ReadMultiplex.com: A Review Of The Research Behind Shufflebrain: The Quest for the Hologramic Mind.

I first brushed against the idea of a holographic mind in the late 1970s, long before most people outside specialized circles had even heard the phrase. I was still young, still absorbing everything I could about lasers, interference patterns, and the strange ways light could store information across an entire surface rather than at single points. Somewhere in those years the notion that the brain might work the same way—encoding memory as distributed phase relationships rather than fixed addresses—lodged itself in me and refused to leave. It felt less like a theory and more like a recognition of something already half-known.When Paul Pietsch’s Shufflebrain appeared in 1981, I found it almost immediately. The book was new, the experiments still raw, and the claim that you could scramble a salamander’s brain and still keep its mind intact struck me with the force of a physical discovery. I tracked it down, read it cover to cover, and then read it again. The Texas Medical Center Library later became one of the places where I found a physical volume years afterward, when the library began clearing older titles from open display, I secured a copy that had already begun its quiet journey toward the discard pile. That particular volume still carries the marks of that earlier era.From that first encounter the research became a private through-line. I followed the older literature backward—Lashley’s failed hunt for the engram, Pribram’s holonomic proposals, the optical work of Gabor and Leith—and then forward into every new paper that seemed to touch distributed coding. The salamander experiments stayed with me not as curiosities but as existence proofs: anatomy could be rearranged, tissue could be exchanged, and coherent behavior still returned. That resilience suggested the code lived in relationships, not in the precise coordinates of cells.Read more at: ReadMultiplex.comSupport this work by buying us a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/brianroemmele