Morphic Fields, a general overview & some reflection

The idea of Morphic Fields / Resonances has been quite extensively researched and promoted by Rupert Sheldrake (biochemist, born 1942, UK). He has written no less than 900 scientific articles and 9 books, which have been translated into various languages. So quite the record, yet the idea remains controversial although he claims that it has been part of biology for almost a century.

In its most general form the claim is that the 'Laws of Nature' are more like 'habits' that get strengthened through repetition and which are mediated by 'Morphic Fields'. In the case of biology those are called Morphogenetic Fields that would shape organisms in addition to their (insufficient) genetic information. 

"The sense of being stared at," which the great majority of people seem to have experienced in daily life (me included), would be a morphic field effect as well. Quite some scientific experiments namely have been done on it (someone alternately staring or not at a test subject who has to guess which it was) yielding statistically very significant results and ruling out all kinds of explanations based on current scientific knowledge (e.g. by using one way mirrors and/or blindfolds). More detail can be found on Sheldrake's website: sheldrake.org.

The general succes rate is around 55%, where the 'non-staring' part interestingly only yields chance results. So people can sense being stared at but not not being stared at which seems perfectly logical. Also a learning effect has been observed e.g. in a test with German 8-9 year old children the succes rate could be boosted up to 90%! Moreover, the results with twins (or in general with related people, having a 'bond') are better than with strangers. The sense of being stared at apparently even persists through a CCTV system (closed circuit television) using the skin-resistance as the (unconscious) signal of the effect, as well as through binoculars at large distance (based on anecdotal evidence). Some tests with mirrors suggest that the sense is directional. 

A test in public (with a screened observer) resulted in 27 hits and 12 false positives. Similarly, staring at geese in a park resulted in 10 hits and 3 false positives, again highly significant. The higher succes rate of these tests where subjects are unaware of them (the equivalent for the lab tests namely would be 6 hits for each 5 false positives) actually suggests that the sense functions (better) subconsciously. By definition it needs some visual connection but otherwise no physics (including some distance dependence) is involved apparently.

The visual connection actually seems not even to be needed for contact through morphic fields; tests with people knowing who is calling before picking up the phone and animals sensing when their owner only even intends to go home namely yield positive and statistically significant results as well. These effects are part of what is generally called "telepathy."

And even an intention seems not essential for contact and information transfer following quite some experiments on living beings quickly spreading newly acquired traits / habits to their fellows without contact of any known kind. Examples are the automatic avoidance of (fake) cattle grids by animals and sheep learning to cross real ones, tits stealing from milk bottles, new aversions of laboratory chickens and even resistance to toxics of cell cultures without physical contact between different cell lines. 

"Enhanced learning" seems to have been observed in humans too: e.g. it has been found easier to remember real nursery rhymes in a foreign language than fake and/or newly made ones that seem equally well structured. The same goes for remembering existing over none-existing Hebrew words (that anyhow seem random symbols to foreigners), and with often used symbols over non-generally used ones that otherwise wouldn't be distinguishable. Further, large scale tests have been done by making two hidden images (see figure), then showing one on a popular television program and as a result people in some other countries could recognise that one better than the other. Although no general conclusions could be gotten from these lasts tests, it IS clear that they involved some effect that's currently not understood.

A final example of seeming enhanced learning is the so called Flynn-effect: IQ levels have been steadily rising, with about 25 points in 70 years; and 'regular' explanations do not hold.

Finally, we can ask whether morphic fields are restricted to living systems, in other words do non-living systems show 'enhanced learning' as well? For it to possibly work a new form of order is needed that spontaneously forms. Because if it is humanly made then the 'learning' effect will just be human as well. So some sort of 'self-assembling' is needed, or as a chemist once told me: we simply call that crystallization. Interestingly, crystallization of new materials does show a general increase in melting temperature over time (up to 20 degrees?! and in contrast to old ones / naturally occuring crystals) which seems not explainable by increased sample purity as is generally assumed. A critical test of this would be quantum phase-transitions to Bose-Einstein condensates or Superconductors, because those cannot naturally occur & seem to exclude impurities by themselves?!

If the 'enhanced learning' result would hold up then, this would be really revolutionary, because it would mean that morphic fields would apply in similar manner to all matter instead of being something essentially non-physical. And that would greatly increase their scope and impact. Yet they differ strongly from (current) physics, e.g. they're essentially non-local. Some analogy exists with quantum mechanics but their effects go well beyond it. The main difference seems that morphic fields enhance order while otherwise disorder is promoted (entropy generally increases). And so they cannot be explained by quantum mechanics; it would more seem to work in the other direction since the whole idea of morphic fields is that they make the laws of nature at least somewhat 'fuzzy'?!

Some parallel also exists with Platonic ideas influencing/forming worldly objects, but those are not rooted in matter and so can't show any development (or communication).

In conclusion, for me it is sufficiently clear that intriguing effects from 'morphic fields' really exist; yet their precise scope and details definitely require further investigation. For example what are all the factors influencing their strength? Is there a distance dependence? Do they function across time as well? How could they be best exploited?

Only time can tell...

PS it has been suggested that morphogenetic fields play a crucial role in biological Evolution as well in offering a mechanism for new patterns (information) to arise as it is clear that random variations cannot bring anything usefull. However, morphic fields do not yield variations themselves, just help to strengthen and better spread 'habits' that have already arisen and so just improve on the (natural) selection...