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[Music] So I guess what I was getting at earlier in this question was the morphic resonance 50 years later. Have we come around? Has there been more and more evidence now stacking up, saying that there is a lot more than just this material world?
Well, it's a very good question, and you know, if I um, have I mean, to take it as the big picture, the answer is I wish there was more evidence than there is. I, I've spent all these years trying to get research done on morphic resonance. Um, it's been unbelievably difficult to get anyone to do it within universities or scientific institutions because it's been proclaimed a heresy. Anyone who does it is afraid of losing their job, their grant, you know, being attacked by skeptics, and so forth. So, it's been extremely difficult to get the work done.
I mean, I've tried in many ways to do it. I can't get lab space in universities myself. I mean, I'm I'm able to do research as long as it's field research. But for morphic resonance, which is about memory and nature, to do morphic resonance experiments you have to compare what happened in the past with what happens now. And to get any convincing evidence, you have to keep the conditions constant because all sorts of things change in the world. For example, morphic resonance says that it should be getting easier to learn skateboarding or surf or windsurfing or computer programming or to play particular video games. Um, well, it is getting easier to do all those things. There's a lot of evidence, uh, but it's not the only factor. You know, there are videos instructing, there's improvements in the technology, there's better teaching methods. To tease out morphic resonance from all those things is difficult. There are areas where there is consistent evidence over the years. One area, for example, is in IQ tests. People have been doing very similar IQ tests for more than a hundred years, and I predicted in the 1980s that with IQ tests, uh, the score should be going up. The average score should be going up. Not because people are getting smarter. The, the not because their actual intelligence quotient or IQ is getting higher, but because the tests are getting easier to do because so many people have done the tests.
And I couldn't get the data when I tried to look at this in the 1980s, but a psychologist called James Flynn, uh, did exactly this analysis shortly after that and found that all around the world average scores on IQ have been going up and up. Um, since the 19, when they first came in 1918, all through the 20th century, these scores were going up and up and up. At least a 30% increase in average IQ scores, but no evidence that people are actually 30% smarter. You know, by other criteria, they're not smarter, um, and so there's been a real problem for um conventional psychologists to explain this thing, which is called the Flynn effect. Um, some have said that it's because you know, people have had more protein as children, but you know, that might have applied to Japan where they had more protein in their diet through the 20th century, but not to America where lots of people were eating meat all the time through the 20th century. Then some said it was because they're getting smarter because uh they had more practice with tests. Uh, but evidence showed that that wasn't really a very good explanation. Some said they were getting smarter because they'd seen more TV, but other evidence showed that actually TV tended to have a dumbing down effect.
Um, so there's been a long controversy about the nature of the Flynn effect in in IQ. And I think that's one example of a morphic resonance effect. I think morphic resonance may also be happening before our very eyes in phenomena like Wordle, the New York Times uh, word puzzle. It's a five-letter word puzzle. A new puzzle is uh, published every day by the New York Times. And there's a student here in Britain who's been looking into this recently. One of the anomalous things is that far more people get the word right first time every day than you would expect by chance. Why? No one knows why. I mean, this is an ongoing project. She's looking at this as we speak. Uh, but this is an area where you can actually do research in the field. You don't have to have a lab to do research on Wordle because the New York Times produces something called a Wordle bot every day, which gives in real-time updated value on how people are doing in the test as the day goes on, and then the next day there's a new word. So the whole thing's replicated day by day. So that's one promising area for research.
But I've now found a new way of doing this research which gets round the taboo in the academic world. Uh, which is that um there are now companies that do te testing, routine testing for corporations, usually for drug companies, sort of outsourced research companies. uh, and uh I have an experiment starting very soon on morphic resonance in the evolution of antibiotic resistance in E. coli, the bacterium E. coli. Um, I have a funder who's paying for this. I have a lab here in Britain that's um where they're planning to do it. They should be starting soon. Of course, I can't foresee what the results will be. I mean, I've designed the experiments, and I hope they'll show a morphic resonance effect, but um I can't be sure. The, the whole point of research is you don't know what's going to happen. You have to wait and see what happens. But this is now the way forward, I think, doing research in commercial laboratories where their motivation is not getting ahead in the academic world, and they simply do a good job. You have a contract, you pay them, and they do the experiment to a design, an agreed design. Um, and that's exactly as I think science should be done, and it's done by competent, technically competent people, and at last I found a way of getting around this taboo. I only discovered this last year that this was a possible way forward. Um, so I'm actually quite excited about it.
So the answer basically, in a nutshell, is that there's a lot of circumstantial evidence for morphic resonance, some of which I discuss in my books, including the Flynn effect in IQ test scores, but there's been very little actual experimental research, uh, because the sociological um taboo is so strong within the scientific community. There have, however, been quite a number of tests in human psychology, and I summarize those in the new edition, the third edition of my book, A New Science of Life, which in the US has been retitled Morphic Resonance. There's an appendix there with 10 new tests for morphic resonance and a summary of the research so far. So this is very much an ongoing research program; it's a scientific hypothesis, and it's a testable hypothesis. I, I think that's what science is meant to be about.
One of the problems that skeptics have is that they, what they hate is uncertainty. Dogmatic skeptics want to have a worldview that's certain. They want, they're fundamentalists really. They want, they want certainty. And morphic resonance isn't certain. It's not certain it's true. I mean, I've been working on this for decades. I'd love it to be true, but actually I'm not certain it's true. It's a hypothesis, a testable hypothesis. But what the skeptics do is they frame it as a claim that I'm claiming this is true, and they're going to say, no, it's not, and where's the evidence. I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying it's a possibility. A hypothesis is a possibility. It's possible it's true. If it's true, and if the evidence supports it, it has enormous ramifications and implications through the whole world, world of nature, of understanding chemical and physical and biological and psychological processes. Um, it says that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. It has very, very wide-ranging ramifications if it's true. But the key thing is to do the experiments and find out whether this hypothesis is actually supported by them, as the circumstantial evidence appears to support it. But you know, there's not enough evidence yet for anyone, including me, to know. Wow.
I think you found a a brilliant way to test this with the E. coli. So the thinking is that um if E. coli, E. coli becomes resistant in one area of the world or in one lab, on the other side of the world, it will suddenly start to become more resistant over there.
Right. Yes. And there's already circumstantial evidence that antibiotic resistance, when it's evolved in one place, turns up somewhere else. Um, there's already in the ep, the literature on antibiotic resistance, this is already known. But of course, in the real world, you can't be sure that someone hasn't just flown around the world carried the res resistant germs with them. People working in epidemiology, uh, some of them think there really is something mysterious and unexplained going on. But without specific evidence, you can't be sure. Uh, nevertheless, it's very suggestive, and I, I think that the evidence makes me think this may well be happening, that once um E. coli or any other bacterium has developed antibiotic resistance in one place, it'll be easier to develop it in another place. And morphic resonance, you see, also has implications for epidemiology of diseases like COVID. Morphic resonance would say that if a lot of people recover from a a new respiratory infection like COVID, the antibody system is activated, and that might make it easier for other people to activate the antibody system and to overcome the disease. So what this morphic resonance predicts is that um virulent new viral diseases will get less virulent over time. Even if you don't have um vaccines for them, um, they'll become, and even if people haven't been vaccinated, they'll get less virulent over time through a kind of morphic resonance effect on the immune system, on the way that people respond to the infection. And that seems to be the case with a lot of respiratory diseases. Flu, colds, COVID, uh, keep evolving, um, and they become much less aggressive, like the famous Asian flu around 1918. It became, I mean, it killed millions of people, but it was before they had modern vaccine systems to deal with it, and um it faded away. Um, and COVID was certainly an extremely dangerous disease to start with, but it's faded away. But you, you can't actually, in this case, as in most real-life cases, decide how much of this is morphic resonance, how much of it is because of vaccination, and some countries where they had very little vaccination, it's also faded away. So, I'm certainly not a vaccine denier. Um, or I mean, I had the vaccines myself. I'm certainly not part of a kind of conspiracy theory about vaccines. But I do think morphic resonance has implications for epidemiology of respiratory viruses, as it does in many other areas.
While you were saying uh all these different ways of measuring morphic resonance, you've made me think of possibly another different way to test it. Um, it sounds like a lot of the methods are observing how people are learning and, you know, they take a test over time and they get better at taking that test. But it seems to me, just observing culture and and people, that we're actually having like a a collective amnesia. We're forgetting to do things that we used to know how to do, like type or read. You know, now everybody gets their information through videos and quick little videos. They're not reading books anymore. There's a whole list of things that kids aren't doing that a kid 100 years ago would do. They're not socializing. They're not making eye contact. And it seems like we might be forgetting how to do things. So maybe if kids in America are forgetting how to make eye contact because they're on their phones all day, maybe kids in Tasmania will suddenly struggle to make eye contact.
I'm not sure. Well, I mean, morphic resonance would spread bad habits as well as good habits, and it would tend, it tends to reinforce patterns of behavior that are often repeated. They become, it's about the spread of habits. Um, and I think some of it is actually built into our everyday life. I mean, it's I think a lot of morphic resonance is hiding in plain sight. For example, if you look at the, I look at the computer keyboard in front of me, the layout of the keys, QWERTY. The QWERTY layout was developed by the Remington typewriter company in in in the 19th century, in the 1860s or '70s. And the reason they developed this layout was because letters that were frequently typed next to each other, if the, there were bars going to hit the page, if they were near each other, they got jammed. So Q would very rarely appear next to W. So um, if they'd put QU, it would have got jammed more often than if they put QW. So it was to do with the actual ergonomics of the mechanism of 19th-century typewriters with sort of bars going across with the letters on them. So they developed, through trial and error, a keyboard layout that's actually not at all intuitive. I mean, there's no, if you're learning to type, it's not obvious why it should be Q Y U I O P on the top row. um, it's not at all obvious. It would be more logical to have it A B C D, and with with the advent of electronic uh word processors, you know, all the mechanical reasons for this layout on typewriters are no longer valid because there's no mechanical moving parts in the computer. And interestingly, when computers first came in and word processors, a lot of psychologists tried to develop more rational um keyboard systems that would be easier to learn for typing. Um, and you know, much easier systems, A B C D, or ones that were ergonomically designed to work better with two hands. They used all the principles of ergonomic design, and they tested them out on people who hadn't learned typing before. Obviously, if someone's already learned the QWERTY system, they've got habits, and it's hard to break habits that are already established. And what they found was that actually the QWERTY thing was easier to learn than these new improved ergonomic designs. Completely counterintuitive because it shouldn't have been easier to learn. But from the morphic resonance point of view, it makes total sense that millions of people had learned to type using these keyboards with that layout, which made it easier for other people to learn. And so one example of morphic resonance is in front of us every day, every time we look at our computer or our keyboard, um, in the layout of the letters on on on the keyboard. So I think there's hundreds of examples of morphic resonance around us all the time. It's that's what's so frustrating. I can see in front of me evidence for it all the time, but it's a matter of pinning it down in a way that is, you know, conclusive scientifically. That's the difficult bit, which requires special experiments.
Yeah, it seems so hard to test this and isolate it. Um, for one, I'm I'm never going to look at my keyboard the same again now.
Um, well, it's not that hard to do actually, to do tests for it. For example, um, I was talking to someone who developed um a music program. It was something to do with jazz, and you could learn to play jazz instruments on the key. You learn to play saxophone and things on the computer, and they had this program that was successful. A lot of people learned it, and they each time they brought out a new version, they had to make it harder because people were learning. There was a kind of competitive element. How fast can you learn? And people were just learning quicker and quicker, so you had to make it harder and harder to keep that kind of competitive element of of making it hard to learn. So I think a lot of video games um are probably showing these morphic resonance effects all the time. The thing is, it's difficult to test in that case because if you have a new video game and you have lots of people learn it, it means that people who've never come across it before should learn it quicker than they might otherwise have done. But the trouble is video games are now spread all around the world. And so you can't actually isolate people from these things which spread on the internet almost immediately. So everyone can see the new game and learn by watching videos of other people doing it. So it's very hard to tease morphic resonance apart from all these other effects which lead to the acceleration of learning, the acceleration of people acquiring skills in new games, including video games. [Music]