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Rats That Learned to Remember

41:36 recording · EN · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Rats, birds and crystals seemed to learn faster worldwide; Sheldrake's morphic resonance explains it, and cost him everything.

  1. Three labs, three continents, the same impossible resultMcDougall's 165 tries fell to 20 over 30 generations, and Crew's unrelated untrained rats started at 25.
  2. Morphic resonance: nature remembers and repeatsSheldrake's claim is that once a system organizes itself, the pattern is easier for every similar system afterwards, anywhere.
  3. Suppression made the idea biggerThe Nature book-burning editorial turned the book into a bestseller, and the banned TED talk got millions of views elsewhere.
Executive Summary AI
  • In 1920 Harvard psychologist William McDougall put genetically identical wistar rats in a water maze with a moving bright exit that shocked them and a safe dark one, and his first generation needed 165 tries to learn the rule.3:28
  • Later generations improved without training: 141 tries, then 118, then 56 by generation eight, and just 20 tries by generation 30 — eight times faster — and even a line bred deliberately from the slowest learners improved at the same rate.5:34
  • F.A.E. Crew at Edinburgh set out in 1923 to debunk him and found his untrained control rats, genetically unrelated to McDougall's, averaged 25 tries on day one, and W.E. Agar got the same result over 20 years in Melbourne.9:34
  • Rupert Sheldrake, watching a bean plant grow toward a pole that would not be installed for two days, proposed that nature has a memory — morphic fields that any similar system can resonate with — and Nature's editor John Maddox answered his 1981 book by calling it the best candidate for burning in years, a campaign that ran through a 2008 stabbing in Santa Fe and TED pulling his 2013 talk.17:54
  • The host's verdict: the hundredth-monkey story was invented by Bligh Watson, the crystals have a seed-crystal explanation and the crossword and TV results are small and contested, but the rat data is real, replicated on another continent, and epigenetics suggests the effect may be genuine even if the cause is unknown.27:44
Key Quote
“Knowledge had crossed the ocean, and no one could explain how.”
— AJ1:19
Key Quote
“165 attempts, they mastered in 20. They were eight times faster at learning the same task.”
— AJ5:40
Key Quote
“But the untrained rats should have averaged 165 tries.”
— AJ9:30