The whole – The wholeness of its parts

All of us are fascinated by nature. Particularly, we are fascinated by those which are visually captivating. Two things which have fascinated me are fractals and holograms. I saw a fractal diagram for the first time in my life when I was just 14 and was captivated instantly. The combination of colours, the different shades, together with the perfection in its shape captivated me. The holograms also had similar effects, as one tilts them; one gets to see different colours and shades.

I have had a chance to get to know more about them after that. Fractals have been used to model leaves, mountains etc. They have been used to explain seemingly random phenomena, with an idea that even randomness has some determinism. Holograms have been used to capture 3D objects, basically in information storage and retrieval, information security etc.

An important property of a hologram, which stores information, is that a part of it is enough to retrieve the entire information, even though the entire information is spread over it evenly. A similar definition of fractal is being known. A Fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole", as coined by a scientist who was an important contributor to its development, Mandelbrot.

But my recent findings about them is much exciting than what I had known previously. I came to know through literatures that they are being used to explain the working of brain, consciousness, universe and so on. Researches have proved that information is not stored as a whole, but in parts in our brain, at different locations. The exciting information is that a part of the brain is enough to get the entire information stored in the whole, as in a hologram. This has been concluded by an experiment on rats which have been found to perform complex tasks which they learnt before their brains were removed!

While the above experiment tries to explain how information is stored in our brain, many researches have found astounding relationship between science and consciousness. Researchers are of the opinion that there is something which is beyond our perception, and are hypothesizing a holographic universe, an entirely different viewpoint of our existence and beyond. Fractals play a part in it in explaining the connectivity of consciousness.

I encourage you to visit the below links
1. http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Holographic_Universe/id/5864
2. http://www.montalk.net/metaphys
3. http://www.fractalwisdom.com/FractalWisdom/weston.html
4. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1201004

Introductory information about fractals and holograms can be found in the below links
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hologram