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