Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Microtubules: The Gateway To Consciousness | Stuart Hameroff

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Stuart Hameroff explores the intersection between consciousness and quantum mechanics, arguing that consciousness exists on the border of classical and quantum worlds with microtubules within neurons acting as the quantum processing sites that could link to fundamental space-time geometry. This suggests a profound quantum basis for consciousness.This presentation was recorded at MindFest, held at Florida Atlantic University, CENTER FOR THE FUTURE MIND, spearheaded by Susan Schneider. Please consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org LINKS MENTIONED: - Center for the Future Mind (Mindfest @ FAU): https://www.fau.edu/future-mind - Other Ai and Consciousness (Mindfest) TOE Podcasts: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ7ikzmc6zlOPw7Hqkc6-MXEMBy0fnZcb - Mathematics of String Theory (Video): https://youtu.be/X4PdPnQuwjY - Podcast w/ Stuart Hameroff (on TOE): https://youtu.be/uLo0Zwe579g

The world is divided into two realms, and the classical realm, everything is predictable, localized, particle-like and large. But in the quantum world, we have quantum superposition, non-local, wave-like and small, and things are completely different. And I think consciousness actually is on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. If you think that consciousness causes collapse, that would be going from the quantum to the classical. Or if quantum is collapsing, the collapse is happening on its own, to give you a classical and the same thing. Stuart Hameroff is a professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness and for partnering with Penrose to suggest that consciousness not only originates from some quantum mechanical mechanism, but furthermore in a specific structure called neuronal microtubules.

This is also known as orchestrated objective reduction, though it's often abbreviated to ORC-OR. While Theories of Everything is a podcast, today I have a special treat for you as we partnered with the Center for the Future Mind, link in the description, definitely check them out, to bring you this lecture from MindFest, which is a special conference put on by Susan Schneider from the Center for the Future Mind, which is the only conference that annually merges AI and consciousness. People like Steven Wolfram come to it, David Chalmers, Sarah Walker, Scott Aronson, the head of Google's quantum computing AI lab, Ben Gortzel, and last and most definitely

least myself. You can check out the entire playlist in the description. For those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Kurt Jaimungal, and most often what's done is I analyze what are called theories of everything using my background in Mathematical Physics from the University of Toronto to understand the fundamental laws, how does general relativity merge with quantum field theory for instance or the Standard Model, as well as larger questions such as what is consciousness, how does it come about from dead matter, the so-called hard problem of consciousness, if that's even the correct way to frame it, and even what is purpose, why are we here, what separates you from me, what is the self.

If that sounds interesting to you, then there's a videos button somewhere you can always click and browse or subscribe to get notified for future podcasts. Enjoy this special presentation by Stuart Hammeroff. Stuart Hammeroff is a professor of anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona. He is also a long time organizer of the Tucson Consciousness Conference, Tour de Science de Consciousness, now the Science of Consciousness Conference. Correct.

He'll be talking to us about is your brain a quantum orchestra or our theory? And I'll stop talking, so that way Stuart Hammeroff can take it off. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Garrett. Thank you, Susan. Thank you all for being here. Thank you.

And as you can see, the title of my talk, as Garrett said, is Your Brain a Quantum Orchestra, as opposed to a computer. And we'll get to that. And I'm kind of giving away the plot here in the quantum orchestra. This is a neuron and most hierarchical models of the brain and consciousness will go from the neuron up to networks and networks of networks and so on and so forth. But the point is we have to go down inward, deeper, faster.

And we now know with experimental data that inside the neuron in the microtubules, we have operations in kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz, petahertz and faster. And via the Penrose mechanism, presumably all the way to the Planck scale. But I'm gonna talk about only within the brain, primarily today.

So most view the brain as a complex computer of simple neurons. Neuron firing equals one bit. This is obviously an artificial neural network, but that's pretty much what our theories of consciousness are based on. With consciousness theorized to emerge from higher order network effects. This is an insult to neurons. It only considers the membrane and the synapse, nothing inside, only at Hertz frequencies, up to say EEG frequencies, purely algorithmic. There's no real room there for consciousness, free will, and so forth, I'm arguing. So what's the alternative? Well,

to illustrate that point, single cell paramecium, if we're treating a neuron as a one or a zero, which is what most theories do, single cell paramecium can swim, learn, avoid predators, find food and mates and have sex. There's two paramecium engaged in sex. No synapses, no networks. They use microtubules and cilia to sense and navigate. And being means question mark consciousness. We don't know if they're conscious. If they are most likely during sex because they're absolutely still

and that would reward procreation of course. And we'll come back to that point. The paramecium shown there has these, the cilia are these hair-like extensions that come out of this paramecium that are both ores and sensors. And they sense and move by protruding, the cilia are made of nine doublets of microtubules

linked by dynein motor protein arms, which contract to cause purposeful bending and locomotion. And it was proposed by Adam in 1974 that signals propagate along the microtubules till this one to contract, then this one, then this one. So you get a coordinated purposeful motion, which is how the paramecium moves. And microtubules are also found in neurons,

illustrated in this cover from Neuroscience, the long straight, these things here, and they're interlinked by microtubule-associated proteins. And this is an axon because they're all parallel and uninterrupted. Now, what does that have to do with the cilia and the dynein? If we look inside a neuron,

and here's a neuron with the axon going here, and in the dendrite, we're looking inside at synaptic plasticity. So synapses anywhere down here need supplies, need enzymes, need precursors and so forth that are synthesized here, and they're transported along the neuron by a long microtubule serving as tracks with the dynein, the same motor protein that's used in paramecium, to bend to actually carry material. In this case, the dynein's carrying it back to the cell body and the kinesin,

the other motor protein is carrying it the other way. Now, how do they know where to get off? Which synapse needs replenishing for synaptic plasticity? And that's the tau protein, which is a microtubule-associated protein, which is placed at specific locations on the lattice of the microtubules. And this signals the motor proteins, they're kind of traffic signals, to deliver their cargo to particular synapses. So this is learning.

This is memory right here. This is the placement of the tau directing synaptic plasticity. Now when this falls apart, when the microtubules, when the tau falls off the microtubules, it forms neurofibrillary tangles, the microtubules destabilize and disassemble. You lose neuronal volume, you lose brain volume,

you lose memory, you lose cognition, and that's called Alzheimer's disease. Now there was a paper I read in 1989, many of you weren't alive then probably, and it was about Alzheimer's hypothesis microtubules a key to Alzheimer's disease. 1989, Matsuyama and Jarvik from UCLA. It's an excellent paper, I recommend it. It'll explain how the problem is caused. It makes some mention of the amyloid plaques, but they don't really cause the cognitive dysfunction.

It's due to the loss of microtubules and the Tau. So I'm gonna raise two questions at this point. Why are we spending billions and billions on toxic and ineffective anti-emolloid drugs for Alzheimer's instead of treating microtubule stability and resonance? And that's a whole nother story. But for the purpose of this talk, do microtubules process and encode information?

I first published on that in 1982 in the Journal of Theoretical Biology with my colleague Rich Watt, an engineer who knew about computer matrices and so forth. So is memory encoded in microtubules? We don't really know where memory is encoded. If we say it's in synaptic plasticity proteins, these last hours to days and memories last lifetimes, and the most likely site for memory encoding is in microtubules by,

for one mechanism is this calcium chlamodulin kinase 2, CAMK2, which is activated by calcium influx into the neuron. These kinases pop up and these hexagonal little creatures, their enzymes, bind perfectly to the hexagonal little creatures, their enzymes, bind perfectly to the hexagonal lattice of the microtubules and kind of phosphorylate up to six tubulins at a time. And this work was done, led by Travis Kredock, who is here and works at Nova Southeastern.

And we published this back in 2012, I guess. So this is a potential mechanism for memory. And the memory encoding capacity of microtubules is enormous because each tubulin can be in one of 30 different genetic or post-translational states. And you have about a billion per neuron. So a billion raised to the 10th, 30th power, that's a lot of possible memory states in one neuron.

Can they process information? Back in the 80s, there were these cellular automata, the game of life, the simplest form of computer. And basically you start with a orthogonal grid and each square can be dead or alive. Dead in this case means alive. And with very simple rules, if you have a zero, one,

or four alive neighbors in the previous generation, you die because there's either not enough or too much overcrowding. Not enough sustenance or too much overcrowding. Two and three, you stay alive. Those very simple rules give you gliders that move through. And if you make a large enough cellular automata, you can solve partial differential equations

and do all kinds of stuff. So my colleagues, Dean Rasmussen and I, and some others modeled microtubules as cellular automata, which is different because it's a skewed hexagonal lattice with Fibonacci cylindrical geometry. And black and white in this case, represent opposite dipole orientations, which oscillate with each time generation.

So you need a clocking mechanism, you need some kind of coherent clocking mechanism. And for that we used, we applied Frohlich coherence. And Frohlich was a biophysicist in the 60s and 70s who suggested that coupled dipoles in non-polar regions in proteins, geometrical rays and lattices would oscillate coherently in terahertz, 10 to the 12th hertz, gigahertz, and or megahertz condensing to common modes pumped by ambient the heat bath. So it takes biological heat into a lattice

and pumps coherent modes, something like a laser, but something like a laser so that was Frohler coherence was a theory do microtubules have collective Frohler coherence suitable for clocking frequencies and here you can see the microtubules inside an axon and inside the dendrite where they're interrupted in mixed polarity and the other one I showed you before. So are there oscillations? Yes, the answer is yes. Anurban Bandyapadhyay, working at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Scuba, Japan, has studied microtubules and in a series of papers about 10 years ago, looking at three different scales. So here we have a neural network, here's a neuron,

a couple other neurons with some nanoprobes coming in, the thick bars are nanoprobes, and here's one microtubule with 10 nanoprobes, and here's rows of tubulin with four nanoprobes. So three different scales, and in all of them, if you apply a voltage to a microtubule, it's an insulator. You don't get current flow However, if you apply AC alternating and sweep the frequency You will find certain frequencies that the microtubule becomes highly conductive almost

Almost superconductor ballistic conductance is called and this occurs in the same pattern Repeating every three orders of magnitude. So if we start at the smallest here, you can see a terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz, and then we move up to gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz, and then megahertz, kilohertz and Hertz. And we see the same pattern every three orders of magnitude, which is a triplet of triplets. So you

can sort of see it here but you can see it over there from an aerial view and so we see three peaks and each peak has three peaks. This is seen every three orders of magnitude over 12 orders of magnitude. So microtubules do have coherent self-similar resonance patterns. The triplet of triplets repeat every three orders. And Hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and terahertz. And there's there's Anubhan who's done some amazing amazing stuff. He also showed that you can measure megahertz from the scalp in the EEG.

So look on the screen, you can see a triplet there. When he takes it off, it goes away. He puts it back, you can see the triplet on the screen. Takes it off, it goes away. So this is between six and 26 megahertz, which is where it's found in microtubules. So we see the same triplet. We don't quite see the triplet of triplets, but we see triplets from the scalp.

And this, I think, is gonna be a new, a revolutionary new aspect of EEG in its 100-year anniversary, to find out that the hertz that we've been measuring all these years are only the slow end of an iceberg. I'm mixing metaphors here of much, much faster stuff going on inside the neuron. So another study that honor bonds group did

in neural networks found megahertz and gigahertz excitations, not just passive resonances, but excitations in neuronal networks and they regulate axonal firings. In other words, they're functional. So here's a neuron, a part of a neural neck, impaled between two of these chips that have these nanoprobes that are dielectric resonance detectors that can measure

megahertz, gigahertz, high frequency stuff. So if the probes go through the neuron, as we see here, they detect megahertz and gigahertz. So it's detected only from the neuron revealing their shape. So there's no megahertz and gigahertz out in between the neurons. And if you look at a microscope of this,

you can see the neuron. This is in kilohertz, and it's showing ionic fluxes, which are outside the neuron. And the megahertz and the gigahertz is inside the neuron that we see there. So this is mapping out the neurons by where the megahertz and gigahertz is coming from. Now they also found that the dendritic somatic megahertz and gigahertz correlated with axonal firings on the same and different neurons, more so the membrane potentials.

So the deeper, faster activities were overriding the membrane potentials, including the integrated membrane potential and forming their own little circuits. And in the picture there, which is the cover of the lead article in Journal of Physiology, you can see that you see the neurons, but then you see different little networks that are actually due to what's going on at a deeper, faster level that don't necessarily follow the anatomy. So there's a whole other level of activity. He calls them filamentary circuits because they're coming from the cytoskeletal filaments,

including microtubules. Now this explains something called representational drift. There's this problem in neuroscience where if you see a group of neurons that have certain memories stored, and you can tell that they're there, you go back later and those same memories have moved

a little bit to different set of neurons nearby. There is representational drift. And so it's hard to understand how that could happen from synaptic plasticity memory, but it's easy to understand if it's happening at the microtubule level in a kind of a holographic memory and it's just shifting. So it honestly shows a bottom up regulation

in a frequency hierarchy in microtubules inside neurons. So this is the quantum orchestra I was talking about, where we go down from the neuron, the pyramidal neuron here into the microtubule networks in a thousand hertz, a million hertz, a billion hertz, a trillion hertz, and a quadrillion hertz, 10 to the 15th, within the group of microtubules in each and every neuron. Now, these deep, inter-fractal networks in each neuron

would be very useful for that neuron, but what we really need is a global collective effect over the whole brain. And for that we need quantum effects. And when we go faster and faster into the terahertz, for example, we're pretty much into the quantum realm and we go deeper into the quantum realm also. So we do get the possibility for quantum

at these higher frequencies at least, if not the lower one. So we need this quantum non-locality entanglement in many brain neurons for things like spatial temporal binding, the unity of self, as well as zero phase lag, gamma synchrony, and so forth. So quantum properties are useful for consciousness. As I just said, cognitive binding, sense of self, zero phase lag, gamma, condensation, entanglement can solve these problems if they're possible in the brain. Also, agency causal selection for like collapse

of the wave function, causal selection of actions and perceptions as quantum state reduction, collapse of the wave function. For example, the trigger axonal firings, as we showed in the previous slide, it's not just the wave function. For example, the trigger axonal firings, as we showed in the previous slide, it's not just the membranes. Non-computability, as Roger Penrose argued from Gödel's theorem,

you need some kind of quantum mechanism. The hard problem of phenomenal experience as an intrinsic feature of fundamental space-time geometry, for example, Penrose's objective reduction, meaning that consciousness and qualia are fundamental aspects of the universe. Free will, real-time conscious action, dependent on quantum backward time effects, retroactivity. Libet showed this in his 1979 work, and Roger Penrose has written about this, including recently. And also non-locality, parapsychology, out-of-life,

even afterlife and reincarnation are possible. I'm not arguing for them. I'm not claiming any evidence. A lot of people are. You can't rule them out until we know what consciousness actually is. If somebody can prove that it's a classical thing, then these things are impossible.

If it's a quantum thing, then they are possible. So this gets us into the quantum world. And the best way to explain it that I can see is with the yin yang, where the world is divided into two realms. And the classical realm, everything is predictable, localized, particle-like and large. But in the quantum world, we have quantum superposition, non-local, wave-like, and small, and things are completely different. And I think consciousness actually is on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds. If you think that consciousness causes collapse, that would be going from the quantum to the

classical. to the classical or if quantum is collapsing, the collapse is happening on its own to give you classical and the same thing. In any case, a consciousness is on the edge between the two. So in quantum superposition, a particle can exist as a wave of multiple possibility in the background or in the foreground as a particle

in definite states or location. But when we make a measurement or an observation, it seems to cause the wave function, the waves to collapse the particles in definite states. This is the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Now Roger Penrose addressed this. He first addressed the problem of superposition. How can things be in multiple states or places at the same time? And to do that, he resorted to general relativity, where Einstein had equated a matter with curvature in space-time. This is for large things like the sun and planets and so forth. Roger applied the same concept to tiny particles, quantum particles, so that an oscillating particle say going between here and here

I don't know if you can see that it's actually a two different space-time curvature oscillating between two positions so that's and then a super position would be a separation so you have the same particle in two locations and two space-time curvatures. So then what happens? Well, that's debatable. Some people say that collapse occurs by consciousness causing quantum state reduction. This goes back to Bohr, von Neumann, Wigner, Stapp, Dave Chalmers, Kelvin McQueen,

usually known as the Copenhagen interpretation after Niels Bohr, where consciousness, shown here as being, observes and causes the collapse, causes this one to cease and selects this one. I call this subjective reduction because you have a subjective person, conscious observer, but it's dualist. It puts consciousness outside science

and that's okay if you're a dualist. The other possibility, another possibility is the many worlds where the separations bifurcate and each one goes off and forms its own new universe and some people think that consciousness occurs at this bifurcation including Hartman, Hartman Nevin who'll speak this afternoon and he would say that it occurs at this bifurcation. So maybe we'll put a bing there one of these days for that one. Penrose, however, said that superposition separation

is unstable, will self-collapse, undergo objective reduction at time t equals h-bar over e sub g, which is a form of the uncertainty principle. And bing happens when this occurs. And it happens along with a moment of conscious experience. So this is the Penrose proposed origin of consciousness. And I think the most scientific and specific theory of how consciousness is formed that's ever been put forth.

So rather than consciousness causing collapse, collapse occurs spontaneously due to this equation and when George Musso writes about putting ourselves in the equation, this is the equation I would say. So rather than consciousness causing collapse, collapse causes or is consciousness due to this reduction. Now these in the random microenvironment, these would be, which might be the same as decoherence, these OR events would be isolated and lack meaning and context. They would be proto-conscious

or whitehead simple occasions of experience. Metaphorically, these might be considered like the sounds of musicians independently tuning their instruments. How could they be organized, orchestrated in the brain for full, rich, conscious experience? How does it get turned into music? So Roger, after he wrote his book, The Emperor's New Mind,

he needed a quantum device which could biologically orchestrate quantum information, HALT terminate by Penrose O.R., the Emperor's New Mind, he needed a quantum device which could biologically orchestrate quantum information, halt, terminate by Penrose OR, connecting to space-time geometry, non-computable platonic values, and qualia, awareness and feelings, and regulate functional neuronal and synaptic activities. And I suggested microtubules and he liked the idea and we developed our theory of ORCOR, orchestrated objective reduction, in the mid 1990s. So if we look at a microtubule that's made of these tubulins, so this is one tubulin, look at an atomic level, and we see that it has 86 aromatic amino acids. So if you look up top there, tryptophan, phenylalanine,

and tyrosine have these aromatic rings. You can see the rings with the three lines or the three and then the five-sided ring. That's an indole ring and tryptophan. And these are basically organic chemistry. And they also form quantum friendly regions inside tubulin proteins due to these aromatic rings. And 86 is an awful lot for one protein. People, protein chemists are pretty startled by this.

We can also see the anesthetic binding site in the sphere. This is where the anesthetic binds to prevent consciousness. And you can see it's right in the middle of all these aromatic rings where we think the quantum optical effects are happening, which lead to the quantum effects, which lead to collapse, which lead to consciousness. So which lead to collapse which lead to consciousness.

So there's quantum friendly regions around aromatic rings. So a little bit of organic chemistry in the 18th century they had these they knew about alkanes which are linear molecules with or without a double bond. So they had the formula CNH2N plus two or CNH2N. And they also had this molecule C6H6, but they didn't know what the structure was. It was oily, flammable, and they called it benzene, but they didn't know the structure. Then one night Keckley had a dream

that one of these linear chains were snakes, and one of them swallowed his tail like the Ouroboros and he woke up and said benzene is a ring and he was correct and on the far right you can see Another way to show with with three lines which can resonate between these three and the three three opposite position in a resonance Situation so what happens actually is that these rings share three delocalized? situation. So what happens actually is that these rings share three delocalized pi orbital electrons among six carbons forming these pi resonance clouds which are basically superpositions. They're a bulk of electrons being everywhere at the same time and these support quantum electric and magnetic dipole oscillations, excitons, spin transfer, phonons, fluorescence,

phosphorescence, superradiiance. These are quantum effects. So in and around these aromatic rings, as long as they're spatially arrayed or in a geometric lattice, you can support quantum effects even at ambient temperatures. Back in 20 years ago, Ouyang and Aushalam did this study with these quantum dots and connected by aromatic rings. And they showed that spin transfer from dot to dot

through the rings was enhanced by temperature. The warmer it was, the more efficient the spin transfer. So here's the quantum effect that's actually potentiated and promoted by heat. And also fluorescence, where you excite the tryptophan for example or that one of the other aromatic rings that kind of kind of bubbles along in different quantum states and then collapses or emits the fluorescence and you can measure the time in between the

excitation and emission and how far it spreads. So this is all another quantum optical effect. If we just look at the at the aromatic rings, if you leave them alone they attract each other even though they're they're they're uncharged, neutral, and chemically inert. And that's because the electrons in one, shown here is the shaded area, repel the electrons in the other. So you get two dipoles. So here we have two dipoles, like little bar magnets, which attract each other, and then they start to oscillate, and they oscillate in the terahertz.

So this is where the terahertz comes from, from these aromatic rings being in the right position, and then oscillating back and forth. This is the origin of the terahertz, which gives rise to the other ones as well. And you can have a superposition of both, which gives you a qubit from two aromatic rings. And we know that anesthesia works at this level

by forming its own dipole dispersion forces and blocking the oscillations. So I think this is the mechanism of anesthesia. Of course, then you have to say in which protein, and we'll get to that. It should also be mentioned that psychoactive molecules, the neurotransmitter dopamine and serotonin, the pleasure molecule, the mood molecule,

as well as psychedelics all have complex, at least in the psychedelic, complex aromatic rings with five-sided along with the six-sided. And this has effects on consciousness, of course. So we developed a model based on the aromatic rings in here, lining up in different directions so we can have dipole through the tubulin. And this, it's basically a quantum channel,

and that channel can go through each tubulin to the next to the next and form these helical pathways around the in this case the the five-start helix and the microtubule but could also go as the eight-star or other ways. So this is a qubit which extends mesoscopically or macroscopically because it goes the whole length of the microtubule. And when it reaches, when you have enough superposition, you reach threshold at time t equals h bar over e sub g, you have a bing moment and then you start all over with a new set of initial conditions selected by the collapse process. This is just one piece of one

microtubule, but you need a lot of these to have a significant effect in the brain. But it gives you a sequence of beings. And I think consciousness is a sequence of discrete events, discrete moments like frames in a video or a film are discrete moments, but they appear like a continuum. And I think that's the same thing with consciousness.

It's a sequence of events. We can quantify this a little bit. There are about 10 to the 9th tubulins per neuron, 10 to the 20th tubulins in the brain. We need for, if we had 10 to the 15th tubulins, which is about a 10,000th or 100,000th of the brain, we have reached threshold of time T equals 10 to the minus 7 seconds. This is 10 megahertz and we know 10 megahertz occurs in microtubules and it's a favorably short decoherence time.

So the the the quantum state can last that long. But it's also too fast for cognitive epochs and gestalt scenes of several hundred milliseconds. And for that we need interference patterns to resonate and interfere cross-scale from terahertz to gigahertz to megahertz to kilohertz and slower. And the EEG may be interference beats of much faster stuff going on at a deeper level.

If we think about what this means for different organisms, we have about, upper right, I don't know, I think I burned this out, but human maximum is about 10 to the 20th, which would be about 10 to the 13th cycles per second. So over here we have the intensity of the experience, which is proportional to the frequency, kind of like a photon. The higher the frequency, the more energy. And so the higher the frequency, the more intense the experience. And down here we have the number of tubulins, the content complexity, the possible content. And we can see on a, well this is just based on tubulin, so it's going to be

linear, but human, mouse, cerebral organoids, C. elegans, paramecium, and even plants might have a conscious moment every few seconds, for example, maybe a couple of minutes, whereas we have probably 10 million per second. This extends the hierarchy to the Planck scale. So before I was just showing up to here, and now we can take it all the way to the Planck scale, but we I was just showing up to here and now we can take it all the way to

the Planck scale. But we have this kind of an orchestra thing and the vibrations, the oracle war and other vents can couple, resonate, harmonize and interfere across scales like notes, chords and beats in an orchestra. And the interference would actually be beats. And it was Roger's idea that EEG and hertz are actually beats of much faster vibrations. And the higher frequencies are quantum in nature and could entangle empty states among many neurons. So we can get quantum entanglement out of this. Now, one other aspect of this is Greg Scholes

in a separate paper unrelated to, he also worked with us on something else, but he looked at a system, a quantum optical system of aromatic rings where he had 10 to the 15th oscillations, petahertz, and noticed that he got quantum beats changing scale. There's an abrupt loss of phase coherence along high frequency petahertz vibrations followed by an impulsive appearance of phase coherence along lower frequency, terahertz and picosecond. The coherence jumps down three orders of magnitude

as the quantum beat, a new wave packet appears at this lower frequency. So you can imagine this happening in this quantum orchestra bit where we can go from one frequency down to the next and this would be kind of, I'm not very musical myself, but this could be something like in music where we have resonance and harmony across different scales. And objective reduction could also happen as like a chord or a note or some aspect of this. So how can orcoR be tested?

It predicts that there are potentially functional quantum states and microtubules at physiological temperature and that these quantum states are inhibited by anesthetics which prevent consciousness. And this was part of the Templeton Project accelerating research and consciousness. You probably heard a lot about the experiments that did not work on the other theories.

Meanwhile, that cost 4.8 million. This was 100,000 and this is what we found. This was done at Princeton and Greg Skoll's lab by Arad Kalra and we, myself and others are co-authors. And basically he did, we did tryptophan fluorescence lifetimes, we hit the microtubule with ultraviolet light and then measured how long it lasted the tryptophan fluorescence lifetime

and how far it propagated, the exciton propagated through the microtubule. And the conclusions were the microtubules are efficient light harvesters. This was surprising to the chemist. Number two, tryptophan fluorescence lifetimes and photoexcitation diffuse longer than classical forester mechanisms

are presumably quantum in nature. So we showed a quantum effect and then when we added the anesthetics, etomidate and isoflurane, isoflurane is a gas, etomidate is a soluble anesthetic, significantly inhibited the photo excitation, diffusion, electronic energy migration and microtubules. So this validated our prediction that anesthetics would impair quantum effect in a microtubule. Other evidence supporting OrcoR, delayed luminescence, super radiance,

shown in microtubules inhibited by anesthetics. RSD Delgario has been working on this and I think is still writing it up. I don't have time to go into this, but genomics proteomics, optogenetics I don't have time to go into this, but genomics proteomics optogenetics, optogenetics show that anesthetics act on microtubules rather than on membrane proteins to selectively block consciousness. Best work on this has been done by Rod Eckenhoff's lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

Computer modeling of terahertz oscillations the 86-air manic amino acids in tubulin are inhibited by all anesthetics proportional to their potency. Travis and a group of us did this in 2017, and it's the only study that shows a Meyer-Overton correlation, an effect on a biological system that correlates with the known potency of the different anesthetics. And as I mentioned before, nanotechnology shows self-similar coherent excitations in microtubules

in hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, and terahertz, and gigahertz detected from the scalp in the DDG, the dodecanogram, as Anabond calls it. So how can this work in the brain? There are conscious perception involves three ways from the thalamus. So here's the, except for smell, smell comes right up from the olfactory cortex here.

But everything else goes to the primary cortex in the back of the brain for vision. Then in a feed forward loop to the front of the brain, associative cortex, and then the third way where it gets feedback or broadcast. And this fits more or less with the neuroscientific theories of consciousness, global neuronal workspace, IIT, HOT, and PCRP. For example, here is HOT from the front to the back, so this would be wave 3.

The feedback mechanism, the predictive coding error detection is mostly 3, but it includes 2, so it's kind of 2 rubbing against 3. And I think predictive coding actually works at many, many levels, including between microtubules of mixed polarity. So it's not just at the neural level, it can happen at different scales, including between microtubules of mixed polarity. So it's not just at the neural level. It can happen at different scales, including at the microtubule level. Global neuronal workspace is like the second wave from the back to the front. And IIT, I'm not sure how it fits in the wave business.

It obviously quantifies integrated information and says that it happens back there. So only the third wave is inhibited by anesthesia. This was done by George Mashour's group at the University of Michigan. He showed it for all different types of anesthesia, gas anesthesia, ketamine and propofol. They all block only the third wave.

And more recently, Earl Miller at MIT, who will be the keynote speaker at the Tucson Conference, who's done the most amazing work in the past few years related to consciousness, has shown frontal feedback. The third wave occurs as an alpha, alpha EEG, so roughly 10 Hertz traveling wave from dendrites, not spikes and in spirals. Other people have shown that these actually propagate as spiral waves in different directions, and we'll have a talk about

that in Tucson also, and that the third wave suppresses the second wave if it's got predicted inputs. So if it's not an oddball input, if it's something you're used to, it inhibits it. So you don't get bothered by seeing the same thing over again. And it's inhibited by anesthetic. So it correlates with consciousness. So I think this work is very promising and we'll hear more about it. Why is the third wave conscious? Well, there's three ways within within the cortex. First layer four,

then one, two, three, and six, then they all converge on layer five pyramidal cells. And a lot of people, including me, think that layer five pyramidal cells are the origin of consciousness, the most likely place for consciousness. And we know that the apex of the perception action cycle, so any input eventually, if you're going to make a conscious decision based on your input, eventually it's going to have to go through the pyramidal cells and it has the direct output to the spinal cord through its axon. The apical dendrite gives rise to EEG and DDG and it has the largest array of mixed polarity microtubules.

It's really a mystery why in dendrites and soma of neurons and only dendrites and soma of neurons the microtubules are not continuous. If they're part of the cytoskeleton they should be there for support. You wouldn't you know break your femur and they form a basilar dendritic web that Karl Priebrum thought generated a hologram through the basilar dendrites. And psychedelics, which bind a 5-HT2A receptor, turns out that there are 5-HT2A receptors inside the pyramidal cell associated with the microtubule, associated with microtubule-associated proteins. Which came first, consciousness or life? I'm going to go through this quickly.

Most people would say life came first, but others would say that consciousness came first, including Penrose objective reduction, which would have been there all along. Life began in a primordial soup, a simmering mix from which biomolecules emerged. And this was modeled, simulated in the 1950s. And they found amphipathic molecules, which are these aromatic rings with polar tails,

kind of like dopamine. And the aromatic rings attract and form a micelle and operin claimed that this was the the primitive cell so if this were happening in the primordial soup eventually you'd get you get a big moment you'd have you can't see the gray because it's washed out but you get a Bing moment. You'd have, you can't see the gray because it's washed out, but you get a Bing moment and have a proto-conscious moment at that tiny scale. These feelings will be random. Some would be positive and feel good.

There's our happy face emoji. And with pleasure as a feedback fitness function orienting pi resonance groups, did life then evolve to orchestrate and optimize OR mediated pleasure? And I call this the quantum pleasure principle borrowing from Freud. And it makes a lot more sense to me

that even from the get go from primitive, even my cells and primitive organisms, way before genes, way before brains, that there needed to be some motivation for behavior. So I think all these little creatures are conscious in some sense, seeking pleasure of some sort. It could be as simple as this, that there are two stable states for two rings that are next to each other, the perpendicular T and the offset parallel, and maybe one gives happy face qualia and the other, the perpendicular T and the offset parallel, and maybe one gives a happy face, qualia and the other gives the opposite.

So Darwin is unassailable, but the notion that life evolved to promote gene survival is an assumption and really doesn't make any sense. Behavior is driven by reward in us, in animals, in everybody. There are no genes in the primordial soup and evolutionary theory ignores consciousness and feeling. Finally, genes in the primordial soup and evolutionary theory ignores consciousness and feeling. Finally, back in the primordial soup anywhere else,

I'm working with my friend Dante Loretta, who's a planetary scientist at University of Arizona, and these are aromatic polyaromatics, including fullerenes, floating in space, and they're all over the place and They they have various shapes like this and there is Dante described there He headed NASA's Osiris-Rex project which brought back these things from the asteroid Bennu This is a molecule that was found from a meteorite a few years ago here's another one, they're kind of cool and They're all over the place.

Everything, all the green in this picture is fluorescence from PAHs in ice and interstellar dust. And here's Dante collecting the sample. This is one of his books, The Asteroid Hunter, that's a pretty cool name. He also wrote a book just about the photography of Bennu with Brian May who is a musician in the group Queen who also happens to be an astrophysicist and they did this book and I was I started to tell George that we looking at the samples they found something really interesting and I just texted him to see if I could mention it and they're finding something that they call nanoglobules

to see if I could mention it. And they're finding something that they call nanoglobules, which may be something like my cells. They're encrusted my cells. And if that's the case, that's gonna be very interesting. We're trying to figure out what's going on inside of them. Can AI be conscious? Neuroscientific consciousness theories based on cartoon neurons are no different from AI.

If those theories are correct and sufficient, AI is already conscious, we've surrendered. So I don't think that's the case. Brian Remilley asked ChatGBT how AI will become conscious. And ChatGPT said, the most likely way I will achieve, no, just kidding, favored the Penrose-Hammeroff method. So I'll just put that out there. favored the Penrose-Hammeroff method. So I'll just put that out there.

And finally, in terms of Indian knowledge and Eastern spiritual approaches, there's a lot of similarities between hierarchical levels of consciousness leading down to Brahma on the ground of being and the quantum orchestra going down to space-time geometry. So conclusions, number one, neuroscience needs a revolution. Neuroscientific views of the brain

is a complex computer of simple neurons have little explanatory power, few relevant testable predictions, no validation and are an insult to neurons. 12 orders of fractal-like frequency processing occur in microtubules in each neuron and glial cell, which may include quantum entanglement. And Anurban has shown entanglement between microtubules.

Dynamics at various frequencies may couple, resonate, harmonize, and interfere across scales like musical notes, chords, and beats. The brain is more like a quantum orchestra than a classical computer. EEG is the slow end of DDG, the dodecanogram, will sell similar triplets of triplets in these various frequencies, and megahertz is easily detected from temporal scalp in humans. Therapy for mental and cognitive disorders should aim to optimize microtubule structure and resonance for Alzheimer's, TBI, depression, anxiety,

PTSD and addiction. All the therapies are aimed at receptors and things on the membrane surface, ignoring what's going on. I'd be like, your only doctor was a dermatologist. He's just looking at your skin. He's not looking inside. Who cares about the heart and the nervous system? Consciousness by Penrose O'Hara may have preceded life and prompted its origin and evolution.

And finally, future AI may be based on organic warm temperature, quantum computer, quantum computing, like, uh, honor bonds, brain jelly. Uh, and he's just starting to publish on this. And, uh, I'll just close by mentioning the conference that Garrett mentioned, uh, the 30th annual, the science of consciousnessciousness. Susan will be a keynote. Hartman will be there. Dave will be there and many, many others including Earl Miller, who did I forget, of note. Honor Bond will be there and it's a lot of fun and I hope you all come. Thank you for your time. And I look for you. I just thought Scott do it first. I'll go with Scott Aronson in the back, answer first question.

Thanks. So yeah, actually, rather than argue, I'll just ask an actual question. So is it important for your and Penrose's view that there be entanglement between neurons or any other quantum effect that's collective across multiple neurons? And if so, are you claiming that there is any experimental evidence at all that that exists? Yes and yes. As I said, if you have all this going on one neuron, it's gonna make that neuron really smart, but it's not gonna help with consciousness in the brain. The brain needs entanglement just to explain

things like zero phase lag, a gamma synchrony. You can't explain how you can have perfectly timed gamma all over the brain by membrane propagation. If you say well it's dephaptic then but that doesn't that kind of peters out. So I think you need that anyway. You need it for that, you need it for spatial temporal binding and you think you need it for consciousness. Is there evidence, Anubhan just published a paper that where he showed entanglement between two microtubules. He had a group of microtubules. He entangled them with a laser,

separated them one in one cuvette, one on the other, and showed like an EPR experiment between the two. That needs to be fleshed out, but there is preliminary evidence, yes. Thank you. First of all, immense amount of respect for you and Dr. Penrose, right here. The question I had is, you know, if you're studying anything that is supposed to be fundamental or universal, even if we take consciousness to something that's fundamental, right?

If it's fundamental and it permeates everywhere, how do you actually differentiate that? If it is everywhere in everything that you're studying or you're doing because it's ubiquitous, how do you actually quantify or formalize something like that? Well, it's everywhere in the microenvironment, which is everything, but those are not orchestrated, they're proto-conscious. We would call them random. So they're happening everywhere, and in the table and the air and so forth. Now that seems kind of weird,

but if you believe in panpsychism, which many neuroscientists resort to because they can't explain consciousness through emergence, you'd have to accept that everything has a little bit of consciousness. But the problem with panpsychism is come how do you combine it if it's a quantum effect They they combine by entanglement and you get larger and larger and you get orchestration So that's a difference right but if it is you know everywhere if it's pan psychosom

And you know we say everything has some level of being conscious if it's everywhere. How do you actually differentiate it? Do you know what I mean? Like if something is everywhere in anything that you're, the way that you're measuring, whatever you're using to measure, whatever, how do you actually- Well, we can't really measure consciousness. That's the problem.

However, I would answer your question this way. If you go to the symphony and the musicians are tuning their instruments beforehand, you hear everybody, they're making these noises. It's noise, it's not really music. That's like proto-consciousness everywhere. Then they start playing Beethoven or Brahms or the Beatles or whatever. That's music and that's the difference. It's orchestrated. So do you have any developmental story of when the orchestration emerged in development because I forgive my ignorance in biology but I think that

maybe the micro tubes are since the beginning. No, no, okay. No, the beginning are just these aromatic rings but they're gonna self-organize to, they can still self-organize to optimize pleasure. When the microtubules came in most, you know, the party line is that it was a symbiotic event, according to Lynn Margulis Sagan, when you had these prokaryotes, and mitochondria came and gave energy, and then spirochetes came

and gave the cytoskeleton, which stayed inside for internal compartmentalization and motility to move it around. So the microtubule story wouldn't come till fairly later, whenever that symbiotic event was, unless they happened earlier, maybe as some kind of analog of fullerenes, which were there anyway, which have the same structure.

So I think we have to go a long way from the in the micelle stage before we get we get to microtubules but until you get real big that I don't I don't think that's a problem because who's gonna you know these micelles are gonna they're probably everywhere anyway so oh I think you can get some form of orchestration even just with aromatic rings but it's not in the same category as when you get the microtubules and you get all these vibrational resonances

and different frequencies involved. When you get a development. You got like in a single lifetime, right? Oh, I would say in the womb, first line. Thank you so much, that was a really. That's a political question, pardon me, I'm not gonna answer that. That was a really fascinating line. Thank you so much. That was a really- That's a political question. Pardon me, I'm not gonna answer that. That was a really fascinating talk.

Thank you. I like the idea of how, you know, sort of at the lower than the synaptic level, you get this sort of more effective information processing due to these resonance structures that kind of emerge. But I guess I'm not quite tracking exactly how you would get phenomenal experience from these Bing moments.

Like how does that sort of turn into this like cohesive consciousness? Orchestration. So the Bing moment has is at least proto-conscious. It has some element of qualia in it, whatever that may be. And it's and you take you take the and those are like the the tones of the other musicians tuning their instruments, and then you put it all together into a symphony, and that's what the microtubules do. And before the microtubules, they do it to a more limited extent with the aromatic rings self-organizing.

It sounds like with all the microtubules inside neurons, that a single neuron effectively acts as like a quantum reservoir computer and similarity on different time scales says there's like some time fractal like computational nature to it. Yes. Yeah, Audubon calls microtubules time crystals and he's got all these models about about time crystals. So Where so you have these these clock? it's like a clock within a clock, within a clock, within a clock. Yes.

That's, that's what he says. I think that's what you said. So, uh, when you were a practicing anesthesiologist, I still am. Oh, you still are. Okay. So it's fair to assume you have a decent understanding of pharmacology. Yes.

Are you familiar with the drug colchicine? Yes. And its mechanism of action? Deep polymerizes microtubules. Well actually that's not quite true. It prevents microtubules from reassembling. Which means they're falling apart because of hydrolysis, right? Pardon me? Which means that they are degrading constantly because of hydrolysis and since it's bound to the tubulin, it can't replenish that tubulin, right? Hang on.

Which means that a gout medication that a million people take every year, and which people with bichettes take for their entire life often would, under your theory, cause them to lose consciousness. No. But there's, if consciousness is being computed by microtubules and you have people taking a drug, which inhibits microtubules and you have people taking a drug, which inhibits microtubule formation. I got this question 30 years ago, so let me answer it.

Number one, Coagulazine doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. It's not going to get into the brain. But it would get into the peripheral nervous system, which would under your theory cause... And it can be toxic. It can cause neuropathy, as can vincristine, vimblastine, other drugs. Because it inhibits mitosis. There's no mitosis in neurons. In the peripheral nervous system?

In the peripheral neuron, the peripheral nervous system, I'm not sure, but in the, no, brain neurons don't divide. And there is toxicity. But it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, so why would that be related at all? You just said it doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. Right.

So why does it matter if neurons in the brain don't divide? In case it does. And, uh, okay. Um, Ian, Ian, you had to give him a chance for his... Colchicine is toxic, van-Christine is toxic, taxol is toxic, taxol... ...by inhibition of mitosis leading to breakdown of muscle tissue, leading to albumiolysis and kidney failure. It does not have any effect on condition or consciousness

Right because it doesn't get into the brain. It doesn't get into the brain It doesn't get into the brain and and we hang on a second somebody actually injected hang on a second Somebody actually injected culture see in the brain of a rat been Simon and sure not I can't remember the year but it's in one of my papers, and they wiped out the animal. The mouse was like brain dead. Is your inhibiting the formation of microtubules in the birth? It doesn't, hang on a second. Is that how sensitive perception comes from, right?

Sensitive perception, yeah, but there's a lot of duplication and you do get, you get neuropathies from it if you take too much of it. But mostly it affects, it prevents microtubules from disassembling, no, sorry, that's taxol. It prevents them from reassembling into microtubules. That's true. But it doesn't necessarily cause them to de-blimmerize. No, hydrolysis does that. I have to assert the authority as the moderator.

We have a lot of questions still lined up. This might be a good discussion for during the break, which we'll have time for. I believe you were next. Yeah. Hi. When you showed the picture of the two benzene rings next to each other and said there could be conscious experience just between those two because there's a pleasure.

It would take a long time. By equals H over T, the E sub G there is so small, the T would be like a decade, 10 years, from just two little things. You need a lot of them for it to happen in a reasonably short time. I guess what I'm wondering is, what's the difference between stability of some like conformation of electromagnetic state versus pleasure. Like who's perceiving pleasure when you're talking about two benzene rings? The event itself is pleasure. You don't necessarily need a self.

I mean, people meditate to lose their self. They just want the pure experience. And I don't think you need a self. I mean people meditate to lose their self. They just want the pure experience and I don't think you need a self. I've argued other people have different opinions but if you have the experience and you have it over and over again or similar experiences with memory and so forth that's how the self forms. I don't think you need a self to have an experience but a lot of people would agree with you. I don't think so. Then you have to explain what that is. And it's just kind of coherent and entangled information.

So you still need quantum. In other words, you have experience over time and you're you because you remember those and anything that triggers your memory, that's part of you. Hello. Why do you think they are not looking at microtubules to treat Alzheimer's? Because they're making too much money on drugs that don't work. I kind of guessed that, okay. It's sickening, it's absolutely sickening. So we have time for one more question. Can I just add to that? I've been messing around for years

with putting brain ultrasound into the brain because it's megahertz. We use it to treat depression in our chronic pain patients. It's a mood elevator. And some pilot studies have shown it's beneficial in Alzheimer's because the microtubules fall apart and it causes them to repolymerize and grow, which is what you want.

But I can't get, I can't do that kind of study and I can't get, when I go to the Alzheimer's people and say, no, go away. They don't wanna hear about it. I don't know why. I just wanted to just follow up to this young lady's question and just say that, certainly in our medical, technical, and biological world,

we're moving very fast. And certainly some of the imaging now that's taking place in our AI world will ultimately be able to diagnose and advance our understanding of Alzheimer's. So we're getting there. And certainly surgeries and some of the modern medicine is at our front door. So it's coming

Thank you. I hope you're right, but I'm very dubious about but no no, thank thank you so much for today. It's fantastic I apologize for stealing ten minutes of your coffee time, but I think it was worth it for professor hammer off to talk to us All right, because you've watched all the way till the end, I can assume that you enjoyed that. Alternatively, you're scrubbing through because you want to see some more of my handsome dashing face. And who could blame you? But if you'd like to see some more Stuart Hameroff, then click the link in the description

because Stuart was on Theories of Everything before discussing the technical details of Ork OR for over two hours. You can also watch the rest of the MindFest conference shown on screen here. The links are in the description. Some of the people there are Sarah Walker, Scott Aronson, David Chalmers, Ben Gortzel and Stephen Wolfram. More are coming such as the head of Google's Quantum Computing AI Lab. Take care.

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