Memory was supposed to have an address.

In the mid-twentieth century, the brain surgeon Wilder Penfield kept stumbling onto something strange on the operating table. When he touched a patient’s brain with an electrode, the patient would suddenly start narrating the past. A childhood garden. A mother’s voice. Scenes long forgotten replayed like film. Move the electrode, and a different memory poured out. The conclusion seemed natural: memory is filed away in specific locations in the brain, one item per slot. All that remained was to draw up the directory—so brain science believed. The young Karl Pribram had no reason to doubt it.

But the man who went to draw up that directory never came back.

According to the book, in 1946 Pribram joined the neuropsychologist Karl Lashley at a primate research laboratory in Orange Park, Florida. Lashley had spent over thirty years searching for nothing but the storage place of memory. His method was simple, almost cruelly direct. Teach a rat a maze. Then surgically remove parts of its brain. If memory were stored somewhere, then the moment you cut away that place, the solution to the maze should vanish.

It did not vanish.

No matter where he cut, it did not vanish. Even as the removals accumulated and the rat’s motor control was damaged to the point of staggering, the rat would totter—but accurately—remember its way to the exit. Thirty years of experiments meant to pinpoint the address of memory proved the exact opposite.

Memory has no address.

Pribram watched this result with his own eyes, and fell into thought. Something that loses a part yet keeps the whole. Something that is nowhere in particular in the brain, and yet everywhere in it. Science at the time had no language to explain such a form of storage. He would carry this riddle for more than ten years before he met the word for it.

The memory of your first love sits at no address in your brain. And yet it does not fade.

The device that could explain this strangeness, humanity was about to invent.

“It’s—you know—that thing. What was it again?”

Everyone knows those few seconds. The name is definitely there in your head, but you can’t pull it out. Then, at some trigger, it surfaces. The book gives this universally felt phenomenon a strangely precise explanation. To remember is to search for the “angle” at which to shine light on the film.

The device behind that explanation is the hologram.

Tear an ordinary photograph in half, and what is pictured is halved too. A hologram’s recording film is different. Because it records the image as a pattern of interference fringes made by laser light, splitting the film in half yields not half the image but the entire image, whole. Split it again—the same. Every tiny fragment contains the whole. In other words, the very notion of “a part” does not hold inside this device.

Exactly the same property as Lashley’s rat. When Pribram learned this device existed, the lock on a riddle he had carried for over a decade fell open. What if the brain records memory the way a hologram does—not in a specific place, but as an interference pattern distributed across the whole? Then why memory never vanished no matter where you cut becomes explicable.

Here the book slips in a tale that runs a chill down the spine. The seventeenth-century mathematician Leibniz argued that the universe is made of monads, each reflecting the whole. Some scholars argue it was because he knew the Buddhist Huayan teaching—that the entire universe dwells within a single grain. And the calculus that Leibniz gave to humanity was the very mathematics that, three centuries later, let Dennis Gabor invent the hologram.

The Eastern intuition that the whole dwells in a single grain came back, by way of mathematics, as the light of a laser.

David Bohm‘s career reads less like a physicist’s than like that of a tragic hero.

A prodigy whose future Einstein had high hopes for. But in the 1950s, in the storm of the Red Scare, he refused to give testimony unfavorable to his former mentor Oppenheimer. The price was his post at Princeton, and he never again stood at a lectern in an American university. The position he could have kept by staying silent, he threw away.

And that exiled man, in the middle of plasma research, saw something odd. The electrons in a plasma state, though they ought to be individual grains one by one, behaved as if the whole were a single living thing. According to the book, Bohm described their motion as being like a ballet rather than a disorderly crowd. The individual electrons had no boundary of “self”; the choreography of the whole came first, and the grains were merely a part of it.

From here Bohm proceeds to the conclusion that runs through his whole life. To see the world cut into separate “things” is a habit on the human side, not the reality of the universe. He left behind the parable of the fish in a tank. Film one fish with two cameras, front and side, and watch on separate monitors, and two fish would seem mysteriously to move in sync. But they seem to sync because they were one fish to begin with. The “instantaneous correlation of distant particles” shown by Alain Aspect’s 1982 experiment looked the same to Bohm’s eyes. The particles are not communicating. They were never separate to begin with.

The visible world is only an open surface, projected from a deeper level—what he called the “implicate order.” From the side of the brain, Pribram; from the side of the universe, Bohm—each, without knowing the other, touched down on the same single point. The world is a hologram.

Bohm’s late words summarize this man’s whole way of living. In the long run, clinging to an illusion is far more dangerous than facing the facts.

Back to the hospital room of the opening.

This case was reported in a scholarly journal in 1957 by the psychologist Bruno Klopfer. The patient, a man with terminal lymphosarcoma called “Mr. Wright.” His physician, Philip West, had already given up on treatment. But Mr. Wright caught wind of a new drug under trial in the hospital, Krebiozen, and pressed to be given a dose too.

Three days after the worn-down doctor administered the injection, the bedridden man was walking the ward, cracking jokes with the nurses. The tumors, by the physician’s record, had melted “like snowballs on a hot stove.” Ten days later, discharged. Not one of the other patients given the same drug had improved.

Two months later, the papers reported “Krebiozen has no effect.” The logically minded Mr. Wright read it, relapsed, and was readmitted. Here the physician told a lie that would go down in medical history. “Those reports were about a degraded early batch. An improved version with double the potency has arrived”—and he injected nothing but water. The result surpassed the first time. The man was discharged symptom-free once more.

And two months later, the American Medical Association issued its final pronouncement: Krebiozen is worthless. Mr. Wright died within days of that report.

It was not the water that worked. It was belief that worked. And print that killed it. The book places this case near the opening not as a sideshow. If the brain is “projecting” reality, then belief is a change of setting on the projector, and the body—that image—can be rewritten. This is its most dramatic, and most cruel, demonstration.

If Mr. Wright’s case were a one-time firework, you could still call it chance. But the book follows it with a phenomenon far more uncannily reproducible. Multiple personality.

According to the book, in patients with multiple personalities, cases have been reported in which even the body’s medical condition switches the instant the personality changes. In one personality there are signs of diabetes; switch to another and they vanish. One personality has an allergic reaction to a particular substance, while another shows no reaction at all to the same substance. There are even reports that visual acuity and color perception swap out along with the personality.

It is one and the same body. The same pancreas, the same immune system, the same eyeballs. If the blueprint were fixed as a solid, what is happening should not be able to happen.

In the holographic model’s reading, it goes like this. The body is not a statue but an image being screened. If the source data of the projection—which personality is “seated before the projector now”—changes, then it is only natural for the image on the screen to change. The book presses on, borrowing the view of the physician Larry Dossey: when we stop seeing illness as an “enemy” severed from ourselves and instead see it as one state within the whole of our life and relations, we often turn toward recovery.

Your body is not as “fixed” as you think.

From here the book steps on the gas.

“Bilocation”—the phenomenon, recurring in the lives of saints, of being witnessed in two places at the same hour. In the psychokinesis experiments by Jahn and Dunne at Princeton University, subjects were said to have given a slight bias to a machine’s random number generation by will alone. The two held that consciousness, too, has the dual nature of wave and particle, and that its wave aspect can act at a distance. The psychologist Keith Floyd went further still: perhaps it is not the brain that produces consciousness, but consciousness that creates what appears to be the brain—matter, space, time, and all.

—Now. Stop here for a moment.

The “I see” you are feeling right now—would it withstand scrutiny? Most of the cases lined up in this book are anecdotes, not controlled experiments. Anecdotes, however many hundreds you gather, do not make a single proof. The Princeton experiments have faced relentless criticism over the smallness of their effect size and their reproducibility. Neither the holographic brain theory nor Bohm’s interpretation is a model adopted by today’s mainstream neuroscience or physics. The harsh verdict—that this book is a textbook example of dressing up in the air of science to make people believe—is still being written, thirty years after publication.

The right posture for reading this book is not that of a believer. It is the posture of the thought-experimenter, who asks “if this were true, what about the world would change?” Talbot himself wrote this book not as a book of proof but as an invitation. Just as the subtitle says.

If it’s an invitation, you can doubt it after you accept it. The next three chapters proceed to the farthest room of that invitation.

There is an experience that people who return from cardiac arrest describe in unison. Every scene of their life replayed in an instant, and all at once—the so-called life review. Not a flickering reel that flows in order. Every scene “is,” all at once. A mode of playback that is, in principle, impossible in the brain’s ordinary mode, which can treat time only as a straight line.

In 1980 the researcher Kenneth Ring proposed that this near-death experience could be explained by the holographic model. Seen from a whole that lies outside time, there is no contradiction in all scenes of a life existing simultaneously. The life review is the state in which the device that advances the film one frame at a time has stopped, and you have seen the whole film at once.

According to the book, the lessons the returned bring back agree, strangely, on only two things. Love, and knowledge. One 62-year-old businessman, after returning from cardiac arrest, put it this way. Looking at a forest, a flower, a bird, he can say—that is me, a part of me. To think you can harm another and remain unharmed yourself was a sad mistake.

The world Bohm saw in the plasma—“never separate to begin with”—this businessman, without any theory, had seen at the threshold of death.

What is strange is what comes next. The landscape that Bohm and Pribram assembled from equations and experiments in the late twentieth century—there were those who, centuries earlier, reported having “seen” it without instruments.

The saint Sri Yukteswar, who died in Puri, India, in 1936. According to the book, this figure, gifted at passing back and forth between this world and the other side, described the realm after death as made of “faint vibrations of light and color,” hundreds of times larger than the material universe. As for the words of Sri Aurobindo, the book’s account makes them nearly indistinguishable from the conclusions of Bohm and Pribram. That everything exists separately is an illusion; all things are ultimately one whole—.

The eleventh-century Tibetan ascetic Milarepa taught that the reason people cannot directly perceive the world’s true form is that the inner consciousness has been too strongly conditioned. In his lineage, the Kagyu school, a monk is said to shut himself in a cave for up to seven years to perfect the art of visualization. The Hawaiian kahuna held that thought itself has substance, and called it “kino mea”—the shadow body. Tibetan esoteric Buddhism called the same thing “tsal,” and held that the universe was created by the sum of that substance across all beings.

Yoga, esoteric Buddhism, kahuna, Kabbalah. The traditions the book gathers from around the world, though the terms differ, all draw the same single picture. Beneath the visible world lies a domain of vibration. A well-trained consciousness can touch it.

What the ascetics polished over seven years in their caves was, so to speak, the technique of changing, by their own power, the angle at which light strikes the film.

In its final stretch, the book steps into the strangest territory. UFOs, fairies, encounters with the dead—a cluster of phenomena that fits poorly into either the box of “mistaken sight” or the box of “real.”

Here the book brings out the word “omnijective.” A third reality, neither objective nor subjective. Whitley Strieber, author of the bestseller Communion, speaks of his own encounter: the very act of observing may create a concrete reality equipped with its own sensation, outline, and consciousness—perhaps the first quantum event to occur in the macro world. In a world where the seer and the seen are not separate, the very question “did it really exist?” is half broken.

What the book chose for its final chapter’s title was the worldview of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, “the Dreamtime.” The thought that the world is not a fixed stage but something still in the midst of being dreamed. Shamans likened all things to a mesh, and held themselves to be at its center. That is precisely why they could touch anywhere in the net.

And the book quietly closes the door on this realm by citing the warning of the Greek poet Orpheus.

“Do not open the gate of Pluto, king of the underworld. Within dwell the dream people.”

It is not that what lies beyond the gate is dangerous. What is dangerous is noticing that beyond the gate and this side were continuous from the start.

Finally, let me place the question everyone is meant to swallow and finish reading.

If belief melts a tumor, why did the man who wrote this book die?

Michael Talbot grew up from childhood alongside paranormal phenomena, and spent his life asking why science could not explain them. On May 27, 1992, the year after this book was published, he died of leukemia in New York. Age 38. In footage recorded about half a year before his death, with a gaunt face, still cheerful, he speaks of this projected universe.

Let me answer without dodging. This is not a book that says “believe and you’ll be cured.” If it were, Mr. Wright died too. Belief is fragile enough to be killed by a single newspaper article, and humans cannot freely operate the projector. Talbot lined up miraculous cases yet never once wrote “you can do this too.” What he showed is the upper limit of possibility, not an operating manual.

So what does this book leave behind?

Not lifespan, but the way you see. That is this book’s true work. After you finish reading, the world does not wear the same face. If the whole is pictured in the shard of a broken photo, then death is not a move to “somewhere.” Just as a memory with no address does not fade, what was never separate to begin with cannot be lost—and that, most likely, is the one point Talbot was gazing at, alongside his illness, in his final years.

The whole dwells in the shard. Then in you—a shard—the whole is pictured too.

The screen now showing you this article. The brain reading it. The scene of this room, which that brain believes to be “the outside world” and constructs.

—Who is running the projector?