A recent experiment suggests the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a quantum wave that connects with the rest of the universe.
When people talk about consciousness, or the mind, it’s
always a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a
function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us,
there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from
or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry
of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.
In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true
architecture of consciousness.
The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D.,
first posited in the 1990s: the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch
OR). Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by
microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.
Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a
quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every
quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many
places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that
are very far away to be connected).
Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch
OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.
Across the Universe
To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.
Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory.
Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a
wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only
worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of
that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles.
The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy.
Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking
went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.
But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out,
living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and
controlled.
Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the
energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the
plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the
energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to
the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like
navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the
end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s
carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is
used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of
superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.
New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even
better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the
scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor
Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational
model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule,
sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were
testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure
could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light
lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it
indicated quantum coherence.
Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan
fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human
eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across
22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum
reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer
than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than
long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually
confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in
chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS
Central Science earlier this year.
Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending
light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central
Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those
experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over
hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to
any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into
microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is
a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says,
“which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having
coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or
consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness
to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory,
it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the
boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to
explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to
identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes
many scientists very uncomfortable.
Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture
of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes
from the study of weather.
The Architecture of Universal Consciousness
Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford
who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.)
Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The
Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among
other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the
universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”
That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a
lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that
are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter
of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help
Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our
experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well
as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result
of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts
with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.
You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that
the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a
hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more
complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in
1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a
particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three
differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a
particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature,
wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot
the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions
into the equations.
He found that if initial conditions were different by even
one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or
the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be
wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one
direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates
completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started
to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating
within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange
attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any
number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and
they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.
Palmer believes that our universe may be just one
trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor.
When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information
about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same
strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts
for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a
greater universe.
“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”
Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell
us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness
lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal,
disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that
somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.