April 2025
Is our long-term memory kept in electromagnetic fields rather than in the physical tissue of the brain? This is what University of Maryland scientist James A. Reggia hypothesizes in this month’s issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Reggia, a computer scientist with research interests spanning neural and evolutionary computation and memory, notes that electromagnetic field theories have been proposed by many researchers before him. These theories lie somewhere in between Cartesian dualism and materialism. Some explicitly advocate panpsychism, some don’t (see our Topic Brief Covering Consciousness).
In the article, Time, Memory, and the Physical Basis of Consciousness, Reggia claims that previous theories don’t sufficiently account for subjective conscious experiences (qualia). He offers two salient examples: The conscious awareness of the flow of time and the recall of past conscious experiences.
Reggia suggests that recollection of past experiences — episodic memory — is a perceptual process rather than simply ‘retrieval from storage’ (the brain). When we remember episodes, we access the same electromagnetic fields and waves that were active during the original event.
“This assumption, while speculative, implies that electromagnetic fields extend into time as well as into space”, Reggia writes.
His hypothesis complements, rather than refutes, the well-established science on what parts of the brain are involved when long-term memory is active. The brain’s ‘memory place’ is perhaps then more akin to a processor than to a hard drive.
“This also helps to explain the enormous memory capacity of episodic memory — our ability to recall so many past sequential events, faces, etc. occurring over a lifetime”, Reggia states.
Reggia’s idea resembles what ancient Hindu tradition refers to as the Akashic records: that all information exists in a nonphysical field, which the conscious mind can access.
The new theory has another explanatory advantage, according to the author: “Changes in the speed with which temporal wave activity propagates in the brain under different physical conditions may also contribute to explaining why subjective time can appear to accelerate or slow down relative to objective clock time.”
The phenomenon of time expansion or contraction is gaining increasing attention. Psychologist Steve Taylor, PhD, recently released, “Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time.”
While widening the understanding of consciousness, Reggia asserts this new hypothesis, does not solve the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness: Why, and how, do we have subjective qualitative experiences?
Anders Bolling
