Drs Magne and Pribram at the Icons Of the Field Conference

London, UK, March 2006

Karl H. Pribram is a research professor in Psychology and Cognitive Science at Georgetown University, Washington DC. He trained as a neurosurgeon and became a professor at Stanford University, he did pioneering work on the cerebral cortex. To the general public, he is better known for his development of the holonomic brain model of cognitive function and his contribution to the ongoing neurological research into the engram. Pribram is less known for his theory about so-called "spiritual" experiences.

Dr. Pribram is the author of Languages of the Brain and hundreds of articles about the mind-brain relationship. Dr. Pribram is probably one of the most influential scholars alive today in probing the mysteries of the mind-brain relationship. 

When asked to summarize his research interests, Pribram said: "My interests are focused on cerebral function as it relates to psychological processes. I am especially concerned with the differences between the functions of the posterior convexity of the brain on the one hand, and its frontolimbic systems on the other. Briefly put, the convexity deals with locating us in space and time; the frontolimbic formations monitor that experience to create a narrative about our existence. The substance of my research and theorizing is to provide data and interpretations as to just how our brains organize the psychological processes that make up 'locating' and 'monitoring'."

PRIBRAM : Sure, the rules of quantum mechanics apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what's going on in the nervous system -- we have an explanation to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences, because the descriptions you get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of quantum physics. That's why Fritjof Capra wrote The Tao of Physics, why we have The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and all of this sort of thing that's come along. And in fact Bohr and Heisenberg already knew; Schroedinger talked about the Upanishads, and Bohr used the yin and yang as his symbol. Because the conceptions that grew out of watching the quantum level -- and therefore now the neurological and psychophysical level, now that it's a psychological level as well -- seem to have a great deal in common with our spiritual experience. Now what do I mean by spiritual experience? You talked about mental activity, calling it the mind. But we want to belong. And that is what I define as the spiritual aspects of man's nature.

We observe and communicate with others, we develop tools for more acute observation, and we formulate the results to receive consensual validation that we are on the right track. What is really private are the unconscious processes to which we have such limited access. Sigmund Freud's contribution was to attempt a technique by which we could access these unconscious processes and bring them into our conscious experience so that we could share them and do something about them.

Thus, through consciousness we become related to each other and to the biological and physical universe. Just as gravity relates material bodies, so consciousness relates sentient bodies. One can no more hope to find consciousness by digging into the brain than one can find gravity by digging into the earth. One can, however, find out how the brain helps organize our relatedness through consciousness, just as one can dig into the earth to find out how its composition influences the relatedness among physical objects by gravitational attraction.

Pribram said, “My claim is that the basis function from which both matter and mind are “formed“ is flux (measured as spectral density) that provides the ontological roots from which conscious experiences regarding matter as well as mind become actualized in spacetime. To illuminate this claim, let me begin with a story I experienced: Once, Eugene Wigner remarked that in quantum physics we no longer have observables, but only observations.”

Tongue in cheek I asked whether that meant that quantum physics is really psychology, expecting a gruff reply. Instead, he beamed a happy smile of understanding and replied, “yes, yes, that's exactly correct”. If indeed one wants to take the reductive path, one ends up with psychology, not particles. In fact, it is a psychological process, mathematics, that describes the relationships that organize matter. In a non-trivial sense current physics is rooted in both matter and mind.

“English is not spoken by the computer, nor are there photographs in the computer when it processes the takes of a digital camera. Likewise, there are no words or pictures in the brain, only circuits, chemical transactions and quantum-like holographic (holonomic) processes based on Gabor-like wavelets. To use another metaphor, the processing of an fMRI tomograph uses quantum holography. The pictures we see are reconstructions made possible by the process.”

Pribram continues, “The main unanswered question for identity theory has been: “How does the identity come about?” One answer has been that brain processes and psychological processes are different aspects of some more basic process. Linguistic philosophers termed this difference as a difference between brain talk and mind talk. The problem then arises as to what is that untalked about basic process? My answer has been that the untalked about basic process is identified as flux, describing measurements of energy and moment in terms of frequency. Note that the mathematical use of frequency is neutral to time and space: in audition, frequency determines the pitch, time the duration of a tone.

My additional claim is that by identifying flux as their basis function, brain organization and psychological organization become more than merely multiple aspects, multiple perspectives on some unspecified underlying order. Another example is that my experience of self is unitary. Under certain conditions two rather different selves can be discerned: an objective “me”, and a monitoring narrative “I”. When part of my body or brain is tampered with, for example my face after a dentist's novocaine injection, or an injury to the right parietal cortex of the brain, an objective “me” experiences a change in the contents, the objects, of the experience. My experience is about the imaged distortion of the essentially unchanged face and about the loss in one's body image of an arm, which is perfectly intact and may, in fact, perform, that is, behave, normally.

I am in a state of hunger and thirst and suddenly perceive hitherto ignored restaurant signs all over the place even when they are in written in the Russian alphabet. I am on my way to work, urgently considering the day's tasks when I pass a doughnut shop. Perceiving the fresh baking odors stops me in my tracks, I perceive the store window with its display and I go in and buy a couple of the doughnuts because now I am in a new state, I feel hungry.

Karl Pribram has become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. In the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words,Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime, or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Similarly, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly. Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Pribram believes the brain comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions. Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. Each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smel lis in part dependent on what are now called "cosmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist.

As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This new picture of reality has come to be called the -holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level. It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number ofunsolvedpuzzles in psychology.

In particular,  Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness. In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species's anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations"transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called "transpersonal psychology" devoted entirely to their study.

Technological advances associated with brain wave patterns, such as neuroimaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), have emerged and become more prominent in recent years. These advances, foreshadowed by the insights of Pribram and Bohm, offer the potential for improving diagnostic objectivity and the efficacy of psychiatric interventions. Researchers have made significant advances with TMS brain implants, which focus magnetic pulses on specific brain regions, thereby altering the neurological wave patterns that Pribram describes. TMS has proved a valuable tool in the treatment of epilepsy, and shows promise for efforts to suppress certain thought processes.

It is now widely recognized that the electrical activity of neural membranes (which result from the activity of ion channel transfers) is a significant variable affecting cognition. Pribram believes that if psychology is to understand the conditions producing the world of appearances, it must look to the thinking of physicists like Bohm.

Books

• Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with George Miller and Eugene Galanter) 1960
• Languages of the Brain 1971
• Freud's "Project" Reassessed (with Merton Gill) 1976
• Brain and Perception 1991

In the book, Cancer Free For Life, Dr Magne explores the way our brain works at the quantum level to facilitate healing. Current quantum research is starting to confirm what Dr Magne discovered, that healing is a quantum process. She answers such questions as:

• What causes cancer?


• Can you heal yourself of cancer using the mind-body connection?


• Is there a quantum path to health?


• How Placebo medicine can heal you?


• What the secrets are to creating the life you want, disease free?


• Whether you can recreate yourself from the inside out using your mind powers?


• Is all healing a miracle?


• Do quantum physics have anything to do with healing?


• Are healers more effective than doctors?


• Was Jesus a quantum physicist?

Dr Magne ended the interview by saying:

Dr Magne ended the interview by saying: