Ecological Intelligence (17 page)

In the same way that Ellis and Toronchuk question the emphasis on the genetic influence in favor of environmental triggers in structuring our brains, Sheldrake, too, believes that it is too simplistic to attribute morphogenesis to mere genetic programming. He believes in specific, nongenetic morphic fields that include social and cultural fields, molecular, behavioral, and mental fields, and he thinks they all have one thing in common: they contribute toward the organization of the systems within that particular field. A good example of this is the amazing way that flocks of birds fly at high speeds without colliding with each other. Another example is the way that shoals of fish, when threatened, suddenly change direction like a single organism, scatter, and then reform. The dilemma is obvious. Is it sufficient to say that the genetic neurophysiology of birds and fish are such that they can selectively avoid midflight or midswim contact, or do they fly or shoal within a field of information and influence that shapes and patterns their flight or swim? Perhaps it is both.

Sheldrake is well aware of the skepticism he has evoked. He acknowledges that he does not know the origins of morphic fields or how they evolve, but through well-documented experiments on termite communication, pets who know when their owners are coming home, and the human sense of being stared at (see mirror neurons in chapter eight) he nevertheless believes these fields exist. They may be there as a matter of pure chance, or perhaps as a result of some inherent creativity in mind and Nature, he says, but they exist and, in true evolutionary style, they bring with them a kind of memory, a signature or a pattern of what has gone before. What is more, he writes, “once a new field or pattern of organization comes into being, then through repetition, this field becomes stronger. The same pattern becomes more likely again.” In the human realm, says Sheldrake, “this kind of collective memory is closely related to what C. G. Jung called the collective unconscious.”

Providing a scientific way of thinking about ends, purposes, goals, and intentions, mathematician René Thom, in a branch of mathematics called dynamics, has constructed mathematical models that support Sheldrake’s field theory. These models focus on what Thom calls attractors—a field of influence toward which biological systems are pulled or developed. Imagine an eddy spinning in a flowing river. Now imagine a group of eddies, some of them moving closely together, others coalescing. This image is a metaphor for the way attractors work. As in the notion of a mindfield, they are in the same river, the same process, they develop, they become different expressions of the same substance, they have a life and a death, they have influence and are in turn influenced by each other and by their surroundings. Is it too poetic to imagine that we live in a field in which eddies of like-mindedness are not only drawn to each other, but merge according to the intensity of the attraction? And what about an eddy as an individual life, eventually, upon death, returning to the substance from which it was formed? Or the realization that it is the substance (Nature) that is eternal and not the autobiographical self?

A
nother view of a mindfield is that of the scientist Richard Dawkins, author of
The Selfish Gene
. He considers the possibility that we have given birth to a new and more rapid kind of evolution involving culture rather than chemicals. Genetics has genes, so culture, he believes, must have its own units of transmission. He calls these cultural units memes. Memes, he says, are thought processes—ideas, notions, images, fantasies, symbols, tunes, fashions, methodologies, strategies, philosophies that become part of a meme pool, infiltrating the thought processes of individuals who are either sensitive to or ready for them. They can be understood as projections of consciousness striving to continue their existence in a new creature. In Dawkins’s words, “they leap from brain to brain,” or as Sheldrake suggests, they are passed on not only from ancestors to their descendants, but move sideways from one group of organisms to another across gaps of space and time.

Lyall Watson, drawing on the principles of natural selection, sees memes as living structures capable of implanting themselves in another mind, like viruses that parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. He adds that they are then forced, as viruses are, to compete with one another in a truly Darwinian fashion. In other words, they compete for access to minds that will ensure their survival.

If natural selection does operate at the level of thought processes, then it is clear that fashions and philosophies, particularly those that come and go, are good examples of evolutionary cul-de-sacs. In a sense, we are porous to thought processes that are both conscious and unconscious, and the memes that survive and that are successful are the ones that are in the right place at the right time—the ones that fulfill our immediate as well as our long-term needs. They stand the test of time.

THE BRAIN-ENVIRONMENT INTERPLAY

D
eep in the left and right temporal lobes of our brains is a constellation or nucleus of highly sensitive nerve cells known as the amygdala, the Latin name for almond—a description of the shape of this constellation of cells. Thanks to the work of neurobiologist Paul Whalen and his colleagues, we now know that the amygdalae are able to detect emotionally charged situations, even if we are not aware that we are in that situation. What is more, if the situation or activity is one of fear or anger, the right-side amygdala is particularly active. The sensitivity of these nuclei, then, do not depend on selective attention to what is going on. Could this unconscious sensitivity to what is happening around us be the basis for what we often refer to as intuition or a gut feeling? To me, the following clinical findings point in this direction.

In medical terminology, there is a condition known as functional blindness. In these patients, the eyes as well as the optic pathways are intact. They are blind as a result of damage to the occipital region of the brain—the area responsible for the reception and interpretation of visual images. Although blind, these patients nevertheless pick up on the ambience or emotional state of their immediate surroundings. In these patients, not only do the amygdalae remain sensitive to emotion-charged images and situations, but so does another region—situated low and toward the middle of the frontal lobe—the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex. Unlike the amygdalae, this area appears to be crucial for discerning the emotional
significance
of the prevailing stimulus or situation—clearly, a more complex form of discernment. This is the key brain region for experiencing empathy, sympathy, and compassion, i.e., the sharing of feelings: the pain, the joy, and the circumstance of another. So, this is where our evolutionary antennae are hidden.

What is really important in these clinical findings is that, as neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, “the barrier of blindness has been broken through.” In other words, in terms of our survival and of the power of the all-seeing eye, the retina is a secondary, more recent phenomenon than our internal antennae. Seeing, on its own, is not the precondition for believing. Feeling is.

B
ut what about long-distance interactions? How can one explain the following story, told to me by one of my patients, a young woman in her midtwenties? Which parts of her brain were active in the unfolding of these events? The year before coming to see me she was living in England, thousands of miles from her home in South Africa. She began to experience frontal headaches and with them an increasing fear that her father was suffering from a malignant brain tumor. Repeated telephone calls to her home were met with the assurance that her father was in good health. Several weeks after the onset of the headaches and while her fears for her father were still present, her mother phoned her in London to tell her that her father was to undergo emergency surgery for a brain tumor. “My mother’s words, when she phoned to tell me,” she said, “could have been mine.”

What was I to say, for I was well aware that an important part of this young woman’s grieving process was to come to terms not only with her premonition, but with a deep-seated guilt that her father’s death may have had something to do with her own thought processes. “Every time I had these thoughts about him, I had to keep pushing them away. I didn’t want to tempt fate,” she said. But fate had already dealt its hand. The tumor, albeit asymptomatic, was already established when it was picked up by the daughter all those weeks before the diagnosis was made. Pablo Neruda touches on this mystery in the lines of his poem “And I Watch My Words”:

And I watch my words from a long way off.

They are more yours than mine.

They climb on my old suffering like ivy.

From children to adults, we all have death thoughts about siblings, spouses, and parents for which we often feel guilty, and we all, even the most hardened of us, have those uneasy moments when we believe that we are tempting fate. I don’t think that we need too much convincing to acknowledge that old biblical admonition that what we fear will come upon us. As irrational as it may seem, it is as if our negative thoughts and fears magnetize the field around us. But it works the other way too. We can put positive thoughts, images, and feelings into the field as well. What happens to these products of the mind? If the brain, the mind, and the environment are a continuum, then the logical answer is that they become part of an extended field of influence. Is it too much to imagine that they enter the mindfield where they are then picked up or rejected by other minds? Do we not attract like-mindedness?

An excellent example of an extended field of influence comes from the astonishing observations of macaque monkeys by Japanese scientists in the 1950s. What they observed was equivalent, in monkey terms, to the harnessing of fire. A young female macaque, a resident on one of a group of islands, was seen taking soil-covered plant bulbs to nearby seawater pools to clean them before eating them. As the human observers watched, this idea took root and spread, slowly at first but with gathering momentum until it became general practice not only throughout the entire island colony but on the surrounding islands as well. Lyall Watson calls this the hundredth-monkey phenomenon, meaning that it takes only a certain number of like-minded individuals to create an idea or an image that will find its way through the world.

F
inally, can we share the field of another species? The answer to this question might not be that far off and the animal that could show us the way is our traditional best friend—the dog. In his research on epileptic patients who own dogs, Stephen Brown, a British neuropsychiatrist and specialist in epilepsy, has found that a significant percentage of the dogs in his study were able to detect an impending seizure in their owners anywhere between fifteen and forty-five minutes prior to the event. To communicate the impending event, the dogs would approach the owner and begin pawing or barking, or both. Another of his findings is that no particular breed is found to be better at sensing an oncoming seizure than any other. In all cases, however, probably because the dog owners were able to prepare themselves, the frequency of seizures were reduced. It is reported that many were able to abort the event altogether.

Considering the quality of life of patients suffering from epilepsy, these findings are hugely significant. The important question of course is how do they do it? Do they pick up cues from their human companions such as a change in body language, mood, or behavior? So far, we don’t know. What we know, however, is that patients suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy often experience what is medically referred to as an aura. This is a peculiar sensation or phenomenon that precedes and marks the onset of the seizure. For some, the aura could be one of entering a dream-like state or of becoming disoriented. Others may experience alterations in their sense of taste, hearing, or body movements. Then there are those patients who don’t experience an aura at all and yet the dogs still respond to the impending event. Could it be that the electrochemical event pre-ceding a seizure is not restricted to the brain but extends beyond it into a field to which our canine companions are sensitive?

In his fascinating book
Dogs Who Know When Their Masters Are
Coming Home
, Sheldrake has convincingly shown that certain dogs, through distinctive and timely changes in their behavior and over considerable distances (nine to fifteen miles away) become instantly aware of the homecoming intentions of their owners. How else could this be possible if not through a field, which at present we may suspect, but which we know little about? And what intentions do we unwittingly communicate to animals, to plants, and to our human companions? I will address this question in chapter eight.

QUANTUM FIELDS

M
odern physics reminds us that the interaction and influence of particles occurs in a quantum field that exists throughout space and where the speed or the timing of the influence of particles, one upon another, is instantaneous. According to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity, the notion of separate particles having an instantaneous influence on each other was inconceivable. Also known as the law of local causes, this theory proposed that events in the universe happened at speeds that did not exceed the speed of light. However, after some exquisite mathematical reasoning, Einstein eventually challenged his own theory, and in 1935 he and his colleagues came up with a new proposal: “the change in the spin of one particle in a two-particle system would affect its twin
simultaneously
.” Absurd? No. In 1964, physicist John S. Bell proposed that there is an elemental oneness to the universe, a proposal that would become known as Bell’s theorem. He theorized that particles operate and influence each other within a field. His theory put a restraint on the belief that the influence of particles, one upon the other, is limited to the speed of light. But how could it be proved? In 1972, in an experiment involving photons, calcite crystals, and photomultiplier tubes, John Clauser of Berkeley University validated Bell’s theory. It was true—the quantum field was for real. Particles, over distances, do influence each other instantaneously, a validation of astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s quip “When the electron vibrates, the universe shakes.” And what about that ancient poetic notion “Pick a flower, disturb a star?”