Two weeks before the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, I flew to Tucson, Arizona, and knocked on the door of a suburban ranch-style home. I was there to visit Stuart Hameroff. He is an anesthesiologist and co-inventor with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose of a radical proposal for how conscious experience arises: that the origins of conscious experience lie in quantum phenomena in the brain.
Such ideas, in one form or another, have existed on the fringes of mainstream consciousness research for decades. There is no solid experimental evidence that quantum effects occur in the brain, as critics claim, and aside from a clear idea of how quantum effects produce consciousness, they come in from the cold. Not that it was. “It was very popular to bash us,” Hameroff told me.
But after a week of questioning him about the concept, I realized that at least his version of quantum consciousness is widely misunderstood. Partly, I think it’s Hameroff’s fault. He gives the impression of a single package. In fact, his ideas are a series of independent proposals, each forcing us to confront important questions about the relationship between fundamental physics, biology, and the indescribable thing called consciousness.
Furthermore, during my visit I saw several experiments that Hameroff had proposed come to fruition, and it became clear that his ideas could be applied to experimental research. Researchers have now provided preliminary evidence suggesting that fragile quantum states can persist in the brain and that anesthetics can influence those states.
Now is the time to start taking it…
Source: www.newscientist.com
