The Holographic Universe (5 page)

When Pribram encountered
Bernstein's work he immediately recognized its implications. Maybe the reason
hidden patterns surfaced after Bernstein Fourier-analyzed his subject's
movements was because that was how movements are stored in the brain. This was
an exciting possibility, for if the brain analyzed movements by breaking them
down into their frequency components, it explained the rapidity with which we
learn many complex physical tasks. For instance, we do not learn to ride a
bicycle by painstakingly memorizing every tiny feature of the process. We learn
by grasping the whole flowing movement. The fluid wholeness that typifies how
we learn so many physical activities is difficult to explain if our brains are
storing information ia a bit-by-bit manner. But it becomes much easier to
understand if the brain is Fourier-analyzing such tasks and absorbing them as a
whole.

The Reaction of
the Scientific Community

Despite such evidence,
Pribram's holographic model remains extremely controversial. Part of the
problem is that there are many popular theories of how the brain works and
there is evidence to support them all. Some researchers believe the distributed
nature of memory can be explained by the ebb and flow of various brain
chemicals. Others hold that electrical fluctuations among large groups of
neurons can account for memory and learning. Each school of thought has its
ardent supporters, and it is probably safe to say that most scientists remain
unpersuaded by Pribram's arguments. For example, neuropsychologist Frank Wood
of the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, feels
that “there are precious few experimental findings for which holography is the
necessary, or even preferable, explanation.” Pribram is puzzled by statements
such as Wood's and counters by noting that he currently has a book in press
with well over 500 references to such data.

Other researchers agree
with Pribram. Dr. Larry Dossey, former chief of staff at Medical City Dallas
Hospital, admits that Pribram's theory challenges many long-held assumptions
about the brain, but points out that “many specialists in brain function are
attracted to the idea, if for no other reason than the glaring inadequacies of
the present orthodox views.”

Neurologist Richard
Restak, author of the PBS series
The Brain
, shares Dossey's opinion. He
notes that in spite of overwhelming evidence that human abilities are
holistically dispersed throughout the brain, most researchers continue to cling
to the idea that function can be located in the brain in the same way that
cities can be located on a map. Restak believes that theories based on this
premise are not only “oversimplistic,” but actually function as “conceptual
straitiackets” that keep us from recognizing the brain's true complexities. He
feels that “a hologram is not only possible but, at this moment, represents
probably our best ‘model’ for brain functioning.”

Pribram
Encounters Bohm

As for Pribram, by the
1970s enough evidence had accumulated to convince him his theory was correct.
In addition, he had taken his ideas into the laboratory and discovered that
single neurons in the motor cortex respond selectively to a limited bandwidth
of frequencies, a finding that further supported his conclusions. The question
that began to bother him was, If the picture of reality in our brains is not a
picture at all but a hologram, what is it a hologram of? The dilemma posed by
this question is analogous to taking a Polaroid picture of a group of people
sitting around a table and, after the picture develops, finding that, instead
of people, there are only blurry clouds of interference patterns positioned
around the table. In both cases one could rightfully ask, Which is the true
reality, the seemingly objective world experienced by the observer/photographer
or the blur of interference patterns recorded by the camera/brain?

Pribram realized that if
the holographic brain model was taken to its logical conclusions, it opened the
door on the possibility that objective reality—the world of coffee cups,
mountain vistas, elm trees, and table lamps—might not even exist, or at least
not exist in the way we believe it exists. Was it possible, he wondered, that
what the mystics had been saying for centuries was true, reality was
maya
,
an illusion, and what was out there was really a vast, resonating symphony of
wave forms, a “frequency domain” that was transformed into the world as we know
it only
after
it entered our senses?

Realizing that the
solution he was seeking might lie outside the province of his own field, he
went to his physicist son for advice. His son recommended he look into the work
of a physicist named David Bohm. When Pribram did he was electrified. He not
only found the answer to his question, but also discovered that according to
Bohm, the entire universe was a hologram.

One can't help but be astonished at
the degree to which [Bohm] has been able to break out of the tight molds of
scientific conditioning and stand alone with a completely new and literally
vast idea, one which has both internal consistency and the logical power to
explain widely diverging phenomena of physical experience from an entirely
unexpected point of view. . . . It is a theory which is so intuitively
satisfying that many people have felt that if the universe is not the way Bohm
describes it, it ought to be.

The path that led Bohm
to the conviction that the universe is structured like a hologram began at the
very edge of matter, in the world of subatomic particles. His interest in
science and the way things work blossomed early. As a young boy growing up in
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he invented a dripless tea kettle, and his father,
a successful businessman, urged him to try to turn a profit on the idea. But after
learning that the first step in such a venture was to conduct a door-to-door
survey to test-market his invention, Bohm's interest in business waned.

His interest in science
did not, however, and his prodigious curiosity forced him to look for new
heights to conquer. He found the most challenging height of all in the 1930s
when he attended Pennsylvania State College, for it was there that he first
became fascinated by quantum physics.

It is an easy
fascination to understand. The strange new land that physicists had found
lurking in the heart of the atom contained things more wondrous than anything
Cortes or Marco Polo ever encountered. what made this new world so intriguing
was that everything about it appeared to be so contrary to common sense. It
seemed more like a land ruled by sorcery than an extension of the natural
world, an Alice-in-Wonderland realm in which mystifying forces were the norm
and everything logical had been turned on its ear.

One startling discovery
made by quantum physicists was that if you break matter into smaller and
smaller pieces you eventually reach a point where those pieces—electrons,
protons, and so on—no longer possess the traits of objects. For example, most
of us tend to think of an electron as a tiny sphere or a BB whizzing around,
but nothing could be further from the truth. Although an electron can sometimes
behave as if it were a compact little particle, physicists have found that
it
literally possesses no dimension.
This is difficult for most of us to
imagine because everything at our own level of existence possesses dimension.
And yet if you try to measure the width of an electron, you will discover it's
an impossible task. An electron is simply not an object as we know it.

Another discovery
physicists made is that an electron can manifest as either a particle or a
wave. If you shoot an electron at the screen of a television that's been turned
off, a tiny point of light will appear when it strikes the phosphorescent
chemicals that coat the glass. The single point of impact the electron leaves
on the screen clearly reveals the particlelike side of its nature.

But this is not the only
form the electron can assume. It can also dissolve into a blurry cloud of
energy and behave as if it were a wave spread out over space. When an electron
manifests as a wave it can do things no particle can. If it is fired at a
barrier in which two slits have been cut, it can go through both slits
simultaneously. When wavelike electrons collide with each other they even
create interference patterns. The electron, like some shapeshifter out of
folklore, can manifest as either a particle or a wave.

This chameleonlike
ability is common to all subatomic particles. It is also common to all things
once thought to manifest exclusively as waves. Light, gamma rays, radio waves,
X rays—all can change from waves to particles and back again. Today physicists
believe that subatomic phenomena should not be classified solely as either
waves or particles, but as a single category of somethings that are always
somehow both. These somethings are called
quanta
, and physicists believe
they are the basic stuff from which the entire universe is made.

Perhaps most astonishing
of all is that there is compelling evidence that
the only time quanta ever
manifest as particles is when toe are looking at them.
For instance, when
an electron isn't being looked at, experimental findings suggest that it is
always a wave. Physicists are able to draw this conclusion because they have
devised clever strategies for deducing how an electron behaves when it is not
being observed (it should be noted that this is only one interpretation of the
evidence and is not the conclusion of all physicists; as we will see, Bohm
himself has a different interpretation).

Once again this seems
more like magic than the kind of behavior we are accustomed to expect from the
natural world. Imagine owning a bowling ball that was only a bowling ball when
you looked at it. If you sprinkled talcum powder all over a bowling lane and
rolled such a “quantum” bowling ball toward the pins, it would trace a single
line through the talcum powder while you were watching it. But if you blinked
while it was in transit, you would find that for the second or two you were not
looking at it the bowling ball stopped tracing a line and instead left a broad
wavy strip, like the undulating swath of a desert snake as it moves sideways
over the sand.

Such a situation is
comparable to the one quantum physicists encountered when they first uncovered
evidence that quanta coalesce into particles only when they are being observed.
Physicist Nick Herbert, a supporter of this interpretation, says this has
sometimes caused him to imagine that behind his back the world is always “a
radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.” But whenever he
turns around and tries to see the soup, his glance instantly freezes it and
turns it back into ordinary reality. He believes this makes us all a little
like Midas, the legendary king who never knew the feel of silk or the caress of
a human hand because everything he touched turned to gold. “Likewise humans can
never experience the true texture of quantum reality,” says Herbert, “because
everything we touch turns to matter.”

Bohm and
Interconnectedness

An aspect of quantum
reality that Bohm found especially interesting was the strange state of
interconnectedness that seemed to exist between apparently unrelated subatomic
events. What was equally perplexing was that most physicists tended to attach
little importance to the phenomenon. In fact, so little was made of it that one
of the most famous examples of interconnectedness lay hidden in one of quantum
physics's basic assumptions for a number of years before anyone noticed it was
there.

That assumption was made
by one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, the Danish physicist Niels
Bohr. Bohr pointed out that if subatomic particles only come into existence in
the presence of an observer, then it is also meaningless to speak of a
particle's properties and characteristics as existing before they are observed.
This was disturbing to many physicists, for much of science was based on
discovering the properties of phenomena. But if the act of observation actually
helped create such properties, what did that imply about the future of science?

One physicist who was
troubled by Bohr's assertions was Einstein. Despite the role Einstein had
played in the founding of quantum theory, he was not at all happy with the
course the fledgling science had taken. He found Bohr's conclusion that a
particle's properties don't exist until they are observed particularly
objectionable because, when combined with another of quantum physics's
findings, it implied that subatomic particles were interconnected in a way
Einstein simply didn't believe was possible.

That finding was the
discovery that some subatomic processes result in the creation of a pair of
particles with identical or closely related properties. Consider an extremely
unstable atom physicists call positronium. The positronium atom is composed of
an electron and a positron (a positron is an electron with a positive charge).
Because a positron is the electron's antiparticle opposite, the two eventually
annihilate each other and decay into two quanta of light or “photons” traveling
in opposite directions (the capacity to shapeshift from one kind of particle to
another is just another of a quantum's abilities). According to quantum physics
no matter how far apart the photons travel, when they are measured they will
always be found to have identical angles of
polarization.
(Polarization
is the spatial orientation of the photon's wavelike aspect as it travels away
from its point of origin.)