Karl H. Pribram

Karl H. Pribram
Karl Pribram in Kepler Museum, Prague, 2010.
Born	(1919-02-25)February 25, 1919 Vienna, Austria
Died	January 19, 2015(2015-01-19) (aged 95) Virginia, United States
Fields	Neuroscience
Alma mater	University of Chicago (B.S., 1938) University of Chicago (M.D., 1941)
Known for	Holonomic brain theory
Influences	Sir Charles Sherrington, Karl Lashley, Dennis Gabor
Spouse	Katherine Neville

Karl H. Pribram (February 25, 1919 – January 19, 2015) was a professor at Georgetown University, in the United States, an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and distinguished professor at Radford University. Board-certified as a neurosurgeon, Pribram did pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain. He worked with Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center of which he was to become director later. He was professor at Yale University for ten years and at Stanford University for thirty years.

To the general public, Pribram is best known for his development of the holonomic brain model of cognitive function and his contribution to ongoing neurological research into memory, emotion, motivation and consciousness. He was married to American best selling author Katherine Neville.

Pribram's holonomic model of brain processing is described in his 1991 "Brain and Perception", which contains the extension of his work with David Bohm. It states that, in addition to the circuitry accomplished by the large fiber tracts in the brain, processing also occurs in webs of fine fiber branches (for instance, dendrites) that form webs, as well as in the dynamic electrical fields that surround these dendritic "trees". In addition, the processing occurring around these dendritic trees can influence that occurring in those trees of nearby neurons whose dendrites are entangled but not in direct contact. In this way, processing in the brain can occur in a non-localized manner. This type of processing is properly described by Dennis Gabor, the inventor of hologram, as quanta of information he called a "holon", an energy-based concept of information. These wavelets are used in quantum holography, the basis of MRI, PET scans and other image processing procedures.