Lyall Watson (1939-2008) was an explorer, scientist, and thinker. His interest in animal behavior led him to investigate in different fields such as anthropology, chemistry, botany, ethology and zoology, among other disciplines, resisting the compartmentalized approach of official sciences. “All I do is look, listen and try to make sense of what seems to me, in biological terms.”. His best known contribution is the Hundredth Monkey Theory. proposal in the book published in 1979, «Vital tide: the biology of the unconscious» (Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious). This book echoes the following: In the 1950s, a group of Japanese researchers observed the behavior of macaque monkeys (macaca fuscata) on the island of Koshima to see if they could influence their learning.
The scientists gave a sweet potato to an 18-month-old female who, when she tasted the potato, did not eat it because it was still full of dirt. The monkey spent a few hours with the potato in her hand until it occurred to her to throw it into the sea water. In this way the grains of sand fell and the potato was left clean, and thus he ate it.. The monkey showed her children how to wash the potatoes in the sea and also taught the rest of the monkeys that were approaching, both male and female. Those who were not interested at all were the older generations of monkeys. In a very short time, many monkeys were already cleaning the potatoes before eating them.
When 100 monkeys learned, the rest of the monkeys learned to wash the potatoes even though they had not been in direct contact with the monkeys who knew how to wash them.
And beyond the island where they were, the monkeys of islands that were hundreds of kilometers away also learned to wash the potatoes before eating them. The sum of the energy of monkey number 100 created the essential critical mass for the hatching of a new idea. This was dubbed “The Hundredth Monkey Effect.” When a certain number of people reach a degree of knowledge and an open communication field is created, each individual has access to the same information. The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon has been discussed due to lack of scientific data to verify the theory. However, true or false, the power of the metaphor disclosed by Lyall Watson resonates with many people.
Due to this phenomenon, in The conference “The biology of being: a natural history of consciousness” Watson I affirm that: “Once you learn to think of life in this broader way, once you can resist the old temptation to break things up into convenient little and totally artificial pieces, some parts of this puzzle we call “life” then begin. to put yourself in your place of your own accord, establishing connections that are otherwise very difficult to see. We break the old barriers of perception and understanding, such as the divisions that force us to affirm that zoology and botany are separate disciplines, requiring different professors and different university departments. This whole thing is ridiculous.”. (Lyall Watson collected in the book: Lorimer, D., “The Spirit of Science”, Ed. Kairós, 2000).
Societies are not just groups of subjects, they are also systems that function as independent organisms, capable of learning and evolving.
From all this, we can deduce that when an idea is shared, it spreads and is reinforced. The more people “wake up”, the more people are aware of their responsibilities, the more the critical mass will increase.. More than making an external revolution, it is necessary to make an internal revolution. The long-awaited change is a change of consciousness, a change of thoughts and feelings in relation to everything I have been doing in my life. We should aspire to be that hundredth monkey. We are not only part of a system, we are its composition, its reflection and its consequence..
“Perfect your soul, with the confidence that only in that case will you contribute to the improvement of the larger society of which you are a part”
leo tolstoy
Know more: In addition to Watson’s book, the phenomenon was first described (1975) by anthropologist Lawrence Blair in his book «Rhythms of Vision: Changing Belief Patterns» (Rythms of vision: changing patterns of belief) and, later (1982) by the author Ken Keyes, Jr. in his book “The Hundredth Monkey” (The hundredth monkey). Along these same lines, we can relate it to the book A New Science of Life from 1981, in which Rupert Sheldrake talks about morphic resonances and how information can be transmitted through morphogenetic fields. .
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