The Sheldrake’s “neatomind”: Does The Past Take Us Out of Our Minds?

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Magic moments, images and scents from childhood, things we wish we could forget – there are all kinds of memories. We know our brains conjure them up, and so we have assumed that the memories themselves are stored in the brain. But this view may be mistaken, suggests a British biochemist, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.

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Many scientists believed that memories imprinted on the brain are held there by electrical activity in the synapses, the bridges between the brain’s nerve cells. According to this theory, memories should be stored in particular places in the brain.

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But if the theory is true, it ought to be possible to locate precisely where particular memories are registered. Yet many studies have indicated that all memory remains intact unless very large portions of the brain have been damaged. Memory, as one baffled scientist has put in, seems to be “everywhere and nowhere in particular.”

Acid Test for DNA

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Sheldrake’s answer to the paradox is that the brain is not a warehouse full of memories but a device for “tuning them in.” He arrived as this conclusion while developing an explanation for the way that animal species inherit their unique characteristics – for instance, why a cat is always cat – shaped.

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Conventional theory maintains that an animal’s form is determined by the genetic code carried in the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules of its cells, although scientists have not yet established exactly how this transmission takes place. Because DNA cells are the same wherever in the eyes, the fur, or the flesh – Sheldrake suggests that DNA does not determine an animal’s form. Since the makeup of cells in various parts of an animal varies considerably, he proposes that the cells cannot all have been “programmed” by an identical genetic code.

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It is Sheldrake’s theory that as the forms of living creatures have evolved, they have created a morphogenetic (form-creating) field. The field ensures that the animal’s descendants will conform to the patterns established by generations of their own kind, be they cars, kangaroos, or two-toed sloths.

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Thus the individuals of past generations have, in effect, created the forms of their own species. As each new individual develops, it contributes to the morphogenetic record; at the same time, the field shapes the individual.

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Morphogenetic fields have not been detected in the laboratory. If they do exist, the fields do not obey accepted laws of science and would, for example, allow direct communication between the past and the present, a phenomenon that no existing scientific instrument can detect.

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“Morphic resonance” is the term that Sheldrake gives to the means by which creatures are able to communicate with those that resembled them in the past. As he says, “The thing that an organism resembles most closely in the past is itself.” He suggests that morphic resonance not only permits individuals to communicate with past members of their own species but also enables an individual creature to tune in its own past. Therefore, memory is a journey that the mind makes into the past via morphic resonance, not a physical record stored in the brain.

Startling Implications

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One of the fundamental tenets of biology is that living things can explained exclusively in terms of physical and biochemical processes. Sheldrake’s hypothesis challenges this belief, since morphogenetic fields, and memories, do not exist in any as yet measurable physical form. 

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Another by product of Sheldrake’s hypothesis is that it offers possible explanation for variety of paranormal phenomena. If human being can tune in their past, perhaps they can tune in the past of other individuals. Telepathy, then, would not be thought transfer but the reading of someone else’s recent memory of someone who is distance away.

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Sheldrake’s hypothesis also offers support for the idea of a collective unconscious put forth by the eminent Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Jung theorized that there was a pool of unconscious images and wisdom shared by all humans.

Could the collective unconscious be a form of species memory, a sum of human experience that out morphogenetic field passes on to us?