Could that same hologram even offer a way to resolve the baffling paradoxes of modern physics? Pribram addressed this larger concern we had heard voiced by so many other scientists.
"We've got to get into a different frame of reference," he declared. "We need a math and physics that will allow us to ask the right questions. We're not asking them now. We're not anywhere near them, and we can't reach them as long as we're stuck within the old Cartesian deterministic coordinates of time and space.
"Look at what is happening in nuclear physics," he said, making reference to the tachyon. "You have a particle leaving here and getting there before it left. Something's wrong! Someone may get a Nobel prize for putting that in diagrams that have time running backwards, but if you ask him what he means by that, he'll say, 'What do you mean, what do I mean ? I can describe it mathematically, but I haven't the slightest idea what it's all about.' Somehow, we've got to switch to an entirely different way of thinking. Not that the ordinary way is wrong -- I'm not giving up the idea that this is a flat floor, but that doesn't mean that the world isn't round."
Many members of the scientific community have begun to show great interest in Pribram's work. Yet, inevitably, when a theory of this magnitude is proposed, it takes years, sometimes even generations, for it to gain widespread verification and acceptance. Nevertheless, in under a decade Pribram's holographic model has already made deep inroads into scientific thought concerning such fundamental processes as memory and perception. It has suggested new ways of looking at everything from social relationships to particle physics, and, in time, it may even shed light on some of the most intangible aspects of the human spirit.
"All of a sudden these things are no longer mere wisps of imagination," Pribram told us with a smile. "They turn out to be, mathematically, precisely describable ideas."
Pribram is a modest man, but his enthusiasm for his model comes forward in a confident and forthright manner. As we prepared to leave, he said, "I think the hologram notion is in fact a real change in our scientific paradigm. It makes studiable by scientific tools all the things that have been dismissed as mystical and subjective and so on. In other words, here is an explanatory device that turns the corner."
11 The Law of Experience
Just as no man lives or dies to himself, so no experience lives or dies
to itself.
-- John Dewey, The Need of a Theory of Experience
We left Stanford confident that Karl Pribram's revolutionary holographic model of the brain offered our investigation the new window we had been looking for into the subjective world of human awareness. Through it, one could see the human mind in a way it had never been viewed before, no longer clouded by the paradoxes of information and experience that once posed insurmountable barriers to understanding. The brain's lightning speed and versatility, taken for granted by the layman, became much more compatible with the laws of nature and modern physics. The miracle of memory, so effortlessly accomplished, and the mystery of perception dropped into new positions in the context of the puzzle we were working.
No longer was the term "information" simply a lifeless engineering concept, a procession of signals, a tally of messages directing the performance of computers and other robots. With the aid of the hologram, we could at last understand the meaning of information in its fully human form. In the brain, information bursts alive in vivid projections of the sense impressions that create our experience of the world, superimposing on one another at many different levels or frequencies. Intermingled with those projections are the private sensations of thought and feeling, what Pribram called "introjections," that make uo our experience of ourselves as human beings. Following the direction set by Pribram's insights, it became possible for us to start drawing together the separate elements of our own perspective and, cautiously, begin sketching an overall picture of the mind in communication terms, a mind that became even more amazing when viewed as a living product of information.
As we had come to understand it, the human mind was not some abstract concept, some inaccessible phenomenon, or even the subjective "ghost in the machine." It could be depicted as an organic, holographic information mix, the living whole of billions of interacting perceptions, sensations, thoughts, and feelings coming together not in a computer store of discrete neural pigeonholes but throughout the rich and interwoven structure of the brain. Within this compact but infinitely complex arena, an individual may focus his attention on any portion or detail of his mind in a manner characteristic of the hologram itself. He may approach the overall perspective from many different windows or points of view, or he may zero in on any particular focus of thought, feeling, memory, imagination, or perception. In holographic fashion, it became possible for us to envision every purported state of consciousness, from everyday awareness to those altered psychological or mystical states, not as disconnected "realities" but as alternative slices of each individual's holographic reach and flexibility.
However, in order to complete the communication framework essential to a full interpretation of snapping and the alterations of awareness that may follow from it, we found it necessary to go further still. We had to integrate the insights gained from Pribram and the other scientists we interviewed with our own understanding of the role of experience in human development. Finally, the last pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. In our emerging perspective, the monster of "experience," the beast that had come charging into our culture in the sixties, devouring the traditions of psychology and loosing an epidemic of sudden personality change in the seventies, was, if not yet mathematically exact, at least precisely describable in information terms. And slowly we began to see how information alone -- whether in the form of an overwhelming physical experience, a grueling weekend retreat, a rush of intense emotion, or simply an earful of the right words -- could have the power to shape and alter human awareness and personality.
Whether you call it "consciousness," "ego," "psyche," "mind," or, in the last analysis, "the human spirit," the organic whole of human awareness, as we have come to understand it, is a living thing. Each moment the brain receives and processes billions of bits of experience in the form of minute electrical impulses. This torrent of multisensory information flows through the brain's 10 billion living cells called neurons, sparking slowly through the minute fibers of the synapses, the winding, tangling junctures of weblike interconnection that link each brain cell to many others. It is in these synapses that the brain's most important information-processing activities occur, for here information mixes freely, creating a teeming pool of mental activity that takes place at many conscious and unconscious levels. It is a kaleidoscope of visual images, a rush of sounds, and an endless parade of sensations, from direct impressions, such as a punch in the face, to the most subtle textures of human awareness, such as the veiled signals each individual picks up and gives off via "body language." In holographic fashion, this barrage of information is actually spread out and distributed throughout the brain and nervous system. Feelings of sadness and loss may come to rest in the pit of an individual's stomach. Shocking news may stab him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him -- just as an awesome spectacle may leave him breathless. In this way, the things we as human beings experience deposit traces of information throughout the body, literally informing a person's life from that moment on.
The process may be compared to the way in which the body digests food. The powerful chemical and biological machinery of the digestive system breaks down the food we eat into its basic nutritional components, which are then made available to the rest of the body. In this same sense, the brain can be said to metabolize experience, through its natural capacity for transformation, converting its rich diet into information which it then uses to fuel its other complex communication operations. Like the other organs of the body -- the heart, which runs on blood, or the lungs, which run on air -- the human brain, the seat of awareness, thrives on information.
This analogy is not simply
a vivid organic metaphor; experiments in sensory deprivation offer a taste of what happens to the brain when it is starved of information. The effects go far beyond the spiritual moments described by Sargant. In sensory deprivation tests, subjects are suspended in sightless, soundless tanks of water which produce an effect of weightlessness, the water warmed to body temperature to nullify all impressions of heat and cold. No physiological stress need be applied (adequate oxygen is ensured), yet when all information is cut off, the operation of the brain is totally disrupted. Disorientation results almost immediately. After about twenty minutes, visual and auditory hallucinations begin to occur. The alterations of consciousness that have been widely noted generally follow, ranging from high states of ecstasy and joy to deep realms of cosmic bliss and spiritual transcendence. After a point, however, prolonged periods of sensory deprivation may cause irreversible damage to the nervous system. Insanity, violence, or complete withdrawal may result -- not from chemical or physiological causes such as drugs or a lack of food or sleep, but from a simple lack of information. Apparently, man's hunger for order is not merely a poetic notion. The body's basic need for information is an explicit physical demand. Deprived of information, the brain ceases functioning normally; starved to extremes, it goes altogether haywire. Yet this life-supporting information does not merely fuel the brain as gasoline fuels a precast auto engine. In human terms, information plays a much more vital and fundamental role.
Of all the organs of the body, the brain is without a doubt the most miraculous, for unlike the heart, the lungs, or the stomach, in performing its natural duties the brain does not proceed according to some genetically determined program. The most recent bio-information findings reveal that human awareness does not spring full blown from the biological machinery of the brain. Before it can begin to organize the world, the brain must first organize itself, yet this is a feat it performs brilliantly and automatically, like everything else it does: from experience.
For all practical purposes, the size and structure of the human brain is genetically determined. The number of neurons in the brain is set at birth and does not increase appreciably from then on. The intricate synaptic connections between and among those neurons, however, the information-processing pathways that determine how an individual's experience will, in fact, become ordered and interpreted, are only minimally organized at birth. The fundamental workings of the mind -- the so-called wiring of the human computer -- are determined by experience. During the first years of life, the infant brain establishes the basic information-processing pathways that govern its perceptions throughout life. What an individual sees, hears, senses, etc., the manner in which he or she experiences the world, is determined by these first experiences. Yet even as these basic perceptual faculties are developing, the child's awareness is being shaped by his parents and others in the modes of perception of his culture. Different cultures perceive the world in different ways, seeing different shapes, distinguishing different colors, and ignoring different things as well; and a child's awareness can only expand within the social context of his first shared experiences and relationships. Later, more complex and sophisticated capacities evolve, such as thought, language, and imagination, all of which grow and develop in response to further childhood experiences. If these basic capacities are not tapped and nurtured in the child's early years, they will not develop on their own. If he never uses his powers of imagination when he is young, when the brain is in its most ambitious period of organization and development, the capacity will not be there when he grows older. In direct contrast to earlier thinking on the subject, in recent years the prized quality called genius has been shown to be as much as 90 percent a product of experience, a result of the active cultivation of an individual's primary mental capacities during his most impressionable years.
This capacity for learning, for growth and development through experience, is unparalleled among other species. Experience literally creates the workings of the human brain, transforming the raw material of billions of neurons into a triumph of communication. And, in our perspective, experience also shapes the individual patterns of thought and feeling that underlie that larger human form, personality.
In contrast to the rest of nature, human beings have evolved into a general and infinitely adaptable species. Unlike animals, our genetic code contains almost no specific instructions for behavior, but rather an economical set of rules for developing individual patterns of response. These patterns form information-processing pathways in the brain which make up our individual capacities of thought and feeling. Long before the ability to communicate through language is developed, these fundamental patterns of thought and feeling, the base on which personality rests, are forged in the intimate relationship between parent and child. A mother's touch, the sound of her voice, the warmth of her skin, provide the child's first experiences and shape feelings that will influence him throughout his life. Later, as the child grows and ventures into the world, he is introduced to new forms of action, expression, and relationship, experiences which further shape his individuality and inform his budding social nature.
All this information, virtually everything an individual experiences, becomes a permanent part of the organization of the brain, but the extent to which it shapes personality throughout life, or at any one moment, is not fixed or predetermined. As we have come to understand it, an individual's personality, like his awareness itself, is fluid and ever-changing, a mix of resonating bits of information and experience, past and present.
This idea that information is, in a very real sense, metabolized and stored in basic patterns of thought and feeling throughout the brain accounts for the classical Freudian notion of personality as a product of a young child's earliest experiences as well as many aspects of the Skinnerian concepts of behavioral conditioning and environmental control. But in our view, this organic and uniquely human shaping process is ongoing throughout the lifelong course of personal growth. At any time in an individual's life, new and intense experiences may leave deep and lasting impressions on fundamental information-processing pathways in the brain. Also, in holographic fashion, thoughts and feelings from some past experience may be regenerated by new experiences of a similar nature, giving rise to images and emotions which spring up, we may surmise, in rough proportion to the intensity of the combined old and new experiences. As cited in a well-known example, exotic smells may call up long-forgotten memories and their associated feelings. In another widely noted phenomenon, long after a person has reached adulthood, the overwhelming pressures of job or career may unleash feelings of anxiety and panic reminiscent of exam periods in high school or college -- sometimes even triggering explicit dreams of those bygone days. Under other circumstances, marital problems, for example, may evoke feelings of insecurity and rejection that date back to earlier romances and love affairs. In an individual's later years, the aging process may be accompanied by a flood of past impressions stirred by present thoughts and feelings; for while an individual's memory of recent events usually deteriorates with age, the earliest experiences have been shown to become more salient. And, finally, at death, in a phenomenon that has been endlessly reported, the entire storehouse of the brain may be illuminated simultaneously, causing the complete record of an individual's experience to flash before his eyes -- and pass through every other sense as wall.
Despite proof of this copious activity in the lifelong metabolism of information and experience throughout the brain, the tacit assumption among many scientists, psychologists, and the general public is that the heart of each individual's personality, his human awareness in all its multicolored variety, is an unfading flower that grows out of childhood experiences, environmental conditioning, and the rock-hard structure of his genetic code and that, once formed, it remains indelibly fixed, maintaining itself effortlessly throughout life. Our investigation of snapping has convinced us that this assumption is invalid. In the natural course of human development, experience does indeed shape individu
al awareness and personality. But, as we have come to understand, this shaping process is organic and in a state of constant change. An incessant flow of experience is needed to actively create and sustain our individual information-processing capacities. And as our research reveals, that same life-giving flow of information can be used to alter or destroy those capacities as well.
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This prospect was first suggested in the early fifties by a British engineer, W. Ross Ashby, a seminal figure in communication science. Ashby made the first comprehensive application of communication principles to the machinery of the human brain. In two brilliant technical works, Design for a Brain, published in 1952, and An Introduction to Cybernetics, published in 1956, Ashby developed mechanical and behavioral models to describe how a sophisticated cybernetic device like the human brain could organize itself from experience, and how new experience could alter that organization at its most fundamental levels. From these models, Ashby derived the basic principle of communication that underlies both technological and human information processing. He named this principle the Law of Experience.
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