I have often found that I had different memories in dreams and woke up to realise that those things in the "past" never happened and were completely irrelevant to waking life. Sometimes in dreams I even forgot about waking life and suddenly remembered it during the dream and became lucid.
Here's a thought/theory...
Memories
don't happen specifically in the brain as there is no trace of them there whatsoever. The brain could serve as a
tuning device for fields of energy which permeate everything and where
memories may be accessed. We, the
mind, may
use the brain to tune into and
experience this world and during altered states of consciousness we may acquire
different perspectives. Like when you play a computer racing game and you can view your vehicle or the track from different angles. Some angles have advantages and disadvantages.
You might be wondering now...what about brain damage causing memory loss? Well, a damaged TV set will affect the reception of information or external signals. Without this, the programs and films on the various channels will be distorted or simply not be there. We are merely the
life force and we can be sentient if we choose to. We may
hold on to memories even after we have left the physical body because they were never there in the first place. But the
ultimate nature of mind as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a radiant emptiness. We all have this intrinsic awareness. It is the
pristine cognition we may acquire at any time just like the various modalities we acquire in waking life or in dream states. This pure emptiness devoid of all knowledge (but not thought!) is how babies come into the world...slowly they
enrich their experience.
Here's a couple of links. You heard of Sheldrake and his theory on the M fields?
http://www.primalspirit.com/pr1_1sheldrake_nature_as_alive.htmhttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ruperts-resonanceKarl Spencer Lashley is the one who presents us with the strongest evidence AGAINST the trace theory of memory with his experiments. He thought that if traces are existent in the brain, then it should be possible to locate them. Well, duh!!! He experimented on rats by cutting out portions of their brains in order to identify the bits of memory that disappeared. After many years he ended up completely frustrated in his research. He found that memory loss only occurred when large portions of the brain were removed (my thinking is that this would affect any tuning system!). Importantly, loss of memory was proportional to the amount of nervous tissue removed, rather than its location. Lashley called this the law of mass action: the idea was that it was the mass of tissue removed that was important, not the specific bits.
The experiment was repeated with octopuses, and the same results were obtained: again, loss of memory was proportional to the mass removed, rather than the particular portion of the brain taken.
Clearly, all attempts to find localised traces within the brain have failed. This, of course, has posed great difficulties for the trace theory of memory, which had earlier seemed straightforward. It is, in fact, the main reason why the holographic theory of memory was developed where memory traces would be spread all over the brain in such a way that cutting out parts of it would not make much difference since all memories are localised everywhere. The theory is, however, obscure because a hologram works on the principle of light waves and interference patterns stored on photographic film. There is nothing of the sort to be found in the brain.
So far, everything seems to prompt us towards the notion that the brain, which plays a vital role in running our bodily functions, is not a memory storage device at all, but rather, a tuning system that enables memories to be picked up and this would certainly explain why no memory traces can be found in the brain (you may also ask yourself the question: who is using the tuning device to receive information?). So where are the memories? A metaphysical realm which we can tune into, perhaps? Some people have suggested that not only is it possible to access our own memories but also the memories of others (indeed the
“morphic resonance” theory would entail this). We may even acquire memory from the future (precognition).
Carl Jung, who studied dreams for most of his life, posited that there is a
personal as well as a
collective unconscious. I think he might have been right. Perhaps on one level we are all
one mind. Perhaps we are already all-knowing on some level but since we became human beings our
infinite perspective has been narrowed down to a
finite one. This would explain why some psychedelics can make you feel like you already know something about existence and yet, once the "high" is over, the mind can revert to not-knowing again. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we choose our experience...
I hope this provided more food for thought!
It's always good to see people in the AP community approaching these things from a scientific, tentative viewpoint.
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