Can Information Be Temporarily Retained in the Brain?

Information is formless and shapeless; it is not a material thing. The brain is a material form (rūpa-dharma). How can the two merge together? Imagine this: can a room temporarily retain a piece of news? Can events that have occurred be preserved for a little while within a room or space? Absolutely not. Therefore, the brain cannot retain any information whatsoever.

If the brain could store information, then by slicing apart the brain of a living or deceased person piece by piece, one should be able to locate this information, understand and study it, thereby revealing all of a person’s secrets. In that case, people in the world would have no secrets, criminal investigators would solve cases far too easily, and there would be no unsolved mysteries from millennia past, no wrongful convictions, and no enigmas left unresolved. If a computer could store information, would disassembling it reveal that information? If a mobile phone could store information, would taking it apart allow one to find that information?

If information belonged to material form (rūpa-dharma), it would be composed of the four great elements (mahābhūta). Only the ālaya-vijñāna (storehouse consciousness) contains the seeds of the four great elements; the brain does not possess these seeds and thus cannot store information. Moreover, the brain’s capacity is insufficient to contain it. Therefore, information must reside within the ālaya-vijñāna and originate from it. If information does not belong to material form and is not composed of the four great elements, then it must exist in a formless, shapeless seed state, which necessarily resides within the ālaya-vijñāna. The brain cannot store seeds. Footprints on walls or the ground belong to the material form of the four great elements; they are not information, and thus the eyes can naturally perceive them.