Shufflebrain

As a general theory, derived from the generic phase principle, hologramic theory does not make champions of the holists and chumps of the structuralists. Instead, hologramic theory breaks the mind-brain conundrum by showing that one need not choose between holism and structuralism. Hologramic theory will supply us with the missing idea--the thought that Hegel would have said allows thesis and antithesis to become synthesis.

But before we take our first glimpse at hologramic theory, let us consider holograms as such.

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chapter three

Holograms

"It's spooky over there," one of my students said, gesturing with a thumb toward the big room across the hall from our neuroanatomy laboratory. The next student to return mumbled something about

The Exorcist

, which was a hit movie at the time. His lab partner came back next, made a quip about touching the thing but then went mute. I had volunteered my class for an experiment in educational systems technology. But as my students kept returning, house-of-horrors look on their faces, I began wondering if I might have exposed them to a hidden danger. Then it was my turn to go.

The windowless room would have been infinitely black, except for a bright emerald rod of laser light twenty feet from where the door shut out the world behind me. "Come this way," beckoned one of the experimenters. Taking my arm like an usher at a seance, he led me to a stool opposite the laser gun. "Don't look directly into the beam," his partner warned, unnecessarily. The usher slipped a photographic plate into a frame in the beam's path. Instantly, a dissected human brain appeared in the space before me.

It was one of my own specimens, from my class demonstration collection. I'd made the dissection with great care the previous year and had loaned it to the experimenters a few weeks before. But I knew for certain that this specimen was now across the hallway, safely stored in a pickle jar and locked in a cabinet whose only key was in my pants pocket. Yet as an optical phenomenon the specimen was right here in the room with the three of us.

I had known what would be in the room. At least I'd thought I knew. I understood the technical side of what was happening, as did my students. Yet I found myself wondering, as they must have, just what "real" really means. Visually, I could make no distinction between what I was seeing and the actual object. I looked down into a complexly shadowed recess of the specimen where I'd dissected away the forward part of the temporal lobe and had pared back the cerebrum to expose the optic tract and LGB; and I saw features not even the best stereoscopic photographs can capture. When I shifted my gaze to the right, structures I hadn't seen over on the left came instantly into view. When I stood and looked down, I could see the top of the specimen. As I backed off, more structures filled my visual field, and their individual details became less distinct. As I moved in close, fewer structures occupied my field of view, but those that were there I saw much more clearly. Moving still closer, I made out gridlike indentations gauze had pressed into the soft cerebral cortex before the brain had been transferred to formaldehyde and had hardened. And I suddenly became aware that, from habit, I was holding my breath, anticipating a whiff of strong formaldehyde fumes. Finally, even though the scientist in me knew better, I was compelled to reach out and try to touch the brain, to convince myself the object wasn't there.

My students and I weren't hallucinating, observing trick photography, experiencing illusions, or skirting the edges of the occult. In the strictest technical sense we had been looking at the actual brain, even though it wasn't there. We had witnessed the decoding of an optical hologram.

***

How does a forest or a stained- glass window communicate a visible presence? How do objects let us see them? How do they impress their features onto light?