A modern myth of the new age movement. The story of the hundredth monkey was first told by Lyall Watson in his book Life-tide: A Biology of the Unconscious (1979). According to Watson, four primatologists were observing monkeys living on the islands off Japan. They began to leave food for the monkeys to find and eat to keep them away from local farms. In 1953 they watched an older female monkey wash a potato to get the dirt and grit off it. She taught the process to others. Slowly the process spread, but then suddenly at one point, the practice exploded: where before only a few were washing potatoes, suddenly almost all of the monkeys were doing it. Up to a certain point Watson supposed up to 99 monkeys washing potatoes the behavior grew slowly, step by step. But when the next monkey joined in the hundredth almost all of the remaining monkeys immediately adopted the practice.
Watson used the story as a simple illustration of the operation of the paranormal, but one reader, Ken Keyes, saw in it a parable for the new age. If a critical mass of people attain to a new consciousness, then the idea will quickly appear throughout the human race. Keyes wrote a book applying this idea to the issue of world peace. In his book The Hundredth Monkey, he argued that if a critical mass of people could attain to peace consciousness, then miraculously that consciousness would be multiplied around the world. Within a few years several books appeared that further explored the implication of the hundredth-monkey idea in various realms. It was especially attractive to New Age thinkers as it supplied what appeared to be a mechanism by which the “New Age” could be brought into existence in spite of the disbelief of a great majority of the population.