Choy Lee Mu

The prayer-healing crowd seem to have latched on to the whole "brain as a hologram" as well as the speculated quantum nature of human conciousness.

I've read about the theories suggesting that human memory is stored holographically within our neurons and that this is the reason why massive brain trauma patients can retain memory and abilities, even after losing a large portion of their physical brain. (As you know when you "cut" a holgram in half you end up with two whole images.)

I've also read about the idea that our human conciousness is a mechanism for collapsing wave-states into "reality" in universe that is fundentally a foam of quantum possibilities.

Gobbledygook aside, I find these two related ideas interesting and I was wondering what you folks think of these things?

Here's an article touting the supposed healing benefits of imaging and citing these two ideas as support. The comments on visualization ring true to me, but the prayer-healing stuff sounds like bunk.

http://dr--ed.freeyellow.com/Hologram.html

Thanks in advance for the comments!

Gnomelord

I think it's absolute crap.

Prayer heals much like any other kind of placebo, only the strength is considerably more firm in the power of the methods used.

So it's kind of like extra-strength placebo

This is of course coming from someone with no medical background, so don't listen to me. I probably don't know anything.

Choy Lee Mu

No, I actually agree. Prayer healing is a load of crap.

I am interested in the theories surrounding the physical basis of human conciousness, however, such as holographic human memory and the speculated quantum-physical nature of our brains.

Of course, I'm just a layman as well, so I may have mis-interpreted, or wishfully-interpreted the "real" science behind these popular theories.

Anyone know more about this field?

Marduk

“Anyone know more about this field?”

Not me, but you might want to look up mathematician/physicist Roger Penrose “Shadows of the Mind”

Peter Soderqvist

Consciousness and Quantum Measurement by Amit Goswami
The interpretational difficulties of quantum mechanics can be solved with the hypothesis (von Neumann, 1955; Wigner, 1962) that consciousness collapses the quantum wave function. The paradoxes raised against this hypothesis have now all been satisfactorily solved (Bass, 1971; Blood, 1993; Goswami, 1989, 1993; Stapp, 1993). There is, however, one question that continues to be raised: Is consciousness absolutely necessary for interpreting quantum mechanics? Can we find other alternatives to collapse and consciousness as the collapser?
http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/Summ...oswami9901.htm

An Interview with Goswami professor of physics at University of Oregon
http://www.twm.co.nz/goswintro.htm

Amit Goswami professor of physics at Oregon University
Is there evidence of the quantum nature of the mind? Yes, there is. The physicist David Bohm noted long ago that we cannot simultaneously follow both the content of a thought and the direction the thought takes. This is like the quantum uncertainty principle — you cannot simultaneously ascertain both the position and the momentum of a material object (or thought).
http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/Spri...01goswami.html

Soderqvist1: I will give you some examples so you get a feeling for what Bohm mean! An inexperienced car driver has lot of attention on the car's details and knows less where the car is going! Schoolboys at oral exam can suffer from tongue-tied-ness when they think too much about the content of what to say, and because of that lose their ability to talk (momentum). You lose your ability to write if you have too much attention on spellings, since an experienced writer's hands, write precisely as they are doing it by themselves, just as we walk without any attention what our legs are doing, and vice versa!

Wounded King

If you dont actually want to go as far as reading Penroses books you could just google Penrose, Hameroff and ORCH OR.

This paper has a short overview of the topic

Hameroff S, Nip A, Porter M, Tuszynski J.
Conduction pathways in microtubules, biological quantum computation, and consciousness.
Biosystems. 2002 Jan;64(1-3):149-68.

ps418

Memory does indeed appear to be stored in a distributed way, but I don't know if holography is an apt analogy, since there is no reason to think that all of a person's memories could be reconstructed from a small piece of brain. Likewise, I could selectively destroy many pits on a compact disc without noticable deterioration of the sound or video encoded in the pattern of pits, yet CDs are not a holographic storage system. Also, there is no evidence that memories are stored "within our neurons," if by that you mean that a single neuron is sufficient to store a memory. Furthermore, there are indeed plenty of cases of brain insults, like stroke or neurodegenerative diseases like alzheimer's, that do result in permanent retrograde amnesia, and to all appearances cause the permanent loss of previously aquired memories.

Patrick

Choy Lee Mu

Thank you all very much for the information and the links.

MyKell

This whole field of quantum brain science is highly speculative. There is no single experiment that would show microtubules of neurons functioning as quantum computers or whatever the Penrose-Hamerhoff model suggests. Instead of going to exotic physics trying to demystify human consciousness, I'd rather suggest looking in Neurology and Neurosciences. Try Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman, I believe they have the best theories on consciousness ever formulated.