The Science Delusion by Sheldrake Rupert

Author:Sheldrake, Rupert [Sheldrake, Rupert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Coronet
Published: 2012-01-04T21:00:00+00:00

Holograms and the implicate order

In a famous series of investigations carried out during brain surgery on conscious patients, Wilder Penfield and his colleagues tested the effects of mild electrical stimulation of various regions of the cerebral cortex. As the electrode touched parts of the motor cortex, limbs moved. Electrically stimulating the auditory or visual cortex evoked auditory or visual hallucinations like buzzing noises or flashes of light. Stimulation of the secondary visual cortex gave hallucinations of flowers, for example, or animals, or familiar people. When some regions of the temporal cortex were stimulated, some patients recalled dream-like memories, for example of a concert or a telephone conversation.22

Penfield initially assumed that the electrical evocation of memories meant that they were stored in the stimulated tissue, which he named the ‘memory cortex’. On further consideration, he changed his mind: ‘This was a mistake . . . The record is not in the cortex.’23 Like Lashley and Pribram, he gave up the idea of localised memory traces in favour of the theory that they were widely distributed in other parts of the brain.

The most popular analogy for distributed memory storage is holography, a form of lens-less photography in which interference patterns are stored as holograms, from which the original image can be reconstructed in three dimensions. If part of the hologram is destroyed, the whole image can still be reconstructed from the remaining parts, although in lower definition. The whole is present in each part. This may sound mysterious, but the basic principle is simple and familiar. As you look around you now, your eyes are sampling light from all the parts of the scene in front of you. The light absorbed by your eyes is only a small part of the available light, and yet you can see the whole scene. If you move a few feet, you can still see everything, the whole scene is present there too, although you are now sampling the light-waves in a different place. In a similar way, the whole is enfolded into each part of a hologram. This is not true of an ordinary photograph: if you tear off half the photo, you have lost half the image. If you tear off half a hologram, the whole image can still be re-created.

But what if the holographic wave-patterns are not stored in the brain at all? Pribram later came to this conclusion, and thought of the brain as a ‘wave-form analyser’ rather than a storage system, comparing it to a radio receiver that picked up wave-forms from the ‘implicate order’, rendering them explicate.24 This aspect of his thinking was influenced by the quantum physicist David Bohm, who suggested that the entire universe is holographic, in the sense that wholeness is enfolded into every part.25

According to Bohm, the observable or manifest world is the explicate or unfolded order, which emerges from the implicate or enfolded order.26 Bohm thought that the implicate order contains a kind of memory. What happens in one place is ‘introjected’ or ‘injected’ into

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.