Hologram

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of
Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one
of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the
evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you
probably have never even heard Aspect’s name, though there are some who believe his
discovery may change the face of science. Aspect and his team discovered that under
certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously
communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter
whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem
with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can
travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is
tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists
to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has
inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect’s
findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity
the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand
a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid
of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light
of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first
and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is
captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark
lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a
three-dimensional image of the original object appears. The three-dimensionality of such
images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is
cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the
entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always
be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal
photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an
entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western
science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon,
whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves
to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will
not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect’s discovery.
Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one
another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some
sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion.
He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities,
but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. To enable people to better
visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see
the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two
television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its
side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on
each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at
different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to
watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship
between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding
turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain
unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be
instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles
in Aspect’s experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic
particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy
to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he
adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we
are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and
more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously
mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these
"eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram. In addition to its
phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the
apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level
of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic
particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star
that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to
categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all
apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as
fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing
is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of
the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper
order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past,
present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it
might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and
pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for
the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to
everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that
has been or will be– every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from
snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic
storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden
in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not
contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a
"mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a
hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Stanford neurophysiologist
Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where
memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than
being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley
found that no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed he was unable to eradicate
its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only
problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this
curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he
had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories
are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve
impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light
interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image.
In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram’s theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in
so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize
something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime
(or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopedia
Britannica). Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other
capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage=97simply by
changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is
possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated
that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the
enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions
according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind
when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through
some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations
like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa"
all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that
every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of
information; another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a
hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature’s
supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes
more tractable in light of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain. Another is how the
brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light
frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.

Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just
as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able t= o convert an
apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the
brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the
frequencies it receives through he senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic
principles to perform its operations. Pribram’s theory, in fact, has gained increasing
support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic
model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the
source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear,
Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording
technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram’s belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard"
reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of
experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range
of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive
to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called
"osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a
broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic
domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into
conventional perceptions. But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model
of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the
concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is
actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only
selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into
sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long
upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical
beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of
frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but
one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. This striking new picture of
reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram’s views, has come to be called the holographic
paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized
others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model
of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some
mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the
paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have
noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of
the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of
the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be
the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the
mind of individual– to that of individual– at a far distance point and helps to
understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the
holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena
experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a
psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had
assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of
her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to
be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species’s
anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge
about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species
of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of
sexual arousal.

The woman’s experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof
encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species
on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene
in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently
contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological
phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of
collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave
detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology.
In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body
journeys, o= f precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life
incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy
sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such
experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual’s consciousness beyond the
usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such
manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late ’60s he helped found
a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to
their study.

Although Grof’s newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a
rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of
psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism
for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has
changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth
that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every
atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is
able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no
longer seems so strange.

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like
biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that
if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true
to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the
appearance of the brain as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as
physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers
to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be
transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is
but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much
more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as
miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in
turn effect changes in the hologram of the body. Similarly, controversial new healing
techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of
thought images are ultimately as real as "reality".

Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become
explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book "Gifts of Unknown
Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman
woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees
instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he an= d another astonished
onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then
"click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such
events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a
holographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because
what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human
unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the
most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that
experiences such as Watson’s are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our
minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no
limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any
picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to
the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui
brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability
to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a
holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen
as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful
coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a
metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.
Whether Bohm and Pribram’s holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an
ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an
influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic
model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem
to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by
Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect’s findings "indicate
that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".