"whole in every part" nature of memory storage

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientistKarl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain heremoved he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to performcomplex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem wasthat no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explainthis curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s, Pribram encountered the concept of holography andrealized he had found the explanation brain scientists had beenlooking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons,or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulsesthat crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns oflaser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece offilm containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribrambelieves the brain is itself a hologram.Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so manymemories in so little space. It has been estimated that the humanbrain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (orroughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of theEncyclopedia Britannica).