Quantum Biology: Irreducible Mind (Part 4)

when you think of your brain you might think of chemical reactions and electrical signals taking place which you might think generate all your thoughts dreams and your consciousness if this is the case your mental processes should be explained fully by classical physics however the way we think and operate seems to be completely different from how classical physics operates at the macro level in a new field of research called quantum mind theory is challenging these established beliefs that were nothing but biological robots determined by the laws of physics in the past few decades a new field

of research has begun called quantum biology which is the field of science that applies quantum mechanics to biological systems in order to explain how they operate where classical biology cannot give a full account several aspects of biology cannot be explained by classical biology alone and quantum biology is providing better models for biological systems for example quantum mechanics has been shown to play a role in photosynthesis and seems to be utilized in how birds migrate quantum mechanics might also play a role in how we're able to smell quantum entanglement has been shown to hold together dna

and researchers recently found evidence of quantum jitters within our dna which could be a driving force in evolution duke researchers have found what they call quantum jitters in the shapes of dna bases that may account for the spontaneous mutations driving both evolution and disease it was once argued quantum mechanics played no role in macro objects let alone biological structures because the environment was too hazardous for quantum processes but this research refutes this claim it is now known biological systems can and do take advantage of quantum processes and use them for beneficial means when our modern

theory of quantum mechanics was first developed some physicists speculated they could possibly explain another conundrum life and consciousness one of the reasons was quantum mechanics was confirmed in multiple experiments and the strange rules of the quantum world seemed counterintuitive so some suggested it might unlock a completely new way of looking at the world that could eventually lead to understanding the rules and features of life this was seen as speculative at first but recently new evidence has supported this idea about a decade ago the physicist diedrich eretz began suggesting the mathematics of quantum mechanics could be

used to model the inner world of the mind we point out that quantum mechanical principles such as superposition and interference are at the origin of specific effects and cognition related to concept combinations we investigate the implications of our quantum modeling scheme for the structure of human thought and show the presence of a two-layered structure consisting of a classical logical layer and a quantum conceptual layer in other words the inner world of the mind seems to act as if it's quantum-like for example in quantum mechanics there's something called a superposition where a quantum system can behave

as if it's in multiple states at the same time until it's measured and a collapse happens to the final observable position however erch notes this seems to be how our thoughts behave we often can have multiple contradictory ideas or solutions to a problem existing in our mind simultaneously before we consciously cause collapse to the final decision that we carry out in our classical or macro reality sometimes it feels like certain thoughts or memories are entangled you might be thinking of one subject and instantly you're connected to another subject that just popped into your mind we

can also think of mental processes like quantum tunneling for example you may encounter an odd object or smell something that instantly reminds you of a long lost memory and we can bounce around between different topics without any logical path from one to another erd suggests these concepts and more are better at explaining how the mind operates in other words the mind seems to behave in a quantum-like manner and mental processes can be modeled as such it has been argued this is nothing more than a coincidence that the brain is just a classical machine that behaves

quantum-like when generating the mind in fact it is fair to say many researchers working on quantum cognition speak of it as merely an abstract framework for modeling the human mental lexicon through the brain's network of neurons but this element alone is probably not enough to fully explain why the mine acts quantum-like and one could argue the brain's neural network is somewhat of a reflection of an underlying quantum mechanical aspect deep within the brain and from computational issues alone it is unlikely the brain just simulates a quantum system it makes more sense from a biological standpoint

to just utilize quantum processes instead of simulating them classically and we know biological processes can and do utilize quantum mechanics stuart hamroff explains so quantum cognition is this mathematical approach and from wikipedia they they they say well the the field clearly distinguishes itself from the quantum mind as it is not reliant on the hypothesis that there is something quantum mechanical about the brain so they're trying to have their cake and eta too they're trying to say we're using quantum mathematics but we don't want to go on that risky limb that there's quantum biology in the

brain because everybody knows the brain is too warm wet noise you have quantum computing going on uh nonetheless some of us do feel that the brain has quantum biology it has to and for example if a classical system would try to simulate a quantum system you'd have exponential slowdown as feynman showed you it would be you wouldn't be able to do it it would involve so much computation what would be the point of using a classical system in the brain to to simulate a quantum system if you could have the quantum system furthermore we do

have evidence quantum processes seem to exist deep within the brain physicist matthew fisher brought to light a study from the 1980s where mice were given either lithium-6 or lithium-7 and compared with a control group lithium-7 is used in pharmaceutical drugs to treat things like depression or bipolar disorder now if the brain is purely chemical and not quantum lithium-6 should have the same effect the reason is chemically they are the same as they have the same number of electrons the only difference is lithium-7 has one additional neutron in the nucleus so the only difference is their

quantum vibration frequency not their chemical makeup however researchers found vast behavioral differences between the lithium-7 group and the lithium-6 group the lithium-7 group mellowed out and displayed little interest in performing normal instinctual tasks and the lithium-6 group had the exact opposite effect fischer says for the mother rats fed lithium-6 their nest building was reported to be excessive nursing was very frequent long duration grooming and retrieval of pups was excessive so these were the cleanest and safest rat pups in the world state of alertness instead of being average or low was reported to be very high

apparently not only did lithium-6 and lithium-7 have different effects on the mood of the mother rats but the effects had opposite sign thus the change was influenced by the resonance of the quantum particles not their chemical makeup implying there are quantum processes in the brain that correlate to our mental properties quantum cognition seems to be more than just a model so let me uh just assume this experiment is right and ask how on earth could this possibly be that the two isotopes of lithium have an opposite effect on the sign of the mood of these

uh female rats well okay there's a mass ratio of seven to six not so big um but what's remarkable is the nuclear spin entanglement time i showed you this uh ten seconds so it turns out that for that's for lithium seven lithium six is five minutes i don't know about you but my memory is much not much longer than five minutes and when i saw that i was like good lord could it really be that evolution had you know undergone the a process where nucleus spins you know became um cubits and a quantum processing in

the brain and that our brains are some sort of quantum computer other research has only supported the notion the brain is actually quantum computing within the past few years additional research has been published supporting quantum mind theory information processing has been reported to be taking place within microtubules where quantum mind theories say quantum processes are taking place another paper has shown that tubulin protein molecules will self-assemble via quantum tunneling on top of this we even have evidence that suggests quantum vibrations are coming from microtubules which would imply topological qubits are likely within the brain [Music]

quantum biology researcher inter-band bandio pet hia said the microtubule appears to be a fundamental information processing device in biology thus it appears we have sufficient evidence quantum processes are taking place within the brain most of these theories for quantum mind revolve around the basic premise that deep inside neurons there are tiny structures called microtubules which are made of proteins called tubulins since tubulins are proteins they contain amino acids called tryptophan on a molecular level tryptophan out of 10 is made up of six carbons bound together in the form of a ring the ring contains electrons

that oscillate from one side to the other because of the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics the actual location of these electrons is more properly described by a wave function or as a cloud of possible locations because these tryptophan molecules are close to each other one tryptophan ring can share an electron cloud with another tryptophan ring sharing of the electron clouds causes the displacement of the tryptophan into a superposition of two states so basically all this means in a nutshell is according to quantum mind theory within microtubules of a neuron due to the molecular makeup of

tubulins they can exist in a superposition of two states which we'll represent as a one or a zero being in a superposition it would exist as both a state of one and zero which would be known as a cubit until it collapses to one state or the other now since tubulins make up microtubules the sharing of the superposition along an electron cloud can exist along several different pathways which is known as a topological qubit thus through the different possibilities of just one microtubule different pathways could exist in a superposition and this results in large-scale coherence

among thousands of tryptophan molecules on a microtubule now here is where quantum computation comes in the two requirements for quantum computation are a superposition of two states which allows molecules to represent qubits such as a one and a zero we have seen how this can occur in just one tryptophan molecule which when displaced exists as a superposition of a one in a zero state the second requirement for quantum computation is large-scale coherence again we have seen how this can occur among thousands of tryptophan molecules thus microtubules inside neurons could potentially fulfill the two requirements necessary

for quantum computation now i know this is a little complex but what this would mean is the brain could compute different possibilities simultaneously until a decision is made by the agent and a collapse to one state is produced which corresponds to the intuitive way of how we think as well as what researchers found in developing the model of quantum cognition this is also supported by the fact that there's a correlation between the binding affinity of many brain altering chemicals like anesthetics for the hydrophobic pockets where these tryptophan residues are located in their anesthetic potency in

other words the more tightly an anesthetic binds to tryptophan residues on microtubules the more likely they are to disrupt cognitive processes like memory formation suggesting there is a correlation between microtubules and how the mind interacts with or manifests as the brain when these theories first came out some claim the brain is too large and wet for quantum coherence what this means is the brain contains a lot of water and the random motion of water seems to destroy quantum coherence and produce decoherence and thus it was claimed the brain is too wet for quantum computation to

occur but these objections don't work for three reasons first the objection is based on a mathematical miscalculation assuming the superposition needed to be much larger than what quantum mind models predicted and since the superposition would be much smaller there would be less of a chance for interference second the tryptophan molecules which were proposed to be involved in quantum coherence exist in areas of microtubules which are hydrophobic that is areas which exclude water and would protect against interference so water molecules cannot enter into these areas and interfere with coherence third this objection was directly challenged by

the fact that quantum coherence does seem to play a role in biological organisms as we discussed earlier these biological organisms contain as much water as the human brain and it doesn't seem to preclude quantum coherence from taking place quantum mind theory also deals with another objection from physicalness and explains how the mind can cause collapse within microtubules physicalists have argued a non-material force such as a mind cannot influence the brain as it would violate the law of conservation of energy which states the total energy of an isolated system remains constant if another force was acting

upon our brains that would require some type of outside energy source and violate the law of conservation but neuroscientist john eckels and physicist henry marginal responded to this by appealing to quantum mechanics some fields such as the probability field of quantum mechanics carry neither energy nor matter in other words if the mind behaves or manifests as a quantum process it could cause collapse of the brain without violating the law of conservation by simply affecting the probability outcome within the brain instead of through a process of adding energy marginal says in very complicated physical systems such

as the brain the neurons and sense organs whose constituents are small enough to be governed by probabilistic quantum laws the physical organ is always poised for a multitude of possible changes each with a definite probability if one change takes place that requires energy or more or less energy than another the intricate organism furnishes it automatically hence even if the mind has anything to do with the change that is if there is a mind-body interaction the mind would not be called upon to furnish energy so john echols concludes inciting marginal the law of conservation is not

violated if the mind manifests and behaves like a quantum process which would be expected given the recently discovered evidence for quantum mind theory the quantum nature of the mind suggests it doesn't necessarily have to be a product of the brain but it could be something irreducible that only correlates with the brain it can be concluded that calculations on the basis of the heisenberg uncertainty principle show that the probabilistic emission of a vesicle from the presynaptic vesicular grid could conceivably be modified by a mental intention acting analogously to a quantal probability field all that we can

surmise is that mental events acting as a field in the manner postulated by marginal could affect changes in the spatiotemporal activity of a module by changing the probability of a mission in many thousands of active synapses there need to be no violation of conservation laws basically energy is not taken away or added all that has changed is the mind acts to affect the probability distribution within the brain so quantum mind theory explains how the mind could affect the brain without being physical itself now notice echols doesn't say the mind is composed of quantum particles or

is reducible to quantum processes and i want to be clear we're not arguing for the idea consciousness emerges from quantum mechanics or is a product of quantum collapse however if irreducible minds do exist that are correlated with the brain in order to retain our intuitive understanding of how our free will and other mental processes work the mind when manifesting in reality to cause real physical changes would have to behave quantum-like in other words irreducible minds would be expected to manifest with a quantum-like nature to avoid the determinism of classical physics and to have the ability

to freely think and process information quantum systems and minds seem to correlate in how they behave as the model of quantum cognition shows and this correlates perfectly with where the evidence in quantum mechanics is pointing us with the issue known as the measurement problem physicist henry stapp reminds us the logical situation in quantum theory is there is an absolute logical need for something else such as consciousness in quantum mechanics there is no physical equation to explain quantum collapse yet stap and other physicists have argued this measurement problem implies something beyond the physical descriptions and equations

to cause quantum collapse which they argue would need to be consciousness basically all physical systems are bound to the rules of quantum mechanics but quantum mechanics shows us no physical system has definite properties prior to being measured by an outside source if all things physical are bound to these rules of quantum mechanics this implies something outside the whole physical system must interact and cause collapse for the classical physical world to emerge as is which points to the theory consciousness is what is interacting with the physical to cause collapse instead of consciousness being an emergent feature

of matter bruce rosenbloom and fred kutner say only a consciousness something beyond schrodinger equation evolution can collapse away function john gribben and paul davies say the observer plays a key role in deciding the outcome of the quantum measurements now if the brain engages in quantum computation then the same quantum rules and effects apply so the implications of the measurement problem apply to the brain as well if the brain has several different pathways along its microtubules in a quantum superposition then what is causing measurement in final collapse as we said there is no physical equation to

describe collapse yet collapse must happen for brain processes to move forward the implication we see in quantum experiments would carry over into quantum biology the wave function of the material brain is collapsed by the mind or the observer in other words the mind measures the brain and produces real effects carried out in the brain thus the brain itself would have in its very fabric the need for an observer to cause collapse which would point back to the existence of an irreducible mind beyond mere brain chemistry on top of that this data correlates to what we

see in the neuroscientific research on mindful attention and the plasticity of the brain the mind is able to produce real observable effects in the brain as researchers have pointed out in multiple studies thus the evidence demonstrates the mind seems to be a real active force that collapses the quantum nature of the brain to produce real changes and cause results quantum biology and the measurement problem point back to an irreducible mind not created by brain chemistry that is needed to measure the quantum superpositions of the brain and cause actions to play out thus quantum mind theory

points to an irreducible conscious agent [Music] you