Where does our knowledge come from? It would seem that the answer to this question is simple. We all study at school, then, say, listen to lectures at the institute, read books. Without noticing it, we learn a lot in the family or from comrades, and in the end we draw from the media. At the same time, the question of the sources of knowledge possessed by a particular person is not so simple.
About tits
At the beginning of the last century in England, milk began to be delivered in bottles, closed with cardboard lids. The bottles were placed in front of the door, at the threshold. In the town of Southampton, local titmice quickly embraced this innovation. They easily pecked at the lids and drank milk. Soon this know-how became known to titmice all over Britain, and then most of Europe.
With the outbreak of World War II, when food cards appeared, milkmen no longer left bottles at the doorstep. And only eight years later they returned to the previous practice of milk delivery. And what? The tits immediately began to punch holes in the cardboard lids …
It would seem that there is no wonder. The point, however, is that tits live on average three years. This means that almost three generations of these birds have changed in eight years. How did the post-war tits adopt the experience of their ancestors? As you know, they do not know how to read, and no one has compiled manuals on how to steal milk for them.
About Morse Code
Promotional video:
Another example, now from observations of people. A psychologist from the USA Ardenne Malberg suggested that students master two Morse code of the same complexity.
The secret was that one option 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 the signals to the letters. Without exception, all students quickly and easily mastered the generally accepted telegraph alphabet, although they did not know that this was the original version.
Mysterious fields
To explain these phenomena, the famous English biologist Rupert Sheldrake put forward the theory of morphogenetic fields. In his opinion, the brain of a person or an animal itself contains neither memory nor knowledge. But the whole world around us is permeated by special morphogenetic (form-building) fields.
They accumulate all knowledge, all the experience of mankind or animals. Wanting to “remember” something, for example a multiplication table or some verses, a person automatically tunes his brain to this task and receives the information he needs from the outside.
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, tits all over Western Europe immediately began to "cope" with them.
Even if we assume that in some area birds have rediscovered this method of stealing milk, their knowledge could not spread so quickly to the vast bird range. This means that this information, valuable for tits, came from outside, it was preserved from 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 morphogenetic field, the generally accepted version was presented in huge numbers, it simply "scored" the experimenter's version.
Rupert Sheldrake noticed 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 student of the Land of the Rising Sun. And it was the second poem that the English students remembered much better!
Note that in order to "ask a question" to the information field of the Earth, a person must have certain knowledge, that is, acquire it through training. So, according to Sheldrake, it turns out that our brain is not just a "radio receiver", but something more.
Rear view
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 ever been found, although each of us has experienced this more than once on ourselves.
Sheldrake claims that a person does not feel a look (he has no eyes on his back), he catches the thought, the intention of the one who looks at his back. And this thought comes to him from the morphogenetic field.
One girl was hypnotized into thinking that she was actually 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, according to Sheldrake, she received information about a man who lived 400 years earlier, and to some extent the girl was given the ability to draw.
Doves, dogs and foxes
However, back to animals and birds. As you know, pigeons find their native dovecote sometimes even a thousand kilometers away. How do they do it? For a long time it was believed that they remember the topography of the area well. When this assumption was not confirmed, they began to believe that they were guided by magnetic lines of force.
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 in the open sea.
It has long been noticed that a dog, being in an apartment, feels that the owner is going or is already going home. In joyful anticipation, she sits at the door. A person at some point can change his plans, somewhere to linger, and then the dog moves away from the door, expressing disappointment with all kinds of expressions. Of course, neither dog's hearing nor smell has anything to do with it. Some other information channel is working.
Sheldrake believes that an "elastic thread" of morphogenetic 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 hound named Caesar made it from Switzerland to France, where its owner had gone, and found him not just anywhere, but in Versailles, in the royal palace. During the First World War, the dog Prince even swam across the English Channel in search of his owner!
Biologists studying the behavior of foxes once observed a striking picture. The mother fox went very far from the hole, while the fox cubs got naughty and even got up. Mother could neither hear nor see them.
The fox sat down, turned around and began to stare in the direction of the hole. And that was enough for the cubs to calm down and hide. The usual methods of communication, as in the described cases with dogs, could not take place here.
Brain Radio
It turns out that we are surrounded by an ocean of information. And the whole problem is how to get out into this boundless information world and tune your "brain radio" to the desired wavelength. Academician Vladimir Vernadsky wrote about this in the first half of the 20th century when he formulated his theory of the noosphere (“noos” in Greek means “mind”).
It would seem that this task is practically insoluble. But now we are using mobile phones extensively. And now there are hundreds of millions of them on the planet. However, we find in this sea of information the only number we need, and they find us too.
The theory of morphogenetic fields, it would seem, explains a lot in the nature of those phenomena that for a long time remained a mystery. However, physicists have not yet discovered, have not identified this field itself. Of course, this does not mean that such a substance does not exist in nature at all. So we need to look …