on a single photographic plate by using different frequencies of coherent light for each one, so could the brain store millions of billions of bits of information by using a number of different frequencies and sources of "coherent" neuron impulses.
That model also makes something else a bit less puzzling; selective loss of memory. Older people often retain very sharp memories for long-past events, while losing the ability to remember more recent things; perhaps they're losing the ability to come up with new coherent reference standards. Some amnesiacs recall nearly everything in great detail, yet can't remember specific blocks of their life: the loss or scrambling of certain "reference standards" would tend to cause en bloc memory losses without affecting other memories at all.
Aphasias are often caused by specific brain-structure damage. I have met a man who can write anything he likes, including all his early memories; but he can't talk. A brain injury caused him to "forget" how. It's terribly frustrating, of course. It's also hard to explain, but if the brain uses holographic codes for information storage, then the encoder/decoder must survive for that information to be recovered. A sufficiently selective injury might well destroy one decoder while leaving another intact.
In other words, the model fits a great deal of known data. Farther than that no one can go. The brain could use holograms.
Not very long ago, Ted Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, and I were invited to speak to the Los Angeles Cryonics Society. That's the outfit that arranges to have people quick-frozen and stored at the temperature of liquid nitrogen in the hopes that someday they can be revived in a time when technology is sufficiently advanced to be able to cure whatever it was that killed them to begin with.
I chose to give my talk on the holographic brain model. The implications weren't very encouraging for the Cryonics Society.
If the brain uses holographic computer methods, then the information storage is probably dynamic, not static; and even if a frozen man could be revived, since the electrical impulses would have been stopped, he'd have no memories, and thus no personality. If the holographic brain model is a true picture, it's goodbye to that particular form of immortality.
On the other hand, whether our own brains use holograms or not, holographic computers almost undoubtedly will work and the holographic information storage technique offers us a way to construct those independent robots that figure so large in science fiction stories. Either way, it looks as if the big brains may be coming before the turn of the century.
* * *
The above was written in 1974. Surprisingly, it needed no revision, except to foreshadow what follows: Since 1974, there have been some exciting developments, most of which came to light at the 1976 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They were reported in my column "Science and Man's Future: Prognosis Magnificent!", from which the following has been derived.
* * *
Studies of how we think—and of how machines might do so—continue. Take biofeedback The results are uncanny, and they're just beginning. Barbara Brown, the Veteran's Administration Hospital physiologist whose book NEW MIND, NEW BODY began much of the current interest in biofeedback, is now convinced that there's nothing the eastern yogas can do that you can't teach yourself in weeks to months. Think about that for a moment: heart rate, breathing, relaxation, muscle tension, glandular responses—every one of them subject to your own will. Dr. Brown is convinced of it.
The results are pouring in, and not just from her VA hospital in Sepulveda, either. Ulcers cured, neuroses conquered, irrational fears and hatreds brought under conscious control—all without mysticism. When I put it to Dr. Brown that there was already far more objective evidence for the validity of the new psycho-physiological theories than there ever has
That model also makes something else a bit less puzzling; selective loss of memory. Older people often retain very sharp memories for long-past events, while losing the ability to remember more recent things; perhaps they're losing the ability to come up with new coherent reference standards. Some amnesiacs recall nearly everything in great detail, yet can't remember specific blocks of their life: the loss or scrambling of certain "reference standards" would tend to cause en bloc memory losses without affecting other memories at all.
Aphasias are often caused by specific brain-structure damage. I have met a man who can write anything he likes, including all his early memories; but he can't talk. A brain injury caused him to "forget" how. It's terribly frustrating, of course. It's also hard to explain, but if the brain uses holographic codes for information storage, then the encoder/decoder must survive for that information to be recovered. A sufficiently selective injury might well destroy one decoder while leaving another intact.
In other words, the model fits a great deal of known data. Farther than that no one can go. The brain could use holograms.
Not very long ago, Ted Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, and I were invited to speak to the Los Angeles Cryonics Society. That's the outfit that arranges to have people quick-frozen and stored at the temperature of liquid nitrogen in the hopes that someday they can be revived in a time when technology is sufficiently advanced to be able to cure whatever it was that killed them to begin with.
I chose to give my talk on the holographic brain model. The implications weren't very encouraging for the Cryonics Society.
If the brain uses holographic computer methods, then the information storage is probably dynamic, not static; and even if a frozen man could be revived, since the electrical impulses would have been stopped, he'd have no memories, and thus no personality. If the holographic brain model is a true picture, it's goodbye to that particular form of immortality.
On the other hand, whether our own brains use holograms or not, holographic computers almost undoubtedly will work and the holographic information storage technique offers us a way to construct those independent robots that figure so large in science fiction stories. Either way, it looks as if the big brains may be coming before the turn of the century.
* * *
The above was written in 1974. Surprisingly, it needed no revision, except to foreshadow what follows: Since 1974, there have been some exciting developments, most of which came to light at the 1976 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They were reported in my column "Science and Man's Future: Prognosis Magnificent!", from which the following has been derived.
* * *
Studies of how we think—and of how machines might do so—continue. Take biofeedback The results are uncanny, and they're just beginning. Barbara Brown, the Veteran's Administration Hospital physiologist whose book NEW MIND, NEW BODY began much of the current interest in biofeedback, is now convinced that there's nothing the eastern yogas can do that you can't teach yourself in weeks to months. Think about that for a moment: heart rate, breathing, relaxation, muscle tension, glandular responses—every one of them subject to your own will. Dr. Brown is convinced of it.
The results are pouring in, and not just from her VA hospital in Sepulveda, either. Ulcers cured, neuroses conquered, irrational fears and hatreds brought under conscious control—all without mysticism. When I put it to Dr. Brown that there was already far more objective evidence for the validity of the new psycho-physiological theories than there ever has
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