The Universe as a 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, Standford 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 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.
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 to 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 the 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 'A' to that of individual 'B' 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, of 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 and 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".
by Michael
Talbot