🍄 Memory of Water

Can water remember things? Its molecules make up most of what we—and Earth—are made from, so imagine if we found its ‘to-do’ list, stored details in our cells. Science is searching for its secrets.

Jan 05, 2024

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Hello, we’re Alice, and we are always in a state of wander. Chatty water molecules can communicate with one another to exchange and store information—all without touching. Really? Jacques Benveniste believed so, the late controversial French immunologist who pioneered this theory back in the ‘80’s—that water seems to memorize a unique signature frequency of molecules. “It’s not the memory of water that’s interesting, it’s what water remembers,” Benveniste told ALICE in 2004. “You are now taping that interview and you are not interested in the tape … you’re interested in what is on the tape. And water is a tape that’s able to record anything from one discreet sound to a symphony.”

Or, as Olaf the snowman simply said in Frozen II, water “remembers everything.”

Let that soak in

The theory of water memory triggered the scientific community. It shook the foundation—but didn’t disappear. Interest still swells as hydrologists and molecular biologists throw their test tubes into the ring. Researchers explore cell communication, scientists consider snowflakes and rainwater as new approaches to quantum computing and glaciologists are racing to analyze ancient “cores” of ice.

“Many additional experimental results support the contention that water has the capacity to store information,’ writes Gerald Pollack, professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, for Meer. “At the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of Water, the concept of water memory is widely taken as an experimental fact.”

Water itself gains more respect. Water Memories, an exhibition at The Met, explored water’s significance to Indigenous peoples and Nations in the United States. Artworks swam four themes — Ancestral Connections, Water and Sky, Forests and Streams, and Oceanic Imaginations.

Recent years have also seen rivers, long considered to be “alive” by Indigenous people, beginning to be granted the same rights as people. The Magpie in Canada is one of many rivers to be recognised as a living entity across the world. “When we see the river as a living being, is that when we start to say, hang on, what do we want for the river?” Dr Erin O’Donnell, a lecturer in Law at the University of Melbourne, told The Guardian. She sees it kick-starting a cultural shift away from conceiving of nature as a “warehouse of commodities for human use.”

Testing the waters

Benveniste first published his findings in 1988. A highly diluted solution of human antibodies, he said, evoked a biological response, even once all antibodies had been diluted to the vanishing point. “When exposed to specific antibodies, basophil cells release histamine,” writes Pollack for Meer. “Benveniste noted something odd: When antibodies were diluted and diluted, even beyond the point at which, statistically speaking, no antibodies remained, only water that had been exposed to those antibodies, still, the response was the same. Cells released histamine.” Benveniste argued that the water that had been exposed to the antibodies must have retained the memory of antibody structure. “Otherwise, how could the water have elicited so specific a response?” continues Pollack.

Diluted but disputed, Benveniste was ridiculed by Nature, the very journal he published his results in. “When the memory of water will be accepted,” Benveniste told ALICE. “You will see people with totally different ideas coming, and going much further, as usual, in science.”

Go tell it on the fountain

Other scientists started to dip their toes in. In 2011, the late virologist Luc Montagnier (also controversial), (who shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2008, for his part in establishing that HIV caused AIDS in 1983) found that DNA can send electromagnetic imprints of itself into distant cells and fluids. “What we have found is that DNA produces structural changes in water, which persist at very high dilutions, and which lead to resonant electromagnetic signals that we can measure,” said the Nobel laureate. “Not all DNA produces signals that we can detect with our device. The high-intensity signals come from bacterial and viral DNA.”

He had two test tubes. One contained a tiny piece of DNA from a sample of bacteria highly diluted in water, and the other contained only water. They were kept near to one another, and both were surrounded by a weak 7-hertz electromagnetic field. When they checked the second test tube 18 hours later it too had evidence of the DNA in the first test tube as though information had been beamed from the first and teleported to the second—although no actual DNA was recorded.

“The biological experiments do seem intriguing, and I wouldn’t dismiss them,” scientist Greg Scholes of the University of Toronto in Canada, told New Scientist.

“This really opens whole other worlds for quantum information transfer,” Dr Carly Nuday, author of Water Codes: The Science of Health, Consciousness, and Enlightenment [2014] tells the Medicine Stories podcast. “And when we look at quantum mechanics and quantum physics and how things are able to sort of teleport across distance or how atoms and molecules are able to communicate over large or small spaces of distance. This really ties into that and discussing how that’s possible and the critical role that water plays in making that happen.”

More evidence blooms

“Water is a medium that is largely not understood by physics and chemistry,” wrote the late German scientist Prof. Dr. Bernd Kröplin. “Its material nature is tested, studied and understood by physics. However, beyond its physical and chemical qualities also memory and information play a significant role in water, and these build a bridge from the immaterial world to the material world. These subtle phenomena are a ground of misunderstanding, and they can neither be studied not detected by traditional experimental methods.”

Kröplin co-authored the 2016 book, Water and its Memory, alongside Regine C. Henschel. The duo led experiments in Stuttgart that harnessed an epic flower power. “A real flower was placed into a body of water, and after a while a sample droplet of the water was taken out for examination,” explains William Brown, a Resonance Science Foundation biophysicist. The results produced a mesmerizing pattern when hugely magnified, but all of the droplets of this water looked very similar. “When the same experiment was done with a different species of flower, the magnified droplet looked completely different, thereby determining that a particular flower is evident in each droplet of water. Through this discovery, which shows that water has a memory, according to scientists, a new perception of water can be formed. They believe that as water travels it picks up and stores information from all of the places that it has travelled through, which can thereby connect people to a lot of different places and sources of information when they drink this water, depending on the journey that it has been on.”

“The water that makes up you and me has passed through at least four humans and/or animals before us.”—Olaf, Frozen II.

You must remember this, a fish is just a fish

Seawater holds “memories” in the form of DNA from fish and invertebrates that have recently passed by, according to new research from Montreal’s McGill University. This information, called ‘environmental DNA’ or ‘eDNA’, can be used by scientists to track species across space. The Pacific eDNA Coastal Observatory (PECO) network has been collecting seawater from Juneau, Alaska to San Diego, California to find out which fish live where and how these change over time, focusing on seagrass habitats across this large coastal region. “Networks like PECO could mark the start of a new frontier in tracking underwater biodiversity,” says Jennifer Sunday, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. “Groups like these are forming around the world.”

Turn up the amp

In one of his studies, Benveniste took a test tube of blood plasma and added water exposed to the sound of an anti-coagulant drug (“not Heparin but close to Heparin”) that prevents blood from clotting, transmitted via its digitized signature electromagnetic frequency. Benveniste had used a machine “to record those drugs, the activity of the drug, the specific set of frequency of the drug and, if you want to be more scientific, the specific spectrum of frequencies of the drug,” he explained to ALICE. “And we record that in a computer. And you end up with a file which is just like any music … and you can send that to the other end of the world.” He replayed the sound to the water. “And then we mix water with the blood to be coagulated and the blood doesn’t coagulate as well. There is an inhibition of coagulation.” This signature frequency worked as if the molecules of the drug itself were there. “So it shows that we can transfer biological activities via this kind of system all over the world…from one place of the world to the other, and even to the planets and to the space station if you want. Water is a carrier and, most probably, an amplifier.”

Quantum Flow

Water, itself, is a pretty simple molecule—just two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. “However, it’s been argued that that is a fairly complex quantum system all by itself and that it could, in fact, be in many, many different measurable states,” Vint Cerf, the American Internet pioneer, told ALICE in 2006. “Well, if that’s true and if those states are stable, you could imagine using a molecule of water to store a fairly substantial amount of information. And given how small the molecule is, the density of storage could be quite substantial,” he explained. Cerf reflected on the electronic level of elevation of the atoms, between the hydrogen atom and the oxygen atom. “Is it in an elevated state or not? That could represent a 0 or 1, or even higher order of logic. So if we had the ability to control quantum state pretty thoroughly, water itself could be a potentially powerful medium for storing information and getting it back.”

Crystal tech

“We can look at the water inside our body as a very malleable computer,” Dr Carly Nuday tells the Medicine Stories podcast. “The crystalline structure – the structure that it currently has – determines its programming and its function. It determines how much information it can transfer and how efficiently and effectively it can transfer that information, which all of our biological processes require, this transfer of information, through water.”

Rebel, rebel

Let’s remember what we’re dealing with here—a law unto itself. “Water continues to bedevil scientists, even those working with it everyday in the laboratory,” says author Lynne McTaggart on her podcast, Living the New Science. It’s a law unto itself. “This seemingly simple molecular structure—two atoms of hydrogen for every one atom of oxygen—belies its singularity. Water is a chemical anarchist that behaves like no other liquid in nature, displaying no fewer than 72 physical material and thermodynamic anomalies, with many more apparently still to be unmasked.” Water is among the most mysterious of substances, she says, because it’s a compound formed from two gases yet it is liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. “It’s the lightest of gases and far denser as a liquid than as a solid. Hot water behaves differently than cold water. It freezes faster than cold water does and ice density increases as you heat it up but shrinks on melting. Water has an unusually high melting point and boiling point. The list of bad behavior goes dizzyingly on.”

Fluid messaging

“Water is transparent, it knows no color, creed or religion” states Veda Austin, a water researcher and artist who photographs water in its ‘state of creation’, the space between liquid and ice. Over 36 000 photographs have shown water respond in what she calls “hydroglyphs,” essentially a “symbol in ice that I’ve seen multiple times.” Austin is one of a few artists and researchers extending the seminal work of Masaru Emoto documented in his book “The Hidden Messages in Water,” (a 2004 New York Times Bestseller). “I use words so for example I write the word creation, I’ll put my petri dish of water on top of the word, freeze it… take it out and take a photograph of what I see and each time I do that, I will see a specific image and I have to have done that at least 50 times and seen the same image appear” she explains in a Life Stylist Podcast. In four years, she has repeatedly documented 35 hydroglyphs.

A final word

“Water has a memory,” Benveniste told ALICE. “Maybe, it participates in the memory of the world in some way … of the cosmos. You know that comets are made of water mainly, of ice, but water. So those comets travel through the solar system. And do they collect information? Do they send information to other places we have water? Is the magnetic field of the sun playing a role as a carrier for these activities? Do you have huge cosmic memories where all activities that look like life, like the beginning of life, are recorded? And, on Earth, maybe all of these things are floating around … and when evolution was instrumental in making the species move from the first bacteria to most advanced animals, which are probably the dolphins, and then maybe they pick up that memory which is cosmic … and that memory stays in water somewhere.”

What else we are wandering…

🔍 Epitaxy and Water
The late Rustum Roy, a materials scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park believed it was time for a radical overhaul of the scientific view of water–one which, he believes, had been dominated by chemistry for too long. In a review paper published in Materials Research Innovations, Roy and a team of collaborators called for a re-examination of the case against the most controversial of all claims made for water: that it has a "memory”. Roy argued that water has proven itself capable of effects that go beyond simple chemistry, and these may imbue water with a memory. One way this may occur, he said, is through an effect known as epitaxy: using the atomic structure of one compound as a template to induce the same structure in others.

🔍 Memory problems
Ancient ice is urgently being saved for analysis, as scientists fear that the ocean will soon forget vital information, due to climate change. "Glaciers at high latitudes, such as those in the Arctic, have begun to melt at a high rate," said paleoclimatologist Carlo Barbante, vice-chairman of the Ice Memory Foundation that is running the mission. Analysis of chemicals in deep "ice cores" provides scientists with valuable data about past environmental conditions, but meltwater is now leaking down and altering the geochemical records preserved below. Specialists will extract ice in a series of tubes from as far as 125 meters (137 yards) below the surface, containing frozen geochemical traces dating back three centuries—and take it to an ‘ice sanctuary.’ "In coming decades, researchers will have new ideas and techniques to give voice to these archives. For instance, they may be able to isolate other information contained in the ice of which we are not aware today."

🔍 Water babies
“Perhaps the meridians, acupuncture meridians in Chinese medicine, are actually based on the water cables aligned along connective tissues, and then these cables become finer and finer meshes and ultimately they go into each cell,” geneticist Mae-Wan Ho tells ALICE in 2006. “And so there is, in a way, a whole matrix, a whole water matrix if you like … we are water babies. A water matrix with all this memory intercommunicating and all this knowledge and memory constituting a consciousness. And they are, individual cells and so on, are acting as literal memory stores. So you can imagine the whole having a kind of memory. There are a lot of very intriguing things that people have claimed. There have been claims that when peoples organs are transplanted some people think they are recalling other peoples memory. I don’t know if it’s true but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were.”

🔍 Alkaline Water
Many health experts have written books, papers or given lectures explaining why alkaline ionized water is the simplest, most effective way to Alkalize, Hydrate, Detoxify and Mineralize the body. In the book, "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" the authors state: Consuming the right type of water is vital to detoxifying the body's acidic waste products and is one of the most powerful health treatments available. We recommended that you drink 8-10 glasses per day of alkaline water. It is one of the simplest and most powerful things that you can do to combat a wide range of disease processes. It is interesting to note that in Japan, professional sports teams drink alkaline water to improve performance.”

🧠 Loving this
“Water would be one of the things that's involved in mediating field effects, whether it's magnetic stuff between people, the solar stuff in terms of within our bodies, we know that we're over 80% water,” Rollin McCraty, Director of Research at the Institute of HeartMath, told ALICE in 2011. “We were doing some experiments with water quite a while back. The idea came…wonder if we can detect a person's heartbeat in water? So we stuck an electrode, its high impedance meter, and stuck it in a glass of water. And sure enough, using some signal averaging techniques, we could detect the person's heartbeat in this glass of water sitting out here on the table. It's kind of odd the way we came around to it. Then the realization was, oh we're water, I bet we can detect each other's fields—instead of the other way around. And the water was critical, without the water you didn't detect the field.”

Craving more?

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🎧 Alice podcast: Memory of Healing in Water with Bill Bengston
👁‍🗨 Meridians and the water matrix with Dr. Mae Wan-Ho