Skeptic: Rupert's Resonance; November 2005; Scientific American Magazine; by Michael Shermer; 1 Page(s)

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to do a newspaper crossword puzzle later in the day? Me neither. But according to Rupert Sheldrake, it is because the collective successes of the morning resonate through the cultural morphic field.

In Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, similar forms (morphs, or "fields of information") reverberate and exchange information within a universal life force. "Natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind, however far away they were and however long ago they existed," Sheldrake writes in his 1988 book, Presence of the Past (Park Street Press). "Things are as they are because they were as they were." In this book and subsequent ones, Sheldrake, a botanist trained at the University of Cambridge, details the theory.