The Quantum Brain
Defining the relation of the Mind to Time
Every day, we experience it. From the moment we were born until the very last instant preceding death. In our daily lives we are ruled by it. It tells us when to wake up, when to eat, when to sleep (most of the time), and overall we cannot escape its ever-existing tick.
Time is indeed woven in the very fabric of our existence, and although we can’t see it, its presence is nevertheless always felt to varying degrees.
In our collective unconscious, we perceive time as a fixed and regular ticking machine, always running at the same pace. But when we think about it, some events seem to contradict this basic concept. We can all recall instants which seemed to last for hours, and days which seemed to flew by so fast we found ourselves amazed at the amount of time that passed. This first idea is rather unsettling, and paradoxical. Although clocks are omnipresent in our daily lives, our brains seem very obtuse in perceiving it at an irregular rhythm.
The perception of time has been a center of discussions since the earliest days of ancient philosophy, and no answer seems definitive. Neurologists have put forward the functions of the Cerebellum and the Basal Ganglia which play a role in keeping a biological clock running. I won’t delve into the matter here since I’m not a neuroscientist, but you can read a very acute article about the neurophysiology of the perception of time by the brain here.
Even though there are a number of hypothesis, we still don’t really know how the brain perceives time as a whole, and why different people perceive time at different rates. Furthermore, we are still clueless how even time works. Why does it seem to go forward? Is there some kind of engine running it? Is there a universal clock ticking somewhere in the universe? More simply, what is time itself?
The concept of time has always been one of the deepest mystery ever conceived by humankind, and few other have still stayed so impenetrable. But some advances in science have set some basic rules that seem to be coherent. At first there was Newton, who thought that Time was universal, and every celestial body reacted the same way to it. This idea was debunked a few hundred years later by Einstein in its special theory of relativity. Basically it said that Time was not absolute, and that it was part of a single entity called space time. This meant that the flow of time could be influenced mainly by two forces, which are gravity and velocity. Indeed, the more massive the body, the more it influenced the passage of time in its area (Fig 1).
So, the theory dictates that the more massive the body, the more it could bend space-time around itself. Even, in a particularly extreme case, a Black Hole. A black hole is what remains after a particularly heavy star (weighing more than 3 times the mass of the sun) collapse under its own gravity. A black hole is called a singularity, because it is a point where gravity is infinite, so much so that even light cannot escape it. If someone were unlucky enough to fall to it, the more he would be closing on the singularity, the more his watch would slow down, coming to a stop at the singularity, the center of the black hole. From an outside perspective, things would go even weirder. The observer would see the unfortunate fellow fall down in direction of the black hole, and at one point, the observer would see the body stop its fall, and then gradually fade away (Fig.2).
Einstein’s theory of relativity also says that the flow of time can change with velocity. Which is better explained by the Twin Paradox. Taken from the website Einstein-online.info, here’s the paradox explained:
In Einstein’s special theory of relativity, there is no such thing as “time” in the singular. Time passes differently for different observers, depending on the observers’ motion. The prime example is that of the two hypothetical twins: One of them stays at home, on Earth. The other journeys into space in an ultra-fast rocket, nearly as fast as the speed of light, before returning home:
Afterwards, when the twins are reunited on Earth, the travelling twin is markedly younger, compared to her stay-at-home sibling. The exact age difference depends on the details of the journey. For example, it could be that, aboard the space-ship, two years of flight-time have passed — on-board clocks and calendars show that two years have elapsed, and both spaceship and travelling twin have aged by exactly that amount of time. On Earth, however, a whopping 30 years have passed between the spaceship’s departure and its return. Just like all other humans on the planet, the twin on Earth has aged by 30 years during that time.
This means that the closer we get to the speed of light, the slower the time goes. Einstein’s theory of relativity was a ground-breaking retelling of physics. His theory worked so well and on so many levels that it became the basis on which was built the standard model that defines the very basic law of physics today.
We saw that time is not absolute. It doesn’t have an intrinsic flow, but it rather is a dimension within space. But it gets even weirder. In physics, the math that describe every physical process does not take time into account. You can for example describe how an atom will behave under certain rules, and you can work the formula backward or forward in time. This means that on a purely abstract point of view, time does not exist… at all. It arises from this thought two completely natural question: Why does it seem to go forward in the universe? And why do we perceive time the way we do?
The first question is still debated, but physicists agree on a common thought. Time goes forward because it follows entropy. Entropy describes the way a system (in this case the whole universe), goes from organized to disorganized with time. For example, when you pour coffee in a cup, the system, which includes the liquid and the cup, has low entropy. The liquid is homogeneous, everything is fine. But then if this cup falls to the ground and breaks, spilling liquid everywhere. The entropy has increased. It’s the same for the entire observable universe. The entropy goes up consistently because there are only a very few number of states which are organized, and a lot more that are disorganized. So the direction of entropy decides how we perceive things to “go forward” in time, as explained by Stephen Hawking in his book “A Brief History of Time”.
So, what is the link between the brain and time? Well, just before answering that, I have to put a little context into how and why I came to ask myself this question.
My background
I’m not a physicist, nor a psychologist. You can say that I don’t have many credentials. And you would be right. I’m just a human being in search of truth and understanding. So you can consider my opinion as you wish, and give it as much weight as you’d like.
I always had the scientific mind. I consider events that happened to me or others, and I can draw some conclusions about these events. I am also very skeptical, which is a lot less bad than the word might imply. Skeptical means “having an attitude of doubt”. From an early age I have been skeptical about many things (which was a nightmare for my parents), and the more I grew up, the more I was skeptical of everything. I doubted me first, then my parents, then people I didn’t know, then society, then what we call reality. This attitude, doubting everything, can be highly constructive, since it puts you in charge of defining your own reality. It’s hard, because everything that was taught to you since you were born had no real weight, no internal value. It was pretty scary at first, and very unsettling, and since you need stability to build confidence, let’s say I was a very troubled teen and young adult. But, I got better. Since then, I’ve been studying avidly Science and Physics, and Psychology. For me, the human mind is the most complex system ever created. It is also very mysterious, since the brain is still today seen as a black box with many hidden secrets still left to uncover. The passage of time, which I mentioned at the beginning of this article is one of them, and a subject which pushed me to investigate the matter.
Let’s get real
Firstly, I realized that the brain is a lot stranger than what we believe. First and foremost, it holds a conscious mind. It can be described as the very intricate identity of a person. It’s what defines her, how she interacts with the world. In fact, if you could build a brain from zero and switch it on, the result wouldn’t be alive nor human. This part that makes us living, thinking human, I call it “the mind”. It can’t be reduced to simpler components, and is an extremely complex and intricate entity. It also can’t be transferred. I see it as a point in mathematics. You can’t reduce a point, you can’t divide it into two points. The thought construct that constitutes the sum of thoughts, desires, experiences and everything else that makes a human what it is cannot be traced, I think, to a single part in the brain. More than just the sum of its parts, the mind is a separate entity.
In the next part, I will tie together two aspects that were not seen as fitting together. Psychology and physics seem to be very distinct and incompatible domains, but in the next part, I will attempt to show that psychology can be seen as the physics of the mind. Physics (from Ancient Greek: φυσική (ἐπιστήμη) phusikḗ (epistḗmē) “knowledge of nature”, from φύσις phúsis “nature”) is the natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion and behavior through space and time, along with related concepts such as energy and force. One of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, the main goal of physics is to understand how the universe behaves.
With the same paradigm, psychology is the physics of the mind, since its goal is to understand how the mind behaves, and to identify patterns. The study of human psyche is a lot harder than it seems to study, because every mind is different, and although you can apply certain rules, the fact remains that every person on this planet remains different, and human behavior is still a puzzling endeavor to analyze.
With this in mind, I just threw away every preconceived notion about what I knew, what the mind was and wasn’t capable of. I came to some very weird conclusions, which I will come to in other articles.
About the specific relation of our mind to time, I built this theory:
The mind is not a time-related entity
First, let’s nuance that statement. I fully acknowledge that everyone share some kind of continuity. If I mentioned what happened to me an hour ago, it will happen in the same time frame as yours, or as everyone else’s. On a psychological level though, I think the unconscious doesn’t follow the same path, in fact, the mind is not bound by the regular passage of time.
In psychology, the mind is divided into two main parts. On one hand, we have the conscious. It is described in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality as everything inside of our awareness. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about in a rational way.
The conscious mind includes such things as the sensations, perceptions, memories, feeling and fantasies inside of our current awareness. Closely aligned with the conscious mind is the preciousness, which includes the things that we are not thinking of at the moment but which we can easily draw into conscious awareness.
On the other hand we have the unconscious. This other entity is still a mystery. We know repressed emotions are “stored” in some ways in it, but not much else. It is believed by many though that it contains a great amount of processing power, which our conscious mind can “tap into” in very rare occasions without even knowing about it. We still can grasp a portion of its power when we dream, or when we find a solution to a problem at moments when we didn’t consciously thought about it. This is known as the Eureka effect, which is the sudden understanding of a previously incomprehensible problem or concept. It seems to work constantly, sending to our conscious mind (through a hidden mean of communication) thoughts, problems, and emotions. It’s like a hidden force, directing our conscious mind. But if it can help us, it’s also the place where psychological problems could come from. Repressed memories, repressed feelings, and other irrational fears arise, like bubbles, and impose themselves on the conscious, despite their (sometimes) pathological nature. We are sometimes remembering continuously bad memories. Traumatizing experiences can have an extremely strong impact the mind, sometimes for life. I wondered why, and came to the conclusion that the unconscious seems to be “stuck” in the past, reliving ad vitam æternam these traumatizing experience. Everybody can recall blunders, humiliating, or infuriating moments, and what if the unconscious that keeps sending us these memories is really stuck in the past? It would explain why some people who had traumatizing experiences seem to be eternally reliving it, remembering not only the event itself, but everything with it, like what they were smelling, seeing, feeling at that time. It’s as if the mind has taken a “picture” or a series of picture of the event, and that every emotions, every perception is relived along the event.
The unconscious not being a time-related entity also explains the various crises we all face when we age. The midlife crises for example, is the manifestation of various behavior that occur when someone comes to face its own aging process. The symptoms can include the desire to stay young, feelings of depression, remorse, anxiety and so on. In my theory, age crises happen because the mind changes suddenly from the perceived state of “being young” to “being old” and it “jumps” from one age to another. Like the transition of energy between atoms, the unconscious can change from age 34, for example to age 55 in a flash, causing these numerous distressing symptoms. In the same way, this Past Persistence can explain other behaviors such as every critical age transition, from child to adolescence, from adolescence through adulthood, and the midlife crisis mentioned above. In the same way we can interpret that the memory difficulties that arise with aging are just the unconscious jumping erroneously from the present time, and the different pasts lived by the person.
It seems that in some deep part of us, the construction of our self cannot evolve as regularly as the flow of time we experience in our daily lives. And even though we accumulate experiences, our unconscious do not evolve as fast, sometimes sending to our conscious a constant stream of past, a phenomenon we could call nostalgia.
I postulated that the unconscious mind is not bound by the present but evolves abruptly from past to present. But what about the future? After careful thinking, let me put forward this statement:
The mind is a quantum entity
But what do I mean by Quantum entity?
Quantum comes from the word quantize which means coming in discreet quantities. It comes from the Quantum theory which describe the behavior of the smallest objects that constitutes our reality. It’s a highly counter intuitive theory, and also pretty complex. It says for example that you can never know every properties of a particle at a time. You can know its velocity, but not its position, and vice versa. It also express the behavior of particles with statistics. You can never know with absolute certainty how a particle will behave. Imagine you have a single electron, and you fire at a wall. Quantum theory can never predict the exact place where the particle will end up. It can only highlight areas where it might end up. The particle can land on the surface of the wall, but it can also end on the opposite side of the room, or in another galaxy, or twenty million years into the future. If you want to learn more about quantum theory, you can go on YouTube and watch tons of very informative material.
Another weird property of a quantum particle, and the one which is of interest in this article, is that as long as you don’t measure a particle, it exists in state where every possibility can occur at once. I’ll explain :
Take a basketball, and draw an arrow on it. When the arrow is going up, it means that the state of the ball is 1. When the arrow points down, it means that the state of the ball is 0. Quantum physics implies that as long as you don’t see the ball, it is in a state where its state is equal to 0 and 1 at the same time. Furthermore, if we look at the particle, a phenomenon happens called the collapse of the wave function, which means that the ball “chooses” a 0 or 1 state. Scientists are still puzzled about this statement, and one explanation was put forward as the Many-Worlds interpretation. Postulated by Hugh Everett in 1957, it says that when we measure a quantum particle, and want to know if it will have a spin of 0 or 1, the universe splits, and both state of the particle happen, but each in a different universe. It means that in our example, when we measure our basketball, both of the possibilities happen, but each one in a different universe. This is a pretty disconcerting thought, but it answers the question of the collapse of the wave function nicely. This many-worlds interpretation tells us that there’s an infinite number of futures branching out from our present time, and that they all happen simultaneously.
So, what is the relation between Quantum theory and the mind?
The mind being a quantum entity relates to the fact that the mind can indeed “see” these different futures, not by the process of imagination, but by really delving into some of these futures, the ones which are deemed the most probable, and observe its consequences in situ.
Bear in mind that although it can extend to certain futures, it’s still ruled by quantum physics. Which means that the uncertainty principle still applies. When we guess some scenarios about specific events, like the outcome of the flip of a coin, we can “see” the coin with heads or tails, but we cannot guess with more precision than the natural probability of the coin going on one side rather than the other, it will still be a 50% chance.
We can include in the same framework another explanation of what exactly happens when the Coué method is applied on an individual. Invented by a French psychologist and pharmacist Emile Coué de la Châtaigneraie, his method consists in one patient repeating to himself a set of mantra-like sentences every day. This method, which was highly criticized at first, proved to be quite effective. The mechanism of exactly how it works on the brain is still little known, since its effectiveness rests on the power of self-suggestion, and belief in the healing power of applied willpower. But how can the mind be healed by sheer suggestion? With the theory developed above, we can deduce that when a patient begins to apply his desire to heal, and be cured through self-spoken phrases, he pushes his brain to choose a future where he gets better, even though no true medicine were applied. This takes into account the weird effect of statistics in quantum mechanics which tells us that in a system, every possible outcome can happen, even if the probability is very low.
The same effect applies when a placebo effect occurs. The placebo effect is described when a patient takes a fake medicine without knowing it’s a false medicine containing only water, sugar, and food colouring. Since he doesn’t know that it’s a fake. The belief can be so strong that the patient can heal himself without knowing it. His belief can be so strong he can even feel bad side effects!
With these examples, we can see that when an outcome of an event rests solely on how the mind interprets the world, and a certain conviction is applied, it can force the outcome to fit his belief. It can happen in the Coué method and in the placebo effect, but it can also happen so that the mind will force a bad outcome, even for itself, when it applies a fatalistic way of seeing the world for example. By believing only bad events can happen to it, it unconsciously make sure that only the predicted outcome will happen.
With can apply the same principle to reinterpret how memory problems comes with aging for example. Memory could be seen as a set of present moment that can be tapped into when needed. But since the mind is not a perfect tool, errors can be created, and even false memories can arise, which could be interpreted as the mind not “choosing” the right past. The one that the person really lived. Or it could be that, since every experience stored in memory have the same value, the aging mind begins to erroneously send to the conscious the wrong slices of time.
Since I’m not a psychologist, I cannot verify anything I say in this article with solid data. Some researches were made with the possibility of the brain using quantum particles like Quantum Cognition: The possibility of processing with nuclear spins in the brain, or this article citing other researches in this domain.
I really hope people more talented than me could be able to take my postulate and go into more precise details about the implication of this theory, and that someday we could talk openly about quantum neurosciences and at last, maybe, begin to redefine what we call mental disorders.
References
Bergson, H. (1889). Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Paris: Félix Alcan.
Coué, E. (1920). La Maîtrise de soi-même par l’autosuggestion consciente. Nancy: Société Lorraine de Psychologie Appliquée.
Gozlan, M. (2013, January 01). A stopwatch on the brain’s perception of time. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/01/psychology-time-perception-awareness-research
Harrington, A. ( 1997). The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Harvard University Press.
Hawking, S. (2016). A Brief History of Time. Bantam Books.
O’Connor, P. A. (2000). Facing the Fifties: From Denial to Reflection. Allen & Unwin.
Poidevin, R. L. (2000, August 28). The Experience of Perception of Time. Récupéré sur Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/
Studios, P. D. (2016, August 10). How the Quantum Eraser Rewrites the Past. Retrieved from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ORLN_KwAgs
Vaidman, L. (2016, Mars 24). Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford Universit. Retrieved from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/