The Brain and Universe as Hologram

Despite its enormous size and apparent materiality, the universe does not exist of itself. Indeed, hardly anybody is aware that the universe and everything within including ourselves ^a), is perpetually created and annihilated to and fro energy at the rate equal to the speed of light. The formation and dissipation of this wave-like material world across the surface of the vast ocean of energy create what we perceive as the passage of time.

In Bohm’s notion this dynamic phenomenon is called the unfoldment of the implicate order and enfoldment of the explicate order, like what implies in the hologram ^b). According to Bohm, the universe is like a kind of colossal dynamic hologram or holo-movement.

Our world and everything within is only shadows, mere projections from reality beyond our ordinary space and time. However, if it was so, how come that we perceive the world around us continuous and persisting over time? The simple answer is that nobody can see the discontinuity of time which interval is in the order of 10^-44second.

However, the argument does not stop there. The amazing thing is that nature seems to conform to the working of the human brain to that of the universe. Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University, discovered the brain works under the hologram mechanism. He found that memories were not localized at specific brain side but were somehow spread out throughout the brain as a whole. Every part of the brain contains all the information necessary to recall a whole memory, just like the hologram of which every small fragment of a piece of holographic film contains all the information recorded in the whole.

Pribram concluded that if the brain works following the holographic model then so does the universe. Even though Pribram and Bohm worked independently, they arrived at the same conclusion similar to what the mystics had said that the world around us was just an illusion. The universe and everything within existing only in a series of a fraction of seconds successively separated by gaps of nonexistence.

Both the brain and cosmos work at the same mechanism and rhythm which make human feel at home as they are unaware of experiencing such weird underlying reality.

Notes:

a.  What we mean here by oneself is the material body. Consciousness, information (knowledge) and intelligence are forms of more sophisticated energy which persist through time.

b.   Descartes who introduced coordinate systems to describe the order in physical process strongly influence our current concepts of order. The Cartesian grid and those of curvilinear coordinates essentially described a local order of separate points. The quantum realm, however, does not take this kind of local order and seems to have no significant order which Bohm called implicit or enfolded order. This kind of nonlocal order is what hologram does have.

References: 

1.  Talbot, M.: "The Holographic Universe," HarperPerennial, New York, 1992, p. 46-49

2.  Bohm, D. et al.: "The Undivided Universe," Routledge, London, 1993, p. 374-380.

The Brain and Universe as Hologram