Rupert Sheldrake in his excellent “The Science Delusion“, challenges a number of basic tenets (or dogmas) of science as it is most commonly practiced and preached. The key belief he challenges is that everything in the universe is material and mechanical – the universe and everything in it is “stuff”. One of the most thought provoking chapters is about memory. He asks “Are memories stored as material traces?”
You’ll be familiar with the idea. Memories are stored in the brain. When we want to recall a memory we find it in the brain somewhere and call it up somehow so we can examine it. Analogies such as filing cabinets are used – all that has ever happened to us is filed away somewhere in the brain and we have some kind of amazing google-type search engine which goes and finds things for us inside our own brains.
In this model, whatever happens, whatever we feel, whatever we think leaves some kind of physical trace –
Maybe that trace is a network of neurons which fire off together, or maybe it is a storage area of groups of neurons. The trouble is that despite millions of pounds of research and thousands of researchers using a multitude of technologies and methods, we can’t find such traces. Nobody has managed to discover where the physical traces are which are accessed by our search engines.
Sheldrake proposes a different model. One of resonance.
In this model, the brain is more like a tuner, and memories are more like the radio or tv signals which surround us all the time. Recalling something is a matter of tuning in to those signals. (No not the radio and tv signals!)
Rupert Sheldrake’s “big idea” is “morphic resonance”. He suggests that in memory we tune in to our own personal “morphic fields”. We, in a sense, tune in to our past selves, our past experiences, which remain as fields in the universe. Whatever you think about the morphic fields idea, this idea of memory being more like a tuning in to fields which are not contained within individual brains is a fascinating one.
Think about it.
Heroes Not Zombies 
I have just finished Rupert Sheldrake’s book. I thought it was an excellent exposure of ideas that we can too easily become dogmas. This is why I would argue all doctors should take interest in not just the history of our profession but also of science.
For me, Rupert Sheldrake’s best chapter was his chapter on scientific objectivity. The chapter on memory that asks if memories really are stored as material traces was also fascinating. The chapter on biological inheritance is well written and thought provoking
This is a book worth reading even though I am not so sure about the pansychism of all matter?
[…] Sheldrake, in his Science Delusion, proposed an interestingly different model – one of resonance. Briefly, he suggests that memory is stored outside the person and in the […]