holography

If I know one man, I know them all

The small people of Lilliput appear to be exact copies of Gulliver's people: three-dimensional copies. This brings me to holography.
Holography, invented in 1948 by Dennis Gabor, uses a lenseless camera to record information in a way that stores the whole in all parts. Interacting beams of light create an "interference pattern" that scatters the information being recorded on a photographic plate, the hologram. Interesting is that if the hologram is broken, any single piece can be used to reconstruct the entire image. Holography demonstrates in a very concrete way that it is possible to create process where the whole can be encoded in all the parts, so that each and every part represents the whole.
The holographic character of the brain is most clearly reflected in the patterns of connectivity through which each neuron (nerve cell) is connected with 100,000nds of others, allowing a system of functioning that is both generalized and specialized.
Different regions of the brain seem to specialize in different activities, but the control and execution of specific behaviours is by no means as localized as was once thought. All are closely interdependent and capable of acting on behalf of each other when necessary.
For example:
- Karl Leshley removed increasing quantities of the brains of rats which had been taught to run through a maze. He found that, provided he did not remove the visual cortex and thus blind them, he could remove up to ninety percent of their cortex without significant deterioration. -

The principles of holographic design:
-Get the whole into the parts.
-Create connectivity and redundancy.
-Create simultaneous specialization and generalization.
-Create a capacity to self-organize.
-Get the whole into the parts
We know the redundancy of parts when we look at our organizations:: the foreman checking others, a maintenance team, quality officers looking for faults which could have been more easily found by those who made them, etc.
Create connectivity and redundancy.
With spare parts extra functions are added to the working parts. E.G. autonomous working groups: it creates flexibility and facilitates reorganization of the parts. The question is how much redundancy is required? Any control system should be as varied and complex as the environment that must be controlled (requisite variety). Redundancy should be built in where it is needed, not at a distance. The whole assumes a cell structure, directly related to the environment. In creativity this plays its role when we mind map different parts of the situation. The redundancy is created by using colours, pictures, words, etc. In order to remember one particular thing it helps to connect the facts up in a story.
Create simultaneous specialization and generalization.
The mind map shows both details and provides overview. Separate targets can be worked out in different maps like 'exploded views'.
Create a capacity to self-organize.
The organization of the brain reverses the bureaucratic principle that organizational requirements need to be defined as clearly and precisely as possible. The seemingly irrelevant, even mistakes, may help to change one's perspective and see new things (cf. synchronicity and synectics).
The processing of data should not always be with the goal in mind but at times 'free floating' in order to facilitate thinking, creating "conditions that allow a problem to find its own solution" (cf. creativeness).

When we compare this with the holographic brain we know that the brain records every happening as a single event: > trial > event > feedback > check > adjust > trial. A mistake is a single event which provides feedback. Every mistake is fascinating, because it is the result of the thinking of our magnificent brain and teaches us something. This cannot but show us that the brain is a mechanism designed to succeed.


It is good to realize that everything is part of a process, and not as the mechanistic view has it: fixed and stationary.
David Bohm, (1917-92) in Wholeness and the implicate order

“I regard the essence of the notion of process as given by the statement: Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process.
The best image of process is perhaps that of the flowing stream, whose substance is never the same. On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.”