Hi Lawry, Just stopped in and read your message. The person was Dr. Karl H. Pribram a Neuro-psychologist and head of the Neuro-psychology department at Stamford University. And as near as I, an artist, can tell, it runs something like this. All of the information for a person is encoded like a hologram, on a cellular level in the body. I should note that this is a metaphorical idea however. It also is one of the ideas that relates to the process of information in cloning. The idea of DNA was uncoded when Pribram first proposed this hologram model.
I worked with some of the pioneers in Body Awareness techniques, Ilana Rubenfeld, Elaine Summers, etc. in the late seventies and early eighties and there are big problems with the standard models for what constitutes Intelligence, Memory and the development of psycho-physical Mastery. The problem with most science on this has to do with the quality of the reporting instrument. So many of the problems of health and consciousness has to do with the inadequacy of those personally reporting on it. The problem of diagnosis in medicine is a good example. So much of what makes the body "work" or "run" is in the consciousness and intent of the patient. Often the success of the diagnosis of the MD for a patient is wrapped up in what the Doctor can induce in the belief system of the patient. Pribram, a medical doctor as well as a world class Neuro-Psychologist was well aware of that fact. As he worked with the various Awareness techniques, he like, Nickolas Tinbergen http://www.alextech.net/about.html before him began to experience what others only theorize. The problem with brain research is that it is largely built upon secondhand instrumental data with very little that actually resembles the subtlety of memory and the mental processes of Mastery. Where does the consciousness lie? Keith, I surmise, would say that it is found in the Brain alone. Those of us who have done long term research and have both mastered and taught complicated psycho-physical skills feel that this is a little too glib. In a class where I was working with Ilana Rubenfeld Pribram had just given a lecture on his holographic theories. At the end of the lecture he volunteered himself to be "worked on" by Rubenfeld. This entailed lying on a table while Ilana Rubenfeld demonstrated various techniques at free the consciousness through physical manipulation and verbal conditioning. At that point working on him she did a little "trick." She left her hand on his foot for a period of time while she spoke to him about various aspects of the training we were receiving. At a certain point she removed the hand and moved, silently, to his head. When she spoke again he was surprised because he still felt her hand on his foot. That demonstration of the "phantom limb" phenomenon was basic to his understanding of the encodement of information in the body on a cellular level. The complexity of attention and memory is a synergy between the brain and the "thinking" of other parts of the body. It is not that the brain is the human and the limbs are devices to manipulate the world. It is much more complicated than that. Only now are we beginning to understand why the DNA in a toe cell could be used to create another related being. It is not unimaginable that information that we term intelligence exists there as well. The 19th century model of the hand is that it is a dumb instrument of the brain. That may very well prove to be too simple when it comes to what is actually going on functionally. It has been known for years that the problem of the simple double-blind test does not work with certain complex combinations like Mega-vitamins for example. They get results based upon the prejudice of the testers. Another story far too complicated for here. Let me just say that the Arts and Sports have been the primary developers of psycho-physical awareness mastery in the Western World. Meditation and Prayer being tools for the same end in other parts of the world. As the Arts and Sports in the West have become more and more specialized and the average person more and more consumerized, psycho-physical awareness has decreased and a kind of psycho-physical anesthetization has taken its place. Competition was originally a tool for the development of more coordination and subtlety of movement and psycho-physical awareness. In today's consumer world, competition is about economics and not about personal development. In the gym today, it is about aerobics and not having a heart attack rather than about the development of one's potential and mastery over one's skills. Pribram was a part of the human potential movement that has its economic corollary in the works of Peter Senge and Peter Drucker and the development of holistic intelligence of Organizations. In Pribram's case, like Alexander, Summers, Gindler, Feldenkrais and Rubenfeld, to mention only a small portion of a very large movement, he was concerned with the human body as the organization with each physical area having its own intelligence. Sir Herbert Read the great Art historian and theorist was another and Howard Gardner with his "Frames of Mind" , at Harvard, is a leading proponent today. Pribram conceived of the psycho-physical reality in the metaphor of the Hologram where all of the information is encoded in every element of the whole. Others see it differently but the one thing I believe they and I share with them is the belief that the medical "system's model" that puts the uniqueness of any species in one single area of the anatomy is probably wrong. It was not so long ago that the Phrenologists were dissecting my relatives to prove their theories while the "Somatic body types" were taking naked pictures of the former first lady as a freshman in college on a study grant. Pictures that were later blatantly used against her when she was just a "research" subject by a famous professor. Now discredited. Phrenology wasn't disproved by scientist's theories it was disproved by the Osage here and the Dinke in Africa. Phrenology theory said that the size of the brain was what created the most advanced Western Knowledge. That disconnect hit them in the face when the most civilized of peoples tended to have the smallest crania while the Osage and Dinke are giants. Now it is the size of a lobe. I just say that the computer model of RAM potential is as good an explanation for the venturi effect in information flow in the brain as well as heightened blood pressure as that frontal lobe and that people who work with the human thumb early on coupled with language and perceptual training like hearing and singing music, do well later on in all of those activities Keith prizes. I do not discount the brain or even that lobe but personally I am not a seeker of the "magic bullet" and I don't believe in messiahs either except it is a nice oratorio. I like Karl H. Pribram. But let me close with a story from my own work in vocal anatomy. Raol Hussan conceived of a theory of vocal movement that was totally nerve oriented. i.e. the vocal cords moved because of the same action by the nerves that moves other muscles of the body. That movement moved the air which created sound. It was totally backwards from the traditional theory which was that the vocal cord is a membrane that is vibrated by the air and that the muscles stretch the cords to create higher and lower pitches and that the thickness of the cords determined whether one was a bass or a soprano. Hussan turned this upside down and in effect answered a number of questions about the ability of the human being to go far beyond Western ideas of vocal range, volume and color. In effect, he said it was located in the neurons of the brain and that the cords were complicated muscles who responded to consciousness just as was the rest of the body. This stimulated a lot of vocal research. It had to because most of the voice teachers of the world taught from the idea of a passive larynx and filled in the blanks with a theory of "talent." Millions were spent on research and to date, Hussan has been disproved, sort of. People still learn to sing from the "passive" theory as they always did. In fact, anyone who know the history of vocal pedagogy can show that people have learned to sing no matter what they have been led to believe about it. One could draw the conclusion that voice teaching is hokum based upon this fact. But if we turn that same light on Allo-pathic medicine it too suffers greatly. Why do people cure themselves of cancer? Why does some medicines cure while in other people it kills? My point is this. On some level, all of these things are true while on another they are wrong because they are holistically inadequate. Voice too is a Synergy between many different elements and the passivity of the larynx can be renamed and called efficiency i.e. the right amount of energy when too much had been the cause of the vocal deficiency in the first place. I would council respect for our scholars and prudence in how we look at what they say. The only answer is whether it "works" or not. Any answer that fits in its own system but destroys life is a fantasy. Most information fits into the whole but fails when being considered the whole. I believe that is true of Medicine, Economics, Religion, Art, Science and any other "ism." Pribram imagined that the whole extended down to the smallest element of our conscious being. My experience tends to corroborate that. We call that kind of thinking "listening." Ray Evans Harrell, ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lawrence de Bivort" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Ray Evans Harrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, August 18, 2002 3:23 PM Subject: RE: America in decline? (was Re: What is Economics, Hudson? > Greetings, Keith, > > I agree with Ray's "Wow!" > > I must have missed the fling <smile> -- could you take a couple of minutes > to summarize what Probram's 'holographic' model suggested? Apologies for > not already having some acquaintance with it -- my library is a couple of > thousand miles from here. > > Thanks, > Lawry >
