Chapter 11

Remembering and Forgetting

We can consciously remember people, places, words, ideas, stories, events, tunes and a host of other things. We usually take our memories for granted and do not think about how they work. On the basis of what they have been told in the course of their education, most people also take for granted that everything they remember is somehow stored inside their brains in the form of material patterns, the memory traces. There are supposed to be traces in our brains for every tune we know, for everyone we can recognize, for every word in our vocabulary, for every event we can recall – a myriad of memory traces for everything we can remember.

But this is an assumption. No one has ever seen a memory trace; and scientists who have looked for these traces have failed to find them. Again and again, neuroscientists thought they had pinned down memory to a part of the brain, but they were then confounded by the discovery that many memories survived the destruction of the supposed memory stores.

In this chapter I explore the possibility that memories are not stored inside the head. What we remember is not inscribed in the brain but depends on morphic resonance. We remember because we resonate with ourselves in the past.

As in the case of animal memory, a part of the brain that seems to play an essential role in the formation of memories is the hippocampus. As in other animals, the human hippocampus is concerned with remembering spatial locations and connecting together spatial and other sensory information. The brains of London taxi drivers, famed for their navigational abilities, have enlarged hippocampi.1 And the hippocampus is one of the first areas of the brain to be affected in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, along with an inability to form new long-term memories.

I first discuss the morphic fields of behaviour and of mental activity, and the general role of morphic resonance in memory. I then consider an essential precondition for conscious memory: awareness. In general, we cannot remember something if we were not aware of it in the first place; and awareness arises against a background of unawareness, owing to habituation, which itself depends on morphic resonance. I go on to consider the role of morphic resonance in recognizing and recalling and its relationship to brain activity. I end with a discussion of forgetting.

Behavioural and mental fields

According to the hypothesis of formative causation, the morphic fields that organize our behaviour are not confined to the brain, or even to the body, but extend beyond it into the environment, linking the body to the surroundings in which it acts. They underlie the extended mind, discussed in the next chapter. They co-ordinate sensation and action, bridge the sensory and motor regions of the brain, and co-ordinate a nested hierarchy of morphic fields, right down to those that organize the activity of particular nerve and muscle cells.

A similar conception arose within the Gestalt school of psychology in the 1920s and 1930s and has continued in various forms ever since.2 Gestalt psychologists often described the connections between the body and environment as ‘psychophysical fields.’ They thought of the behavioural environment not in terms of objects alone, but also in terms of the ‘dynamic properties’ of the psychophysical fields. Kurt Koffka gave a simple illustration of this principle. Imagine yourself basking in the sun in a mountain meadow, relaxed and at peace with the world. Suddenly you hear a scream for help – your feelings and your environment immediately change:

At first your field was, to all intents and purposes, homogeneous and you were in equilibrium with it. No action, no tension. As a matter of fact, in such a condition even the differentiation of the Ego and its environment tends to become blurred: I am part of the landscape and the landscape is part of me. And then, when the shrill and pregnant sound pierces the lulling stillness, everything is changed. Whereas all directions were dynamically equal before, now there is one direction that stands out, one direction into which you are being pulled. This direction is charged with force, the environment seems to contract, it is as though a groove had formed in a plane surface and you were being forced down the groove. At the same time there takes place a sharp differentiation between your Ego and the voice, and a high degree of tension arises in the whole field.3

Koffka pointed out that the first type of field, the homogeneous, is very rare; any action presupposes inhomogeneous fields, fields with lines of force. These fields organize behaviour towards ends or goals. Football players, for example, as they move towards the enemy goal line, ‘see the playing ground as a field of changing lines whose principal direction leads them towards the goal … All the motor performances of the players (as shifting about on the field) are connected with the visual shifting.’ These responses are not a matter of logical thought; for a player in his tense state, ‘the visual situation produces the motor performances directly.’4

The Gestalt approach and the hypothesis of formative causation resemble each other in their conception of fields, but they differ in that the Gestalt psychologists did not have the idea of morphic resonance. Rather, they adopted a conventional theory of memory traces. They believed that the fields could be remembered because of traces they left in the brain. As Koffka put it, ‘The field of the present process comprises the traces of previous processes.’5 By contrast, on the hypothesis of formative causation, it is not necessary for the fields to leave material traces in the brain, any more than the programs to which a radio set is tuned leave traces in the set. A field brings about material effects while the system is tuned in to it. But if the tuning is changed, then other fields come into play: the original field ‘disappears.’ It appears again when the body in relation to its environment re-enters a state similar to that in which the field was expressed before; the field becomes present again by morphic resonance.

Behavioural fields organize our habitual activities, and usually do so without our being conscious of them. But conscious mental activity, for example thinking about alternative courses of action, does not necessarily involve overt behaviour. It is more concerned with virtual or possible activity. The fields associated with this mental activity are therefore different from behavioural fields and can most appropriately be described as mental fields. Like behavioural and morphogenetic fields, mental fields stabilized by morphic resonance from similar past patterns of activity. The distinction between morphogenetic, behavioural, and mental fields is of value when considering the kinds of organized activities with which these fields are associated; but it is not a hard and fast distinction. They are like different parts of a spectrum of morphic fields, and merge into each other. For example, in the case of Amoeba, which moves by changing its shape, the associated fields are intermediate between morphogenetic and behavioural fields. And in the case of a newly invented human skill, such as playing a new video game, the mental fields through which the game was conceived shade off into behavioural fields as playing it becomes habitual.

The connections between morphic fields and the activities of the brain are discussed in more detail in the following chapter. In this chapter I explore the idea that morphic resonance underlies our memories.

Memories and morphic resonance

Our original experiences of events, as well as our recalling of them, are influenced by our interests and motives. We remember what is significant and meaningful more than that which is not. Nothing has significance and meaning by itself; things matter only in relation to their context and the people involved. Frederic Bartlett, one of the pioneers of memory research, called the systems of relationship and interaction through which we construct meaning schemata.6 Arthur Koestler thought of them as perceptual and motor hierarchies.7 The psychologist Gordon Bower thinks of ‘organizational factors in memory’ in terms of grouping together, or classifying, or categorizing of psychological elements on the basis of common properties, and then the relating of such classes to one another in multiple ways.8

From the point of view of the hypothesis of formative causation, such schemata, hierarchies, or organizational factors are morphic fields, organized in hierarchies and connected together in multiple ways through higher-level fields.

Our ability to identify and categorize things depends on patterns of relationship. For example, we can recognize a word whether it is spoken in a high or low voice, with a regional or foreign accent, by an old person or a child, or handwritten or printed. We recognize it through the pattern of sounds, the way the different elements or phonemes are related to each other in time, or the pattern of the letters as sequences in space. Likewise we recognize the form of a letter in a wide variety of typefaces and handwritings. We recognize a tune when it is hummed or played on a piano, a violin, or a flute; we also recognize piano, violin, flute and humming sounds by their characteristic qualities irrespective of the tune being played. Likewise we recognize plants, animals, and things – cedars, cats, and chairs – even though individuals differ in detail.

On the present hypothesis these classes or categories can be thought of in terms of morphic fields that organize our perceptual experiences, closely associated with language, through which we organize, describe and communicate our experience. These classes or categories of experience are part of our biological and cultural inheritance, and are stabilized by morphic resonance with our own past experience and also with many other people’s. Like all morphic fields, those underlying perceptions, categories, and concepts are not rigidly defined in terms of exact positions and dimensions and frequencies, but are probability structures. This is why categorization takes place on the basis of similarity, and does not depend on exact identity.9

In short-term memory, elements of recent experience are preserved for a limited time, rather like echoes. This kind of memory may well be associated with reverberating patterns of electrical activity in the nervous system, maintained by self-resonance. But if these elements are not related together by a higher-level resonant field, their temporary coexistence soon fades away, and there is no cohesive pattern to be recalled.

Long-term memory is different. It depends on the establishment of higher-level fields that can become present again by morphic resonance. This establishment of new fields depends on awareness. Habituation is the other side of the coin.

Habituation and awareness

Our conscious memories are of events that took place in particular places at particular times, even if we cannot always ‘place’ the memories geographically or chronologically. It is precisely because of the uniqueness of these past experiences that we can remember them consciously. In academic psychology they are called autobiographical or episodic memories. Another kind of conscious memory concerned with understandings, meanings and knowledge, is called semantic memory – for example remembering that strawberries are red. Episodic and semantic memory are also called declarative or explicit memory, because they can be consciously declared or discussed. By contrast, implicit or procedural memory applies to skills and habits, and works unconsciously.

Our conscious experience takes place within a framework of repetitive habits: our own, other people’s, and the world’s in general. Like all animals, we habituate to patterns that are repetitive or continuous. In our own experience, habituation produces a sense of familiarity that enables us to take for granted most aspects of our environment and ourselves. But habituation is an active kind of unawareness. Through the contrast with the familiar, of which we are unaware, we are aware of what is unfamiliar. The unfamiliar generally attracts our attention. And without attention, we are unable to establish the patterns of connection that allow us to remember.

Habituation can be understood in terms of self-resonance: the more similar the present patterns are to those from the past, the more specific the morphic resonance. The less the difference between the present and the past, the less we are aware of any difference and the less we notice about this aspect of our present experience.

Habituation is fundamental to the way that our senses and perceptual systems work. If the rhythmic electrical pattern aroused in the sense organs and the nervous system by a particular stimulus continues, this repeated pattern is subject to self-resonance and ceases to be noticed. We notice changes and differences, not what stays the same. For example, we cease to notice continued tactile stimuli, such as the contact of our bottoms with chairs and of our clothes with our skins. What we notice are changes in touch or pressure: if someone touches us unexpectedly we are aware of it at once. We feel differences in surfaces or textures as we move our hands and fingers over them; we sense changes.

The same is true of other senses. We soon stop noticing familiar smells, sounds, tastes, and sights. Habituation occurs over a wide range of time scales, from year to year, day to day, minute to minute, and even from second to second. Such short-term habituation in the visual system, for example, gives a sensory awareness of differences as the eyes scan over things; we notice boundaries more than continuous surfaces in between; and we notice things that move more than things that stay put.

Habituation over all time scales involves a kind of unconscious memory of the familiar, which is the background against which we can be aware of changes, movements, and differences.

I now consider two principal aspects of our memories, recognizing and recalling, and the role that morphic resonance may play in them.

Recognizing

Familiarity usually results in a habituated unawareness. It is experienced consciously through recognition. Recognition is the awareness that a present experience is also remembered: we know that we were in this place before, or met this person somewhere, or came across this fact or idea. But we may not be able to recall where or when, or recall a person’s name. Recognition and recall are different kinds of memory: recognition depends on a similarity between present experience and previous experience and is an awareness of familiarity. Recall is an active reconstruction of the past on the basis of remembered meanings or connections.

Normally we recognize more easily than we recall. I may recognize a plant but not recall its name. But if someone reminds me of the name, I recognize it at once.

Many psychological experiments have shown that recognizing is easier than recalling. In one study, subjects were asked to memorize 100 words that were presented to them five times. On average they could recall only 38 per cent. But when they were asked to recognize the 100 words mixed with 100 unrelated filler words, almost all were recognized: the mean score was 96 per cent.10 The differences were even more striking in visual experiments. For example, subjects were asked to memorize a meaningless shape. When asked to reproduce it by drawing, their ability declined rapidly, within a few minutes. By contrast, they could pick this shape out from a range of similar shapes almost perfectly many weeks later.11

Most of us have remarkable powers of visual recognition that we take for granted. In one study, people were shown 2,650 colour slides for ten seconds each. Later, they were shown pairs of slides, one of which was a new picture, the other seen previously. When asked to identify the one seen before, they were more than 90 per cent correct after several days. The subjects’ performance was almost as good when the original 2,650 slides were shown for one second each, rather than ten seconds, and when slides were shown with right and left reversed.12

According to the hypothesis of formative causation, recognition, like habituation, depends on morphic resonance with previous similar patterns of activity within the sensory organs and the nervous system. These rhythmic patterns of brain activity are similar because the sensory stimuli are similar, if not identical. The more the similarity, the more the morphic resonance.

Recalling

Recognizing involves the sensory aspect of memory, and depends on the sensory organs and the sensory portion of the nervous system. Recalling involves active reconstruction, in other words the motor aspect of memory, and depends on the motor organs and the motor portion of the nervous system. This is clear enough in the case of our memories for physical skills, such as riding a bicycle or playing the piano, and in speaking and writing. All of these kinds of recall involve habitual patterns of activity that are more or less unconsciously organized. On the present hypothesis such patterns are organized by chreodes, and the chreodes are stabilized by morphic resonance from similar past patterns of activity.

Conscious recall, even if it does not show itself in any objectively observable physical activity, is also an active process. We often call to mind past experience and factual knowledge when we are trying to solve a practical problem. These memories often contribute to a solution to the problem: a new pattern of organization.

Recalling also occurs in dreams and daydreams: here too it is part of an active, constructive process. The weavings of past experiences in our dreams often surprise us. Or we recall things during conversations with other people, or in response to particular circumstances and sensations, such as evocative smells. Recalling is part of our ‘inner lives’ in our ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘internal dialogue’. We ‘go over’ things in our minds.

Animals that appear to think may well have a mental recall of elements of past activities. Chimpanzees that had played with boxes and sticks were able to work out how to use them to reach a bunch of bananas suspended out of their reach (see above). Such mental activity is virtual rather than material, in the realm of possibility rather than fact.

Most human recalling depends on language. We tell other people about our experiences. Verbal recall is necessarily active: it depends on speaking or writing, and it also depends on our ability to code our experience in words in the first place. People who ‘talk to themselves’ or ‘think out loud’ actually utter their thoughts, and people who ‘think on paper’ write them down. Even when we are thinking silently, using language in our thinking, we are speaking in a virtual, as opposed to actual, manner. Non-verbal auditory memory is active too: for example I can hum a tune I know, or I can recall it silently by singing or humming it virtually, ‘under my breath’.

The ability to recall a particular experience depends on the connections we made in the first place. To the extent that we use language to categorize and connect our experiences, we can use language to reconstruct these past patterns. But we cannot recall connections that were never made.

Our short-term memory for words and phrases enables us to remember them long enough to grasp the connections between them, and understand their meanings. We most often remember meanings – patterns of connection – rather than the actual words. It is relatively easy to summarize the gist of a recent conversation, not to reproduce it verbatim. The same with written language: you may be able to recall facts and ideas from the preceding chapters of this book, but you are unlikely to recall a single sentence word for word.

In general, short-term memory provides the opportunity for categorized elements of our recent experience to be connected with each other, as well as with past experiences consciously recalled. What is not connected is forgotten. I suggest these connections depend on morphic fields. The structures of language provide the basic framework for these connections, and are associated with nested hierarchies of chreodes (see above).

In the case of spatial recall – for instance in remembering the layout of a particular house – the morphic fields that connect different things and places together are related to patterns of movement of the body, for example going through a door, along a corridor, climbing stairs, along a landing and to a bedroom. These patterns of movement are organized by morphic fields, recalled through morphic resonance. These fields are associated with bodily movements in relation to the environment; they integrate patterns of movement with relevant features of the environment perceived through the senses. These morphic fields are spatio-temporal: spatial in the sense that they are extended in and around the body and embrace the environmental space, and temporal in that they are associated with patterns of activity that unfold over time, influenced by memories and pulled towards attractors.

The principles of memorizing and recalling have long been understood from a practical point of view. In ancient Greece and Rome, the basic principles for practising the art of memory were taught to students of rhetoric through mnemonic systems, techniques for establishing connections that enable items to be recalled more easily. Some depend on verbal connections and involve coding the information in rhymes, phrases, or sentences. For instance, ‘Richard Of York Gained Battles In Vain’ is a well-known mnemonic for the colours of the rainbow (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet). Other systems rely on visual imagery. For instance, in the ‘method of loci’ you first memorize a sequence of locations, for example the rooms and cupboards of your own house, and then place the items you want to remember in them. You can recall them by visiting the places in your imagination one by one.13 Modern mnemonic systems, such as those advertised in popular magazines, are heirs of this long and rich tradition.14

Alexander Luria, a Soviet neuropsychologist, wrote a classic monograph on The Mind of a Mnemonist. His subject, S., was working as a junior newspaper reporter in Russia when he astonished his editor by his remarkable ability to write detailed reports without the aid of notes, an ability that S. himself took for granted. He was sent by the editor to see Luria, who tested him with ever longer sequences of words and numbers – first 30, then 50, then 70 – and found that he could recall them perfectly with apparent ease in any order, even years later. He could memorize poems in foreign languages that he did not understand, as well as complex mathematical formulae. Luria found that he used a version of the method of loci.

When S. read through a long series of words, each word would elicit a graphic image. And since the series was fairly long, he had to find some way of distributing those images of his in a mental row or sequence. Most often (and this method persisted throughout his life), he would ‘distribute’ them along some roadway or street he visualized in his mind … This technique of converting a series of words into a series of graphic images explains why S. could so readily reproduce a series from start to finish or in reverse order; how he could rapidly name the word that preceded or followed one I’d selected from the series. To do this, he would simply begin his walk, either from the beginning or the end of the street, find the image of the object I had named, and ‘take a look at’ whatever happened to be situated on either side of it.15

Not all mnemonists use visual imagery. Some rely on the construction of verbal or numerical associations.16 But none remember in the passive way implied in the popular notion of ‘photographic memory’. Memorizing and recalling are active mental processes. What are recalled are the mental constructions through which the memorized items were linked together.

Brains and memories

Decades of brain research have shown that building up of declarative, conscious or autobiographical memories depends on the activity of the hippocampus, a region in the temporal lobe of the brain found in all mammals – and in reptiles too. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, a set of brain structures bordering the cerebral cortex playing a variety of roles concerned with emotions, flight or fight reactions, sexual pleasure, and the sense of smell. Damage to the hippocampus can destroy the ability to form new memories and cause disorientation. The hippocampus is one of the first regions to be damaged in Alzheimer’s disease.

In the hippocampus, there is a spatial coding system; distinctive patterns of electrical activity within it are related to the position of the animal and its movements. At the same time the hippocampus is connected to all the different sensory systems. Influences from the senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch all converge here, together with nervous pathways concerned with spatial navigation. Together they set up patterns of electrical activity that play an essential role in the formation of episodic memories.17 On the present hypothesis, these wave-patterns of electrical activity are linked to morphic fields, and enter into morphic resonance with similar previous patterns.

Recognition depends on activity in different regions of the brain, particularly in the perirhinal cortex in the temporal lobe. The removal of this part of the brain in monkeys and rats impaired their ability to recognize individual objects, as well as smells and tactile stimuli. By contrast the removal of the hippocampus had relatively little effect on recognition.18

Brain research has been remarkably successful in revealing the kinds of activities that occur in parts of the brain such as the perirhinal cortex and the hippocampus when memories are forming. Similar parts of the brain are active when memories are being recalled. Neuroimaging studies have shown that there is enhanced activity in the hippocampus when people are memorizing words, pictures, objects or faces, and also when they are recalling them.19

Both the formation of memories and their retrieval involve characteristic patterns of brain activity. But what happens in between is utterly obscure. It is simply assumed that the memories are somehow shifted somewhere else in the brain where they are stored, as discussed in Chapter 9. The disappearance of the memories between their formation and retrieval is exactly what would be expected on the basis of morphic resonance. The rhythmic patterns of electrical activity in the nervous system are patterns in morphic fields. When similar patterns occur again, morphic resonance leads to recognition and a sense of familiarity.

The fact that the long-term memory is not ‘stored’ in the hippocampus is made very clear by a remarkable experiment carried out in the laboratory of John Gray in London with some unfortunate marmoset monkeys. They were first trained to discriminate between pairs of objects depending on whether the object was on the left or the right. Then their hippocampus regions in their brains were deliberately damaged by surgery, after which the animals could no longer carry out the task they had learned, nor could they learn new discrimination tasks. Then Gray and his colleagues transplanted into the damaged hippocampus region some neural stem cells, which grew and repopulated the damaged region.

A couple of months later the marmosets were tested again and at once showed good recall of the discriminations they had learned at the start of the experiment, before the damage to the hippocampus was made. From these results, one can conclude that even during the period of amnesia the forgotten memories were intact but inaccessible: and that restitution of the hippocampus provided anew the means to access them.20

These results agree well with an interpretation in terms of morphic resonance, but provide no evidence at all for the storage of the memories in ‘traces’ somewhere else in the brain.

The trace theory of memory

The conventional idea that memory must be explicable in terms of physical traces within the nervous system is an assumption rather than an empirical fact. The assumption has been questioned by a series of philosophers, including Plotinus in the third century AD.21 The most stimulating critique remains that of the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his book Matter and Memory.22

In addition there are fundamental logical problems for any trace theory of memory.23 When the hypothetical memory traces need to be consulted or reactivated, they are called up by a retrieval system. But for the retrieval system to be able to identify the stored memories, it must be able to recognize them. But to do this it must itself have some kind of memory. There is thus a vicious regress: if the retrieval system is itself endowed with a memory store, then this in turn requires a retrieval system with memory – and so on.24

In spite of such arguments, the lack of empirical evidence for memory traces, and the difficulties faced by mechanistic models of memory storage within a dynamic nervous system (see above), the idea of traces has been remarkably persistent. One reason for its durability has been the apparent lack of any alternative; another is that it appears to be supported by two well-known lines of evidence: that brain damage can lead to loss of memory, and that electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain can evoke memories. I now consider this evidence in more detail.

Brain damage and loss of memory

Brain damage can result in the loss of memory in two distinct ways, known as retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Retrograde or ‘backwards’ amnesia is the loss of the ability to remember things that happened before the damage occurred. Anterograde or ‘forwards’ amnesia is a loss of the ability to remember things that happen afterwards.

From the conventional point of view, retrograde amnesias may be due either to the destruction of memory traces or to a destruction of the ability to retrieve the memories from the memory store (or to a combination of both). By contrast, from the point of view of the hypothesis of formative causation, the potential for past patterns of activity to influence the present by morphic resonance cannot be destroyed; rather, brain damage affects the ability of the brain to tune in to its past patterns of activity. Anterograde amnesia, from the conventional point of view, results from the loss of the ability to form new memory traces; from the point of view of formative causation, it involves the loss of the ability to establish new morphic fields.

The known facts can be interpreted from both points of view. The purpose of the present discussion is to show that the effects of brain damage on the loss of memory provide no persuasive evidence in favour of the trace theory. The hypothesis of formative causation fits the facts just as well, if not better.

In concussion as a result of a sudden blow on the head a person loses consciousness and becomes paralysed. The loss of consciousness may last only a few moments or for many days, depending on the severity of the impact. As a person recovers, he may seem normal in most respects, but is unable to recall events before the accident: he has retrograde amnesia. Typically, as his memories return, the first events he can recall are those that occurred longest ago. Memories of more recent events return progressively. In such cases, the amnesia cannot be due to the destruction of memory traces, for the lost memories return. However, the events immediately preceding the blow on the head may never be recalled: there may be a permanent blank period. For example, a motorist may remember approaching the crossroads where the accident occurred, but nothing more. A similar ‘momentary retrograde amnesia’ also occurs as a result of electroconvulsive therapy, administered to mental patients by passing a burst of electric current through their heads. Such patients usually cannot remember what happened immediately before the administration of the shock.25

The generally accepted explanation for such amnesias is that they represent a failure of long-term memories to be established. Events and information in short-term memory are forgotten because a loss of consciousness prevents them from being connected up into patterns of relationship that can be remembered (see above). The failure to make such connections, and hence to turn short-term memories into long-term memories, often persists for some time after a concussed patient has recovered consciousness: this anterograde amnesia is also sometimes described as ‘memorizing defect’. People in this condition rapidly forget events almost as soon as they occur. They may, for instance, forget a meal they have just eaten or news they have just heard.

Various memory defects occur as a result of damage to the central cortex caused by strokes, accidental injury, or surgery. Some, such as massive lesions of the frontal lobes, have general effects on the ability to concentrate, and hence affect the formation of fresh memories. Others have quite specific effects on abilities to recognize and recall.26 The ability to recognize faces, for instance, may be lost as a result of a lesion in the secondary visual cortex in the right hemisphere. A sufferer may fail to recognize the faces of his wife and children, although he still knows them by their voices and in other ways. This inability to recognize faces is called prosopagnosia (from the Greek prosopon, face, and agnosis, not knowing) and is one of many kinds of loss of power to recognize the import of sensory stimuli. Neurologists have described agnosias for colours, sounds, animate objects, music, words, and so on. These are sometimes described in terms such as mind-blindness or word-deafness.

Neurologists generally attributed these agnosias to disturbances of organized patterns of activity in the brain rather than to a loss of memory traces.27 The same is true of other disorders, such as the aphasias (disorders of language use) due to lesions in various parts of the cortex in the left hemisphere; and apraxias, the loss of previously acquired abilities to manipulate objects in a co-ordinated way.

On the present hypothesis, these abilities are lost because the brain damage affects parts of the brain with which the morphic fields are normally associated. If an appropriate pattern of brain activity is no longer present, the fields cannot be tuned in to or bring about their organizing effects.

This interpretation makes it much easier to understand the fact that lost abilities often return; patients often recover partially or completely from brain damage even though the damaged regions do not regenerate. The appropriate patterns of activity come into operation somewhere else in the brain. This is almost impossible to understand if programs are ‘hard-wired’ into the nervous system; but fields can move their regions of activity and reorganize themselves in a way that fixed material structures cannot. Such recoveries are reminiscent of the regenerative abilities of plants and animals, and they pose the same kind of problem for mechanistic explanation.

In general, after traumatic head injury, memories and skills return at a rapid rate during the first six months, with recovery sustained at a lower rate for up to 24 months. Defects in sensory, motor, and cognitive functions caused by brain injury due to penetrating wounds are characterized by an enormous resiliency of function in the great majority of cases, ultimately leading to little or no detectable defect.28

One of the leading researchers on the long-term effects of brain damage, Hans Teuber, after years of studying the recovery of wounded veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, concluded that ‘this far-reaching restitution of function remains, in my view, unexplained’.29

We are far from understanding how the brain is organized, how memory works, or how people recover from brain injuries. The mechanistic interpretations of these phenomena are vague and speculative, despite decades of intensive research. The hypothesis of formative causation offers a new approach that may turn out to be more fruitful; but at present the question is open.

The electrical evocation of memories

During operations on conscious patients with various neurological disorders, the brain surgeon Wilder Penfield and his colleagues tested the effects of mild electrical stimulation of various regions of the brain. As the electrode touched parts of the motor cortex, appropriate limb movements occurred. Stimulation of the primary auditory or visual cortex evoked auditory or visual hallucinations, such as buzzing noises or flashes of light. Stimulation of the secondary visual cortex gave rise to visual hallucinations of flowers, animals, familiar people, and so on. And when some regions of the temporal cortex were touched, some patients recalled apparently specific memory sequences, for example an evening at a concert or a telephone conversation. The patients often alluded to the dream-like quality of these experiences.30

The electrical evocation of these memories might mean that they were stored in the stimulated tissue, as Penfield initially assumed; or it might mean stimulation of that region activated other parts of the brain that were involved in remembering the episode.31 But it could also mean that the stimulation resulted in a pattern of activity that tuned in to the memory by morphic resonance.

Significantly, Penfield himself, as a result of further reflection on these and other findings, abandoned his original interpretation that certain parts of the temporal cortex should be called the memory cortex: ‘This was a mistake … The record is not in the cortex.’32 Like Lashley and Pribram (see above), Penfield gave up the idea of localized memory traces within the cortex in favour of the theory that they were distributed in various other parts of the brain instead, or as well. The advantage of this hypothesis is that it accounted for the recurrent failure of attempts to find these traces; the disadvantage was that it is untestable in practice.

In the light of formative causation, the elusiveness of the memory traces has a very simple explanation: they do not exist. Rather, memory depends on morphic resonance from the patterns of activity of the brain in the past. We tune in to ourselves in the past; we do not carry our memories around inside our brains.

Forgetting

There are at least five kinds of forgetting, conventionally explained in terms of hypothetical memory traces and retrieval mechanisms, but they are just as compatible with morphic resonance.

First of all, the majority of our experience is forgotten more or less immediately. We pay no particular attention and form no new connections or associations between the disparate elements; consequently no characteristic connections or associations can be remembered. From the mechanistic point of view, this is because appropriate memory traces were not laid down in the first place; from the point of view of formative causation, it is because appropriate morphic fields were not established.

Second, forgetting depends on the context; we may remember things under some conditions and forget them in others. It is a matter of common experience that we can recall people’s names or words in foreign languages in familiar contexts better than in unfamiliar contexts. The context-dependence of recall has often been demonstrated experimentally.33 This kind of forgetting cannot be explained in terms of the decay of memories, but rather serves to emphasize that recall depends on patterns of interconnection; the more the similarity, the greater the resonance.

Third, repression, to which Sigmund Freud drew attention, involves an inability to remember certain events, especially painful ones, which nevertheless continue to exert a powerful unconscious influence on behaviour. They are difficult, if not impossible, to recall consciously because of their disturbing significance. No one supposes that they are forgotten because hypothetical memory traces have decayed.

Fourth, various kinds of memory loss occur as a result of brain damage. But as we have just seen, this does not prove that the lost memories were encoded in the damaged tissue.

Last, much forgetting appears to occur because of the interference of subsequent similar patterns of experience and activity. Our experience is cumulative, and similar experiences tend to ‘run together’ or to be confused in such a way that we cannot recall them separately. Such repetition strengthens habits, but at the same time works against conscious recall. For example, we cannot recall all the separate occasions on which we have driven a car, although these cumulative experiences underlie our driving skills. We also know from our own experience that if we visit an interesting place or meet an important person only once, we are likely to remember our impression in detail. But if we visit a place or meet a person many times, the first occasion is harder to remember; the details tend to be lost in a ‘blur,’ a cumulative composite memory of the place or the person. In the psychological literature, this reduction in the ability to recall experiences after subsequent similar experiences is called retroactive interference, and has often been demonstrated experimentally.34 In this context, the emphasis in mnemonic systems on forming striking and unusual images makes good sense.

The blurring or confusion that underlies this kind of forgetting fits well with an interpretation in terms of morphic resonance, which pools or fuses together influences from similar past patterns of activity. Individual differences between similar past patterns of activity are not exactly lost, because they contribute to the overall probability structures of the morphic fields; but they can no longer be recalled separately. They are confused or confounded with each other, in a way that recalls the root meaning of both these words. The Latin word confundere means to pour together or mix.

Memories of past lives

On the hypothesis of formative causation, the reason we have our own memories is that we are more similar to ourselves in the past than we are to anyone else; we are subject to a highly specific self-resonance from our own previous states. But we are also similar to members of our own family, to members of social groups to which we belong, to people who share our language and culture, and indeed to some extent we are similar to all other human beings, past and present. Our individual and collective memories differ in degree but not in kind.

Morphic resonance might provide a new interpretation for a relatively rare but well-documented phenomenon: memories of past lives. Some young children spontaneously claim to remember a previous life, and sometimes give specific details about the life and death of the previous person whom they claim to be. Dozens of case studies have been documented.35 Careful research has shown that some of the details children gave were correct, and that the children could not have known them by normal means. Adults under hypnosis sometimes have apparent memories of past lives, but many may be fantasies and are much less impressive than in the spontaneous cases in young children.

Those who accept the evidence for memories of previous lives usually explain it in terms of reincarnation or rebirth. However, the hypothesis of formative causation provides a different perspective: in such cases a person may for some reason tune in by morphic resonance to a particular person who lived in the past. This could account for the transfer of memories without having to suppose that the present person is the past person.

However, the principal way in which we are influenced by morphic resonance from other people may be through a kind of pooled memory. We have already discussed the collective influence of other people’s habits on the learning of languages and the acquisition of physical and mental skills, and considered ways in which this possibility can be, and has been, tested by experiment (Chapter 10). The idea that a collective memory underlies our mental activity follows as a natural consequence from the hypothesis of formative causation. A very similar idea already exists in the concept of the collective unconscious worked out by Carl Jung and other depth psychologists.

Collective memories are like habits in the sense that the repetition of similar patterns of activity effaces the particularity of each individual instance of the pattern; all similar past patterns of activity contribute to the morphic field by morphic resonance and are, as it were, merged together. The result is a composite or average of these previous similar patterns, which we can think of by analogy with composite photographs (Fig. 6.4). Jung called such habitual patterns archetypes and thought that they were built up by collective repetition:

There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution … When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated.36

I return to a discussion of Jung’s ideas in Chapter 14 in the context of the social and cultural aspects of human mental life. In this chapter we have seen how our experiences of remembering and forgetting can be interpreted in terms of morphic fields and morphic resonance. We now consider the relationship of our mental activity to our brains, and explore the new interpretations that the hypothesis of formative causation provides.