After decades of research, scientists are still unable to explain why the human brain appears to lack a memory storage compartment
Most people believe that our memories must be somewhere inside our head. However, despite this, medical experts have been unable to determine which part of the brain stores what we remember. Is it possible that our memories actually reside in a space outside our physical structure?
Biologist, author, and scientist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake notes that the research of our minds went in two opposite directions. While the realm of research for most scientists is within our brain, it looks beyond it.
According to Sheldrake, author of countless scientific books and articles, memories are not located at some geographical point in our brain, but in a kind of field that surrounds and permeates the brain. The brain itself directly plays the role of a "decoder" of the flow of information produced by each person in contact with the environment.
In her article "Mind, Memories, and the Archetype of Morphic Resonance and the Collective Unconscious," published in Psychological Perspectives, Sheldrake compares the brain to a television, drawing analogies to explain how mind and brain interact.
"If I break your TV, it will not be able to receive individual channels, or I break a part in it, so that you can only see the image, and there will be no sound - this does not prove that the sound or images are inside the TV."
“This will only demonstrate that I messed up the setup, so you can no longer receive the signal normally. Likewise, memory loss resulting from brain damage does not prove that memories accumulate inside the brain. In reality, memory loss is usually temporary: for example, amnesia following a concussion is often temporary. Memory recovery is very difficult to explain, following conventional theories: if memory was lost as a result of tissue damage, it should not be restored. However, this often happens, Sheldrake writes.
Sheldrake goes further by refuting the notion that memories accumulate in the brain, citing key experiments that he believes have been misinterpreted. During these experiments, patients replayed scenes from their past in their heads while areas of their brains were subjected to electrical stimulation. The researchers concluded that the stimulated divisions are in a logical way the divisions where memory resides.
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Sheldrake offers a different perspective on the problem, again using the TV analogy: “If I press on your TV remote control, which will change channels, this does not mean that the information is inside the TV remote,” he writes.
Morphogenetic fields
However, if memory is not located in the brain, then where is it? Following the opinion of other biologists, Sheldrake believes that all organisms have a field that exists inside and outside the organism, which gives it form and content.
As an alternative to the dominant mechanical-reductionist understanding of biology, the morphogenetic approach sees organisms closely related to the corresponding fields, self-adjusted, with accumulated memory that individuals, as a whole, experienced in the past.
In addition, these fields become even more complex, forming fields within the fields, being connected with every mind, even with every single organ, with their own resonance and unique history. “The key concept of morphic resonance is that things like this affect similar things in space and time,” Sheldrake writes.
Still, many scientists insist on a deeper study of the brain in order to find the place where memory is stored. One of the most famous of these researchers is Carl Lashley, who demonstrated during an experiment that even after a rat has removed up to 50 percent of its brain, it can still remember things that it was taught before.
Curiously, there seems to be no difference in which part of the brain to remove - rodents without a right or left hemisphere were able to perform the learned actions as before. Scientists have successfully conducted similar experiments with other animals.
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The holographic theory, born of experiments similar to those conducted by Lashley, suggests that memories are not located in any specific part of the brain, but in the entire brain as a whole. In other words, like a holographic image, memory, like radio signals, permeates the entire brain.
However, neuroscientists have discovered that the brain is not a statistical system, but a dynamic synaptic mass in constant motion - all cellular and chemical components constantly interact and change their position. Unlike a computer disk, which has a permanent, unchanging format that will return the same information recorded years before, it is difficult to imagine that memory can be accommodated and stored in an ever-changing brain.
If we stick to the idea that all thoughts are in our heads, the concept that memory can be influenced from the outside looks a little strange at first glance.
In her article "Vivid Experiments" Sheldrake writes: "… the moment you read this page, beams of light pass from the page into your eyes, creating a specular reflection on the retina. This image is recognized by light-sensitive cells, causing nerve impulses to act on the optic nerves, leading to complex activities in the brain.
All this has been studied in detail by neurophysiologists. But here comes a mystery. You somehow become familiar with the image on the page. What you perceive is outside of you, in front of your face. But from a traditional scientific point of view, this is an illusion. In reality, the image is inside you, like all your mental activity."
While the study of memory has challenged traditional concepts of biology, scientists like Sheldrake believe that the true location of memories can be found in a spatial dimension that is not observable.
This idea intersects with early representations of thought as Jung's "collective unconscious" or Taoism, which views the human mind as derived from various sources inside and outside the body, including energetic factors emanating from various organs (except, of course, the brain).
From this point of view, the brain does not act as a store of information or even a mind, but only as a physical connection that connects a person with his morphic field.