hello. I'm Rupert Sheldrake, and I'm here with Mark Vernon to talk about memory. Hi there, Rupert. Nice to join you again. Good. Well, I thought as part of our series of talks on fundamental principles of nature, memory is one of them, and it's not clear how much memory is simply a psychological process that we have to explain in humans and animals, or to what degree it's a fundamental principle of the whole of nature. There's a sense in which everything has a memory or expresses memory, even things that seem very, very long-lived, like rocks and mountains and things like houses, tables, and chairs, and so on, persist, and they're in a sense their own memory. You go back the next day, and they're still there. There's a kind of persistence built into matter, which means that the past influences what's happening in the present, and it's a kind of continuous persistence. So we don't usually think of it as memory, but one can think of it as

a kind of memory, and I'd like to explore that later. Um, a more restricted view of memory is the psychological aspect of memory, the way we have habits which depend on what we've done in the past. That's one kind of memory, habit memory. When we learn some new skill, at first it's sort of conscious. When riding a bicycle, for example, you have to get on, and you have to know which pedals to press and hold the handlebars, that kind of thing. And you have to think about it when you're learning a new skill. Um, you follow instructions, but once you've mastered it, it becomes habitual. And a great deal of what we do, and a great deal of what animals do, is habitual. So there's habit memory, and then there's several other kinds of memory. Uh, recognition is a kind of memory where you know that something's happened before. For example, you meet a familiar person, and you immediately recognize them. You know, you know them. Um, and you recognize a place. Um, and so recognition memory is another kind.

and then there are several other kinds, but recalling is a more complicated one than recognition. Many people experience this in the common everyday situation: you meet someone, you recognize them, you know you know them, but you've forgotten their name. Recording the name is a more active process. You have to recall, call back their name, and it's not automatic like recognition. Recognition happens without any mental effort at all. You either recognize them or you don't, but recalling the name depends on having remembered it in the first place and calling it back. And then there's episodic memory, where you remember a particular incident, something that happened yesterday, or when you tell a story about something that happened in the past, you remembering the details of a particular event. So these are all different kinds of memory, and the way in which they're understood has varied over the years, but they're still not understood within science. It's still a profound mystery. We'll come back to that, but I thought it might be good

idea to start with looking at how in the western tradition philosophers have thought about memory. So, I wondered if you could say something about the ancient Greeks and classical ideas of memory in the Western tradition. Yeah, I mean, Aristotle is a good starting point for this because it feels like he lies behind a lot of what you've outlined, that kind of taxonomy of memory. For him, memory is really a kind of perception. It's a perception that looks into the past and sees what has happened. Now, that might happen in a quite deliberate way, like episodic memory or recalling a name, and it might happen in a more implicit way as well, a kind of embodied memory. So, a habit, such as you mentioned, there is something that's been laid down in our body, and our body remembers that. And so, for example, you know, the archer is one of Aristotle's examples, and when they know how to hit the target well, and be that come rain or shine, whether they're walking or running, it's a kind of memory that enables them to pull

back the bow and release the arrow to hit the target through practice, through habit. Um, and so it's linked to other things in Aristotle as well. Therefore, like, for example, virtue, the kind of person you are will have a bearing upon the quality of your memory. Um, and you can also, um, develop ways of enhancing your memory. Um, it is something you can, you can, you can, uh, interact with and train like you can train your perception. Um, and this in the medieval period actually developed into quite elaborate, um, memory exercises. Quite a well-known one is imagining a house full of cupboards and drawers, and you can put memories into these various, um, spaces. And then it's amazing actually how it works. You can recall far more than perhaps you ever thought you might be able to by traveling around this house and opening the drawer and seeing the memory in the drawer. Um, people can even turn it into a trick, um, but it's all based on this idea that it's a kind of inner act of perception, um, and by

looking you recover a memory. Um, in the early Christian period, um, memory was linked to other faculties of the human mind. Um, it was seen often as one of three key faculties. So, memory is different, for example, from thinking, um, which is something which is much more in the present, and also from willing, um, desire, which is something that's more into the future. So, it was sort of divided up in that way as well, that if memory was to do with the past, thinking is to do with processing what's happening in the present, and the will, willing, is to do with looking into the future. And in, uh, Augustine, for example, um, he also links that um, Tri sort of pattern of the human mind, relates it to the Divine mind actually, um, and he sees how memory is a bit like the fundament, um, the ground, the source, um, so it's a bit like God the Father, um, thinking is like the logos, the active principle in the present, making the present, so that's like the sun, and then the will is a kind of spirited um, desire that we have, and

so that is a bit like the spirit, um, and so for him, that was a way also of kind of training and ordering, um, the memory, thinking, and um, the will, and to align them with a kind of deeper principle that's not just good for human psychology, but it's in the cosmos as well, um, yeah, and, and then the other element which it's perhaps is worth drawing in now, um, is I work as a psychotherapist, and um, it always strikes me how memory is deeply connected to both to place but also to emotion actually, so this adds an element that perhaps isn't so much in Aristotle, um, but um, I mean people have would have had the experience where I don't know they turn a corner and in the instance of turning the corner on a street remember what they were saying to the friend that they were walking with on that corner, um, you know there and then, but it was a week ago and they can even remember the words that were said, you know, well you listen to a piece of music and you

remember where you were when you first heard that piece of music. So, I think the sense of memory being a kind of perception and link to place is echoed in that phenomenon, that experience that people would have had. But also in Psychotherapy, memory is clearly very linked to emotion. Something that happened that carried a lot of emotional valence is something that's much more easy to recall in terms of memory. Conversely, emotions can actually overwhelm memories as well. One of the ways of understanding trauma is that it's a kind of emotion that has overwhelmed the memory of what actually happened. People often hold on to the past in what's called screen memories, so that it's just one incident that has become enormous in their minds and both remembers but also strangely screens the details of what had happened or what had happened before. It's quite an interesting question to ask someone when they first approach you for Psychotherapy, you know, what their

earliest memories are, and if someone doesn't really remember anything very much, I'd know, say, before the age of 10. Um, you wonder what's happened. Um, because typically people start having certainly episodic memories, you know, memories of things and events from about the age of three or four. Um, prior to that, memory I think still happens, but it's much more a felt sense of what's going on in the body. And so people who have early difficulties in their life, they may not remember what happened, but they'll feel it maybe as a sense of dread, you know. Conversely, if early experiences were good, as a sense of happiness and pleasure. Um, it's linked to this emotional sense rather than what actually happened. So I'm very fascinated as well by how emotion and memory is very, very connected. Um, but maybe that leads us a bit into the difficulty of accounting for memory in the modern scientific view, you know. You know, where are memories stored? Are they stored at all? Um, what's going on when we recount

or recall a memory and so on. I mean, I know this is something which you've looked at an enormous amount. Yes, the scientific study of memory has been dominated by a kind of assumption for most of the history of investigation, certainly through the 20th and 21st century. Um, and that assumption is that it's stored materially, that memory has to be stored materially because, in a materialist worldview, everything's got to be material, including memory. Um, and this was not the traditional view necessarily. I mean, Plato, for example, the Neoplatonist philosopher, um, thought that memory was a function of the soul and was immaterial. Um, but the whole point of mechanistic materialism is to reject ideas like that and to try and say everything's material. Um, and then the question is, what are the material memory traces? And the most common idea is that they depend on modifications of the nerve endings, that when nerves have been activated, that somehow they're changed and more likely to be activated again. Um

by a similar stimuli, I mean it's a simple, straightforward kind of idea. Um, the trouble is that attempts to find these memory traces have failed over and over again. Um, in the famous experiments of Carl Lashley, the American neurosurgeon, um, he cut out bits of brain of rats. He trained them to learn tricks, then he removed different chunks of their brain to see where the memories were stored. And to his surprise, he found that it didn't seem to make much difference which bits you cut out. If you cut out the whole brain, of course, the rat couldn't do anything. But you had to leave some brain, but the amount of memory loss roughly corresponded to the amount of brain that had been removed. It didn't much matter if it was the front, the back, the top, the bottom, so on. Um, and similar experiments with octopuses uh, gave similar results, uh, which is why the octopus researchers said that memory seems to be everywhere and nowhere in particular within the brain. Um, and that led to the idea it's stored

holographically um a kind of metaphor from the Hologram which where the information stored at all different places in the holographic photograph um so that LED this was in the 1950s and 60s and' 70s that this became clear um but then people tried again um Steven Rose for example trained D chicks to imprint on particular moving objects and it's well known that young chicks and ducklings uh follow the first thing they see they think it's normally is their mother but you can drag a balloon in front of them and they'll imprint on it and they'll just follow the balloon thereafter and a particular bit of the brain and the trick became active when imprinting happened and so Rose said well here we are this is activated this is where the memories are stored um but his colleagues then found that if you cut out this bit of the brain a day later they remember they remember perfectly well so the memory traces again proved elusive uh so then they said well maybe it's moved to

different parts of the brain, so the memories could shift when this happens over and over again. Whenever people can't find them, they say, Well, they must be somewhere else. Then there were some more recent studies using optogenetic methods, where they genetically modify the organisms, usually mice, in such a way that when the memory, when the nerve cell becomes active, particular proteins are activated, which you can, by shining fluorescent light, you can make them fluoresce. So, you can actually see where which cells were active. And then, once you've got these particular green fluorescent proteins expressed in the cells, you can reactivate those cells by shining lights on them. So, in this case, they actually create memory traces by making particular cells labeled and then reactivate the labeled cells. And this seems to retrieve some simple memories. So, they said, Oh, that proves it. But actually, they created the memory traces. They actually deliberately labeled these particular cells and reactivated the same cells. So,

In a sense, they're artificial. Later turned out that when you look at the actual cells involved, when you label the cells and look at them, when you see which ones are actually involved when the memory is retrieved, when a mouse remembers which way to go in a maze, for example, then some of the same cells are reactivated when the memory is recalled, but only about 10% of them. Other ones are activated, and the memory seems to have shifted, and so it becomes very hard to say what it's in those cells. The most recent research used extremely sophisticated electrodes implanted in mouse brains, has shown that when memories are laid down, you have a very complicated pattern of waves in the brain, of waves of electrical activity. And when the memory is reactivated, you get very similar wave patterns. So the memory seems to be related to these waves, but the wave patterns don't necessarily occur in the same place. They can shift around in the brain, and this is now called

representational Drift. Um, so again, when they thought they'd found the memory traces, they're not actually etched into the nerve cell. It's a pattern of activity that's involved. It's not actual cells. So memory research has, um, has, after years and years and years and huge expenditure and lots of ingenious experiments, is very frustrating for researchers because they just simply can't find or pin down these memory traces, which leads to the possible idea that memories don't work that way at all. And I myself have long thought that memories don't work by memory traces, um, and I was very influenced by the French philosopher Bergson, whose book Matter and Memory, uh, first translated into English in 1911, um, argues that memories aren't stored in the brain, that the brain receives the memories but isn't storing them, that the memories depend on a kind of causation across time, a direct causational connection across time, rather than having to have a material link continuously. And this idea was taken up by Whitehead, Alfred North Whitehead, who

thought in terms of memories as pretensions. Prehensions are kind of reaching back and grasping something from the past but not being stored as memory traces. Um, the philosopher Bertrand Russell took this, uh, took it up and called it nemic, m-n-e-m-i-c, emic causation, a new kind of causation working directly across time. Uh, the philosopher Wundt also, uh, took the view that there was no reason there should be traces. He said, When I recognize somebody, I immediately know I've seen them before. There's nothing in my experience that tells me there are traces inside my brain. That's purely a theory of memory. So, uh, there's always been a strand of people who don't think it's in the brain, um, and I think the evidence points that way myself. My own theory is the hypothesis of morphic resonance, that similar patterns of activity influence subsequent similar patterns across space and time. Um, and that depends on similarity, a kind of resonance across time, and this hypothesis leads to the idea that since we're similar to lots of

other people in the past. Um, we may not just tune into our own memories but to lots of other people's. That be a kind of collective memory. Each species would have a collective memory of form and of behavior. Uh, indeed from this point of view, the instincts of animal species like spiders being able to spin webs without going to a web training school or class. They just instinctively know how to do it. Baby spiders. Um, that this is a kind of habit of the species, a memory of the species that's inherited collectively. Individual memory on this view would depend on the fact that we're more similar to ourselves in the past than we are to anyone else. So, individual and collective memory differ in degree but not in kind. Um, so I generalize this view of morphic resonance to say that actually there's memory inherent in all nature. Uh, that um, when a crystal crystallizes, it's drawing on the collective memory of previous crystals of the same chemical. Uh, forming and is sort of influenced by them. When a molecule or an

atom forms, or when a protein folds up, uh, all these processes at the chemical level are influenced by memory too, a kind of collective memory. And indeed, when this is taken in its most general form, this hypothesis leads to the idea that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. Um, the conventional view is that they were all there at the moment of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic Code. Um, but in an evolutionary Universe, which we've had in Western science since the 1960s, The Big Bang Theory with an evolutionary cosmology, why shouldn't the so-called laws of nature evolve as well and depend on a kind of memory, become like habits? So I'm suggesting that a lot of nature is Habitual. Um, and habits are unconscious in us, and there's no reason to assume they're more conscious than the rest of nature. So they're a form of unconscious memory. Uh, but there's also conscious memory. Uh, and both of them depend on morphic resonance. Now I think this also helps to

explain that single-celled organisms like paramecium or stentor can have memories. They haven't got nerves; they haven't got synapses; they're just a single cell, and yet it's well established, has been known for over 100 years, that they can remember stimuli. They can habituate to familiar stimuli, for example. They have a memory. Plants can have memories too and can habituate. Sensitive plants can habituate to being repeatedly stimulated. So the memory doesn't just depend on nerves. It's generally recognized; it's widespread in the whole of biology, which suggests, yes, it's not simply a process to do with nerves. It's more fundamental, and I think it's yet more fundamental than biology. I think it's inherent in all nature. And interestingly, the idea that memory is inherent in all nature, it's not just about humans and minds and higher animals and brains. This view is quite widespread in eastern philosophies, in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, and I know this is something.

you yourself have been interested in, and so I wonder if you could say something about Oriental Eastern views of memory. Yeah, just to say thanks for that, that's a tremendous sort of explosion of the sense of what memory might be. It's not just like a database that we kind of access like a computer, but is absolutely fundamental to our sense of connection with others and to the natural world as well. I mean, this partly connects up with what one observes about the link between emotion and memory, and that similarity you mentioned there, we're sort of most similar with ourselves, and so therefore that seems like personal memory. But similarity with others, emotional connection with others, is the way you experience that, seems to enhance memory as well. And then, of course, that can be similarity across a species, identification with a species, and so on. And so, you know, intuitively, that's another way of saying that what you're arguing there.

about morphic resonance kind of makes sense in terms of how we actually experience memory. Um, you know, similarly, what I was saying about how memory and place are so linked, both actually going to a particular place and a memory returning or using a kind of thought experiment, traveling around a place in order to stimulate memory as well. And this all sort of, this all seems to resonate very powerfully with what you're saying that, um, let me just add one more thing, add to that, which is that the, uh, learning through emotion, it is actually very fundamental in animals. I myself have recently been doing some research with nematode worms, C. elegans, a small 1 mm long round worm that's very widely used in biological research. Now, it has a very short generation time, about a week. And, um, it's now, it's now known that you can train round worms to be averse to particular chemicals or attracted to particular chemicals. For example, if you starve them in the presence of a particular chemical for

example butanone, a ketone related to the alcohol butanol. Um, um, then, uh, when they're exposed to butanone, after that, they're repelled by it. If, on the other hand, you associate um food with a particular chemical, for example, balide, then they'll be attracted to balide thereafter. So, smell is even in humans a very powerful uh connector with emotions and with memory um but it's very fundamental in these small animals. And moreover, if you expose them repeatedly to balide over several generations, then thereafter even without exposure to it um they retain this memory of being attracted to Benz alahh. And this is a form of what's now called epigenetic inheritance, the inheritance of acquired characteristics um. I think it depends partly on morphic resonance um so this the fundamental nature of emotion sort of star ation produces aversion and food produces attraction. This is pretty fundamental attraction and repulsion, some of the most fundamental emotions in us as well as in worms um and these

memory is very closely connected with them, yeah, and I think, you know, the link there with smell, emotion, and memory. There's the famous opening in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, you know, where the smell of the madeleine and the tea prompts this whole discourse on his early life. And it's not just the pure smell; it's the loveliness of the smell to him. So, it's an attractive feeling in that moment, and the whole thing opens up. I mean, another way of taking this and to link back maybe to this idea of memory being not just something that we have but being inherent in reality, just to go to the Indian ideas, but maybe first via Plato. You mentioned that Plotinus and the idea that memory is a function of the soul, and I think, you know, that's in Plato as well. And I think the way that it works in Plato is that memory is actually for him recollection and not just personal

recollection, but recollection in terms of, um, the way reality is, um, there's the famous experiment that he does, or at least he relates Socrates doing with the chat Mino in the dialogue called Mino, where he tries to show that Mino can solve, in inverted commas, mathematical problems, not by working it out, but by recollecting the nature of things. And so, in the dialogue, Socrates takes Mino through this sort of step-by-step act of recollecting things that then help them to solve the mathematical problem. And this is the idea, therefore, that, um, a fundamental part of what it is to be human is to recollect, um, and to remember, um, what we've forgotten, um, maybe because of the, you know, that the, I don't know, the business of everyday life obscures things from us, maybe because our virtues and the person we've become have cut us off from various kinds of memory, um, but again, I think it does actually connect with the sense of habit often Plato talks about in me rather.

mechanistic ways these days, as if there's a kind of blueprint that nature is sort of born from. But I think that that's really only since Francis Bacon that that happens, and something much more dynamic is really in the original Plato. And so, memory and feeling, and attunement to qualities like what's good and what's beautiful and what's true, that is all part of what it is to remember, and to draw on memories which are held, you know, ultimately in all things, which maybe takes us to ideas that one can associate with India, particularly in their origin. And of course, I think there was probably a lot of commerce between India and the Eastern Mediterranean, which means no doubt Plato too was shaped by these things. But maybe just to sort of leap into one particular aspect of the Indian understanding that I've been thinking about recently, actually, which is the role of memory in reincarnation. Because what you have there, say in the Buddhist framework, reincarnation is thought about in

different ways. I mean, Plato too has an idea of reincarnation, which he calls metempsychosis. Um, but in the Buddhist tradition, um, memory is in our, in any one life, you kind of lay down memories and which are kind of habits. Um, they're often referred to as karmic seeds. Um, their kind of attitudes, stances, um, the way that we are in the world, and that's me, that's remembered from one life to another. And so, certainly for the Buddhist, it's not that one particular person survives a reincarnation, but you as an individual have a sort of an opportunity, even a responsibility, to shape that which would get laid down through these karmic seeds, and then that will inform the person or the creature, um, that's incarnated next. Um, and you know, torturous, difficult parts of life, the suffering of life, the craving and the aversion, like you were mentioning there, these are called Samaras, and um, they're like knots or twists, and which actually, you know, makes

a lot of sense to me as a psychotherapist because I think that right from the early stages in this life um we're reacting either with aversion or with desire um and so those habits kind of build up and people can live a whole life um shaped by the habits that built up from early life whether they be useful or or or inhibiting suffering or sort of releasing um and um yeah so that's that's the sort of one way at least in which memory is seen to be part of the the very fabric of reality um you know moving people across not just their own lives and but between lives as well um and it has this subtle twist that it's not the person so maybe this relates a bit to it's not as it were stored um in the one individual um but is part of the mure into which someone's born and so maybe like a sort of morphic resonance shapes the way that that person um lives their life um and of course the

you know the liberated or enlightened person gets sight of that in the Buddhist tradition and is so able to do something about that which they've inherited by memory um and to therefore move into a different future and the one that would just be determined by the memory that they've inherited. Did that, did those kind of ideas have an impact upon you? Well, I was, when I lived in India for seven years, as you know, and when I arrived there, I'd already had the idea of morphic resonance, but I found India a much more helpful environment to think about it because instead of it seeming completely weird, the idea of morphic resonance, most Indian Hindus that I talked to just simply took it for granted. They seemed, you know, when I explained the idea of morphic resonance, they were completely blasé about it. They said, There's nothing new in this idea. Ancient Rishis have said this thousands of years ago, you know, that there's memory in everything, and so on because some Hindu and Buddhist

philosophical systems generalize these reflections on reincarnation to the whole of reality, that all everything in reality has seeds of memory or Karma U, which are expressed in all nature. So, um, the idea of a memory inherent in all nature is pretty well taken for granted, I would say, in Hindu philosophy. And when I discussed it with, it wasn't just Indians who studied deep philosophy for years, there were sort of ordinary people I met on train journeys, you know, who they liked talking about big ideas, on at least they did when I lived there on railway journeys. You've got hours and hours, 'cause the trains are so slow. Um, the, so I found, you know, almost everyone took for granted the idea that there's some kind of memory in nature. So, in a sense, this paradigm of memory everywhere and in everything, which is implicit or explicit in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, is very different from the normal Western view, which is that the whole universe is amnesic, uh, because it's governed by eternal laws, which

don't have memory within them because they're beyond space and time. Along together, rocks and things stay the same because of eternal laws and um U and but we're moving more to this Eastern view, not just through morphic resonance but through quantum theory, which shows us that matter isn't just brute persistent stuff like little billiard balls and atoms. We're often pictured as sort of billiard balls and bits of stuff, but processes, wave patterns that repeat, and in a sense, an electron, which or a proton, which just continues to exist, is a wave pattern. Everyone agrees in quantum theory they're wave patterns, but it's a wave that just keeps going, and in a sense, you could say it's self-resonant, a wave propagating itself, and in a sense, that self-propagation of a wave, a process which is repeating itself, involves a kind of memory. The persistence of rocks and mountains involves a kind of inherent memory in the things that persist. That's why they persist um uh because we can't any longer take

for granted that they just possessed because their stuff matter is no longer seen even in mainstream science as just stuff. It's a vibratory pattern that repeats, and this repetition is a kind of memory process. So, I think memory, far from being something confined to human minds or animal minds, is deep and in all nature. Yeah, and I mean, this would make sense if you're at all inclined to an idealist worldview rather than a materialist one. So, the idea that the fundamental stuff of reality is more mind-like than it is stuff-like, um, and then, um, that which persists is that which is remembered, um, that which is habitual, um, and I guess that at the ultimate level, um, everything is held in the mind of God, and so everything for its existence, moment by moment, arises from the Divine mind, um, and the Divine mind's faithfulness, as would be a kind of religious language that's used, is faithfulness to reality, um, that that's is, that's where our security rests, that's the ground of our being, um, it, it

has this kind of dynamic lived sort of quality, um, and therefore, you know, related to that upon which we depend, um, and um, praising um, that upon which we depend because it gives us this life. Moment by moment, um, these all are very natural parts of the religious systems that would see um, the world in this way, um, it's not just um, God being a kind of detic um, lawmaker who sets things off um, at year zero, and then it just rattles along like a more or less perfect machine, and but that rather our relationship to the Divine is active and Alive Moment by moment, and because of who we are and that we persist um, is as a result of this um, energy um, this uh, presence, this place even that we have in in in the Divine mind. Well, I think that's a good place to conclude. Not is memory fundamental to Nature, it's fundamental to the Divine, and indeed, it's just fundamental um, and um, I'm very pleased we've had the chance to think this through and arrive at that conclusion. Yeah, I mean, it's again, it's a wonderful

subject because when you ask how the attempts materialistically to account for memory are doing, and as you so brilliantly sort of outlined there, um, realize that they seem to stumble at every new attempt. But that needn't be a recipe for despair, because actually what it does is it takes you back to these older ideas, but renewed as well, um, and shows that a scientific subject like memory, a part of um, you know, fundamental part of nature, does lead us into these wider perceptions and Horizons once again, which is what we found several times now we've discussing these things. So thanks very much indeed, r. Well, thank you, Mark.

How does memory work? Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogue 90

How does memory work? Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogue 90

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