Morphic Resonance: The “Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon”

So here is another possible explanation for the seeming explosion of ADHD, if a bit more esoteric than the usual. Perhaps we’ve all just tuned into a new morphic field!

Image by Anne-Ed C. from Pixabay

“The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization. And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth.”
—Chief Luther Standing Bear

Sir Arthur Eddington, who proved Einstein’s theory of relativity by leading the expedition in 1919 to photograph a solar eclipse, was boggled when he saw that gravity did, indeed, bend light. When he realized the implications of Einstein’s theory, he wrote: “The stuff of the world is mind stuff,” and that “the mind stuff is not spread out in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it.”

Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance proposes that behavior is inherited as an organizing field rather than as a specific genetic encoding. This field is both derived from parents, from self (that is, it accumulates through life), and from others.

This may sound absurd at first, and even Pavlov, when confronted with it, assumed it was a sort of genetic transmission of learned behavior. He trained a group of rats to run to a particular feeding place whenever he rang a bell. The first generation of rats he trained took an average of 300 tries before they learned always to run to the feeding place when Pavlov rang the bell.

Their offspring, however, learned how to find the food when the bell was rung after only 100 tries.

The children of this second generation got it after thirty tries, and their children learned how to find the food after only ten tries. None were given an opportunity to learn this behavior from their parents, and the results of this study boggled the mind of Pavlov. He died, however, before he was able to follow it up.

But it was followed up, with startling results. From 1920 to 1950, one of the longest studies in the history of behavioral science was conducted at Harvard (and, later, other institutions) by Dr. William McDougal. He put together a test for rats: they were dropped into a darkened tank of cold water from which there were two exit ramps. One ramp was lighted, but gave the rats an electric shock when they tried to use it. The other exit was dark and hard to find, but provided safe escape from the cold water.

Using standard white laboratory rats, McDougal found that the first generation of rats he tested took over 165 tries to master this test. By the time he got to the thirtieth generation, however, the rats easily mastered the test in fewer than 20 tries. When he first published the results of this test, it of course raised skepticism. The idea that behavior might be inherited was odd, to say the least, and more disturbing, might have enlightening or chilling implications if applied to humans.

So biologist FAE Crew tried to replicate McDougal’s Harvard experiment in faraway Edinburgh, Scotland. Using the same standard laboratory rats, but ones that had no relation to McDougal’s (still in Boston), he found that on the first try his rats could learn the water test with only 25 tries.

The results of this stimulated biologist W.E. Agar in Melbourne, Australia, to try the test out with his rats. He found that the first generation also learned the test in about 25 tries, and as he continued training rats through subsequent generations, he was able to get this down considerably by the fiftieth generation, over twenty years.

What Agar did that was different from Crew or McDougal, however, was that he kept another group of rats breeding in a separate room, unrelated to the test rats, for the same fifty generations without ever giving them any tests or training. When he finally tested his control group, he discovered, to his and everybody else’s shock and amazement, that they too learned the maze with a speed identical to offspring of the tested and trained group.

One of the most famous examples of this “remote shared learning” occurred in Britain where for nearly 100 years milkmen left bottles of milk at homeowner’s doors during the dark hours of early morning. In 1921, the first incidence of a small bird opening the top of one of these milk bottles was recorded. It happened in the small town of Southampton, and the bird was the blue tit. By 1947, eleven species of birds had begun this activity, and it had spread to 89 different cities.

Then the jump occurred. A certain critical mass appears to have been achieved in Britain, because suddenly blue tits in Sweden, Denmark, and Holland began to attack milk bottles. It was geographically impossible that this could have been a learned behavior or something that these birds observed.

To further compound the mystery, milk bottles disappeared in Holland during the years of World War II, and were only reintroduced in 1947. None of the blue tits alive then could have ever seen a milk bottle: the last ones placed on doorsteps were during the era of their grandparents or great-grandparents. Yet as soon as the bottles reappeared, the tits began to attack them.

Another well-known story of this phenomenon occurred off the coast of Japan in 1952, on the island of Koshima. Scientists studying the behavior of a local band of monkeys (Macaca fuscata) began feeding them by dropping sweet potatoes on the sand of the beach. The sand made the potatoes difficult to eat, and one young female, Imo, learned to wash the potatoes in the ocean before eating them.

She taught this behavior to her friends and relatives, and pretty soon many of the members of this band of monkeys were imitating Imo’s food-washing behavior. The scientists observed this with interest, watching how the behavior slowly spread through the tribe, until one day something startling happened: every monkey in the tribe began washing their food.

Amazed by this, the scientists reported their observation. At the same time another group of scientists at Takasakiyama on the distant mainland noticed an odd and eerie phenomenon: suddenly all the Macaca fuscata monkeys they were observing began to wash their food in the ocean! (This assertion is controversial; it’s possible there was contact between the communities that shared that knowledge.)

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake calls this phenomena “morphic resonance,” and points out several human examples in his book, The Presence of the Past. Before 1953, in all of recorded human history, no person had ever run a mile in less than four minutes. This was widely regarded as an unbreakable barrier, having to do with basic laws of physics and human anatomy. Then, in 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes and shocked the world. The widely-held assumption at the time was that Bannister must have been some sort of a freak, a super-human runner, to have accomplished this feat that everybody knew was patently impossible.

But even more amazing than Bannister having broken the four-minute-mile was the fact that within a year over a dozen people had matched his feat, and within a decade over a thousand had. By 1985, the “barrier” was redefined by Steve Cram, who ran the mile in 3 minutes 46.3 seconds. That this feat was duplicated not just in Bannister’s native England but all over the world is testament to the fact that this didn’t represent some sudden evolution in the technology of running shoes or human nutrition. It was the newly-shared knowledge that to do this was possible.

Extending this to learning, studies were done with non-Japanese speaking students in England and the United States who were presented with two poems in Japanese. One poem was a classic nursery rhyme known to millions of Japanese and the other a “made-up” rhyme similar in structure and form. The students were able to memorize the “real” poem 62% more easily and faster than the made-up rhyme.

They tested to see if this effect was merely the result of the real rhyme having survived some sort of natural selection process in Japan because it was somehow structurally or intrinsically easier to learn. Yale professor of psychology Dr. Gary Schwartz put together three sets of seemingly nonsense words, each made up of three characters. One set was 24 3-character words in Hebrew which were common in the Old Testament. The second set was 24 3-character Hebrew words which were rare in the Bible. And the third set weren’t Hebrew words at all, but scrambled anagrams of the first two sets, comprising 48 nonsense words structurally similar to the two sets of real words.

These 96 words were then randomly projected on a screen, and students were asked to guess at their meaning, and also to rank how confident they felt that they’d guessed right. None of the students had any knowledge of or background in Hebrew.

Dr. Schwartz was impressed to discover a “highly statistically significant” result. The students felt far more confident about their guesses when they were looking at real words and they were more than twice as likely to feel that way when looking at the common real words rather than the uncommon ones.

A similar test using Persian words in Arabic script was performed in England by psychologist Alan Pickering, with similar results.

The concept of people having shared memories or knowledge isn’t new, although the scientific validation of it is. Gestalt psychology has long held that there is a psychological field that people are immersed in, and Carl Jung saw this in his concept of the psychological archetype. Prior to the many scientific experiments recently and currently being carried out to test the hypothesis of morphic resonance, this was largely kept in the realm of metaphysics, with proponents such as Edgar Cayce, or as a core concept in the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

But now it’s widely becoming accepted that what author Ken Keyes called the “Hundredth Monkey Phenomena” is at least possible, even if not with those particular monkeys. If this is the case, when a certain critical mass of people engage in a particular type of behavior that behavior then becomes universalized, spreading to other humans all over the world.

Might not this be a possible explanation for the explosion of ADHD?

American and Australian societies, pioneering being in their core nature, are vastly more ADHD-friendly than stable agricultural societies such as Japan. As the populations of these nations increase, with the numbers of ADHD-type individuals growing, one could hypothesize that this would create what Sheldrake calls a Morphogenic Field for ADHD behaviors. This field, once it reaches a particular strength, would then have the ability to influence other humans, causing them to behave in a more ADHD-like fashion than they might have otherwise done.

So here is another possible explanation for the seeming explosion of ADHD, if a bit more esoteric than the usual. Perhaps we’ve all just tuned into a new morphic field!

This view of ADHD also implies that it may not be a disorder or disease. It may simply be a normal variation of human behavior that, during the tens or hundreds of thousands of years of human history, has been more or less useful.

At the heyday of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, with their armies and pesticides and destruction of natural environments becoming more anachronistic, it may be that ADHD is again useful. And, as there is more ADHD-like behavior, more people tune into the ADHD Morphogenic field—leading to even more ADHD.

Solution? Maybe this isn’t a problem, but a solution for the future of the world in and of itself.