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The maze rats and morphic resonance

Joe keeps telling the maze story. The name under it is morphic resonance. The lab work is a Harvard water tank and a twenty-year rerun in Melbourne.

Documented / wild read Updated Sept 25, 2026

Watch first

Start on these channels. Joe is one chair at the table, not the whole room.

Other chair

The claim

Once enough animals learn a new trick in one place, similar animals somewhere else should learn the same trick faster — even with no contact. Rupert Sheldrake calls the carrier a morphic field. Habits build up in the field. Later members of the species tune in.

Joe’s street version: teach rats a maze on one coast and the rats on the other coast start finishing quicker. He said it again on Sept 24, 2026 with Tyler Engle on JRE #2558, around 1:00:56. He said it at length in 2014 when Sheldrake sat in the chair for JRE #550.

The paper trail

• William McDougall, reports through 1938 in the British Journal of Psychology. White Wistar rats. A water tank with two gangways. The lit exit gave a shock. The dim exit was safe.
• F. A. E. Crew, Edinburgh. Same general design. Crew argued genetic mix and scoring explained McDougall’s curve.
• W. E. Agar, F. H. Drummond, O. W. Tiegs, M. M. Gunson, University of Melbourne. Final report in the Journal of Experimental Biology 31 (1954): 307–321. Improvement showed up in trained descendants and in controls. That killed the clean Lamarck read. It also left a result nobody wanted to own.
• Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life (1981) and the rat chapter on his site. He treats the control-line improvement as the point.
• John Maddox, Nature, 1981. The editorial that called Sheldrake’s book a candidate for burning.

Sheldrake’s rat page · Agar et al., 1954 · dates only, Wikipedia

Joe’s table

• JRE #550 — Rupert Sheldrake, Sept 16, 2014. The source episode. Rat stretch sits in the opening. Watch #550
• JRE #2558 — Tyler Engle, Sept 24, 2026. Joe brings the maze story back. Jump to 1:00:56
• JRE #1279 — Jessimae Peluso, 2019. The East Coast / West Coast shorthand when the scientist is not in the room.

The other chairs

What is actually known

• The tank existed. Multiple labs spent years on it.
• McDougall’s later generations performed better than his first generations.
• Agar saw improvement in trained descendants and in controls.
• Crew did not replicate the pretty curve.
• No modern, pre-registered, multi-lab test of Sheldrake’s exact prediction has closed the question.

What would move the stamp

A clean blinded test: train a brand-new trick in one city, then test naïve rats on that trick plus dummy tricks in two far cities. If only the trained trick gets easier far away, the stamp moves up. If nothing moves, the stamp drops toward folklore.

Start here tonight

1. #2558 at 1:00:56
2. First fifteen minutes of #550
3. sheldrake.org/rats and the 1954 Agar report
4. Shermer

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