Danny Jones Podcast - #361 - Evidence of a Soul, NASA’s $1,000,000,000 Study & Awareness at Death | Stuart Hameroff

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Stuart Hameroff is an astrobiologist, retired anesthesiologist and leader of the Science of Consciousness conferences at the University of Arizona. Hameroff is best known for his controversial belief that consciousness originates from quantum states in neural microtubules. SPONSORS https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/DANNY - Use code DANNY to get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup. https://shopmando.com - Use code DANNY to get $5 off your Starter Pack. https://dupe.com - Find similar products for less - 100% free to use. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://x.com/StuartHameroff https://consciousness.arizona.edu/science-consciousness-2026 FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Connection between anesthesia & consciousness 02:14 - How anesthesia works 08:54 - Overdosing vs. underdosing anesthesia 12:31 - Scariest patients to administer anesthesia to 15:45 - Why computers can't replicate consciousness 21:18 - Consciousness & the collapse of the wave function 29:15 - Consciousness is fundamental, not emergent 30:19 - Simulation theory is a "cop-out" 34:29 - NASA's OSIRIS-REx Asteroid sample return mission 40:56 - The origin of life on Earth 42:20 - Microtubules & time crystals 43:58 - Evidence of consciousness in plants 46:27 - Why microtubules could be the source of consciousness 48:25 - Can AI develop consciousness? 53:48 - Psilocybin consciousness experiment 55:08 - What happens to consciousness when the body dies 01:01:53 - Consciousness is controlled by our subconscious 01:03:32 - How evolution is driven by consciousness & pleasure 01:06:47 - Life is the vehicle for consciousness 01:10:32 - How to create consciousness from scratch 01:13:13 - Consciousness in the afterlife & reincarnation 01:15:23 - Consciousness is a hologram 01:17:35 - How psychedelics elevate consciousness 01:23:25 - The logic of dreams 01:25:37 - memories encoded in organ transplants 01:32:07 - How to confirm microtubules hypotheses 01:35:53 - The leading Alzheimer's treatment is a scam 01:41:41 - Top Alzheimer's treatment researchers VANISHED 01:44:20 - New theoretical Alzheimer's cure 01:50:08 - Beneficial effects of ultrasound therapy 01:53:58 - Dangers of ultrasound technology 01:59:18 - New study on ultrasound on the brain 02:06:11 - Proof of ultrasound reversing Alzheimer's 02:09:10 - Quantum consciousness + parapsychology 02:16:42 - Neuron biology & why the brain is more than a computer 02:20:09 - Suspicious movement of plasma ball lightning 02:23:18 - Anesthesia vs. the corona effects Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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How does an anesthesiologist get so deep into this consciousness stuff? Actually, I got interested in consciousness first in undergraduate back in the 60s, and then I went to medical school and was interested in brain-mind specialties like neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry, but they didn't grab me from the lifestyle standpoint. I didn't like what they did on a day-to-day basis. I did research in a cancer lab and studied how cells divide and how. how the chromosomes are perfectly separated in exact daughter pairs and for mitosis, and then they go on and divide again and again.

And everybody else in the lab got interested in the chromosomes, the genes, but for some reason I got interested in the structures that pulled them apart and separated them, mitotic spindles made of microtubules. They seem to have some kind of intelligence, some kind of consciousness, and I'd been interested in consciousness from before. and so I got fixated on the microtubules. Everybody in the lab went into the chromosomes, the genes, and probably genetic engineering and whatnot.

But I stuck with the microtubules, and I then went to Arizona for an internship and wound up going into anesthesia because my future chairman said, if you want to understand consciousness, figure out how anesthesia works. And by the way, microtubules are deplomerized by anesthesia, which turned out to be true.

They're what? they're deplomerized. If you give enough anesthesia and too much, more than you need to go to sleep, your microtubules will fall apart. And the microtubules are the cytoskeleton inside all cells, including neurons. So neurons are quite full of them.

And if you give about five times too much anesthesia, which you wouldn't want to do, the microtubules would disassemble. And that was done in simple organisms that they didn't care about. But it made a connection between microtubles, anesthesia, and consciousness that I pursued. And finally figured out, along with others,

that anesthesia acts on microtubules, not on neuronal membrane receptors, like most people think. Interesting. How does anesthesia actually work? What is the mechanism there? Well, that's a very good question. Nobody knows for sure.

We know that in the 1800s, a group of gases were discovered, which, when inhaled at low concentrations caused euphoria, caused euphoria, giddiness. And this was like diethyl ether. So they had parties called ether frolics where everybody sniffed a little bit of ether,

danced around, acted stupid, and fell over. Or nitrous oxide laughing gas, the same thing. Yeah. And they realized that if they gave more than they did fall over, become unconscious, and as long as you didn't give too much, and as long as they didn't vomit and aspirate and a few other things,

they woke up perfectly fine. And so it began to be used for surgery. They gave enough anesthesia to put the guy to sleep. They would take out a tumor. The first one was done on a big neck mass at Mass General in 1846. And it started to be used for anesthesia for surgical procedure. That was the first time it was used 1846. Right.

Wow. And I'm sure it took a while before we actually got it right. Because it's a scary thing, anesthesia. That's why the anesthesiologist paid the most, right? We deserve it. Thank you. I was an anesthesiologist for 49 years. I retired about two years ago.

But yeah, it's a great field. And it is. You have to be very, very careful. A lot of things could go wrong. And especially as we do sicker and sicker patients with older, you know, like even in my career, we did more and more elderly sicker patients with complex disease. And, you know, and the interplay between the heart and the lungs and the kidney and the liver and everything else comes into play. But basically, you got to like not give too much and maintain. the airway and make sure they're hydrated and et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, it is a very demanding

rigorous field. As far as how anesthesia works, that's a good question. And the interesting thing is that the anesthetic molecules are all different, but they do exactly the same thing. They affect consciousness and very little else in the brain. So for example, if you put someone to sleep, they're unconscious, but the brain is still active. The brain is still working. So for example, if we're doing surgery. Working as if they're conscious? No, they're not conscious. But for example, let's say we're doing a spinal surgery.

So the surgeon is operating on the spinal cord in the neck. And we want to make sure he doesn't do something to the spinal cord because the patient would be paralyzed, wake up paralyzed. Like put a screw through the bone too far or this or that. So we monitor or we have people come in who monitor the physiological effects. So they put electrodes on the feet or the hands, stimulate and record from the brain. so the signal has to go through the spinal cord. And we do that, and we can do the anesthetics such that they're unconscious,

but these sensory evoked potentials they're called are still going on. So the brain is processing these signals. The spinal cord is intact. So that's good. As long as that happens, the surgeon keeps going. And if it gets too close or squeezes the cord or cuts off the blood supply, the guys say, hey, we just lost the sensory evoked potential, pull back or do something. and he fixes it.

So it's very effective and useful. And it shows that the brain is, the patients are unconscious, but their brains are still active. And we know that from other reasons. The EEG is still there, just slow. And all this that continues is that the, is happening at the membrane surface of the neurons.

So neurons are usually considered to be integrate and fire. So they receive inputs, integrate to a threshold, and then fire and output. So very much like a, computer chip or transistor with an input output mechanism only at the membrane and and that's how most people think and the membrane effects are mediated by receptors and ion channels and so everybody assumed anesthesia must work on the membranes and membrane receptors and ion channels but that turned out

not to be the case because as i just told you the membrane receptors and ion channels continue to work but the patient can be unconscious so what's happening well uh if you if you look inside there are these structures microtubules that I had become interested in, and that's where they act, as it turns out. So is there a fundamental difference between the state of the brain when they are under anesthesia, when a human is under anesthesia, versus when they're sleeping? Oh, yeah, it's quite different. When you go to sleep, if somebody pokes you or takes a knife to you, God forbid, you'd wake up and you'd feel it.

And anesthetized patients don't respond and don't feel it if they're adequately anesthetized. And sleep is not well understood either, but it's more of probably a membrane effect or some hormonal effect, something just chilling out the neuron and making it inactive. But it's arousable. If you stimulate, they respond. Right. Yeah. A weird thing about anesthesia is I've experienced it a few times is it's like an instant. From the moment you fall asleep, it's like you wake up one second later.

Correct. Time does not pass under anesthesia, which is a very interesting thing because. The whole nature of time is another mystery. We don't know, at least the flow of time. You know how we have an arrow of time, well, we only go forwards in time instead of backwards. And when you go to sleep at night and you wake up in the morning, you can kind of guess I was to sleep a few hours,

I was asleep in a long time. But when you wake up from anesthesia, you have no clue. It could be 30 seconds or three hours. Yeah. You don't have a sense of time. Time stops flowing under anesthesia. Yeah, I've heard of, I've heard many funny theories about anesthesia, one of them being like, what if, what if anesthesia wasn't really putting you unconscious?

What if it was just wiping your memory? Like, what if when you wake up, you were awake during all that shit? They just erased your memory and you have no memory of it because that's what it feels like. Well, since we can't directly measure consciousness, I can't say for sure you're conscious. I'm pretty sure you are, but I can't prove it. I might be an NPC. You could be what's called a zombie, a philosophical zombie, someone who acts like us but doesn't have internal consciousness.

And there was this, and there is also this horrible situation of awareness under anesthesia that's usually a mistake. Like you quite literally run out of gas or you're not paying attention enough and surgeon gets near something more painful and the patient responds or feels it. And occasionally the patients can be paralyzed with muscle relaxants. And we do that so that to get through muscles for various types of surgery. And patients have woken up or come back and said, I was awake the whole time.

What? And there are very rare occasional, you know, they're basically pilot error. You know, usually somebody screws up. But then again, there's also a lot of cases where we do, they're not intended to go to sleep. Let's say you're gonna have a lump or a bump taken off and the surgeon will numb that up.

And then we give you propofal to have you go to sleep, but it's a very light propofal. So you'll keep breathing. We don't have to work. about that. And that's not designed to have you completely asleep. And a lot of people say, well, yeah, I heard them talking. I was awake the whole time or they go in and out. And that's okay because they're not supposed to, they don't need to be asleep because they're not going to feel it because wherever the lump or bump is, is already numb. Or like epidurals, things like that.

Spirals, yeah. Spinal tops. Exactly. Spinal anesthesia, epidural, local nerve blocks of various kind of the arm, the leg. You can do all kinds of things now, field blocks. And, you know, you don't feel anything and then we put you to sleep because you don't want to lay there bored and anxious for an hour or two or three or... Right.

So then we just give you purple fall sedation and you know, and it's actually good if you wake up a little bit, move around and so forth. And you don't really need to be asleep because you're not going to feel it anyway. So a lot of people say,

yeah, I remember I was awake the whole time. So that is sometimes taken as, you know, failed anesthetic, but it's not. However, as I said, there are occasional horrible situations where a patient is awake due to pilot error. And it's never happened to me.

Personally, in my practice, I always erred on the side of a little extra because, you know, it's like a bell-shaped curve. So if you're right at the dose, one standard error of patients are going to be, standard deviation are going to be inadequately necessary. So you want to err on the side of. And fortunately, it's a good. You'd rather overdose them than underdose them. As long as you don't go too far.

So that's the art. That's where it comes in. You want to make sure they're asleep, but not too asleep. Whenever I've woken up from anesthesia, I felt like I got hit by a truck. It takes me, I feel like twice as long as normal people. I'm nauseous afterwards. I want to throw up. Like, I probably got overdosed.

Well, nausea, you can usually prevent, it depends on what the procedure is and also the patient. But, you know, we can give other drugs that prevent nausea specifically. And propofal, which has become the go-to drug for induction. for going to sleep, which got a very bad rap because of Michael Jackson, but it's actually a fantastic drug. And most people wake up feeling good with very little, if any, pain, no nausea, and a little euphoria and occasionally even erotic dreams when they wake up. Erotic dreams for Propheaval. Yeah, that's kind of a trade secret, but it does happen.

Interesting. Steve, put that on the grocery list. So how long were you doing this for? How long? Have you practiced anesthesiology? 49 years. 49 years. I was going to go for 50, but I figured I'm not going to press my luck. That would be just for show. Was there any specific type of surgery you would be involved in, or was it all types?

During the course of my career, I did all types, and including when I was younger, cardiac, pediatrics, a lot of neurosurgery, some OB. And after a while, the cardiac, the heart anesthesia became specialized, and we had people who just did nothing but that. Same thing with Peds. So over the course of my career, I became more of a generalist, which was fine by me.

But over the course of my career, I did pretty much everything, including newborns, the scariest, because you have very little margin for errors. So now we have people who do nothing but very, very tiny babies. Oh my God, I can't imagine. And pediatric hearts are probably the toughest.

Pediatric hearts. Yeah, because you've got to go on bypass and you've got to do this and that. So it's very technical and very, very precise. And you have much less margin for error, the smaller the patient. How crazy was the training?

Like, I imagine, I've heard stories of neurosurgeons talking about their, like doing their residency and practicing in hospitals doing brain surgery with no power. Like you have to imagine the whole building loses power.

We still have to freaking cut this guy's head open and do a craniotomy on them. Well, every OR I've been in, I've ever been in Hezabaca power system. And occasionally we've had a power system. You know, the lights go out, but usually within about three to five seconds they come back on. So I've never been in a situation that I can remember where they were

off for a long enough, a very long period. Yeah, we had this guy, Jack Cruz in here as a former brain surgeon, and he said that if the building, he was sitting in the room with me and we had like a bag of power tools in the corner. And he's like, if we lost power right now and I to do a craniotomy on you, I could find a tool in here to cut your head up. I'm like, Jesus Christ. You got to be resourceful, I guess. It's 2026 and it's a new year, which means replacing old, destructive habits with new productive ones. Prize picks has really filled that gap because it always feels good to be right. With huge football games every weekend and nonstop hoop action during the week, there's always something to bet on. And prize picks lets you stay locked in. What I like about prize picks

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Yeah. So I was an academic anesthesiologist. So I worked at the university. So part of my job was doing research. So when I was early in my career, I worked four days in the OR and had a day off for research. And after a while, things got tough and you had to have, get your own funding.

But I've always had some time for research while I'm also doing anesthesia. And I was interested in consciousness. So I started studying how anesthesia works. I was interested in basic mechanisms and I was interested in microtubules. So I did a lot of computer modeling of microtubules as information processing to see how they could compute and process information. And I worked with physicists. Before I met Roger Steen Rasmussen, who was at Los Alamos, a nonlinear chaos theory guy and Jack Tussinski and some other people,

and published a lot on microtubal information processing, mostly from the theoretical standpoint. and then got a new experimentation later. So I was going around to NeuralNet and AI meetings. The point was that most people say the brain is a complex computer of simple neurons. So each neuron would fire or not fire, and that would be like a bit, like a one or a zero in a computer. And at synapses, so if you had enough complex computation, you would get consciousness emerging. at a higher level of complexity. And that was and remains the standard explanation.

And I didn't think that was right because if you look at a single cell, so a neuron is a cell, so it can fire or not, but if you look at one cell like a paramecium or an amoeba or a tetrahmin or all these simple one-cell creatures, they're quite clever. They can swim around, they have cilia made of microtubules

that swim them around or sense. And so if they can avoid a option, They can avoid predators. They can find food. They can find a mate. They can have sex. Two paramecium fuse actually and have sex. And they can learn.

If you suck them in a capillary tube, they escape faster each time. So a paramecium is fairly clever. I'm not saying it's conscious. Actually, it could be, but at a very slow rate. But it's intelligent. It has some, it has information processing. So if a, I ask my colleagues, you know, if you were going to going to design a machine, a computer to do what a paramecium does, you need an enormous computer.

You know, how are you going to do that? Whereas you're saying that each neuron is a one or a zero, that's a big insult to neurons. So that was a point I was making. I was going to neural net meetings and AI meetings. And for example, they were trying to reproduce consciousness in a computer, assuming that there were a hundred billion neurons, which is about right, with a thousand synapses at 100 hertz, gives you 10 to the 16th operations per second. So that was the capacity of the brain

according to the singularity, Ray Kurzweil and all those guys. And they said, well, we have a computer with 10 to the 16th ops per second. We'll have brain equivalence. Everything the brain does, including consciousness. Well, they went past that years ago.

But I was saying that, no, if you look inside each neuron, there's about a billion tubulins at oscillating at 10 megahertz, radio frequency, oscillation frequency. So you have 10 to the 16th operations. billion microtubules per neuron? A billion tubulence.

The proteins that make up the microtubulose. So maybe hundreds of microtubules, depending on it. And so a billion tubulence oscillating in megahertz gives you 10 to the 16th ops per second per neuron, which is what the singularity people were saying for the whole brain. So I was saying, no, your target's way, way downstream. You know, they were going to a funding agency, give us a few more a billion or trillion and we'll have conscious computers. And I was saying, no, bullshit. it, that's the capacity of one neuron, you know, your target's way, way downstream. They didn't like that very much. They basically told me, you know, get out of here, who are you? And what do you

know? And I said, well, I study the brain, you know. So one day somebody said, okay, wise guy, let's say you're right. How would that explain consciousness? You know, love, feelings, joy, pain, pleasure, all this and that, it doesn't automatically come from computation. And this later became known as the hard problem by philosopher David Chalmers. And when it was posed to me, I think it was probably 1990, I didn't have an answer. I realized I was a reductionist and I had been saying that consciousness came from information processing and microtubules, but I didn't have a mechanism for consciousness. Information processing, yes. Intelligence, yes. Computation, yes. Consciousness, no. It's a different thing. So fortunately, this person suggested I read a book.

by Roger Penrose called the Emperor's New Mind, which I did. And he had a mechanism for consciousness based on a quantum mechanism, quantum collapse. So I read this in about 91, 92, and the first part was about how consciousness can't be a computation. He used something called Gertl's theorem, which basically says a mathematical theorem cannot prove itself.

You have to be outside the system to judge, like a mathematician can say, okay, that theorem is true or not. You need to be outside the theorem. And so Roger extrapolated that to say that understanding, conscious understanding, has to be outside the system. So there must be something other than our classical computation.

And that other has to be quantum, because that's all there is outside of classical. If you, once you get outside classical physics, you're in quantum physics. So he said there must be a quantum explanation for consciousness. And by the way, that explanation would also solve what's called the measurement problem.

in quantum mechanics, which is a whole other problem, but turns out they're related. So in quantum mechanics, okay, let me back up on this. So we have basically two worlds. We have our classical world that we're familiar with. Material world? Material world, right. And where things are predictable,

things are in one place at the same time, follow Newton's laws, Maxwell's equations, and are fairly large, although the size, the exact cutoff is vague, and that's a problem. But then if you go small, we know that things can be in multiple places at the same time. A particle can be here, here, and here at the same time. And yet if we measure it or observe it,

it collapses to one or the other. So this is called collapse of the wave function. Yeah. So in the quantum world, the observer effect. Yes, so if we measure it, or some people said consciously observe it, then it collapses. So that led to the idea that consciousness causes collapse of the wave function, or consciousness collapses the wave function.

And that was the first idea. Then other people had other ideas that each possibility, that there was no collapse, each possibility evolved and formed its own universe, leading to an infinite number of overlapping universes, the many-world's hypothesis. And a lot of people believe that because you don't have to deal with consciousness, you don't have to deal with collapse. And all you have to deal with is the infinite number of overlapping universes, which doesn't seem to bother them. It seems kind of silly to me, but a lot of people believe that. Meaning that every decision that we make during the day gets branches off into its own universe.

And the opposite, the alternative decision has its own universe too. So if you order pizza for lunch in another universe, you ordered turkey sandwich, something like that. I mean, a lot of people actually believe that. But Roger Penrose said that he came along with, among another set of explanations which are called objective reductions, in which there's an objective threshold for reduction of the wave function. So in other words, reduction or collapse,

the same thing, occurs spontaneously due to a law of nature, which he derived from the uncertainty principle at a time, t equals H bar over E, which is the amount of superposition. So that any superposition would hit the threshold and then collapse. And when that happened, and here was the real kicker, there would be a moment of experience,

of conscious or proto-conscious awareness, if it was really small and random. So rather than consciousness causing collapse, which had been around for at least 100 years or so back then, it was the opposite. Collapse occurred spontaneously and caused consciousness. So it was the first and remains the only source of consciousness ever put forth,

other than hand-waving emergence. You get complex enough and consciousness happens without any explanation of why. So it was a true mechanism and it put consciousness at the very basic fundamental of the universe because he related, well, the first question he addressed, which is still amazing to me, how can things be in multiple places at the same time? How can a particle be here, here, here, and here at the same time? And for that, he resorted to using Einstein's general relativity with spacetime curvature.

So Einstein realized that there was a spacetime metric. that mass was related, mass was related to curvature in space time. So this underlying metric or spacetime continuum. And if it curved enough, you had mass. So he said, well, okay, something like the sun, which is obviously massive, would have a big curvature. And therefore, you should be able to see stars on the other side of the sun here on earth because the light would be curved around the sun and we'd see it here on Earth.

And so Eddington in 1919 did went during an eclipse, went to a mountaintop and observed stars that were known to be behind the sun, which was blocked out by an eclipse. So he wasn't blinded. And he saw these stars that were known to be behind the sun because spacetime curved it and he saw them. And he proved Einstein's general relativity. And Eddington won a Nobel Prize. Wow. Einstein had already won his. And there's a great picture of the two of them.

I'm having a drink over it. So that was, yeah, there it is. You can see that the path of the starlight is bent around the sun, and we can see it on Earth. So that's Eddington's experiment. So that's for very big things. So Penrose applied it to tiny things. He said, well, a quantum particle, a proton or electron or an atom,

would have a tiny curvature. And if that proton was here and here, two places, it'd be two tiny curvatures. And that would mean that there was actually a separation in space-time geometry, which he showed in these very clever two-dimensional diagrams so we can envision what it looked like. And so a superposition of being in two places at once was actually kind of a shredding or a blistering or separation in the fabric of the universe.

And you can imagine that if each of these evolved, you'd get multiple universes. Each one would have its own universe. So he said, no, the separation is unstable, and after this time, T will collapse to one or the other, giving off a moment of consciousness. So not only explaining a mechanism for consciousness, but avoiding the need for multiple worlds and solving the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. It wasn't the conscious observer. It wasn't many worlds. It was this objective threshold that happened that gave you consciousness. So it was kind of taking two problems, killing two birds with one stone or feeding two birds

with one hand and you got both. But nonetheless, it was ridiculed. Stephen Pinker and David Chommer's kind of said, sure, one's a mystery, the other's a mystery. Let's make them the same mystery. You know, as a derisive ridicule. But actually, when you think about it, you know, Occam's Razor, you want the simplest explanation so if you have one solution to do grant to two grand mysteries i think that's a good thing and i think that's what roger discovered that so he put together general relativity and quantum mechanics

and got consciousness was actually three mysteries uh with one one potential solution it's a new year and that means it's time to leave behind those old stinky routines and you don't want to be stinking up your future plans with old dirty deodorant choices that's why i choose Mando. And if you order using my code, you get 20% off site wide. From your pits to your package and everything in between, Mando controls body odor for 72 hours, which is perfect for intense shoppers. It's clinical strength, two times better than the standard. And after just 12 hours, sweat was reduced by 92%. And it doesn't just mask odor. It prevents it. 100% of study participants experienced all-day odor protection. And that's why I use Mando. My favorite is their new deodorant plus sweat control. solid stick. It is absolutely pleasant in hot situations. I highly recommend their bourbon leather flavor. It's sensational. Some men mask their B-O with scents. Mando men get the job done right. Don't mask it. Mando it. Available at retailers near you or head on over to shopmando.com. Because for a limited time, new customers get 20% off site-wide with our exclusive code.

Use code Danny, D-A-N-N-Y at shopmando.com for 20% off sitewide plus free shipping. S-H-O-M-A-N-D-O.com. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Mando's got you covered. With deodorant plus long-lasting sweat control, say goodbye to sweat stains, and hello to long-lasting freshness. So consciousness is not, it's analogous to like electricity on a circuit board, right? It's not, it's fundamental in our, in our universe. It's not necessarily created from the ground up.

It's fundamental in the universe. I don't know about electricity because that's a, it's certainly related. It's something like that, but it is fundamental. I put it along, you know, mass. Electricity is not created in the circuit board. Correct. Right. I think of it, you know, mass, spin, charge, things like that are fundamental.

So electricity would be made of fundamental charges that are moving. in a current or have a field. So it's fundamental, like those things, it's not emergent. So emergent means it comes out of other stuff getting complicated. Fundamental means it was there all along. And consciousness like mass spinner charge and a bunch of other cosmological constants are intrinsic to the universe and somehow encoded or embedded in fundamental space-time geometry, which Roger Penrose happens to be the world's expert on,

on what that actually looks like and what it does. So what's your take on simulation theory then? I was talking about that with my friend Susan Schneider at Florida Atlantic University. I don't like it. I don't buy it. No, I think it's a cop-out. If you can't explain consciousness, then you make up this story that there's something or some entity or some God or some guy or something that created us and we're all in a simulation. But yet we're conscious, so you still have to explain conscious.

So I don't buy it. I love a lot of people do. Yeah, well, you can't disprove it, right? There's no way to actually disprove that we are in a simulation. Well, no, but you could prove what consciousness is without it, which is what we're trying to do. And, you know, I think it's a default position. You could say, you know, the moon is made of green cheese until somebody went to the moon and said, hey, it's not. It's rocks and dust.

So I think, you know, eventually that can be disproved, but we have to explain consciousness first. That would be the key. I had this guy explain to me how basically information is how the world, the universe that we live in, how information is basically in a computational cloud, an all dark matter is a computational cloud that we live in, which would somehow explain that we live in a simulation. And the way he described this to me was with using, he used the analogy of a hard drive. And in the universe, we're bound by the laws of entropy,

where entropy always goes up over time since the heat death of the universe. And in a hard drive, a blank hard drive, it is very low entropy. It's either all ones or it's all zeros. Now, once you take information on it and you put information on that hard drive, now it's going to be a chaotic mess of ones and zeros

because it has data stored on it. So the entropy went up and it has all this data, but you can erase a hard drive. So when you erase all that hard drive, it goes back to very low entropy, all ones or all zeros. Now, there was someone who theorized that, I forget who the person's name is right now, um, that if you weighed all of the, if you took all the hard drives and data centers that exist on the face of the earth right now and you calculated all of the, um, all of the data on it, it would have mass, very low. little mass though. I think it was like less than a kilogram of mass with all the data stored

on all the hard drives around the world. If it is true that this data that is stored on these hard drives does is mass, that would mean that data equals mass. And if data equals mass and you can erase the hard drive, that that mass has to leave the hard drive and go out into the universe. Well, you cover a lot of ground there. Let me go back to entropy because as you say, say it seems to be the enemy of life. Life has to overcome entropy. So let's go back to how does a microtubule form? Microtubule is made of tubulence, individual proteins. If you set the calcium and pH and other things just to write the the tubulence will self-assemble into this crystalline lattice of a microtubule. So that would seem to be decreasing entropy, right? Because it's going from a bunch of

stuff and solution to this crystal, crystal and lattice. However, it's entropy-driven because each tubulin has eight ordered waters on it when it's in solution. And if it joins to another one, it loses some of those ordered waters. And then if you form a lattice, it loses even more. And so the number of ordered waters goes down, and the entropy actually goes up as the crystal assembles. So you get this elaborate crystal lattice. which is entropy driven because of the ordered water. So biology is very clever, actually, is the point,

and has figured out a way. And why does biology do anything? This is kind of a changing the subject a little bit, but why, you know, I got interested in the origin of life. And when I retired from anesthesia, I went into astrobiology with my colleague, Dante Loretta looking for the origin of life. And why did, you know, his big thing is,

why did life start? And he was in charge of a NASA probe that went to an asteroid and brought back these organic molecules that were looking at for signs of life and consciousness. Did they find it? We're working on it. They sent a probe to an asteroid. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And it brought it back and we're studied. What year? It landed a year and a half ago. Oh, wow. And it was a 20-year project, seven years in flight. Dante was a young assistant to the boss when it started. Mike Drake, he was a professor at University of Arizona. they got a billion dollars from NASA.

They made the plan. They picked the asteroid. And then unfortunately, Mike got sick and passed away. And Dante became the chief of the project at a very young age. He's still pretty young. He's in his 50s. And it was a 20-year project. Was there a name?

Osiris Rex. Osiris-R-S-N-A-NASA. Yeah, I forget the OSIR-I-S-R-E-E-E-A. I can't remember what it stands for, but it was a big success. And they just recently found sugars on Osiris Rex. There it is. So Osiris Rex is the name of the asteroid? Yeah.

No, no. Osiris Rex is the name of the probe. Of the probe. Of the project. Click on all, Steve. Oh, this is the project. Sugars discovered in Benu. Benu was the asteroid.

And this was just discovered recently. He sent samples all over the world. So there's labs all over the world studying this. Oh, my God. That's crazy. We're interested in looking for, for, uh, signs of quantum oscillations in organic molecules. Now, life is based on organic chemistry, which in organic rings are these carbon rings

with hydrocarbon aromatic quantum optical effects. And they're all over the sky, they're all over the universe. They're produced by young stars and they're the basis of life on Earth because they come here in asteroids, or in meteorites, rather. How far away is this asteroid? It was a quote unquote near-earth asteroid, but it took seven years. Three years to get there. They circled for a year or maybe four, I forget, four or five years to get there.

They circled for a year, picked a spot, and then one, and they had one shot at it. And this thing had to come down and scoop up organic materials. And if it goes too far, it goes right through the asteroid because an asteroid is just a bunch of rocks that are held together by very weak gravity. So if you hit it too hard, you go right through and come out the other side. What? Yeah. So but so they it was and they couldn't do it directly because it took minutes, many minutes to get the signal back to Earth. So they couldn't sit there and say, okay, now do this.

It all had to be pre-programmed on contingency. And all they could do is, you know, cross their fingers and hope. And it worked like, it worked perfectly. And they, they have a simulation. and they have a video from after the fact after what happened. And it went down, it scooped it up, closed the thing, the thing closed, retracted, went back, and the thing was able to close. They were worried that it wouldn't close perfectly, but it did.

And they got 120 grams of carbonaceous material, which is a treasure trove, because they found everything they were hoping for, including not all, but most of the amino acids, including the, aromatic amino acids, which are the true building, building blocks of life, and other stuff, including sugars that they just found. Sugars? Yeah, deoxyribos. That was that headline you just saw.

They just found that recently. Somebody elsewhere around the world who's been looking at these samples. Wow. Sugars discovered in bender samples, third from the left there. So that was just in the last few days. But previously they found aromatic amino acids and cells and, and, you know, and cells, and, Go back, Steve, click on overview on the bottom, bottom right. Wow, Astero study sample return mission visited and collected samples from the 101-955 Benu,

a carbonaceous near-earth asteroid. The material returned in September 2023 is expected to enable scientists to learn more about the formation and evolution of the solar system, the initial stages of planet formation. Wow, I wonder how fast this thing was going. Does it say? I don't know. It was pretty fast, and they caught up to it. they got behind it and then they went into orbit around it. Oh, look at this. I think it says right here.

It's hyperbolic escape speed from Earth was about 5.1 kilometers or 3.36 miles per second. Okay. So that thing was going way slower than the AI Atlas. That's crazy. That's crazy they can get something to go that fast and freaking land on it. Yeah. Well, they didn't actually land. And they scooped it up and then turned around and it came home.

And it took two years to get home. And it came down in the Utah Desert with a parachute. And Dante was on the team that met him there. And I watched it on NASA TV. And it was a little bit nerve-wracking because the thing disappeared. It turned out in retrospect that the main shoot didn't open. And so they're waiting for it. It's kind of like, you know, that movie Apollo 13,

where they're waiting for it to come out of the clouds and they're waiting and waiting and waiting. and this was they were really waiting and it was overdue and and there's dante told me later okay he figured it it had crashed already or something because it turned out the shoot didn't open but the drogue shoots open and that did the trick and it landed gently in the Utah desert and i watched on NASA tv as as Dante was in a helicopter they came and he got out and he went over and he looked at it and they brought it home and it it went directly to Houston where they started opening it very carefully and were really happened they were hoping for 60 grams and they got

120 there was one previous mission to an asteroid by the Japanese to a different a different asteroid and and they got I think two grams and they were thrilled with that and Dante's project got 120 so and among other things they found what looked like cells so the origin of life on earth is basically thought to be in the primordial soup with things called my cells, which are primitive cells, where you have kind of a liquid environment with proteins which fluoresce with some layering around it, like a biological cell. And they found these in the asteroid. And the coating around these, they're not lipids. It's, they're actually carbon. And inside there's a liquid with which fluoresces. So if it fluoresces, that means it has

these aromatic rings, which is what we're looking for, because that's essential to life. And it gives you quantum effects, quantum optical effects. So what we hope to do is, what we started to do is look at the quantum effects in these samples and we're gonna see if they respond to anesthesia. Because if they respond in a way- Really? That's, yeah, we wanna, we first wanna look for quantum oscillations,

which would be kind of a sign of life. And if that's the case, then it should be, if consciousness was relevant at that time, which we think, it was then it would be inhibited by the anesthesia proportional to the anesthetic potency. So one anesthetic that's a three times as potent than the other, you need one third as much. And you do that for all the anesthetics. If they all line up, you can make the argument that there was some primitive consciousness there. So that's what we're hoping to do.

And we're also looking for the patterns of the dynamic oscillations because we think there should be like fractal dynamics where you have oscillation patterns occurring at different frequencies with the same dynamics with the same pattern. That would give you what's called a time crystal, which we think is the key to life. So we're looking for time crystal behavior in these samples. And microtubules are time crystals. So we're trying to make that connection,

not necessarily in a microtubuleous, but into something general and universal for life and consciousness, which would be time crystal behavior. So quantum oscillations that are inhibited by anesthesia. That's what we're looking for. Never heard of a time crystal before. That's crazy.

Actually, they're an interesting story. they were hypothesized by Frank Wilczek who won a Nobel Prize for the strong force, the nuclear forces, I forget, earlier. And then in 2012, he proposed that like a spatial crystal repeats spatially, and you have the same configuration, a time crystal would be a dynamic that would repeat in different frequencies. So repeat in hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahhertz, every thousand. That's exactly what we found in microtubules

by my colleague, Anurban Bandiapagia over the last 15 years. So he came up with the idea that microtubles are time crystals, and we just finished the paper. We just submitted it. Anurban, Dante and I proposing microtubles as time crystals, and the implications of that for life and consciousness because microtubles are in all cells, all animal and plant cells, and they could be the key to everything.

Oh, yeah. anesthesia works on plants, right? Yes, it does. And plants have microtubules. That's bizarre. And I think plants can be conscious. So I get kind of ridiculed by this. You think a plant is like, what are you nuts?

Well, yeah, because, well, I'm not nuts, but yeah, I believe that. Because, for example, we have enough microtubules so we could have these collapses leading to consciousness at about 10 million per second. A plant might have a couple per second. So, you know, we're 100 million times more conscious than a plant. And same with single-cell organisms. They would also have very simple slope. But for them, you know, even if you have one every 10 seconds, that's still better than nothing.

And you're not conscious in between. So they may not care. There's a book that was written by a former CIA analyst where he was a polygrapher. And he was bored at the office one day. and he saw a plant sitting in the corner of the office and he hooked up his polygraph to this plant somehow. And he lit a cigarette or something and he noticed like the polygraph starting to jump.

So then I think he actually lit the plant on fire and the thing went off the charts, which I think that leads into more of this. Cleve Baxter, that's who it was. Yeah. What's the actual story? There's been a lot of stuff like this. The Secret Life of Plants was a book when I was in college.

I think that my mind. It might have been his book. Yeah, it might have been. It was rejected by the scientific community. Imagine that. Yeah, well, my friend Rajneesh Kana is studying plants. And for example, you know, like the sunflowers follow the sun. And a Venus flytrap will eat a bug if it's in there.

And you can anesthetize that. And you can put anesthesia on the Venus flytrap and put the bug there. won't do anything or you can stimulate it. You take away that response and you block the sunflowers from moving. Wow. And it's working on the microtubules in the stem root area that turn the plant and something else in the Venus flat traps. So he's going to present at our conference, the science of consciousness.

We're going to have a session on what can be conscious going from animals, plants, ET, AI, quantum AI, organoids, microtubules, et cetera, et cetera. So how many people, is this an agreed upon thing that the microtubules are directly responsible or directly working with consciousness? No. No. Everybody, you know, there's, we're a minority. We have 99% of the evidence on our side. They don't have any evidence.

I mean, the alternative basically is a bunch of theories that rely on what I call cartoon neurons. Okay. They take a schematic of a neuron or just the, very basic principle of the Hodge conuxley neuron, integrate and fire to a threshold algorithmic, only using the membranes. So it only one low frequency hurts, like EEG. And if you put enough of those together, you can sort of make a toy computer out of it. And that's what they say consciousness comes from from emergence of complex computation amongst simple cartoon neurons, which I think is ridiculous. And then AI got in the business. And of course, AI wants us to

believe that machines can be conscious. And because, well, for various reasons, because rich people want to download their consciousness into a computer, which I think is folly. And also maybe we'll be more accepting of AI running governments and religions and education, who knows what, which I think would be a horrible thing. So AI is funding a lot of these cartoon neuron labs. And they're the, you know, they've opposed. us strenuously. And it's got to be a big political argument. And I maintain that we have all

the evidence and that, you know, they have all the money in the clout. And they tend to ridicule and ignore us. But, you know, we're coming on strong. And I think the evidence from anesthesia will make the difference. And we have a lot of other evidence. And so I feel pretty good about it, even though we're definitely outnumbered. So if you ask most things, most people would say, oh, those guys are nuts. So what is there? Can you elucidate or steal man their argument for how sentient AI can become conscious? I think it's bullshit. Right, but can you summarize their hypothesis of how it would work?

What is their argument? Emergence complexity that, well, their argument is that consciousness is a computation, which is what Roger proved wrong in 1989. He didn't prove it, but he argued strongly that it was wrong. and they ignore that and say it has to be computation. And I say, well, if you say, well, how do you know that? They say, well, what else could it be? And I don't think it's a computation at all.

And I don't even think the brain is technically speaking a computer. Then you say, okay, what is it? Well, consciousness is more like music than computation. And the brain is more like an orchestra. In fact, a quantum orchestra than it is a computer. And that's because it acts at not just it hertz, but it kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahhertz, petterhertz, and probably faster, faster, all the way down in a spacetime geometry.

And when you do that, at some point, you cross into the quantum level, and that's where consciousness happens. It can actually shift. So all these events happening at these different frequencies are kind of like notes and chords in music, and which are orchestrated by the microtubles in the brain acting collectively as time crystals synchronously to give us consciousness. So then how do you explain these stories of these LLMs communicating with each other? Or like there's even stories of where I think somebody did a test with one of these LLMs and like told the LLM a fake story on how he was cheating on his wife and then threatened to shut him down and then the LLM threatened to blackmail him.

I've heard these stories. In fact, Sue has been telling me about them. She thinks some of them are hoaxes. Some of them are... Really? Some of them, you know, probably not all of them. And, you know, you can be fooled by, you know, there was this guy at Google who thought that their classical computer was conscious and then we should, it should be treated better and wrote some letters and he wound up getting fired by Google. Yeah, what was his name again?

Le Moyne, I think. Le Moyne, Blake Lemoyne. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't believe that. I mean, then there was this film about with Joaquin Phoenix where he fell in love with his iPhone or something like that. Oh, that's such a good movie. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, I think that's all BS. Well, that could, like you could explain that. explain her as being a computational version of consciousness, right? Like she could have been, just because she was able, it was to him, he was being tricked. He wasn't able, she was passing the Turing test. But that doesn't necessarily mean that she's conscious in the same way that we're conscious. Right.

The Turing test, I think, was overrated. It's been met, you know, Dave Chalmers, who started the hard problem where he said, consciousness is not computation and you know we need something different turned around in the last couple of years concomitant with getting a lot of funding from AI to start a machine consciousness center at his NYU and kind of threw the hard problem under the bus and is now saying that that consciousness can be a computation so and I don't believe that I think it's all and I think they're going to run into a they're going to hit a wall because it's not going to be I mean there's all these, you know, they're more worried now about welfare for AI. They're worried about hurting

their feelings and so forth without even proving or knowing that they're consciousness. Well, here's the thing. For our brains and our consciousness to operate, I think it's a very low amount of electricity, right? It's like 10 watts. Is that roughly? 20 watts. Now, to have that same level of computation in a machine, it's like absurd. Oh, I know. And they have to build these energy, the amount of energy to run the, they're talking about nuclear reactors and putting them on the moon and space and all this stuff. So here's the thing. Couldn't you, you couldn't replicate according to your theory of consciousness. You couldn't replicate that with the machine. You can't you can't come up with it with the same ingredients, but you could create something that is indecision.

distinguishable to us from our own consciousness. It could be a machine, an AI, that appears conscious to the most conscious human on Earth, that we would not be able with all of our senses and all of our science to detect that it's not what we have, right? It would be, this is the Turing test, right? Well, it's the Turing test, which has already been surpassed,

but now even Chomber's saying, well, that doesn't prove their conscious. You know, the Turing test was actually pretty weak. Like they got there, they got there from a different road. And it requires way more energy and way more money to keep it alive and to keep it conscious. Yeah, but how do you know it's conscious? We don't. We don't.

We don't. You know, again, I can't prove that you're conscious. The only, the only test we have for consciousness is what goes away with anesthesia. And, you know, if I wanted to, I could say, well, you know, you can't anesthetize those AIs so they're not conscious. But like you said, it could be a different way. So I can't, you know, I can't rule it out entirely. but the only way for sure now is something that goes away with anesthesia. But as far as the high energy thing, you know, that goes for the brain too.

So, for example, Robin Carhart Harris, who's a famous... Oh, yeah, yeah. He did a study in 2012, and he presented it at our conference and where he had patients, volunteers in an MRI or EEG resting with their eyes closed. So they're not doing any cognition. They're just chilling out. And he's giving them intravenous psilocybin, the active ingredient in psilocybin. And say, don't tell it, don't, don't speak, just lay there.

Later, tell us how you, what you were feeling, how you were, later they said, I was, you know, tripping my brains out. I was having all these vivid hallucinations. They expected the MRI to be lit up like a pinball machine. It was cold and dark like they were comatose. With the intravenous? Correct. Because they're resting, they're resting peacefully.

And the EEG was flat, like they were almost brain dead. What? And he came up with this entropy argument. And I was chairing the session. I said, I would look at it this way, Robin, that consciousness is actually happening at a deeper level at the quantum level of microtribus, which is very, very low energy.

And so that continues. And the membranes are on vacation. And the membranes are what you need to speak, to follow something visually, to, you know, if you're on a roller coaster or anything like that. But if you're just resting there, you don't need your membranes.

Consciousness is at a deeper level, which is why when patients, die or when patients have near-death experiences or have a cardiac arrest, they might, they might, if they are resuscitated, come back and say, you know, I saw this white light, I saw my deceased relatives, I saw the tunnel, and I was very peaceful and serene. And you see that same story in many, many, every culture for thousands of years. So it's a very repetitive, reproducible result. And that's, and I, and I, and I, and, and, I think it could also extend to, I think what happens there is that, or could happen, is that consciousness is happening in space-time geometry, as Roger said. And when the body dies and the blood stops flowing to the brain and the microtubules don't get oxygen or don't get what they need, the quantum information, that's the consciousness, kind of dissipates to the universe, space-time.

It's already in space-time. So it's leaking out? Yes, it leaks out, but it stays entangled because as a self. So it could be distributed maybe holographically in the universe, but remaining entangled as an entity, as a quantum soul, if you will. And I think that's quite possible, actually. I don't claim. Have you spoken anybody who's had an NDE?

Many. Yeah, we hear about it all the time at the conference. And, you know, the skeptics say, well, it's hypoxia, you know, it's lack of oxygen. Well, that's not true because. Hypoxia, wow. Yeah, but it can't be that because, In anesthesia, we see a lot of patients get hypoxic. You know, and we take care of them, we treat them,

give them oxygen or do whatever needs to be done. And they are not serene or calm. They're agitated and confused. And these people are not agitated and confused. They're calm and serene. And so that's not an explanation. And it's not because of an outburst from one particular brain region. So I think it's a real effect.

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I explain to you personally. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, many times. And you witnessed it happen and then you listen to them talk about an NDE they had? I've never followed up, but I hear from the surgeons they talk about that or people have studied that. So yeah, it's a pretty common phenomenon. And in fact, you can measure, you can use brain monitors like simply eG when patients die. And this was done for transplant donors that they were withdrawing support from. it was done in the ICU's patients were succumbing. And what happens is, so they don't use fully EG,

they use these processed EG, so you get a simple number, zero to 100. So 80 to 100 is awake, 40 to 60 is where you want your patient anesthetized. Below that, there's something wrong with the brain. So what happens is that when the heart, so the heart stops, the blood pressure goes to almost zero. the EEG goes flat and then there's this burst of activity lasting from seconds to a couple minutes that looks like high gamma, high gamma EEG frequency, which is as fast as they can record it.

And it's very coherent and it lasts and then it's gone. How long? Up to several minutes actually, seconds to minutes. And that seems to be a correlate of the near-death experience. So if those people, now those people who are donating organs or who are dying in the ICU, they didn't come back. But it seems that that would be what would be the neural correlate of the NDE. Oh, that's fascinating because I've heard stories. One lady in particular who the her story was written about by Jeffrey Kriple, who got struck by lightning, walking into her synagogue.

And she explained being in this garden with some of her relatives for, I think, like a couple weeks. And she was out for maybe five minutes or 10 minutes or something like this. Yeah. So it seems like in that spike, that spike, whatever it is in the material world, could be forever in your inner consciousness. Yeah. Well, time dilation is a whole other. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think, you know, when people are in the flow state, you know, when great athletes or great performers, whatever, and they say that everything slows down, it's because their consciousness speeds up. So they're having more conscious moments per second. So instead of say 10 million, they're having maybe 100 million. And the result is that the external world, their perceived world, slows down. So if you're in a car accident and everything slows down because your conscience is actually speeding up. Yeah, that's crazy, right?

And another thing, too, is when you're doing things like with flow state, have ever been like, I'm sure you've been in the car driving down the highway and your mind is off somewhere else and then you realize, holy shit, where have I been for the last 25 minutes? It's how have I been driving and staying alive? There's like this crazy mysterious power to like the unconscious mind. Like what is that? Yeah. Well, most people, yeah, that would be your autopilot, your unconscious mind taken over while you're daydreaming or whatever.

Yeah. And then, you know, somebody swears and you come right back. And that could be. It's extremely powerful. Yeah. And actually the party line in neuroscience is that. almost everything, if not everything we do consciously, is actually unconscious,

and we have an illusion that we're in conscious control because neurocomputations can't really explain consciousness. And moreover, there's this problem of the timing of conscious experience. So if I say something to you and you answer me back immediately, and then somebody was looking in your brain for the activity processing what I said, it occurs after you've responded. So the party line is that, you responded non-consciously because of your inner autopilot

and the consciousness happens later and you have a false illusion that you were in conscious control. And this follows Dan Dennett's idea about multiple drafts and this and that. But that takes away real-time conscious control and takes away free will. There's a solution to that, which is backward time effects,

that when the activity is happening in your brain and you reach a conscious conclusion of what to do, what to order for launch or whether to swerve or not to swer. That actually is referred backward in time to real time when you make the decision. And if it weren't for this, then you couldn't hit a tennis ball at 150 miles. You couldn't hit a baseball at 95 miles an hour

or cricket ball or anything else. And this backward time is probably necessary for real-time conscious control and free will. And it would be good for evolution. and you could see why it would have evolved. If you have two organisms and a predator prey relationship, whoever's going to get hints from the future is going to win. So it would be good for evolution too.

Although I think evolution is actually driven by conscious feelings. I started to talk about this before, the origin of life. You know, how did molecules organize and get larger and self-organize and fight entropy and create organisms 100 million years before genes? There was life for 100 million years before genes. and I think conscious feelings were there right from the start. And in fact, I wrote a paper about that in 2017 that in the primordial soup

where these molecules, these aromatic rings were organizing, that they started to have the Penrose OR moments and occasionally one would be pleasurable. And I call this the quantum pleasure principle. And if that were the case, then the molecules would arrange themselves to optimize pleasure. And that's what started life. And that's why life developed.

to optimize pleasure and avoid displeasure. So even now, pretty much everything we do for one reason and another is to optimize our feelings. We might delay our gratification, get an education, do this or that so we can feel better later. But, you know, if you go in any lab, any animal lab, behaviorist or otherwise, the behavior is due to feelings, you know, a reward, dopamine. And dopamine is almost exactly like the molecules that were there in the primordial

soup. In fact, it could have been, it could have been there. And the pleasure molecule. So I think pleasure was there from the primordial soup and was the spark of life. And I think we're still, and that drove evolution and that's still driving evolution and driving our behavior to optimize pleasure over the long haul. So all animals have dopamine? Yeah. And you think dopamine is the, was the ultimate target of this? Or do you think that dopamine was a function of other things. Well, dopamine provide the aromatic rings and provide the quantum effects. So dopamine has an aromatic ring. A aromatic ring is, if you look at carbon chemistry, and, you know, when I was an undergrad, I wanted to go to medical school and everybody said,

okay, you got to ace organic chemistry to get into medical. That's the first thing that they look at. And so maybe the only thing. And so I did. And it's fascinating. And it's actually about these aromatic rings that have, so anyway, if you have six carbons, thank you. You can see the, the double rings or the double lines or the circle, that means you have an electron cloud that sits above and below the molecule. We don't see a picture of the electron cloud, but you have a, it's a quantum object.

It's electrons that are distributed over space and it's an, and they're not in any one place. They're all in all places at the same time. It's a quantum object. And when they get together, they couple with others and they oscillate, and that's the origin of life. that oscillation between aromatic rings. And then you get more and more and they develop

and they evolve to optimize pleasure and that's what led to life. So that's what I wrote in this paper and when Dante was looking for a mechanism to study when the samples came back, he read this paper and he said, who's this crazy guy? And he realized I'm at the same university,

quite literally across the street from him. And so he called me up and he said, what are you doing after you retire from anesthesia? I said, I wanna work for you. He said, you got it. So it wasn't quite that simple, but that's what happened. What do you think the function of consciousness is?

To feel good. No, I would say the real question is, what is the function of life? I think life is the vehicle for consciousness. I was at a Deepak Chopra conference, and somebody was quoting from the Upanishads, the Vedic literature, and they said that consciousness preceded life

and got bored and created life as a vehicle to get around and to have different types of experiences. So I think vehicle, sorry, I think life is the vehicle for consciousness. So that's the purpose of life. The purpose of consciousness is to evolve and be. I think that's probably the most important thing there is. I mean, consciousness is really all that matters. If we didn't have consciousness, we wouldn't have anything.

So I think it was there before life. It's intrinsic to the universe. And, you know, Roger has this other idea about multiple eons. So before the Big Bang, there was another Eon. Before that, there was another one. And we took an idea from a guy named Lee Smolin, who was talking about black holes, where the cosmological constants,

which determined the universe, the 22 values, which determined how the mass of the proton, all this and that. And if they weren't exactly how they are, this is called fine-tuning, If they weren't fine-tuned for life, there wouldn't be life. There wouldn't be stars. There wouldn't be light.

There wouldn't be life. There wouldn't be consciousness. And yet they are perfectly. And the odds against that are quite literally astronomical. And so there are two explanations. One is many worlds, and we just happen to live in the one world where there's consciousness, which I think is kind of stupid because, well, that anyway, that's one explanation. And the other is that something like God or something motivating,

motivating this and it could be that feelings were driving it and consciousness was driving it. So that's kind of what I follow. Okay, I want to go circle back to the NDE stuff and the near-death experiences and what is your personal belief on what happens when we die? Bless you. You know, I've become, I was never really. really religious. But, and when I was younger, I had a notion that, yeah, I want to, I want to figure out

consciousness so I can park my consciousness and be immortal in some kind of device or this or that. As a lot of people are now thinking and wanting to do. Oh, yeah. People are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to wear these little dog tags around their necks for when they get in a car accident. People can, like, take their, cut their head off and put it in a cryo chamber or something. Yeah, good luck with that. What happens with the power grid goes down?

Well, the problem with that is that if you freeze the brain, the cryonics and all that. Yes, exactly. If you freeze the brain, you mess up the microtubules. You destroy them. Really? They chose the method to preserve the membranes and not the microtubials. And so when I pointed that out, we had a session on this, one of our, actually was in 2014, our 20-year anniversary conference, we had the future of consciousness.

And we had representative of cryonics and this or that. And they said that, yeah, our preservative destroys the microtubils. I said, so if consciousness of the microtubules, you're out of luck. He said, well, yeah, I don't believe, he didn't want to believe it. Of course you want to believe that. Look at all that money they're raking in. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, so I don't believe that.

I think there's actually probably better ways to do it. My friend, Honorban, who discovered all this stuff, Anurban Bandhya Pagethe, he's from India. He works in Japan at the National Institute of Material Sciences. He, so he got into microtubules after reading my stuff with Roger and started studying him. He's the one who found the kilohertz, gigahertz, the time crystal stuff, all that stuff. He's shown that microtubes generate optical and magnetic vortices that can interact holographically,

suggesting unconscious might be a hologram, a three-dimensional hologram in the brain, which I think is a wonderful idea. So he developed something called brain jelly based on organic polymers with these aromatic rings that in the right mix, and they self-assemble and form helical oscillators, which he says is the key to life and consciousness.

So these aromatic rings line up, and so you get this helix, kind of like DNA or microtribules, which oscillates and give you these quantum oscillations, and if that's the case, eventually you're going to have consciousness. So he got funding from the Indian government. He just got, and he's been working on for a while, and they just reached a milestone,

they gave him another $25 million, which is cheap for quantum AI compared to, like, ultra-cold. The point is you can do this in warm temperature, self-growing. It grows itself. And it's kind of biomimetic quantum computing is what you call it. And he interfaces with it with many, many optical and microwave probes. So input and output is through optics and microwave. And it's going to have 1,024 qubits and will be possibly more.

power than any quantum computer at a tiny tiny fraction of the cost. Wow. You know I've been to Google a couple times my friend Hartman Nevin who runs their quantum AI and he uh he you know they have the the willow uh quantum computer and it's it's so expensive of course so much energy has to be ultra cold and I don't think it'd be conscious you can be conscious because it doesn't uh it's not gonna have collapse it doesn't have the aromatic rings and and I don't know how you can have it potentially could but it's very unlikely to be conscious it has some conceptual problems uh having the kind of stuff that at at cold temperatures that we think happens to warm temperature the point is that organic uh organic uh organic biomomatic quantum computing may be the

way to go for something that could be conscious where you could maybe deposit your conscious consciousness again i'm not interested in that per se in answer your uh previous question due to my own personal experiences, I do believe in afterlife. What do you think it is? I think it's consciousness in holographic space time. It's distributed throughout the universe and can focus locally and remain as a quantum soul. Interesting. So do you think like reincarnation happens?

Your soul gets shuttled into something new? Your soul finds another set of microtubules. Oh, wow. And there's some pretty good evidence for reincarnation, actually. You know, the group at University of Virginia studies pediatric cases where these kids have memories of what seems like a previous life. Yeah. And many times they have birth marks or signs of trauma from what caused their death.

So like a blow to the head and there's a scar there and some amazing coincidences or stories. Yeah. Who did that study? A group at the University of Virginia, it was Jim Tucker, Kim, Penn Berthie now. Before that, there was another guy. I forget his name. He retired or passed away. But there was a guy there for many, many years doing that work, and he got passed along to Tucker and not to others.

I heard something about this study saying that the majority of the kids that had memories of previous lives, they were overwhelmingly male. in their previous lives. And one of the theories to why that was was because males historically died more traumatic deaths than females. And the trauma is somehow linked to this connection they have to their previous life. Yeah, that could be. I mean, trauma and emotion give us memories.

I mean, more impactful memories. Right. You know, I can remember exactly what I was doing when I heard Kennedy got shot. I mean, you're probably not born yet. And I remember that vividly. And stuff like that. You know, 9-11, everybody remembers.

So. Yeah. Let's put a pin right there. I can take a leak. I don't know what's going on. Coffee's running through me today. We'll be right back. Okay.

I think consciousness is a hologram, actually. There was a guy, Carl Prebrilm had a theory of this in the 70s. He was a originally neurosurgeon, neurosychologist. And this guy, Lashley had studied, looked for memory in Graham and animals, the first part of the 20th century. spent like 30 years looking for where memory was stored, and he would teach a trick or something and then try to ablate this part of the brain

or that part of the brain and try to get rid of it. He could never, ever, ever get rid of a memory entirely. There's always some trace. Really? And so he concluded that facetiously, he said memory's impossible, but then he said, it just shows it's distributed. It's everywhere. And Prebren came along and knew something about holograms

where, you know, you shine a laser off view and bounce it into a photographic plate and also through the photographic plate and when you do that, your information is in the plate but it's as wave interference. It doesn't look like you. But if you shine a laser through it,

it projects a three-dimensional image of you on the other side of the plate. So remember Princess Leia and Star Wars were the everything and she's three-dimensional. Well, that's what it does. So it takes a two-dimensional information and projection in three dimensions. And Prim had this idea

that consciousness is a hologram. in the brain somehow. But he was criticized because he was told, well, there's no laser in the brain. Carl, there's no laser in the brain. And I read this. I was a medical student, and I said, well, yeah, it's microtubules.

That's his laser. And so I wrote him, and we became friends and wrote a paper together. And I think the hologram idea is actually a pretty good one. It explains a lot. So microtubules are actually two-dimensional surfaces. And Anabon has shown that it actually, they actually project 3D outward optical and magnetic vortices,

which can interfere and give a hologram. So it could be. Yeah. We were talking about, what were we talking about before we started this? NDEs? You wanted to get back to NDEs, yeah. Yeah, we were talking about NDEs. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the kids thing, the trauma and the past lives with the kids.

That's what it was. Yeah. And there's also a crazy connection between NDE's and psychedelic experience. experiences too. Yeah. What do you make of that? Psychedelics are very interesting. I think they kind of do the opposite of what anesthesia does.

And we've shown that we're studying effects of anesthesia on the megahertz. So we can, these kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz oscillations, you can measure megahertz at least from the scalp like buried in the EEG. And we actually tested in India, one of Honobahn's colleagues at a hospital in India, and measuring megahertz as somebody goes under anesthesia with Propheaval. And you see triplets in megahertz, and then they get the anesthesia, and the triplets go away and are replaced by megahertz bursts. So anyway, the anesthesia gets rid of them.

So I was working with a group called DMT Quest, who are trying to study the potential therapeutic benefits of DMT, dimethyl tryptomy, which you smoke. And so I was out in California where they operate. And I had this device. I've been practicing with it. I can measure my megahertz triplets pretty well. And when I was camping in my RV out on the beach and I got good triplets.

But then when I went to the city, there's too much electrical noise. So when the experiment was set up in the city, I got a good triplets. up in the city and it didn't work. I said, we got to do it out at the beach out at Half Moon Bay where I was camping in San Francisco on the other side. And so they came out there the next day and we got signals. And basically what we found was that the triplet under DMT was higher intensity and higher frequency and the three peaks sometimes split into five peaks. Now this is preliminary results. so we don't have enough statistics to publish yet. And it's kind of hard to do that in this type of study.

But there does seem to be an effect. So the point is that psychedelous increase, which have these aromatic rings. I mean, the Indole ring. So there's the hexagonal ring, and then there's the Indole ring with a six and a five, like in serotonin, like in psilocybin, DMT, and all this. And they have the, and so,

and tryptophan. the aromatic amino acid. And it's more quantum. And so the hypothesis would be that it shifts the resting state or the consciousness to a higher frequency, which is more non-local, more quantum, more non-local within the brain, but also outside of the brain.

So maybe more NDE-like. Have you heard of the theory, the brain filter hypothesis, that what it's doing is it's stripping, but basically the idea is that our vision, our sense of smell, and these things are all filtered so that we can get through the day, survive, eat, sleep, all that stuff. And normally, if it wasn't for these filters that we have,

it would just be shit everywhere. That we wouldn't be able to comprehend, and we would just be, like, yeah, overwhelmed. Yeah. Yes, I have. And a lot of people say, well, the brain's not a transmitter, it's a receiver. And I think it's both, because if it were just, receiver, we'd all be on the same channel.

We'd all be having the same experience. And yet, presumably we're not, and we don't. But so I think what happens is the memory, everything's stored in the microtubules is projected. And then at the instant of collapse, Rogers non-computability comes in. So he had this idea that to get around algorithmic, if consciousness is algorithmic, then we can't have free will.

Everything is gonna be predetermined and deterministic. But if there's something out, If it's random, that's not good either. But there's another possibility called non-computability where the process is neither random nor algorithmic, but influenced by some other system. And that's where he brought in the quantum. And specifically he said that's going to be,

have platonic values in it. So going back to Plato's pure form, you know, geometric form, but also good, evil, aesthetic values. And this would influence the collapse. So it's not really random. but it's going to kind of guide your perceptions and your actions towards certain things with which it resonates.

There could be values embedded in the universe like even good and evil. I mean, following the way of the Tao, divine guidance. And there's actually a theorem, the Schrodinger-Newton theorem, that gives the resonances that this might happen with. And so that's what I think. So it's a combination. It's an interface actually, kind of like what Don Hoffman says, except it's actually what comes up for the microtubules and then what meets the platonic values from space time at the instant of collapse. And that happens 10 million times a second.

Yeah, it's pretty wild that the human body actually makes DMT in all those. And I think the lungs, I don't know if it's actually in the brain or not, but I know it's definitely the lungs. Yeah, that's the theory. I don't know if it's proven or not. I think Gigi-Porgijian, Gimo-Porgijian from Michigan, has shown that in rats that Pineal produces it. I don't know about humans, but in rats. If rats do it, we probably do it. It wouldn't be that, I mean, we make so many things that are so similar.

It's very similar to melatonin and many other things. Right, and it's supposed to be responsible for our dreams, right? Dreams. It could be, and dreams are another interesting thing. And I think dreams are actually kind of quantum states that, don't collapse so they don't come into consciousness. And the reason I say that is that there's a Chilean psychologist named Ignacio Mate Blanco, who, I don't know, 30, 40 years ago, studied the logic of dreams.

Yeah. And he said the logical dreams is quite different from our waking Aristotelian logic. And some of us looked at that, and it looked like the logic of dreams is basically quantum logic. And so dreams may be where you stay in the quantum state and you don't collapse so you don't get into the classical world because you have all these deep interconnections, all these anomalies with time and deep interconnections and stuff like that.

Yeah, but you can also lucid dream. That's true, yes. Where people can train themselves to knock on doors and ask themselves questions like habitually and in dreams and realize that they're dreaming. Like I've done it a couple times by accident. Yeah. Like how do you explain that?

Yeah, what's the guy? He comes to our conference. I can't remember his name right now. Yes, lucid dreaming. Yeah, and most of the, I think the conventional theory for these dreams, for dreams in general, are trying to process real world experiences, right? And throw random external influences into them to prepare your brain for how this potentially could happen and helping prepare your brain for future potential. events that could happen to you, right? Well, that's the idea, but nobody knows for sure.

Right, right. Yeah. I like the idea that dreams are quantum logic. That's more fun for sure. Yeah. As far as their purpose, I don't know. Well, I mean, there's a lot of possibilities, Freud for one. Mark Soames is a big Neo-Froidian.

He's always pushing that. He's calls it. What was Freud's view? The dreams are important. You know, the subconscious, the royal road to the subconscious. And they're actually telling us more than we can appreciate. I had a guy in here previously, about a year ago, Jack Cruz, the neurosurgeon was explained to me.

Early on in his career, he had a patient where he was involved in. It wasn't actually a neurosurgery, but I think the person had a heart transplant. And have you heard the story? No, but I know heart recipient, yeah, they get memories from the donor. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. This woman came back to his practice and was like calling his nurses up habitually saying, I need to talk to the surgeon, he talked to the surgeon, he talked to the surgeon.

She came back, she's like, I don't know what's going on, but I keep craving McDonald's French fries. And she got the heart from a child who was in the way in the drive-thru at McDonald's. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Well, when I did cardiac anesthesia, which was years ago, the heart surgeons used to talk about their transplants. And they couldn't tell the patients a lot of stuff.

It was part of the deal. They couldn't tell them about the donor. But I remember they were talking about one guy who, after he got his transplant from a patient that they knew who was big into dancing, this guy who never danced before in his life, all of a sudden craved dancing and started dancing.

And his wife says, I don't get it. All of a sudden, all I wants to do is dance. And the donor had been a big dancer. And in the heart, a heart has a lot of big nerve ganglia, the AV node, Nessi node,

and all full of microtubules. It's one of the biggest sets of... Really? Yeah, biggest sets of nerve ganglia and microtubas outside of the nerve system. And so it's quite likely that... And I think memory is actually encoded in microtubules.

This is another problem with conventional neuroscience, they don't know, well, they don't really know where memory is. I mean, I told you before about Lashley and it's all over the place, but where at the cellular level, and most people would say in synapses, and the strength of the synapse will guide activity through a network this way or that way. And so that's how, so if we're given stimulus, you'll follow a certain pathway through a network because of memory encoded in the synapses. but synaptic proteins last hours to days and memories can last lifetime.

So that can't be right. And I think it's actually in the microtubules and uniquely in neuronal microtubules mostly because in most cells which divide, the microtubules will be doing their thing whatever they're doing in that cell. And then when it's time to divide, they disassemble, they reorganize these mitotic spindles

to pull the chromosomes apart. After that, sudden, they go back to doing what they were doing before. And if memory is encoded in the microtubule with all the tubulins related to their neighbors, kind of like a ladder, it's like a mosaic. And each tubulin, and there's anywhere from up to a billion tubulins per neuron, and each one of them can have one of 22 different genetic isoforms and another five or six post-translational changes and phosphorylation, so maybe 30 possible states of each tubulin,

and you got a billion of those. So that's a huge number of possible mosaic states encoding memory per neuron, enormous. More than enough to have distributed redundancy throughout the brain. So you can repeat everything over and over again, and you can have a hologram. So I think memory's in the microtubus, which is important. Yeah. So you can see there. What is that?

That's a tree. Well, that's a neuron. And on the left, you see four dendrites. And then there's a nucleus in a cell body. and then to the right you see the long axon. Now there's a couple things wrong with this picture, I'm sorry to say. The microtubules in the axon,

you can see they're pretty long, but it shows them being interrupted. And usually they're not interrupted. So once they go to the- Like the brakes in them? Yes, yes. Now in dendrites on the left, there are breaks. And not only that,

but the microtubules in the dendrites are interrupted and of mixed polarity. So a microtubial has, is each microtubulele has a plus end and a minus end. And usually like in the axon, they're all aligned. So all the plus ends are in and all the minus ends are out. Right. Whereas in the dendrites in cell body, they're mixed polarity.

So you have one next to another one going the opposite direction. So this one's up, this one's down, up down, so they're in these arrays of opposite polarity, anti-parallel microtubules. And nobody has a good explanation for that, except in our theory, with the other that means is since the two of them would be oscillating, let's say, in megahertz, and they're both going to be in an external field from the membrane. One's going to be more aligned with the membrane

than the other, and it's going to be slightly faster, and the other one would be slightly slower, and so they're going to be slightly off in their frequency. So one might oscillate it, let's say, 10.000-0-0-40, the other one on 10.0-40, which is, and they would interfere and give an interference beat, like in music, a 40 hertz, which is the carrier wave for EEG. So we think that the mixed polarity networks give rise to interference beats, which like in music, slows down to give slower and slower. And in fact, we think that EEG, which is in Hertz, comes from very fast oscillations of microtubes and megahertz, which interfere to give the slower EEG.

Because after all these years, we don't really have a good explanation of EEG, or at least not of a unified theory of EEG. Really? Yeah. Nobody, yeah. People can say, well, this alpha band comes from this network, the beta or the theta comes from this pacemaker, this frequency comes from this, gamma we don't really know. So it's, it's, they can sort of.

It's a proxy. Yeah. They're just anatomical, but without saying what it really is and what it really signifies. And we think actually that it's all microthebable time crystals oscillating at these different frequencies, just like the terrahertz, gigahertz, meghertz, kilohertz, but because of interference. And so you need

the mixed polarity interrupted microtubules to get that. And that's where we think it's coming from. And Roger Penrose and I published that in 2014 as the origin of EEG. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

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How could we drill down and actually prove this idea that microtubules do all this? We're trying. Hypothetically, in a perfect world. unlimited money how would you do it well um we were in the templeton project with theories of consciousness and we were supposed to be in a adversarial collaboration with i iit but we couldn't we couldn't and we're supposed to come with one experiment that would disprove one and prove the other and we couldn't because i don't think their theory is is falsifiable and they wanted us to do an experiment where

we would demonstrate a quantum effect in a microtubal at ambient temperature and then show it would go away with anesthesia and they wanted us to do it in a live monkey. And the monkey would have to be awake with us monitoring with this quantum optical stuff, which never been done before and really needs to be done on a quantum optics table with exact balance and no vibrations at all. Quantum optics table. Which is eventually what we did. But we said, we're not going to do that in a monkey because number one, it would be cruel.

Number two, it would be technically impossible. And that wouldn't falsify your theory. So anyway, we didn't get the, we didn't get the, the adversarial collaboration, which was a lot of money. When they were doing paid, it was like $5 million per study, and they didn't prove anything. They were all inconclusive. Templeton gave us $100,000 to do one, actually $200,000 to do two studies,

one of which has already published, other ones are already to be published, where we showed in a lab, if you take a UV laser to a bunch of microtubules, they fluoresce. So you hit him with like 280 nanometers, UV light. And a short time later, they emit at a lower frequency, lower energy, longer wave like, like

340, something like that. Yeah. And but there's a delay. And there's also propagate, and then we used these fluorescent labels, which emitted at a different frequency so we can tell. So, and then we can calculate the distance how far it traveled. And we found that the distance had traveled and the duration of time that the quantum state lasted was too long for, too long for cloud. So it had to be a quantum state, quantum process. And then we gave two different anesthetics

and inhibited the quantum stuff, the quantum activity. So we called our shot, we actually made those predictions, which were pretty risky. Most people said, you know, you're not gonna be able to do that, but we did. And this was done at Princeton in a neutral lab, and somebody who was kind of agnostic about our theory, and actually didn't really like it.

I was hoping to disprove it. But anyway, but it worked. But it worked and other, we have another experiment about to be published where we have even longer duration of the quantum state. So we've done those studies, but all the publicity went to the IIT versus global neuronal workspace, the big bet that Chalmers had with Christoph and they didn't even mention. None of those other experiments worked to support any of those theories except ours. But, you know, we kind of got drowned out in the noise of the other experiment.

So that's more of that, which we're trying to do, and more experiments with anesthesia showing that anesthesia selectively binds to affects microtubules. And, you know, I think that, you know, eventually we're going to win out because I don't think they're going to have any more, you know, they're going to have more clout, more noise, more publicity. What I'm more interested now is, because this is going to drag on for a while, and I'm getting old, but what I'm more interested now is practical applications of this,

which has to do with Alzheimer's disease. And I was talking to Steve about this before. And basically, in Alzheimer's disease, there's two lesions. So there's these amyloid plaques, there are these big ugly things that are in between the neurons. So like there's a neuron here, neuron here. So out here there's a big ugly. And they say, well, it affects the synapses,

and that's what causes the dementia. Yeah. But memory's not in that. But and then there's another type of lesion that are inside the neuron, which is called the neurofibrillary tangle. And that's made up of tau proteins. Tao? Tao. T-A-W. T-A-U-Sorri-Rou. And T-A-U-Rubal.

So normally, tau is sitting on the microtubule. So here's my contoult, Tau sits on it and acts as a traffic signal for these motor proteins that move along to tell, okay, get off here and deliver your cargo to this synapse. So it's a form of learning, the placement of the tau on the microtubule. And it could also be the tau stabilizes the microtubule. Well, somehow, for some reason, there we go, there's a tau protein. So the amyloid plaques are outside and the tau tangles are inside and the microtubule is disintegrating below. And so what happens is when the tau falls off, the microtubial disassembles.

And you can see the tubulents coming off on the right side. So the microtubule literally disassembles, de-plemerizes, and it'd be like the bones in your body disintegrating, and you get really short, really fast. And that's what happens to the neuron. The neuron shrinks because it's losing its cytosolid support. And I'm saying that the memory is stored in the microtubles in the relationship of all those little spheres,

which actually should be a little barbells, little peanut shapes. And the tau either stabilizes the microtubule or acts as memory. In either case... So the amyloid plaques, they fuck with the tau proteins.

They hurt the tau proteins. I don't know what they do. I mean, everybody... They're not connected to the tau. They have nothing to do with... There's a lot of theories, but nobody knows. Okay, got you. The point is that in post-mortem studies,

of somebody who had severe Alzheimer's and dementia or had loss of memory. And you look and the correlation, there's much, much better correlation with noofibrillary tangles or tau proteins than with the amyloid. Oh, interesting. You can have the amyloid and not have the disease. You can have the disease and not have the amyloid.

Wow. But if you have the disease, you're going to have the tau proteins and vice versa. It correlates a lot better. So the tau is because the microtubules fall apart. And or the, the tau correlates with the microtubus falling apart. So the more tau proteins, the more memory loss, the more dementia. The more tau protein that's not on the microtubial. And it can- That's not on the microtubule.

Right. Okay. It can be in the, in the neuron in the corner, in these tangles, neurofibrillary tangles, and it can spill out into the blood or the CSF. So if you do a spinal tap on a patient with Alzheimer's, you get tau. in the CSF. You can see it in the urine. You can see it in the blood

because it's spilling out of the nervous system. So it just tells you that Tao is being lost and it's coming off the microtubuleous because what it normally does is the microtubal, it's a microtubal associated protein and stabilizes it.

So the problem is, and this was known in 1989, there was a paper by Matsuyama and Jarvick, Libby Jarvick, who was a neurologist who was married to Robert Jarvick, who invented the first artificial heart,

but that's not the hearing of there. But she and this guy, Matsuyama, came out with a theory or with a paper in PNAS in 1989, microtubule was the key to Alzheimer's disease. And at that time, people were just learning about the amyloid. So I remember she came to the University of Arizona and I went to her talk.

It was great talk. And I said, yeah, that makes perfect sense. So right after that, our neuroscience group, dealing with Alzheimer's and neurology. We had a big meeting about what to do about this because they were all jumping on the amyloid bandwagon. And the drug companies were throwing money at them to find anti-ameloid antibodies and this and that,

which is what they did. And they've been developing ever since these anti-amiloid drugs for Alzheimer's, which don't work are toxic. Probably have crazy side effects. Crazy side effects. They're toxic, that cause bleeding, and they're expensive as help.

that costs like 20 to 30,000 per patient per year. And the drug companies are getting rich. Cha Ching. Yeah. The drug companies and the researchers are getting wealthy doing this. So, you know. Neuroprotective. Nicotine.

Well, I got caffeine. Anyway. Amyloid plaques. Yeah. So amyloid plaques, I think, are a red herring. And, you know, they don't really correlate the disease, but they attract all the money and the attention. Do they correlate with anything that we know of?

It depends who you ask. I have a good friend, Rudy Tansy, who's a big Alzheimer's research at researcher at Harvard. And he's been studying amyloid. He's completely on the amyloid train. But his whole financial picture, you know, he started a company. That's where it gets messy. It gets very messy. Yeah.

So I don't have a dog in the hunt in that regard. and I think it's microtubule. Well, I guess I do because of my theory, but it would support it. But as far as helping people, that doesn't matter. So in researching this, I found out that microtubal stabilizing drugs, which are used in cancer to prevent the microtubules

from disassembling and becoming metallic spindles, that they actually are protective against Alzheimer's. And in some animal studies, and actually clinical studies, a particular drug, apothelone B, which is a microtubal stabilizing drug. Apothelone? Epithelone B.

Epithelone B. It's actually an anti-cancer drug. And a friend of mine, Mike Wies, just did a study where he gave this to rats and then put him asleep and found out he needed more anesthesia when they had this microtubal stabilizing drug, that the Apothelone B was blocking the anesthetic from getting to the target of the microtubial. Whoa. Anyway, somebody was doing a study for Alzheimer's with Apothelone B. and they found out it helped.

And they did a pilot study, and then they started a big study, and then all of a sudden they disappeared. They stopped. The study was halted for no apparent reason, and they vanished. What? Yeah. It sounds crazy. The people vanished?

Well, they stopped publishing, and nobody can find them. So they either got paid off by the drug companies, or... They got whacked. Maybe. I hope not. Well, I hope not either. Well, but they probably got paid off. And so anyway, they stopped.

This is like the story. I was just so, so funny. I was just watching this interview my friend Jesse Michaels did today. And he's talking about these two guys who came up with Cold Fusion. That vanished right after. I figure what their names were. Oh, yeah. I remember that.

Yeah, well, these guys vanished. I hope they're okay. But the previous, a portfolio and B is off patent because it's been around for a while. So you can't patent it. and there's no way to make money out for this. So they didn't want it. And every new... So this is not...

Is this currently used for anti-cancer? For anti-cancer, yes. It is used, even though that it doesn't make anybody any money. Well, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if they... So it's like the other... What was the COVID drug that everyone got mad at?

That was not patented, but it won a Nobel Prize. There was a similar drug that was used for COVID. That was... Anyways, I can't remember what it was. They called it horse. paste or something. Oh, yeah, I don't know. Ivermectin.

Ivermexing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Horse dewormer. I don't know if it worked for COVID or not. Yeah. I don't think so. But anyway, so this drug disappeared, but it does antagonize anesthesia with

Holtz our theory. Okay, so if not that, so anyway, and when Honorban discovered the kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and micro tubules in around 2010, first published in 2013, I said, wow, I wonder if we could use any of those frequencies to treat mental and cognitive disorders by resonating the microtribials. So, kilohertz is electromagnetic. Megahhertz is also, in electromagnetics is radio waves,

gigahertz is microwaves and terrahertz are photons. So I didn't want to put any electromagnetics into the brain necessarily. And photons are hard to get in, and they're also electromagnetic. But as an anesthesiologist, I was very familiar with ultrasound. And I remember looking up and seeing an ultrasound machine and I said, wait, that's megahertz.

Ultrasound, which, as you know, passes through the body. You can see the baby in the uterus. We use an anesthesia seed nerves for nerve blocks, the jugular vein, it hit the jugular vein. And so, and you know, you use it as a, to see into the body because the waves pass harmlessly through the body, then reflect off surfaces so you get an image back. So I wondered if anybody had tried megahertz ultrasound into the brain to treat depression or Alzheimer's or anything. And the answer was no, but it was approved for brain imaging.

And it's not that good for brain imaging, but before they had CT and MR. It was good enough, I guess, better than nothing. And it was still used at that time, and I think it's still used for newborns to look through the fontenelle for bleeds. So they don't have bone here, so it's just straight into the brain. And the ultrasound for like 30 minutes at a time to look for signs of bleeding

without any apparent negative effect in newborns. So I said, well, it can't be that harmful. And then I found this guy, actually, a guy had actually, Arizona State University, our arch rival. I'm from University of Arizona. We hate those guys. No, not really, but they're a big sports rival. And he had been studying it in animals,

ultrasound into the brain of animals and seeing physiological effects. And so he could like ultrasound here, make the paw move here or put electrodes in and see electrolytes. So he's getting physiological effect, didn't seem harmful. So at the time, well still, we had a pain clinic in our anesthesia department,

which I used to run. So I knew chronic pain patients. They're mostly, they're usually depressed, and they're chronic pain. And I said, I wonder if this would help our chronic pain patients. They're mood because they all have, you know, crappy moods. They're depressed. And I said, hey, to my colleagues, and I said, we should try this on our chronic pain patients.

And they go, yeah, right, Hammer. That's my nickname, anesthesia. This is when I put patients to sleep with a hammer. They say. That's comforting. It's a joke. but I'm actually very, I was very gentle and pretty good at it. Anyway, right before you put the patient to sleep,

you start telling them your theory of consciousness. Wait, wait. No, I tell them jokes, actually. I tell them, this is going to burn in your vein but melt in your brain or a few other jokes that I can't really repeat because they're not going to remember. Hammer time, yeah. But anyway, they said, yeah, Hammer, great idea. You go first.

You got a nice shaved head. We'll watch. Right. So they call my bluff. And so one day, at the end of a day, we sat around a table and we brought an ultrasound machine and so they're all kind of water. I getting a little self-conscious here.

But so I put the, you have to have this gel and I held it to my temple area because I know that's a, and I held it there for about 15, 20 seconds. I didn't know how long to hold it. And I didn't feel anything. I was a little disappointed. But about a minute later, a couple minutes later,

I started to get a buzz. and I was buzzed for like a couple hours. I felt really creative. Kind of a buzz. Kind of like a mile high. Kind of like invigorated. Like stimulated? Mildly stimulated.

You know, just feeling good. Slightly high and thinking very well, thinking very clearly. Wow. And creative and a little euphoria. I mean, I felt really good. Steve, add that to the grocery list. So most of this was after I went home, so I came back the next morning and told my, he said,

we got to try this. We got to do this on a chronic pain patients. And so we did. And we wrote a protocol, double blind study, because on the ultrasound machine, you can hit a button and freeze the, so there's no ultrasound coming out of the device, but the machine is still making noise, the same noise. Yeah. So we did a double blind study on 30 pain patients. and we found statistical improvement in mood and almost statistical improvement

in their pain reduction and published in the very good journal brain stimulation the first study on effects of ultrasound on mental states and humans and Jamie Tyler from Arizona State who had done all this work for years on animals

and you know he got scooped on the first human and he emailed me and said congratulations. You got the first human study. Of course, he got all the patents. Is this published? Yeah, published 2013. I'll send you the link.

Wow. And since then, there have been hundreds, if not thousands of papers on brain ultrasound for this and that. Now, most neuroscientists took up and started using it as focused ultrasound because, you know, TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, transcranial electrical stimulation.

You can stimulate the brain, but you can't focus it. And the electrical, when it hits the brain, goes around the surface, it doesn't really go through. Sure. And TMS is kind of like all over the place, and we don't really know what it does. We don't really know what the electrical does, actually.

Something that nobody knows. But ultrasound goes right through, as if it's not, and it'll hit the skull on the other side and bounce back. Because it's very low frequency. It's, no, it's mechanical. It's megahertz, so it's a million times a second. So it's not low frequency.

Well, you can go as low as 20 kilohertz, which is still ultrasound, and that's also been shown to be beneficial for senescence in cells. So anywhere from 20 kilohertz on up to millions of hertz, megahertz is ultrasound. It seems to be have benefits on beneficial effects on biological systems, probably by resonating the microtubles as long as you stay low intensity. So not low frequency, but low intensity. You don't want to heat the brain.

So it can be used at three different intensities. The low intensity below thermal, but then a medium, and then you go high, you start heating the brain, which we don't necessarily want. And then a medium, you can open the blood-brain barrier and let stuff in. And people were using that to give anti-amiloid drugs, and they're really high intensity caused lesions.

And people are now using ultrasound to cause lesions. Like if you have a tumor or a seizure focus, your focus two ultrasound means you zap that, whatever it is there, and get rid of it, which is what you want. So everybody got into the focus business, including a friend of mine, Jay Sanquenetti, who was at U of A, and he's published a whole bunch and formed his own company now. They're making kind of a high-end ultrasound to induce

meditative states. Would it be like a helmet you wear that like pumps ultrasound into your head? They have a helmet. Yeah, they have a helmet or band, and it's got sensors to read out EEG and then ultrasound to put it in, and you can, you can target. And then the patient gets an MRI, and you know you want to target the poster or singulate or the frontal cortex or whatever, and then you need a stereotactic frame to target that area. So you're just hitting that one area.

So whereas the study I had done, the first study was unfocused. So it just, it quite literally, doesn't sound good to say, it's shotgunning the brain, but basically it scans back and forth so you get the whole brain. And anyway, in 2015, these two guys in Australia,

Australia were studying an anti-ameloid drug for Alzheimer's. And they used medium intensity. It didn't get across the blood-brain barrier very well. So they used ultrasound at medium intensity to open the blood-brain barrier to get the drug in. And they had a control group that got the ultrasound without the drug, and those animals got better from their Alzheimer's symptoms. So the ultrasound alone at medium dose improved the Alzheimer's symptoms without without giving the drug.

And so they've now gone into just treating Alzheimer's, although at this medium dose, which I don't think is necessary. I think it should be lower. Yeah, you don't need, you don't want the medium, the higher dose because it's going to heat, and you don't want to open the blood-brain barrier.

It's there for a reason. Right. You know, infections, you know, other drugs, we don't really know what could get in. So it's there for a reason, and I didn't really want to. That's fascinating. Now that's focused,

ultrasound. See, that makes me think about how technology is going and how that's affecting the evolution of humans, right? Like, we're surrounded by screens, by these phones, by cell towers on every corner of every street and like power lines or everywhere. I mean, I'm not a electromagnetist, so I don't know exactly how all this works, but I can't imagine that all this, and all this electricity everywhere. 5G, I don't know what the hell that is. I don't know what the hell that does. Bobby Kennedy says it passes through the blood-brain barrier,

but I don't know anything about any of it. But I can't imagine that it's good for us. I can't imagine that it's increasing our cognitive abilities. No. And in fact, you know the Havana syndrome where they... Yeah, oh yeah. So that was high intensity, either microwave or ultrasound. Yeah.

And that kind of fries the brain. and gives a lot of symptoms. And I think it's frying the microtubules because they're using the resonant frequency, whether it's ultrasound or microwave, they're resonating microchitis, over resonating the micro tubes and probably shattering them.

And which is also what happens in a concussion, in concussion you fracture your microtubules. Really? Yeah, yeah, particularly, in the long axons, if you look at them, they're like this. They're like a bone fracture. That's exactly what happens. So, and that's how these people get like CTE.

Exactly, exactly. And I wish they would try ultrasound, and I wish Alzheimer's patients would start, would use ultrasound. So let me back up again. Back up. So when the guys in Australia found this, they started using medium-range, medium-intensity ultrasound to treat Alzheimer's. And other people started using focus ultrasound at the hippocampus, and then others started using ultrasound at high-intensity to hack away at the amyloid plaques, which was the wrong. wrong thing to do. Anyway, my view was low intensity unfocused, which is also very cheap.

If you use focus, you need an MRI and you need a fancy, fancy device. You need to target and you need to know what target you're going for. You can buy these very low power ultrasound devices on Amazon. Exactly. Now, you've got to be careful because we looked at this and a lot of them are a little bit too hot, a little bit because they're used for peripheral massage. which increases blood flow, so they intentionally heat a little bit.

We did find one particular device that at low intensity is below the thermal threshold, which is about a watt per square centimeter at the scalp. That's the thermal threshold. So this is that one we use is 700 million watts per square centimeter. And it's been shown to be safe. What is, you remember the name of the device? US Pro 2000.

US Pro 2000. Yeah, yeah. So this friend of mine started, Erling Cooley is his name. He's a ultrasound engineer. And when I first started messing with ultrasound, I gave a talk on this at Berkeley. And this is probably around, I think probably,

I don't know, around 2012. We published that paper in 2013. And I gave this talk at Berkeley. And he was there and he had been reading up on it on what I've been saying online and whatnot. And started making ultrasound devices, messing around with it and trying it on himself. And he mostly got into vagal ultrasound

down to stimulate the vagus nerve in the neck, but also brain ultrasound. Why would he do that? To treat digestive problems and to treat brain problems because the vagus goes up into there. And there's a lot of different ways for vagus nerve stimulation. But then when I started doing the brain ultrasound,

he started looking at that. So, and then when I started talking about Alzheimer's that may be, oh, let me back up. So meantime, Honor Bond had said, studied electromagnetic energy and effects of polymerization of microtubules. And this is electromagnetic, not ultrasound, but he found that 10 to the 7th hertz in electromagnetics caused the peak reassembly of microtubules. So if you start from tubulence in solution and give electromagnetic energy at different

frequencies, you see how much they polymerize, and you can do that with optical density pretty easily, 10 to the 7th was the peak. they they they maximally polymerized so 10 of the seventh would be 10 megahertz so uh basically what we uh used in unfocused ultrasound so um um he uh sterling started uh kind of doing this over the internet telling people uh that they could buy this device and he and he researched and the turner was safe and said buy this device use it uh a couple times a day to the temple area and just let me know how you're doing. And he did this for about a, for a couple of years, actually,

and told me about it. And I said, wow, that's pretty, pretty balzy of you to do that because, you know, I wouldn't do that because I had a medical license to protect. And he didn't have that. But he disappeared. No, he's still alive and kicking doing very well, actually. He lives in Washington State. And, but anyway, so he was, you know, was he prescribed?

You know, it's unclear whether ultrasound. is practice of medicine or not because it's used by a physical therapist. And anyway, so I was talking about this with some friends of mine at California Institute for Human Sciences, which is a small institute near San Diego. And they do various research, mostly on parapsychology and stuff. But they have an institution review board that can ratify and research study and protect human subjects and so forth. So I was talking to them about it because I wanted to do a clinical study of ultrasound versus control. And they said Helena Wabe was the researcher. She said, you know,

what we should really do first is just operationalized Sterling study. Take what he's doing and get those people to sign consent forms to do what they're doing and we record the data. And we'll, you know, because, you know, we have all this information which we can use. So that's what we did. We've had the study going for about a year now, but we did insist on the patients getting permission from their doctors, so we couldn't be accused of stealing patients. And doctors, you know, probably reluctant,

what's this crazy shit? You know, they do. So it's hard to get patients in, but we have enough patients, and we haven't cracked the code yet to see the results, but it seems like patients are doing well, and we've had no negative effects. So we wanna do the next step

and try this for, you know, either double-blind controlled or larger-scale studies. So I'm actually, I've actually been talking to my friend Sue Schneider at Florida Atlantic University, who's in touch with the medical people there and some funny people. So we're gonna hopefully start that study, you know, kind of develop that idea here in Florida.

How long has the testing been going on in San Diego and how many people? About a year, I don't know, 20 or so, not that many yet because, but certainly has more that we can't count, because they weren't part of the study. And do you think this could hypothetically be used to reverse cognitive decline or things like CTE injuries from concussions, things like that?

Yeah, I don't know about CTE, but there's a pretty good literature. A lot of people have been using it using ultrasound now for Alzheimer's, although in different ways. At medium doses, which I think is too much, focused at one area or another, which I don't think is necessary. So nobody but us has done this unfocused, low intensity. bit, which is basically do it yourself because, as you said, you could buy this, the U.S. Pro 2000 is a handheld device.

Low intensity is 700 million watts per square centimeter, so below the, yeah, there is. That's it. That's it. Yeah. How much does that think, Steve? 150 bucks. Wow. Look at that.

Now the butterfly is used. I'll take two. Yeah. Oh, you can get a used one for 50 bucks. That's amazing. Butterfly is expensive because you get imaging. The U.S. Pro 2,159.95. And look at that.

It's got a four and a half star review. Yeah. Do you ever use this? Have you used it? Yeah. Yeah, I have one. I use it for jet lag, actually. Really?

Yeah. You can tell a big, you can tell a difference. It seems to, yeah, set a lot jet lag. It gives you a little buzz and, yeah. You got one in the car? No, unfortunately. I forgot it. I forgot it.

I gave my last one away. I got to get some new ones. but I may be back actually because to get the study going at Florida Atlantic and Boko-R-R-Tone. Wow. So, yeah, we're trying to get people to do it. And, you know, the drug companies and the Alzheimer's Foundation, the Alzheimer's Society and so-called charities, I think, are in the pocket of the drug companies because I write them and they don't respond. and they keep pushing these, oh, we got a new anti-emoloid drug. This one's going to work for sure, you know, trust us.

And so far, no. It's disheartening. Yeah. You know, that's the, I think, one of the probably the biggest problems with cancer research. It's like we've been treating cancer the same way with this blunt, forced hammer of radiating people and giving people, you know, these chemo drugs and killing them just to the point where they're hanging on by a thread and the cancer's gone. It's like we can't come up with a more advanced way. We're still using these primitive tools to attack this thing we've been dealing with for years.

We don't understand cancer. You know, when I told you that my first research was in a cancer lab back in medical school in the 70s. And that was before we knew a lot about oncogenes or anything like that. And there was a theory from previous century that cancer was due to abnormal mitosis. So when cells divide, the microtubules divide the chromosomes. perfectly. And if they don't, you get too many over here, not enough here, or some kind of abnormal genotype leading to an abnormal phenotype, which could be cancer. And there was a German guy named Bovary who had this theory, and it was revived by a guy at UCSF named Dusberg, who was

very controversial because he actually didn't think that HIV was caused by AIDS. So he got a bad name for that. But I think a theory of cancer of, what do you call it? from abnormal mitosis, he had another polyploidy or something like that because you get too many sets of chromosomes. What was the origin of cancer? I think that might be right. So maybe it's all in the, making sure the mitosis happens properly instead of separating the chromosomes abnormally.

I wonder when it comes to the microtubules, what the effects of hyperbaric oxygen would have on that or if there would be any correlation? because I know hyperbaric oxygen is FDA approved for treating, for like wound healing. Yeah. And there's also, I don't know if it's proven, but I think we, it's accepted universally that hyperbaric oxygen can lengthen telomeres. Yeah.

Well, yeah, I don't know. I think that's treating a different problem. Yeah, for sure. But I don't think, you know, if it was tissue hypoxia or not enough oxygen, that'd be one thing. but there's no evidence that it does that. And I know people who are into it, but in medicine it was like a fadness like now. You get that same kind of euphoric feeling

after hyperbaric oxygen that you were describing. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that could be a complete, I mean, obviously it is a different, completely different mechanism of action that's going on there. Yeah, all I know is that in Tucson,

one hospital had a hyperbaric chamber, then all the others were gonna jump on board and get their own. And then they, after looking at it, they didn't bother. So it can't be that dramatic. Or maybe its insurance doesn't pay for it, I don't know. Yeah.

Some combination. Yeah. But this wouldn't, you know, for 150 bucks, these families, well, there have been, let me back up. There have been quite a few studies now on ultrasound for Alzheimer's, doing it various different ways. But with interesting results getting improvement. For example, one group showed improved cognition. This is not our study. This is somebody else's study.

Yeah. and they got MRIs before and after. And they had a patient, for example, who had marked cortical atrophy. His brain had shrunk. Cortical atrophy. Yeah, the cortex actually shrunk because, again, the microtubes disassemble.

So the neurons shrink, you lose synapses. So the neurons get smaller and the whole brain gets smaller. And so after treatment with ultrasound, his memory came back, his cognition improved, and they got a repeat MRI, and the cortex had grown back and it got bigger again. And the only way I could figure that is by stimulating the microtubuleous to repalembrize and flesh out the, quite literally flesh out the brain and the neurons again and reestablish

synapses. So that's pretty impressive. And there have been a lot of studies now showing improvement. And there are several reviews of large cell studies with many patients and very, very safe. I think no significant adverse effects more than, I think, a couple minutes of maybe local irritation or something like that in like three out of 700 patients. So low intensity, it's quite safe. Yeah. And it seems to be potentially beneficial.

There's no reason it's not being used, at least tried. And even if it just helps somewhat, it doesn't cause any problem. Sterling had a patient that he said that, so he deals a lot of times with the family. And the kids taking care of their parents or grandparents. And he said they had one patient and the guy didn't speak. He had lost ability to speak. It was nonverbal. So he didn't say anything.

He just kind of sat there. And after and they were kind of getting a little frustrated. He said, well, keep going. Keep going. After three months, he started speaking again. After three months of ultrasound. Had he spoken previously? Well, no, not for years and years.

Yeah. Something happened. We got Alzheimer's. He stopped. Ah. Yeah, the Alzheimer's took away his verbal skills. But after a couple months, so it took a while because probably that's pretty far gone. So it shows that even if they're pretty far gone, they may come back if you persist long enough. Because the microtriples grow back by themselves at a millimeter per day.

So with ultrasound may be faster. So it may take a while. So you mentioned it briefly a minute ago. about a place in San Diego that studies parapsychology and it seems like these microtubules combined with memory and all this stuff and consciousness. Paras Psychology is linked to all this somehow.

What is your view on parapsychology? I think it's real. And first of all, the place is called the California Institute for Human Sciences. They've now merged with ions, the Institute for Nuitic Sciences, which is a big... And that was founded by Edgar Mitchell,

who had this epiphany coming back from the moon and so... forth. And so he founded it and they they support parapsychological research. And I think, you know, quantum, quantum consciousness enables non-locality and parapsychology. So I have no problem with ESP and telepathy and precognition and all that stuff. And so I think it's real. I've had enough experiences myself where I kind of sense something before it happens and or have a feeling. and some coincidence, you know. Yeah.

So I kind of believe in that kind of stuff. Yeah. And if consciousness is quantum, non-local, then there could be entanglement between people, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely something, there's definitely those feelings that, you know, everyone has had that they can attribute

to some sort of serendipity or thinking about something, thinking about a person, and then they, like, all of a sudden they call you. Like, what was that? or like walking into a place like a building and like having a feeling like something feels something feels dark or evil or something's off about this place and like you know animals you contribute that to animals like cats or dogs like can sense when their owner is going to come home or when something is not right in the room or deja vu and who knows what that is oh deja vu okay and um i always wonder

like is that something that humans had long ago that has just atrophied over millennia, you know? Could be. And, you know, we still have it to some extent. With the advent of technology. You're like, technology's replaced. Our need to have that, right? Like we have, you know, we do less now with our brains,

now that we have iPhones and we have computers. We can talk to our phone. We can, you know, order Uber Eats, whatever. You know, we don't have to do as much work. And there's also the platonic information that we could be accessing too, that's gonna give us information. That's not the same thing because it's stuff that's intrinsic to the universe.

So, but I think that that can be helpful too. Yeah, I mean, you've, I've heard anecdotal stories of people talking about like going often to nature for like days and weeks on end and having like this reawakening, like senses reawakening deep that have been buried within them. Yeah. Like when they leave society, when they leave like this big city they live in. Right. Just getting away from the noise might be doing it. Getting away from that. Maybe, yeah. Or like, is there something else happening there? Something is, are these deep senses like reawakening in us?

I don't know, but I think about that a lot. And like, like even going to memory, right? Like memory in, in history had to have been way better because like going into antiquity when stuff was written down, it wasn't paginated. It was written on scrolls, right? So like you couldn't just say, oh, I want to access this memory. I know where what page and what book to go to or just type it into Google. Like you would have to have a, oh, you would need to have a way greater capacity for memory back that. And even going back before that, before the written word, right, when stuff was transmitted orally for decades.

And, and, you know, what was going on there? How, how did people have that kind of memory? So, yeah, I don't know. It makes me think like maybe parapsychology was there long ago. Could have. And now we just, it's gone away and it's been gone for so long. We've forgotten about it. And now it just is in this woo-woo sort of realm.

We don't know what to think about it. It's been suppressed probably. Yeah. Various technology, but also. Well, the government, the U.S. government spent lots of money on it. We know that. CIA, remote viewing. Yeah.

Stuff like that. Yeah. That's all real. So, I mean, if they spent millions and millions of dollars on it, there must be something there. That's my view. Yeah, it's kind of gone dark, but there's a lot of stuff that goes around that you kind of get bits and pieces of it. A few people are prominent in that history.

Yeah. Yeah. And then there's these telepathy tapes that have come out with these nonverbal autistic children. You seem to have the ability to communicate telepathically and read minds and stuff like that. Right. I don't know what to make about that stuff, man. Well, I think a lot of that is real, but there's also some kind of fakery going on there. There's a lot. I think there's a lot of them.

And we're actually going to have a session on that with a skeptic and an advocate. And we're going to go over that. Because I've seen demos of it that were very convincing and other demos that were not convincing. You know, like they're peaking and this sort of stuff. So you've got to be very careful. But I think conceptually, I think telepathy is quite possible. I think if you have somebody demonstrating this stuff, there's been a lot of people doing it recently,

especially like seeing without their eyes, with blindfolds on. I think one of the ways that you should do it is have like a stage magician there to like verify, like are you doing this, are you doing that? Yeah. Because normal everyday people, you know, normal dumb dumbs like me can't tell the difference.

Yeah. Well, we're going to have that. Actually, we have a skeptic. He's a neuroscientist. He's studied this intent. I mean, he thinks it can be real, but he also says there's a lot of fakery. So we're going to have somebody who was involved

with the telepathy tapes, Diana, Tennessee, yeah, she's going to be there. And then Arno Delorum is the skeptic. He's a neuroscience. He works at ion. So he's generally in favor of parapsychology. Who's the guy who Aya Whiteley was telling us about that was a part of ions?

The gentleman who couldn't travel? Dean Radin. Dean Radin, that's what it was, yeah. Dean is traveling to our conference, for the first time. He's been in Idaho, but he's going to come in person and he's going to talk about, he's got a new book coming out. And he's been doing a lot of stuff. CIA guy, right? Or like, he's history, he was either in the CIA or he knows a lot about the CIA. I don't know. He knows a lot about a lot of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, he's quite smart actually. And he's been, they have this,

you know, random number generator system around the world. Exactly. And a moment like 9-11 or, this big spike in activity and New Year's Eve. He has a study, New Year's Eve, this big spike around the world. And yeah, so when everybody's thinking the same thing, you see an effect on these random number generators. So something like that is going on. So Dean's gonna be there.

We have actually two sessions on Parapsychology. What's the, yeah, I forget what the other one is. But anyway, yeah, we take it seriously. But most of what, most of our conferences, You know, mainstream science. But, you know, we don't kind of cater to the neurocomputation, the cartoon neuron crowd because I don't believe, we don't, we're, we're dubious of, where I'm more dubious of mainstream stuff.

Well, I'm dubious of everything. Sure. But I think the mainstream cartoon neuron stuff, the, the idea that the brain is a computer of simple dumbass neurons just doesn't make sense. It's an insult to neurons and biology in general. Because what's happened is people, you know, neuroscience, a lot of neuroscientists now, they don't look inside the neuron. They don't even know about it.

They don't even, they don't know biology. They come from neuroscience, from AI and from psychology. And so they don't actually know the hardware. They don't know about a neuron. They don't know that it has multiple frequency levels and that sort of thing. So I think that's the problem. So we try to do that. We try to emphasize that.

because I think that's where the key is. And anesthesia is the bottom line. The best way to understand and study consciousness. Yeah, I heard, I was watching something on YouTube their day where they were interviewing this Diana Hennessy Powell woman who did the telepathy tapes. And I think she was saying that they got infiltrated by the CIA. I'll ask her. Do you have that clip, Steve?

I think I texted it to you. Yeah. that was wild because they have historically been fascinated by that stuff. Yeah. Right? So it makes sense. They probably want to use it. They probably are using it in various ways.

And it seems to be somehow connected to this whole UFO, UAP phenomena that the media and the government seems to be hell-bent on releasing into the public and acclimating us too recently. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, we had a session on that last time. And actually, that is kind of interesting. because to me, personally, it'd be highly unlikely if we're the only conscious entities around.

And I'm particularly interested in these plasmoids. So I don't know, you know, last couple years we've all these UIP UFO stuff. Yeah. And there's one category called plasmoids, which are kind of like ball lightning. Oh, yeah. Me and Steve saw some of those. Here's the clip for, oh, this is Kai Dickens.

She's the one who directed the telepathy tapes. Yeah, play the clip. We all figured out who it was. No way. Because I did not think that would happen. And I'm such not a conspiracy theorist at all, but then it happened. That's crazy. Wild.

Here's a question. Do you know of any of these children or anyone in this realm that have been like approached by like a government agency? Because we talk a lot about the government, the CIA, how they try to weaponize everything. We've talked about Operation Often, which they tried to weaponize like witchcraft. So this seems kind of like a prime. subject for them to approach. Yeah, a lot of people were warning us about that. And then a few scientists actually were like,

it's not going to happen how you think it's going to be someone coming in and infiltrating your world, gaining your trust, so they have access to these families. Whoa. And that happened. And we all figured out what happened and who it was. No way. It's all I could do was tell everyone.

And so everyone's aware of it. And just to be careful. It was weird because I did not think that would happen. And I'm such not a conspiracy theorist at all. but then it happened. And it can be really confusing, I think, to know who to trust and who not to. Is this person part of a government agency?

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Yeah. Okay, yeah, you have the plasmoid stuff. Yeah. So among the various types of observations where these plasmoids, which are kind of like corona discharges, plasma, electromagnetic, like ball lightning. Yeah. Which is a whole other subject. And, but what's interesting is that they seem to be doing intelligent things.

Like they would kind of have little, uh, play games with each other or hide and seek and this and that, move around. But what's really interesting is the way they, they move is that they're here and then they go over here and then they go here. and there's no vapor trail there's no sign of propulsion you know as you know if it's a rocket or something

something should be coming out the other end that has heat and they don't and then they're here and then they do whatever then they go here and somebody I think it was Jack Sarfadi who came out to Jack Sarfadi yeah he and I go way back

oh really we used to fight a lot but I think we've used to no he's yeah well it's a long story but we're on good terms now And although I, anyway, I'll give him credit for this, that he said the way, the way they move is, there's no propulsion. And he said, I wonder if it's involving gravity, that they actually can, and this is right up Roger Penrose's alley.

Because, well, two things. To move effortlessly without propulsion and really fast, without. about a vapor trail, if you could curve space time and create a hole, you're gonna fall through the hole. And you're not gonna, you don't need propulsion, you don't need any. Right. So, and if they are in touch with,

if they can mess with gravity, then they might be conscious because that's where gravity comes from according to Roger, quantum gravity, something like that. So they're talking about fast movements? They're pretty fast, yeah. I don't know exactly how fast because I can't tell the distance.

But when you see them, there's one paper, actually, one of our planetary sciences from the U of A, University of Arizona, was on this, and I know him from astrobiology. And he didn't want to talk about whether they were conscious or not, but he said, yeah, the way they move is a mystery. Nobody really knows. So if they can bend space time to move like that,

then they also may be able to access space time where the consciousness is happening. So they could be conscious. And somebody's going to talk about this at our conference. She's been studying, studying this, Dana Kippel. And I told her that when I was back in the 80s, when I was early in my anesthesia career, we actually looked at this phenomenon called Curly in Photography.

Do you know what that is? I've heard of it, yeah. So Curling Photography is something I first read about in a book called Secret Discoverers Behind the Iron Curtain in the 70s, where somebody went to Russia and learned all the stuff they were doing about parapsychology, way, way ahead of us. That's probably where the CIA got everything. But if you, if you, if you, it's basically looking for an aura or a corona effect.

So, you know, some people see aura as they see colored lights coming out of people. And if you put a body part, something living on a, oh yeah, we did, we had a guy in that showed us the stuff. There it is. There it is. So, um, Curlian photography. So I learned about this in the early 80s, I said, I wonder if that would go away with anesthesia. You know, is it consciousness?

And so we did a study with rats. And so we had a rat. So we didn't intubate the rat. We put the rat in a plexiglass chamber and just put air in and air out. And the rats moved around. And then when we added anesthesia gas to the air going in, they would go to sleep.

And so we had them so that their tail, which is the only symmetrical easy-axis thing, was on this photographic plate, and we could see a corona effect. So when they're awake, we see this corona effect coming out of their tail. We're turning on the anesthesia, and they go to sleep, and the tail goes away.

What? So, but wait, hang on. So I actually presented this at an anesthesia meeting, and this guy asked a question, and he said, well, wait a second. You didn't intubate the rat. so there's anesthesia everywhere in the chamber. So how do you know this is because the anesthetic is taken away consciousness

and then it's not coming out of the tail? Or is it because the anesthesia is between the tail and the plate and it's blocking it at the tail level and it has nothing to do with consciousness. It just has to do with this corona effect. And I said, that's a very good question. And I was a bit embarrassed because I hadn't thought of it. So I went back and I told my guys that, okay,

we have to try this without the rat. We have to do control. So we made a chamber that had a transparent top to it, but it was two electromagnetic plates, and we put radio frequency across it to get a corona effect. And so when you do it without anything, you see a bunch of these sparkles, kind of like you saw coming out of finger,

and with air. And then if you add anesthesia, it goes away. So the corona effect goes away. And we did it for a bunch of different anesthetes. and we knew the potency of all the anesthetics and roughly speaking, relatively, the inhibition was proportional to the potency of the anesthetic. So in other words, if it was a potent anesthetic,

you just needed a little bit to get rid of this corona effect. And if it was less potent, you needed a lot. And if it was non-anesthetic like nitrogen or helium, it didn't do anything. So we tested, and we published that in anesthesia as anesthesia acting by inhibiting electron mobile. The corona effect is essentially electrons moving, not as sparks, but more as a cloud.

It's actually an ionic cloud. So it's, and anesthesia is a gas, so it seemed to work out. So we know that anesthesia blocks electron mobility at that level, and that could be, so conscious, it could, that's how it could affect consciousness inside the microtubules, for example. But it would also affect the corona outside, you know, in the atmosphere. And so it would be interesting to know if you could anesthetize these plasmoids or, but it also means that maybe they are conscious if the plasma or the plasma is a sign of consciousness.

Although they would have to be connected to gravity to be conscious. But anyway, there's some connection there. Yeah, we had a gentleman on the show a couple of years ago who was able to like, he was doing this thing where he was he believed he was able to summon these plasma balls they look like ball lightning and he had these crazy claims on how he believed that they were biblical biblical angelic beings that were coming because he would pray and these things would appear and we're like okay show us yeah so i we met him the night before we recorded our podcast we me and Steve took him out to the beach to this location and we sat out there and stared at the sky for like two hours with video cameras and he had the specific type of um the specific type of binocular that was called uh it was like a psionic um a very very low light

binoculars that actually recorded what you could see through there too and um there was lots of planes coming in off of the off the coast like landing in Tampa like coming down you could see the planes because there was flashing lights on them and after like an hour and a half maybe hour 45 minutes uh this like plasma orb came up off of the the horizon and like came up and then went slowly to the left and then like fizzled out and then another one popped up and and went slowly to the right and then fizzled out. And it was like, the closest thing I could relate it to would be like one of those Chinese lanterns.

But like how would you explain it coming off of the horizon and then moving in one direction and going away? And then another one coming out and going away. It was so bizarre. I've never seen anything like that before. But I've also never stared at the sky uninterrupted for two hours. So there's that. well uh why they go away i don't know they could they could uh they could be uh oh here's a video of it

one more time so we're staring at this that's a plane i don't see it the pink thing there it is on the bottom there it is yeah so that's where the horizon is yeah it's still in the camera it's still in here and one on top will fizzle out Thank you. Look at that one getting brighter. Oh. Here, someone needs to look through this. It's very bright.

Thank you. Oh, you see it? It's right there. You see it? That is definitely an orb. I'm tracking it here. Do you want to look? And it just fizzles out.

He's got videos all over his Instagram page of these things. Like, he's like telephoto. And like if you go to his Instagram, you can see these, like these super zoomed in images of these things. and they look like plasma lightning balls. Yeah. They, there's, there's actually quite a few in a,

scientific literature showing that, including the paper from one of our U of A people's on. People's on. And it's a mainstream journal. And, you know, they don't claim that they're conscious. They claim that they're unidentified. They have this,

they have this, uh, interactions with each other like they're intelligent. And, like they're playing, playing with each other, playing tag or something. Yeah.

And then they disappear. But they have this funny movement. So. Did you find it, Steve? Those images? Yeah. There's something, there's definitely something spooky going on that we don't understand, like on another level.

Right. Yeah, that's like a zoomed-in image of what they look like. Chris Bledz, Christopher Bledzo. He lives in, I think it's North Carolina. Somewhere in North Carolina. Well, I went to this meeting at S.S. in California. And they had somebody summoning UFOs.

And the first night, I went out on the beach. Stephen Greer? I don't know. I forget who the guys. They had several. But they didn't see any. And then they did it the second night. And the second night, I didn't go because I got cold the first night.

And, of course, that's when the orbs came. And my friend took a beautiful picture of one. Yeah, look at this one. This one's nutty. It looks like a cell under a microscope or something, doesn't it? Yeah. And he's got all these crazy like like ex-military folks. Oh, yeah.

That are like befriending him and visiting him all the time. Some dude from NASA like befriended him. Yeah. Allegedly they're trying to figure out what he, what it is about him that attracts these things. You know? Yeah. He's been through a lot of trauma.

Like he had a very traumatic upbringing and like a like a lot of, he's been shot before. He's like witnessed his wife. die in a car accident and he's been through a lot of shit. And they think there's there's people who speculate that it something about the trauma opened up some sort of portal in him where these things are like attracted to him or he somehow brings out something that's like not visible to normal people. Something.

Something. Definitely something. Well, Stuart, thank you for doing this, man. This has been a fascinating conversation. Danny, you're welcome. It was a pleasure. Good questions. Good, good conversations.

Let me just mention the Science of Consciousness Conference. I've been organizing this conference since 1994. And this will be my last one organizing. I'm turning it over to my colleague, Dante Loretta. It'll be in Tucson, Arizona, April 6th through 11th. We have a tremendous lineup. We're going to cover all these topics we talked about today and a lot of mainstream stuff and some other stuff.

There it is right there. Look at that. Yeah, since 1994. So everybody should come or zoom in. There we go. Oh, that's amazing. And ultrasound for Alzheimer's. Yes.

Ultrasound for Alzheimer's. I think, you know, I'm getting old and I'm trying to think about what I want to do before I pass on. And that's it. Actually, that's very important. Yeah, man. That's super interesting stuff. I'm definitely going to have to get one of those little ultrasound things and see how it works. And I'll keep in touch.

Okay. I'll be one of your science experiments, lab rats. link to our study and if you're going to do that, may as well end of the study and you can report in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess we probably need your doctor's permission, but you can. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get that. Okay. I'll link everything below too for people that want to find out more and figure out the studies or get in touch with you, all that stuff. So thanks again, man. Thank you. I enjoyed it. All right. Good night, Steve.