THERE IS NO “OUT THERE” OUT THERE
Dr. Karl Pribram has had a long and illustrious career. Born in Austria in 1919, Pribram is both a neurosurgeon and a neurophysiologist who spent many years trying to find out where memories are stored in the brain.
The problem was that in the 1920’s a brain scientist by the name of Karl Lashley had found “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.”1 So Pribram set out to solve the mystery of memory storage that seemed independent of brain cells (neurons).
But it wasn’t until he met David Bohm, one of the pioneers in quantum physics, that Pribram found his answer. “Bohm helped establish the foundation for Pribram’s theory that the brain operates in a manner similar to a hologram, in accordance with quantum mathematical principles and the characteristics of wave patterns.”2
Technically, “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.”3
Memory storage is not the only thing that becomes more understandable in light of Pribram’s theory.
“Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, etc.) 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.”4
In short, Pribram believes “our brains mathematically construct ‘hard’ reality by relying on input from a frequency domain.”5
Okay. Let’s translate all of this into simple English. According to Karl Pribram and the results of many scientific experiments, the human brain itself is a hologram. Its function is to receive holographic wave frequencies and translate them into the physical universe we see “out there.”
And now the fun begins….
I want to talk about two specific scientific experiments – out of many – that not only seem to prove Pribram’s theory, but go beyond it to an amazing conclusion.
The first began in the 1970’s with a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Benjamin Libet. Put very simply, Libet would experiment with brain surgery patients during their operations. The patients’ brains were exposed and they were fully conscious, having received only local anesthetic.
Libet would, for example, stimulate the patients’ little finger on one hand (like a pin prick) and ask the patients to tell him when they felt it. Then he would stimulate the area of the brain associated with that little finger, and ask the patients to tell him when they felt that as well.
Before I tell you what he discovered, we need to understand how we feel things, like a pin prick. The stimulus (pin prick) is transmitted from the location on the body where it happened to the brain, and then the brain lets us know about the sensation. Technically, we don’t actually “feel” things where they happen; we “feel” them in the brain.
So it would make sense that if you stimulate someone’s little finger, it would take time (fractions of a second) for the nerves to move that sensation to the brain where it would be “felt,” since the physical body is limited by space and time and nothing in the physical universe (according to Einstein) can travel faster than the speed of light. Basically, it would take time for a stimulus on the little finger to get to the brain and for the person to then become “aware” of it.
On the other hand, it would also make sense that if you stimulated the brain directly at the exact location where the little finger sends the sensation to be “felt,” the person would be “aware” of it immediately. In other words, there would be no time delay since the brain already has the information about the stimulus and only needs to alert the person to the sensation.
What Libet found, and others after him, was that the exact opposite was true. In fact, you will probably read many times in this book that the information we’re getting from the scientific research in quantum physics is proving that the opposite of a lot of what we have always believed is true.
Libet’s patients would tell him instantly (no time delay) when he stimulated their little finger, and yet there was a delay when he stimulated the brain directly. (Watch a video here.)
Libet was flabbergasted. He tried to find an explanation, as did many other scientists; and the prevailing theory became that time can travel backwards. It’s called the “time reversal theory,” or “subjective backward referral,” or “antedating.” However, after trying to prove this and failing, Libet himself later said “there appeared to be no neural mechanism that could be viewed as directly mediating or accounting for the subjective sensory referrals backward in time.”6 In other words, there is no evidence in the brain for time reversal as the explanation for this phenomenon.
For now, just file that information away and let’s talk about another experiment….
This one started in the 1990’s conducted by Dr. Dean Radin and other colleagues. Dean Radin is a Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, on the Adjunct Faculty at Sonoma State University, and part of the Distinguished Consulting Faculty at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. He earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and both a master’s degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked at AT&T Bell Labs and GTE Labs, mainly on human factors of advanced telecommunications products and services, and then held appointments at Princeton University, Edinburgh University, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, SRI International, Interval Research Corporation, and the Boundary Institute.
I say all that because Radin’s research is admittedly not widely accepted by the mainstream scientific community, which is why you may have never heard of it, although his credentials are beyond question. Here’s why his results are so hard for some scientists to swallow….
Radin would hook a person up to various machines to measure a number of different bodily responses, such as heart rate, EKG, skin conductants, the amount of blood in the fingertip, and respiration.
The person then sits in front of a computer screen with a button in their hand. They’re told to press the button whenever they’re ready, and five seconds later the computer will randomly select a picture and display it on the screen.
There are two different types of pictures the computer can choose from. One group of pictures will evoke an emotional response in normal people – like a picture of violence, or war, or rape, or ugliness, or the Twin Towers coming down on 9/11. The other group of pictures are designed to be neutral, to normally not have any emotional impact when viewed, like a scene of a city street in Anytown.
We already know what happens in the body when people see an emotional image – what happens to their heart rate, to their EKG, skin conductants, the amount of blood in the fingertip, and respiration. They “spike.”
We also know what happens in the body when people see a neutral (non-emotional) image. They remain “calm.”
When the person in this experiment pushes the button, the computer has not yet chosen which picture to display, or from which group, and will not make that decision until five seconds later when it immediately puts the picture on the screen.
Now here’s the amazing thing: The person’s bodily responses being measured would occur before the computer chose the picture and displayed it on the screen. In other words, the person’s heart rate, EKG, skin conductants, the amount of blood in the fingertip, and respiration would all spike prior to the picture coming up if the picture were an emotional picture, and the bodily responses would all remain calm if the picture about to appear would be neutral.
To repeat, all of these bodily responses (or lack of bodily responses) would occur before the computer had even chosen which picture to put on the screen. The only conclusion that makes any sense is that the brain knows what picture is coming before the person is aware of it – indeed, before the computer has even chosen which picture to display – and the body is responding accordingly!7(Watch a video here.)
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The very latest evidence (July, 2010) comes from a BBC documentary called Neuroscience and Free Will. Here’s the setup….
The subject lies in a CT scanner holding a button in each hand. All the subject has to do is decide to press the button in his left hand or the button in his right hand, and then press the appropriate button immediately while the CT scanner records his brain activity.
The result is that the brain clearly shows up to 6 seconds in advance which button the person will press - left or right. This is 6 seconds before the subject consciously decides which button he will press. The brain activity is so clear and 100% consistent that the technician watching the scanner could easily predict with absolute certainty which button the subject would press before the subject makes his own conscious decision.
You really need to watch the video to believe it!
This gives further proof of the Radin experiments and verifies what Dr. Andrew Newberg says….
“There have been other studies that have shown that when people are beginning to move a hand, or beginning to say something, there is actually activity in certain nerve cells of the brain even before they become consciously aware of what they’re trying to do.”8
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What does all this mean?
Before I answer that question, I have to introduce one last scientific concept called “Occam’s Razor,”9 a principle that’s been hanging around for almost seven-hundred years. It is often paraphrased as, “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best,” although that’s technically not the correct interpretation of Occam’s Razor. It is also called the “scientific principle of parsimony,” which is a “preference for the least complex explanation for an observation.”10 The general rule is that the best answer requires the least number of assumptions and postulates the fewest entities.
There have been many different attempts to explain the results of these brain experiments, by as many different scientists. But the simplest and most logical explanation – the one that seems to satisfy Occam’s Razor the best – is that the brain knows what is going to happen before it happens “out there” in the physical universe. The sequence, apparently, is that the brain receives holographic wave information, and then sends it “out there,” creating a physical universe for the person to perceive and experience.
For example, in the Libet experiments, the brain “knew” the little finger was going to be stimulated before the actual stimulation took place, and therefore there was no time delay for the person to become aware of it. However, when the brain was stimulated directly – as if a new hologram was being downloaded to it – it took time for the brain to send the sensation out to the little finger and bring it back to the brain to be perceived.
In Radin’s experiments, the only thing that makes sense is that the brain knew what picture would appear because it was creating the reality that was about to happen, not simply responding to a reality after it happened.
Let me repeat that, because it is so critical to understanding how the Holographic Universe works…. the brain knew what picture would appear because it was creating the reality that was about to happen, not simply responding to a reality after it happened.
So let’s put this together with Pribram’s holographic brain model….
Pribram says the human brain is itself a hologram, and it will “mathematically construct ‘hard’ reality by relying on input from a frequency domain.”
Remember The Field? The Field is Pribram’s “frequency domain” – an infinite number of possibilities existing as waves of frequencies.
So Pribram is saying the brain receives wave frequencies from The Field, which it then translates into “’hard’ reality” – what we normally call the physical universe. In fact, all these experiments suggest your brain receives a hologram in wave frequencies from The Field, collapses the wave function and converts them into particles to create physical “reality,” and then sends that “reality” “out there” for you to experience.
This is confirmed by the CT scan experiments in the BBC documentary, Neuroscience and Free Will. In fact, if you watch the video, you can even see the exact area of the brain where it is converting the downloaded wave frequencies into the hologram that six seconds later will be projected “out there” for you to become aware of and experience.
It means, first of all, the human brain is the “observer” that “collapses the wave function” that I talked about in Chapter Five, since quantum physics says it is the “observer” that changes an electron from a wave into a particle.
Put more simply, it’s the brain that takes those wavy 3-D pictures….
