazil these things are very widely taken for granted in the culture and are probably cultivated a lot more than they are in our society um and then of course there are individual differences even in Africa and India and Brazil there are people who are better at this than others other individual differences in every human skill some people are more musical than others others have a better sense of smell or hearing than others so it's not surprising there are differences in telepathic sensitivity in animals and in people I suppose what is surprising is that in our society despite Like official denial no training whatever dismissal of these experiences by educated people despite all that they haven't gone away in fact they're on the increase because the widespread use of mobile phones now means that people are in contact with others all the time and telepathy is very much on the increase in the modern world both in connection with phone calls text messages and emails because we now have these technological means of immediate communication so far from going away they're actually becoming more predominant and more common in people's lives and yet the official world view hasn't caught up with that yet would you say that maybe in India because like people are quite literally enhancing their morphic resonance by being more open-minded to it so therefore they're better at it than perhaps in other Western societies yes I think people are more open-minded they pay more attention to it when it happens they don't deny it and and so it's it encourages these abilities to develop um and you know if you for example the Vandana Shiva the environmentalist told me that when she was a child um her father was a forest officer and was working in Forest areas way beyond the reach of the Indian telephone system so when she was going home from school she was at boarding school she couldn't tell them exactly when she'd arrive sometimes she'd stay with friends for a day or two afterwards and it all depends on getting reservations on trains and irregular bus services and so forth so it was all rather unpredictable she didn't even try to tell them when she'd be arriving but when she got home her mother had got her room ready had cooked her favorite meal it was all ready for her when she arrived because her mother just knew when she was coming home like dogs knowing when their Inns are coming home the mother knew when her daughter was coming home and so I said to Vance and Shiva you know did she see this remarkable or as remarkable or did any of your family see it as remote said no no we just took it for granted she's a mother I'm her daughter of course she'd know when I'm coming home and so in those sort of circumstances where it's taken for granted as part of the culture and it's much easier for these things to happen than if you're an educated person you mention it to friends or family members and they feel they've got to try and deny it or debunk it and try and prove it's not really happening to prove they're educated so it's a very different culture and I think that it's definitely more favorable thanks there are some more questions I think we'll probably go for like maybe five to ten more minutes and there's going to be some drinks and we'll just have some music yeah so any more questions yeah we're gonna go here and then we're gonna go over here hello um when you first went to India what were your colleagues referring to morphic Resonance as well when I first went to India I was working in an international institute so my British and American colleagues um were a little bit like my colleagues in Cambridge so sort of felt that they had to be skeptical but I found that working in agriculture was much was very refreshing compared with working in molecular biology in Cambridge agriculturalists on the whole of pragmatic they you know their interest in what works and they don't know how most things work in plant breeding or in disease resistance or whatever and so they're much less ideological whereas people are professors or would-be professors at Cambridge are much more concerned with being scientifically correct and not saying something that's the wrong Theory or something so I found that the I found in general with botanists and agriculturalists they're much less ideological and much less prone to just denialism but among my Hindu colleagues I found that almost all of them found morphic resonance perfectly acceptable in fact they welcomed the idea because they all believed in reincarnation and there's nothing in modern genetics that enables you to believe in reincarnation if all the inheritance depends on genes just being passed down from parents to children then How could somebody who lived in a different village with a different family background be reincarnated in another body the like the Dalai Lama in Tibet he's the stream of 14 down alamas have not been closely related to each other in fact they've been completely unrelated and one of the tests they do when they're finding a new llama is show them objects that belong to the previous llama which they remember and they show them a range of bells or hats or whatever some of which one of which belonged to the previous alarm and the others are decoys they didn't belong to the previous llama who they're supposed to be The Reincarnation of and in these empirical tests if they pick out the right objects over and over again then there is one of the things that enables them to be recognized as a reincarnation so reincarnation involves a transfer of memory from a previous life to a present one now anamorphic resonance could help to explain that I think we tune into the memories of lots of other people the collective memory but there may be conditions in which you pick up one particular person more than others and may have memories from a particular person um and so um that then could be morphic resins would help to explain that as a memory transfer it wouldn't necessarily say you are that person that would then be a theological question Buddhists deny that the entire personality transmigrates whereas Hindus think it does so there's been an ongoing debate among Hindus and Buddhists about what exactly the transfer of memory involves and we're not in Soviet here this evening been going on for over 2000 years but morphic resonance enables the basic principles of karma which is Central to Hindu philosophy action having effects um Karma as expressed in reincarnation does not have to involve a direct material continuity but rather can involve influences leaping across time and space so most Hindu scientists I talked to my colleagues were totally open to morphic Resonance and um but they rather annoyingly instead of thinking this is a good reason to start doing research and testing it they just went on doing their conventional genetics and stuff during their day job because that's how you get ahead in science you don't question things you just do the what you're expected to do and um and so when I tried to incite them to insurrectional research and do unconventional things we're totally resistant to that they wanted to keep their jobs have an easy life not provoke trouble Etc very understandable um and so when I said well look then who if you're not if people in India aren't going to try and do research on this you know who is and they said oh sooner or later it will be shown in Western science is still in its infancy they used to say to me you know 50 years 100 years then it will be generally recognized that the ancient rishis were right all along and so so they took this long-term view which I find frustrating because it didn't mean they actually did anything they just complacently identified these theories as being well known and they'd come into their own sooner or later no doubt this was a wise and long-term view but I was in a hurry to get experiments done and okay um I think we had some over here I think can we go to this person yeah okay thank you well just in case thank you very much for um I just want to send some couple of things thank you Eddie who invited me here thank you for you Richard to introducing the theory to me like the construct to me and also to the organized collection event obviously um just wanted to ask you a question what do you think is the role of morphic resonance into a structural change and an ideological change because obviously work with different speed thank you the structural change did you say yes yeah and I don't know ideological change well I think of ideologies or indeed paradigms in science as kind of morphic fields they're habits of thought um and so like all habits they become deeply entrenched um you know an ideology becomes very deeply entrenched where all of us entrenched in the ideology of progress until about 400 years ago 500 years ago no one believed in progress through science and technology and now every government in the world has been converted to this ideology of progress through Science and Technology economic growth and development it's an ideology which all of us are within and you know there are people who question it by saying well why do we need growth and we could have a no growth economy or we could have a secular economy instead of one that's always growing Etc but the the the ideology is very very deep seated in institutions of government education in people's lives and their own philosophies and so forth and the Marxist ideology was deeply embedded in the Soviet Union taught to all children and they saw the world through many of them sold the world through that lens and the mechanistic materialist ideologies very deeply embedded within the scientific world this is one of my problems that I you know trying to sort of suggest Alternatives in various areas of science but what I come up against over and over again is a very deep-seated habits of thought where people are convinced that the world fits this material this model not because they've thought about it but because they haven't and so I think morphe resonance plays a very large part in social structure and in ideology in general um and then it comes the question well then how do you have change and how do changes occur and this is something after all which historians and historians of ideas and sociologists have studied so there are is empirical data but one thing that's important is to have an alternative an alternative most people aren't going to give up a world view and replace it with nothing they're only going to give it up if there's a plausible alternative and right now there is a plausible alternative to the mechanistic materialist worldview in science which is a holistic integrative evolutionary worldview where Nature's more like an organism than a machine and my own work is part of that and in my book The Science solution I try to show how by breaking out of the dogmas of materialism we could have a different worldview now many people already have that different world view um but the educational system is still inculcating the mechanistic materialist world view the GCSE Science at a level science so give not a hint of change towards a more holistic perspective nor do most University degree courses so we're educating new generations of young people in the old Paradigm in fact brainwashing or indoctrinating them with it and many of them don't go beyond it until they have a kind of midlife crisis and then start looking at alternative World Views um so I think there has to be an alternative and the alternative has to be attractive people have to want to change world view because it's better as as one of my American friends likes to say if you want to change the world throw a better party and I think that that's part of it you know if you have a world view which is more attractive and ideology is more attractive than more plausible then there's more chance of people switching but it's like switching channels on a TV set it's not it's like a a paradigm shift as described them in science was a shift from One World View to a different world view it's not a kind of gradual changes so a rather a revolutionary change from one particular way of seeing things to another and that's what scientific paradigms are the classic example being the chef from the model with the Earth at the center to the model where the earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun the copernican revolution you can't you see it one way or you see it the other way it's a shift in perspective or world view and I think that's what's going on at the moment and we don't yet know at least in the political area it's there aren't any clear blueprints that I can see for an alternative to neoliberalism or you know it's not as if we're all rallying around some Visionary political leader who can see some whole new way forward the only person in public life I think who clearly expresses a holistic integrative worldview is our King who fears has been very much part of this shift in Paradigm to a more holistic and integrative worldview I think we're very fortunate we have a king who embodies these ideas but um they're not yet working their way through the educational the political system to any great degree in my opinion thanks I'm being told that we're kind of out of time and we want to have a little bit of time for drinks um and just kind of relaxing running down the evening I'm sure Rupert's going to be around for a little bit longer he's got some books here and I'd just like to thank everyone for coming and listening I know it's been quite long there's a lot of dense ideas I'd really encourage you to interact more with Uber's work if you don't know it and um if you'd like to join me in just thanking everyone for coming and that'd be great foreign