Lyman acknowledged the delicacy of the problem.
"There are a lot of subjects that you have to step very carefully on," he said, "because there are many phenomena physics has not put into order yet."
According to Lyman, the final challenge to the study of the mind lies not in biology but in modern physics, which has yet to extricate itself from the paradoxes of relativity. Light, for example, he said, is conveniently conceived of in terms of both particles and waves, despite the fact that the two models contradict each other in fundamental ways. Inside the atom as well, Lyman felt modern physics had reached "the bottom of the barrel," trying to solve the mystery of numerous "elementary particles that can only be given romantic names," he said, such as 'quarks' -- fractions of mass; 'charm' -- wisps of electrical charge; and 'tachyons' -- hypothetical particles that move backward in time at speeds faster than the limit of light.
"The traditional concepts of physics are being profoundly questioned by our own methods," Lyman told us. "Nobody's willing to go mystic and say, 'Okay, we admit that logic doesn't exist.' On the other hand, science is starting to recognize that there's a lot more to relativity than Einstein ever put together."
In Lyman's view, questions of human consciousness will remain unanswerable until the crisis in physics is successfully resolved. As he sees it, the breakthrough that is required here could not be of greater conceptual proportions.
"We had Newton and we had Einstein," said Lyman appreciatively, "but now we need somebody to carry us to the next stage. We need someone to take us beyond E=mc²."
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At Stanford University in California, a neurophysiologist by the name of Karl H. Pribram has gone beyond E=mc². In the course of his lifelong investigation of the inner workings of the brain, this internationally acclaimed scientist has developed a new model of the human brain that is the stuff of which scientific revolutions are made. Sir Isaac Newton looked for answers to puzzles of the universe in the outermost regions of the solar system; Albert Einstein sought ultimate understanding among cosmic forces that doubled back upon themselves at the boundaries of space and time. Unlike them, Karl Pribram has broken through ironclad barriers of physics by seeking answers to questions posed not by the largest or furthermost objects known to man but by what is acknowledged to be the most complex and challenging structure in nature: the human brain.
Pribram's work on the brain spans enormous areas of research. He has made primary investigations into fundamental neural processes to find out how nerve cells communicate with each other, how the brain filters the input it receives from the senses, and what role the brain plays in psychological processes. Pribram's most recent and stunning achievement, however, is his proposed new model of important aspects of brain function, which shatters many of our previously accepted notions concerning such basic activities as perception and memory. His model has evoked widespread discussion and excitement within the scientific establishment, and it is slowly being recognized as a major breakthrough in scientific theory.
Following threads of research loosened by some of the most important figures in brain research, many of whom he has known and worked with personally, Pribram took on the greatest challenge in the field: the mystifying problem of how memory is stored and retrieved in the brain. His approach was brilliantly innovative. Instead of looking for specific bits of information, as most of his predecessors had done, he abandoned this file-drawer model in favor of a new approach to information storage suggested by Dr. Karl Lashley, a pioneer in American brain research. Lashley, who gave up in despair after an unsuccessful thirty-year search for specific memory traces, proposed that memory was not stored in discrete units but rather in intersecting patterns of information flow within the brain. As Pribram was pursuing this avenue of exploration, he came upon a precise mathematical and physical model called the 'hologram.' A recent invention of the science of optics, the hologram is by now well-known as a novel way to achieve a photographic "store" from which a three-dimensional image can be reconstructed. What Pribram saw in it, however, was an elegant demonstration of his new theory of memory and perception. The three-dimensional holographic image is the emergent product of the stored "interference pattern" created by two intersecting beams of light -- and patterns of light, of course, are simply a visible form of information!
To create a hologram, a beam of coherent light (light waves of a single frequency, in phase, traveling in the same direction) produced by a laser is split through a mirror that is partially silvered and partially transparent. Half the light goes directly to a photographic plate; the other half is reflected off the person, object, or scene being photographed -- in this ease, 'holographed' -- and then it too converges onto the photographic plate. The plate records not the actual image, as in conventional photography, but the interference pattern formed by the twin beams of intersecting light. The plate or film, often called the 'holograph' as distinct from the image itself, the hologram (although the two terms are also used interchangeably), shows a series of patterns and swirls that mean nothing to the naked eye. To recreate the hologram, the holograph has only to be illuminated by another beam of coherent light, which produces an image with true three-dimensional perspective, an image not on the film but somewhere behind or in front of the film. By looking at the film from a variety of angles, the viewer can see the image from below, above, and either side, perceiving it just as though he were looking at the original object itself from several different positions.
Holography is more than just a photographic gimmick. It is also the most sophisticated method of information storage yet devised. By using different frequencies of light, many interference patterns can be superimposed on a single holographic plate. In recent experiments, 10 billion bits of information have been stored holographically in one cubic centimeter of space! More important than the capacity of the hologram to store enormous quantities of information, however, is the manner in which that information is stored.
In a hologram, the information or light reflected off each point of the object being holographed is spread out and distributed across the entire surface of the film. The holographic film can then be cut into small fragments, and each fragment, when illuminated, will generate the entire image! Damage to any part of the film, even to the majority of it, will not affect the ability of the film to reproduce the whole image.
Karl Pribram seized upon the concept of the hologram as a remarkably appropriate model of how the brain functions in perception. In the process of vision, for example, information that reaches the brain through its vast number of separate channels comes together at several levels to form interference patterns. The result is a "brain representation" (akin to the photographic holograph) that registers beyond the retina (the photographic plate of the eye). The subjective experience is the image created when a visual input reaches this representation deep within the visual arena of the brain. As in holography, this image is projected outward away from the representation and is therefore perceived as an object in the individual's field of vision. The impression of distance, also known as depth of field, is another holographic effect, a phenomenon called 'parallax,' caused by the intersection of the twin inputs brought to the brain by the left and right eyes.
Similar processes take place in relation to other sense impressions. Pribram has noted that the principles of holography are not dependent on the physical presence of coherent light waves. Another common form of the holograph is the stereophonic recording. The two channels of sound coming out of the stereo speakers create an interference pattern caused by intersecting waves of vibrating air. The product, a three-dimensional auditory "image," seems to be coming not from one speaker or the other but from somewhere in between -- which is, in fact, exactly where the stereophonic image is located. The stereophonic hologram serves as an exact model for the way our two ears function in the process of hearing. Like the eye, the ear sends a vast multiplicity of information through the auditory nerves which conjoins in holographic patterns thr
oughout the network of the brain. Recent research and computer simulations have shown that the same processes are likely to occur with the other senses of taste, touch, and smell. These sensations are not only projections of the enormous quantities of information received by each isolated sense. In many instances, they are products of intersecting patterns from two different sensory systems at once. Our taste impressions, for example, are so heavily dependent on our sense of smell that without the latter many foods would be indistinguishable.
Beyond describing sensation, the holographic model also resolves the conceptual dilemmas of time and space which arise in regard to both memory and dreaming. Its ability to distribute information and retrieve it without searching through endless strings of data bits accounts for many puzzles of the brain's remarkable speed of memory. Presumably, the memory mechanism of the brain is similar to the holographic principle of storing many images within the same space or film by using varying frequencies. One particular wavelength of information will illuminate only one specific image or memory; multiple sources will generate many images simultaneously. This holographic quality would seem to account for the apparent simultaneity of memory in dreaming. In a sense, it enables the brain to relive an entire event from memory or, alternatively, slice apart the separate frames of its time-bound motion picture and, in effect, lay them out side by side, making all the information available at one time. This versatile scheme would also seem to suggest explanations for other remarkable mental processes, from our capacity for free association to those integrative or creative processes that go into imaginative and poetic activity.
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A supremely sophisticated and eminently practical form of information storage, processing, and organization, Pribram's holographic model of the brain is highly attractive and entirely plausible. The scientific soundness of the holographic model has been carefully worked out and verified mathematically; the distribution of information has been shown to take place in accordance with precise mathematical "spread functions." In addition, the applicability of the model to the brain has been established experimentally by researchers working independently of Pribram. In 700 operations, Dr. Paul Pietseh of Indiana University has successfully "shuffled" the brains of salamanders -- excising, grafting, and literally scrambling their structure and contents -- to prove that memory storage does in fact conform to holographic principles. In Pribram's holographic breakthrough, it would seem, science has at last produced a credible theory, mathematical and experimental proof, and, in the three-dimensional holographic image, a working model of consciousness itself.
We drove into Palo Alto one cloudy afternoon in the spring of 1977 to discuss with Karl Pribram the implications of his holographic model. Silver-haired but youthful, even sprightly, Pribram possesses an ageless quality that seems to reflect both greatness and humanity. For several hours, he breathed life into his model of the brain, augmenting his views with photographs, diagrams, and his own colorful manner of expression.
"Holograms do deal with conscious awareness," he said. "When I light up a hologram, the image I see is not on the photographic film. It's somewhere beyond; it's a projection. If the brain is holographically organized, conscious experience will be similarly projected when the right input comes in."
Throughout our talk, Pribram was careful not to state conclusively the implications of his theory, for he was quick to admit that the brain is much more complex and specialized than a simple hologram, combining a variety of modes of information storage, distribution, and organization over the various regions of brain function. Nevertheless, he cited recent research suggesting the broad applicability and flexibility of his basic model. He seemed delighted to surmise about its countless fascinating ramifications, new holographic principles that seemed to resolve long-standing paradoxes of the human mind, and notions which, we suspected, held vital clues to the mysteries of sudden personality change that we were investigating.
Most intriguing to us, and of immediate concern with regard to the descriptions we had heard of abrupt changes in awareness, was the paradox that the brain does not appear to be time-bound in its function, yet meets the sequential demands of every aspect of human activity and bodily function. Pribram accounted for this contradiction with little difficulty, transporting us beyond our traditional notions of space and time into the inner world of the brain.
"Now if the hologram is something that is for real in the brain," he cautioned, "it means that we can store things in our brains in terms of various frequencies of information. Then we can read out the information in either linear or spatial fashion. The linear way is sequential, over time, and the spatial is simultaneous. Space and time are not in the brain; they are read out of it." As we contended with this new idea that the brain may be, in fact, the master of its own time and space, Pribram recounted the brief history of the hologram. He pointed out that although his model is a radical one for both biology and psychology, proposing an explanation for intangible qualities of the mind in practical terms, scientists and philosophers have been thinking along similar lines for centuries, developing more and more sophisticated concepts to help them grasp the complexity of the world around them. The first formal principles of holography were introduced in the late forties and fifties by a mathematician named Dennis Gabor, Pribram explained, whose intention was to improve the resolution of electron microscopes, high-powered optical devices that magnify objects to the limits of visible light. Gabor was hoping to find a way to sharpen those ultimate images, as American scientists have since succeeded in "deblurring" images received from satellites in outer space. To do this, Gabor drew upon complex mathematical equations called spread functions, which describe the precise manner in which information is spread out around the entire holographic plate. They also determine how that information is gathered up again to reproduce the original holographic subject.
Pribram cited important historical connections to the mathematics of the hologram.
"The mathematics Gabor used were differential equations, the integral calculus," he said. "And if you go back in your philosophy, you get to Leibniz, who invented calculus. Leibniz first proposed the idea of 'monads,' elementary units that contained the entire image of the universe. At the time, everybody thought, 'Well, Leibniz is getting old. He's trying to talk about God again, just to make sure he gets into those portal gates of St. Peter.' They thought he was going soft, but it turns out the hologram is nothing but a bunch of monads! In other words, every part of the hologram has the attributes of a monad. It includes everything. All the information is there, from a slightly different window or viewpoint. Nonetheless, each part represents the whole, and that, of course, is Godlike, isn't it?"
Pribram let that idea sink in as well, as our minds raced to make connections. We thought about all the people we had talked to whose experiences with various cults, therapies, and drugs had given them overwhelming sensations of oneness with the universe, or of stepping into other dimensions of reality in which they saw the world "through a different window." We thought about the immensely popular, free-wheeling fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, whose characters frequently came "unstuck" in space and time. And we thought about an astrologer we had interviewed in New York who, in his own nonscientific way, had attempted to convince us that an individual's life is influenced by the entire configuration of the solar system at the instant of his birth. All these ideas, if not holographic truths, were at least holographic possibilities -- as was the way our own imaginations triggered one tantalizing association after another. Already we were beginning to grasp the new understanding of human information processing and human experience that could be derived from Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Pribram shared our enthusiasm and helped us ground it in more practical matters as well.
"The holographic notion applies to all of the spiritual ideas we've ever had," he said nonchalantly, "but it also applies to everything we know about social organization."
We had already begun speculating along thos
e lines, for we knew that our emerging communication perspective could not isolate the individual from his larger social nature. The hologram infused new meaning into ideas of interdependence and social relationship to which our society has only recently turned its attention. Each individual can be viewed as a kind of complex hologram of his culture and his time both the reflection and the focal point of his family, his work, his personal relationships, and his society as a whole. In regard to our own investigation, the social implications of the hologram opened the door to a new understanding of the impact of all group activities, from marathon encounters to religious revivals, lending tangible form to the complexity of interacting sensations, information, and potent communication forces that come together in the individual's sweeping "experience" of the group. On a larger scale, the principles of the hologram mirrored our view of the flow of information in a mass society. Like the rush of sensation to the brain, the flood of mass communication, daily news, ideas, and entertainment is spread out and distributed among every individual, each person receiving his unique mixture and interpreting that information from his own distinctive holographic "window." It seemed to us that, in contrast to the world of matter and energy, the entire universe of information and communication, from the smallest flashes of human awareness to the broadest disseminations of mass culture, may be governed by its own set of coherent laws and properties -- which, significantly, appears to conform to the math and physics of the hologram.
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