Revisiting Sheldrake's Theory of Morphic Resonance

Description

Rupert Sheldrake continues to be one of the most influential thinkers with respect to phenomena that are difficult to account for in terms of conventional models of psychology and physics. His recent book, The Science Delusion, sold out within just four days of publication. He is perhaps best known for proposing experimental protocols that enable the scientifically untrained to investigate common anomalous phenomena for themselves using intuitive and straightforward methods that nevertheless afford some degree of scientific control (e.g. Sheldrake, 2002). But his most significant contribution might be an empirically testable theory for anomalous communication among genetically similar organisms, which he calls morphic resonance (Sheldrake, 2009). Sheldrake’s theory describes how the thoughts or behaviours of physically isolated individuals might converge in a manner that is reminiscent of ESP because they are able to draw on a ‘morphic field’ that acts as a record of an organism’s or species’ previous behaviours.

Such experiences are typically dismissed by the scientific mainstream on the grounds that they are incompatible with the generally accepted model of reality in which consciousness is purely a product of brain activity and has capacities that are severely constrained in space and time. Yet research in parapsychology suggests that under some circumstances, people may be able to transcend those usual constraints so that, for example, their current thoughts and behaviours can be shown to be affected by accessing non-local information. Sheldrakes’s work is particularly interesting in suggesting that this material might be available unconsciously, allowing individuals to learn new information or behaviours more quickly by accessing this non-local information via the morphic field, but not giving rise to overt ‘psychic’ experiences. In this respect, it is consistent with the ‘reducing valve’ theory of consciousness suggested by Henri Bergson (1913) and popularised by Aldous Huxley (1961), whose origins can be traced back to Eastern religio-mystical conceptions of the nature (and capacities) of consciousness, and have recently seen a resurgence of serious philosophical interest (e.g. Marshall, 2005).

Sheldrake’s potentially powerful theory makes testable predictions that until recently have resulted in surprisingly few formal experiments. Those that had been conducted gave a fairly consistently positive picture, tending to confirm predictions derived from morphic resonance, but were undermined by the tendency for results to be reported in popular accounts (e.g. Sheldrake, 2009) rather than peer-reviewed journal papers. We felt it important to replicate this work with word-based stimuli in a laboratory-based study that was designed to meet stringent scientific standards so that it could be submitted for journal publication as a full paper, irrespective of outcome. In our first such study (Robbins & Roe, 2010), sixty participants were exposed to genuine and imitative Chinese characters and then had to identify which characters they could recognize from a sheet that also included decoys. As predicted by the theory of morphic resonance, participants accurately recognized significantly more of the genuine than false characters, but also were more likely to report false memories (i.e. claim that they recognized items that were never presented) that were genuine characters than false ones. Participants’ transliminality scores were also significantly related to their performance with presented characters but not with decoy characters.
These findings were interpreted as being consistent with Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance rather than as a confirmation of it because the theory is as yet too poorly specified to rule out some artifactual causes. For example, despite special care being taken to ensure that the false characters were adapted from genuine stimuli and appeared plausible to a native Chinese speaker, it was possible that the genuine characters were inherently more memorable than those contrived specially for the study, perhaps on aesthetic grounds. Any such difference could be restricted to just one or two of the stimuli used here, but since all participants were presented with the same small sample of five real and five false characters, even this could be sufficient to generate an overall difference between conditions.

In a replication study (Roe & Hitchman, 2011) we addressed these shortcomings by drawing upon a larger set of more systematically manipulated genuine and imitative characters, and using a more comprehensive system of randomising across participants. One hundred and one participants were shown eight genuine and eight imitative characters and then took part in a distractor task before being presented with symbols in pairs (one genuine and one imitative) matched for complexity. Contrary to the previous study, participants correctly identified a similar number of real and imitative characters, and in fact exhibited more false memories for the imitative; no relationship was found between performance and scores on measures of transliminality and openness to experience.

The most likely explanation would seem to be that the more thorough method in experiment 2 effectively removed weaknesses in the original design that produced an artifactual difference in memorability of genuine and imitative characters. However, it is also possible that the second experiment introduced some feature that inhibited performance at the task. For example, in shifting from a recognition task in which an array of symbols are presented simultaneously to a task in which symbols are presented with a matched pair, the recognition element may have been made too easy or may have encouraged guessing behaviour so that there was no scope for performance to be enhanced by a morphic resonance effect. Alternatively, it may be that some of the genuine symbols employed in experiment 2, which had to meet strict criteria in terms of properties of the head component and number of additional strokes, were rarer or less salient than some of the symbols from experiment 1 and so did not benefit from a ‘strong’ morphic field.

Period	1 Sept 2023
Event title	BPS Transpersonal Section Annual Conference: Returning to our roots
Event type	Conference
Location	Scarborough, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National