Monday, March 2, 2009

That class is not the only place that I have heard about this. In Richard Linklater's Waking Life Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke talk about this very experiment and all the implications it has. I admit I want to believe this.

So inevitably at a party Jung comes up and people wax philosophical and I can barely contain myself. Ooo, ooo, ooo I chime in, check out this study. People listen and are excited to hear that science confirms beliefs they take comfort instead of cutting them down with mechanical efficiency.

The closest thing to any confirming evidence was a study by Marc Mishkind in 1993 on "inducing Morphic Resonance fields." While sifting through pscyh articles Morphic Resonance appears the "scientific" term for what we dub the collective unconscious or the ability in some fashion access or be influenced by the past experience after others.

Though stumbling upon this particular study hardly bolstered my confidence in this phenomenon. For starters the plethora of results on the Psychological database that popped up upon typing "Morphic Resonance" (man that is fun to write) dwindled to about eight when I told it only to display peer reviewed studies. Then that eight was narrowed down to one when the rest were lengthy articles with researchers talking about possible mechanisms for the existence of "Morphic Resonance." So I'm left with one study with questionable methodology and vague results.

All this boils down to the fact that teh internets isn't an expression of the "collective unconscious" because that doesn't exist, at least not until now. The Internet is the closest thing to a unified collection of human thought and experience.

Yes humans seem to behave in eerily similar ways but that’s because we are all wired the same way. My skepticism stems from a deeply routed obsession with having something demonstrated. Yes all this nebulous information floating on the Internet would suggest a pattern, but where is it. Without strict scientific analysis it would seem that the majority of the unconscious is preoccupied with dick jokes and porn.

Sources cited
-Marc Mishkind. A Test for Morphic Resonance in Behavioral Response to Multiple Response Stimuli [online article] (Journal of Analytical Psychology, 1993. Available from the ASU PsychInfo Database
-Waking Life, DVD. Directed by Richard Linklater. 2002



1 comment:

  1. "All this boils down to the fact that teh internets isn't an expression of the "collective unconscious" because that doesn't exist, at least not until now. The Internet is the closest thing to a unified collection of human thought and experience."

    Teh internets give us the illusion of a collective unconscious. The idea of a universal thought process is appealing to humans naturally, as we all want to fit in. By joining the anonymous mass, we satisfy the need for conformity.

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