The Holographic Universe (2 page)

The fact that the
paranormal cannot be explained by our current scientific worldview is only one
of the reasons it remains so controversial. Another is that psychic functioning
is often very difficult to pin down in the lab, and this has caused many
scientists to conclude it therefore does not exist. This apparent elusiveness
will also be discussed in the book.

An even more important
reason is that contrary to what many of us have come to believe, science is not
prejudice-free. I first learned this a number of years ago when I asked a
well-known physicist what he thought about a particular parapsychological
experiment. The physicist (who had a reputation for being skeptical of the
paranormal) looked at me and with great authority said the results revealed “no
evidence of any psychic functioning whatsoever.” I had not yet seen the
results, but because I respected the physicist's intelligence and reputation, I
accepted his judgment without question. Later when I examined the results for
myself, I was stunned to discover the experiment had produced very striking
evidence of psychic ability. I realized then that even well-known scientists
can possess biases and blind spots.

Unfortunately this is a
situation that occurs often in the investigation of the paranormal. In a recent
article in
American Psychologist
, Yale psychologist Irvin L. Child
examined how a well-known series of ESP dream experiments conducted at the
Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, had been treated by the
scientific establishment Despite the dramatic evidence supportive of ESP
uncovered by the experimenters, Child found their work had been almost completely
ignored by the scientific community. Even more distressing, in the handful of
scientific publications that had bothered to comment on the experiments, he
found the research had been so “severely distorted” its importance was
completely obscured.

How is this possible?
One reason is science is not always as objective as we would like to believe.
We view scientists with a bit of awe, and when they tell us something we are
convinced it must be true. We forget they are only human and subject to the same
religious, philosophical, and cultural prejudices as the rest of us. This is
unfortunate, for as this book
will show
, there
is
a great deal of
evidence that the universe encompasses considerably more than our current
worldview allows.

But why is science so
resistant to the paranormal in particular? This is a more difficult question.
In commenting on the resistance he experienced to his own unorthodox views on
health, Yale surgeon Dr. Bernie S. Siegel, author of the best-selling book
Love,
Medicine, and Miracles
, asserts that it is because people are addicted to
their beliefs. Siegel says this is why when you try to change someone's belief
they act like an addict

There seems to be a good
deal of truth to Siegel's observation, which perhaps is why so many of civilization's
greatest insights and advances have at first been greeted with such passionate
denial. We
are
addicted to our beliefs and we
do
act like addicts
when someone tries to wrest from us the powerful opium of our dogmas. And since
Western science has devoted several centuries to not believing in the
paranormal, it is not going to surrender its addiction lightly.

I am lucky. I have
always known there was more to the world than is generally accepted. I grew up
in a psychic family, and from an early age I experienced firsthand many of the
phenomena that will be talked about in this book. Occasionally, and when it is
relevant to the topic being discussed, I will relate a few of my own
experiences. Although they can only be viewed as anecdotal evidence, for me
they have provided the most compelling proof of all that we live in a universe
we are only just beginning to fathom, and I include them because of the insight
they offer.

Lastly, because the
holographic concept is still very much an idea in the making and is a mosaic of
many different points of view and pieces of evidence, some have argued that it
should not be called a model or theory until these disparate points of view are
integrated into a more unified whole. As a result, some researchers refer to
the ideas as the
holographic paradigm.
Others prefer
holographic
analogy, holographic metaphor
, and so on. In this book and for the sake of
diversity I have employed all of these expressions, including
holographic
model
and
holographic theory
, but do not mean to imply that the
holographic idea has achieved the status of a model or theory in the strictest
sense of these terms.

In this same vein it is
important to note that although Bohm and Pribram are the originators of the
holographic idea, they do not embrace ail of the views and conclusions put
forward in this book. Rather, this is a book that looks not only at Bohm and
Pribram's theories, but at the ideas and conclusions of numerous researchers
who have been influenced by the holographic model and who have interpreted it
in their own sometimes controversial ways.

Throughout this book I
also discuss various ideas from quantum physics, the branch of physics that
studies subatomic particles (electrons, protons, and so on). Because I have
written on this subject before, I am aware that some people are intimidated by
the
term quantum physics
and are afraid they will not be able to
understand its concepts. My experience has taught me that even those who do not
know any mathematics are able to understand the kinds of ideas from physics
that are touched upon in this book. You do not even need a background in
science. All you need is an open mind if you happen to glance at a page and see
a scientific term you do not know. I have kept such terms down to a minimum, and
on those occasions when it was necessary to use one, I always explain it before
continuing on with the text.

So don't be afraid. Once
you have overcome your “fear of the water,” I think you'll find swimming among
quantum physics’ strange and fascinating ideas much easier than you thought. I
think you'll also find that pondering a few of these ideas might even change
the way you look at the world. In fact, it is my hope that the ideas contained
in the following chapters
will
change the way you look at the world. It
is with this humble desire that I offer this book.

A REMARKABLE NEW VIEW OF REALITY

Sit down before fact like a little child, and be
prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to
whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

—T. H. Huxley

It isn't that the world of
appearances is wrong; it isn't that there
aren't
objects out there, at
one level of reality. It's that if you penetrate through and look at the
universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different
reality. And that other reality can explain things that have hitherto remained
inexplicable scientifically: paranormal phenomena, synchronicities, the
apparently meaningful coincidence of events.

The puzzle that first
started Pribram on the road to formulating his holographic model was the
question of how and where memories are stored in the brain. In the early 1940s,
when he first became interested in this mystery, it was generally believed that
memories were localized in the brain. Each memory a person had, such as the
memory of the last time you saw your grandmother, or the memory of the
fragrance of a gardenia you sniffed when you were sixteen, was believed to have
a specific location somewhere in the brain cells. Such memory traces were
called
engrams
, and although no one knew what an engram was made
of—whether it was a neuron or perhaps even a special kind of molecule—most
scientists were confident it was only a matter of time before one would be
found. There were reasons for this confidence. Research conducted by Canadian
neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the 1920s had offered convincing evidence that
specific memories did have specific locations in the brain. One of the most
unusual features of the brain is that the object itself doesn't sense pain
directly. As long as the scalp and skull have been deadened with a local
anesthetic, surgery can be performed on the brain of a fully conscious person
without causing any pain.

In a series of landmark
experiments, Penfield used this fact to his advantage. While operating on the
brains of epileptics, he would electrically stimulate various areas of their
brain cells. To his amazement he found that when he stimulated the temporal
lobes (the region of the brain behind the temples) of one of his fully
conscious patients, they reexperienced memories of past episodes from their
lives in vivid detail. One man suddenly relived a conversation he had had with
friends in South Africa; a boy heard his mother talking on the telephone and
after several touches from Penfield's electrode was able to repeat her entire
conversation; a woman found herself in her kitchen and could hear her son
playing outside. Even when Penfield tried to mislead his patients by telling
them he was stimulating a different area when he was not, he found that when he
touched the same spot it always evoked the same memory.

In his book
The
Mystery of the Mind
, published in 1975, just shortly before his death, he
wrote, “It was evident at once that these were not dreams. They were electrical
activations of the sequential record of consciousness, a record that had been
laid down during the patient's earlier experience. The patient ‘re-lived’ all
that he had been aware of in that earlier period of time as in a moving-picture
‘flashback.’”

From his research
Penfield concluded that everything we have ever experienced is recorded in our
brain, from every stranger's face we have glanced at in a crowd to every spider
web we gazed at as a child. He reasoned that this was why memories of so many
insignificant events kept cropping up in his sampling. If our memory is a
complete record of even the most mundane of our day-to-day experiences, it is reasonable
to assume that dipping randomly into such a massive chronicle would produce a
good deal of trifling information.

As a young neurosurgery
resident, Pribram had no reason to doubt Penfield's engram theory. But then
something happened that was to change his thinking forever. In 1946 he went to
work with the great neuropsychologist Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Laboratory of
Primate Biology, then in Orange Park, Florida. For over thirty years Lashley
had been involved in his own ongoing search for the elusive mechanisms
responsible for memory, and there Pribram was able to witness the fruits of
Lashley's labors firsthand. What was startling was that not only had Lashley
failed to produce any evidence of the engram, but his research actually seemed
to pull the rug out from under all of Penfield's findings.

What Lashley had done
was to train rats to perform a variety of tasks, such as run a maze. Then he
surgically removed various portions of their brains and retested them. His aim
was literally to cutout the area of the rats’ brains containing the memory of
their maze-running ability. To his surprise he found that no matter what
portion of their brains he cut out, he could not eradicate their memories.
Often the rats’ motor skills were impaired and they stumbled clumsily through
the mazes, but even with massive portions of their brains removed, their
memories remained stubbornly intact.

For Pribram these were
incredible findings. If memories possessed specific locations in the brain in
the same way that books possess specific locations on library shelves, why
didn't Lashley's surgical plunderings have any effect on them? For Pribram the
only answer seemed to be that memories were not localized at specific brain
sites, but were somehow spread out or
distributed
throughout the brain
as a whole. The problem was that he knew of no mechanism or process that could
account for such a state of affairs.

Lashley was even less
certain and later wrote, “I sometimes feel, in reviewing the evidence on the
localization of the memory trace, that the necessary conclusion is that
learning just is not possible at all. Nevertheless, in spite of such evidence
against it, learning does sometimes occur.” In 1948 Pribram was offered a
position at Yale, and before leaving he helped write up thirty years of
Lashley's monumental research.

The Breakthrough

At Yale, Pribram
continued to ponder the idea that memories were distributed throughout the
brain, and the more he thought about it the more convinced he became. After
all, patients who had had portions of their brains removed for medical reasons
never suffered the loss of specific memories. Removal of a large section of the
brain might cause a patient's memory to become generally hazy, but no one ever
came out of surgery with any selective memory loss. Similarly, individuals who
had received head injuries in car collisions and other accidents never forgot
half of their family, or half of a novel they had read. Even removal of
sections of the temporal lobes, the area of the brain that had figured so
prominently in Penfield's research, didn't create any gaps in a person's
memories.