Warning: this story contains spoilers for Sunday’s episode of Tales of the Walking Dead, “Blair/Gina.” Déjà vu, time loop, or psychotic disorder? One explains how Circle of Trust Insurance Company co-workers Blair (Parker Posey) and Gina (Jillian Bell) repeat an endless loop on Tales of the Walking Dead. When bossy Blair and meek Gina try to survive the onset of the apocalypse in 2010, they’re stuck reliving a day that ends the same way every time: with Blair and Gina dying over and over. The episode restarts each time their hijacked oil tanker truck explodes, the constant result of Blair and Gina meeting at their nexus point — a gas station on their way out of Atlanta, Georgia. (Read the full episode recap here.)
Morphic resonance is a process whereby self-organizing systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.
The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species.
Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.
