The Holographic Universe Read Online Free

than localized in the
brain. If it was possible for every portion of a piece of holographic film to
contain all the information necessary to create a whole image, then it seemed
equally possible for every part of the brain to contain all of the information
necessary to recall a whole memory.
     
    Vision Also Is
Holographic
    Memory is not the only
thing the brain may process holographically. Another of Lashley's discoveries
was that the visual centers of the brain were also surprisingly resistant to
surgical excision. Even after removing as much as 90 percent of a rat's visual
cortex (the part of the brain that receives and interprets what the eye sees),
he found it could still perform tasks requiring complex visual skills.
Similarly, research conducted by Pribram revealed that as much as 98 percent of
a cat's optic nerves can be severed without seriously impairing its ability to
perform complex visual tasks.
    Such a situation was
tantamount to believing that a movie audience could still enjoy a motion
picture even after 90 percent of the movie screen was missing, and his
experiments presented once again a serious challenge to the standard
understanding of how vision works. According to the leading theory of the day,
there was a one-to-one correspondence between the image the eye sees and the
way that image is represented in the brain. In other words, when we look at a
square, it was believed the electrical activity in our visual cortex also
possesses the form of a square.
    Although findings such
as Lashley's seemed to deal a deathblow to this idea, Pribram was not
satisfied. While he was at Yale he devised a series of experiments to resolve
the matter and spent the next seven years carefully measuring the electrical
activity in the brains of monkeys while they performed various visual tasks. He
discovered that not only did no such one-to-one correspondence exist, but there
wasn't even a discernible pattern to the sequence in which the electrodes
fired. He wrote of his findings, “These experimental results are incompatible
with a view that a photographic-like image becomes projected onto the cortical
surface.”
    Once again the
resistance the visual cortex displayed toward surgical excision suggested that,
like memory, vision was also distributed, and after Pribram became aware of holography
he began to wonder if it, too, was holographic. The “whole in every part”
nature of a hologram certainly seemed to explain how so much of the visual
cortex could be removed without affecting the ability to perform visual tasks.
If the brain was processing images by employing some kind of internal hologram,
even a very small piece of the hologram could still reconstruct the whole of
what the eyes were seeing. It also explained the lack of any one-to-one
correspondence between the external world and the brain's electrical activity.
Again, if the brain was using holographic principles to process visual
information, there would be no more one-to-one correspondence between
electrical activity and images seen than there was between the meaningless swirl
of interference patterns on a piece of holographic film and the image the film
encoded.
    The only question that
remained was what wavelike phenomenon the brain might be using to create such
internal holograms. As soon as Pribram considered the question he thought of a
possible answer. It was known that the electrical communications that take
place between the brain's nerve cells, or neurons, do not occur alone. Neurons
possess branches like little trees, and when an electrical message reaches the
end of one of these branches it radiates outward as does the ripple in a pond.
Because neurons are packed together so densely, these expanding ripples of
electricity—also a wavelike phenomenon—are constantly crisscrossing one
another. When Pribram remembered this he realized that they were most assuredly
creating an almost endless and kaleidoscopic array of interference patterns,
and these in