Can we please forget about “water memory”?

When I was a child, I remember reading about the water cycle, also known as the hydrologic cycle.  Water molecules in lakes and oceans evaporate into the atmosphere, return to the Earth as precipitation, and then flow back into the rivers, lakes and oceans.  Some water, of course, is used for industrial purposes, while other water is consumed and used by living creatures, to be eventually eliminated and returned into the cycle.

The hydrologic cycle. From Environment Canada.

I was quite amazed at the thought of the same water existing on Earth for millions and billions of years. Beyond the somewhat academic discussion of the cycle, one article encouraged me to imagine the journey of a single drop of water as it made it way around the World.  From that, I can imagine that the first drop of water from this morning’s shower might have been part of a bath taken by Socrates. The bit of water in the bottom of my glass could have been part of the iceberg that was struck by the Titanic. The bit of sweat on my forehead right now may have been on Roger Bannister’s forehead as he was breaking the four-minute mile.

An illustration of hydrogen bonding – each oxygen atom is somewhat negative, while each hydrogen atom is somewhat positive.

A water molecule can interact with neighbouring molecules, and it has a rare ability to form a hydrogen bond – since the electronic charge shared in the O-H bond is so lopsided towards the oxygen atom, the hydrogen atom is essentially a naked proton, which will be immediately attracted to the unusually high negative charge on the oxygen atom of the neighbouring water molecule. Hydrogen bonding explains some unusual properties of water – for example, while the boiling point of a substance typically increases as the size of the molecule increases, water’s boiling point of 100°C is incredibly high for such a small molecule (many molecules of its size boil around room temperature, or even lower.)  Extra energy, in the form of heat, is needed to break all hydrogen bonds for the molecules to separate completely from each other, in order to enter into the gas phase.

Water molecules surrounding ions from sodium chloride.  From the University of Arizona.

When water encounters another polar substance such as ethanol or a substance separated into ions such as sodium chloride (Na⁺ and Cl^-), the water molecules surround those species in a way to balance charges – the negative oxygen atoms will surround the Na⁺ ion, while the positive hydrogen atoms will point towards the Cl^- ion.

The life of a water molecule is an amazing and ongoing journey, but unfortunately, the molecule itself remembers none of it. It forms its hydrogen bonds, dissolves, evaporates, becomes ice or steam, spends a few hours travelling in a person’s body, makes it way around the World, yet it remains the same plain water molecule.  Nevertheless, there are businesses built on claims that water has a memory – that it remembers what was previously dissolved in it, that it can retain information it has been exposed to, and that it can even have emotional responses to external stimuli.

The notion that water can remember what it has just dissolved is the central physical tenet of homeopathy – I have written several posts on that topic in the past. The other two claims came to my attention recently as I was watching an old episode of CBC’s Dragon’s Den.  The show’s premise involves entrepreneurs pitching business ideas to five venture capitalists (the “dragons”), offering equity in exchange for business capital. (There are versions of this show around the World – Americans know this show as Shark Tank.)

In its fourth-ever episode, which aired in October 2006, a pitcher was seeking funding for a special water. Canadian readers can watch this pitch here, starting at 18:50. The product, Rashana Sound Essences, is claimed to be a water that provides emotional support when used. The pitcher prepares the water by meditating over it and singing to it – and the water somehow remembers the song.  She referenced a Japanese doctor, Dr. Masaru Emoto, who had (in her words) “found a way to take pictures of water molecules, and proven that water will hold our intention”. The dragons did not appear to take the claims very seriously, although she argued the business point that her products “appeal to a large market of growing people who are taking a proactive approach to health”.

I had never heard of Dr. Emoto or the claims that water can “hold intention” – this is certainly a more impressive claim than the homeopathic idea of water retaining the imprint of an active ingredient that it dissolved. The statement that he could see water molecules may have been her misspeaking – he looks at ice crystals through a microscope and interprets their appearance, and even small crystals contain a significant number of water molecules. He found that crystals from tap water or rivers in big cities were not as beautiful as the crystals made from water taken in “pristine locations”.  This is not surprising – there may be impurities dissolved in the tap water or polluted river waters that would affect the formation of the crystals during the cooling of the water.

Are these ice crystals really manifesting their feelings?

Water crystals are certainly beautiful to look at.  However, it is dangerous to use their beauty to add meaning or “intention” to water.  Dr. Emoto makes very significant claims – most importantly, that beautiful crystals were always observed “after giving good words, playing good music, and showing, playing, or offering pure prayer to water.”  Disfigured crystals were observed when doing the opposite.  His article makes several mentions of beauty, but gives no indication of what he defines as a beautiful crystal.  It is a subjective criterion – remember that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” – so the interpretation of what makes a crystal beautiful remains with the researcher.

A further article details some experiments where small water samples are placed in Petri dishes, exposed to words or music, and then cooled.  The ice crystals are said to give appearances consistent with feelings associated with the stimulus; water samples exposed to Bach’s Air for the G String “gives the impression that the crystal is dancing merrily”, those exposed to the word angel made the crystal “burst forth in a multitude of flowers”, while exposure to the word devil made the crystal “look distinctly sinister”.  Even exposing the water to names caused a reaction – the name of Hitler made the crystals look like “I will kill you”.  (This article does admit that 100 Petri dishes are used at once and that no two are exactly alike, but that the replicates “were definitely variations on a specific theme”.)

Along with the subjective criterion of beauty, these experiments suffer from a fatal flaw – the people inspecting the crystals already knew the word or sound that the crystal was exposed to.  This would certainly affect their “interpretation”.  Knowing that a group of crystals was exposed to “Hitler”, they will certainly seek the most negative and evil qualities of the crystal.  (Claiming that the crystals appeared anything less than absolutely sinister would surely cast doubt on the entire operation, right?)  To avoid experimenter’s bias, and to offer any credibility to this test, one person would be responsible for exposing the water to words and cooling the samples.  (I will assume that leaving the words in an envelope would cause some sort of interference.)  Several other people would then interpret the crystals without any knowledge of the words that were used, or how the other participants are interpreting the same crystals.

In making claims that water can respond to words and names, there is an implicit claim that water is capable of judgement – yet that judgement will be inevitably tainted by the person’s own views of the World.  The words “father” and “mother” will be extremely positive to some people, and very painful to others.  It’s one thing to ask ten people to interpret a water crystal after telling them that it was exposed to “Hitler” – those results will be predictable.  Ask these same ten people to interpret a water crystal of the same water exposed to the name of a person who evokes more complex feelings (such as “Obama” or “Pope Benedict XVI”) – or better yet, the name of a person they don’t even know – and I believe the results will be much more ambiguous.  In fact, the totality of the interpretations will probably end up looking random.

Along with these practical observations, I must re-emphasize the key physical point – water simply does not have a memory.  There is no credible evidence that water, in the form of ice, retains any information from external sources.  In the liquid state, research published by Cowan et al showed that any unusual structure among the water molecules is lost within 50 femtoseconds (50 millionths of a billionth of a second). Therefore, any “memory” that water may have – any information that it could retain through its arrangement – lasts for such a negligible blip of time, that it is inconsequential for us.

Water is beautiful, whether it is flowing in streams, waterfalls, on a beach or in a pool on a hot day.  It is essential for life.  There is already plenty about water that makes it such a fascinating chemical compound – and yet, let us never forget that water is, after all, a very simple molecule.

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