Karl Pribram speculates that the brain may function as a spectral analyzer—recording images by holography and distributing the information to all parts of the brain. He does not say when it starts to function.

Early function of memory is conceivable if one accepts the theory of Richard Bergland that the brain is a gland…The brain is a gland, Bergland claims, because it produces hormones, is outfitted with hormone receptors, is bathed in hormones. Hormones run up and down the fibers of individual nerves, and every activity that the brain engages in involves hormones—all over the body. Thus, the "stuff" of thought is everywhere.

Candace Pert and colleagues discovered that some sixty neuropeptides (information molecules manufactured by nerve cells), journeying to specific receptor sites, are major means of information exchange in the brain and body. Now that their locations have been mapped by radioactive molecules, it is apparent that neuropeptides connect the nervous system, endocrine system, and the immune system.

Stationary receptor sites for neuropeptides are widely scattered through the body and brain, making body-brain one vast interactional communication system. Pert discovered so many receptor sites for neuropeptides in the brainstem that she says it is, in reality, part of the limbic system, which appears to play a key role in memory. Because the brainstem is already visible at four weeks from conception…one can find here a possible basis for very early memory.

In Pert’s view, the body-brain is the physical substrate of the mind, which has yet another "immaterial substrate"—the information that is flowing around in it . This is a new way of talking about memory: the faculty that accumulates information.

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