Consciousness and the Brain

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake

The Spectrum of Consciousness, described in my previous post, gives us a new framework for understanding consciousness. But, if consciousness comes from outside the body - from the higher dimensions outside spacetime - what role does that leave for the brain?

In the first half of the following 27 minute video (the late) Michael Talbot talks about a holographic model of the brain that was suggested by David Bohm and Karl Pribram.

A 3D hologram can be created if you shine a laser light through a flat holographic plate. The plate contains patterns of information which create interference patterns in the laser light. These interference patterns generate the image. If you then break the plate into several fragments, the whole image is still contained in each fragment.

Michael Talbot:
Synchronicity and the Holographic Universe


At 04:30 Talbot says

"If the universe is a hologram, in some sense it suggests that there may be two very drastically different levels of reality: the concrete reality that we see when we look at [things]... and at some deep level there's a level of reality where everything dissolves into an ocean of energy that is holographically interconnected."

The holographic model is not an exact analogy but more of a metaphor. One interpretation is that the brain is the "holographic plate" and the vibrations of universal consciousness serve as the equivalent of the laser light. Another interpretation could be that the fabric of the universe is like a hologram and that the brain is the emitter of conscious energy which interacts with the holographic universe to create reality.

It could of course be a complex mix of these two models or something even more complicated and maybe outside our ability ever to understand. Is it actually possible to use our own conscious awareness to measure conscious awareness? As Alan Watts put it: can a car headlamp illuminate the cables that supply its power?

From 09:00 Talbot describes gruesome experiments on rats' memory aimed at discovering exactly where a specific memory is stored in a rat's brain. Regardless of which parts or how much of the brain are removed, a memory could never be removed. In other words, the brain stores information in a similar way to the holographic plate.

Unlike a holographic plate which represents a fixed 3D snapshot of a subject, a hologram inside the brain would be continuously updating itself as a result of input from the environment. We used to think that the brain was constructed with a fixed architecture although functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown that it is actually very malleable. This process of structural and functional change in the brain is called Neuroplasticity.

Because it's a dynamic hologram, your brain is continuously producing a 4D (space-time) impression of the material world. In effect, it converts conscious awareness into an internal "film show" representing your own personal reality. We have scientific evidence that our awareness of "now" is in fact up to 500 milliseconds (half a second) behind the "real" now and I will return to the subject of "now" in a later post.

Consciousness generates a field effect, similar to an electromagnetic field. Like a magnet attracting a metal object without having to touch the object, consciousness is capable of interacting with things at a distance.

We have already seen evidence for a field of consciousness. In the double-slit experiment, it is a field of consciousness that collapses the wave function of sub-atomic particles and forces them to adopt a particular material state of existence.

But more tangible evidence exists of the field of consciousness and this is the subject of my next post.

From the perspective of THIS universe, I am "The REAL" Jeff Hall

Further Study

Because it's slightly off-topic for this post I didn't mention the "fish in an aquarium" analogy that Bohm used to explain quantum superposition (see 06:45 in the video). The "two fish" observed from the end and from the the side of the tank are actually the same fish, but you only get that understanding from a 3D perspective. Thus, two particles in superposition with one another in space time are actually, like the fish in the tank, the same particle viewed from a higher dimensional perspective.

The interview with Michael Talbot can be found on Jeffrey Mishlove's excellent online resource Thinking Allowed. I thoroughly recommend you spend some time indulging your curiosity on this site, or visit Jeffrey's Youtube Channel: ThinkingAllowedTV.