The Why Files: The Forbidden Theory of Morphic Resonance (Transcript)

What took their ancestors 165 attempts, they mastered in 20. They were eight times faster at learning the same task.

McDougal tried to break the pattern. He split his colony and started breeding specifically for slow learners, taking the worst performers from each generation and mating them together. These rats should have stayed slow or gotten worse. But they got faster too. Same rate of improvement as the randomly bred line. The slowest learners were producing offspring that learned faster than their parents, generation after generation.

McDougal published his results carefully. No wild claims, no revolutionary declarations. Just the data. 30 generations, thousands of rats, every trial documented. He mentioned in his private notes that it looked like Lamarck might have been right. Skills could be inherited. But genetics don’t work that way. Except here it was, happening in his lab.

The rats were inheriting something. Not genes, not training. They were inheriting the ability to solve a puzzle their parents had learned through pain and repetition.

The Knowledge Spreads: Cross-Species Transmission

Whatever was happening, it wasn’t genetics. Because not only were skills being transmitted across generations, they were being transmitted across the entire species all over the world.

F.A.E. Crewe was a geneticist at Edinburgh. A pioneer in animal genetics. He thought McDougal was sloppy. So in 1923, he set up his own experiment to prove it. He set up the same water maze. Same whisk to rats, just different genes. But he also added a control group. Something McDougal didn’t do. He had a trained line of rats and an untrained line.

Oh yeah, we got a nice showdown. In one corner, wearing a tweed jacket and horn-ringed glasses, is the strength, William McDougal, A.K.A. the social psycho, A.K.A. Trud Range. And in the other corner, also wearing a tweed jacket and horn-ringed glasses, is the geneticist, F.A.E. Crewe, A.K.A. the phenotype foe, A.K.A. Genes Wilder. Welcome to the brain in DNA. Let’s get ready to rumble!

Crewe expected his trained rats to master the maze in about 20 tries. And they did. But the untrained rats should have averaged 165 tries. They averaged 25. 30 generations, that’s what it took McDougal’s rats to crack the maze. These rats had no genetic connection to any of those. And they just needed 25 tries. On day one.

W.E. Agar, a scientist at the University of Melbourne, ran a similar study for 20 years. Same result. Trained and untrained. Related and unrelated. Different labs. Different countries. It didn’t matter. The knowledge was spreading through the entire species.

The Blue Tits of Southampton

But it wasn’t just rats. For years, milk was left on people’s doorsteps. Glass bottles with foil caps. And I can’t believe I’m old enough to remember this, but I am. In 1920, in Southampton, England, the blue tit birds learned something useful about milk. Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.

The Blue Tit Mystery

Oh, crap. Did you just say blue tit birds? Yes. Sometimes they’re called blue caps, but technically they’re… Please stop saying… Hey, hey, hey, we’re going to be talking about blue tits and milk for a while. We are. Oh, baby, it’s Christmas morning and Santa’s been good today.

Here’s what the birds… Blue tits. Here’s what they learned about milk. Pierce the foil cap, drink the cream. This behavior spread all over Britain. By the 1940s, they were all doing it. Every… Go ahead. Every blue tit was doing it. Hey, hey, hey, do you have any stories about blue bazoombas or turquoise tapas? No. Cobalt cairns, periwinkle peas, midnight melons? No. Denim dumplings, sapphire sandbags? That’s enough. I can’t breathe. I can’t… I can’t… Human, human…

You could argue that the birds were watching each other and learning this trick. But then came World War II. All aluminum was needed for aircraft, though no more foil caps. They used wood or cheaper, harder metal. Blue tits couldn’t get through. They only lived a couple of years, so by the time the war was over, every bird that had ever pierced a cap was dead. The entire generation that knew the trick, they were gone.

But when the foil caps came back, blue tits were piercing them again. Birds that had never seen the trick across all of Britain, all at the same time. This wasn’t genetics, memory, or observation. This was a skill somehow encoded into the species itself.

Crystals and the Mystery of Spontaneous Organization

But this can happen to nonliving things, too. Specifically, crystals. When chemists synthesize a new compound, getting it to crystallize for the first time can take months or years. Different temperatures, different solvents, different pressures. The molecules just won’t organize. They won’t form a pattern until one day they do. And then something strange happens. A compound that resisted crystallization for decades suddenly crystallizes everywhere.

On Earth. Glycerol was a liquid for centuries. No one could crystallize it. Then in 1867, a barrel crystallized during shipment to Vienna. After that, glycerol crystallized easily everywhere. Xylitol, same story. Decades of failure in one success, then success everywhere.

Rats, birds, crystals. They were passing behaviors to each other all over the world. Something had to be carrying this information. Something we couldn’t see. Something we didn’t understand.

Rupert Sheldrake and the Bean Plant

But in 1981, a young scientist from Cambridge found a pattern. Not only could species pass information anywhere around the world, they could pass information anywhere through time.

In 1973, Rupert Sheldrake sat in his Cambridge lab staring at a bean plant. It was doing something that shouldn’t be possible, according to everything he knew about biochemistry. Oh, hang on, hang on. The guy was called Rupert Sheldrake? Yes, why? That’s the kind of name that’s going to cost you a fortune in lunch money. Yeah, I don’t think there was a lot of bullying going on at Cambridge. Oh, wake up, human. Wedgies are universal. I bet even Stephen Hawking had to eat his own tidy whities from time to time. And he sat on those things all day.

Anyway, bean plants are like vines. They can’t stand on their own. He needed a structure to grow around. A wall, a fence, a tree. He was growing plants using pots and small wooden poles for support, same method every time. The plant sprouts, grows toward the pole, and starts climbing. But this particular bean plant was doing something very strange. It was growing toward a pole that wasn’t there yet. It was growing to where the pole would be in the future.

Now, Sheldrake was a serious scientist. Cambridge Fellowship, Harvard, PhD in biochemistry, director of studies at age 31. His research on plant hormones is still in textbooks today. But this bean plant was bothering him. Plants don’t have eyes. They don’t have nervous systems. The support pole wouldn’t be installed for another two days, yet the bean was already changing its growth pattern, already preparing to climb something that didn’t exist yet.

He’d seen this before, thousands of times. Every biologist had, they just didn’t talk about it. DNA doesn’t actually contain the blueprint for what an organism becomes.

The Mystery DNA Cannot Explain

An acorn has the same DNA in every cell, but those cells grow into roots, or leaves, branches. They organize themselves into a tree, and nobody can really explain how they know to do that. Think of DNA like Lego bricks. A Star Wars set and a Castle set use exactly the same pieces. The only difference is the final shape. A fruit fly, a banana, even a human being share most of the same DNA, but they develop into completely different organisms. The final shape isn’t in the DNA. Something else is guiding the process.

A Memory in Nature

One night, walking home along the River Kam, Sheldrake had a moment of clarity. Maybe nature has a memory. When any system organizes itself, a crystal forming, a plant growing, an animal learning, it creates what Sheldrake would call a morphic field, a memory in nature. A similar system can resonate with that field and access that memory, meaning a bird learning to pierce the foil, crystals learning to form, and the more that memory is accessed, the stronger it gets, and it influences everything that comes after, across space and time. No physical connection required, because that memory is now part of nature, all of nature, everywhere, forever.

A New Science of Life

In 1974, Sheldrake moved to India to work at an agricultural institute. That was his day job. He spent his nights at a monastery, and for 18 months, between prayers and meditation, he wrote a book proposing that the universe has memory. He called it A New Science of Life. He published it in 1981. The most important science journal in the world responded by calling for his book to be burned. The theory of morphic resonance cost Sheldrake his career, and a few years later, it almost cost him his life.

The Book-Burning Editorial

September 1981. John Maddox, editor of Nature, then the most prestigious science journal in the world, wrote an editorial about Sheldrake’s book. He called it “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.” Nature published his Nobel laureates, Einstein, Watson and Crick, Darwin. Calling for burning was unprecedented in the modern history of the journal. Maddox compared the book to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and its potential for damage. He wasn’t calling Sheldrake wrong, he was calling him dangerous.

Maddox even said, “Sheldrake’s not a real scientific theorist. It’s not even a theory. It’s an exercise in pseudoscience. You see, Sheldrake’s is not a scientific theory. Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science. And that can be condemned in exactly the language that the popes used to condemn Galileo. And for the same reasons. It is heresy.”

Professors curious about morphic resonance went silent. Graduate students were warned away. Research funding dried up. But the more the establishment attacked Sheldrake, the more people read his work. The book-burning editorial made Sheldrake’s book a bestseller. He became the most talked about biologist in Britain overnight. Not for science, but for the attempt to suppress it.

The Stabbing in Santa Fe

But the worst attack on Sheldrake wasn’t intellectual. April 2nd, 2008, he was giving a lecture in Santa Fe. A man in the audience rushed the stage with a knife. He stabbed Sheldrake in the leg, then security tackled him. The attacker told police and a reporter afterward that Sheldrake was using him as a subject in telepathic mind control experiments for five years. The wound was serious, but Sheldrake recovered. And days later, still using a walker, he gave a talk titled Science and Hope.

The Banned TED Talk

In March 2013, Sheldrake gave a TEDx talk called The Science Delusion. He challenged what he called the ten dogmas of modern science. That nature is mechanical. That matter is unconscious. And that mind is nothing but brain activity. That kind of stuff. Well, TED removed the talk from their YouTube channel. Bloggers campaigned against it. TED consulted what they called a science board, but they never told us who was on it. The talk was about scientific dogmatism. The response was dogmatic censorship.

But the attempts to silence Sheldrake kept backfiring. The banned TED talk got millions of views on other channels. The stabbing made international news. Every attack made more people ask, what are they so afraid of?

The Television Experiment That Tested Morphic Resonance on Two Million People

Then a British TV broadcaster had an idea. They would test morphic resonance on the largest scale ever attempted. So now there were two million people about to test this theory on live TV.

In 1984, British television ran an experiment. They showed viewers a puzzle. One of those hidden pictures where you stare at random dots until an image appears. About two million people watched. Then researchers tested people who hadn’t seen the broadcast. Some were in different cities. Some were in different countries. They solved that specific puzzle faster than a control group tested before the broadcast. And not a little faster. Much faster. Those two million people who watched the show gave nature a new memory. A solution to that puzzle.

Sheldrake said this could apply to crossword puzzles. He said crosswords should get easier to solve as the day goes on. As more and more people solve the puzzle, they’re creating and reinforcing a morphic memory. That new memory makes the puzzle easier for everyone trying the puzzle for the first time.

Some newspapers tested the puzzle theory. The London Evening Standard found their puzzles were solved 20% faster in the evening after thousands of people spent the day solving them.

The Flynn Effect and Rising IQ Scores

Then there’s the Flynn effect. Since the 1920s, IQ scores have risen worldwide by about three points per decade. Every generation scores higher than the last on the exact same test. Experts credit better nutrition, better education, better test-taking skills, but the gains show up even in pattern recognition tests that don’t rely on education at all. Morphic resonance says as more humans master cognitive tasks, those tasks become easier for everyone.

Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home

Sheldrake’s most famous research involves dogs. He documented over 200 cases of dogs that go to the door or window when their owners decide to come home. Not when they come home, when they decide to. Owners came home at random times in unfamiliar vehicles. The dogs still knew. One dog, a terrier named JT, was tested over a hundred times. Within 10 seconds of his owner leaving work, JT went to the window 85% of the time. The owner was four miles away.

The Sense of Being Stared At

Then there’s the sense of being stared at. Sheldrake ran 25,000 trials. Subjects guessed whether someone was looking at them from behind. They guessed right 55% of the time. Should be 50%. Now, 5% might not seem like much, but with that huge sample size, it’s significant. We’ve all had that feeling where we know someone’s looking at us.

The Hundredth Monkey Effect

The book Lifetide, released in 1979, is about monkeys on Kushima Island. One learned to wash sweet potatoes in the ocean. Other monkeys copied her. Once a hundred monkeys learned the trick, monkeys on other islands started washing potatoes too. Just like McDougal’s rats, knowledge had jumped across the ocean.

We’ve got rats and monkeys teaching each other on different islands, dogs and plants that can predict the future, people solving puzzles faster as the day goes on. I love the concept of morphic resonance, but is it true?

The Problems With the Evidence

Well, let’s start with the bad news. That famous monkey story? That’s completely made up. Lyle Watson took real observations from primatologists and added a little fiction for fun.

The crystal formations have a conventional explanation too. When scientists first synthesize a new compound, it resists crystallization. After one lab succeeds, others find it easier. Sheldrake says it’s morphic fields. Chemists say it’s seed crystals. Microscopic traces on clothing, in beards, on shared equipment that’s shipped between labs. And once the crystals exist anywhere, they exist everywhere. No mysterious fields required. That one is a stretch for me, but that’s the official scientific view.

Now the crossword puzzles and TV experiments are interesting, but the effects are small and the methods are contested. So they can go either way. It’s not the smoking gun that Sheldrake needs.

But then there are the rats. MacDougall’s data is real. Crew replicated it. Agar replicated it on a separate continent.

Rats got smarter across generations with no physical contact. Now critics explain it like this. Early generations of rats were stressed by inexperienced researchers who didn’t handle them properly. So as the researchers got better at handling them, the rats did better on the test. Now I think the skeptics lose that one, especially when we consider something discovered decades after MacDougall died. Epigenetics. This shows acquired traits can chemically tag DNA and pass information to offspring. So the effect might be real. The cause, we still don’t know.

The dogs anticipating their owners coming home is Sheldrake’s strongest published work. Critics have found methodological problems, but defenders have replicated the results. That one is still being debated and every dog owner has thoughts.

Morphic Resonance and the Laws of Physics

Now here’s the core problem that skeptics use. Morphic resonance requires information transfer with no energy cost. That violates the law of conservation of energy. Physics has rules. But not all physics. Not quantum physics. Two particles separated by any distance. A room, a galaxy, it doesn’t matter. They respond to each other instantly. This was confirmed in the 1980s. That’s an instant transfer of information that ignores the law of conservation of energy and ignores the speed of light. And nobody knows how this works.

The Greatest Minds Arrive at the Same Conclusion

In the 1930s, Carl Jung proposed a collective unconscious. A shared reservoir of human experience running beneath individual awareness. Physicist David Bohm said all points in space are fundamentally connected. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the architects of quantum mechanics and famous for the cat, argued that individual consciousness is just an illusion. That there’s only one mind. Max Planck, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, all arrived at the same place from completely different directions. Some through mathematics. Some through watching rats learn mazes. Some through quantum theory itself. All of them looked at the universe and landed on the same word. Connected.

Maybe the laws of nature are fixed, written into the fabric of reality before the first star formed. Or maybe the universe creates memories that strengthen through repetition, always evolving. We can’t prove it either way.

But there is one scientific fact that nobody can deny. A long time ago, every atom in your body was connected to every other atom in every other person on earth. Every atom in your body was connected to every atom in every animal, every plant, every rock, and every planet in the universe. And if the smallest things in existence stay connected to each other across any distance, then acting like the people around you are separate from you isn’t just unkind, it’s unscientific.

Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is AJ, that’s Cyclefish. This has been The Why Files. If you had fun or learned anything, we’d appreciate it if you hit like, subscribe, comment, share, and that stuff really helps us out. And like most topics we cover on the channel, today’s was recommended by you. And if there’s a story you’d like to see or learn more about, go to thewhyfiles.com/tips, hop on Discord, email us, send a chat. There’s a lot of ways to get a hold of us. We’re always looking for topic ideas.

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♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Oh, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ I play for Libby, it’s an area 51 ♪
♪ A secret code inside the Bible said I was ♪
♪ I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music ♪
♪ So I’m singing like I should ♪
♪ But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends ♪
♪ And it never ends, no, it never ends ♪
♪ So I’m singing like I should ♪

♪ I fear the crab got out, got stuck inside my home ♪
♪ With MK Ultra, I’m being only too aware ♪
♪ Did Stanley Kubrick fake the Moon landing alone ♪
♪ On a film set, I would have shadowed people there ♪
♪ The Redwell aliens just fought the smiling man, I’m told ♪
♪ And his name was Cole, and I can’t believe ♪

♪ I’m dancing with the fishies ♪
♪ And the fish on Thursday nights with AJ too ♪
♪ And the Wi-Fi’s hovering all through the night ♪
♪ All I ever wanted was to just see the crew ♪
♪ And the Wi-Fi’s hovering all through the night ♪

♪ The Mothman’s died in James, a solar storm still comes ♪
♪ And we’ll gather the secret city underground ♪
♪ Mysterious number stations, planet surfboard too ♪
♪ Graphic stargates, and where the Dark Watcher’s found ♪
♪ We’re in a simulation, don’t you worry so ♪
♪ The Black Knight satellite is known to me so ♪
♪ I can’t believe I’m dancing with the fishies ♪

♪ And the fish on Thursday nights with AJ too ♪
♪ And the Wi-Fi’s hovering all through the night ♪
♪ All I ever wanted was to just see the crew ♪
♪ And the Wi-Fi’s hovering all through the night ♪
♪ And the fish on Thursday nights with AJ too ♪
♪ And the Wi-Fi’s hovering all through the night ♪
♪ All I ever wanted was to just see the crew ♪
♪ And the Wi-Fi’s hovering all through the night ♪

♪ Gertie loves to dance, yeah Gertie loves to dance ♪
♪ And it’s time to dance, girl, because she is a camel ♪
♪ Camels love to dance when the feeling is right on way ♪
♪ Same time ♪

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