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 ...