Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 766: Stuart Hameroff

Episode Date: September 27, 2026

Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist doing some fascinating research into neural microtubules and the origin of human consciousness, joins the DTFH!For a good primer on Dr. Hameroff's research check out his Popular Mechanics article from about a year ago: This Doctor Says He Knows How the Brain Creates Consciousness. New Evidence Suggests He's On to Something.Michigan family! Duncan is coming to Mic Drop Comedy in Detroit, October 23-25. Click here to get your tickets now!This episode is brought to you by: Right now when you buy two months of BlueChew Gold you get the third FREE with promo code DUNCAN. You will also receive an additional 10% OFF + Free overnight shipping on your first order. Visit BlueChew.com for more details and important safety information. In as little as 10 minutes you can get your free quote and up to 3 million dollars in coverage at Ethos.com/DUNCAN This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self.

Hello, welcome back to the DTFH. Before we get going with this incredible mind-blowing, mind-bending, consciousness-exploring episode, I would love for you to come and see me do some live stand-up in Detroit. I'm going to be there October 23rd through the 25th at Mike Drop Comedy. I love you, Detroit, and I'm excited to get back to the city of Machine Elves. Today's guest came across my radar screen and yours probably a few years ago. Dr. Stuart Hammeroff is an anesthesiologist who has come up with a theory of where or why consciousness happens within the brain.

It's way outside my pay grade and IQ grade. So I'm not even going to try to describe it here other than to say you've probably heard about his research into nanotubules within the human brain that have within them a kind of protein lattice structure within which computations, highly complex computations emerge that could help us understand that consciousness is happening at a deeper level than the current theory, which is it's the neurons, ones and zeros that perhaps it's infinitely more complex. And I say infinitely more complex to say, I don't understand at all what's going on with his research because I am not an anesthesiologist. I am not obviously a neurologist. But what's so impressive about Dr. Hammeroff is that somehow he was

able to articulate to someone with my skill set, this theory in a way that I could understand it, which means I think you'll be able to understand it. If you like this conversation with Stewart, I hope you will check out the TSC 2026, which is happening in San Diego this October. That's the Science of Consciousness 2026. Dr. Hammeroff will be there along with other brilliant philosophers, scientists, neurologists, people who have devoted their lives to studying consciousness. Roger Penrose is going to be there. I might even go and visit. It just seems so cool. You're so lucky if you live in San Diego. Go to this thing. It's going to be so fascinating. But first, listen to this great episode. Everybody, please welcome to the DTFH, Dr. Stewart Hammeroff.

Thank you so much for coming on. on the show, Stu. It is so incredible to meet you. I've been marveling at your research for some time now. It's just wild. But before we get into that, and I want to, you just made me think of something. It's been a real pain in the ass to get people to go to sleep for a lot of human history, right? And it's useful. Put somebody under. You could set. a bone, you can fix them while they're awake, they wriggle, they scream. So this is a real problem. And as an anesthesiologist, I guess you must study the history of anesthesia.

I've never thought of it until just this moment. What was the, what's the earliest record of anesthesia out there? In ancient times, cultures used drugs that were available, poppy, other things, and just sedate people and go from there. There were some other things like pressing the carotas to knock somebody out, which, and then they would come back, hopefully. And the Inca's in Peru, actually, for local anesthesia. So local anesthetics is when you just numb the surface, like lytocaine or mar cane or something. And they actually used, the shamans would chew cocaine and spit into the wound to make it numb because cocaine is a local anesthetic.

Wow. So that kind of stuff went on. And then other drugs came in, alcohol, biting a bullet, that sort of thing. And then in the 19th century, they discovered these gases that if you inhale them at low concentrations cause euphoria. People got giddy, like ether. And they had parties called ether frolics or laughing gas, nitrous oxide. So people were using them as social events.

You could say abusing them or just getting high and happy. but if they breed more, they became unconscious. And somebody figured out, and as long as they kept on breathing and didn't vomit and aspirate into their lungs, they did fine. They woke up just fine. So guys in, they fight about who was the first. I think the Americans were first. The guy in Georgia in 1846 used diethyl ether, I think. And then, and wrote about it, but nobody really heard about it.

then they invited him, I think it was him to Boston, the mass general, the famous Etherdome, it's called, where he showed the use of diethyl ether for an anesthetic. I think it was a big tumor this guy had. And so they knocked him out, took out the tumor. And there's a famous picture of it at the Etherdome. Everybody's standing around watching in coats and ties, you know, no masks or anything like that while this guy is laying there. Yeah. So that's how it started. But they didn't really know how how it worked and we still don't completely know how it works, although I think I know how it works. Yeah. But the thing about the anesthetic gases is that they're inert, they're chemically inert.

For example, xenon, the element is an anesthetic. And all the other ones basically don't form chemical bonds. They do slightly for metabolism, but for their action, they don't. And that's because they don't have charges or polar, you know, plus or minus is sticking out to bind with another minus or plus. on something instead it's just a completed electron outer shell so it's neutral and it meets another similar molecule basically aromatic rings like benzene or in phenylide, tyrosine and triptophan amino acids inside proteins which is where they work and so the aromatic ring which is

non-polar and inert and the anesthetic the electrons in one repel the electrons in another and those repel the other and they oscillate and actually they oscillate in terrahertz which is like infrared very fast and that's probably the basis of all oscillations in biology in these aromatic rings so and the aromatic rings came from a probably the origin of life they came from space they're produced by stars they're in the cosmic in the in the interstellar dust they're there in the interstellar dust is it when When they talk about finding organic matter, when they talk about when they analyze meteors and stuff, and they talk about finding this stuff, this is what they're talking about,

the precursors to life. This is what is out there, just floating around. Okay, cool. Because, you know, life is really a mystery too. People say, well, you know, consciousness emerged from complexity in brains recently, which I think is completely crazy. because how did we get from like almost nothing, basically nothing to complex brains without something driving it? And I think that required feelings and consciousness right from the start.

In fact, it's quite possible that consciousness in the form of Penrose objective reduction, a collapse of the wave function, was there first. And that life form with these aromatic molecules, they started oscillating and they started to have objective reduction, which would give random feelings, including some of them might be. pleasurable. And I wrote in a paper in 2017 that the molecules arranged themselves to optimize pleasure. Why wouldn't they? Or why the pleasure was optimizing the molecules maybe? In any case, interesting. Molecules and systems develop to optimize pleasure. So anyway, I had this idea. Can I not to, like, maybe it's a semantics discussion. Is it to optimize pleasure or Is it to evade suffering?

Well, I think it's the same thing. You know, I say feelings and pleasure. And it could be hedonistic pleasure. It could be altruistic. It could be loved. It could be avoiding displeasure, for sure. So. Because this thing, I'm sorry to cut you, just this little point here of this sort of, however,

you want to chalk it up that it happened, but these, the universe kind of blinking in and out of awareness and that awareness having some state. that you could refer to as pain or bliss or whatever. I worry about this because I just think about that primordial is-ness blinking into some kind of sense of identity and how scary that would be. Like it reminds me of Hoffman, the first LSD trip, or, you know, there's no reference other than I-Amness

which is probably not coherent or staying fixed. It's just blinking in and out. And that blinking and out could be happening over hundreds of thousands of years. It could just be these moments of awareness that go away. Well, I think these moments of awareness, so according to Roger Penrose's objective reduction, any self-collapse of the wave function gives rise to feelings. It's the only actual theory, well, science. scientific theory of subjective phenomenal experience.

What people usually say is emergent complexity and then consciousness pops out like a rabbit out of a hat or out of something. And that's really, that's really a default position because they can't think of anything else. Right. Because it's really hard to explain. So Roger came up with this somewhat torturous argument through Gertil's theorem that consciousness had to have something called non-computability, that it wasn't algorithmic.

Because otherwise, we'd be just completely deterministic and following a predictive course, and life wouldn't be, there'd be no creativity, no consciousness, no fun maybe, I don't know. But with non-computability, you bring in something else and it includes what he called platonic values intrinsic to the universe. So this could be taken spiritually, and some people do, like following the way of the Tao or, you know, something like that. and our divine guidance and gets religious real fast if you want. But it also brought in qualia, consciousness, which must be a fundamental component of the

universe, like mass spin or charge. So now it's something complex emergence, something more fundamental. And I think that's what it is. So it builds up to the universe. But that doesn't mean the whole universe as a whole is conscious. Some people think that. I think there's consciousness everywhere, but I think mostly the universe. these objective reduction moments are random and they don't entangle. Oh, they could. So, for example,

the aromatic rings in the interstellar dust, they're getting UV light to drive these reactions or these excited states that collapse to consciousness. They could be entangled over great distances. So there could be something like that. But it doesn't necessarily imply a godlike entity, although it could. It doesn't rule it out. But that's a step that we don't need to take at this point. And Roger in particular avoids this kind of stuff. Sure. I said, isn't this kind of spiritual or godlike? And he said, I don't find that term useful.

So I took that as a cue. You like to not go too far in that direction because you're going to piss people off. So, you know. Well, this does piss people off. Your research does consciousness, the exploration of consciousness in general, pises people off. And to me, it's a little surprising. You with AI, you start talking about consciousness as it relates to AI and people get mad.

No, it's only a human brain that can have consciousness. Not a machine. That could never happen. And if you're going to take that to the point of some kind of interstellar dust clouds springing into some momentary glimpses of hedonic pleasure out there, boy, you're going to piss people off. And I think you and Penrose have pissed people off a little bit. No doubt. But it seems like the reaction to this, it's too pissed off.

Yeah. What's getting people so mad? Why are people getting so mad at this field of research? Just looking at the universe through this lens. I don't get it. Well, reductionist, materialists can't explain consciousness, even if they, even if they know every neuron of the brain, whatever neuron is doing. And even if they include the microtubules. but don't include, you know, quantum aspects of it and the Penrose mechanism.

For example, I got interested in microtubules, which are these structures inside all cells that are polymer lattice polymers. So they kind of think of an ear of corn where the kernels, except it's hollow inside. And each of the kernels can be an on-off state and they talk to the neighbors and you get interactions and patterns that move. So that increases the information capacity of the neuron tremendously. So back in the 80s, you know, The singularity had just come on, which, you know, Rick Hurds, why I was talking about.

Yeah. When we get to brain equivalence, everything's going to change. Yeah. And he was calculating brain equivalence as 100 million neurons, 100 billion neurons and a thousand synapses. And that gives you, at 100 hertz, that gives you 10 to the 16th ops per second, 10 to the 16th operations per second. And so this will when we get to 10 to the 16th operations per second, you know, we'll have brain equivalence. Therefore, these machines will be conscious. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by some other of my favorite scientists,

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and important safety information. And we thank Bluechu for sponsoring the pod and the better. Thank you, Blue Chew. And I think they've surpassed that by now and they're not conscious. But I was going around saying, no, if you look inside every neuron, you have about a billion tubulence,

the components of micro tubules, at say 10 megahertz. That gives you 10 of the 16th operations per second and one neuron. Then you have to multiply that times 100 billion neurons. So that pissed them off because that pushed the AI target, you know, way, way downstream.

And, you know, I wasn't in that business so I didn't mind pissing people. I kind of enjoyed it, actually, I have to say. But one day, somebody said to me, this is a faithful moment in my life, I think. He said, okay, Mr. Wise-ass or something like that, if you're right, how does that explain consciousness? How does that explain feelings, love, joy, the color green, envy, feelings, all this, blah, blah, which later became known as the hard problem.

This was about five years before the hard problem was coined, although the idea had been around for a while. And I was kind of stunned because I realized this guy was right and I didn't have a clue. You know, I was just taking reductionist, materialism, computationalism to a deeper level. Yeah. And, you know, so what? So he had a good point. And fortunately, he suggested I read a book by Roger Penrose called The Emperor's New Mind, which I did.

And it was amazing. And it's still one of the great books in the world, I think, particularly in this area. But the basic idea, the first half of the book, was why consciousness is non-computable, why it's not algorithm. And he used Gertl's theorem, which basically said, a mathematical theorem can't prove itself. You need an outside observer, like a mathematician, to judge that it's true or not. Got it.

And the way I look at that is that the outside observer knows or has a feeling that it's true. If the theorem is true, you know it as a feeling, not as a, It's whatever the equation tells you, it doesn't matter. You have to know, you have to have a feeling that it's, that's true. That's basically a girdle's theorem. So, that seems so non-scientific. Isn't, isn't science supposed to, to help you avoid listening to some deep sense that this is right? Because that can trick us, that can fool us.

You think, you listen to that part of you, and the next thing you know, you've come up with some kind of superstitious theory or idea. I love it, by the way, but doesn't that sort of fly in the face of how we figure out what's real and what isn't? Well, it just shows that consciousness is not addressable by conventional science, by materialism, reductionism, and you need to go outside of it, but you don't need to leave science. You just need to leave classical materialist science and go into quantum physics, which is a whole, you know, kind of a whole other thing. And classical physics and quantum physics are kind of separated, but also quantum and general relativity are separated. And so when Roger turned to a solution, he went to general relativity and therefore kind

of put general relativity and quantum physics together, which in and of itself is a tremendous achievement. And in fact, it was the first suggestion of that because these two great edifices of modern science have been, they don't talk to each other. If you try to resolve them, you get these infinities and the math doesn't work and this and that. And he did it, you know, conceptually. And he said by, by, so in quantum physics, you have this superposition. You have probably, you know, things can be multiple places at the same time. And, and then they're in superposition and they're entangled. And then something

happens. You make, make a measurement and then it collapses from multiple possibilities to one. And that's the basis of quantum, quantum computing. But the first question that nobody really addressed until Roger was, how can something be in two places at once or multiple places? places at once. You know, how it can be like a wave instead of, you know. And he, to answer that, he turned to general relativity. Einstein's idea that mass or gravity curved space time. And he first had to postulate space time metric that there was something in nothingness. So in between the atoms where there's no matter, there's, there's still a, a pletable. And a pletion. It has a lot of names going back a long time to the Greeks trying to figure out whether they're, I think they called it a plenum.

And then the space time continuum, some other names. And he called it space time basically, space time geometry. And so he predicted that, for example, light from distance stars would be bent by the sun and could be seen on Earth. and in 1919, Eddington went to the top of a mountaintop during an eclipse and observed and saw these stars that were known to be behind the sun, proving Einstein's theory.

Right. Excuse me. Well, that was for large objects. And then Roger applied it to tiny objects. He said quantum particles, atoms, electrons, anything really, really small. And how small is small is another issue. But could be,

we'd have a tiny curvature here. And if it was over here, a tiny curvature here, if it was both places, you'd have curvatures in both directions. And this would be curvature, separated curvatures in spacetime geometry. So like a kind of a blister or a little window or something in spacetime. And you can imagine, or I imagine that if these possible space times continue, each would form its own universe and you'd have the multiple worlds hypothesis. Sure.

So but Roger said, no, these separations are unstable and will collapse to one or the other at time T equals H over E sub G. So H is plank's constant over 2 pi and E sub G is the gravitational self energy of the particle, whatever it is, which means the energy required to pull a particle from itself, to separate something from itself. and there's an equation for this depending on whether there's complete separation or partial separation. And in fact, when we started our theory, he said we've realized, well, we've got to figure out the superposition. The, we've got to figure this out for tubulin. We've got to figure out the E sub G for tubulin for the protein. Is this, I'm so, forgive me, it's quite complex.

I kind of jumped ahead there. I love it. But are these things, these curvatures, are they? like twins or these curvatures do they mirror each other and only one can exist? Well one can well that's that's the heart of the matter. No they can be slightly different which is why you have multiple possibilities. Yeah and they he said the separations are can only exist as long and will self-collapse at time T equals H-bar over E sub G. So So E sub G is in the denominator is the energy of the superposition.

So the larger the superposition, the greater this number. And since it's the inverse of the time, the shorter the time. So a large superposition will collapse quickly and a small superposition will take a long time. And like an atom or electron would take a million years to collapse if it could be. But it's something large in superposition will collapse almost immediately. Gotcha. So when we started out theory, we needed something to collapse, microtables to collapse in the range of neurophysiology we thought, you know, like EEG range.

Yeah. So our first attempt was to figure out what we set time T equals to 25 milliseconds, which is like for gamma synchrony EG, 40 hertz. Okay. So 40 hertz is 25 milliseconds. And so we calculated E sub G for 25 milliseconds. And it was really small because T is very small. long, relatively speaking. So it was like 20 neurons worth of microtubules out of $100 billion.

So he said, you know, that doesn't really sound right. Plus 25 milliseconds is a really long time to avoid decoherence. And also, I feel like we did skip over a part here, which is you're trying to find where in the brain is, could this happen? And your theory is, it's these microchububes. And I'm sorry if I'm again, this is a lot for me. So forgive me if I have to slow it down to like an idiot's pace. You are just trying to find where is the action happening in the brain? Is it happening in these microtubules? And then by trying to figure out, this is the part where I'm kind of stuck,

trying to figure out within these microtubules where this collapse is happening, or how it's happening. happening. And so I don't understand the 25. I don't understand this part. Okay. Just described. All right, let me, let me back up. So the brain has 86 billion neurons, human brain, roughly, and probably 10 times that many glial cells, which everybody ignores. But glial cells are full of microtubules. Yes. So I think they're part of the, part of the deal. They just don't communicate by membrane depolarization. So most people just look at the neurons, forget the glia.

just look at the neurons and treat them as input output devices, integrate and fire threshold logic devices. So the synapse is taken. Everything's happening at the membrane. At the membrane, the potentials integrate. And when they reach a threshold for firing, the axon fires. And that's treated as a one or a zero. And that's what lends itself to AI.

Because if you can have one or a zero, it's bits and you can make it a computer. Or claim it's a computer or build a computer along those lines. But there's many, many problems with that idea. For example, a single cell organism like a paramecium swims around, finds food, finds a maid, has sex, can learn. If you suck it into a capillary tube, it escapes faster and faster each time. And yet it doesn't have any neurons or synapses. It's one cell. Right.

But it does it with its microtubules. So it's got the cilia on the outside that are both sensors and motors. Okay. And inside it's got... It's got more microtubules. So it uses microtubules to navigate and do some pretty clever things. And, you know, like it says, defines a sex partner and- That's great.

You know, probably enjoys life. That's great. Yeah, and this is true for what? Slyme mold is true for. Slime mold is an amoeba, a single cell. It's got a lot of pseudipods. And it can solve the traveling salesman problem. A number of people, this started about, I don't know, 20 years ago, people, they made these wells where the suitepods could go

and, you know, like imagine a clock, but many more than 12. And you put food in some of them and aversive therapy, something aversive they didn't like in others. And the amoeba, slime mold would ooze toward the food and away from the aversive. And it's basically the traveling salesman problem, which is a big problem in computer science. And it does it, it takes a little time. It's a little slow, but it can do it. And it does it with the microtubules. Right.

And we're actually trying to prove that now that it is the microchievous, but it almost has to be because they pick the direction that everything's going to flow. Wow. So the point. So, up until this moment, we've just been looking, it's like somebody looking at a car engine,

but just from the outside or something and saying, this is what's running the car. It's just what I can see on the outside when it's much deeper. Right. It reminds me of zooming in on the computer chip, You know, once you zoom closer in, you realize there's a much more complex system. This is what you've discovered. Right.

These are the microtubules, and that gets us to where I, I think, delayed us earlier on. This is why. The other thing that's delaying us is that AI wants to be like the brain. They want to have, at least they did want to have consciousness. And they assume that it, well, if you get complex enough computation, consciousness is going to have. happen. But their view is that each neuron is like a bit, a one or a zero. And so that's a huge insult to neurons because if a paramecium can get laid, then it's kind of dumb to say a neuron can, you know, is a one or a zero. So I think the cartoon, I call them cartoon neurons, and that's what

neurocomputationalism has embraced. Yeah. Kind of to please AI along the same time that AI is pumping a lot of money into the labs that push this line. And so it's kind of a little bit corrupt, actually. I think AI is pushing the, is pushing the neuroscience toward this view. You know, don't worry about what's inside, you know, don't look under the, under the hood. Don't look behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, you know. And that's exactly what we've got to do. I mean, if they can explain a paramecium, then they could go on to explain consciousness. I mean, I'm not saying a paramecium is conscious, although I think it is. I think, actually all organisms has some bits of consciousness.

Otherwise, why would they have behavior and why would life have started? What's the motivation for a creature or a molecule to do anything? Yeah. Yeah, it can be, you know, following various gradients and optimizing this and that, but to do something voluntarily, purposefully, to grow in a certain direction or to do this or that. I think, you know, the only reasonable motivation is feelings. But evolution doesn't mention.

consciousness. Evolution doesn't even acknowledge it. And, you know, Darwin didn't, you know, I'm sure he knew that what consciousness was, but he didn't have a mechanism. So Darwinian evolution ignores it. And then people say, well, okay, when the brain, you know, recently with language and tools maybe or some kind of brain, there was complex enough computation and consciousness emerged. That's a fallback position that really has no basis. Well, it's, it's a hand-waving argument, I think. There's no evidence for it. There's no way to prove it, really. Sure. And they don't even say what the activity is that's emerging. Is it exonal firing? Is it dendritic potentials? They don't know. They make it seem like smog. It's like some kind of like brain smog that just gives you this sense of identity and self and allows you to experience orgasms and grief.

But it's just a byproduct of all this stuff going on in there. There's a lot going on. Yeah. And it just creates a kind of smoggy sense of identity. It really is a depressive. theory. I've always disliked it and it's never seemed true to me, but I've never had any way to back that up. This is why when I stumbled upon your work, I got very excited because it seemed more in line with how things must be that I don't, I mean, my woo-wooey hippie ass can go on and on about, you know, Buddhism and theories of consciousness and all of all of the sort of emptiness and you know, the framing of consciousness, how it's actually the space that surrounds the framing of consciousness that produces a sense of somethingness. And that feels like what you've stumbled onto, or not stumbled, forgive me for saying that, but what you've discovered. I don't think you stumbled

at all. There was a few stuff. I just stumbled to it. But yeah, I mean, the modern version of smog is complexity. You know, they go, if things get complex enough. This episode, of the DTFH has been sponsored by Ethos Life Insurance. You want to know what just happened to me? It was super fun. I didn't take my freaking diabetes meds for like a week, and my blood sugar got out of control. For the diabetics out there, you know how crazy that is. Number one, it's crazy that I let that happen.

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But then, you know, the event that I told you about, the guy turned me on a Roger's book, I realized he was, you know, Roger had something and this emerging complexity stuff was baloney. Yeah. And I still think that, although it's the conventional explanation. It's a real weird explanation for anything. I like to say that complexity is the last refuge of the bewildered. Let me tell you, if consciousness emerges from complexity, then my children's playroom should wake up pretty soon. You know what I mean?

Look at all the complexity around us. the time. It seems like complexity doesn't produce any kind of clarity at all. I guess you could argue it's harmonious complexity or something as well. But I have to just mention this. To me, the the most shocking thing about being put under is how time doesn't exist anymore. And that is really it's unnerving and beautiful simultaneously. You can just time travel like that, that someone can just turn you off and turn you on and you've leapt through time space.

What's going on there? Well, the first question is, why does time flow in the first place? I mean, time is a mystery. I mean, is it a dimension like three space and one time? Or is it a process that flows through, you know, some other vector space or something else. And, you know, was it Tom Sequin?

Somebody said, I can, I understand time until somebody asked me about it. Then I have no clue or something like that. And it's true. It's a very, very difficult. Anyway, and some people say it's thermodynamics, it's entropy, you know, going to moving towards entropy. But that doesn't work because, you know, like a river has any current. So you can go upstream. And you can, it would allow backward time effects.

I think what causes the flow of time, the direction of time, the error of time is collapse of the wave function. Because it's kind of an irreversible step. It picks something new and then it goes on to the next one, the next one, next one. Although you can also have backward time from that. That's a little bit complicated, but although very important. So I think the consciousness creates the flow of time. So when you go under, you're not creating, there's no flow of time. So you wake up at the same time than when you went to sleep.

And it's true. But people wake up, they don't know if they've been to sleep five minutes, five hours, or five days. And that's not true of sleeping. You sort of have a pretty good idea roughly. So I think consciousness and collapse caused the flow of time, the directional arrow of time. That is so interesting. I mean, this is, you know, I think you've done a good job describing this. It's so complex.

but this sort of brings to something I was hoping we would talk about which is the application of this research because just what you just mentioned there that this collapse function if we could understand it I mean it implies so many things and if this is the flow of time has to do with this

does this produce the possibility to see into the future to see more clearly into the past to understand And memory itself is memory, some kind of entanglement with... Well, I think memory is encoded in microtubules. I mean, most people say memories in the synapses and this guides information through the network, depending on the synapses.

But the proteins which make up synapses last hours to days and memories can last lifetimes. So it's much more likely, I think, that memories in the microtubules. Because this lattice configuration, you go back to the ear of corn, every kernel could be in a different state and it can change dynamically moment to moment, but it also has intrinsic, more or less permanent conditions that can be modified. So going back to the tubuline, microtubulins, each tubulant can be modified by, it's called post-translational modification. An amino acid can be added or subtracted or you can add a phosphorylation or you can do this or that. So you can label that one. And so if you have a billion or a hundred million,

tubulins in one neuron in microtubules, and each one can be in one of, say, 30 states. There's 22 genetic states, and there's about eight post-translational states. So about 30 possible states for each tubulins. So you have 100 million raised to the 30th power of different mosaic states per neuron. So like the bricks on this wall, imagine each one could be a different color, and one of 30 different colors. And just this wall alone would have the possible mosaics you could have on your. your brick wall would be enormous.

Enormous. And then... Get going on that, Josh. That would be cool. So, yeah, so that's per neuron, but that's actually more memory than you need. However, that allows redundancy because you can have the same, sort of the same pattern in other neurons. And memory is distributed. And for example, you know, people used to think that, you know, one memory of your grandmothers

in one particular neuron or group of neurons, and this is over here. But that's not how it works. A guy named Lashley, Carl Lashley, the first part of the 20th century, spent 50 years studying memory. He said, I'm going to find the N-gram for memory. And he worked with animals, and he would teach them a trick or something that would have a memory. And then he would start lesioning and zapping, getting rid of this part of the brain, if that didn't

work, try another part of him, to try to get rid of this particular, and then test them for this trick or whatever it was, and he could never, ever get rid of the memory. There was always some vestige of that memory remaining. Yeah. And a guy named Carl Prebram came along in the 70s and said, you know, that's how a hologram works. So, you know, a hologram is if you have an object. The famous one is Princess Leia in Star Wars. So Princess Leia is on the, and, you know, they turn on and she pops up and it's kind of glowing.

and you sort of see through her, but other than that, she's lifeline. And the way you do that is, well, that's a video. But if you just say still, if you had a statue of Princess Leia, took a laser and bounced light off and that would bounce off into a photographic plate. Yeah. So let's say the coffee cups, the photographic plate, and it has a little bit of thickness. Yeah. And it would encode the information on that.

Right. So then you look at the photographic plate and, okay, we're going to find Princess Leia in the photographic plate. and the way you do it is you shine the original laser through it and it Princess Leia is projected outward and right here. However, if you go back to the plate before before you illuminate it and smash it into a million pieces and look at each piece, you know, you're not going to get one piece that has her big toe, another piece that has her finger and this or that.

You're going to get the whole image, Princess Leia, just very fuzzy and very, you know, poor resolution. But you still get the whole. thing. So the hole is stored is encoded everywhere in different sizes. Okay, so but is this whole, is this within these microtubules or is this within the plenum? It is, you know, in other words, is there an exchange happening here between whatever you want to call that time space geometry and in the brain, which would almost, which would point towards being able to, I don't know, Oh, store information in time space somehow or that memories could be encoded? There's actually an interaction happening between these quantum states and the whatever you want to call it, the plenum, time space, whatever.

Space time. Space time. Yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of people say that because they know that synaptic memory doesn't really work. So that's kind of grasping at straws. But on the other hand, you know, there's everything space time, really. I mean, mass is just, you know, curvatures in space time. And but I think what they're missing is the encoding in the microtubules because that gives you this, I think, holographic.

And I think memory is a hologram. I think consciousness may be a hologram actually. So I think and the influence from space time comes in the collapse. There's a platonic influence. That's what Roger said. And that gives you the non-computable influence, which has is platonic. it could be, as I said before, you know, aspects of good, evil, following the way of the Tao, divine and God, and this sort of thing.

But I, but that's, that's, the main point is I think memories stored as microtubules holographically in a distributed way. Now, the hippocampus goes and gets it and everything, but in the cortex, memory is everywhere, which also implies that memory is encoded, if you, it implies memories and encoded in microtubules, which is relevant to Alzheimer's disease because most people, almost everybody says it's the amyloid plaques. You know, it's these big goobers of waste products in between the neurons that form. And they're big and ugly if you look at them and say, ooh, I don't want that in my brain.

So they get rid of the amyloid. But the amyloid doesn't correlate with the symptoms, with loss of memory. You can have amyloid and no memory, you can have memory and no amyloid. or you can have symptoms with no amyloids. So it's the microtubules that fall apart. And they have a microtubal-associated protein called tau, which probably stabilizes the microtubules and also serves as a traffic signal

for the motor proteins that walk along and deliver their carto to particular synapses, that it's formal learning. So when the tau falls off and it forms what's called neurofibrillary tangles, and those correlate with the symptoms more than the amyloid. But they probably aren't toxic. It's just the fact that they

fall in off the microtubules and the microtubles destabilize and they shrink. They disassemble. So imagine, God forbid, your bones dissolved, you get real short. So the neurons shrink, you lose synapses, pulls away from the synapses, you lose memory. Whether that's because of the synapses or because the microtubules are lost is the question. I would say it's primarily the microtubules. So all these anti-ameloid drugs that they've been trying for decades that don't work that cost 30 or 40,000 per patient per year, is just, they don't work.

They're barking up the wrong tree. They're treating the wrong thing. So if it's microtubules, what do you do about it? Well, people were trying, microtipal stabilizing drugs and actually getting kind of good results. But then the studies stopped mysteriously, and the researchers vanished. What? Yeah. Well, they were never heard from. I mean, yeah, you can't find. They just kind of. Wow. And you know, you could think, well, maybe the drug companies rubbed them out, but I think probably the drug companies paid them off. They said, you know, here's a couple million dollars. Go forget about this. Because the drugs that they were using to stabilize microtubules are off patent, so nobody could get rich on it. Wow. So I think these are anecdotal stories. But there's some good evidence. So what do you do if you can't, if you can't, have And so the microtubules have oscillations in.

So brain waves, EEGs like hertz, so zero to 100 or 200 maybe hertz, 40 hertz being gamma synchronate. But my friend, Anurban Bandiapadier, working in Japan, found that they have coherent oscillations and resonances not only in hertz, but kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terrahertz. And they're what we call time crystals. So that's kind of a whole other story. But, yeah, so the time crystals allow, allow biology to transcend scale. So you can have the same information, very, very fast and tiny, like inside cells. And also, like, kind of holographically throughout your body or your brain, so consciousness.

Wow. I think time crystals are very important, actually. And they were proposed theoretically by Frank Wilcheck, who won a Nobel Prize. for a strong force, one of the nuclear forces. And in 2012, he theorized that you could, just like you have spatial crystals like quartz or diamond, where atoms are periodically arrayed, that you could have a time crystal where dynamics repeat different frequencies. And beginning in 2019, they started making these in the lab. And they worked. And initially, they were, They were like inside quantum computers.

They simulated them. But that's kind of the same thing. Or they did them with one atom or one, kind of like a crystal. I mean, is it like a quartz crystal, the thing that they're using to keep time? Well, those do oscillate. Yeah. Okay, those do oscillate. There's a similar function.

But those oscillated at one constant frequency, which is what you want in a watch. Right. Definitely. But a time crystal oscillates, you know, at, like I said, a hertz. Then you see like actually the pattern. is three peaks. Well, let me back up. So here's a microtubial.

Let's say you put four electrodes, two to stimulate and two to record. If you put a voltage across the length of a microtubal, it's an insulator. There's no current flow. Okay. But then if you start oscillating the voltage or an AC current and sweep it from zero on up, you'll get to certain frequencies where there's a big jump in conductivity. Got it. Super conductivity.

Yeah. And that happens. It hurts. that would be the EEG maybe, kilohertz, megahertz, and charhertz. And in each region, you get three peaks

and each peak has three peaks. So triplets of triplets. Wow. Excuse me. And you see the same thing. So that's what we're calling it a biological time crystal. That's cool.

Which is a bit outlandish because because like I said before, the other ones have single atoms or something cubits. whereas microchibals are fairly large compared to that and have lots of different systems. Yeah. Nonetheless, we think that's, so actually we wrote a paper, Honorban and my colleague Dante Loretta and I wrote a paper about microchubles as biological time crystals.

And we actually analyzed, or they did, the systems within a microchibyl that are oscillating, which system oscillates in kilohertz, which system oscillates in terrahertz, megahertz, gighertz, and terrahertz. And that's in our paper. And it has to do with the water inside that oscillates in, in, in, in terrahertz and the things that stick out called C-termini are slow. And so we have a mechanism for each of those four one for oscillation frequencies. But they all come out of microtubules. So, wow.

This is cool. You've basically discovered some sort of the DNA of consciousness. That's what it feels like. You found this just, it's like the economy. Akashik Records or something, just this storehouse that's, it's so interesting. The Akashic Records, which I was trying to think about before when you're talking about divine guidance or memory. It could be, it could be something like that. That would be like Rogers Platonic values, actually. I mean, I agree with, even though I love thinking about, like,

the Akashic Records and all of those things, I agree. Like, with this sort of research, it's, right now, you're just where you need to be. Because, gosh, just think. if we could find a way to cure Alzheimer's disease from this. I mean, just that alone would. Well, let me get back to that because what I was getting to is that we know microtubus have these oscillations, different frequencies. Yeah. And when this came out around 2012, 2013, or actually I learned about in 2009, 2010,

I thought to myself, microtubes have these vibrations. maybe we could use them to treat micro-treatles to affect mental states in a good way. And then later, I realized about the Alzheimer's problem. But so anyway, I was thinking about, well, this episode is supported by Better Help. You know, if you could wake up tomorrow and be better at one thing, what would it be? You ever ask yourself that you ever think about what would I like to be better at? And boy, you know what I'd like to be better at. I like to be better at not being addicted to everything.

That'd be nice to not just anything that makes me feel good. Video games, nicotine. My body just latches on to it like some stray puppy clamping on to a strange nip of a dangling nip of some passing lactating dog. Be nice for that not to happen. Better is a feeling defined by you. And for Better Help, it's a Better Help therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global emotional well-being with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries. It's progress.

Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash Duncan. That's betterh-H-E-L-P dot com slash Duncan. Thank you better help. Killahertz, megahertz. Let's just take megahertz. That's radio waves. So I wasn't that interested in putting radio waves into my brain or anybody's brain. Although people do it.

At low intensity, apparently it's okay. But then I looked up and there as an ultrasound machine. Because as an anesthesiologist, we used ultrasound for necklines and nerve blocks. So we could see where we're going with the needle and this and that. And so it passes through the body. you can see the baby in the womb moving around and, you know, it's been around for 100 years, and it's safe as long as it's not too intense. At high intensity, you can cause lesions.

And people are doing that to burn brain tumors because you can focus it and intersect. But anyway, the ones we used in the operating room were imaging and were scanning. So they were unfocused and they go back and forth and you see a big part of the brain. Now, these devices aren't made for brain. They were approved for brain imaging, but CT and. MRI much better. But they were proof of brain imaging. They were used, they were and are still used in newborns to look for bleeds through the skull, actually through the fountainals where there is no skull for like 30, 40 minutes at a time. They didn't seem to cause any problems. Maybe they did

the baby some good. Who knows? Right. Because the other thing that Honor Bond did was he tested for electromagnetics, not for ultrasound, but the frequency, so he had tubulin, the basic protein of microtubules, and they will assemble into microtubules at a given rate. And then he did that in the presence of different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. And he found that 10 megahertz was the optimal. If you hit 10 meghertz, you had the very, very fast rise of assembly of microtubules. So that's what ultrasound is. So that was electromagnetics.

So we said, well, let's try with ultrasound, see what happens. And actually, people have shown that ultrasound promotes neurite regeneration if you sever the nerve. So we had a chronic pain clinic in our anesthesia department. I used to run it, actually, treating chronic pain with nerve blocks and this and that. And I said to my anesthesia colleagues, you know, these guys are really depressed. Mostly guys, women too. These patients are depressed. Let's try putting ultrasound into their brain.

and see if they feel better. Maybe their pain will go away too. Their mood will get a better. And my friend said to me, yeah, right, you go first. So they kind of called my bluff, and I had looked this up, and people have been putting into animals and seeing physiological effect. It was a proof of brain image. I said, well, how bad can it be?

So one faithful day, at the end of the day, we're sitting around a table in the conference room and the operator room, and they wheel on the ultrasound, and I'm sitting there, And my friend holds it up to me. And I didn't know how long. So I think it was like 15, 30 seconds. And you can see my brain sort of on the screen. And I didn't, he put it down and I didn't feel anything. I was kind of disappointed.

I was kind of hoping for a buzz or something. Yeah, sure. But about a minute or two later, I did get a buzz. And it lasted for a couple of hours. And what was it like? Like a martini or a joint or something like that. Just, you know. Everyone right now listening.

They're on Amazon trying to order ultrasound machines. Well, okay. Well, let me continue then. But so we started a, so we did the first study in 2013. It came out in brain stimulation. The first ever study of ultrasound on human mental states. And we showed a significant, and we did a double blind because you can, the machine is on and it makes the hum, but you can, you can turn off the ultrasound coming out of the probe. Okay.

So, and we did a double-blind study and found a significant improvement in mood, almost significant in pain. Pain patients don't like to give up their pain for other reasons. I want to keep their pills going, that sort of thing. Yeah, sure. But nonetheless, their pain got better, although not statistically significant, but their mood improved. And that was the first paper in that area. Well, then a lot of people started doing ultrasound, including a friend of my Jay Sanguinetti at Arizona than I was on a paper with later. But they all got into focus.

You know, if you're a neuroscientist, you want to, you have a, everybody has a favorite brain area that they want to stimulate. You can't do it. You know, it's hard to do it. If you put an electric, electrical stimulation, it hits the surface. The brain tends to go over the surface. It doesn't actually penetrate. Ultrasound penetrates right through. And you can target.

So if the patient has an MRI and you have a stereo attack, you can target anyone in particular area. That's interesting. And Jay did a paper that I was a co-author. where stimulated the prefrontal cortex and showed mood enhancement and a reorganization and new connections by MRI so it's doing something it's probably stimulated the microtubules although the ultrasound people don't accept that as an explanation they think it's stretch receptive there's no they don't want to go go to microtubules either but i'm but i'm pretty sure it's actually on microtubules so anyway in 2015 these guys in in in australia they were there were there were

studying Alzheimer's mice and they wanted to give an anti-ameloid drug that couldn't cross the blood-brain barrier. But medium-dose, higher dose ultrasound, medium dose would be to cause lesions. Medium dose opens the blood-brain barrier. So they're using ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier to get this drug across and they had a control group that got the ultrasound but no drug and they got better from the Alzheimer's. Their symptoms improved markedly. So these guys started using medium dose ultrasound for, but targeted, I think, at the hippocampus for Alzheimer's and have a company and I don't know how they're doing. But is this in conjunction with another drug? Or is it just medium dose ultrasound to the hippocampus seems to?

Yeah, I don't know how good they claim good results. And they're doing human trials now. But with focused, the patient needs an MRI and you need this stereotytic frame. So it becomes an expensive device. So since I had done our study earlier with an unfocused device, although it was part of an OR imaging device, which costs like 70,000 bucks, I realized that, well, we don't need imaging for this. And if we don't need imaging and we don't, you know, and we use unfocused, it's a lot, it's a lot, you don't need an MRI, you don't need a stereotype frame. So a friend of my name, Sterling Coley, was, follow this, and he started, he found

a device from China that costs $150. And it's a handheld device and the settings were below thermal threshold. And he started playing with it and advising people online to use it. Not, you know, maybe a little bit risky there. Sure. But anyway, and he was telling me, hey, a lot of these people are really getting better, you know. And so about a year ago, I got with my friends at Ions Institute of Noetic Sciences and said, hey, you want to, you want to, I told him about Sterling's work and Alzheimer's. And so why don't we, you know, do a study? I thought we could do a controlled study.

and they told me, Helene Wabé, who was their research director, a very, very smart woman. And she said, really what we should do first is just gather information. Why don't we take over or incorporate Sterling's study? We'll bring, you know, bring him invited. And so we basically continued his, but with statistics and with rigorous controls and keeping track of everything. And just have the patients report how they feel. and the family, the caregivers.

And, you know, they have to buy the device for $150 bucks. So we're not making any money off of it. And we never even see the patients. You know, it's all online. Self reporting online. And we just wrote up the paper and it was accepted and is coming out any day now in frontiers and aging. No way. Wow.

And so I think, you know, we're going to encourage other people to try this because the patient's reported significant improvement. And let me put it this way. Anti-amilog drugs cost 30,000 or 40,000 a patient per year, and they don't work for one patient. This, it could, for 150 bucks, you could treat 100 patients a day. You know, my dream, I don't know if it's a kind of fantasy, is to go to these huge memory care centers.

There's one where I used to live in Tucson that when I first moved there was like one little building and I was like six buildings and go from room to room and give everybody, you know, 30 seconds of ultrasound, maybe twice a day. And you could treat 100 patients a day for 150 bucks plus the guy to do it. And it does that, you don't need to be doctor and nurses assistant to do it. The family can do it. The patient can do it themselves if they're not too far gone. And so anyway, I think that's, I'm hoping that's where the future is going.

with this. But there's resistance because people don't want to admit it's the microtubas mediating the Alzheimer's, and mediating the Alzheimer's, nor mediating the ultrasound effect. Nonetheless, we're just going to keep pushing because, you know. It's beautiful. Well, thank you. It's so beautiful. And it all makes sense. You know, the holog, if it is, if memory is holographic, then it means that whatever the mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease are, it's not like your memory banks are getting destroyed. It's potentially throughout your entire. Well, the memory banks are in the microtubules. I mean, it's a hologram, but the memory has to be encoded somewhere, and that's in the

microtubuleals. So if the microtubules fall apart, you lose memory. You lose synapses, it, lose brain volume. There's one study, there's been a number, there have been about 20 studies showing improvement with ultrasound in Alzheimer's. In one, the patient had an MRI that showed cortical atrophy. The cortex had actually shrunk because after the ultrasound, it grew back. They got a follow-up MRI and actually grew back because, presumably because the microchereals are reassembling and not inflating, but enlarging, you know, making the neurons big of it.

It's astounding. When does this paper come out? Oh, it's going to, it should be on any day. It's not, we put it on the archive and we just got the galley proofs and then Helena. So I don't know. Feels like that's going to make some waves. Like that's pretty incredible. We didn't make any, we didn't make any strong claims because it was uncontrolled.

And it was patient report. Yeah. The main thing we, we show is that it's safe. Yeah. We had no significant side and the patients reported improvement. Wow. So, you know, people should do double blind studies or people should just start using them. and see what happens.

Yeah. Maybe a groundswell because if I had it, God forbid, or somebody I loved had it, I'd say, you know, before you go see somebody who's going to give you some anti-amilide crap, try this. It's $150. It gives you a little buzz. You feel good.

And we've not. The reviews paper had 700 patients and only a few very minor, like skin irritation or changing headaches that went away with drinking fluids and stuff like that. So no real significant. side effects. I want one. Do you have one? I do have one.

I don't have it with me though. Actually, I have one that Sterling modified to be modulated at 40 hertz, which I haven't tried it yet, but he said it's really good. Wow, 40 hertz, man. 40 hertz. Ultrasound pulsed 40 hertz. Listen, it's been a joy talking to you. You are a genius, and thank you so much for spending time with me today.

It's just, and if people want to connect with you or your research or, you know, Do you have a website? I got a couple of it, a couple of them. Will Reed just made one for me. What's that? Stuarthammeroff.com. Stuarthammeroff.com. Great.

I still have one from the University of Arizona. And my only social media is Twitter or X. Okay. At Stuart Hammeroff. Beautiful. There's another one with my name on it. That's not mine. I don't know how I got there.

But at Stuart Hammeroff, I'm pretty active on Twitter. X. I argue with a lot of people about this, so that's my thing. Okay, well, thank you. Thank you so much. You're so generous with your time. I really appreciate it.

You're very well. Thank you. That was Dr. Stuart Hammeroff, everybody. Don't forget, there's still room at TSC 2026 in San Diego, or you can listen to Dr. Hammerov speak, along with Penrose and many other brilliant human beings. And also, why not come see me? I'm going to be in Detroit. coming right up you can find all my dates at dungutrussle.com thank you so much for being here i love you

i'll see you next week