Shufflebrain

The same kinds of equations can describe holograms of all sorts. And the very same phase code can exist simultaneously in several different media. Take acoustical holograms, for instance. The acoustical holographer produces his hologram by transmitting sound waves through an object. (Solids transmit sound as shock vibrations, as, for example, knocks on a door.) He records the interference patterns with a microphone and displays his hologram on a television tube. Sound waves cannot stimulate the light receptors in our retinas. Thus we would not be able to "see" what a sonic wave would reconstruct. But the acoustical holographer can still present the scene to us by making a photograph of the hologram on the TV tube. Then, by shining a laser through the photograph, he reconstructs optically-- and therefore visibly-- the images he originally holographed by sound.

Sound is not light, nor is it the electronic signals in the television set. But information carried in the phase and amplitude of sound or electronic waves can be an analog of the same message or image in a light beam, and vice versa. It is the code-- the abstract logic--that the different media must share, not the chemistry. For holograms are encoded, stored information. They are memories in the most exacting sense of the word--the mathematical sense. They are abstractable relationships between the constituents of the medium, not the constituents themselves. And abstract information is what hologramic theory is about.

As I said in the preceding chapter, the inherent logic in waves shows up in many activities, motions, and geometric patterns. For example, the equations of waves can describe a swinging pendulum; a vibrating drum head; flapping butterfly wings; cycling hands of a clock; beating hearts; planets orbiting the sun, or electrons circling an atom's nucleus; the thrust and return of an auto engine's pistons; the spacing of atoms in a crystal; the rise and fall of the tide; the recurrence of the seasons. The terms harmonic motion, periodic motion, and wave motion are interchangeable. The to-and-fro activity of an oscillating crystal, the pulsation in an artery, and the rhythm in a song are analogs of the rise and fall of waves. Under the electron microscope, the fibers of our connective tissues (collagen fibers) show what anatomists call periodicity, meaning a banded, repeated pattern occurring along the fiber's length. The pattern is also an analog of waves.

Of course, a periodically patterned connective-tissue fiber is not literally a wave. It is a piece of protein. A pendulum is not a wave, either, but brass or wood or ivory. And the vibrating head of a tom-tom isn't the stormy sea, but the erstwhile hide of an unlucky jackass. Motions, activities, patterns, and waves all obey a common set of abstract rules. And any wavy wave or wavelike event can be defined, described, or, given the engineering wherewithal, reproduced if one knows amplitude and phase. A crystallographer who calculates the phase and amplitude spectra of a crystal's x-ray diffraction pattern knows the internal anatomy of that crystal in minute detail. An astronomer who knows the phase and amplitude of a planet's moon knows precisely where and when he can take its picture. But let me repeat: the theorist's emphasis is not on the nominalistic fact: It is on logic, which is the basis of the hologram.

Nor, in theory, does the hologram necessarily depend on the literal interference of wavy waves. In the acoustical hologram, for example, where is the information? Is it in the interferences of the sonic wave fronts? In the microphone? In the voltage fluctuations initiated by the vibrating microphone? In oscillations among particles within the electronic components of the television set? On the television screen? In the photograph? The answer is that the code-- the relationships-- and therefore the hologram itself, exists-- or once existed-- in all these places, sometimes in a form we can readily appreciate as wavy information, and in other instances as motion or activity, in forms that don't even remotely resemble what we usually think of as waves.

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Lashley's experiments can be applied to diffuse holograms, as I have pointed out. His results depended not on where he injured the brain but on how much . Likewise, cropping a corner from a diffuse hologram does not amputate parts from the regenerated scene. Nor does cutting a hole in the center or anywhere else. The remaining hologram still produces an entire scene. In fact, even the amputated pieces reconstruct a whole scene-- the same whole scene. What Lashley had inferred about the memory trace is true for the diffuse hologram as well: the code in a diffuse hologram is equipotentially represented throughout the diffuse hologram.

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