Shufflebrain

. and Leith and Upatnieks's observations would aptly summarize Lashley's lifelong assertions. Fragments of a diffuse hologram reconstruct whole, if badly faded, images. Correspondingly, a damaged brain still clings to whole, if blurred, memories. Sharpness of the reconstructed image depends not on the specific fragment of hologram but upon the fragment's size. Likewise, the efficiency with which Lashley's subjects remembered their tasks depended not on which parts of the brain survived but on how much brain the animal retained. "Mass action and equipotentiality!" Lashley might have shouted had he lived another six years.

Leith and Upatnieks published an account of the diffuse hologram in the November 1964 issue of the Journal of the Optical Society of America. The following spring, ink scarcely dry on the journal pages, Bela Julesz and K. S. Pennington explicitly proposed that memory in the living brain maps like information in the diffuse hologram. Hologramic theory had made a formal entry into scientific discourse.

***

Whom should we credit then for the idea of the hologramic mind? Lashley? He had forecast it in pointing to interference patterns. Van Heerden? He saw the connection. Pribram? The idea might not have made it into biology without his daring. The cyberneticist Philip Westlake, who wrote a doctoral dissertation to show that electrophysiological data fit the equations of holograms? Julesz and Pennington, for the courage to come right out and say so? I've spent many years unsuccessfully trying to decide just who and when. And I'm not really the person to say. But I am thoroughly convinced of this: subtract Leith and Upatnieks from the scene, and a thousand years could have slipped by with only an occasional van Heerden observing, unnoticed, how closely the hologram mimics the living brain. For the genesis of the theory recapitulates virtually the history of human thought: only after Pythagoras's earth became Columbus's world did it become perfectly obvious to everyone else that our planet was a sphere. And only after Gabor's principle became Leith and Upatnieks's diffuse hologram did science enter the age of the hologramic mind.

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chapter four

Mimics of Mind

THEORY, ABSTRACTION, AND ANALOGY are words used pejoratively by many writers, editors, and publishers, even in an age alternately sustained and menaced by the yield of theoretical physics. Yet theories provide a matrix for much of scientific knowledge. And whatever less committal synonym we may choose (principle, explanation, concept, generalization, for instance), theory is what we really demand of science when we apply

why

to our questions about Nature.

Abstractions, in turn, are what theories really deal in: when we compare six apples with six oranges, we divide or square or multiply the numbers, the abstractions-- not the pits or rinds. The old cliché about not comparing apples and oranges is (to tweak if not mix a metaphor) a lot boloney if we're talking about numbers. "How many apples will you give me for two or oranges?" A good test of a valid abstraction is to ask: does it survive if we shift it to a new set of parochial conditions? The ninety-degree angle-- the abstraction-- made by the edges of a table top does not depend on oak or maple; it can be formed of brass, or asphalt, or two streaks of chalk.

The analogy has its intellectual justification in the first axiom of geometry: things equal to the same things are equal to each other. Things dependent upon the same abstractions are analogs of each other!

Analogy can show us what a theory does , but not what a theory is . Nor does analogy provide a rigorous test of a theory's applicability to a problem. Analogy can't serve as substitutes for the experiment, in other words. Nonetheless, analogies often reveal a theory's implications. They also help connect abstractions to some concrete reality; they often put us in a position to grasp the main idea of a theory with our intuition. The analogy can also expose a subject and show important consequences of a theory, even to those who do not know the strange language of the theory. The analogy can put the theory to work on a human being's familiar ground-- experience. It is by way of the analogy that I shall introduce the reader to hologramic theory.

***

The hologram is not a phenomenon of light, per se, but of waves; in theory, any waves or wavelike events. I've already mentioned acoustical holograms. X-ray holograms, microwave holograms, and electron holograms also exist, as do "computer" holograms, which are holograms constructed from mathematical equations and reconstructed by the computer; holograms, in other words, of objects comprised of pure thought.