Michael Talbot

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 to 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 prardigm 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 discribes 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."