In the past few weeks two of my children have spoken to me about The Hologram Paradigm. I'm not sure if their motive was to startle me, or merely to share information.

Well, it does startle me, and I find it very difficult to get my head around these
fantastic new ideas, - and I use the word fantastic as describing what seems to have slight relation to the real world because of its strangeness or extravagance.

Quantum Mechanics and the String Theory have never been clear to me, - I grew up with particles and relativity and these strange new theories make my head spin, - slightly. The fact that physicist Alain Aspect and his research 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, whether they are ten feet or ten billion miles apart does not communicate to me with instant clarity, although I can see that this might be an explanation for telepathy.

As I continue puzzling and reading I come across a portion of work written by Michael Talbot on the Universe as a Hologram which blows away my Memory File Drawer Theory and leaves instead a blank space waiting to be filled.

Michael Talbot informs that a fellow name Pibram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain.

Well, I had wondered about that too, and thought my Theory was quite reasonable, - when you can't remember something the drawer is stuck! Simple...

However, I feel it necessary to try to understand how Pibram explains memory storage. And this is what Michael Talbot has to say about it.

" 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 Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply 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 every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system."

My word! What next, I wonder......



If we allow, for the sake of argument (Talbot says) that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, then was it by Design or by Chance????