Does water have memory?

A rerun of an old blog entry.

Does water have memory? According to homeopathic thinking – yes, but according to mainstream science – absolutely, no (they have proven this scientifically!). What is ‘memory’? Well simply put, memory is the ability to remember something. Therefore then, water does have memory! Does water not have the proven ability to ‘remember’ its temperature, and does that memory not also fade slowly over ‘time’? Well, well! Is this Orwellian double talk then? No, it is in fact merely scientific confusion; semantic confusion, that is!

There are many types of memory; many ways to store (or ‘remember’) data and information. The most obvious memory is our ‘biological memory’. Computers have different kinds of memory, e.g. core memory, registers, ROM, RAM, hard discs, CDROM and DVD, magnetic tape, and magnetic diskettes (‘floppies’). However, holograms, pictures, written materials, etc. can all be seen as types of ‘memories’.

So, in fact we can distinguish between biological (bio-electrical), magnetic (hard disks, magnetic tape, and magnetic diskettes), electrical (core memory – magnetism also involved), electronic (registers, ROM, and RAM – use transistors), optical (holograms and pictures), and even written ‘memory’.

‘Memory’ is so important to our lives that it is not surprising that its nature and mechanisms are a major theme of research in both psychology and neuroscience. Sixteen centuries ago, St Augustine (354-430) devoted an entire chapter of his famous Confessions to puzzling over how it was that we could conjure up in our memories entire scenes and conversations, full of colour, scent, and sound, and yet our memory itself was space-less, colourless, soundless.

In the 17^th century, René Descartes (1596-1650) proposed that memories were stored in the pineal gland* in the brain by the bending of minute hairs with which the surface of the gland was studded. The idea that memories are indeed in some way preserved in the brain in the form of ‘some type of lasting change in structure or connections’ is still held by most researchers.

Are biological memories represented by special molecules in the brain? If the brain learns and remembers by ‘reorganising its connections and setting up special pathways’, then what is learned and remembered is peculiar to each particular brain and can never be physically transferred. If ‘special molecules’ are involved in remembering, then these molecules might be transferable.

In the early 1960s experimenters found that a very primitive creature, a flatworm, could be trained to perform some simple activity, like responding to light. If these trained flatworms were chopped up and fed to untrained flatworms the latter would possess the learned ability, or develop it more easily than otherwise. Some molecules in the trained flatworms seemed to have been incorporated into the untrained, and it meant the same to both.

In 1965 the Danish physiologist Ejnar Fjerdingstad found he could do the same with a much more advanced animals, rats.

The Hungarian physiologist Georges Ungar went even further. In 1970, he subjected rats to electrical shocks in the dark, so that they finally developed a strong fear of the dark. Their brain extracts were then injected into non-shocked animals, which caused these rats to show extreme fear for the dark too. From several kilograms of the brains from trained rats, Ungar isolated ‘a chemical compound’, which would induce fear in untrained rats. He called this chemical compound, ‘scotophobin’ (Greek for ‘fear of the dark’).

The ‘chemical compound’ is a simple one, made up of a chain of nine amino acids, and it induces fear of the dark not only in rats but in goldfish as well. It would seem that this simple compound is the closest approach yet to an actual ‘memory molecule’.

But stranger still! Rupert Sheldrake, an English biologist, found that when laboratory rats in one place have learned how to navigate a new maze, other rats all over the world seem to be able to learn it more easily! Sheldrake describes this process as morphic resonance; the past forms and behaviours of organisms, he argues, influence organisms in the present though direct connections through time and space.

This makes one think of Carl Jung’s (1875-1961) notion of ‘an inherited collective unconscious’ containing archetypal forms which then forms ‘a collective memory’! Or even ‘the Hindu’s Akashic record’!

‘Jung’s collective unconscious’ is a form of the unconscious (that part of the mind containing memories and impulses of which the individual is not aware) common to mankind as a whole and originating in the inherited structure of the brain. It is distinct from ‘the personal unconscious’, which arises from the experience of the individual. According to Jung, the collective unconscious contains archetypes, or universal primordial images and ideas.

The ‘Akashic record’ is a compendium of pictorial records, or ‘memories’, of all events, actions, thoughts, and feelings that have occurred since the beginning of time. They are said to be imprinted on ‘Akasha’, the astral light [A hologram?], which is described by spiritualists as ‘a fluid ether’ existing beyond the range of human senses. The Akashic records are reputedly accessible to certain select individuals – e.g., a spiritualist medium who conducts a séance. Akasha allegedly transmits the waves of human willpower, thought, feeling, and imagination and is a reservoir of occult power, an ocean of unconsciousness to which all is linked, making prophecy and clairvoyance possible.

Memory, in computer science, is ‘the workspace for the computer’s processor (CPU)’. It is ‘a temporary storage area’ where the programs and data being operated on by the processor must reside. Memory storage is considered temporary because the data and programs remain there only as long as the computer has electrical power and is not reset.

Memory is often called ‘RAM (Random Access Memory)’. Main memory is called RAM because you can randomly (as opposed to sequentially) access any location in memory. This designation is somewhat misleading and often misinterpreted. ‘Read-only memory (ROM)’, for example, is also randomly accessible, yet is usually differentiated from the system RAM because it maintains data and programs without power and can’t normally be written to.

When we talk about a computer’s memory, we usually mean the RAM or physical memory in the system, which are mainly the memory chips (transistors and capacitors) or modules the processor uses to store primary active programs and data. This is often confused with the term ‘storage’, which should be used when referring to things such as disk or tape drives (although they can be used as a form of RAM called virtual memory).

‘Permanent or semi-permanent computer storage’ works by either optical or magnetic principles – or, in some cases, a combination of the two. In the case of magnetic storage, a string of binary computer data bits (0s and 1s) is stored by magnetising tiny pieces of metal embedded on the surface of a disk or tape in a pattern that represents the data.

‘A hard disk drive’ is a sealed magnetic storage unit that a PC uses for non-volatile data storage. Non-volatile, or semi-permanent, storage means that the storage device retains the data even when no power is supplied to the computer.

‘Optical disk storage’ (CDROMs and DVDs) is similar to magnetic disk storage in basic operation, but it reads and records data using light instead of magnetism. Interesting, note the convention in which we refer to magnetic as DISK and optical as DISC!

Computer memory and storage is digital! What about biological memory – is it digital or analogue?

Information can also be stored by an ‘interference pattern of waves’ [see the ‘Akashic record’ above]. To have ‘interference’, we must have at least two interacting components. In holography, a laser light beam is split into two components by a half-mirror, that is, a semi-transparent mirror. This allows part of the beam to continue undisturbed while part of it is deflected to another mirror. Both the narrow beams are spread open by lenses. The ‘reference beam’ arrives at a photographic plate (‘film’) after an eventless journey.

The ‘working beam’ encounters interference. On its way it encounters ‘the object’ that we want to photograph. The working beam will then be reflected from the object and fall on the film. On the film, it will again meet up with its twin the ‘reference beam’.

The interaction between the two beams will cause ripples to form between them, which will form ‘an interference pattern on the film’. When the same type of laser-light is shone through the film a three-dimensional image of the object is formed – the ‘hologram’.

If you, theoretically, take a pan filled with water and drop three pebbles in it, and freeze the event immediately; you can then use it as ‘a holographic storage device’. Now lift the ice from the pan and find a proper light source to illuminate it. The light source must be of ‘coherent light’, i.e. laser light. We shall find to our great surprise that we can see the three pebbles suspended in midair if we look through the ice toward the light. The three pebbles will look three-dimensional to us.

It seems that rippled surface of the ice, or ‘the interference pattern’, has somehow ‘stored the information’ about the whereabouts and the shape of the pebbles. The ice surface acted as a distorted lens in such a way as to focus the light to points taken up by the pebbles that have caused all these ripples. The chaotic-looking ice is actually ‘an information-storage device’.

Suppose you drop the ice now and it breaks into hundreds of pieces. If you now pick up any piece and look at it towards a coherent light source, you will again see the three pebbles suspended in midair.

Is this perhaps the way that Nature store information? There is already evidence that our brains store information in ‘a holographic form’! This kind of storage device is the most compact known in Nature. An example of this is ‘the genetic code carried in our chromosomes’. Each cell in our body carries all the information required to make an additional copy of our bodies! Neat!

‘Does water have memory?’ Do we have to find physical evidence of a former molecule in water to be able to state that water has memory, or do we have to look for something else? Well, it will very much depend on what is meant by ‘memory’ and also how memory operates, or else we really have a case of serious semantic and scientific confusion!

Willie Maartens
 

PS:

*... Some interesting facts: The pineal gland was the last endocrine gland to have its function discovered. Its location deep in the brain seemed to indicate its importance. This combination led to its being a ‘mystery’ gland with myth, superstition, and even metaphysical theories surrounding its perceived function.

The pineal gland is occasionally associated with the sixth chakra (also called Ajna or the third eye chakra in yoga). It is believed by some to be a dormant organ that can be awakened to enable ‘telepathic’ communication.

The tuatara from New Zealand has a gland beneath the skin on the head, which contains a simple ‘third eye’.

The tuatara is famous because it is a very ancient reptile – it is the only survivor of a large group of reptiles that roamed the earth at the same time as dinosaurs. It hasn’t changed its form much in over 225 million years! The relatives of tuatara died out about 60 million years ago which is why the tuatara is sometimes called a ‘living fossil’.