THE SCIENCE OF REINCARNATION

Where is memory stored

Ask yourself, “where is memory stored?” “It is stored in the mind” is a good answer, for the mind must access your memory to operate, so that you can be you. Scientists have been researching memory, trying to determine where and how it is housed.

           For over thirty years, the great neuropsychologist Karl Lashley worked at the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology when it was located in Orange Park, Florida, where he was involved in an ongoing search for the elusive mechanisms responsible for memory. There Dr. Karl Pribram was able to witness the fruits of Lashley’s labors firsthand. Dr. Pribram was another scientist (and professor) working on the holographic brain theory. This was in 1946.

          During his tenure, Lashley trained rats on different tasks, such as running a maze. He tested their performance, then surgically removed various portions of their brains and tested them again. His aim was, literally, to cut out their memory. Where was it? Which section of the rats’ brain remembered the maze? He reasoned that ultimately, he would burn the part of the brain that housed that memory—and perhaps memory in general—with his wife’s curling iron. The experiment was a bit crude, but again, this was the 1940s.

However, “to his surprise, he found that no matter what portion of their brains he cut out, he could not eradicate their memories. Often, the rats’ motor skills were impaired and they stumbled clumsily through the mazes, but even with massive portions of their brains removed, their memories remained stubbornly intact” (Talbot 2001, 12–13). No matter what part of their brain was burned, the rats were always able to navigate the maze.

Working with Lashley was a young neurosurgery resident named Karl Pribram. “For Pribram, these were incredible findings. If memories possessed specific locations in the brain the same way that books possess specific locations on library shelves, why didn’t Lashley’s surgical plunderings have any effect on them? For Pribram, the only answer seemed to be that memories were not localized at specific brain sites, but were somehow spread out or distributed throughout the brain as a whole.” However, they were both left with no answer to the question of how memory could be stored throughout the brain until the mid-1960s, when Pribram read an article in Scientific American describing the first construction of a hologram.

          Holography exists thanks to a phenomenon called interference. Interference is the crisscrossing pattern that occurs when two or more waves, such as waves of water, ripple through each other. For example, if you drop a pebble into a pond, it will produce a series of concentric waves that expands outward. If you drop two pebbles into a pond, you will get two sets of waves that expand and pass through one another. The complex arrangement of crests and troughs that results from such collisions is known as an interference pattern.

          Any wavelike phenomena can create an interference pattern, including light and radio waves. Because laser light is an extremely pure, coherent form of light, it is especially good at creating interference patterns. It provides, in essence, the perfect pebble. As a result, it wasn’t until the invention of the laser that holograms, as we know them today, became possible. These are the holograms you are likely most familiar with.

          A hologram is produced when a single laser light is split into two separate beams. The first beam is bounced off the object to be photographed. Then the second beam is allowed to collide with the reflected light of the first. When this happens, they create an interference pattern which is then recorded on a piece of film.

          To the naked eye, the image on the film looks nothing at all like the object photographed. In fact, it even looks a little like the concentric rings that form when a handful of pebbles is tossed into a pond. But as soon as another laser beam (or in some instances a bright light) is shined through the film, a three-dimensional image of the original object reappears. The three-dimensionality of such images is often eerily convincing. You can actually walk around a holographic projection and view it from different angles as you would a real object. However, if you reach out and try to touch it, your hand will waft right through it and you will discover there is nothing solid, just light (Talbot 2001, 14–15).

          There is, however, another fascinating trait about holographic film besides its ability to display three-dimensional images.

Three-dimensionality is not the only remarkable aspect of holograms. If a piece of holographic film containing the image of an apple is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the apple! Even if the halves are divided again and then again, an entire apple can still be reconstructed from each small portion of the film (although the images will get hazier as the portions get smaller). Unlike normal photographs, every small fragment of a piece of holographic film contains all the information recorded in the whole.

          This was precisely the feature that got Pribram so excited, for it offered at last a way of understanding how memories could be distributed rather than localized in the brain. If it was possible for every portion of a piece of holographic film to contain all the information necessary to create a whole image, then it seemed equally possible for every part of the brain to contain all of the information necessary to recall a whole memory (Talbot 2001, 16–17).   

          Here is where it becomes interesting. If you cut the holographic film you made of a person in half and shine a laser through each half, you get two complete holograms of your person. Cut your film into ten or one hundred pieces and you get ten or one hundred complete holograms of that person, one for every little scrap of film, thanks to interference. Even though the image from the film gets fuzzier with every subsequent cut, each slice of the film contains the entire image.  

So, do we have evidence of this kind of thing at the macro level?

In 1988, Claire Sylvia received a heart and double lung transplant. Following the operation, she underwent some apparent personality changes: she began to have unusual (for her) cravings for beer, green peppers, and chicken nuggets; she dreamt about beautiful women and experienced homosexual urges. She also dreamt of meetings with a young man called Tim. Alarmed, Sylvia sought out her donor’s family and discovered her new organs had belonged to an 18-year-old boy. His name was Tim. Tim had a penchant for the same foods she was craving—he was actually eating chicken nuggets when he died—and Sylvia felt he was the boy in her dreams. (Talbot 2001, 154–155)

So what does this show? Your memory is stored holographically throughout your entire body. Your mind must be able to access your memory, so your mind must be able to operate throughout your entire body.