Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation — Memory, Instinct and the McDougall Controversy

Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation sets out the hypothesis of formative causation as a general account of how biological form, movement and behaviour are organized and how they come to repeat themselves. The book's central proposal is that the shapes, movements and habits of living things are shaped by fields that carry a memory of previous similar systems, and that this memory is transmitted not through genes or nervous tissue but through a process Sheldrake calls morphic resonance. The material captured here covers the book's later chapters and its two appendices, where the argument turns from morphogenesis to memory, instinct, learning and the inheritance of behaviour, and where Sheldrake proposes new experiments and closes with a dialogue with the physicist David Bohm.

The four kinds of morphic field

Sheldrake distinguishes four types of field, all of which he treats as instances of a single generic category. Morphogenetic fields organize the development of form; motor fields organize movements; behavioural fields organize behaviour; and social fields organize the behaviour of animals within a society. These are arranged hierarchically: a social field includes and organizes the behavioural fields of the animals that make up the society, those behavioural fields organize the animals' motor fields, and the motor fields in turn depend on nervous systems and bodies that are themselves organized by morphogenetic fields. Sheldrake's generic term for all of them is "morphic field," and he characterizes every morphic field as having an inherent memory supplied by morphic resonance from previous similar systems. On this account all four kinds of field are essentially habitual in character.

Memory and the brain

A substantial part of the argument concerns where memory is located. Sheldrake reviews the finding, associated with Karl Lashley's summation of hundreds of experiments, that a memory trace cannot be demonstrated as localized anywhere in the nervous system: limited regions may be necessary for learning or retaining a particular activity, but within those regions the parts appear functionally equivalent. He notes a parallel observation in the octopus, where learned habits survive destruction of various parts of the vertical lobe, leading to the conclusion that memory is both everywhere and nowhere in particular. Sheldrake presents these results as deeply puzzling for a mechanistic view, and he mentions Karl Pribram's suggestion that memory traces are distributed in the brain in a manner analogous to interference patterns in a hologram — a suggestion Sheldrake describes as remaining no more than a vague speculation.

The hypothesis of formative causation is offered as an alternative reading of the same evidence. If learned habits depend on behavioural fields that are not stored in the brain at all, but are instead given directly from the organism's own past states through morphic resonance, then the persistence of habits after brain damage becomes far less puzzling. Sheldrake frames this as an alternative interpretation of the findings rather than as a refutation of neuroscience, and he points forward to the experimental tests discussed in the following chapter.

Instinct, learning and the inheritance of behaviour

Sheldrake argues that the inheritance of behaviour cannot be reduced to genetic inheritance alone. On his account it depends on genetic inheritance, on epigenetic inheritance, on the morphogenetic fields that control the development of the nervous system and the whole animal, and on the behavioural and motor fields supplied by morphic resonance from previous similar animals. The conventional view, by contrast, treats innate behaviour as programmed in the DNA. He observes that relatively few experimental investigations of behavioural inheritance have been carried out, largely because behaviour is difficult to quantify, and he lists the kinds of measures that have been attempted — running speed on treadmills, frequency and duration of sexual activity, defecation scores, maze-learning ability, and susceptibility to audiogenic seizures — noting that breeding from high- and low-scoring animals shows a heritable component but reveals little about the inheritance of patterns of behaviour as such.

The book's treatment of birdsong illustrates the field framework. In species whose songs are almost entirely innate, the lack of individual variation is presented as both an effect and a cause of well-defined, highly stabilized motor chreodes: the more a pattern of movement is repeated, the greater its tendency to be repeated in future. In species with individual differences in song, morphic resonance is said to give less well-defined chreodes, with the general structure supplied by automatic averaging and the details depending on the individual and its own remembered experience.

The McDougall rat experiments

Chapter 11 revisits the long-running controversy over what became known as McDougall's Lamarckian experiment. Sheldrake reports that the similar improvement seen in both the trained and the untrained lines of rats ruled out a Lamarckian interpretation, so that McDougall's own conclusion was refuted — while his results were nonetheless confirmed. The outcome, in Sheldrake's telling, seemed inexplicable in terms of any current ideas and was never followed up. He argues that the results make good sense under the hypothesis of formative causation, but he is explicit that they cannot in themselves prove the hypothesis, since other explanations are always possible — for instance, that successive generations of rats became more intelligent for some unknown reason unconnected with their training. He also sketches what he regards as the most unambiguous future test: training large numbers of rats on a new task at one location and checking whether rats learning the same task at a second location hundreds of miles away show a progressively increasing rate of learning, with precautions against experimenter bias.

Learning rates and the limits of the hypothesis

Sheldrake extends the argument to human skills. Because morphic resonance is cumulative, recently acquired motor patterns should become progressively easier to learn, and he suggests that riding a bicycle, driving a car, skiing or playing a video game should all have become easier over time as more people have acquired those skills. He immediately concedes that even reliable quantitative data showing faster learning would be complicated by other probable influences, including improved machine design, better teaching methods and higher motivation, and that specially designed experiments holding those factors constant would be needed to obtain persuasive evidence. He also states plainly that the hypothesis cannot account for the origin of new patterns of behaviour in the first place: creativity, in his framing, lies outside the scope of natural science and can be addressed only on metaphysical grounds.

Proposed tests and the Bohm dialogue

Appendix A sets out a programme of new tests for morphic resonance, organized around the idea that newly arising morphic fields are weak and become stronger, faster and more stable as the process is repeated. Sheldrake notes that processes repeated for billions of years — the formation of hydrogen atoms, methane molecules or sodium chloride crystals — would show no measurable change, so tests must target new self-organizing systems. The proposed areas range from low-temperature physics, beginning with Bose-Einstein condensates, through melting points and crystal transformations, adaptations in cell cultures, heat tolerance in plants, the transmission of aversion, the evolution of animal behaviour, collective human memory and the improvement of human performance, to the speculative possibility of resonant computers. Appendix B is a dialogue with David Bohm on morphic fields and the implicate order.

Four possible conclusions

The book closes by setting out four possible metaphysical positions: the hypothesis of formative causation itself, modified materialism, the conscious self, and the creative universe with a transcendent reality. Sheldrake presents the hypothesis of formative causation as a testable claim about objectively observable regularities of nature, while insisting that it cannot explain the origination of new forms and new patterns of behaviour, nor subjective experience, and that such questions require metaphysical theories more far-reaching than natural science.

Evidence and its limits

The material is a book excerpt rather than a primary experimental report, and its claims are theoretical and programmatic. Sheldrake's own concessions are notable: the McDougall results cannot prove the hypothesis, the learning-rate prediction is confounded by design, teaching and motivation, and creativity is placed outside the scope of the hypothesis altogether. The argument that memory is not stored in the brain stands in tension with mainstream neuroscience, though Sheldrake presents it as an alternative interpretation of Lashley's and Pribram's findings rather than as a refutation of them. The capture covers the book's structure and selected passages rather than the full text, so the absence of a topic here should not be read as the book's silence on it.

Related work

The hypothesis developed here connects to the wiki's existing coverage of concepts/morphogenetic-fields and to the broader Sheldrake corpus, including Rupert Sheldrake, concepts/new-animism-sheldrake and concepts/gaia-hypothesis. Appendix A refers directly to Sheldrake's Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At, all of which are represented elsewhere in this collection.