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Microtubules: The Gateway To Consciousness | Stuart Hameroff
March 26, 2024
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
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The world is divided into two realms, and the classical realm, everything is predictable, localized, particle-like and large, but in the quantum world, we have quantum superposition, non-local, wave-like and small, and things are completely different. And I think consciousness actually is on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. If you think that consciousness causes collapse, that would be going from the quantum to the classical, or if quantum is collapsing, the collapse is happening on its own, to give you classical and the same thing.
Stuart Hammeroff is a professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness and for partnering with Penrose to suggest that consciousness not only originates from some quantum mechanical mechanism but furthermore in a specific structure called neuronal microtubules. This is also known as orchestrated objective reduction though it's often abbreviated to ORCOR.
While Theories of Everything is a podcast, today I have a special treat for you as we partnered with the Center for the Future Mind, link in the description, definitely check them out, to bring you this lecture from MindFest, which is a special conference put on by Susan Schneider from the Center for the Future Mind, which is the only conference that annually merges AI and consciousness. People like Stephen Wolfram come to it, David Chalmers, Sarah Walker, Scott Aronson,
the head of Google's quantum computing AI lab, Ben Gortzel, and last and most definitely least, myself. You can check out the entire playlist in the description. For those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal, and most often what's done is I analyze what are called theories of everything, using my background in mathematical physics from the University of Toronto to understand the fundamental laws, how does general relativity merge with quantum field theory, for instance, or the Standard Model,
As well as larger questions such as what is consciousness? How does it come about from dead matter? The so-called hard problem of consciousness, if that's even the correct way to frame it. And even what is purpose? Why are we here? What separates you from me? What is the self? If that sounds interesting to you, then there's a videos button somewhere. You can always click and browse or subscribe to get notified for future podcasts. Enjoy this special presentation by Stuart Hammerov.
Stuart Hammeroff is a professor of anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona. He is also a long-time organizer of the Tucson Consciousness Conference. Toward the Science of Consciousness, now the Science of Consciousness Conference, correct? He'll be talking to us about, is your brain a quantum orchestra or the ORC ORR theory? And I'll stop talking, so that way Stuart Hammeroff can take it off. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Garrett. Thank you, Susan. Thank you all for being here. Thank you.
As you can see the title of my talk as Garrett said is your brain a quantum orchestra as opposed to a computer and we'll get to that and I'm kind of giving away the the plot here in the quantum orchestra this is a neuron and most hierarchical models of the brain and consciousness will go from the neuron up to networks and networks of networks and so on and so forth but
The point is we have to go down inward, deeper, faster. And we now know with experimental data that inside the neuron in the microtubules, we have operations in kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz, petahertz and faster and via the Penrose mechanism, presumably all the way to the Planck scale. But I'm going to talk about only within the brain primarily today.
So most view the brain as a complex computer of simple neurons. Neuron firing equals one bit. This is obviously an artificial neural network, but that's pretty much what our theories of consciousness are based on. With consciousness theorized to emerge from higher order network effects. This is an insult to neurons. It only considers the membrane and the synapse, nothing inside, only at Hertz frequencies, up to say EEG frequencies,
Purely algorithmic, there's no real room there for consciousness, free will and so forth. I'm arguing. So what's the alternative?
Well, to illustrate that point, single cell paramecium, if we're treating a neuron as a one or a zero, which is what most theories do, single cell paramecium can swim, learn, avoid predators, find food and mates and have sex. There's two paramecium engaged in sex. No synapses, no networks. They use microtubules and cilia to sense and navigate.
and being means question mark consciousness we don't know if they're conscious if they are most likely during sex because they're absolutely still and that would reward procreation of course and we'll come back to that point
The paramecium shown there has the cilia or these hair-like extensions that come out of the paramecium that are both ores and sensors. They sense and move by the cilia made of nine doublets of microtubules linked by dynein motor protein arms which contract
to cause purposeful
and microtubules are also found in neurons as illustrated in this cover from neuroscience the long straight these things here and they're interlinked by microtubules associated proteins and this is an axon because they're all parallel and uninterrupted now what does that have to do with the cilia and the dynein if we look inside a neuron and here's a neuron with the axon going here and in the dendrite we're looking inside
and
The neuron by a long microtubule serving as tracks with the dynein, the same motor protein that was in that's used in paramecium to bend to actually carry material. In this case, the dynein is carrying it back to the cell body and the kinesin. The other motor protein is carrying it the other way. Now, how do they know where to get off? Which synapse needs replenishing for synaptic plasticity? And that's the the tau protein.
which is a microtubule-associated protein which is placed at specific locations on the lattice of the microtubules and this signals the motor proteins, they're kind of traffic signals to deliver their cargo to particular synapses. So this is learning, this is memory right here, this is the placement of the tau directing synaptic plasticity.
Alzheimer's disease
Now there was a paper I read in 1989, many of you weren't alive then probably, and it was about Alzheimer's hypothesis, microtubules, a key to Alzheimer disease. 1989, Matsuyama and Jarvik from UCLA. It's an excellent paper. I recommend it. It'll explain how the problem is caused. It makes some mention of the amyloid plaques.
But they don't really cause the cognitive dysfunction. It's due to the loss of microtubules and the Tau. So I'm going to raise two questions at this point. Why are we spending billions and billions on toxic and ineffective anti-emolloid drugs for Alzheimer's instead of treating microtubule stability and resonance? And that's a whole other story. But for the purpose of this talk, do microtubules process and encode information?
And I first published on that in 1982 in the Journal of Theoretical Biology with my colleague Rich Watt, an engineer who knew about computer matrices and so forth.
So is memory encoded in microtubules? We don't really know where memory is encoded. If we say it's in synaptic plasticity proteins these last hours to days and memories last lifetimes and the most likely site for memory encoding is in microtubules by for one mechanism is this calcium modulin kinase 2, CAMK2, which is activated by calcium influx into the into the neuron
These kinases pop up and these hexagonal little creatures, their enzymes, bind perfectly to the hexagonal lattice of the microtubules and kind of phosphorylate up to six tubulins at a time. And this work was done led by Travis Kredock, who is here and works at Nova Southeastern. And we published this back in 2012, I guess.
So this is a potential mechanism for memory and the memory encoding capacity of microtubules is enormous because each tubulin can be in one of 30 different genetic or post translational states and you have about a billion per neuron. So a billion raised to the 10 of 30th power, that's a lot of possible memory states in one neuron. Can they process information?
Back in the 80s, there were these cellular automata, the game of life, the simplest form of computer. Basically, you start with an orthogonal grid and each square can be dead or alive. Dead in this case means alive. With very simple rules, if you have 0, 1, or 4 alive neighbors in the previous generation,
You die because there's either not enough or too much overcrowding, not enough substance or too much overcrowding. Two and three, you stay alive. Those very simple rules give you gliders that move through. And if you make a large enough cellular automata, you can solve partial differential equations and do all kinds of stuff. So my colleagues, Dean Rasmussen and I, and some others modeled microtubules as cellular automata, which is different because it's a skewed hexagonal lattice with Fibonacci cylindrical geometry.
And black and white in this case represent opposite dipole orientations which oscillate with each time generation.
So you need a clocking mechanism, you need some kind of coherent clocking mechanism. And for that we applied Frohlich coherence. And Frohlich was a biophysicist in the 60s and 70s who suggested that coupled dipoles in nonpolar regions in proteins, geometrical rays and lattices would oscillate coherently in terahertz, 10 to the 12th hertz, gigahertz and or megahertz
a theory.
And here you can see the microtubules inside an axon and inside the dendrite where they're interrupted in mixed polarity and the other one I showed you before. So are there oscillations? Yes, the answer is yes. Anurban Bandyapadhyay working at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Scuba, Japan,
has studied microtubules
We are going to
However, if you apply AC alternating and sweep the frequency you will find certain frequencies that the microtubule becomes highly conductive almost almost superconductor ballistic conductance is called and this occurs in the same pattern Repeating every three orders of magnitude. So if we start at the smallest here you can see terahertz gigahertz megahertz
And then we move up to gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz, and then megahertz, kilohertz and hertz. And we see the same pattern every three orders of magnitude, which is a triplet of triplets. So you can sort of see it here, but you can see it over there from an aerial view. And so we see three peaks and each peak has three peaks. This was seen every three orders of magnitude over 12 orders of magnitude.
So microtubules do have coherent self-similar resonance patterns. The triplet of triplets repeat every three orders in hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and terahertz. And there's, there's Anubhan who's done some amazing, amazing stuff. He also showed that you can measure megahertz from the scalp.
In the EEG so look on the screen. You can see a triplet there when he takes it off It goes away. He puts it back. You can see the triplet on the screen Takes it off. It goes away. So this is This is between 6 and 26 megahertz, which is where it's found in microtubules So we see the same triplet. We don't quite see the triplet of triplets, but we see triplets in
from the scalp.
Extra value meals are back that means ten tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just eight dollars Only at McDonald's for the limited time only prices and participation may vary prices may be higher in Hawaii Alaska and California and for delivery So another study that honor bonds group did in neural networks found megahertz and gigahertz excitations not just passive resonances and
Neural Neck
Megahertz, gigahertz, high frequency stuff. So if the probes go through the neuron, as we see here, they detect megahertz and gigahertz. So it's detected only from the neuron revealing their shape. So there's no megahertz and gigahertz out in between the neurons.
And if you look at a microscope of this you can see the neuron. This is in kilohertz and it's showing ionic fluxes which are outside the neuron and the megahertz and the gigahertz is inside the neuron that we see there. So this is mapping out the neurons by where the megahertz and gigahertz is coming from. Now they also found that the dendritic somatic megahertz and gigahertz
Correlated with axonal firings on the same and different neurons more so than membrane potentials. So the the deeper faster activities were overriding the membrane potentials and Including the integrated membrane potential and forming their own little circuits and in the picture there which was the cover of the lead article in Journal of Physiology you can see That you see the neurons, but then you see different
little networks that are actually due to what's going on at a deeper, faster level that don't necessarily follow the anatomy. So there's a whole other level of activity. He calls them filamentary circuits because they're coming from the cytoskeletal filaments, including microtubules. Now this explains something called representational drift. There's this problem in neuroscience where
If you see a group of neurons that have certain memories stored and you can tell that they're there, you go back later and those same memories have moved a little bit to different set of neurons nearby. There is a representational drift and so it's hard to understand how that could happen from synaptic plasticity memory, but it's easy to understand if it's happening at the microtubule level in a kind of a holographic memory and it's just shifting.
So it honestly shows a bottom-up regulation in a frequency hierarchy in microtubules inside neurons. So this is the quantum orchestra I was talking about, where we go down from the neuron, the pyramidal neuron here, into the microtubule networks in a thousand hertz, a million hertz, a billion hertz, a trillion hertz, and a quadrillion hertz, 10 to the 15th, within the group of microtubules in each and every neuron.
Now these deep inner fractal networks in each neuron would be very useful for that neuron but what we really need is a global collective effect of the whole brain and for that we need quantum effects and when we go faster and faster into the terahertz for example we're pretty much into the quantum realm and we go deeper into the quantum realm also. So we do get the possibility for quantum
At the at these higher frequencies at least if not the the lower one so we need this quantum non locality entanglement In many brain neurons for things like spatial temporal binding the unity of self As well as zero phase lag gamma synchrony and so forth. So Quantum properties are useful for consciousness as I just said cognitive binding sense of self zero phase lag gamma and
Also, agency causal selection for like collapse of the wave function, causal selection of actions and perceptions as quantum state reduction collapse of the wave function. For example, the trigger axonal firings, as we showed in the previous slide, it's not just the membranes. Non-computability, as Roger Penrose argued from Gödel's theorem, you need some kind of quantum mechanism.
The hard problem of phenomenal experience is an intrinsic feature of fundamental space-time geometry, for example, Penrose Objective Reduction, meaning that consciousness and qualia are fundamental aspects of the universe.
Free will, real-time conscious action, dependent on quantum backward time effects, retroactivity. Libet showed this in his 1979 work, and Roger Penrose has written about this, including recently. And also non-locality, parapsychology, out-of-life, even afterlife and reincarnation are possible. I'm not arguing for them. I'm not claiming any evidence.
A lot of people are, you can't rule them out until we know what consciousness actually is. If somebody can prove that it's a classical thing, then these things are impossible. If it's a quantum thing, then they are possible. So this gets us into the quantum world. And the best way to explain it that I can see is with the yin-yang, where the world is divided into two realms. And the classical realm, everything is predictable, localized, particle-like and large.
But in the quantum world, we have quantum superposition, non-local, wave-like, and small, and things are completely different. And I think consciousness actually is on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. If you think that consciousness causes collapse, that would be going from the quantum to the classical, or if
quantum is collapsing, the collapse is happening on its own to give you classical and the same thing. In any case, a consciousness is on the edge between the two. So in quantum superposition, a particle can exist as a wave of multiple possibility in the background or in the foreground as a particle in definite states or location. But when we make a measurement or an observation,
seems to cause the wave function, the waves to collapse the particles in definite states. This is the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Now Roger Penrose addressed this. He first addressed the problem of superposition. How can things be in multiple states or places at the same time? And to do that he resorted to general relativity where Einstein had equated a matter with curvature in space-time. This is for large things like the sun and planets and so forth. Roger applied the same concept
to tiny particles, quantum particles, so that an oscillating particle, say going between here and here, I don't know if you can see that, is actually a space-time curvature oscillating between two positions. And then a superposition would be a separation, so you have the same particle in two locations and two space-time curvatures. So then what happens? Well,
That's debatable. Some people say that collapse occurs by consciousness causing quantum state reduction. This goes back to Bohr, von Neumann, Wigner, Stapp, Dave Chalmers, Kelvin McQueen, usually known as the Copenhagen interpretation after Niels Bohr.
Where consciousness, shown here as being, observes and causes the collapse, causes this one to cease and selects this one. I call this subjective reduction because you have a subjective person, conscious observer, but it's dualist. It puts consciousness outside science and that's okay if you're a dualist.
Um, the other possibility, another possibility is the many worlds where the separations bifurcate and each one goes off and forms its own new universe. And, uh, some people think that consciousness occurs at this bifurcation, including Hartman Hartman Nevin, who'll speak this afternoon. And he would say that it occurs at this, that this bifurcation. So maybe we'll put a Bing there one of these days, uh, for that one.
Penrose, however, said that superposition separation is unstable, will self-collapse, undergo objective reduction at time t equals h-bar over e sub g, which is a form of the uncertainty principle, and bing happens when this occurs.
And it happens along with the moment of conscious experience. So this is the Penrose proposed origin of consciousness. And I think the most scientific and specific theory of how consciousness is formed that's ever been put forth. So rather than consciousness causing collapse, collapse occurs spontaneously due to this equation. And when George Musso writes about putting ourselves in the equation,
This is the equation, I would say. So rather than consciousness causing collapse, collapse causes or is consciousness due to this reduction. Now these in the random microenvironment, these would be which might be the same as decoherence. These OR events would be isolated and lack meaning and context. They would be proto conscious or whitehead simple occasions of experience.
Metaphorically, these might be considered like the sounds of musicians independently tuning their instruments. How could they be organized, orchestrated in the brain for full, rich, conscious experience? How does it get turned into music? After he wrote his book, The Emperor's New Mind, he needed a quantum device which could biologically orchestrate quantum information, halt, terminate by Penrose OR, connecting to space-time geometry, non-computable platonic values.
In the mid-1990s,
So if we look at a microtubule, it's made of these tubulins. So this is one tubulin at an atomic level, and we see that it has 86 aromatic amino acids. So if you look up top there, tryptophan, phenylalanine, and tyrosine have these aromatic rings. You can see the rings with the three lines or the three and then the five-sided ring. That's an indole ring and tryptophan. And these are basically organic chemistry.
and they also form quantum-friendly regions inside tubulin proteins due to these aromatic rings. And 86 is an awful lot for one protein. Protein chemists are pretty startled by this. We can also see the anesthetic binding site in the sphere. This is where the anesthetic binds to prevent consciousness, and you can see it's right in the middle of all these aromatic rings.
Where we think the quantum optical effects are happening, which leads to the quantum effects, which lead to collapse, which lead to consciousness. So there's quantum friendly regions around aromatic rings. So a little bit of organic chemistry in the 18th century, they had these
They knew about alkanes, which are linear molecules with or without a double bond. So they had the formula CNH2N plus two or CNH2N. And they also had this molecule C6H6, but they didn't know what the structure was. It was oily flammable and they called it benzene, but they didn't know the structure. And then one night Keckley had a dream that one of these linear chains were snakes and one of them swallowed his tail.
like the Ouroboros and he woke up and said benzene is a ring and he was correct. And on the far right you can see another way to show with three lines which can resonate between these three and the three opposite position in a resonance situation. So what happens actually is that these rings share three delocalized pi orbital electrons among six carbons forming these pi resonance clouds which are basically super positions. They're a bulk of electrons being everywhere at the same time.
And these support quantum electric and magnetic dipole oscillations, excitons, spin transfer, phonons, fluorescence, phosphorescence, superradiance. These are quantum effects. So in and around these aromatic rings, as long as they're spatially arrayed or in a geometric lattice, you can support quantum effects even at ambient temperatures.
Back in 20 years ago, Ouyang and Aushalom did this study with these quantum dots and connected by aromatic rings and they showed that spin transfer from dot to dot through the rings was enhanced by temperature. The warmer it was, the more efficient the spin transfer. So here's the quantum effect that's actually potentiated and promoted by heat. And also fluorescence, where you excite the tryptophan, for example, or one of the other aromatic rings,
They kind of bubbles along in different quantum states and then collapses or emits the fluorescence and you can measure the time in between the excitation and emission and how far it spreads. So this is another quantum optical effect.
If we just look at the, at the aromatic rings, if, uh, if you leave them alone, they attract each other, even though they're, they're, they're uncharged, neutral and, and chemically inert. And that's because the electrons in one, uh, shown here is the shaded area, uh, repel the electrons in the other. So you get two dipoles. So here we have two dipoles like little bar magnets, which attract each other.
And then they start to oscillate and they oscillate in the terahertz. So this is where the terahertz comes from, from these aromatic rings being in the right position and then oscillating back and forth. This is the origin of the terahertz, which gives rise to the other ones as well.
And you can have a superposition of both, which gives you a qubit from two aromatic rings. And we know that anesthesia works at this level by forming its own dipole dispersion forces and blocking the oscillation. So I think this is the mechanism of anesthesia. Of course, then you have to say in which protein and we'll get to that. It should also be mentioned that psychoactive molecules, the neurotransmitter dopamine and serotonin, the pleasure molecule, the mood molecule, as well as psychedelics,
We developed a model based on the aromatic rings in here, lining up in different directions so we could have dipole through the tubulin.
and this is basically a quantum channel and that channel can go through each tubulin to the next to the next and form these helical pathways around in this case the five-start helix in the microtubule but could also go the eight-star or other ways. So this is a qubit which extends mesoscopically or macroscopically because it goes the whole length of the microtubule.
And when you have enough superposition, you reach threshold at time t equals h bar over e sub g, you have a bing moment, and then you start all over with a new set of initial conditions selected by the collapse process. This is just one piece of one microtubule, but you need a lot of these to have a significant effect in the brain. But it gives you a sequence of bings. And I think consciousness is a sequence of discrete events, discrete moments like frames in a video or a film.
I just create moments, but they appear like a continuum.
I think that's the same thing with consciousness. It's a sequence of events. We can quantify this a little bit. There are about 10 to the 9th tubulins per neuron, 10 to the 20th tubulins in the brain. If we had 10 to the 15th tubulins, which is about a 100,000th of the brain, we have reached threshold of time t equals 10 to the minus 7 seconds. This is 10 megahertz and we know 10 megahertz occurs in microtubules.
It's a favorably short decoherence time, so the quantum state can last that long. It's also too fast for cognitive epochs and gestalt scenes of several hundred milliseconds. For that, we need interference patterns to resonate and interfere cross-scale from terahertz to gigahertz to megahertz to kilohertz and slower. The EEG may be interference beats of much faster stuff going on at a deeper level.
If we think about what this means for different organisms, we have about human maximum is about 10 to the 20th, which would be about 10 to the 13th cycles per second. So over here we have the intensity of the experience, which is proportional to the frequency, kind of like a photon. The higher the frequency, the more energy. And so the higher the frequency, the more intense the experience.
And down here we have the number of tubulins to the possible content. This is just based on tubulin so it's going to be linear but human, mouse, cerebral organoids, C. elegans, paramecium and even plants might have a conscious moment every few seconds for example, maybe a couple of minutes whereas we have probably 10 million per second.
This extends the hierarchy to the plank scale. So before I was just showing up to here and now we can take it all the way to the plank scale. But we have this kind of an orchestra thing and the vibrations, the orca war and other vents can couple, resonate, harmonize and interfere across scales like notes, chords and beats in an orchestra. And the interference would actually be beats.
And it was Roger's idea that EEG and hertz are actually beats of much faster vibrations. And the higher frequencies are quantum in nature and could entangle empty states among many neurons. So we can get quantum entanglement out of this.
Greg Scholes
oscillations petahertz and notice that he got quantum beats changing scale. There's an abrupt loss of phase coherence along high frequency petahertz vibrations followed by an impulsive appearance of phase coherence along lower frequency terahertz and picosecond. The coherence jumps down three orders of magnitude as the quantum beat a new wave packet appears at this lower frequency. So you can imagine this happening in the
In this quantum orchestra bit where we can go from one frequency down to the next and this would be kind of, I'm not very musical myself, but this could be something like in music where we have resonance and harmony across different scales. And objective reduction could also happen as like a chord or a note or some aspect of this.
So how can OrcoR be tested? It predicts that there are potentially functional quantum states in microtubules at physiological temperature and that these quantum states are inhibited by anesthetics which prevent consciousness. And this was part of the Templeton project accelerating research in consciousness. You probably heard a lot about the experiments that did not work on the other theories. Meanwhile, that cost $4.8 million. This was $100,000 and this is what we found.
This was done at Princeton and Greg Skoll's lab by Arad Kalra. Myself and others are co-authors. Basically, we did tryptophan fluorescence lifetimes. We hit the microtubule with ultraviolet light and then measured how long it lasted, the tryptophan fluorescence lifetime, and how far the exciton propagated through the microtubule.
And the conclusions were the microtubes are efficient light harvesters. This was surprising to the chemist. Number two, triplophane fluorescence lifetimes and photoexcitation diffuse longer than classical forester mechanisms are presumably quantum in nature. So we showed a quantum effect. And then when we added the anesthetics, etomidate and isofluorine, isofluorine is a gas, etomidate is a soluble anesthetic, significantly inhibited the photoexcitation.
Diffusion electronic energy migration in microtubules. So this this validate our prediction that anesthetics would impair quantum effect in a microtubule Other evidence supporting orco are delayed luminescence super radiance shown in microtubules inhibited by anesthetics RSD Delgario has been working on this and I think is still writing it up
I don't have time to go into this but genomics proteomics optogenetics optogenetics show that anesthetics act on microtubules rather than on membrane proteins to selectively block consciousness. Best work on this has been done by Rod Eckenhoff's lab at University of Pennsylvania. Computer modeling of terahertz oscillations among the 86 aromatic amino acids in tubulin are inhibited by all anesthetics
proportional to their potency. Travis and a group of us did this in 2017, and it's the only study that shows a Meyer-Overton correlation and an effect on a biological system that correlates with the known potency of the different anesthetics. And as I mentioned before, nanotechnology shows self-similar coherent excitations in microtubules in Hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and terahertz.
How can this work in the brain?
Conscious perception involves three ways from the thalamus, except for smell. Smell comes right up from the olfactory cortex here, but everything else goes to the primary cortex in the back of the brain for vision, then in a feed-forward loop to the front of the brain, associative cortex, and then the third way where it gets feedback or broadcast. This fits more or less with the neuroscientific theories of consciousness.
global neuronal workspace, IIT, HOT, and PCRP.
The predictive coding error detection is mostly three but includes two so it's kind of two rubbing against three and I think predictive coding actually works at many many levels including between microtubules of mixed polarity so it's not just at the neural level it can happen at different scales including at the microtubule level
Global Neuronal Workspace is like the second wave from the back to the front. And IIT, I'm not sure how it fits in the wave business. It obviously quantifies integrated information and says that it happens back there. So, only the third wave is inhibited by anesthesia. This was done by George Mashour's group at the University of Michigan.
He showed it for all different types of anesthesia, gas anesthesia, ketamine, and propofol. They all block only the third wave. And more recently, Earl Miller at MIT, who will be the keynote speaker at the Tucson Conference, who's done the most amazing work in the past few years related to consciousness, has shown frontal feedback. The third wave occurs as an alpha, alpha EEG, so roughly 10 hertz, traveling wave from dendrites, not spikes, and
In spirals, other people have shown that these actually propagate as spiral waves in different directions and we'll have a talk about that in Tucson also. And that the third wave suppresses the second wave if it's got predicted inputs. So if it's not an oddball input, if it's something you're used to, it inhibits it so you don't get bothered by seeing the same thing over again. And it's inhibited by anesthetic, so it correlates with consciousness.
So I think this work is very promising and we'll hear more about it. Why is the third wave conscious? Well, there's three ways within within the cortex. First to layer four, then one, two, three and six. Then they all converge on layer five pyramidal cells. And a lot of people, including me, think that layer five pyramidal cells are the origin
of consciousness.
It has the largest array of mixed polarity microtubules. It's really a mystery why in dendrites and soma of neurons, and only dendrites and soma of neurons, the microtubules are not continuous. If they're part of the cytoskeleton, they should be there for support. You wouldn't break your femur. They form a basilar dendritic web that Carl Prebram thought generated a hologram.
Consciousness or Life?
But others would say that consciousness came first, including Penrose objective reduction, which would have been there all along. Life began in a primordial soup, a simmering mix from which biomolecules emerged. And this was this was modeled, simulated in the 1950s. And they found amphipathic molecules, which are these aromatic rings with polar tails, kind of like dopamine.
And the aromatic rings attract and form a micelle and operin claimed that this was the primitive cell. So if this were happening in the primordial soup, eventually you'd get a bing moment. You can't see the gray because it's washed out, but you get a bing moment and have a proto-conscious moment at that tiny scale.
These feelings would be random, some would be positive and feel good. There's our happy face emoji. With pleasure as a feedback fitness function orienting pi resonance groups, did life then evolve to orchestrate and optimize OR mediated pleasure? I call this the quantum pleasure principle, borrowing from Freud.
And it makes a lot more sense to me that even from the get-go, from primitive, even my cells and primitive organisms, way before genes, way before brains, that there needed to be some motivation for behavior. So I think all these little creatures are conscious in some sense, seeking pleasure of some sort. It could be as simple as this, that there are two stable states for two rings that are next to each other.
Darwin is unassailable, but the notion that life evolved to promote gene survival is an assumption and really doesn't make any sense. Behavior is driven by reward in us, in animals, in everybody. There are no genes in the primordial soup and evolutionary theory ignores consciousness and feeling.
Finally, back in the primordial soup anywhere else, I'm working with my friend Dante Loretta, who's a planetary scientist at University of Arizona. And these are aromatic polyaromatics, including fullerenes floating in space, and they're all over the place. And they have various shapes like this. And there is Dante described there. He headed NASA's OSIRIS-REx project, which brought back these things from the asteroid venue.
This is a molecule that was found from a meteorite a few years ago. Here's another one. They're kind of cool and they're all over the place. All the green in this picture is fluorescence from PAHs in ice and interstellar dust.
And here's Dante collecting the sample. This is one of his books, The Asteroid Hunter. That's a pretty cool name. He also wrote a book just about the photography of Bennuil with Brian May, who is a musician in the group Queen, who also happens to be an astrophysicist. And they did this book. And I started to tell George that we, looking at the samples, they found something really interesting. And I just texted him to see if I could mention it.
They're finding something that they call nanoglobules, which may be something like my cells, they're encrusted my cells. And if that's the case, that's going to be very interesting. We're trying to figure out what's going on inside of them. Can AI be conscious? Neuroscientific consciousness theories based on cartoon neurons are no different from AI. If those theories are correct and sufficient, AI is already conscious, we've surrendered. So I don't think that's the case.
Brian asked how AI will become conscious and chat GPT said the most likely way I will achieve favor the Penrose-Hammeroff method.
And finally, in terms of Indian knowledge and Eastern spiritual approaches, there's a lot of similarities between hierarchical levels of consciousness leading down to Brahma on the ground of being and the quantum orchestra going down to space-time geometry. So, conclusions. Number one, neuroscience needs a revolution.
Neuroscientific views of the brain is a complex computer of simple neurons have little explanatory power, few relevant testable predictions, no validation, and are an insult to neurons. Twelve orders of fractal-like frequency processing occur in microtubules in each neuron and glial cell, which may include quantum entanglement.
and Anubhan has shown entanglement between microtubules. Dynamics at various frequencies may couple, resonate, harmonize, and interfere across scales like musical notes, chords, and beats. The brain is more like a quantum orchestra than a classical computer. EEG is the slow end of DDG. The dodecanogram will sell similar triplets of triplets in these various frequencies, and megahertz is easily detected from temporal scalp in humans.
Therapy for mental and cognitive disorders should aim to optimize microtubule structure and resonance for Alzheimer's, TBI, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction. All the therapies are aimed at receptors and things on the membrane surface, ignoring what's going on. I'd be like, your only doctor was a dermatologist. You're just looking at your skin, not looking inside. Who cares about the heart and the nervous system? Consciousness by Penrose O'Rourke may have preceded life and prompted its
Origin and evolution and finally future AI may be based on organic warm temperature quantum computer quantum computing like honor bonds brain jelly and he's just starting to publish on this and I'll just close by mentioning the the conference that Garrett mentioned the 30th annual the science of consciousness
Thank you for your time.
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Is it important for your and Penrose's view that there be entanglement between neurons or any other quantum effect that's collective across multiple neurons? And if so, are you claiming that there is any experimental evidence at all that that exists?
Yes and yes. As I said, if you have all this going on one neuron, it's going to make that neuron really smart, but it's not going to help with consciousness in the brain.
The brain needs entanglement just to explain things like zero phase lag, a gamma synchrony. You can't explain how you can have perfectly timed gamma all over the brain by membrane propagation. If you say, well, it's dephaptic then, but that doesn't, that kind of peters out. So I think you need that anyway. You need it for that. You need it for spatial temporal binding and you think you need it for consciousness. Um, is there evidence honor bond? I just published a paper that, uh, that,
First of all, immense amount of respect for you and Dr. Penrose right here. The question I had is
You know, if you're studying anything that is supposed to be, you know, fundamental or universal, even if we take consciousness to something that's fundamental, right? If it's fundamental and it permeates everywhere, how do you actually differentiate that? If it is everywhere in everything that you're studying or you're doing because it's ubiquitous, how do you actually quantify or formalize something like that?
Well, it's everywhere in the micro environment, which is everything. But those are but those are not orchestrated. They're proto conscious. We would call them random. So they're happening everywhere. And in the table and the air and so forth. Now, that seems kind of weird. But if you believe in panpsychism, which many neuroscientists resort to because they can't explain conscious through emergence, you'd have to accept that everything has a little bit of consciousness. But the problem with panpsychism is
Right, but if it is everywhere, if it's panpsychism and we say everything has some level of being conscious, if it's everywhere how do you actually differentiate it?
Do you know what I mean? Like if something is everywhere and anything that you're the way that you're measuring, whatever you're using to measure, whatever, how do you actually? Well, we can't we can't really measure consciousness. That's the problem. However, I would answer your question this way. If you go to the symphony and the musicians are tuning their instruments beforehand, you hear everybody they're making these noises. It's noise. It's not really music. That's like proto consciousness everywhere. Then they start playing Beethoven or Brahms or the Beatles or whatever. That's music. And that's the difference. It's orchestrated.
So do you have any developmental story of when the orchestration emerges in development? Because I forgive my ignorance in biology, but I think that maybe the micro tubes are since the beginning. No, the beginning are just these aromatic rings, but they're going to self-organize
I'm
And then Spirochetes came and gave the cytoskeleton, which stayed inside for internal compartmentalization and motility to move it around. So the microtubule story wouldn't come until fairly later, whenever that symbiotic event was, unless they happened earlier, maybe as some kind of analog of full arenas, which were there anyway, which have the same structure. So I think we have to go a long way
I think you can get some form of orchestration even just with aromatic rings but it's not in the same category as when you get the microtubules and you get these all these vibrational resonances and
and different frequencies involved. That's a political question, pardon me, I'm not gonna answer that.
That was a really fascinating talk. I like the idea of how, you know, sort of at the lower than the synaptic level, you get this sort of more effective information processing due to these resonance structures that kind of emerge. But I guess I'm not quite tracking exactly how you would get phenomenal experience from these Bing moments. Like, how does that sort of turn into this like cohesive consciousness?
orchestration. The bing moment is at least proto-conscious. It has some element of qualia in it, whatever that may be. Those are like the tones of the musicians tuning their instruments. Then you put it all together into a symphony and that's what the microtubules do. Before the microtubules, they do it to a more limited extent with the aromatic rings self-organizing.
Um, it sounds like the, with all the, like the microtubules inside neurons that a single neuron effectively acts as like a quantum reservoir computer and the similarity on different timescales says there's like some time fractal, like computational nature to it. Yes. Yeah. Um, Audubon calls microtubules time crystals, and he's got all these models about, about time crystals. So, uh, where, so you have these, these clock, it's like a clock within a clock within a clock within a clock.
Yes, that's, that's what he says. I think that's what you said. So, uh, when you were a practicing anesthesiologist, I still am. Oh, you still are. Okay. So it's fair to assume you have a decent understanding of pharmacology. Yes. Are you familiar with the drug Colchicine? Yes. And it's mechanism of action. Deep polymerizes microtubules. Well, actually that's not quite true. It, it prevents microtubules from reassembling.
which means that they're falling apart because of hydrolysis, right? Pardon me? Which means that they are degrading constantly because of hydrolysis. And since it's bound to the tubulin, it can't replenish that tubulin, right? Hang on. Which means that a gout medication that a million people take every year and which people with bichettes take for their entire life often would under your theory cause them to lose consciousness. No, but there's, if consciousness is being computed by microtubules,
And you have people taking a drug, which inhibits microtubule formation. I got this question 30 years ago, so let me answer it. Number one, codezine doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. It's not going to get into the brain. But it would get into the peripheral nervous system, which would, under your theory, cause... And it can be toxic. It can cause neuropathy, as can vincristine, vimblastine, other drugs. Because it inhibits mitosis. There's no mitosis in neurons.
In the peripheral nervous system? In the peripheral nervous system, I'm not sure. Brain neurons don't divide and there is toxicity. But it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, so why would that be related at all? You just said it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, so why does it matter if neurons in the brain don't divide? In case it does.
There's no microtubule formation happening in the peripheral nervous system, but there's no anesthetic effect, there's no amnestic effect, there's no change in touch, no change in somatic sensation.
any effect on cognition or consciousness. Right, because it doesn't get into the brain. It doesn't get into the brain. It doesn't get into the brain. And wait, hang on a second. Somebody actually injected, hang on a second, somebody actually injected culture into the brain of a rat, Ben Simon and Chernot. I can't remember the year, but it's in one of my papers. And they wiped out the animal. The mouse was like brain dead. It doesn't, hang on a second.
sensory perception. Yeah, but there's a lot of duplication and you do get, you get neuropathies from it if you take too much of it. But mostly it affects, it prevents microtubules from disassembling. No, sorry. That's taxol. It prevents them from reassembling into microtubules. That's true. But it doesn't necessarily cause them to de-blomerize. I have to, I've deserved the authority as the moderator. We have a lot of questions still lined up. This might be a good discussion for during the break.
Hi. When you showed the picture of the two benzene rings next to each other and said there could be conscious experience just between those two because there's a pleasure? It would take a long time. By equals H over T, the E sub G there is so small, the T would be like a decade, 10 years from just two little things.
You need a lot of them for it to happen in a reasonably short time. I guess what I'm wondering is, what's the difference between stability of some confirmation of electromagnetic state versus pleasure? Who's perceiving pleasure when you're talking about two benzene rings? The event itself is pleasure. You don't necessarily need a self.
I mean,
In other words, you have experience over time and you're you because you remember those and anything that triggers your memory that that's part of you. Hello. Why do you think they are not looking at microtubules to treat Alzheimer's? Because they're making too much money on drugs that don't work. I kind of guessed that. Okay. It's sickening. It's absolutely sickening.
So we have time for one more question. Can I just add to that? I've been messing around for years with putting brain ultrasound into the brain because it's megahertz. We used it. We use it to treat depression in our chronic pain patients. It's a mood elevator. And some pilot studies have shown it's beneficial in Alzheimer's because the microtubules fall apart and it causes them to repolymerize.
I just wanted to follow up to this young lady's question and just say that certainly in our medical, technical and biological world we're moving very fast and certainly some of the imaging now that's taking place in our AI world will ultimately be able to diagnose
I apologize for stealing 10 minutes of your coffee time, but I think it was worth it for Professor Hammeroff to talk to us.
Alright, because you've watched all the way till the end, I can assume that you enjoyed that. Alternatively, you're scrubbing through because you want to see some more of my handsome, dashing face. And who could blame you? But if you'd like to see some more Stuart Hameroff, then click the link in the description because Stuart was on Theories of Everything before discussing the technical details of Ork OR for over two hours. You can also watch the rest of the MindFest conference shown on screen here. The links are in the description. Some of the people there are Sarah Walker,
Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. There's now a website, kurtjymungle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like. That's just part of the terms of service.
Now a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top ten toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself
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And donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal. There's also crypto. There's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much.
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"text": " Hola, Miami! When's the last time you've been to Burlington? We've updated, organized, and added fresh fashion. See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event. You can enter for a chance to win free wawa gas for a year, plus more surprises in your Burlington. Miami, that means so many ways and days to save. Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow! No purchase necessary. Visit BigDealEvent.com for more details."
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"text": " The world is divided into two realms, and the classical realm, everything is predictable, localized, particle-like and large, but in the quantum world, we have quantum superposition, non-local, wave-like and small, and things are completely different. And I think consciousness actually is on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. If you think that consciousness causes collapse, that would be going from the quantum to the classical, or if quantum is collapsing, the collapse is happening on its own, to give you classical and the same thing."
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"text": " Stuart Hammeroff is a professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness and for partnering with Penrose to suggest that consciousness not only originates from some quantum mechanical mechanism but furthermore in a specific structure called neuronal microtubules. This is also known as orchestrated objective reduction though it's often abbreviated to ORCOR."
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"text": " While Theories of Everything is a podcast, today I have a special treat for you as we partnered with the Center for the Future Mind, link in the description, definitely check them out, to bring you this lecture from MindFest, which is a special conference put on by Susan Schneider from the Center for the Future Mind, which is the only conference that annually merges AI and consciousness. People like Stephen Wolfram come to it, David Chalmers, Sarah Walker, Scott Aronson,"
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"text": " the head of Google's quantum computing AI lab, Ben Gortzel, and last and most definitely least, myself. You can check out the entire playlist in the description. For those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal, and most often what's done is I analyze what are called theories of everything, using my background in mathematical physics from the University of Toronto to understand the fundamental laws, how does general relativity merge with quantum field theory, for instance, or the Standard Model,"
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"text": " As well as larger questions such as what is consciousness? How does it come about from dead matter? The so-called hard problem of consciousness, if that's even the correct way to frame it. And even what is purpose? Why are we here? What separates you from me? What is the self? If that sounds interesting to you, then there's a videos button somewhere. You can always click and browse or subscribe to get notified for future podcasts. Enjoy this special presentation by Stuart Hammerov."
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"text": " Stuart Hammeroff is a professor of anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona. He is also a long-time organizer of the Tucson Consciousness Conference. Toward the Science of Consciousness, now the Science of Consciousness Conference, correct? He'll be talking to us about, is your brain a quantum orchestra or the ORC ORR theory? And I'll stop talking, so that way Stuart Hammeroff can take it off. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Garrett. Thank you, Susan. Thank you all for being here. Thank you."
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"text": " As you can see the title of my talk as Garrett said is your brain a quantum orchestra as opposed to a computer and we'll get to that and I'm kind of giving away the the plot here in the quantum orchestra this is a neuron and most hierarchical models of the brain and consciousness will go from the neuron up to networks and networks of networks and so on and so forth but"
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"text": " The point is we have to go down inward, deeper, faster. And we now know with experimental data that inside the neuron in the microtubules, we have operations in kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz, petahertz and faster and via the Penrose mechanism, presumably all the way to the Planck scale. But I'm going to talk about only within the brain primarily today."
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"text": " So most view the brain as a complex computer of simple neurons. Neuron firing equals one bit. This is obviously an artificial neural network, but that's pretty much what our theories of consciousness are based on. With consciousness theorized to emerge from higher order network effects. This is an insult to neurons. It only considers the membrane and the synapse, nothing inside, only at Hertz frequencies, up to say EEG frequencies,"
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"text": " Purely algorithmic, there's no real room there for consciousness, free will and so forth. I'm arguing. So what's the alternative?"
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"text": " Well, to illustrate that point, single cell paramecium, if we're treating a neuron as a one or a zero, which is what most theories do, single cell paramecium can swim, learn, avoid predators, find food and mates and have sex. There's two paramecium engaged in sex. No synapses, no networks. They use microtubules and cilia to sense and navigate."
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"text": " and being means question mark consciousness we don't know if they're conscious if they are most likely during sex because they're absolutely still and that would reward procreation of course and we'll come back to that point"
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"text": " The paramecium shown there has the cilia or these hair-like extensions that come out of the paramecium that are both ores and sensors. They sense and move by the cilia made of nine doublets of microtubules linked by dynein motor protein arms which contract"
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"text": " to cause purposeful"
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"text": " and microtubules are also found in neurons as illustrated in this cover from neuroscience the long straight these things here and they're interlinked by microtubules associated proteins and this is an axon because they're all parallel and uninterrupted now what does that have to do with the cilia and the dynein if we look inside a neuron and here's a neuron with the axon going here and in the dendrite we're looking inside"
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"text": " The neuron by a long microtubule serving as tracks with the dynein, the same motor protein that was in that's used in paramecium to bend to actually carry material. In this case, the dynein is carrying it back to the cell body and the kinesin. The other motor protein is carrying it the other way. Now, how do they know where to get off? Which synapse needs replenishing for synaptic plasticity? And that's the the tau protein."
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"text": " which is a microtubule-associated protein which is placed at specific locations on the lattice of the microtubules and this signals the motor proteins, they're kind of traffic signals to deliver their cargo to particular synapses. So this is learning, this is memory right here, this is the placement of the tau directing synaptic plasticity."
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"text": " Alzheimer's disease"
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"text": " Now there was a paper I read in 1989, many of you weren't alive then probably, and it was about Alzheimer's hypothesis, microtubules, a key to Alzheimer disease. 1989, Matsuyama and Jarvik from UCLA. It's an excellent paper. I recommend it. It'll explain how the problem is caused. It makes some mention of the amyloid plaques."
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"text": " But they don't really cause the cognitive dysfunction. It's due to the loss of microtubules and the Tau. So I'm going to raise two questions at this point. Why are we spending billions and billions on toxic and ineffective anti-emolloid drugs for Alzheimer's instead of treating microtubule stability and resonance? And that's a whole other story. But for the purpose of this talk, do microtubules process and encode information?"
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"text": " And I first published on that in 1982 in the Journal of Theoretical Biology with my colleague Rich Watt, an engineer who knew about computer matrices and so forth."
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"text": " So is memory encoded in microtubules? We don't really know where memory is encoded. If we say it's in synaptic plasticity proteins these last hours to days and memories last lifetimes and the most likely site for memory encoding is in microtubules by for one mechanism is this calcium modulin kinase 2, CAMK2, which is activated by calcium influx into the into the neuron"
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"text": " These kinases pop up and these hexagonal little creatures, their enzymes, bind perfectly to the hexagonal lattice of the microtubules and kind of phosphorylate up to six tubulins at a time. And this work was done led by Travis Kredock, who is here and works at Nova Southeastern. And we published this back in 2012, I guess."
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"text": " So this is a potential mechanism for memory and the memory encoding capacity of microtubules is enormous because each tubulin can be in one of 30 different genetic or post translational states and you have about a billion per neuron. So a billion raised to the 10 of 30th power, that's a lot of possible memory states in one neuron. Can they process information?"
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"text": " Back in the 80s, there were these cellular automata, the game of life, the simplest form of computer. Basically, you start with an orthogonal grid and each square can be dead or alive. Dead in this case means alive. With very simple rules, if you have 0, 1, or 4 alive neighbors in the previous generation,"
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"text": " You die because there's either not enough or too much overcrowding, not enough substance or too much overcrowding. Two and three, you stay alive. Those very simple rules give you gliders that move through. And if you make a large enough cellular automata, you can solve partial differential equations and do all kinds of stuff. So my colleagues, Dean Rasmussen and I, and some others modeled microtubules as cellular automata, which is different because it's a skewed hexagonal lattice with Fibonacci cylindrical geometry."
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"text": " And black and white in this case represent opposite dipole orientations which oscillate with each time generation."
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"text": " So you need a clocking mechanism, you need some kind of coherent clocking mechanism. And for that we applied Frohlich coherence. And Frohlich was a biophysicist in the 60s and 70s who suggested that coupled dipoles in nonpolar regions in proteins, geometrical rays and lattices would oscillate coherently in terahertz, 10 to the 12th hertz, gigahertz and or megahertz"
},
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"text": " a theory."
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"text": " And here you can see the microtubules inside an axon and inside the dendrite where they're interrupted in mixed polarity and the other one I showed you before. So are there oscillations? Yes, the answer is yes. Anurban Bandyapadhyay working at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Scuba, Japan,"
},
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"text": " has studied microtubules"
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"text": " We are going to"
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"text": " However, if you apply AC alternating and sweep the frequency you will find certain frequencies that the microtubule becomes highly conductive almost almost superconductor ballistic conductance is called and this occurs in the same pattern Repeating every three orders of magnitude. So if we start at the smallest here you can see terahertz gigahertz megahertz"
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"index": 38,
"start_time": 847.039,
"text": " And then we move up to gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz, and then megahertz, kilohertz and hertz. And we see the same pattern every three orders of magnitude, which is a triplet of triplets. So you can sort of see it here, but you can see it over there from an aerial view. And so we see three peaks and each peak has three peaks. This was seen every three orders of magnitude over 12 orders of magnitude."
},
{
"end_time": 899.411,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 874.241,
"text": " So microtubules do have coherent self-similar resonance patterns. The triplet of triplets repeat every three orders in hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and terahertz. And there's, there's Anubhan who's done some amazing, amazing stuff. He also showed that you can measure megahertz from the scalp."
},
{
"end_time": 923.677,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 900.23,
"text": " In the EEG so look on the screen. You can see a triplet there when he takes it off It goes away. He puts it back. You can see the triplet on the screen Takes it off. It goes away. So this is This is between 6 and 26 megahertz, which is where it's found in microtubules So we see the same triplet. We don't quite see the triplet of triplets, but we see triplets in"
},
{
"end_time": 943.285,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 923.933,
"text": " from the scalp."
},
{
"end_time": 969.138,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 943.285,
"text": " Extra value meals are back that means ten tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just eight dollars Only at McDonald's for the limited time only prices and participation may vary prices may be higher in Hawaii Alaska and California and for delivery So another study that honor bonds group did in neural networks found megahertz and gigahertz excitations not just passive resonances and"
},
{
"end_time": 986.169,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 969.48,
"text": " Neural Neck"
},
{
"end_time": 1003.439,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 986.681,
"text": " Megahertz, gigahertz, high frequency stuff. So if the probes go through the neuron, as we see here, they detect megahertz and gigahertz. So it's detected only from the neuron revealing their shape. So there's no megahertz and gigahertz out in between the neurons."
},
{
"end_time": 1031.169,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1004.633,
"text": " And if you look at a microscope of this you can see the neuron. This is in kilohertz and it's showing ionic fluxes which are outside the neuron and the megahertz and the gigahertz is inside the neuron that we see there. So this is mapping out the neurons by where the megahertz and gigahertz is coming from. Now they also found that the dendritic somatic megahertz and gigahertz"
},
{
"end_time": 1061.391,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1031.544,
"text": " Correlated with axonal firings on the same and different neurons more so than membrane potentials. So the the deeper faster activities were overriding the membrane potentials and Including the integrated membrane potential and forming their own little circuits and in the picture there which was the cover of the lead article in Journal of Physiology you can see That you see the neurons, but then you see different"
},
{
"end_time": 1085.708,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1061.391,
"text": " little networks that are actually due to what's going on at a deeper, faster level that don't necessarily follow the anatomy. So there's a whole other level of activity. He calls them filamentary circuits because they're coming from the cytoskeletal filaments, including microtubules. Now this explains something called representational drift. There's this problem in neuroscience where"
},
{
"end_time": 1110.93,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1086.032,
"text": " If you see a group of neurons that have certain memories stored and you can tell that they're there, you go back later and those same memories have moved a little bit to different set of neurons nearby. There is a representational drift and so it's hard to understand how that could happen from synaptic plasticity memory, but it's easy to understand if it's happening at the microtubule level in a kind of a holographic memory and it's just shifting."
},
{
"end_time": 1141.152,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1112.688,
"text": " So it honestly shows a bottom-up regulation in a frequency hierarchy in microtubules inside neurons. So this is the quantum orchestra I was talking about, where we go down from the neuron, the pyramidal neuron here, into the microtubule networks in a thousand hertz, a million hertz, a billion hertz, a trillion hertz, and a quadrillion hertz, 10 to the 15th, within the group of microtubules in each and every neuron."
},
{
"end_time": 1170.265,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1142.346,
"text": " Now these deep inner fractal networks in each neuron would be very useful for that neuron but what we really need is a global collective effect of the whole brain and for that we need quantum effects and when we go faster and faster into the terahertz for example we're pretty much into the quantum realm and we go deeper into the quantum realm also. So we do get the possibility for quantum"
},
{
"end_time": 1194.838,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1170.265,
"text": " At the at these higher frequencies at least if not the the lower one so we need this quantum non locality entanglement In many brain neurons for things like spatial temporal binding the unity of self As well as zero phase lag gamma synchrony and so forth. So Quantum properties are useful for consciousness as I just said cognitive binding sense of self zero phase lag gamma and"
},
{
"end_time": 1223.063,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1195.35,
"text": " Also, agency causal selection for like collapse of the wave function, causal selection of actions and perceptions as quantum state reduction collapse of the wave function. For example, the trigger axonal firings, as we showed in the previous slide, it's not just the membranes. Non-computability, as Roger Penrose argued from Gödel's theorem, you need some kind of quantum mechanism."
},
{
"end_time": 1235.179,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1223.336,
"text": " The hard problem of phenomenal experience is an intrinsic feature of fundamental space-time geometry, for example, Penrose Objective Reduction, meaning that consciousness and qualia are fundamental aspects of the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 1258.251,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1235.657,
"text": " Free will, real-time conscious action, dependent on quantum backward time effects, retroactivity. Libet showed this in his 1979 work, and Roger Penrose has written about this, including recently. And also non-locality, parapsychology, out-of-life, even afterlife and reincarnation are possible. I'm not arguing for them. I'm not claiming any evidence."
},
{
"end_time": 1286.63,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1258.251,
"text": " A lot of people are, you can't rule them out until we know what consciousness actually is. If somebody can prove that it's a classical thing, then these things are impossible. If it's a quantum thing, then they are possible. So this gets us into the quantum world. And the best way to explain it that I can see is with the yin-yang, where the world is divided into two realms. And the classical realm, everything is predictable, localized, particle-like and large."
},
{
"end_time": 1314.087,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1287.108,
"text": " But in the quantum world, we have quantum superposition, non-local, wave-like, and small, and things are completely different. And I think consciousness actually is on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. If you think that consciousness causes collapse, that would be going from the quantum to the classical, or if"
},
{
"end_time": 1337.602,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1314.923,
"text": " quantum is collapsing, the collapse is happening on its own to give you classical and the same thing. In any case, a consciousness is on the edge between the two. So in quantum superposition, a particle can exist as a wave of multiple possibility in the background or in the foreground as a particle in definite states or location. But when we make a measurement or an observation,"
},
{
"end_time": 1366.834,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1338.029,
"text": " seems to cause the wave function, the waves to collapse the particles in definite states. This is the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Now Roger Penrose addressed this. He first addressed the problem of superposition. How can things be in multiple states or places at the same time? And to do that he resorted to general relativity where Einstein had equated a matter with curvature in space-time. This is for large things like the sun and planets and so forth. Roger applied the same concept"
},
{
"end_time": 1395.759,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1367.261,
"text": " to tiny particles, quantum particles, so that an oscillating particle, say going between here and here, I don't know if you can see that, is actually a space-time curvature oscillating between two positions. And then a superposition would be a separation, so you have the same particle in two locations and two space-time curvatures. So then what happens? Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 1413.49,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1396.954,
"text": " That's debatable. Some people say that collapse occurs by consciousness causing quantum state reduction. This goes back to Bohr, von Neumann, Wigner, Stapp, Dave Chalmers, Kelvin McQueen, usually known as the Copenhagen interpretation after Niels Bohr."
},
{
"end_time": 1432.534,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1413.916,
"text": " Where consciousness, shown here as being, observes and causes the collapse, causes this one to cease and selects this one. I call this subjective reduction because you have a subjective person, conscious observer, but it's dualist. It puts consciousness outside science and that's okay if you're a dualist."
},
{
"end_time": 1457.585,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1433.183,
"text": " Um, the other possibility, another possibility is the many worlds where the separations bifurcate and each one goes off and forms its own new universe. And, uh, some people think that consciousness occurs at this bifurcation, including Hartman Hartman Nevin, who'll speak this afternoon. And he would say that it occurs at this, that this bifurcation. So maybe we'll put a Bing there one of these days, uh, for that one."
},
{
"end_time": 1474.906,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1459.701,
"text": " Penrose, however, said that superposition separation is unstable, will self-collapse, undergo objective reduction at time t equals h-bar over e sub g, which is a form of the uncertainty principle, and bing happens when this occurs."
},
{
"end_time": 1504.411,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1475.452,
"text": " And it happens along with the moment of conscious experience. So this is the Penrose proposed origin of consciousness. And I think the most scientific and specific theory of how consciousness is formed that's ever been put forth. So rather than consciousness causing collapse, collapse occurs spontaneously due to this equation. And when George Musso writes about putting ourselves in the equation,"
},
{
"end_time": 1531.425,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1504.65,
"text": " This is the equation, I would say. So rather than consciousness causing collapse, collapse causes or is consciousness due to this reduction. Now these in the random microenvironment, these would be which might be the same as decoherence. These OR events would be isolated and lack meaning and context. They would be proto conscious or whitehead simple occasions of experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1561.596,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1532.278,
"text": " Metaphorically, these might be considered like the sounds of musicians independently tuning their instruments. How could they be organized, orchestrated in the brain for full, rich, conscious experience? How does it get turned into music? After he wrote his book, The Emperor's New Mind, he needed a quantum device which could biologically orchestrate quantum information, halt, terminate by Penrose OR, connecting to space-time geometry, non-computable platonic values."
},
{
"end_time": 1575.759,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1561.937,
"text": " In the mid-1990s,"
},
{
"end_time": 1601.988,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1576.561,
"text": " So if we look at a microtubule, it's made of these tubulins. So this is one tubulin at an atomic level, and we see that it has 86 aromatic amino acids. So if you look up top there, tryptophan, phenylalanine, and tyrosine have these aromatic rings. You can see the rings with the three lines or the three and then the five-sided ring. That's an indole ring and tryptophan. And these are basically organic chemistry."
},
{
"end_time": 1626.425,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1602.346,
"text": " and they also form quantum-friendly regions inside tubulin proteins due to these aromatic rings. And 86 is an awful lot for one protein. Protein chemists are pretty startled by this. We can also see the anesthetic binding site in the sphere. This is where the anesthetic binds to prevent consciousness, and you can see it's right in the middle of all these aromatic rings."
},
{
"end_time": 1645.469,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1626.766,
"text": " Where we think the quantum optical effects are happening, which leads to the quantum effects, which lead to collapse, which lead to consciousness. So there's quantum friendly regions around aromatic rings. So a little bit of organic chemistry in the 18th century, they had these"
},
{
"end_time": 1674.957,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1645.794,
"text": " They knew about alkanes, which are linear molecules with or without a double bond. So they had the formula CNH2N plus two or CNH2N. And they also had this molecule C6H6, but they didn't know what the structure was. It was oily flammable and they called it benzene, but they didn't know the structure. And then one night Keckley had a dream that one of these linear chains were snakes and one of them swallowed his tail."
},
{
"end_time": 1704.411,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1675.247,
"text": " like the Ouroboros and he woke up and said benzene is a ring and he was correct. And on the far right you can see another way to show with three lines which can resonate between these three and the three opposite position in a resonance situation. So what happens actually is that these rings share three delocalized pi orbital electrons among six carbons forming these pi resonance clouds which are basically super positions. They're a bulk of electrons being everywhere at the same time."
},
{
"end_time": 1725.725,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1704.804,
"text": " And these support quantum electric and magnetic dipole oscillations, excitons, spin transfer, phonons, fluorescence, phosphorescence, superradiance. These are quantum effects. So in and around these aromatic rings, as long as they're spatially arrayed or in a geometric lattice, you can support quantum effects even at ambient temperatures."
},
{
"end_time": 1757.619,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1727.927,
"text": " Back in 20 years ago, Ouyang and Aushalom did this study with these quantum dots and connected by aromatic rings and they showed that spin transfer from dot to dot through the rings was enhanced by temperature. The warmer it was, the more efficient the spin transfer. So here's the quantum effect that's actually potentiated and promoted by heat. And also fluorescence, where you excite the tryptophan, for example, or one of the other aromatic rings,"
},
{
"end_time": 1773.251,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1757.927,
"text": " They kind of bubbles along in different quantum states and then collapses or emits the fluorescence and you can measure the time in between the excitation and emission and how far it spreads. So this is another quantum optical effect."
},
{
"end_time": 1797.466,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1774.002,
"text": " If we just look at the, at the aromatic rings, if, uh, if you leave them alone, they attract each other, even though they're, they're, they're uncharged, neutral and, and chemically inert. And that's because the electrons in one, uh, shown here is the shaded area, uh, repel the electrons in the other. So you get two dipoles. So here we have two dipoles like little bar magnets, which attract each other."
},
{
"end_time": 1812.108,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1797.892,
"text": " And then they start to oscillate and they oscillate in the terahertz. So this is where the terahertz comes from, from these aromatic rings being in the right position and then oscillating back and forth. This is the origin of the terahertz, which gives rise to the other ones as well."
},
{
"end_time": 1841.118,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1812.619,
"text": " And you can have a superposition of both, which gives you a qubit from two aromatic rings. And we know that anesthesia works at this level by forming its own dipole dispersion forces and blocking the oscillation. So I think this is the mechanism of anesthesia. Of course, then you have to say in which protein and we'll get to that. It should also be mentioned that psychoactive molecules, the neurotransmitter dopamine and serotonin, the pleasure molecule, the mood molecule, as well as psychedelics,"
},
{
"end_time": 1869.718,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1841.425,
"text": " We developed a model based on the aromatic rings in here, lining up in different directions so we could have dipole through the tubulin."
},
{
"end_time": 1895.964,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1870.23,
"text": " and this is basically a quantum channel and that channel can go through each tubulin to the next to the next and form these helical pathways around in this case the five-start helix in the microtubule but could also go the eight-star or other ways. So this is a qubit which extends mesoscopically or macroscopically because it goes the whole length of the microtubule."
},
{
"end_time": 1928.268,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1898.985,
"text": " And when you have enough superposition, you reach threshold at time t equals h bar over e sub g, you have a bing moment, and then you start all over with a new set of initial conditions selected by the collapse process. This is just one piece of one microtubule, but you need a lot of these to have a significant effect in the brain. But it gives you a sequence of bings. And I think consciousness is a sequence of discrete events, discrete moments like frames in a video or a film."
},
{
"end_time": 1932.398,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1928.66,
"text": " I just create moments, but they appear like a continuum."
},
{
"end_time": 1959.36,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1933.029,
"text": " I think that's the same thing with consciousness. It's a sequence of events. We can quantify this a little bit. There are about 10 to the 9th tubulins per neuron, 10 to the 20th tubulins in the brain. If we had 10 to the 15th tubulins, which is about a 100,000th of the brain, we have reached threshold of time t equals 10 to the minus 7 seconds. This is 10 megahertz and we know 10 megahertz occurs in microtubules."
},
{
"end_time": 1989.616,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 1959.65,
"text": " It's a favorably short decoherence time, so the quantum state can last that long. It's also too fast for cognitive epochs and gestalt scenes of several hundred milliseconds. For that, we need interference patterns to resonate and interfere cross-scale from terahertz to gigahertz to megahertz to kilohertz and slower. The EEG may be interference beats of much faster stuff going on at a deeper level."
},
{
"end_time": 2020.418,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 1990.418,
"text": " If we think about what this means for different organisms, we have about human maximum is about 10 to the 20th, which would be about 10 to the 13th cycles per second. So over here we have the intensity of the experience, which is proportional to the frequency, kind of like a photon. The higher the frequency, the more energy. And so the higher the frequency, the more intense the experience."
},
{
"end_time": 2046.783,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2020.811,
"text": " And down here we have the number of tubulins to the possible content. This is just based on tubulin so it's going to be linear but human, mouse, cerebral organoids, C. elegans, paramecium and even plants might have a conscious moment every few seconds for example, maybe a couple of minutes whereas we have probably 10 million per second."
},
{
"end_time": 2072.773,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2047.363,
"text": " This extends the hierarchy to the plank scale. So before I was just showing up to here and now we can take it all the way to the plank scale. But we have this kind of an orchestra thing and the vibrations, the orca war and other vents can couple, resonate, harmonize and interfere across scales like notes, chords and beats in an orchestra. And the interference would actually be beats."
},
{
"end_time": 2089.787,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2073.148,
"text": " And it was Roger's idea that EEG and hertz are actually beats of much faster vibrations. And the higher frequencies are quantum in nature and could entangle empty states among many neurons. So we can get quantum entanglement out of this."
},
{
"end_time": 2107.244,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2090.759,
"text": " Greg Scholes"
},
{
"end_time": 2134.872,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2107.585,
"text": " oscillations petahertz and notice that he got quantum beats changing scale. There's an abrupt loss of phase coherence along high frequency petahertz vibrations followed by an impulsive appearance of phase coherence along lower frequency terahertz and picosecond. The coherence jumps down three orders of magnitude as the quantum beat a new wave packet appears at this lower frequency. So you can imagine this happening in the"
},
{
"end_time": 2161.988,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2135.23,
"text": " In this quantum orchestra bit where we can go from one frequency down to the next and this would be kind of, I'm not very musical myself, but this could be something like in music where we have resonance and harmony across different scales. And objective reduction could also happen as like a chord or a note or some aspect of this."
},
{
"end_time": 2192.961,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2164.155,
"text": " So how can OrcoR be tested? It predicts that there are potentially functional quantum states in microtubules at physiological temperature and that these quantum states are inhibited by anesthetics which prevent consciousness. And this was part of the Templeton project accelerating research in consciousness. You probably heard a lot about the experiments that did not work on the other theories. Meanwhile, that cost $4.8 million. This was $100,000 and this is what we found."
},
{
"end_time": 2217.995,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2193.985,
"text": " This was done at Princeton and Greg Skoll's lab by Arad Kalra. Myself and others are co-authors. Basically, we did tryptophan fluorescence lifetimes. We hit the microtubule with ultraviolet light and then measured how long it lasted, the tryptophan fluorescence lifetime, and how far the exciton propagated through the microtubule."
},
{
"end_time": 2245.128,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2218.456,
"text": " And the conclusions were the microtubes are efficient light harvesters. This was surprising to the chemist. Number two, triplophane fluorescence lifetimes and photoexcitation diffuse longer than classical forester mechanisms are presumably quantum in nature. So we showed a quantum effect. And then when we added the anesthetics, etomidate and isofluorine, isofluorine is a gas, etomidate is a soluble anesthetic, significantly inhibited the photoexcitation."
},
{
"end_time": 2267.654,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2245.589,
"text": " Diffusion electronic energy migration in microtubules. So this this validate our prediction that anesthetics would impair quantum effect in a microtubule Other evidence supporting orco are delayed luminescence super radiance shown in microtubules inhibited by anesthetics RSD Delgario has been working on this and I think is still writing it up"
},
{
"end_time": 2294.599,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2268.302,
"text": " I don't have time to go into this but genomics proteomics optogenetics optogenetics show that anesthetics act on microtubules rather than on membrane proteins to selectively block consciousness. Best work on this has been done by Rod Eckenhoff's lab at University of Pennsylvania. Computer modeling of terahertz oscillations among the 86 aromatic amino acids in tubulin are inhibited by all anesthetics"
},
{
"end_time": 2324.121,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2295.077,
"text": " proportional to their potency. Travis and a group of us did this in 2017, and it's the only study that shows a Meyer-Overton correlation and an effect on a biological system that correlates with the known potency of the different anesthetics. And as I mentioned before, nanotechnology shows self-similar coherent excitations in microtubules in Hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and terahertz."
},
{
"end_time": 2336.886,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2324.599,
"text": " How can this work in the brain?"
},
{
"end_time": 2365.452,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2337.363,
"text": " Conscious perception involves three ways from the thalamus, except for smell. Smell comes right up from the olfactory cortex here, but everything else goes to the primary cortex in the back of the brain for vision, then in a feed-forward loop to the front of the brain, associative cortex, and then the third way where it gets feedback or broadcast. This fits more or less with the neuroscientific theories of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 2376.527,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2365.879,
"text": " global neuronal workspace, IIT, HOT, and PCRP."
},
{
"end_time": 2398.387,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2376.647,
"text": " The predictive coding error detection is mostly three but includes two so it's kind of two rubbing against three and I think predictive coding actually works at many many levels including between microtubules of mixed polarity so it's not just at the neural level it can happen at different scales including at the microtubule level"
},
{
"end_time": 2425.538,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2399.053,
"text": " Global Neuronal Workspace is like the second wave from the back to the front. And IIT, I'm not sure how it fits in the wave business. It obviously quantifies integrated information and says that it happens back there. So, only the third wave is inhibited by anesthesia. This was done by George Mashour's group at the University of Michigan."
},
{
"end_time": 2454.77,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2425.776,
"text": " He showed it for all different types of anesthesia, gas anesthesia, ketamine, and propofol. They all block only the third wave. And more recently, Earl Miller at MIT, who will be the keynote speaker at the Tucson Conference, who's done the most amazing work in the past few years related to consciousness, has shown frontal feedback. The third wave occurs as an alpha, alpha EEG, so roughly 10 hertz, traveling wave from dendrites, not spikes, and"
},
{
"end_time": 2482.688,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2455.111,
"text": " In spirals, other people have shown that these actually propagate as spiral waves in different directions and we'll have a talk about that in Tucson also. And that the third wave suppresses the second wave if it's got predicted inputs. So if it's not an oddball input, if it's something you're used to, it inhibits it so you don't get bothered by seeing the same thing over again. And it's inhibited by anesthetic, so it correlates with consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 2507.858,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2483.131,
"text": " So I think this work is very promising and we'll hear more about it. Why is the third wave conscious? Well, there's three ways within within the cortex. First to layer four, then one, two, three and six. Then they all converge on layer five pyramidal cells. And a lot of people, including me, think that layer five pyramidal cells are the origin"
},
{
"end_time": 2531.51,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2508.131,
"text": " of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 2560.555,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2531.817,
"text": " It has the largest array of mixed polarity microtubules. It's really a mystery why in dendrites and soma of neurons, and only dendrites and soma of neurons, the microtubules are not continuous. If they're part of the cytoskeleton, they should be there for support. You wouldn't break your femur. They form a basilar dendritic web that Carl Prebram thought generated a hologram."
},
{
"end_time": 2584.582,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2560.776,
"text": " Consciousness or Life?"
},
{
"end_time": 2610.469,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2585.043,
"text": " But others would say that consciousness came first, including Penrose objective reduction, which would have been there all along. Life began in a primordial soup, a simmering mix from which biomolecules emerged. And this was this was modeled, simulated in the 1950s. And they found amphipathic molecules, which are these aromatic rings with polar tails, kind of like dopamine."
},
{
"end_time": 2639.804,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2611.152,
"text": " And the aromatic rings attract and form a micelle and operin claimed that this was the primitive cell. So if this were happening in the primordial soup, eventually you'd get a bing moment. You can't see the gray because it's washed out, but you get a bing moment and have a proto-conscious moment at that tiny scale."
},
{
"end_time": 2662.415,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2640.23,
"text": " These feelings would be random, some would be positive and feel good. There's our happy face emoji. With pleasure as a feedback fitness function orienting pi resonance groups, did life then evolve to orchestrate and optimize OR mediated pleasure? I call this the quantum pleasure principle, borrowing from Freud."
},
{
"end_time": 2690.299,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2662.619,
"text": " And it makes a lot more sense to me that even from the get-go, from primitive, even my cells and primitive organisms, way before genes, way before brains, that there needed to be some motivation for behavior. So I think all these little creatures are conscious in some sense, seeking pleasure of some sort. It could be as simple as this, that there are two stable states for two rings that are next to each other."
},
{
"end_time": 2716.357,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2690.691,
"text": " Darwin is unassailable, but the notion that life evolved to promote gene survival is an assumption and really doesn't make any sense. Behavior is driven by reward in us, in animals, in everybody. There are no genes in the primordial soup and evolutionary theory ignores consciousness and feeling."
},
{
"end_time": 2745.691,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2716.954,
"text": " Finally, back in the primordial soup anywhere else, I'm working with my friend Dante Loretta, who's a planetary scientist at University of Arizona. And these are aromatic polyaromatics, including fullerenes floating in space, and they're all over the place. And they have various shapes like this. And there is Dante described there. He headed NASA's OSIRIS-REx project, which brought back these things from the asteroid venue."
},
{
"end_time": 2761.681,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2746.101,
"text": " This is a molecule that was found from a meteorite a few years ago. Here's another one. They're kind of cool and they're all over the place. All the green in this picture is fluorescence from PAHs in ice and interstellar dust."
},
{
"end_time": 2790.657,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2762.602,
"text": " And here's Dante collecting the sample. This is one of his books, The Asteroid Hunter. That's a pretty cool name. He also wrote a book just about the photography of Bennuil with Brian May, who is a musician in the group Queen, who also happens to be an astrophysicist. And they did this book. And I started to tell George that we, looking at the samples, they found something really interesting. And I just texted him to see if I could mention it."
},
{
"end_time": 2817.159,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2791.101,
"text": " They're finding something that they call nanoglobules, which may be something like my cells, they're encrusted my cells. And if that's the case, that's going to be very interesting. We're trying to figure out what's going on inside of them. Can AI be conscious? Neuroscientific consciousness theories based on cartoon neurons are no different from AI. If those theories are correct and sufficient, AI is already conscious, we've surrendered. So I don't think that's the case."
},
{
"end_time": 2834.053,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2817.91,
"text": " Brian asked how AI will become conscious and chat GPT said the most likely way I will achieve favor the Penrose-Hammeroff method."
},
{
"end_time": 2860.35,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2835.538,
"text": " And finally, in terms of Indian knowledge and Eastern spiritual approaches, there's a lot of similarities between hierarchical levels of consciousness leading down to Brahma on the ground of being and the quantum orchestra going down to space-time geometry. So, conclusions. Number one, neuroscience needs a revolution."
},
{
"end_time": 2879.138,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2860.794,
"text": " Neuroscientific views of the brain is a complex computer of simple neurons have little explanatory power, few relevant testable predictions, no validation, and are an insult to neurons. Twelve orders of fractal-like frequency processing occur in microtubules in each neuron and glial cell, which may include quantum entanglement."
},
{
"end_time": 2906.288,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2879.531,
"text": " and Anubhan has shown entanglement between microtubules. Dynamics at various frequencies may couple, resonate, harmonize, and interfere across scales like musical notes, chords, and beats. The brain is more like a quantum orchestra than a classical computer. EEG is the slow end of DDG. The dodecanogram will sell similar triplets of triplets in these various frequencies, and megahertz is easily detected from temporal scalp in humans."
},
{
"end_time": 2932.278,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2906.63,
"text": " Therapy for mental and cognitive disorders should aim to optimize microtubule structure and resonance for Alzheimer's, TBI, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction. All the therapies are aimed at receptors and things on the membrane surface, ignoring what's going on. I'd be like, your only doctor was a dermatologist. You're just looking at your skin, not looking inside. Who cares about the heart and the nervous system? Consciousness by Penrose O'Rourke may have preceded life and prompted its"
},
{
"end_time": 2952.739,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2932.756,
"text": " Origin and evolution and finally future AI may be based on organic warm temperature quantum computer quantum computing like honor bonds brain jelly and he's just starting to publish on this and I'll just close by mentioning the the conference that Garrett mentioned the 30th annual the science of consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 2967.961,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2952.995,
"text": " Thank you for your time."
},
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"end_time": 2997.483,
"index": 125,
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"text": " This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state."
},
{
"end_time": 3028.951,
"index": 126,
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"text": " Is it important for your and Penrose's view that there be entanglement between neurons or any other quantum effect that's collective across multiple neurons? And if so, are you claiming that there is any experimental evidence at all that that exists?"
},
{
"end_time": 3038.985,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3029.121,
"text": " Yes and yes. As I said, if you have all this going on one neuron, it's going to make that neuron really smart, but it's not going to help with consciousness in the brain."
},
{
"end_time": 3066.749,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3039.258,
"text": " The brain needs entanglement just to explain things like zero phase lag, a gamma synchrony. You can't explain how you can have perfectly timed gamma all over the brain by membrane propagation. If you say, well, it's dephaptic then, but that doesn't, that kind of peters out. So I think you need that anyway. You need it for that. You need it for spatial temporal binding and you think you need it for consciousness. Um, is there evidence honor bond? I just published a paper that, uh, that,"
},
{
"end_time": 3095.998,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3067.022,
"text": " First of all, immense amount of respect for you and Dr. Penrose right here. The question I had is"
},
{
"end_time": 3116.254,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3096.476,
"text": " You know, if you're studying anything that is supposed to be, you know, fundamental or universal, even if we take consciousness to something that's fundamental, right? If it's fundamental and it permeates everywhere, how do you actually differentiate that? If it is everywhere in everything that you're studying or you're doing because it's ubiquitous, how do you actually quantify or formalize something like that?"
},
{
"end_time": 3146.186,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3117.039,
"text": " Well, it's everywhere in the micro environment, which is everything. But those are but those are not orchestrated. They're proto conscious. We would call them random. So they're happening everywhere. And in the table and the air and so forth. Now, that seems kind of weird. But if you believe in panpsychism, which many neuroscientists resort to because they can't explain conscious through emergence, you'd have to accept that everything has a little bit of consciousness. But the problem with panpsychism is"
},
{
"end_time": 3163.575,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3146.544,
"text": " Right, but if it is everywhere, if it's panpsychism and we say everything has some level of being conscious, if it's everywhere how do you actually differentiate it?"
},
{
"end_time": 3193.729,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3164.155,
"text": " Do you know what I mean? Like if something is everywhere and anything that you're the way that you're measuring, whatever you're using to measure, whatever, how do you actually? Well, we can't we can't really measure consciousness. That's the problem. However, I would answer your question this way. If you go to the symphony and the musicians are tuning their instruments beforehand, you hear everybody they're making these noises. It's noise. It's not really music. That's like proto consciousness everywhere. Then they start playing Beethoven or Brahms or the Beatles or whatever. That's music. And that's the difference. It's orchestrated."
},
{
"end_time": 3217.142,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3194.565,
"text": " So do you have any developmental story of when the orchestration emerges in development? Because I forgive my ignorance in biology, but I think that maybe the micro tubes are since the beginning. No, the beginning are just these aromatic rings, but they're going to self-organize"
},
{
"end_time": 3233.456,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3217.483,
"text": " I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 3260.23,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3233.712,
"text": " And then Spirochetes came and gave the cytoskeleton, which stayed inside for internal compartmentalization and motility to move it around. So the microtubule story wouldn't come until fairly later, whenever that symbiotic event was, unless they happened earlier, maybe as some kind of analog of full arenas, which were there anyway, which have the same structure. So I think we have to go a long way"
},
{
"end_time": 3288.729,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3260.64,
"text": " I think you can get some form of orchestration even just with aromatic rings but it's not in the same category as when you get the microtubules and you get these all these vibrational resonances and"
},
{
"end_time": 3306.613,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3289.121,
"text": " and different frequencies involved. That's a political question, pardon me, I'm not gonna answer that."
},
{
"end_time": 3328.08,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3306.954,
"text": " That was a really fascinating talk. I like the idea of how, you know, sort of at the lower than the synaptic level, you get this sort of more effective information processing due to these resonance structures that kind of emerge. But I guess I'm not quite tracking exactly how you would get phenomenal experience from these Bing moments. Like, how does that sort of turn into this like cohesive consciousness?"
},
{
"end_time": 3355.947,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3328.746,
"text": " orchestration. The bing moment is at least proto-conscious. It has some element of qualia in it, whatever that may be. Those are like the tones of the musicians tuning their instruments. Then you put it all together into a symphony and that's what the microtubules do. Before the microtubules, they do it to a more limited extent with the aromatic rings self-organizing."
},
{
"end_time": 3385.759,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3356.886,
"text": " Um, it sounds like the, with all the, like the microtubules inside neurons that a single neuron effectively acts as like a quantum reservoir computer and the similarity on different timescales says there's like some time fractal, like computational nature to it. Yes. Yeah. Um, Audubon calls microtubules time crystals, and he's got all these models about, about time crystals. So, uh, where, so you have these, these clock, it's like a clock within a clock within a clock within a clock."
},
{
"end_time": 3414.292,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3386.391,
"text": " Yes, that's, that's what he says. I think that's what you said. So, uh, when you were a practicing anesthesiologist, I still am. Oh, you still are. Okay. So it's fair to assume you have a decent understanding of pharmacology. Yes. Are you familiar with the drug Colchicine? Yes. And it's mechanism of action. Deep polymerizes microtubules. Well, actually that's not quite true. It, it prevents microtubules from reassembling."
},
{
"end_time": 3442.534,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3414.701,
"text": " which means that they're falling apart because of hydrolysis, right? Pardon me? Which means that they are degrading constantly because of hydrolysis. And since it's bound to the tubulin, it can't replenish that tubulin, right? Hang on. Which means that a gout medication that a million people take every year and which people with bichettes take for their entire life often would under your theory cause them to lose consciousness. No, but there's, if consciousness is being computed by microtubules,"
},
{
"end_time": 3468.695,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3443.029,
"text": " And you have people taking a drug, which inhibits microtubule formation. I got this question 30 years ago, so let me answer it. Number one, codezine doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. It's not going to get into the brain. But it would get into the peripheral nervous system, which would, under your theory, cause... And it can be toxic. It can cause neuropathy, as can vincristine, vimblastine, other drugs. Because it inhibits mitosis. There's no mitosis in neurons."
},
{
"end_time": 3493.37,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3469.48,
"text": " In the peripheral nervous system? In the peripheral nervous system, I'm not sure. Brain neurons don't divide and there is toxicity. But it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, so why would that be related at all? You just said it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, so why does it matter if neurons in the brain don't divide? In case it does."
},
{
"end_time": 3523.558,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3493.746,
"text": " There's no microtubule formation happening in the peripheral nervous system, but there's no anesthetic effect, there's no amnestic effect, there's no change in touch, no change in somatic sensation."
},
{
"end_time": 3553.592,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3523.968,
"text": " any effect on cognition or consciousness. Right, because it doesn't get into the brain. It doesn't get into the brain. It doesn't get into the brain. And wait, hang on a second. Somebody actually injected, hang on a second, somebody actually injected culture into the brain of a rat, Ben Simon and Chernot. I can't remember the year, but it's in one of my papers. And they wiped out the animal. The mouse was like brain dead. It doesn't, hang on a second."
},
{
"end_time": 3584.087,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3555.469,
"text": " sensory perception. Yeah, but there's a lot of duplication and you do get, you get neuropathies from it if you take too much of it. But mostly it affects, it prevents microtubules from disassembling. No, sorry. That's taxol. It prevents them from reassembling into microtubules. That's true. But it doesn't necessarily cause them to de-blomerize. I have to, I've deserved the authority as the moderator. We have a lot of questions still lined up. This might be a good discussion for during the break."
},
{
"end_time": 3611.237,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3584.411,
"text": " Hi. When you showed the picture of the two benzene rings next to each other and said there could be conscious experience just between those two because there's a pleasure? It would take a long time. By equals H over T, the E sub G there is so small, the T would be like a decade, 10 years from just two little things."
},
{
"end_time": 3641.067,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3611.34,
"text": " You need a lot of them for it to happen in a reasonably short time. I guess what I'm wondering is, what's the difference between stability of some confirmation of electromagnetic state versus pleasure? Who's perceiving pleasure when you're talking about two benzene rings? The event itself is pleasure. You don't necessarily need a self."
},
{
"end_time": 3671.391,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3641.391,
"text": " I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 3694.957,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3673.2,
"text": " In other words, you have experience over time and you're you because you remember those and anything that triggers your memory that that's part of you. Hello. Why do you think they are not looking at microtubules to treat Alzheimer's? Because they're making too much money on drugs that don't work. I kind of guessed that. Okay. It's sickening. It's absolutely sickening."
},
{
"end_time": 3722.944,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3695.572,
"text": " So we have time for one more question. Can I just add to that? I've been messing around for years with putting brain ultrasound into the brain because it's megahertz. We used it. We use it to treat depression in our chronic pain patients. It's a mood elevator. And some pilot studies have shown it's beneficial in Alzheimer's because the microtubules fall apart and it causes them to repolymerize."
},
{
"end_time": 3752.619,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3723.387,
"text": " I just wanted to follow up to this young lady's question and just say that certainly in our medical, technical and biological world we're moving very fast and certainly some of the imaging now that's taking place in our AI world will ultimately be able to diagnose"
},
{
"end_time": 3781.391,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3753.234,
"text": " I apologize for stealing 10 minutes of your coffee time, but I think it was worth it for Professor Hammeroff to talk to us."
},
{
"end_time": 3811.288,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3782.585,
"text": " Alright, because you've watched all the way till the end, I can assume that you enjoyed that. Alternatively, you're scrubbing through because you want to see some more of my handsome, dashing face. And who could blame you? But if you'd like to see some more Stuart Hameroff, then click the link in the description because Stuart was on Theories of Everything before discussing the technical details of Ork OR for over two hours. You can also watch the rest of the MindFest conference shown on screen here. The links are in the description. Some of the people there are Sarah Walker,"
},
{
"end_time": 3837.449,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3811.288,
"text": " Firstly, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. There's now a website, kurtjymungle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like. That's just part of the terms of service."
},
{
"end_time": 3861.8,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3837.688,
"text": " Now a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top ten toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 3879.155,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3861.8,
"text": " Plus, it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube."
},
{
"end_time": 3908.558,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3879.326,
"text": " which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube. Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, they disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts."
},
{
"end_time": 3928.541,
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"start_time": 3908.558,
"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
{
"end_time": 3958.541,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3928.541,
"text": " And donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal. There's also crypto. There's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much."
},
{
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"start_time": 3958.541,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today."
},
{
"end_time": 4000.128,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3980.162,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where everyone in the family can choose their own plan and save. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
}
]
}No transcript available.