Shufflebrain

What if we take a snowman apart and reassemble it with the members in a different order. Call our initial snowman A and our reshuffled one B. Now let's send an imaginary insect crawling on each figure at the same time and at the same speed. Of course, both insects will complete the round-trip excursion together. But relative to the starting point (the phase variation between the two), the two bugs will never once have traveled an equal distance until both have arrived back at the start-finish point. The similarities and differences don't trick us. Likewise, the differences between our hippocampus and the rat's shouldn't mask the similarities.

As I mentioned earlier, some psychologists conceptualize short-term or working memory by means of an idealized compartment.[18] The hippocampus, as I've suggested, may be a location of a portion of that compartment, at least in higher animals. Of course, as evidence from, for instance, decerebrated cats and many other sources indicates, we can't consider the hippocampus as the exclusive repository of short-term memory. But hippocampal functions may yet reveal critical details about the dynamics of perception and reminiscence in higher animals. Circumstantial evidence from rats as well as humans indicates that an active memory in the hippocampus is short term. Now short-term memory in general is very sensitive to electroconvulsive shock (ECS). And relatively mild electrical stimulation of the hippocampus or the surrounding brain can evoke a violent convulsive seizure.[19]

A temporary and erasable working memory would be valuable to us as well as to rats. When we no longer need a telephone number, for example, we simply expunge. Yet we wouldn't want to forget all telephone numbers. After a journey from the garbage pile, the neural map in the rat's hippocampus could become a liability. But the rat wouldn't want to have to relearn every map. ("That's the pipe were the coyote got my brother!") What might control the shift from short-term to long-term storage? I raise the latter question not to signal a final answer. But a little speculation from a few facts will allow me to illustrate how we can use hologramic theory to generate working hypotheses (the kind from which experimentation grows). Also, the hippocampus exhibits an important feature of the brain that Norbert Wiener predicted many years ago.

The human hippocampus interconnects with vast regions of the central nervous system. Its most conspicuous pathways lead to and from subdivisions of what is called the limbic system. The limbic system is most conspicuously associated with emotions. One hippocampal circuit in particular connects the hippocampus to a massive convolution called the cingulate gyrus. Draped like a lounging leopard on the corpus callosum, the cingulate gyrus was the first part of the limbic system ever designated [20] and became a favorite target of psychosurgery in the post-prefrontal lobotomy era. The hippocampal-cingulate circuit has (among other many things) three features that are highly germane to our discussion.

- First, a number of relay stations intervene between the hippocampus and the cingulate gyrus. These relay stations are locations where the signal can be modified; where messages can be routed to and from other areas of the brain and spinal cord and blended (or removed) with (from) other data.

- Second, the circuit consists of parallel pathways (co- and multi-axial) all the way around. The significance of this is that when activated the circuit preserves phase information in principle in the way Young and Fresnel did when making interference patterns--by starting from the same source but varying the specific course between the referencing waves. The hippocampal-cingulate circuitry looks designed to handle phase differentials, and on a grand scale!

- Third, the overall circuit makes a giant feedback loop. Feedback is at the heart of the communications revolution Norbert Wiener touched off in 1947 with the publication of his classic, Cybernetics and that you're living through as you read these very words.

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Biofeedback became a popular subject a couple of decades ago when people were hooking electrodes to the their heads and stopping an starting electrical trains by altering their thoughts. "EEG with electric trains," a friend of mine used to call what seemed to him a stunt wherein amplified electrical signals from the scalp are fed into the transformer of an electric train set instead of a polygraph. However one wants to characterize feedback, it is central to much that goes on chemically and physiologically in our bodies--including the brain.