Are Memories Stored In Brains?

A long debate about the nature and causes of forms has been going on at least since the time of ancient Greece, and within the sciences has been most hotly contested in relation to the morphogenesis of plants and animals. Since the seventeenth century, mechanists – still the dominant orthodoxy – have tried to explain morphogenesis in terms of material causes present in eggs, whereas vitalists and holistic biologists have suggested explanations in terms of formative forces and, more recently, morphogenetic fields. This debate continues, and could well help to revolutionize not only biology, but also chemistry and physics.

Alfred Rupert Sheldrake is an English author and parapsychology researcher who proposed the concept of morphic resonance, a conjecture which lacks mainstream acceptance and has been criticized as pseudoscience. He has worked as a biochemist at Cambridge University, Harvard scholar, researcher at the Royal Society, and plant physiologist for ICRISAT in India. Morphic resonance is not accepted by the scientific community and Sheldrake's proposals relating to it have been widely criticized. Critics cite a lack of evidence for morphic resonance and inconsistencies between its tenets and data from genetics, embryology, neuroscience, and biochemistry. 

Morphic Fields: A Summary

The hypothesized properties of morphic fields at all levels of complexity can be summarized as follows:

1. They are self-organizing wholes.

2. They have both a spatial and a temporal aspect, and organize spatio-temporal patterns of vibratory or rhythmic activity.

3. They attract the systems under their influence towards characteristic forms and patterns of activity, whose coming-into-being they organize and whose integrity they maintain. The ends or goals towards which morphic fields attract the systems under their influence are called attractors. The pathways by which systems usually reach these attractors are called chreodes.

4. They interrelate and co-ordinate the morphic units or holons that lie within them, which in turn are wholes organized by morphic fields. Morphic fields contain other morphic fields within them in a nested hierarchy or holarchy.

5. They are structures of probability, and their organizing activity is probabilistic.

6. They contain a built-in memory given by self-resonance with a morphic unit's own past and by morphic resonance with all previous similar systems. This memory is cumulative. The more often particular patterns of activity are repeated, the more habitual they tend to become.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/COXFjKiZ6_w



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dark Matter Transducer

Image
Scientists are on a quest to solve one of physics’ biggest mysteries: What exactly is dark matter – the invisible substance that accounts for 85 percent of all the matter in the universe but can’t be seen even with our most advanced scientific instruments? Most scientists believe it’s made of ghostly particles that rarely bump into their surroundings; that’s why billions of dark matter particles might zip right through our bodies every second without us even noticing. Leading candidates for dark matter particles are WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) National Accelerator Laboratory is helping to build and test the LUX-ZEPLIN or LZ detector, one of the biggest and most sensitive detectors ever designed to catch hypothetical dark matter particles known as WIMPs. Identifying the building blocks of dark matter is one of the highest priorities of modern physics. Most scientists believe it’s made of ghostly particles that rarely bump int
Read more

Chasing The Dream

Image
Similar to many other fields in Psychiatry, understanding sleep and dreams as biological events remain unconsolidated and a work in progress. In 'The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams', psychologist Patrick McNamara describes the neuroscience of sleep and dreams while emphasizing on the evolutionary and social significance of the two. Organized into two sections, Part I Sleep and Part II Dreams, McNamara walks through definitions, characteristics, variations and theories of sleep and dreams. He draws examples from human case studies to describe the two phenomena in relation to human anatomy, as well as citing animal studies to explain possible mechanisms. McNamara approaches sleep and dreams as physiological and social functions that can be explained within the paradigm of Darwinian evolutionary biology. In other words, sleeping and dreaming involve fitness 'trade-offs' in our social context, such that one’s 'sleep expression' centers around his or her interactio
Read more

The Science Of Lucid Dreaming

Image
Lucid dreaming refers to realizing within a dream that you are dreaming. It is an ancient spiritual technique (used in Buddhist dream yoga, Taoism, Sufism, and numerous native wisdom traditions). However, the scientific evidence for lucid dreaming emerged in 1980, which makes lucid dreaming a fascinating subject, since this ancient spiritual technique has achieved scientific acceptance and investigation. In the video link below, Robert Waggoner examines the experiments which provided evidence for lucid dreaming, along with the more ancient view of lucid dreaming as a pathway to accelerated spiritual growth. He also examines the use of lucid dreaming by modern day psychotherapists to resolve recurring nightmares in people with PTSD, along with lucid dreaming's potential use in areas such as accessing inner creativity, exploring the unconscious, and spiritual practice. In 1975, Robert Waggoner taught himself a simple technique to lucid dream or become consciously aware of dreaming, w
Read more