Experimental Evidence No One Expected! Is Human Consciousness Quantum After All?

Transcript

hello info person this is Anton and today we're going to discuss a really intriguing and somewhat unusual study that could change everything kind of Mostly because of the topic it deals with and the potential implications from this discovery but the thing is I actually had no idea this paper was even out mostly because this is not one of those topics or themes or I guess scientific fields that I generally cover on the channel but in this case some of you wonderful people sent me several messages at asking me to cover this because this does have huge implications for us humans our Consciousness because it discovered something super important for a somewhat kind of a fringe idea proposed a few decades ago by the famous Roger Penrose the idea of quantum Consciousness okay let's actually I guess take it very slowly step by step because there are a lot of super complex topics that we first need to cover but first here's the study ultraviolet super Radiance from Mega networks of tryptophan in biological architectures and so in this particular study the researchers discovered something really unusual by building a network out of a protein known as tryptophan and that something starts to produce Quantum effects and there's a really important reason why this is kind of crucial but to understand all of this let's I guess go back a few decades when the famous Nobel laurate Roger Penrose proposed something that a lot of people thought was maybe a little bit too much or a little bit too EX Centric now Penrose is obviously a really good mathematician and he's an excellent physicist but in this proposition he was dealing with ideas from I guess neuroscience and philosophy and here he tried to explain Consciousness the origin of Consciousness by trying to bring in quantum mechanics but also mixing this with his field of study in general relativity Quantum superposition and even space and curvatures and so he essentially proposed that our brain is able to produce Quantum States inside that are then collapsed by things like for example gravity because these states become unstable with these Quantum waves collapsing into one of possible states with the object of much greater mass so for example our brain very likely going through this collapses much faster or I guess just to rephrase this he proposed that our brains contain a l of these Quantum States at all times and so here we're talking about that Sher cat that's both alive and dead at the same time with the brain acting like some kind of a quantum Orchestra and not really a classical computer which is what's usually assumed by a lot of neuroscientists and even a lot of computer scientists and so here this Consciousness that's very difficult to Define originates as a sort of a Quantum superposition inside individual neurons and is not really the result of neural connections at all and as a result of this he then even argued that Consciousness by itself can never actually appear inside various computer models and is technically non-algorithmic being entirely Quantum in nature so a classical touring machine or a classical computer could never actually reach Consciousness or basically according to him all of those language models that some scientists thought might have become conscious could never become that but this unusual view was basically criticized by everyone neuroscientists computer scientists artificial intelligence researchers and they pretty much all disagreed mostly because first of all there was no evidence it was all just BAS Bas on his propositions but second of all for one very important reason Quantum states are very difficult to produce for example this Quantum system one by IBM used to be one of the most powerful quantum computers out there and it actually requires close to absolute zero temperatures and has to be isolated from the environment in order to avoid the collapse of these Quantum waves and so back in the days back in 1999 a researcher even calculated that in a typical brain environment if there was a Quant wave it would most likely collapse in a tiny fraction of a second something like 10 to the minus of 13 seconds we way too fast to be significant for any type of Consciousness or for any type of neural processes and that's because brains are very hot and they contain a lot of stuff inside making these Quantum waves practically impossible and so for many years his idea was kind of ignored but then someone else read his book and actually added his own ideas this is Stuart Hammer off a professor at University of Arizona who specialized in anesthesiology so yeah that's stuff you get before a surgery and he proposed something that Pen Rose never thought about and something that potentially provides physical explanation for how this Quantum Consciousness is even possible and as you learn today it might even have physical evidence based on various studies but obviously you might be asking yourself anesthesiology what does this have to do with anything well here's the thing when it comes to defining Consciousness even today we have no idea what it is because there are philosophical definitions there are biological definitions there are psychological definitions and they all seem to differ but one of the best definitions comes from medicine it's usually assessed as a combination of verbal Behavior various stps of brain activity and of course the idea of arousal or being aware and that's obviously something we can measure and by definition anesthesiology is usually an attempt to remove this so that the patient doesn't wake up and does not feel anything and so there's actually an intriguing connection between anesthesiology and the idea of Consciousness although when it comes to Consciousness definitions in humans we normally base it on verbal reports to basically being able to communicate that you're conscious which is of course why those language models used by various artificial intelligence scientists were kind of able to fool everyone into thinking that they were conscious they're probably not or in animals we often assess this by using what's known as the self-awareness test it usually involves a mirror and placing something on for example the face of the animal in a lot of cases animals like for example great apes by seeing something in the mirror on their face will actually try to scratch it off or remove it understanding that they're looking at themselves but in a lot of other cases like for example in most dog cases most dogs don't actually see anything and don't care now some do react just not all of them but here it does not mean that the dogs are not conscious it just means that Consciousness is just very difficult to measure or to even Define as a matter of fact according to Wikipedia there are over 20 different individual models of Consciousness all proposed in the last few decades and all with a lot of evidence and a lot of experiments including a lot of explanations for how all of this works and though some of them are quite philosophical or maybe difficult to prove quite a lot of them are based on Neuroscience that does provide us with physical evidence you can find this in the link any description but overall even today in 2024 there is no one definition that everybody agrees with so basically Consciousness despite the fact that we've been talking about this for like thousands of years now still has no definition no explanation and we still know very little about it but this particular study might take us a little bit closer assuming that it's correct okay so back to startart hammer off so because his research was in anesthesiology he actually discovered something somewhat strange he discovered that a lot of different anesthetics so basically things we use to induce anesthesiology or to induce this state of unconsciousness tend to be very strange gases that don't make sense and should not act on neurons for example a lot of different noble gases or inor Gases such as Xenon Krypton and Argan for some reason have anesthetic properties here's one of the papers about Xenon anesthesia but these gases are generally inert they don't actually chemically act with anything and so the actual mechanism of anesthesia here is actually somewhat difficult to explain and so a few decades back he proposed an intriguing idea he realized that maybe all of this is actually the result of interaction between tryptophan rings and various chemical compounds and you might have heard of tryptophan before it's one of the most common amino acids that's usually used in the synthesis of many different proteins and for some reason it also absorbs UV light it's also fluorescent or basically it can emit light if it receives a certain Photon and more importantly it can sometimes form complex structures that eventually form rings and it's really the formation of these unusual Rings or these strange tunnels that could be responsible for everything and so here Hammer of proposed that anesthesia Works through the interaction with these unusual microtubules when certain anesthetics such as for example Xenon bind to various tubine molecules occupying them inside which then changes the frequency of vibration that a lot of these structures produce naturally and so in a natural his proposition was really simple the main reason we become unconscious during anesthesia is because various molecules bind to this unusual tubulin disrupting its natural vibrations and thus somehow making us unconscious and though this might sound maybe a little bit farfetched there's something really important to understand here these unusual tubulins are literally everywhere inside of us okay a brief side note about microtubules and so even though we're technically talking about tryptophan one of the things that tryptophan is able to produce is also known as tubin an unusual protein that can then form these very very long structures known as tubules or technically micr tubles and if you've ever taken microbiology class of any kind you probably remember that these structures are literally everywhere their main function is basically structure this is a type of a skeleton inside the cell the usually determine the shape of the cell but they also function as a kind of a network guiding everything inside for example there's that famous video that when viral a while back that shows us a tiny protein known as kin literally walking on microtubules it sort of resembles this and this is essentially how a lot of different materials get inside and outside of the cell which basically makes these microtubules almost like roads inside a typical cell but apart from structure and guiding things the obviously do a lot of other things as well but what makes these structures so much unusual is really the fact that they form these very strange cylinders and actually cylinders that are extremely orderly that sort of create almost like crystals and so when Hammer of discovered about microt tubules he realized that they have a very high chance of being responsible for what makes us conscious or I guess more specifically for what makes us unconscious during anesthesia and he even went further and argues that microt provide computation inside our brain that can potentially explain Consciousness just because of their complexity and their unusual crystallized structure and because of the sheer number of these structures inside our bodies and so he actually proposed to Penrose that this was the basic unit of processing inside neurons themselves not the connection between neurons but microtubules inside neurons and that of course went contrary to a lot of different studies in Neuroscience that established neuronal connection ction as a very important source of pretty much everything inside the brain here we're talking about this area known as the synapse that usually releases a lot of neurotransmitters that basically creates communication between neurons and modern neurobiology has a lot of evidence to suggest that this is very likely the case and this is of course the idea behind modern computer science and modern artificial intelligence for example those language models they all use the idea of synapsis but basically build them in terms of algorithms replacing the brain with a kind of a neural network and so naturally this idea of tubules or micr tubles was a very contentious proposition and pretty much everyone disagreed with it but it didn't stop pen rolls and Hammer off and they eventually proposed A New Concept they refer to it as orchestrated objective reduction one of those 20 propositions that tried to explain Consciousness but this time through quantum physics and specifically Quantum effects produced inside these micro tuiles that can sometimes be disrupted by things like anesthesia as proposed by Hammer off but overall relies on three main principles first these microtubules produce the quantum States and they're able to produce this because they form these unusual crystalline structures that can somehow produce Quantum States inside it's not really well explained how but that's beside the point second anesthesia any anesthesia is able to affect these Quantum States and disrupt them thus causing unconscious with the third principle being somewhat unusual it actually relates to Quantum States proposed by Penrose because here it states that gravity also plays a role and specifically because of the mass interaction here Gravity usually causes the natural collapse of these Quantum States and thus provides Consciousness so yeah all of this might sound super complicated and it really is but if I were to give you a 5-second explanation it's basically as follows brains contain microtubules microtubules form complex crystalline structures that can somehow produce Quantum States inside of them those Quantum States create these really large Quantum waves inside the brain that collapse for various external reasons that somehow leads to the idea of Consciousness um yeah sounds kind of eccentric when you put it this way right and that's of course what most scientists kind of said and pretty much everyone ignored this except for maybe a few scientists until relatively recently and specifically until we actually found a way to test this mostly because experimental procedures became good enough to physically figure out if this is true and so even though brain is kind of hot and kind of wet and shouldn't really produce Quantum States some scientists decided to see if microtubules can actually do any of this and here I guess let's start with some of the more negative experiments this was actually from 2022 and this is the experimental setup used in this case and so here a group of Italian physicists conducted an intriguing experiment that tried to see if gravity does actually cause Quantum collapse that could then maybe provide evidence for pen roses and Hammer off's propositions so basically here they assume that objects would larger Mass are going to have a much faster collapse of the quantum wave function and this collapse should be accompanied by certain emissions in certain types of light something that this particular experiment was designed to detect but they actually found nothing and so in this case this Quantum weave reduction idea was now believed to be possibly Incorrect and initially when I was going to make a video about this in 2022 that was basically my conclusion it's a cool proposition it tries to use biology quantum physics and a lot of other fields to basically combine everything to explain Consciousness but it was more of a thought experiment than anything else and I'm actually kind of happy I waited to make that video because now we have practically the opposite evidence we actually have at least two experiments on microtubules that potentially prove something entirely different and so in one of the experiments in 202 23 the scientists wanted to find out one simple thing can anesthetics affect microtubules directly thus possibly providing evidence that there might be something about them in terms of Consciousness here's actually a physical picture of microtubules inside a typical cell and here's another picture of different cells connected together and microtubules shown in green and so for this particular experiment the scientists took microtubules and they basically made them glow because a lot of them do display fluoresence but then they decided to test something about those florescence they added certain anesthetics into those microtubules and it surprisingly changed the way they glow in other words they actually discovered that a lot of fluoresence seems to have a substantial delay when microtubules are mixed with anesthetics such as for example Xenon in this case the effect is actually really small the actual delay was only about 20% or so but it provided important evidence that there is a connection between anesthesia and my micr tues or in other words it actually provided important evidence for something that hammer off proposed back in the80s but that doesn't obviously prove anything in regards to Quantum Mechanics none of these effects so far are quantum in nature and that's until we come to this recent paper that as always you can find any description below and I guess in some sense if you watch this whole video you can probably understand what this title says here they used a mega network of tryptophan or basically once again microtubules in order to Pro provide first ever evidence for Quantum effects and the reasoning behind the study was somewhat unusual here the researchers once again realized that this is a kind of a crystalline structure a crystall likee biological structure that makes microtubules a very attractive candidate for all sorts of quantum entanglement and this idea has been previously explored in other papers but never physically proven and so here by using microtubules that you can technically buy online from a lot of different bi ological companies the researchers performed a super simple experiment they used a more complex arrangement of these microtubules and basically made them flues by shining the UV light these microtubules started to emit light back but here because of the arrangement and because of the structure they actually started producing super Radiance very likely caused by the collective interaction inside these Arrangements which results in a production of light as a kind of a high intensity pulse different from what's usually expected in classical physics but this is only something that happens when these molecules are arranged in symmetrical networks kind of similar to what we usually find in various cells if you just take a simple tripop find molecule or just a few of them without a specific Arrangement they don't do any of this and so this unusual Quantum effect that produces stronger fluoresence has been now physically proven to exist inside micral structures and by demonstrating that microtubules can indeed produce Quantum effects it creates a kind of an implication for a lot of studies of Consciousness now it doesn't actually prove that Consciousness is quantum what it does prove though is that it's not impossible here we now have physical proof that first of all microtubular Arrangement can indeed produce Quantum effects and from that previous study these Quantum effects or really any effects inside these microtubules can also be affected by a lot of anesthetics which by itself is a huge discovery for felds like Quantum biology but the main point is really to discover all of the quantum effects in various biological systems and so if a lot of this is confirmed in future studies and if many of these studies do discover that maybe Consciousness is actually caused by microtubules and maybe it is quantum in nature this of course has a huge implication for a lot of fields and more practically for medical Fields so here one example that someone mentioned in one of the studies is things like Alzheimer's there's actually evidence that Alzheimer's which usually leads to a major breakdown of conscious activity is very often caused by some kind of a protein buildup and surprisingly the solution of microtubules inside neurons and not just Alzheimer's a lot of different types of dementia seem to be connected to microtubules as well but more importantly if this is indeed a result of quantum effects since we know so much about quantum physics and how all of this is affected by electromagnetic sources there's even a possibility here for different types of non-invasive therapies and specifically electromagnetic therapies that can potentially treat dementia and Alzheimer's and a lot of other cognitive Problems by directly affecting Quantum effects inside of various microtubules in other words these unusual discoveries could potentially lead to Major breakthrough in a lot of different fields of Neuroscience but as of right now this is still a very big if mostly because we only have like two studies right now and a lot of confirmation is first needed to see if maybe some of this is caused by something entirely different or if maybe there was some kind of a contamination or possibly issues with data collection and so until we see more similar experiments or even additional experiments with microtubules where other Quantum effects can be induced possibly taking us a little bit closer to this idea of quantum Consciousness we're not really going to be able to tell what exactly is happening here and whether all of this is correct or not but these initial discoveries from the last couple of years are currently super exciting because for all we know maybe Penrose and Hammer off were actually correct and maybe it's all because of microtubules with these unusual structures playing an even more important role inside our bodies on that note once we have some updates or once someone else discovers something else exciting about microtubules we'll come back and talk more about this because this is a super important Discovery and so until then thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who Lov rable space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else support this you on patreon by Jian Channel membership or bye-bye in the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye-bye [Music] [Music] n e