At the beginning of the last century in England, milkmaids began to deliver milk to homes in bottles closed with cardboard lids. The bottles were placed under the door, at the threshold. In the town of Southampton, local tits quickly took advantage of this innovation. They easily pecked at the lids and drank milk. Soon this "know-how" was adopted by tits from all over Britain, and then most of Europe. With the outbreak of World War II, when food cards appeared, bottles were no longer left at the milkmaid's doorstep. And only eight years later they returned to the previous practice of milk delivery. And what? Tits immediately began to peck at the cardboard caps …
Morphogenic fields
It would seem that this is surprising? And the thing is that the life expectancy of tits is on average three years. This means that almost three generations of these birds have changed in eight years. How did the post-war tits immediately adopt the experience of their ancestors? As you know, they do not know how to read, and no one has compiled manuals on stealing milk for them.
Another example, now from observations of people. A psychologist from the United States, Ardenne Malberg, suggested that students master two Morse code of the same complexity. The secret was that one variant was actually Morse code (which the subjects did not know), and the other was an imitation of this alphabet, but with completely different correspondences of signals to letters. Without exception, all students quickly and easily mastered the generally accepted telegraph alphabet, although they did not know that this was the first option.
To explain these phenomena, the famous English biologist Rupert Sheldrake put forward the theory of morphogenic fields. In his opinion, the brain of a person or an animal contains neither memory nor knowledge. But the whole world around us is permeated by special morphogenic (form-forming) fields. They accumulate all knowledge, all the experience of mankind or animals. Wanting to "remember" something, for example a multiplication table or some poetry, a person automatically tunes his brain to this task and receives the information he needs from the outside.
Which is easier to remember?
At first glance, Sheldrake's theory seems ridiculous and even insane. But let's not rush to conclusions. Titmice born in the second half of the 1940s could not have had the experience of their pre-war ancestors. However, as soon as milk bottles appeared again, these birdies all over Western Europe immediately began to "crack down" with them. Even if we assume that in some area the birds rediscovered the method of stealing milk, their knowledge could not spread so quickly to the vast titmouse habitat. This means that the information valuable for the tits came from outside, it was preserved from the ancestors, which the birds had never seen before.
And why did the students master the generally accepted Morse code much faster than the variant invented by the experimenter? Apparently, in the morphogenic field, this variant was presented in huge numbers, and he simply "scored" the experimenter's variant.
Rupert Sheldrake noted that a person assimilates knowledge the easier, the more people know it. One day, he asked students to learn two Japanese quatrains in English translation. The first was little known even in Japan, and the second was known to every Japanese schoolchild. And it was the second poem that the English students remembered best!
I am Raphael
For many centuries, scientists have tried to explain how it turns out that a person with his back feels someone else's gaze. No reasonable explanation for this phenomenon has been found, although each of us has experienced it on ourselves more than once. Sheldrake claims that a person does not feel the look, he catches the thought, the intention of the one who is looking at his back. And this thought comes from the morphogenic field.
The theory of morphogenic fields can also explain the phenomenon of predictions. Here, however, a slightly different scheme operates. A person, making this or that forecast, “sends” it into the general information field in the form of a certain “order”, which then returns (or does not return) in the form of an actually accomplished event.
One girl was hypnotized into thinking that she was the great Italian artist Raphael, who lived in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. And this girl began to draw decently, although she had not noticed such abilities before. In all likelihood, she received information about a person who lived four hundred years ago, and to some extent transferred the ability to draw.
The thread between the owner and the dog
But back to the animal kingdom. As you know, pigeons find their native dovecote a thousand kilometers away. How do they do it? For a long time, it was believed that birds remember the topography of the area well. When this assumption was not confirmed, they began to believe that they were guided by the Earth's magnetic field lines. But even this hypothesis, under strict scientific verification, disappeared. The literature describes cases when pigeons found their home, even if their dovecote was placed on a ship sailing in the open sea.
It has long been noticed that a dog left at home feels that its owner is finally returning and sits down at the door. The owner at some point can change his plans, somewhere to stay; then the dog moves away from the door, expressing disappointment with all its appearance. Of course, neither dog's hearing nor smell has anything to do with it. In this case, some other channel of information opens up for her.
Sheldrake believes that an "elastic thread" of morphogenic nature is formed between the dog and the owner. The same thread forms between a pigeon and its native dovecote. And, following this thread, the pigeons return home.
In the 16th century, a greyhound named Caesar made it from Switzerland to France, where its owner had gone, and found him, and not just anywhere, but in Versailles, in the royal palace. And during the First World War, the dog Prince even swam across the English Channel in search of its owner!
We are surrounded by an ocean of information
Biologists who have studied the behavior of foxes once observed a striking picture. The mother fox went far from the hole, while the fox cubs were naughty and even got out. Mother could neither hear nor see them. Nevertheless, she suddenly turned around and began to gaze intently in the direction of the hole. And that was enough for the cubs to calm down and hide again! The usual methods of communication, as in the described cases with dogs, could not take place here.
It turns out that we are surrounded by an ocean of information. And the whole problem is how to enter this boundless information world, how to tune your "brain radio" to the desired wavelength. It would seem that this task is practically insoluble. But today we use mobile phones extensively. There are hundreds of millions of them on the planet now. However, we find in this sea of information the only number we need, and they also find us.
The theory of morphogenic fields, it would seem, explains a lot in the nature of those phenomena that have long remained a mystery. However, physicists have not yet discovered these fields. Of course, this does not mean that such a substance does not exist. So we need to look …