Holographic Coding in the Brain? Options

[purkinje]

probably not, but it would nice to hear other ppl's opinions.

[purkinje]

I think Karl Pribram wrote something about holographic coding in the brain but I'll have to look more into this to post on this thread. I'm not sure how widely accepted Pribram's ideas were by the neuroscience community.

[sol]

#289 Karl Pribram



The holonomic brain theory is based on some insights that Dennis Gabor had. He was the inventor of the hologram, and he obtained the Nobel Prize for his many contributions. He was a mathematician, and what he was trying to do was develop a better way of making electron micrographs, improve the resolution of the micrographs. And so for electron microscopy he suggested that instead of making a photograph -- essentially, with electron microscopes we make photographs using electrons instead of photons. He thought maybe instead of making ordinary photographs, that what he would do is get the interference patterns. Now what is an interference pattern? When light strikes, or when electrons strike any object, they scatter. But the scatter is a funny kind of scatter. It's a very well regulated scatter. For instance, if you defocus the lens on a camera so that you don't get the image falling on the image plane and you have a blur, that blur essentially is a hologram, because all you have to do is refocus it.

[Unknown]

hallograps....hmmmmm....when in the moutains of central california...after much reseach afterwards..i became aware that this science is in use..have seen it...projections can be made that appear REAL...projections of people can be used to fool the enemy[whoever that is] the military has this at its disposal...the topic is vast and enough said from me...

[Unknown]

karl..some one has focused it.....

[Rick]

The holographic theory of memory in the brain has been discredited. To implement it would require that everything be connected to everything, and now we know that the brain is not connected in that way.

[Dan]

memory is distributed in the brain network, not exactly a hologram but not exactly localized either

[Enki]

I agree with Dan, "not exactly localized " is a very important phrase.

[Enki]

[Paul King]

[John Harris]

There have been at least three holographic memory theories. The first was advanced by the optical physicist Pieter van Heerden in the J. of Applied Optics in 1963. He had basically designed a hardware optical memory, but he realized and remarked it might be a strong metaphor for memory in the brain.

A similar theory was advanced independently by Karl Pribram in a series of papers beginning in 1969. He originally focused on the distributed storage aspect of holograms and, demonstrably, the brain.

Finally, about 1987, there appeared the "holonomic" theory, which seems to be a sort of blend of the classical holographic memory theory with quantum physics. It also seems to have religious or mystical overtones.

In the recent, excellent book, Metaphors of Memory there is a good chapter on this history. The author thinks these ideas -- notably the idea of distributed storage -- were absorbed into Connectionism. To my knowledge the basic idea of holographic memory was not discredited. It was just sort of swamped out by the avalanche of enthusiasm for neural networks.

Then, when the "holonomic" version of the idea surfaced, it painted the whole idea of holographic memory as mystical and (my opinion) sort of silly. It is a shame because the first two versons of the theory were grounded on arguable but plausible everyday science.

In addition to holographic theories of memory there were holographic theories of vision. These were apparently hooted down in the 1970s. It was believed the retina, like shapshot film, loses the spatial phase information borne by incoming light. It followed that vision could not be holographic. But in retrospect the holographic vision theories seem to have been (or contained) attractive ideas, and they were probably dismissed a little too abruptly.

I have included two essays on holographic memory and vision in a Blog I write about radical ideas in neuroscience. Here is a link to the Blog:

http://nine-radical.blogspot.com


And here are links to the holography related entries. These include

"Conservation of Spatial Phase"

and

"Gems in a Junkyard."

It seems to me the basic idea of storing memory as an interference pattern is realistic and promising. It was originally conceived by Karl Lashley.

Regards, John Harris