Shufflebrain

Table of Contents

chapter one

Quest of Hologramic Memory

I am an anatomist. I say that with pride and satisfaction, even now. And during much of my career, I was certain beyond a conscious doubt that the truth about life would reduce directly and explicitly to the architecture of the things that do the living. I had complete faith, too, that my science would one day write the most important scientific story of all: How a brain gives existence to a mind. But I was wrong. And my very own research, which I call shufflebrain, forced me to junk the axioms of my youth and begin my intellectual life all over again.

My research supports, vindicates, and extends a theory of biological memory, of neural information generally--whether ordained by instinct or acquired through experience--a general theory of the very nature of mind. "Hologramic theory," I shall call it in this book. As its name implies, hologramic theory relates mind to the principle involved in the hologram. Its conclusions, predictions, and assertions represent the antithesis of what I once believed.

Holograms encode messages carried by waves, waves of any sort, in theory. And holograms of all types share in common the fact that they encode information about a property of waves known as phase. I will defer definition of wave phase until later in the book. But phase is a relative property, without definite size or absolute mass; it is elusive and seemed virtually unknowable until the development of holography, the branch of optics concerned directly with holograms. To reconstruct phase, which a hologram permits, is to regenerate a wave's relative shape and thus recreate any message or image the original wave communicated to the recording and storage medium.

Thus the basic assertion in hologramic[1] theory, and the thesis I develop in this book, is that the brain stores the mind as codes of wave phase.

Where did hologramic theory begin? Its origins are complex, and this question should be answered by a professional historian; but the connection between holograms and the brain caught hold in biology and psychology in the late 1960s. Then a neurophysiologist named Karl Pribram,[2] who was writing and lecturing eloquently and insightfully on the subject, proposed the hologram as a model to explain the results not only of his many intensive years investigating the living monkey brain, but also to account for many paradoxes about memory that had persisted unabated since antiquity.

Memory often survives massive brain damage, even the removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere. In the 1920s the celebrated psychologist Karl Lashley, with whom Pribram once worked, demonstrated that the engram, or memory trace, cannot be isolated in any specific compartment of a rat's brain. Certain optical holograms invented in the early 1960s, the most common today, exhibit just what Lashley had alleged of memory: A piece cut from such a hologram--any piece--will reconstruct the entire image. For as unlikely as this may seem, the message exists, whole, at every point in the medium.[3]

My own research has not always focused directly on memory. Regeneration of tissues and organs held my fascination for many years, and I am still pursuing certain questions about the molecular aspects of the regrowth of muscle tissue. But even as a sophomore in college I had the persistent hunch that all recurrent biological events, developmental or neural, might be explained by one unified theory. I spent some years in the pursuit of a structural explanation of how new muscles and skeletons regenerate in the limb of the salamander. My investigations began to suggest that the cells responsible for each new tissue acted as independent mathematical sets. Using transplantations and various other means, I tried to model transformations of independent sets. This approach was very productive.[4]

No other creature rivals the larva as either donor or host of transplanted organs and tissues.

Here, for instance is an animal with an arm in its right orbit, as anatomist call the eye socket. The transplant moved in harmony with eye in the other orbit, the reason being that the muscles that had previously attached to the eye grew into and mixed with the muscles of the transplant. Meanwhile, the still cartilaginous skeleton of the orbitally transplanted limb remained normal. Now, the forearm and hand of the limb transplant are regenerates (as were the animals normally situated limbs). Later, microscopic examination of speciments like this revealed mixed muscles amid perfectly regenerated skeletons. I planned to employ transplantation in shufflebrain research.