Elizabeth Fernandez writes:
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Most neuroscientists believe that the brain operates in a classical manner.
- However, if brain processes rely on quantum mechanics, it could explain why our brains are so powerful.
- A team of researchers possibly witnessed entanglement in the brain, perhaps indicating that some of our brain activity, and maybe even consciousness, operates on a quantum level.
Supercomputers can beat us at chess and perform more calculations per second than the human brain. But there are other tasks our brains perform routinely that computers simply cannot match — interpreting events and situations and using imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Our brains are amazingly powerful computers, using not just neurons but the connections between the neurons to process and interpret information.
And then there is consciousness, neuroscience’s giant question mark. What causes it? How does it arise from a jumbled mass of neurons and synapses? After all, these may be enormously complex, but we are still talking about a wet bag of molecules and electrical impulses.
Some scientists suspect that quantum processes, including entanglement, might help us explain the brain’s enormous power, and its ability to generate consciousness. Recently, scientists at Trinity College Dublin, using a technique to test for quantum gravity, suggested that entanglement may be at work within our brains. If their results are confirmed, they could be a big step toward understanding how our brain, including consciousness, works.
Quantum processes in the brain
Amazingly, we have seen some hints that quantum mechanisms are at work in our brains. Some of these mechanisms might help the brain process the world around it through sensory input.
Despite such intriguing findings, the brain is largely assumed to be a classical system.
If quantum processes are at work in the brain, it would be difficult to observe how they work and what they do. Indeed, not knowing exactly what we are looking for makes quantum processes very difficult to find.
Seeing entanglement in the brain may show that the brain is not classical, as previously thought, but rather a powerful quantum system. If the results can be confirmed, they could provide some indication that the brain uses quantum processes. This could begin to shed light on how our brain performs the powerful computations it does, and how it manages consciousness.
Complete article at Big Think.
As a physicist whose research involved computational nano-electronics, for which the entire physical schema relied upon quantum mechanical transport of electrons through molecular structures, it would seem to be a “no-brainer” that quantum processes (including entanglement) are prevalent in brain activity.
As to:
First and foremost in regards to quantum entanglement and consciousness,,,, quantum entanglement, due to the fact that it is now proven to be a ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, effect, completely rules out the material brain, all by its lonesome, ever being the explanation of consciousness.
In short, quantum entanglement is an immaterial effect that requires and immaterial cause to explain its ‘non-local’ existence. And, of course, Darwinian materialists, (especially with the falsification of hidden variables), have no immaterial, beyond space and time, cause to appeal to, whereas Christian Theists do have one, and have been postulating just such a ‘non-local’ beyond space and time cause for a few thousand years now.
As to:
Of related note, quantum states have already been observed in a ‘wide range of important biomolecules’,
That quantum principles must be at play, (not only at the microscopic level of biological molecules, but also at the macroscopic level of organisms), is most easily, and clearly, demonstrated by the fact that we can detect a single photon,
Of related note to quantum entanglement in the brain, Stuart Hameroff received fairly strong support for his hypothesis that quantum mechanics was at play in the microtubules of the brain,
Also of note, at the 1:55 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Stuart Hameroff talks about long range quantum entanglement in the brain:
A few more notes that strongly suggest long range quantum entanglement is at play in our brain.
Moreover, when we go to sleep the ‘long range’ quantum coherence displayed by the waking brain disappears.
Verse:
One confusion here is with the term “quantum effects”. Since every cell involves transfers of electrons and other atomic or molecular pieces, then of course quantum effects are active: in electron energy levels, enzyme activity to lower energy thresholds for chemical reactions, transfer of calcium ions, etc. Whether any of this involves entanglement and other strange quantum effects is a different question that would be more difficult to investigate and answer. Given how fragile entanglement is in the lab, any such effects going on in the wet, warm brain, with its active chemistry and packed in atoms, would presumably have to be either very quick, or else very cleverly shielded and maintained by some biological process.
Fasteddious at 2, this may interest you:
In the following video, at the 22:20 minute mark, Dr. Elisabeth Rieper shows why the high temperatures of biological systems do not prevent DNA from having quantum entanglement and then at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper goes on to remark that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it.
@2
Agreed, though I don’t think that shielding by biological process can be ruled out, either.
“consciousness…. What causes it?”
Good question, but that’s a secondary question. The primary question is: what is it? Nobody knows. Neuoscientists sure as heck don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s the primary fact of my existence, and not dependent on mere reason. The “I Am”.
A very good question. An approach that has been successfully used in researching other phenomena is to investigate what things can halt or stop the phenomenon in question. We know that brain damage can interrupt consciousness. As can certain chemicals. We also know that things like aneurisms, strokes and drugs can alter our perception of consciousness.
Indeed. There is the Glasgow Coma Scale that used to be called the Glasgow consciousness scale. Level of consciousness is an assessment of brain activity and the word “consciousness” should be reserved for that or dispensed with altogether. “Awareness” and “self-awareness” are more than adequate alternatives.
Well, there I agree. Certainly, neuroscientists will readily confirm the gap in knowledge between our first-person experience of our conscious selves and how brain activity is observed and interpreted by neuroscientists as third-persons.
Has ID some help, input, suggestions to offer?
Consciousness/awareness is not something that can be known, it is that by which other things can be known. It is not caused; it is that which causes.
Testing others for their apparent level of consciousness or awareness says absolutely nothing about that person’s level of consciousness; all it says anything about is what the consciousness/awareness of the person conducting the test is observing.