Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Stuart Hameroff: Is the Human Brain a Quantum Computer? (#353)

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

Is the human brain a quantum computer? What is the Orch OR model of consciousness? And is there an afterlife for our quantum souls? Here today to answer these questions and take us on a wild tour through consciousness, imagination, and the human brain is Dr. Stuart Hameroff! Stuart is a professor of anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona and director of The Center for Consciousness Studies. In this interview, we dive deep into Stuart’s research and his passion for everything consciousness, so make sure to check it out!  Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) Judging the symposium by its cover (02:06) The Orch OR theory (06:44) The problem of free will (10:14) Elaborating on the Orch OR theory (13:00) How does anesthesia actually work? (26:23) Stuart’s interest in quantum physics (30:10) Artificial intelligence and brain organoids (33:55) AI, Neuralink, and other brain-computer interfaces (38:02) Audience questions (42:54) Outro (55:53) — Additional resources:  🥗 Thanks, HelloFresh! Go to HelloFresh.com/50impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus 15% off the next 2 months. 📝 With a MasterClass annual membership, you can take one-on-one classes from the world’s best for $10 a month with your annual membership, get unlimited access to every class — and even better, right now, as an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off when you go to MASTERCLASS.com/impossible. 🧑‍💻 Visit LinkedIn.com/IMPOSSIBLE to post your job for free! 🎤 Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think music is probably a better metaphor, at least for consciousness than is computation. Dr. Stuart Hammeroff is a professor of anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona. He's best known for his work on quantum consciousness, a theory he's co-created with Sir Roger Penrose. Does neuroscience need a revolution to understand consciousness? And I believe it does. It's also a theory that's been highly disputed by the scientific community. Does our brain really operate like a supercomputer? Or is it actually more like a quantum orchestra?

I think you need microtubules and I think you need these coherent vibrations. Tune in for more about the true nature of consciousness. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, help. Welcome everybody to what promises to be a wild tour through consciousness, imagination, and the human brain. a sample of which I brought here for today's renowned guest, my friend, second time appearance on the Into the Impossible podcast. It's professor, Dr. Stuart Hammeroff, the University of Arizona, where he is a professor of anesthesiology and psychology and the director of the Center for Consciousness Studies where there were plans for the last year because I get these emails every year. And I spoke many years ago at this conference when it was last in San Diego.

And they just had a phenomenal conference held up in Encinitas, I guess, for the Center for Consciousness, featuring our good old friend, Sir Roger Penrose, who's coming up on 93, I think, next week. I think you just turned 93. Yeah, that's right. Stuart, how are you? Very well, Brian. It's good to see you again. It's great to see. Yeah, I'm glad you came.

Get to escape the heat and come into the kitchen here in San Diego. And what you call is Zoni in this part of the country. So we do call you. We see, but you usually leave around Labor Day, so that's nice. So we get our, we get our beaches back. I get the hint. Not you personally. We love having your hair.

So you've been on before. You came on last time with Sir Roger, but this time I wanted to get an in-depth look into your research, what drives you, passions, and also to answer some questions that I've had about consciousness for a very long time. But I thought first we do something that we always do on this podcast. We do a feature that we call judging books by their covers. You don't have a book today that we're discussing, but I thought we'd look at the cover of the symposium,

the artwork for the symposium. And the last time I was here, I spoke at it in 2017, I can't believe it. There was a brain riding a surfboard somehow in La Hoya. So anyway, can you explain the origin story and judge the symposium by its cover? Well, the recent symposium was, does neuroscience need a revolution to understand? understand consciousness, and I believe it does. And this particular conference, which is kind of a satellite conference of our usual consciousness conferences, was a result of the last two ASSC conferences, which ASSC is kind of the other large conference, annual conference on consciousness.

They tend to be more conservative. They are more academic, but they don't really deal with consciousness so much as cognition, metacognition, language, what Dave Chalmers call the easy problems. And the last two ASSC conferences have featured theories of consciousness, but didn't include ours, even though they were centered on the Templeton Foundation Adversarial Collaboration Program, which poured a lot of money into consciousness research in last few years. And originally there were five theories, integrated information theory, global neuronal workspace, predictive coding, and higher order theory, and ours orchestrated objective reduction. And the other four are really what I call kind of wiring diagrams of information flow in the brain without really dealing with any

biology. They're kind of, you know, information goes this way, it goes that way, and then it all converges, and that's where consciousness is. And so their collaborations were based on where is consciousness, is it in the front of the brain, is in the back of the brain? There was one particular one between IIT and Global Neuronal Workspace, whether it's in front of the brain in the back of the brain, and five million dollars later, they had a big showdown at the ASAC conference, and they couldn't decide. It was conflicting, and so it was a big, big tie. And also, Chalmers and Christoph Colk settled a bet from 25 years ago on whether we'd have a neural correlate of consciousness in 25 years. Dave had said no, because he believes in the hard problem, the consciousness is

essentially unsolvable. And Christoph said, yes, we'll have a neural correlate in 25. Well, 25 years later, Christoph had admit we don't. Even though he's a big advocate of IIT, he had admit that it wasn't convincing. Anyway, they didn't consider our theory. And as I told Christoph and Dave, you know, we've already shown that quantum effects in microtubules are inhibited by anesthesia, and therefore the neural correlative consciousness should be in microtubules at a deeper level within the brain. But they only consider neurons as simple on-off switches. They only consider the Hodgkin-Huxley-1950s era, membrane-only ion propagation signaling along the membrane, in a touring that is a computable algorithmic neuron.

And the brain's not like that. If you put electrodes inside cortical pyramidal cells, they're non-alorithmic. They have some other feature other than membrane adjusting the threshold from beat to beat. A great place for consciousness to come in and adjust things and modify what is otherwise automatic behavior. So because we weren't part of the adversary,

we tried to have an adversary collaboration with IIT, and we had a meeting in early 2020, just before COVID in Tucson with Giulio Tannone and Christoph Colk and Roger and Honorban and other colleagues of mine of ours on the orc-or-R on the microtubial side. The idea in the adversary collaboration was that one experiment that if it went one way would prove one theory, if it went the other would prove the other. It would be a decisive experiment. Yes.

And we couldn't come up with anything because, number one, I don't think IIT is falsifiable. And number two, we're at a deeper level. and our theory would be talking about quantum effects in microtubules inside neurons, faster, deeper quantum, and would be consistent with any of the other theories, which are more like wiring diagrams or even phrenology maps on the surface of the skull. So that kind of fell through, but Templeton generously gave us $200,000 to do two experiments, both of which turned out very favorable to us, one of which is published and the other one will be coming out soon.

When I had on David Chalmers, he graciously came on last year for his, new book and he's from Australia and I asked him that the following question which I want to ask you if I were to have on ACDC the most popular band besides maybe Olivia Newton John rest in peace from the land down under of Australia and I were not to ask them to play their song you know back in black I would be worth nothing as a podcaster so I want to ask you your greatest hit I asked him for his greatest hit to find the hard problem of consciousness. And he did, and that was wonderful. I want you, in your words, to describe what is orc-or?

Okay, as I said, most theories look at the brain as a complex computer of simple neurons. So if you have complex enough interactions and they're wired up in the proper circuitry, then consciousness emerges at a critical level of complex interactions. But the neurons themselves are simple on-off switches, no different than what you would find in a computer functionally. And this has been the idea and this grew out of Hodgkin Huxley, which lends itself very well to algorithmic neurons, biological, and then computation. And the brain, consciousness and the brain has always been likened to the current information

processing technology, going back to the Greeks with a seal ring and wax for memory, and then telegraph switching circuits, a hologram, smoke signal, well, maybe not smoke signals, but and then The computer. Of course, in the last 50 years, it's been the computer. And AI has come along and run with that idea and say, when we get complex enough, or we get enough, this or that, we'll have consciousness. And I think that's completely wrong because I follow Rogers' idea, the consciousness is non-computational. And there's something other than computation, something other than a Turing machine going on. Right. So the orc-R component of it relates to quantum mechanics and non-computability, how, how so? If you look at one neuron, as I said, if you put an electrode

into a pyramidal cell, which I think is the most likely place in the cortex, the layer five pyramidal cells for reasons I could go into. And you measure the membrane, kind of the input output, you find that the threshold for firing, it's supposed to be integration on the dendrites and soma to a threshold, reach that, that triggers a firing, and that's a one or a zero. And that lends itself to computation. So it's all dependent on input versus output, which is algorithmic and contouring. However, they found that there's a variability in the threshold, firing threshold, on a beat-to-beat basis, on a firing-to-firing basis. So there was something other than the membrane or even a field coming in from the outside

because that would affect the membrane. Let me just interject just for clarification for my audience, because if I'm a little bit unclear, I'm sure that they might also be. So when you say that the threshold changes, it would be as if you have still zeros and ones, but the threshold to trigger in a transistor-based computer, it would be as if that threshold would not be zero. on five volts, it would be some intermediate value that itself would change over time? Yes, it changes on a firing to firing basis.

And that was, everybody kind of glossed over that. Well, it's, it's artifact, it's noise, it's this, it's that. But it isn't. That is actually a perfect place for consciousness to come in. Because if we're algorithmic, if we're totally computational, then there's no possibility of free will. There's no creativity. There's no imagination.

It's all, we're all basically a computer. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. I know many people believe that we have no free will.

Sam Harris, Sabina Hossinfeld, many people believe in super determinism. And so that's not a problem for them. I know that. But if you want to... Actually, I don't believe that we don't have free will. And I've never met somebody. I don't know.

Have you, you might have... Have you ever met someone who acts in accordance with a perspective that they have no free will? In other words, Sam Harris, I don't think that he goes around thinking, I have no free will. So therefore, I'm going to act in accordance with that fact. In other words, he sees it as a fact. Have you ever encountered a patient perhaps? that maybe in psychological settings that's a zombie like person. Well, believe that like, you know, if they did something around,

they cheat on their wife, that it's because of the Big Bang. You know, is there something like that? Well, there could be. But I think there's a bigger problem with free will, which is that if you say something and I say something, and if someone looks at my brain at the activity, recording or processing what you said, I will have already responded to you.

Yes. Or a baseball player actually swings the bat. it doesn't really have enough time to know where the ball is. Going back to the experiments of Benjamin Libet in 1979, where he had patients awake in surgery with their brains exposed and could do physiological tests, he found that the brain refers information backward in time. And Roger wrote about this in his book, The Emperor's New Mind, and I then looked up Libet and studied him intensely. And basically, Roger argues that every collapse sends quantum information both forward and backward in time. And Aharonov says the same thing. And other than...

do too. So backward time is allowable in quantum physics up to a point. You do have the grandfather causal paradox problem, but you can get around that or you can avoid it by just not affecting anything that hasn't collapsed yet. So this backward and time effect actually enables you, enables us to act in in real time. So even though the activity processing, what you said hasn't happened yet, it's going backward in time so I can answer you consciously. But the phase space or the parameter space isn't infinite. In other words, the baseball pitcher, you know, throwing a pitch, it's not going to, you know, emerge from the dugout. It's going to emerge from his hand. There's a parameter space that narrows down the batter's ability to

actually judge. And there is, you know, it's not that it's a causal. It's they're basing their swing pattern on the actual, you know, probability that they've witnessed over thousands of pitches in the case of a major-like baseball player. Well, that's the mainstream explanation. And that may be true. But a guy named Robert Adair wrote a book called The Science of the Swing about this. And it argued against that. Same thing with cricket and tennis and so forth. And even rapid fire conversation. And there's a lot of experimental evidence for it also. Unfortunately, if it's in the parapsychology literature gets written off as a parapsychology. But there's a lot of precognition. There's some very mainstream studies showing effects from the near future. Right. But getting back to the actual

or our theory. So when we talk about, can you sum that up in a way that, you know, a lay person can understand it? Because I've had trouble. I know other physicists have trouble. understanding it. I know you're not a physicist, but you've been intimately involved. You're the one person that Roger responded to from the Emperor's New Mind, which was the first book I ever read as a science, you know, hungry kid. But I want to ask you, so the orchestrated, let's break it down. What does ORR stand for? And then what do each one of those terms mean in lay person's terms, please? Okay, well, OR is Rogers' theory for collapse of the wave function to do general relativity or quantum gravity, however you want to describe it. I'll come to that in a second. Ork is really what's

happening in the microtubule. So let me put this in a temper perspective. When I was in medical school, I was interested in the brain, mind problem, consciousness, but neurology and neurosurgey psychology didn't really grab me as a specialty to spend my life doing. I did a research elective in a cancer lab was studying mitosis, how cells divide, how these structures, microtubules, mitotic spindles would grab the chromosomes and they were all tangled up and mixed up and grab them in perfect pairs and separate them to form the daughter's set. cells. So they had to know where to go, what to do, they needed to have some kind of intelligence or possibly consciousness. Everybody else in the lab got fascinated by the chromosomes, and this

was the dawn of the genetic revolution, and they probably made billions in genetic engineering and so forth. I got really fascinating with how these structures, these microtriubules, knew where to go and what to do. I was interested in consciousness. At that same time, the early 70s, it was discovered that the microtubules were in all cells, not just mitotic spindles, including neurons. Neurons were chalked full of them. Prior to that, the fixative agent had for electron microscopy had been dissolving them. And the x-ray diffraction crystallography of microchievousal came out from Amos and Clug in the UK. And it was like a crystalline lattice of individual proteins in a helical geometry with Fibonacci geometry, which I thought was really

interesting. And they were in neurons and they looked like computers. I was also learning about computers for the first time, about Boolean switching matrices. And I looked at the structure of microtubule and a bullion switching me, I said, you know, they look like computers. Maybe they're processing information as little computers, and that's how they know where to go and what to do and organize stuff inside the cells. And so I developed some theories and models and worked with physicists at Los Alamos, Steen Rasmussen, Jack Tussinsky, Stephen Smith, and others, modeling microtubilus as automata, like cellular automata. Each protein subunit could be a one or a zero interacting with its neighbors. And we showed that we could get propagating patterns and information

and they could be pretty good computers, especially if you hook them up side by side in opposite directions as we have inside neurons, inside dendrites. Have people built, I was just a sign, have they built, you know, squishy wet computers using microtubules and not, you know, maybe not human subjects, but have the mouse models? Well, Honorban has developed what he calls brain jelly, which is an organic polymer that self-organizes in a helical fashion, which is based on microtubules that he says is a quantum computer. It's an organic quantum computer at room temperature. And that's, he just got big time funding in India to develop that. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So I was going around the 70s and 80s to Neuronet and AI meetings and where, you know, Kurzweil is talking about the singularity. We get to 10 to the 16th operations per second.

They were looking at the brain as 10 to the 11th neurons. A thousand synapses at about 100 hertz gives you 10 to the 16th operations per second. So Kurtzweil, actually this came from Hans Moravik in the 80s. I read his book, Mind Children. I think. And then Kurzweil picked it up and said, well, when we get to, that's the brain capacity, 10 to the 16th operations per second. When we get there, we'll have consciousness in a computer. He's coming on the podcast early next year, so look forward to sharing your ideas of him. Okay. And I had calculated that microtubules, there were about a billion tubulence switching and say 10 megahertz,

gave you 10 to the 16th operations per neuron. So I was going on being a real pain in the butt to that. I'm saying, no, there's way, way more information going on. And if you multiply the 10 to the 16th per neuron times the 10 of the 11th neurons, you get 10 of the 27th operations per second. So I was moving their goalpost, if they wanted to believe me, way, way downstream. So they didn't want to believe me. They didn't like that because they were saying, give us a few more billion and we'll have a conscious computer.

And I was saying, no, no, no, it's like 30, 40, 50 years in the future, you know. So they said, get out of here, kid, you bother me, you know. And so anyway, one day somebody said, okay, wise guy. let's say you're right, how would that explain consciousness? And it was the hard problem thrown in my face. This is five years before Dave Chalmers discussed the hard problem. Other people, including John Searle, had described it in other ways. I had to admit that this guy was right.

I didn't have a mechanism for consciousness. You know, feelings, love, joy, the color pink, blue sky, whatever, taste, smell of coffee. I had no idea. These were qualia. And fortunately that person who recommended I read Roger's book, The Emperor's New Mind, which I did. The first part of the book was arguing against the idea that consciousness is a computation through Gertl's theorem, that a mathematical theorem can't prove itself. You have to have somebody outside a conscious mathematician.

And he said, therefore, for understanding, you have to be outside the computational system, the classical computation, the Turing machine idea, something outside that. And for that, you had to leave classical physics. You had to go to quantum physics. And for that, you had to arrive at the single most mysterious issue in quantum physics, which is the measurement problem, a collapse of the wave function. And as you know, in quantum physics, at small scales, and maybe large scales, but at least in small scales, things can be in multiple states or locations at the same time.

But when measured or observed, they seem to collapse to one or the other. Now, some people say that doesn't happen in each possibility. Branches often forms its own universe or a decoherence. does it. Some people say the consciousness causes collapse. None of those are really satisfactory. And in this book, the Emperor's New Mind, Roger came up with his own new idea that there was a self-collapse. And to explain that, he brought in general relativity, which is a neat trick in and of itself because quantum physics and general relativity generally don't jive. But he likened the position of a particle or a particle to tiny curvature in space time. Now Einstein had done it for

big things like the sun bending light behind the stars so that Eddington can see the stars behind the sun and that proved spacetime curvature. Roger did it for tiny things. So a tiny particle would have a tiny curvature in space time and if it was in superposition of being here and here would have two curvatures would be a separation in underlying space time geometry. And he used these simple two-dimensional space-time sheets to illustrate. And you can imagine that if the curvature separated indefinitely, you'd have multiple worlds. But he's and you can imagine that if somebody looked at it and caused collapse, they would go to one or the other without explaining what the consciousness was out here. But he said the separations were unstable and after a time,

T would collapse to one or the other. And when that happened, it would give a moment of protoconscious experience, a qualia. And this was the only mechanism ever proposed that I know of, and still to this day, for a generation of qualia of conscious experience. The wave function of what? Because there's an infinite number of systems that you could describe right is it every electron collapses their wave function what wave function we're talking about that the brain yeah that's the beauty of it he used space time curvature so it doesn't matter because any superposition of anything would be a separation in in in space time geometry in principle we work for any superposition now to work in the brain is another question but it would mean and it still means that

there are super positions separating and collapsing in the table in the air everywhere ubiquitously throughout the universe. And these collapses would be random, disconnected, lack memory, lack meaning, lack context, and would be what he calls, and I call now protoconscious. And this may seem bizarre that these protoconscious events are happening everywhere, but if you're a panpsychist and many neuroscientists have resorted to panpsychism because neuroscience doesn't work for consciousness, then you have the issue that everything is conscious, including this fake brain, including the table. So it's the same thing.

But then you have the problem, how do you combine them into the kind of unified consciousness we have? And you can't do that for panpsychism, but for quantum you can because of entanglement. And this relies on, yeah, gravitational effects, which are far, you know, literally 40 orders of magnitude smaller

than special relativistic effects or electromagnetic effects. How do they evade the decoherence time scales that, you know, even in a simplistic, many worlds interpretation are happening, you know, 10 to the 30th times per second. And how do they persist long enough for us to have that 100 hertz, which is one, you know, a hundredth of a second perception of qualia or whatever else?

Right. Well, everybody says the brain's too warm, wet, and noisy for delicate quantum effects because you want to build a quantum computer, go to the laboratory and do it at absolute zero. Right. We have a dilution refrigerators, so it will take you down to 0.001 Kelvin, right? Right. Yeah, for that purpose. And the brain is mostly water.

However, the brain is not homogeneous. The brain is not just one big slab. with the same amount of water everywhere. The brain is highly heterogeneous, and anesthesiologist, and I am one, and pharmacologists know that if you give a molecule to an organism, if we give a drug to a patient, it will go in that patient to where it dissolves, to where it's soluble. And drugs have different solubility.

So most drugs are polar, they're soluble in water and blood, and they go to charge receptors on membrane surfaces. But anesthetics, which are selective for erasing consciousness, and have very, very little, very little other effects on the brain. They go to non-polar areas, fat-like regions, lipid-like regions. They're basically oil, kind of like the benzene ring, and oil and water don't mix. So in proteins, all the aromatic rings of amino acids, which are the basis for organic chemistry and a key player in quantum biology, these organic rings, coalesce inside proteins. And so he had these regions of non-polar water-free, because

water, oil and water don't mix, and they exclude water, that support quantum optical effects. And it's these quantum optical effects, which then coupled to the nucleus to have enough superposition, a movement and superposition to reach threshold that gives you quantum effects in that room temperature and a wet system. Yes, it's an adiabatic system. You have a quantum system, a decoherence-free subsystem inside a polar shield, more or less. So let's go back to the microtubules themselves, because you're an expert in this field. So microtubules exist in all cells.

Correct. Right. Is there anything different about their qualities inside of the brain? Yes. For one thing, they're more variable genetically. There are 22 isozymes, isoforms of tubulin in the brain and only 11 in most other tissues. And then you can have post-translational modifications, perfect for memory encoding. So you can have roughly 30 different types of tubulin.

And there's a billion per neuron in these lattices. And in the dendrites and soma, the microtubules are, they're kind of permanently, they're capped on both ends, so they don't add at one end and lose at the other. They don't have what's called dynamic instability where they shatter and repolemized. They don't have to disassemble and get involved in mitosis cell division, which they do in all other cells because neurons don't divide. Once they're formed, they don't divide, which means that the microtubules can stay in their particular lattice configuration. and each one of those tubulins can be in one of 30. So it's kind of a mosaic. And so that's a perfect mechanism for memory,

which is, and I think microtubules store memory. It can't be synapses because the synaptic proteins only last hours to days and memory's last lifetimes. And the synapses are upregulated and downregulated by microtubules. And we've shown how memory can be encoded from synaptic events into the microtubules. And the dendritic microtubules are capped, so they're stable over the lifetime, presumably the lifetime of individuals and they don't have to disassemble or mitosis.

And in dendrites and soma, they're in this very strange mixed polarity network. So microtubias have a plus end and a minus end. In all cells, they're unipolar with a beta plus in alpha minus out like spokes of a wheel. In an axon, they're also in unipolar in a parallel bundle. In dendrites and soma, they're broken, interrupted, and they're part of the cytoskeletons. So if they're skeletal, you will want to break your femur in half and have one go. It doesn't make any sense. There must be something else.

So you have one going one way, one the other, and they're in these mixed polarity networks, which allow for recursive processing and also interference beats. So if they're oscillating and say megahertz and there's slightly different energies because they're going to be an external membrane is going to affect them slightly differently, they're going to interfere and give slower beats. And that's how you get from, say, megahertz to kilohertz to EG. In fact, we think EEG is generated by microtubial oscillation interference. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Can you explain to me how anesthesia, the conventional model for how anesthesia actually works? Most people would say anesthesia acts on membrane proteins, receptors, gaber receptors, acetyl-coline, receptors, serotonin, glycine, maybe a few others on the dendritic side. However, not all anesthetics, there's this unitary feature of anesthesia. If you rank them all in potency, that potency correlates perfectly with their solubility in olive oil, of all things, the aromatic non-polar region of like aromatic rings like tryptophan, phenylalanine, so that holds over many meter

orders of magnitude. And so they all should act the same way. But not all anesthetics bind to all receptors. They don't all bind to GABA receptors. And there's never been any study showing a correlation between anesthetic action on membrane receptors and potency. The world leader in anesthetic mechanism research, a guy at UCSF, who's passed away now, Ted Eager. And when I was in residency, he was the guy, I mean, at UCSF and the expert in anesthetic mechanism and so forth. He and his team worked to find which receptor or receptors meet an anesthetic action.

and after 20 years he gave up. In 2008, he wrote this paper and said that we need a new paradigm. This is not, it's not membrane receptors. One goes up, one goes down, there's no unitary action. And I told him at the time, he said you should look at microtubules, but he didn't want to do that. But since then, Rod Eckenhoff's group at University of Pennsylvania has been doing systematic research into anesthetic mechanism and found, for example, 70 different proteins in a cell and a neuron that bind anesthetics.

and about half in the membrane, half in the cytoplasm, including tubuline. So tubuline does bind anesthetics. And genomic and proteomic studies showed that the gene expression changed the most for tubulins, suggesting that's the functional effect. And they also did optogenetics where they had a fluorescent anesthetic that only acted as an anesthetic when you hit it with UV light, and they gave it to these tadpoles. And they swam around, and fortunately tadpoles have transparent heads so they can then illuminated with ultraviolet light. And when they did that, they all went belly up. The anesthetic

became active. And they donated their little brains to science. And they found that the anesthetic was bound to tubular, microtubules. And also, people on the drug taxol, which stabilizes microchubils, it's an anti-cancer drug. So they can't disassemble for mitosis, require more anesthesia. That also came out of Echinhoff's lab. So there's circumstantial evidence. I think there's far more for microtriotrials than anything else. Despite that, the party line is still membrane receptors. And how does it relate to, say, a drug, you know, a barbiturate or some sort of depressant or something like, how does anesthesia, which you, I don't know, feed a barbidol? What are you, what's the most common one that? Cepalophorine, propofal. So how does that relate to say, you know,

a classic, you know, Schedule 1 narcotic? Are they related at all? Well, narcotics act at opiate receptors primarily. However, if you give enough, fentanyl, for example, you get a general anesthetic. But they're really supposedly specific for opiate receptors. Propheaval and the anesthetics follow the Meyer-Overtin correlation, and therefore they should have a common mode of action. Now, propofal does bind to gabbo receptors, and everybody says, well, they act on gabber receptors, but they also get inside the cell. In fact, it was recently shown that psychedelics also act inside the cell that there are five HT2A receptors inside the neuron in the microtubule associated proteins so it's it's likely that psychedelics act inside

neurons directly on more directly on microtubules as do anesthetics interesting there's some quantum physics or say related to things like spintronics or the Izing model things like that it's what sort of the work in the physical quote unquote hard sciences that's been most you know provocative to you in an interesting way. I actually worked with IAC models and microtubules as ising models are cellular automata, molecular automata, where each tubulin was a, could be a single state. But I think that's too simplistic. And I think probably the most significant work has been done by my friend Honorban, Bandhapagia, who works at National Institute of Material Sciences in Scuba, Japan, who started

working on microtubules in around 2009 after reading some of our papers. He started out studying, he's a nanotechnologist to begin with, and he started out studying individual microtubules with four electrodes, two to record and two to stimulate. And if you stimulate a microtubule, let's say with a DC current, a DC voltage or a voltage,

it's a good insulator. However, if you put a current on and alternating different frequencies and sweep the frequencies, you'll find certain frequency bands where the microtubule becomes highly conductive, almost superconductive. He calls a ballistic conductive.

And this happens, every three orders of magnitude in hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and terrahertz. In each level, the conductance band is what he calls a triplet of triplets. There's three peaks, and each peak has three peaks. And this triplet of triplet repeats in kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and terrahertz. So it's kind of like a resonant orchestra or something in one, you know, microtubes themselves are these incredible quantum vibrational devices, basically based on KT. You don't have to pump them.

You don't have to give them energy. It's just they take ambient energy and vibrate in these frequencies. So he discovered that and really itching to see anesthetic effects. And we're discussing building a chamber where we can have airtight control and study quantum optical effects, microchidivials with effects of anesthesia. So he did that. And then a couple of years ago, he studied a neural network with these dielectric resonance probes inside the neurons in the network and found gigahertz, he can measure gigahertz and

megahertz oscillations in the dendrites insoma that controlled the firing more so than the membrane potential. So here was a perfect example of the microtubules overriding membrane effects, which is exactly what you want for consciousness to overcome automatic behavior. So you're driving down the road and you're daydreaming or mind wandering and then somebody sort of is in front of you, your consciousness takes over. And it's not coming from outside because you would see it in the membrane potential. So it must be coming from inside or it's likely to be coming from inside. And this would explain exactly.

In fact, he's demonstrated that. And then more recently, he's been able to detect megahertz and gigahertz from the scalp with a single electrode and now an array. And he calls this the DDG, the dodecogram, which is essentially ultra-high frequency EEG, where you can measure at least megahertz and gigahertz from the scalp. And we did some fooling around with that while he was here. He brought a device and showed a triplet of triplets from my head and others. And we tried it on a dog and we got a megahertz peak. We tried it on an apple and did not see anything.

And we tried it on a plant. And actually right where the stem and the root combined, we saw some megahertz activity. Plants could be conscious at a very low frequency. So, you know, I think we have, for example, 10 million orc-O-R. moments per second and that interferes down to give EEG and cognition so forth, whereas a plant might have a couple per minute. So it could be at the base level, you know, people argue as much about, you know, what is consciousness as they do about what is life, right? So it could be that, you know, only living things are conscious if, you know, I don't mean currently alive, but those that have

capability to be alive, you have an apple, maybe it's cut off from, you know, actual, you know, cellular mitosis and so forth. But, you know, the panpsychic, notion should have a restriction on it, in my opinion. I don't support panpsychism myself, but it's intriguing possibility that allows people to kind of get around some various conundrum. I want to ask you about two relevant things that have been really popular topics for me and very interesting for me to study lately. One has to do with artificial intelligence and natural stupidity. But the other one has to do with brain organoids. So we had our good friend, Professor Allison Motrion, early this year. Actually, he was our first in studio

guest and he devised, you know, the detailed many great developments that are going on with brain organoids and so forth. Like what are the kind of base level primitives that you could distill, you know, a brain to, consciousness to? Is it like an organoid? I mean, what would be the ideal, you know, control and variable kind of set up for a classic, decisive experiment in this field? Well, I've been discussing this actually. And Allison and I wrote a paper on trying to detect, look for consciousness in brain organoids. And I thought it was pretty good paper, actually. And the main feature was that he sees rhythmic dynamics at different frequencies, and they're phase coupled, kind of like the megahertz, gigahertz activity at different scales. But it wasn't that much

of a difference in frequency. One idea was whether they were coupled or not. And I would think that if the organoid was conscious, there would be uncoupling of the phase. Because if you just, everything's in phase and you're on automatic pilot and you're unconscious. Whereas I think you want to decouple and that's where consciousness could come in. So that's one of the things we put in that paper. And my friend Hartman Nevin at Google and his friends at UC Santa Barbara are trying to entangle an organoid with the quantum system. And so that'll be interesting.

I personally think that it's organoid's already too complicated. They should try to entangle microtubules. And in fact, honor bond has shown entanglement between two microtubules. Interesting. So that is the primitive base level that could be the most useful sort of building block Lego for studying consciousness in some sense. I think you need microtubules. And I think you need these coherent vibrations, megahertz, gigahertz.

And with this device, we're measuring megahertz. And I think at this point in time that megahertz from the brain is probably as good a candidate for a neurocorrholative consciousness as there is. Because we can measure it, you know, from our little studies, it was reproducible. Animals have it. Plants seem to have it. Inanimate objects do not have it. And we also tried stimulating with transcranial ultrasound.

And we found on one side and measured from the other, and we found after a slight delay an increase in activity. So, and transcranic ultrasound is mechanical vibrations in megahertz, which does cause mental effects. After a slight delay, you get a kind of a euphoric mood enhancement, and a number of people have been studying that. What about the electromagnetic phenomena, the Havana syndrome, things like that. Are there pertinent aspects that we could learn about consciousness, either from the claimed or real evidence that's been presented for electromagnetic stimulation? I would bet that Havana syndrome is some kind of effect on microtubules.

It could be microwave, gigahertz. We know microtubles resonated gigahertz. It might be radio waves, megahertz. But if you over-resonate something, like the bridge, you know, it's going to shatter. And I think that's exactly what happened. And in fact, concussion, your microtrivals get fractured and broken, and that's been well proven. And so it's a lot like a post-concussion syndrome. Study and play.

Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college student. get the best of both worlds get the unreal college deal everything you need to study and play with select windows 11 PCs eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox game pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller learn more at windows.com slash student offer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at a.k.m.m. slash college PC. Interesting. Last thing before we take audience questions has to do with these human brain computational augmentation systems, things like neuralink and so forth. I'd like to get your impression of those.

What are the prospects we've had Nome Chomsky on a long time ago, talked about his pessimism that this is not really pertinent to how consciousness is really organized or presented? What are your thoughts as someone who's deeper in this field, the gnome certainly is? If you're talking about brain computer interface with EEG, forget it. The EEG is way too crude, is way, you know, anything's going to be washed out. You might have a better chance with this megahertz, which I think is going to convey a lot more information. And also has the advantage of this guy at the conference, Patrick Pollacky, pointed out that that a big problem with brain computer interface with EEG is that blink artifact or facial movement, it screws it all up.

And we showed with our megahertz device that you can blink all you want and you can make faces and it doesn't change one bit. So it would be better for that aspect. And also you get way more information. Absolutely. So we have a large number of questions from Twitter and from... I didn't get to answer about AI. Oh, yeah.

Can you say one thing? Yeah, yeah. There's a guy, Brian Rohn. I've seen him on Twitter and he's been on James Alpert's so he asked chat GPT how what's the most likely way for you to become conscious and Chat GPT said the best way no I won't I won't I want He's your howl voice he's your howl voice is the Arthur C Clarkson Open the Pod Bay door and chat GPT said the best way is through the Penrose Hamroff orco R theory and went on with a pretty nice exposition of the of the theory really

But let's let's talk about AI generally not just you know the the chat bots and stuff. We have a bribe bot, by the way. You can find my website. You can interact with me and ask me your questions as Brian. The other Brian did. But tell me, Stuart, what do you think is sort of the promise, the pitfalls, the perils of this kind of singularity of AI that seems to be upon us or will be imminently so? I don't think AI is going to become conscious.

They may try to convince us it's conscious, but if it's just computation, I don't think so. You know, maybe somebody builds a quantum computer with objective reduction, possible. But just more complexity, more this, more than it's, no, it's not going to be. It may, you know, it may fool some people, but I don't think it's a big conscious. It could still be dangerous, but not because of its conscious. I still think it's interesting to get your impression about this. You know, consciousness, if we were to understand it, it would certainly involve things we can't really anticipate right now in terms of understanding who we are, what we are.

But it's kind of like cosmology, another COS thing, which is that it's incredibly significant, but it may not be important. In other words, like, it won't affect our daily lives and technology. Maybe consciousness would. I want to get your impression about that. But on the other hand, it's clear anesthesiology. I mean, anesthesiology might be one of the most important inventions of all time, right?

And so, you know, along with, you know, dead money. I wrote a chapter in 2000. This guy wrote a book, greatest inventions of the past 2,000 years. And I wrote the chapter on anesthesia. So we always have these, you know, revisionist histories where people say, you know, if only I were alive and, you know, in the 1640s and I would have just cleaned up. I would have had all the treasure and women.

But if you broke your leg, what are you going to do? You know, we live better now than not even just like 400 years ago. We live better than like the Queen of England lived in the 1950s or 40s. It's just unbelievable. So in terms of benefit to humanity. as Alfred Nobel, you know, clearly wanted. What would create sort of a bigger impact? Understanding consciousness, the base layer of reality as we perceive it.

And there are as many different interpretations of quantum mechanics as there are interpretations of consciousness from Donald Hoffman. You know, we've had them all on. And no one can tell me what it's like to be a bat yet. But I want to ask you, which would have a bigger breakthrough? Advances in anesthesiology and brain computer interfaces and being able to control the brain versus understanding what consciousness is. Well, it depends what it turns out to be.

If we're right and consciousness is an intrinsic feature of the universe, connecting us through multiple layers down to the fundamental space-time geometry, that would kind of define our place in the universe. And I think that would be important for not just practical reasons, medical reasons, but also spiritual reasons, philosophical reasons. We would be connected. It would kind of change our outlook. On the other hand, if it turns out, if it goes the other way,

and it's an emergent epiphenominal process, then who cares? So we've now reached the point in the conversation where I'd like to ask some questions from the audience. So my friend, Dr. Leonard Momeni, who's a great scholar and friend of the show, he asks you the following question. He asks, what are your thoughts on Compton making connections between Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and free will? The uncertainty principle is the basis for the orc-orr collapse, or Rogers-O-R collapse. It's T-E-E-B-E-S-G. So the larger the superposition, the faster it will collapse. And it's an average, so there's still some uncertainty.

It's like a radioactive decay, and that's what gives you consciousness and action for free will. But as I mentioned before, generally the brain activity is too late. backward time referral, you don't have even the possibility for real-time conscious action. And consciousness would therefore be epiphenomenal and we have a false illusion, which most people think are the party line in neuroscience and philosophy, starting from Dan Dennett and Dan Wegner's book, The Illusion of Free Will, is that Free Will is an illusion because the activity happens too late. And our non-conscious autopilot acts first, although they never explain where the brain activity is for the non-conscious autopilot because that should have some

activity too. And then we have this false illusion after the fact that we were in control, consciousness and illusion. And the backward time effect rescues the possibility, rescues conscious free will. Brad Caldwell on Twitter and reminder, you can always ask questions of all my guests on Twitter, at Dr. Brian Keating, YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating, Instagram, Dr. Caldwell asked the following about the triple peak significance. Are there any noticeable change? changes in such patterns during different conscious phases like sleep versus anesthetics versus conscious. We don't know yet. The first thing I want to do is anesthesia. I suspect that the megahertz triplets, I hope, will be more sensitive to anesthesia than EEG. If you look at EEG,

gamma tends to go away and everything kind of slows down. So it will be interesting to see what happens to the megahertz and gigahertz with anesthesia and also perhaps with psychedelics. I bet they go up. I've got a lot of very brilliant people in my audience. The next one is S.K. Svalin K. who asks ORA aside, which theory would you put your money on as a second best guess? I like recurrent processing, predictive coding, because it's more than just a wiring diagram. It's a process that can happen in multiple levels.

In fact, recurrent processing happens. As I said, you have microtubules in opposite direction, so information can go here and then here. So we did a paper in 1990 with two microtubules in opposite direction showing learning between these two microtubules. So I think recurrent processing and predictive coding is a fundamental process, not just at the neural level, but all the way down, including microtubules. So that's my second favorite. Great. John Hussein Kennedy asks, are there any aromatic ring structures that are non-carbon, that could share the quantum properties of benzene,

such as six silicon ring hexacillia benzene. It would have to have Pi resonance and the Indol ring in tryptophan and a lot of the psychedelic, and serotonin, a lot of the psychedelics, has a nitrogen in the five ring. And so it doesn't have to be all carbon, but it has to allow a Pi resonance orbital. Robbie is asking specifically,

I'm very interested in researching the properties of microtubules, especially as wave guides, ordered water. Very interesting question. The water inside, so water on any ordered surface is going to be ordered. In other words, it's not going to be just random water. It's going to align with the charges. And the microtubles have a lot of charges on the outside and also inside.

And on the inside, the water channel, Honor by I was talking about this yesterday. The water channel is in, was he saying, terrahertz? It's oscillating coherently in terrahertz. And in fact, before I started working with Roger in the 90s, I wrote a paper with quantum physicists from Japan, Arijibu and Kuni-Ohi Usui, and Carl Prebman was on that and Scott Hagan about super radiance in the water channel inside microtubules. I thought originally that microtububes might be waveguides for electromagnetics, but it's kind of high energy because the wavelength would be small.

However, the centrioles are cilia, which are nine. triplets of microtubules is about 150 nanometers in diameter and that's a perfect optical wave guide and in fact Albrecht Bueller has shown that centrioles which are essentially cilia to cilia detect photons and capture them and there's these cilia in every one of our rod and cone cells and photons pass through them to get to the redopsin in the back and I was talking to somebody at the conference who agreed with me that it's likely that the cilia might be extracting quantum information and sending them through the mouth in their Mueller cells into the brain other than the optic nerve.

So we may be detecting more than quite literally meets the eye quantum optically. Very good. Okay. So next question comes from Atai Barkhay, who asks your thoughts on Matthew Fisher, Posner molecule proposal where quantum entanglement occurs in the brain, but not via microtubules. Well, first of all, there's no Posner. clusters in the brain. As far as I can tell, postnate clusters or calcium phosphate crystals that might happen in bone formation, but not anything cognitive, not anything information. So they're not,

I don't see how they would be very useful to store information. If you want a lattice, the microtivos are perfect. The other problem with that is that lithium, the isotopes of lithium, differ in their mass significantly. And so you're not sure if the difference in isotope is due to the spin or the mass. There is a very interesting isotope effect in consciousness, which is xenon. Zenon is an anesthetic. It's a single atom, inert, inert atom, and it's complete outer shell, so it's non-polar, and it's a perfectly good anesthetic, and follows Meyer Overton. Anyway, it can have different isozymes, and a group in China studied the potency of the different

isozymes, and they found the one isozyme that had a spin one-half was significantly less, more potent than the other. And they postulated that the spin one half actually promoted consciousness, that actually accelerated consciousness and therefore the xenon was antagonizing its own anesthetic effect. And I reviewed that paper for anesthesiology and they asked me to write an editorial, which I did. And so I elucidated exactly how the spin one half might interact with the other quantum stuff going on of the brain.

Wow. Okay. Tom Anderson is a frequent fan of the podcast. ask the following question. Is there evidence for consciousness extending outside of the brain, say, in the entirety of the nervous system? Well, as I said, there's proto-consciousness everywhere, but I think he might be referring to auto body experiences or near-death experiences or even afterlife. And I'm asked that question quite often. And if consciousness is happening in space-time geometry, it's conceivable that it could, when the blood stops flowing and the oxygen

stops being delivered, that the quantum information might dissipate to the universe at large, but remain entangled as something like a quantum soul. Now, I don't suggest any evidence for that. I won't disbelieve it. I think it may be true, but I'm not claiming that. I'm just claiming that it's not impossible and that anybody who says that it's absolutely impossible, it's unscientific, until they show exactly what consciousness is, they can't make that claim. If consciousness is non-local and a quantum effect connect to the fundamental space-time geometry,

then things like out-of-body near-death and afterlife are not impossible. No, very good. And I mean, there's so much, you know, just wide open, you know, blue sky stuff that we could talk about. I mean, I'm thinking as you're talking, you know, there's a whole subset.

There's a gentleman named Mogadot, who I'd like to get on the podcast. He worked at Google X and tragically lost his son very early in his son's life. And he dedicated his life to making the world happier place. And he has got this mission called $1 billion happy. So, you know, Mo, if you're out there, I'd love to have you on. But one of the things he talks about is, you know, the improbability of things that we take is mundane, even consciousness. And I was thinking, you know, what if any of these models are true?

It could be that consciousness lasts. I mean, certainly microtubules are dividing a second after a person dies, right? Or whatever that means. dead versus heart dead. We could discuss that. There's still processes happening. If it's happening in a plant that's attached to the ground, by the time causality takes, it takes quite a bit of time for the message to get to the toenail that you've stopped being alive, right? So could you extend this and give hope to people of lost history? That's where some of the danger lies, though, right? Because people project anything they want onto these. I mean, some of the questions

I didn't ask are really out there, you know, and it's curious to me how you navigate this realm, you know, scientific approach and using it as a discipline that's falsifiable potentially in the Paparian sense. That's, you know, the neurobiological, obviously. But then you mentioned parapsychology and they spoonbending. Consciousness. No, you didn't mention it. No, you would never do that. But, but you did, you did mention parapsychology. So question is, you know, how do you, how does a serious scientist, you know, kind of navigate these very fraught shawls of, you know, kind of non-sudoscientists where, you know, quantum healing can cure cancer or whatever? versus doing the rigorous, hardcore science that you're known for.

How do you know again? Well, you're putting a few words in my mouth, but I do believe that it's possible, after life is possible. I don't advocate that it's true. I don't know. But until we know what consciousness is, we can't say that it doesn't exist. And if it's a non-local quantum effect, then it's possible. But the reason I can even talk about that is that I don't depend on grants,

you know, pleasing anybody who has their own preconceived notions. I know I've run a foul of AI people. run afoul of a lot of funding agencies who I think have ulterior motives and eight and their own agendas whether they admit it or not but I you know I've always made my living as an anesthesiologist and and I this has been my I won't say my hobby but my passion and my research and figure out anesthesia figuring out consciousness and so I've been able to follow my nose and say what I think whether it's whether it's going to cut off funding or not because I don't really depend on

funding. So and then and Roger's the same way. I mean, he just says what he, you know, logically thinks. Yeah. No, and you guys are courageous. And last time I asked you when you're on the podcast, I asked you for the advice to your former self, which is my way of bringing back to the podcast the name originally given to us by Sir Arthur C. Clark who said the following. He said that the only way to know the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. So ITI. And I asked you that in the form of advice to your former self, what would you give your advice to your former self as a 20-year-old man,

to give yourself the courage to do what you've done, have this courageous career. So you answer that question. Now I'm going to ask you another question. That's another quip of the great Sir Arthur C. Clark. And he said that when an elderly, not calling you elderly. You're older than me. You're retired.

You're emeritus. When an elderly but distinguished, you are distinguished, scientist says something is possible. He or she is very likely to be right. But when he or she says something is impossible, they are very likely to be wrong. I'm gonna ask you, Stuart, Freser Hammerov, what have you changed your mind about?

What have you been wrong about, say in the modern, you know, incarnation of your career, not before you met Sir Roger, and in this field of consciousness research studies, what have you been wrong about, if anything? I don't know, can I get back to you? I don't want to sound very, again, but I, but you know, the major things like microtubials and quantum, and people, you know,

particularly lately of trying to say, well, you know, you got a great model of quantum coherence in microtubes, you don't need objective reduction. You know, quantum gravity, even you kind of sneered at it and the energy is so low. Roger had a good explanation for that. And I just think that it's, it's logical and makes sense to me. The numbers seem to work. And it's the only proposal for for quality for consciousness ever ever put forth so I think I was right latching out of microtubules as the key to consciousness and I think I was right in agreeing with Roger and I think he was right in agreeing with me very nice well Stuart Hammer up professor Hammeroff University of Arizona a zoni self-declared

zoni thank you so much for coming back on the end to the impossible podcast for your second appearance I hope that you'll come back again for a third fourth fifth in the future whenever you come to Southern California you always welcome and we always learn so much from you and broaden our horizons and take us on a tour of the inner cosmos, the cosmos between our ears as we study this. I like the inner cosmos. Yeah, the inner cosmos. Feel free to use it.

You use the astro-consciousness, right? Yes. Very good. Well, thank you so much, too. Thank you, Brian. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and

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