Your Consciousness Can Connect With the Whole Universe, Groundbreaking New Research Suggests

This latest clue about the architecture of consciousness supports a Nobel-Prize winner’s theory about how quantum physics works in your brain.

A RECENT GROUNDBREAKING EXPERIMENT in which anesthesia was administered to rats has convinced scientists that tiny structures in the rodents’ brains are responsible for the experience of consciousness. To pull it off, these microscopic hollow tube structures, called “microtubules,” don’t rely on our everyday flavor of classical physics. Instead, experts believe, microtubules perform incredible operations in the quantum realm. Citing the work of earlier researchers, the study infers that the same kind of quantum operations are likely happening in human brains.

During their rat brain experiments, scientists at Wellesley College in Massachusetts gave the rodents isoflurane, a type of inhaled general anesthetic used to induce and maintain unconsciousness for medical procedures. One group of drugged rats also received microtubule-stabilizing drugs, while the other did not. The researchers discovered that the microtubule-stabilizing molecules kept the rats conscious for longer than the non-stabilized rats, which more quickly lost their “righting reflex,” or the ability to restore normal posture, according to their findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal eNeuro in August 2024.

The Wellesley study is significant because the physical source of consciousness has been a mystery for decades. It’s a major step toward verifying a theory that our brains perform quantum operations, and that this ability generates our consciousness—an idea that’s been gaining traction over the past three decades.

The notion that quantum physics must be the underlying mechanism for consciousness first emerged in the 1990s, when Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., popularized the idea that neural microtubules enable quantum processes in our brain, giving rise to consciousness. Specifically, they postulated in a 1996 paper that consciousness may operate as a quantum wave passing through the brain’s microtubules. This is known as Orch OR theory, referring to the ability of microtubules to perform quantum computations through a mathematical process Penrose calls “objective reduction.”

In quantum physics, a particle does not exist in the way classical physics observes it, with a definite physical location. Instead, it exists as a cloud of probabilities. If it comes into contact with its environment, as when a measuring apparatus observes it, then the particle loses its “superposition” of multiple states. It collapses into a definite, measurable state, the state in which it was observed. Penrose hypothesized that “each time a quantum wave function collapses in this way in the brain, it gives rise to a moment of conscious experience.”

If this quantum theory of consciousness tied to microtubules turns out to be correct, it could revolutionize our understanding of consciousness and even strengthen the trailblazing theory that, on a quantum level, consciousness is capable of being in all places at the same time. In other words, it can exist everywhere simultaneously, suggesting that your own consciousness can hypothetically connect with quantum particles beyond your brain, maybe entangling with consciousness all across the universe.

MANY SCIENTISTS DISREGARD THE ORCH OR THEORY because quantum effects have only been produced in the lab under extremely cold temperatures. For example, our technology now includes quantum computers, but their operations rely on temperatures near absolute zero (around -273 degrees Celsius) to maintain their quantum states. The warm brain falls well outside those limits, at about 32–40 degrees Celsius (about 90–104 degrees Fahrenheit) in the deepest regions of the brain, according to a 2022 study. Yet, scientists have collected a promising set of data over the years indicating that certain quantum-level operations in animals and plants may actually be responsible for life’s functions.

Read More – Your Consciousness Can Connect With the Whole Universe, Groundbreaking New Research Suggests

Comments

Leave a Reply