The Field (16 page)

When we observe the world, Pribram theorized, we do so on a much deeper level than the sticks-and-stones world ‘out there’. Our brain primarily talks to itself and to the rest of the body not with words or images, or even bits or chemical impulses, but in the language of wave interference: the language of phase, amplitude and frequency – the ‘spectral domain’. We perceive an object by ‘resonating’ with it, getting ‘in synch’ with it. To know the world is literally to be on its wavelength.

Think of your brain as a piano. When we observe something in the world, certain portions of the brain resonate at certain specific frequencies. At any point of attention, our brain presses only certain notes, which trigger strings of a certain length and frequency.
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This information is then picked by the ordinary electrochemical circuits of the brain, just as the vibrations of the strings eventually resonate through the entire piano.

What had occurred to Pribram is that when we look at something, we don’t ‘see’ the image of it in the back of our heads or on the back of our retinas, but in three dimensions and out in the world. It must be that we are creating and projecting a virtual image of the object out in space, in the same place as the actual object, so that the object and our perception of the object coincide. This would mean that the art of seeing is one of transforming. In a sense, in the act of observation, we are transforming the timeless, spaceless world of interference patterns into the concrete and discrete world of space and time – the world of the very apple you see in front of you. We create space and time on the surface of our retinas. As with a hologram, the lens of the eye picks up certain interference patterns and then converts them into three-dimensional images. It requires this type of virtual projection for you reach out to touch an apple where it really is, not in some place inside your head. If we are projecting images all the time out in space, our image of the world is actually a virtual creation.

According to Pribram’s theory, when you first notice something, certain frequencies resonate in the neurons in your brain. These neurons send information about these frequencies to another set of neurons. The second set of neurons makes a Fourier translation of these resonances and sends the resulting information to a third set of neurons, which then begins to construct a pattern that eventually will make up the virtual image you create of the apple out in space, on top of the fruit bowl.
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This three-fold process makes it far easier for the brain to correlate separate images – which is easily achieved when you are dealing with wave interference shorthand but extremely awkward with an actual real-life image.

After seeing, Pribram reasoned, the brain must then process this information in the shorthand of wave-frequency patterns and scatter these throughout the brain in a distributed network, like a local area network copying all major instructions for many employees in the office. Storing memory in wave interference patterns is remarkably efficient, and would account for the vastness of human memory. Waves can hold unimaginable quantities of data – far more than the 280 quintillion (280,000,000,000,000,000,000) bits of information which supposedly constitute the average human memory accumulated through an average lifespan.
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It’s been said that with holographic wave-interference patterns, all of the US Library of Congress, which contains virtually every book ever published in English, would fit onto a large sugar cube.
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The holographic model would also account for the instant recall of memory, often as a three-dimensional image.

Pribram’s theories about the distributed role of memory and the wavefront language of the brain met with a great deal of disbelief, especially in the 1960s, when they were first published. Chief among those ridiculing the theory of distributed memory was Indiana University biologist Paul Pietsch. In earlier experiments, Pietsch had discovered that he could remove the brain of a salamander and although the animal became comatose, it would resume functioning once the brain was put back in. If Pribram were right, then some of the salamander’s brain could be removed, or reshuffled, and it shouldn’t affect its ordinary function. But Pietsch was certain that Pribram was wrong and he was fierce in his determination to prove it so. In more than 700 experiments, Pietsch cut out scores of salamander brains. Before putting them back in, he began tampering with them. In successive experiments he reversed, cut out, sliced away, shuffled and even sausage-ground his test subjects’ brains. But no matter how brutally mangled, or diminished in size, whenever whatever was left of the brains were returned to his subjects and the salamanders had recovered, they returned to normal behavior. From being a complete skeptic, Pietsch turned convert to Pribram’s view that memory is distributed throughout the brain.
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Pribram’s theories were also vindicated in 1979 by a husband-and-wife team of neurophysiologists at the University of California at Berkeley. Russell and Karen DeValois converted simple plaid and checkerboard patterns into Fourier waves and discovered that the brain cells of cats and monkeys responded not to the patterns themselves but to the interference patterns of their component waves. Countless studies, elaborated on by the DeValois team in their book
Spatial Vision
,
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show that numerous cells in the visual system are tuned into certain frequencies. Other studies by Fergus Campbell of Cambridge University in England, as well as by a number of other laboratories, also showed that the cerebral cortex of humans may be tuned to specific frequencies.
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This would explain how we can recognize things as being the same, even when they are vastly different sizes.

Pribram also showed that the brain is a highly discriminating frequency analyzer. He demonstrated that the brain contains a certain ‘envelope’, or mechanism, which limits the otherwise infinite wave information available to it, so that we are not bombarded with limitless wave information contained in the Zero Point Field.
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In his own studies in the laboratory, Pribram confirmed that the visual cortex of cats and monkeys responded to a limited range of frequencies.
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Russell DeValois and his colleagues also showed that the receptive fields in the neurons of the cortex were tuned to a very small range of frequencies.
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In his studies of both cats and humans, Campbell at Cambridge also demonstrated that neurons in the brain responded to a limited band of frequencies.
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At one point, Pribram came across the work of the Russian Nikolai Bernstein. Bernstein had made films of human subjects dressed entirely in black costumes on which white tapes and dots had been placed to mark the limbs – not unlike the classic Halloween skeleton costume. The participants were asked to dance against a black background while being filmed. When the film was processed, all that could be seen was a series of white dots moving in a continuous pattern in a wave form. Bernstein analyzed the waves. To his astonishment, all the rhythmic movements could be represented in Fourier trigonometric sums to such an extent that he found that he could predict the next movements of his dancers ‘to an accuracy of within a few millimeters’.
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The fact that movement could somehow be represented formally in terms of Fourier equations made Pribram realize that the brain’s conversations with the body might also be occurring in the form of waves and patterns, rather than as images.
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The brain somehow had the capacity to analyze movement, break it down into wave frequencies and transmit this wave-pattern shorthand to the rest of the body. This information, transmitted nonlocally, to many parts at once, would explain how we can fairly easily manage complicated global tasks involving multiple body parts, such as riding a bicycle or roller skating. It also accounts for how we can easily imitate some task. Pribram also came across evidence that our other senses – smell, taste and hearing – operate by analyzing frequencies.
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In Pribram’s own studies with cats, in which he recorded frequencies from the motor cortex of cats while their right forepaw was being moved and up down, he discovered that, like the visual cortex, individual cells in the cat’s motor cortex responded to only a limited number of frequencies of movement, just as individual strings in a piano respond to a limited range of frequencies.
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Pribram struggled with where this intricate process of wavefront decoding and transformation could possibly take place. It then occurred to him that the one area of the brain where wave-interference patterns might be created was not in any particular cell, but in the spaces between them. At the end of every neuron, the basic unit of a brain cell, are synapses, where chemical charges build up, eventually triggering electrical firing across these spaces to the other neurons. In the same spaces, dendrites – tiny filaments of nerve endings wafting back and forth, like shafts of wheat in a slow breeze – communicate with other neurons, sending out and receiving their own electrical wave impulses. These ‘slow-wave potentials’, as they are called, flow through the glia, or glue, surrounding neurons, to gently touch or even collide with other waves. It is at this busy juncture, a place of a ceaseless scramble of electromagnetic communications between synapses and dendrites, where it was most likely that wave frequencies could be picked up and analyzed, and holographic images formed, since these wave patterns criss-crossing all the time are creating hundreds and thousands of wave-interference patterns.

Pribram conjectured that these wave collisions must create the pictorial images in our brain. When we perceive something, it’s not due to the activity of neurons themselves but to certain patches of dendrites distributed around the brain, which, like a radio station, are set to resonate only at certain frequencies. It is like having a vast number of piano strings all over your head, only some of which would vibrate as a particular note is played.

Pribram largely left it to others to test his views so that he wouldn’t jeopardize his more traditional laboratory work by being associated with his own revolutionary notions. For some years his theory languished. He would have to wait several decades after his initial proposal for other pioneers in the scientific community to catch up with him. His most important support was from an unlikely source: a German trying to make a medical diagnostic machine work better.

Walter Schempp, a mathematics professor from the University of Siegen in Germany, believed he was simply carrying on the work of his ancestor Johannes Kepler, an astronomer working in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Kepler famously claimed in his book
Harmonice mundi
, that people on earth could hear the music of the stars. At the time, Kepler’s contemporaries thought him crazy. It was four hundred years before a pair of American scientists showed that there is indeed a music of the heavens. In 1993, Hulse and Taylor landed the Nobel prize for discovering binary pulsars – stars which send out electromagnetic waves in pulses. The most sensitive of equipment located in one of the world’s highest places, high on a mountaintop in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, picks up evidence of their existence through radio waves.

As a nod to his forebear, Walter himself had specialized in the mathematics of harmonic analysis, or the frequency and phase of sound waves. It occurred to him one day, sitting at home in his garden – his three-year-old son was ill at the time – that you might be able to extract three-dimensional images from sound waves. Without reading of Gabor, he’d worked out his own holographic theory, reconstructed from mathematical theory. He’d consulted his own books in mathematics to no avail, but after looking up what had been done in optical theory, he came across Gabor’s work.

By 1986, Walter had published a book which proved mathematically how you could get a hologram from the echoes of the radio waves received in radar, which came to be regarded as a classic in state-of-the art radar. Schempp began thinking that the same principles of wave holography might apply to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a medical tool used to examine the soft tissues of the body, which was still in its infancy. But when he inquired about it, he soon realized that the people who’d developed and were running the machines had little idea how MRI worked. The technology was so primitive that it was simply being used intuitively. Patients would have to sit still for four hours or more while pictures were slowly taken, by what means nobody was exactly sure. Walter was utterly dissatisfied with MRI technology as it then stood and realized that it was a relatively simple prospect to make sharper images.

To do so, however, required an incredible commitment from the then 50-year-old, who, despite having a young family, with his greying hair and melancholic nature already looked more mature than his years. He had to study medicine, biology and radiology in order to become trained as a doctor before being able to use the equipment. He accepted a place offered at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland, which has the best outpatient radiology department in the USA, and later trained at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is affiliated with MIT. After a fellowship in radiology in Zurich, Walter was finally able to return to Germany, where he now had the appropriate qualifications to officially lay hands on the machine.