Based on an article in the November/December issue of the magazine, Quest/77 in a special feature on brain function, edited by Tony Jones.
Yet I was seeing no photograph. When I shifted over to the left, I could see a side of the brain not visible from the front. Over on the right, or standing up, I got different perspectives. Moving in close, almost expecting to smell strong formaldehyde fumes, I could make out fine gridlike indentations that had been impressed by cheesecloth while the brain was still fresh and soft. Finally, I had to reach out and try touching the brain to convince myself that the thing itself really wasn't there at all.
I wasn't hallucinating or witnessing trick photography. Nor was the image an optical illusion, either. It was an image reconstructed from a hologram .
A hologram encodes for the height of waves and how quickly points on the wave move from one place to the next. Called phase and amplitude, the two properties determine all else about waves, including any images or messages the waves may be transporting. (Photographs contain information only about amplitude.)
I understood what was going on in that room. I even knew the mathematical reasons why. It was science, not magic or supernatural laws at work. Yet the human being in me kept asking over and over again just what reality really was, anyway. For it wasn't only the uncanny hologram. It was the thought that before me might lie the basic secret of how that pickled brain across the hallway had once stored a living mind.
Theories are what make scientific revolutions happen. And we may just be in the early and uncertain rounds of one right now. For the abstract principles of the hologram form the basis of a theory to explain the brain's most elusive properties. Hologramic theory, an editor of mine once named it. And that's what I'll call it here.
Hologramic theory was first proposed by physicists, not psychologists, physiologists, or anatomists. But the theory has been used by a number of behavioral and biological scientists during the past few years to account for many diverse paradoxes about the brain. The theory has predicted incredible results in many laboratories, including my own, and has led to new and unsuspected possibilities of brain and mind. And physical holograms may be used to motel many features of mind that once seemed totally beyond the ken of science.
A generation ago, psychologist Karl Lashley found that he could dim the recollections of laboratory animals by destroying parts of their brains. But it wasn't where he cut, it was how much. Lashley concluded that the engram, or memory trace, is distributed and repeated throughout the brain. He could never isolate the engram.
People's engrams have been equally elusive, although Lashley's doctrine may be too simplistic to cover the complex brains of humans, apes, and, perhaps, dolphins and whales. But his basic idea works, even in us. And his beliefs have been sustained by many different kinds of experiments, some conducted even by his critics. A physiologist named E. Roy John and his colleagues have learned how to detect active memory signals in the living brains of rats and cats; the same signals recur in vastly different regions of the brain, just as Lashley's doctrine predicts. And would you believe that shuffling a salamander's brain does not scramble the animal's mind? I might not, either, except that I did the research myself.
The diffuse hologram makes no more common sense than the brain itself. Cut the hologram in half and both halves still regenerate a whole scene. Try quarters, eighths -- and it's the same thing! The reason is that a whole code exists at every point in the medium. The reasons are mathematical. But, basically, the hologramic code depends on ratios established within the medium, not absolute values. Like an angle, the code is relationships, abstract relationships, really.
At any rate, with very tiny pieces of a diffuse hologram, the regenerated image does blur, as did the memories of Lashley's animals. But the information itself doesn't degenerate. It's in the communication of it; the loss of fidelity is an effect of "noise" on the very weak signal a tiny piece of hologram generates; it's like what static does to a weak radio signal or snow to a dim TV picture. Physiologist John believes that signal-noise differences account for specialized functions in particular parts of the brain.
A subtle dilemma pops up in work such as Lashley's. If engrams are distributed everywhere, how does the same brain house more than a single memory? Holographers have produced what are called multiple holograms -- codes of many different scenes superimposed one on top of the other right in the very same medium! How can this be? In theory the individual code can be made almost as small as a single geometric point. Thus on any piece of medium, the number of individual codes may approach infinity, in theory. In practice, multiple holograms actually exist.
In multiple holograms, the holographer keeps different scenes straight by manipulating such properties as color or the angle of the construction beam. Then, during decoding, by making comparable adjustments, the holographer can cause one whole scene to go off and another to come on -- like an actor forgetting Othello so he can play Hamlet.
Consider, though, what happens if the holographer doesn't make adjustments during the coding process! During decoding, the holograms might act as though they had an imagination: scenes might merge that had never coexisted in physical reality at all. Or, depending, on the scenes, the holograms might also act as though they were producing delirium tremens or were taking a trip on LSD.
The abstract principle in the hologram easily accounts for my shufflebrain experiments. Each code is not only whole, it is also independent of other codes -- although codes cooperate in regenerating the image. Shuffling parts of the salamander's brain was like scrambling a deck of identical cards. But this independence principle would also allow new information to be fed into the deck. I've tested this prediction by transplanting brain parts. An operation can give a salamander thoughts originally taught to another salamander -- or even the instincts of fishes or frogs.
Actually, some 200 reports exist alleging that memory may be transferred in chemical form from one rat to another -- or even from a rat to a hamster! This is a very controversial subject, and it would take me a book to do justice to both sides. But one big imponderable used to be how a tiny molecule might store all the information required to make a memory. Hologramic theory doesn't settle the controversy. But holograms would have no trouble fitting on a molecule, in theory, at least.
There is evidence of memories on molecules. The most convincing case has come from studies of decision-making and memory in bacteria, believe it or not, organisms that don't even have brains. But there's this major obstacle against reducing mind to molecules -- and this extends to the chemical transfer of memory, too: the facts. Some physiologists have found no chemical changes associated with learning. Hologramic theory suggests reasons for such discrepancies, some mathematical, others that can be seen by way of physical simulation. Let's look at an example of the latter.
There are acoustical holograms -- holograms made from sound instead of light. The information is gathered with a microphone and the code is displayed on a TV tube. It's possible to photograph the hologram for permanent storage, should someone pull the TV plug or change scenes.
Short- and long-term memory might work analogously. Or the transition from visual to some other mode might be modeled as follows. It is possible to shine a light through the photograph and visually regenerate a scene originally encoded by sound. But consider this question: Where is the hologram? In the air near the microphone? In the vibrations of the microphone? In the electronics of the set? On the tube? In the photographic film? The answer is that it is in all these places. For the hologram is information. It is abstract relationships. The same code can exist in vastly different kinds of media and depend on different mechanisms -- just as an angle of 30 degrees may be formed from ivory, mahogany, or extruded aluminum.
Hologramic theory does not free mind from media. It is no new variant of mind- body dualism. But the theory's most far reaching implication is that many different mechanisms and media can store the same codes. Stored mind is not thing. It is abstract relationships produced by things. In the sense of ratios, angles, square roots, mind is a mathematic. No wonder it's hard to fathom.