Morphic Resonance: Formative Causation, Behavioral Fields and the Proposed Tests

Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation sets out a single hypothesis and then follows it through biology, behaviour and inheritance. The hypothesis is that nature is organised by fields that carry their own memory: whenever a system of a given kind comes into being, it is shaped not only by its genes and its immediate environment but also by the influence of all previous similar systems. Sheldrake calls that influence morphic resonance and the overall proposal the hypothesis of formative causation. The book is written as a research programme rather than a settled result — it offers a testable claim, gathers historical evidence that the author finds otherwise inexplicable, and closes with a list of experiments that could, in principle, falsify it.

The hypothesis and its two directions

Sheldrake distinguishes two ways the idea can be probed. Morphic fields act in space, connecting the parts of a morphic unit — an embryo, an organ, a behaving animal, a society — so that the whole behaves as a coordinated unit rather than as an assembly of independent pieces. Morphic resonance acts in time, so that the field of a present system is shaped by the fields of past similar systems. The two are complementary: the field gives spatial organisation, the resonance gives it a history.

A central consequence is that morphic fields are habitual. A pattern that has occurred many times is reinforced by resonance from all those previous occurrences, so it becomes faster, more stable and harder to deviate from. A pattern that has just appeared is weak, because nothing similar has gone before to reinforce it. Sheldrake uses this to explain why some processes look fixed and others look plastic. Hydrogen atoms, methane molecules and sodium chloride crystals have formed unimaginably often over the history of the universe; their habits are effectively frozen, and no measurable change in their behaviour should be expected. Only genuinely new self-organising systems, he argues, offer a chance of detecting the effect.

A hierarchy of fields

The book's middle chapters extend the field concept from development to movement and behaviour. Morphogenetic fields organise morphogenesis, the coming-into-form of an organism. Motor fields organise movements. Behavioural fields organise behaviour, and social fields organise societies. These are nested: a social field includes and organises the behavioural fields of the animals within the society; those behavioural fields organise the animals' motor fields; and the motor fields depend on nervous systems and bodies that are themselves organised by morphogenetic fields. Sheldrake uses morphic field as the generic term covering all of them, and insists that all four kinds are essentially habitual in the same way.

The concept of the chreode — a canalised pathway of development or movement — carries much of the argument. A chreode is a route that a process tends to follow once it has been established, and repeated use deepens the canal. Sheldrake applies this to birdsong: in species whose songs are almost entirely innate, the lack of individual variation is both a cause and an effect of a highly stabilised motor chreode, since the more a pattern is repeated the more it tends to be repeated again. In species with individual differences in song, the chreode is less sharply defined; its general structure comes from an averaging effect across the species, while the details depend on the individual bird and its own past habits, remembered through resonance with itself.

Memory without storage

The most concrete empirical case in the excerpt concerns memory. Sheldrake draws on Karl Lashley's decades of lesion experiments, which failed to isolate a memory trace to any particular region of the nervous system. Learned habits in mammals often survive extensive damage to the cerebral cortex and subcortical regions, and when memory is lost the loss tracks the total quantity of tissue destroyed rather than the location of the damage. Lashley's own summary was that no isolated localisation of a memory trace can be demonstrated anywhere in the nervous system, though limited regions may be necessary for learning or retaining a particular activity. Work on the octopus reached a comparable conclusion about the vertical lobe, leading to the formulation that memory is both everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Sheldrake treats these findings as deeply puzzling for a mechanistic account, and notes Karl Pribram's proposal that memory traces are distributed like interference patterns in a hologram — a suggestion he regards as no more than vague speculation. His alternative is that learned habits are not stored in the brain at all: they depend on behavioural fields that are given directly from the organism's own past states by morphic resonance. On this reading, the persistence of habits after brain damage stops being paradoxical, because the habit was never localised in the tissue to begin with. The empirical findings here are well established; the interpretation placed on them is Sheldrake's own and is contested by mainstream neuroscience.

The McDougall rat experiment

The book's most discussed historical case is William McDougall's long-running rat study. Across successive generations, rats appeared to improve at maze learning. The result was widely read as evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but the final report by Agar's group in 1954 showed that both the trained line and the untrained control line had improved at similar rates. That ruled out a Lamarckian reading and refuted McDougall's own conclusion — yet, as Sheldrake emphasises, the improvement itself was confirmed rather than explained away. McDougall had already noted the possibility that the change reflected a real alteration in the constitution of the whole stock, while admitting he could not suggest what its nature might be.

Sheldrake's position is carefully bounded. He argues that the pattern makes sense under formative causation, since rats learning the same task would reinforce a shared behavioural field, but he concedes that the results cannot in themselves prove the hypothesis. Other explanations remain open — for instance, that successive generations became more intelligent for some reason unconnected with training. He also notes that the finding was never followed up, which is why it remains an anomaly rather than a settled datum.

Proposed tests

The book's experimental programme is set out in chapter 11 and Appendix A. The cleanest design Sheldrake proposes for animals is a two-site rat study. Large numbers of rats would be trained on a new task at one location, while a second group hundreds of miles away would be tested on the same task. Initial learning rates at both sites should be roughly equal. Under formative causation, the rate should rise progressively where the large numbers are trained, and a similar rise should appear at the distant site even though few rats had been trained there. Precautions against conscious or unconscious experimenter bias are essential; one suggestion is that the distant experimenters test several different tasks at regular intervals, so that they do not know which task is being mass-trained elsewhere.

For human learning, Sheldrake predicts that skills of recent origin — bicycle riding, driving, skiing, video games — should become progressively easier to acquire as more people acquire them, because of cumulative morphic resonance. He is explicit that this prediction is confounded by better machine design, improved teaching and higher motivation, and that only specially designed experiments holding those factors constant could yield persuasive evidence.

Appendix A lists a wider range of candidate systems, moving from low-temperature physics to human culture: Bose-Einstein condensates, melting points, crystal transformations, adaptations in cell cultures, heat tolerance in plants, the transmission of aversion, the evolution of animal behaviour, collective human memory, improvements in human performance, and resonant computers. The logic is the same throughout — look for processes that are new enough that their habits are not yet fixed, and see whether they speed up or stabilise as more instances accumulate.

What the hypothesis does not claim

Sheldrake is unusually explicit about the limits. Formative causation is presented as a testable hypothesis about objectively observable regularities, not as a complete theory of reality. It cannot explain the origin of new forms or new patterns of behaviour, and it cannot explain subjective experience. Those questions, he argues, require metaphysical theories rather than natural science, and the book's closing chapter sets out four possible metaphysical positions that could accompany the hypothesis: modified materialism, the conscious self, the creative universe, and transcendent reality. Appendix B is a dialogue with David Bohm on morphic fields and the implicate order, exploring how the hypothesis might sit alongside a broader ontology.

Coverage and evidence limits

The material available here is a table of contents together with selected chapter passages, chiefly from the later chapters on behavioural fields, instinct and learning, the inheritance and evolution of behaviour, the concluding metaphysical discussion, and the opening of Appendix A. The full text of the early chapters on morphogenesis and the detailed results of the Appendix A tests are not included, so the absence of a given argument or result here should not be read as evidence that the book omits it. The historical findings Sheldrake cites — Lashley's lesion work, the octopus studies, the McDougall rat generations — are documented in the wider literature; the morphic-resonance reading of them is the author's own framework and remains unconfirmed. The proposed experiments are protocols, not results.

Related work

The argument connects to Sheldrake's other books on the same programme, including Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At, which he cites for the spatial aspect of morphic fields. It also sits alongside his broader writing on the disenchantment of nature and on a revived animistic view of the world, and it touches the Gaia hypothesis through the shared idea that wholes can have properties not reducible to their parts. See Rupert Sheldrake, concepts/morphogenetic-fields, concepts/new-animism-sheldrake, concepts/gaia-hypothesis and concepts/disenchantment-of-nature.