The Holographic Universe

The Holographic Universe
by Michael Talbot

The Holographic Universe
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Book Summary Information

Author: Michael Talbot
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-05-06
ISBN: 0060922583
Number of pages: 338
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Product features:
  • Paperback in colors of black, green and yellow.

Book Reviews of The Holographic Universe

Book Review: Physical reality is a hologram
Summary: 5 Stars

This is an interesting book by an author who passionately believes that existence and physical reality perceived through consciousness is generated by a holographic phenomenon. In other words the holographic universe creates reality. This book is described in three parts; the first part describes the central concepts of physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram. The second and third part of the book does an exhaustive review of the work of many psychologists, psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, and neurobiologists who have expressed strong support for Bohm-Pribram holographic concept to explain phenomena such as; near death experience, out of body experience, telepathy, ESP, etc.

The summary of this book is as follows: The holographic concept is a form of quantum mysticism extrapolated from two theories. One due to David Bohm who proposed that the universe and physical reality is a holographic structure; and the second due to Karl Pribram who proposed that consciousness perceives reality through the holographic structure. The holographic paradigm is rooted in the concept that all organisms and forms of matter are holograms embedded within one universal hologram. A hologram is two-dimensional photographic pattern of interference between coherent light reflected from the object of interest, and light that comes directly from the same source or reflected by a mirror. When this two-dimensional image is illuminated from behind by coherent light, a three-dimensional image of the object appears in space, but without illumination the image appears as blur. The characteristic of a perfect hologram is that all its content is contained in any finite part of itself: If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. The reductive or deterministic approach doesn't work, which means that components or parts doesn't make the whole. Bohm used this analogy to explain quantum entanglement where the separated quantum particles "communicate" with each other regardless of the distance separating them, which is a direct contradiction of special theory of relativity. Bohm suggested that particles remain in contact with one another because at deeper level these particles are not individual entities, but extensions of the same fundamental reality; the separation is a mere illusion. This phenomenon is illustrated by "Bohm's aquarium." Imagine an aquarium containing a fish, which you can not see directly, but this can be seen indirectly from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed to its side. As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate fishes, because the cameras are set at right angles, and the two images are different. But as you continue to watch you will notice that when one turns, the other also turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side at right angle. From this you will conclude that the two fishes are instantaneously communicating with one another, but we know that it is not so. Bohm suggested that this is precisely what is going on between the particles in quantum entanglement.

In a holographic universe time and space are no longer viewed as fundamentals, because concepts such as location and time breaks down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate (as in quantum entanglement described above). At its deeper level reality is a sort of super-hologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. Support for Bohm's quantum physical ideas came from unexpected sources when neurophysiologist Karl Pribram invoked holographic model to explain memories, which are dispersed throughout the brain. Pribram suggested 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 brain itself is a hologram. Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. A human brain memorizes of the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime. How does brain translates the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, electro-chemical potentials, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions? Pribram argues that encoding and decoding frequencies is best performed by a hologram. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions. It is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions. This essentially means that consciousness creates the appearance of the brain, the human body and everything we regard as reality.

When holographic models of David Bohm and Karl Pribram are put together the world becomes a secondary reality. Primarily the world is a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram which selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, then the objective reality cease to exist. This is in agreement with Vedanta philosophy (Hindu philosophy) where Maya, an illusory power creates the illusion which we believe is physical reality, but the universe is one whole entity called Brahman. We are essentially "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequencies of a super-hologram.

1. Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge Classics)
2. Languages of the Brain (Prentice-Hall series in experimental psychology)
3. Brain And Being: At The Boundary Between Science, Philosophy, Language, And Arts (Advances in Consciousness Research)
4. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads: Translated from the Sanskrit: With an Outline of the Philosophy of the Upanishads
5. Advaita Vedanta : A Philosophical Reconstruction
6. Mysticism and the New Physics (Arkana)
7. The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives
8. An Introduction to Black Holes, Information And The String Theory Revolution: The Holographic Universe

Summary of The Holographic Universe

Today nearly everyone is familiar with holograms, three-dimensional images projected into space with the aid of a laser. Now, two of the world's most eminent thinkers -- University of London physicists David Bohm, a former protege of Einstein's and one of the world's most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, one of the architects of our modern understanding of the brain -- believe that the universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. This remarkable new way of looking at the universe explains now only many of the unsolved puzzles of physics, but also such mysterious occurrences as telepathy, out-of-body and near death experiences, "lucid" dreams, and even religious and mystical experiences such as feelings of cosmic unity and miraculous healings.

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