Shufflebrain

The specific character of the activated memory depends on the particular readout. A useful analogy here would be to the holographer's use of light instead of sound to decode an acoustical hologram, except that the nervous system has many more options than the engineer. The activating signal would determine the special features of the transformed transform, but the phase spectrum--the basic series of Ds--would be the same whether imagination or the fist punched somebody in the nose. In other words, through the code in transform space, behavior is the transduced version of perception. I'll expand on this idea more fully in a later chapter, after we've extended hologramic theory beyond where we are now. But we've already come far enough for me to say that hologramic theory provides a unified view of the subjective cosmos. There's not a box over here marked "perception" and one over there labeled "behavior" with fundamentally different laws of Nature governing each. Just as one gravity affects all bodies falling to earth, feathers or bowling balls, so one system of abstract rules works ubiquitously when it comes to facets of the mind.

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Frequency of a traveling wave in perceptual space depends on time. Thus the Hz (herz) value specifies cycles per second. In an interference pattern, however, frequency refers to how many stripes or beats occur in a given area. And whereas frequency assumes a temporal character in perceptual space, it can take on spatial meaning in transform space.

We can draw an insightful corollary from the preceding paragraph. The phase difference between two interfering sets of waves determines the frequency of beats or stripes within the interference pattern. An intimate relationship exists, then, between phase and frequency. In FM (frequency modulated) radio, a specific message is a particular spectrum of phase variations. In waves with frequency independent of amplitude, as in the nervous system, the phase-difference spectrum in transform space is the stored memory. Earlier we used Metherell's phase-only acoustical holograms to postulate phase codes as the character of hologramic mind. Here, however, we have just deduced this conclusion directly from the theory itself.

Karl Pribram suggested in the 1960s that visual perception is analogous to Fourier transforms. He had in mind the hologram. More recently, a couple named De Valois and their collaborators developed a computerized system for calculating Fourier transforms of checkerboards and plaid patterns. They used their system to analyze neurons of the visual cortexes of monkeys and cats. Are the cells encoded to perceive structural elements of the patterns? No! The neurons of the visual cortex respond to Fourier transforms of the patterns, rather than to the patterns' structural elements. The DeValois results "were not just approximately correct but were exact" within the precision of their system.[6] As Pribram had previously predicted, the retina sends the brain not a literal rendition of the image, but a transform of the image. To phrase this observation in the language of hologramic theory, the phase codes stored in cells of the visual cortex transform the transform into images in the perceptual space of the conscious mind.

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Mathematicians often discover the properties of their theorems when they manipulate equations or bring different terms together in novel ways. We are about to do analogous things with phase codes. Instead of equations, though, we will do our "calculations" in the "real" world, with pictures.

Consider these two identical sets of rings (Fresnel rings, they're called).

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If we superimpose them out of phase, they produce moiré patterns --interference fringes or beats:

Just how many beats there are per unit--frequency--depends precisely on how far out of phase the two. In the moiré patterns out of phase depends on how far apart the centers of the central ring lie. The stripes (whose thickness is inversely proportional to the phase difference) represent the phase code in transform space

Are the stripes memories of the phase spectrum in the rings? The answer is yes, when the stripes reach a high frequency. But let's not take my word for it. Let's turn the statement into an hypothesis and test it. If stripes encode for rings, we should be able to back-transform rings using stripes alone. We ought to be able to superimpose stripes on a set of rings and make new rings in perceptual space. Here's what happens if we take a set of fine (high frequency) stripes and lay them on our rings

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New rings indeed back-transform into perceptual space when we superimpose only stripes on our rings.