Consciousness

 Scientists Believe They’ve Unlocked Consciousness—and It Connects to the Entire Universe

It’s just a simple quantum wave that can interact with everything that’s ever existed.

Susan Lahey

WHEN PEOPLE TALK about consciousness, or the mind, the context almost always seems a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our brain as a function of our neurons firing or it exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where consciousness comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of this mysterious notion has begun to reveal its possible form. In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.

The new work builds upon a theory that Nobel Prize–winning physicist Roger Penrose, PhD, and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, MD, first posited in the 1990s, known as the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory, or Orch OR. Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.

KNOW YOUR TERMS: MICROTUBULES

These are tubes made of protein lattices, and they form part of the cell’s cytoskeleton, which is its structural network. 

Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).

Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently said that it doesn’t have a defined physical size. He compared it to a fractal—a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, Hameroff explains, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.

Until recently, scientists could easily discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—worked only in very cold, controlled environments. When quantum particles were taken out of that environment, the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, the thinking went, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.

But then came discoveries in quantum biology. As it turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.

KNOW YOUR TERMS: QUANTUM BIOLOGY

This is the study of quantum processes in living organisms, like superposition and quantum entanglement, that actually facilitate biological processes beyond the subatomic level. 

In photosynthesis, for example, plants use chlorophyll in a process that stores the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it is stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get there, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment—and it has to complete the trip before it burns all the energy it’s carrying. To find the correct path, scientists now say the exciton tries all possible paths simultaneously. That’s superposition.

New evidence suggests that microtubules in our brain may be even better than chlorophyll at maintaining this quantum coherence. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, PhD, recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. If the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it would indicate quantum coherence.

Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. After conducting the experiment 22 times, Tuszynski reported that the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. That is thousands of times longer than some had expected coherence to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than…in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.

Tuszynski draws on similar experiments performed by scientists at the University of Central Florida, who have been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, researchers observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds—a typical human response time to stimulus. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain…postulated quantum states,” he says. “That is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain may not be too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

While these experiments are a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, they do offer significant and promising data. Meanwhile, Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries of the theory, partnering with people such as author and influencer Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab using their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.

Still, other researchers are exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of the more compelling ideas comes from the study of weather.

The Architecture of Universal Consciousness

Timothy Palmer, PhD, is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos theory and the climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes that the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric, and he uses the Invariant Set Theory to explain how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.” State space, essentially, represents the possible configurations in any system.

That’s a lot to digest, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book The Primacy of Doubt: How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having the option to choose our life, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourself—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space.

The idea starts with a special geometry called a strange attractor. You may have heard of the butterfly effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.

The Lorenz attractor is a set of chaotic solutions of the Lorenz system that, when plotted, resemble a butterfly or figure eight. Most people know it as the butterfly effect, and it’s one way to help explain chaos.

He found that if initial conditions were different by a hundredth of a percent, if the humidity were just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: The cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The plot, now called the Lorenz attractor, actually looks like a pair of butterfly wings.

P almer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.

“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”

Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start. 

Popular Mechanics