Shufflebrain

Our experiments model Lashley's experiments and lead to his basic conclusions. The important consideration is not where we erase or cut but how much. And there is nothing equipotential about our system. (The set on the left certainly isn't the same as that on the right!) These imaginary experiments served as my intellectual justification for rejecting Lashley's conclusions long before the hologram came along. They illustrate a set-theory model of gene activation I believed would account for organ regeneration--simultaneously, for memory as well as.

In designing an adequate test of hologramic theory, it is useful to ask why we were able to simulate Lashley's findings. The major reasons are these: First, our message is redundant. Second, we can preserve the analog of structural order by keeping the stack in register. Third, by subtracting or erasing, we can create the equivalents of empty or blank sets. We did nothing to the carriers of meaning, or to the free access surviving sets had to the readout. If our system had been an unknown, our subtraction experiments would merely tell us of its redundancy, and this property of the brain's information has been recognized since ancient times.

Suppose that instead of erasing sets, we rotate one of our sheets 180 degrees. Obviously, this manipulation will change the quality of our readout. Or suppose instead we switch the Y with the T? And what would happen if we simply gave the stack a shove and knocked the sheets out of register? The moment we alter the carriers of meaning, the system's anatomy, we distort the message.

But in a hologram, the carrier of meaning--or phase-- cannot be reached with an eraser or a knife. Unlike our sheets, the hologramic code ought to survive any anatomical changes we can make. Herein is hologramic theory's most astonishing prediction: shuffling the brain will not scramble the mind! And how might we shuffle a living brain? The answer is embodied in the salamander.

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Salamanders are amphibians, taxonomically one step up from fishes and a half-step down from frogs and toads. They begin life as aquatic creatures, and, a few species excepted, they undergo metamorphosis, become land-dwelling animals, and only return to the water to make new salamanders. (In the lab, I've seen adult salamanders them go into water after food; but they have to get out or they'll drown.)

As larvae--the equivalents of toad and frog tadpoles, and before metamorphosis--salamanders of the genus I work with range down in size from the proportions of a six-year-old child's index finger, their digits barely discernible to the naked eye. Under a stereoscopic dissecting microscope, you can see blood corpuscles racing, scarlet, through vessels beneath transparent tissues, turning crimson as they reach the brushlike external gills on either side of the head. The gills, which they lose at metamorphosis, take oxygen from, and give carbon dioxide to, the clear spring-water environment. The larva does have lungs, but they are functionless little cellophane-like bags until the animal gets ready to move onto land. The larva's coloration recapitulates the basins and banks of its native woodland waters in the sunlight of an early spring morning: a thousand continuous hues of soft yellows; browns that range from almost-black through Dutch chocolate to the shades on the belly of a fawn; silver, in spots and patches, glinting like a slick of frost or a drop of dew. The larva's brain, textured like lightly polished Carrara marble and narrower than the letters on this page, can slip through the eye of a needle. Nevertheless, the tiny brain has the same major anatomical subdivisions as our own: cerebrum, diencephalon, midbrain, cerebellum, medulla. And within those minuscule neuroanatomical entities, somewhere, lie the programs for a range of complex, if primitive, behaviors.

Aside from flight, the most conspicuous manifestation of a salamander larva's mind is the quest for food. The salamander is a carnivore, but it is programmed to eat only living organisms. If it is hungry--and it usually is--the salamander will attack and devour whatever moves and can fit between its jaws. Indeed, it is to a crimson, threadlike tubifex worm, or a dainty daphnia, what a hungry wolf is to a careless pack rat or a stray lamb: imminent death.