The yogi who seeks to magically deny his need for food, who seems to live on air in fact has taken control of his or her attention- a hightly sophisticated act of concentration and discipline.

To deny attention to one’s own hunger is also the subject of Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” amply illustrating how an indiscriminate appplication of attentional focus can lead to extreme forms of isolation and self-destruction.

Boehm’s understanding of Pribram’s holographic theory of informational processes includes the notion that “Memories from many different times may merge together, and that memories may be connected by association and by logical thought to give a certain further order to the whole pattern. In addition, if sensory data is also being attended to at the same time, the whole of this response from memory will, in general, fuse with the nervous excitation coming in from the senses to give rise to an overall experience in which memory,logic, and sensory activity combine into a single unanalyzable whole.” (p. 198, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order.”