100th Monkey Phenomenon

I heard this story last week and thought it would make an interesting blog post.

In 1952 a group of scientists were observing a colony of snow
monkeys  on the Japanese island of Koshima. The monkeys liked to eat a
fruit that dropped into the sand where they lived, but they didn’t like
the taste of the sand that stuck to the fruit. One day a young female
monkey worked out that she could clean the fruit in a nearby stream.

For the next six years all the young monkeys on the island and a
small number of adult monkeys (who learned from their children),
learned how to wash their fruit, but there were still a large number of
adult monkeys who continued to eat the dirty fruit. No one knows the
exact number of monkeys that were washing their fruit at that time, but
suddenly one morning in 1958 the scientists observed that ALL the
monkeys had started to wash their fruit. Not only that but all the snow monkeys on the other islands and the mainland at Takasakiyama had started to wash their fruit on the same morning.

The same thing has been observed in lab rats who are presented with
a particularly difficult problem to solve. Once a lab rat in one
location solves the problem then scientists have observed that lab rats
on corresponding experiments in different geographical locations all
solve the problem shortly afterwards.

This phenomenon is called ‘morphic resonance’. It is the theory that
if enough conscious beings know about something then somehow the idea
communicates to all those conscious beings by some kind of natural
telepathy. For this to work we would all have to be linked in to the
minds of our fellow beings in a way that we are not fully aware of. I
love this theory and it gives weight to the fact that what you do to
the environment or someone esle you are in fact acting against yourself
and so you had better make your actions good ones!

If you want to read more about morphic resonance, look up Rupert Sheldrake’s website. He is a Cambridge University educated scientist with a very unusual way of looking at the world.