A Free Soul's Journey into the Magical World of Physics

“You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.” – James Allen

Despite rapid scientific progress, much about how the brain works remains a mystery. The way individual neurons cooperate in ensembles of thousands or millions has been very difficult to decipher.

The mind-body problem is one of the central issues in the history of philosophy, which asks us to consider if the brain and the mind are identical, partially distinct, or related in some unknown way. In philosophy of the mind, Dualism is a school of thought that believes that when it comes to the relationship between mind and brain, mental phenomena are non-physical. The mind is identified with consciousness and self-awareness, while the brain is where intelligence is located, within our bodies which are in the end highly advanced biological computers.

I was recently surprised to learn that up till this day and age the precise mechanism of storing memories is not well understood. How do we remember things so vividly some times, and other times hardly remember something that took place yesterday?

The mechanism of memory formation has been identified, and is located in a part of the temporal lobe called Hippocampi. The mechanism of storing memories and where they are located, however, is a different story. There have been numerous experiments to crack the code, with several outcomes. The end result however is that the mechanism of how memories are stored is still undetermined.

The intriguing part is that when scientists tried to locate memories in any specific area of the brain, they failed. There was an experiment conducted on mice a few decades ago – and yes I am against lab experimentation on animals – to try and locate the part of the brain that contains memories. The mice were first trained to find their way around and out of a little maze, then subjected to partial brain tissue removal in order to find out which part of their brain contained the instructions on how to get out of that maze. No matter which part of the brain was removed, the mice always made their way out of the maze with the same exact precision. This led scientists to the conclusion that memories exist in all parts of the brain equally at the same time.

But this makes me wonder, what if memories are not stored in the brain to begin with? What if they are stored elsewhere within or even outside the body, leaving only the mechanism to recall those memories within the brain? What if we are nothing but avatars to a consciousness that is located somewhere else? What if this whole system is nothing but a super advanced computer program? A hologram?

In quantum physics we are told that we can’t find where one particle is because it’s always a reflection of all particles. Einstein showed us that light has always the same speed, that we live in a vacuum, while Quantum physics showed us that matter does not exist, that atoms are 99.9% empty. On the subatomic level, reality behaves according to the expectation of the observer. Does that mean that the way we think can alter our physical reality?