Is spooky action at a distance responsible for spookiness between our ears ?
Year 2015 proved to be another great year for lovers of science. We have made significant strides towards advancing scientific inquiry of nature.
We not only filled the seventh row of periodic table, we detected new subatomic particles and found a massive mass (possibly blackhole of six million solar masses) lurking at centre of our home galaxy.
While sifting through a huge haul of bones (in a small dark chamber at the back of a cave in South Africa) we found our long lost relative i.e a new species of humans (Homo naledi).
We have made A 26-year-old paraplegic man walk by rerouting signals from his brain to knees.
We not only sequenced and published the epigenome, we found genes essential for cell survival by switching off, one by one, almost 18,000 genes (i.e. 90 per cent of the entire human genome).
First time we captured light as both wave and particle as well as slowed down speed of light by changing the shape of photons.
Moreover we not only proved Einstein wrong by splitting a photon and demonstrating that “spooky action at a distance” is real, we also managed to entangle 3000 atoms using a single photon proving that quantum entanglement is within humanity’s reach.
But I am not planning to write a review of what happend in 2015, today my motivation is to explore the “spookiness” and I want to explore its connection with something that is even spookier i.e. human consciousness.
The reason being that recent findings about detection of quantum states in various biological systems, has renewed some interest in theories that suggest that consciousness may very well be a bye product of some quantum weirdness operating in our heads.
I have already articulated my thoughts about consciousness in another article, so no need to repeat it here, all I want to explore here is the quantum connection.
Well let me put it straight, I am neither an expert on quantum weirdness, nor an expert on human consciousness. In fact I don’t understand any of these, but with the same token I don’t know if anyone else understands it either.
As Richard Feynman once said…
“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
Lets start with quantum itself, what the heck is quantum ?
Quantum in Latin means amount, so it literally means the smallest possible discrete unit of something, such as energy or matter . A photon is unit of light, light is electromagnetic radiation, so it is the quantum of light and quantum of electromagnetic radiation.
So, what does it mean by quantum entanglement ?
Quantum entanglement is when two or more particles are in such a state that their physical properties correlate as if they are somehow connected i.e. if one is spinning clockwise other one will spin counter-clockwise.
This can occur either with two discrete particles or in a single particle. A single photon can be split into two particles that still appear to be connected. This is what exactly scientists at Griffiths University demonstrated in march last year, they managed to split a single photon between two laboratories and tested whether the choice of measurement on one particle caused a change in the local quantum state of the particle in the other laboratory.
That sounds trivial, but there is a twist, the twist is that act of taking a measurement of an entangled particle collapses its wave function, this in turn affects the state of the particle, so it is impossible to know whether the other particle’s equal and opposite measurement was a result of the entanglement, or mere act of measurement.
In order to get our head around let’s use a simple model, a model that many of us may be already familiar with.
Most households that depend on electricity these days have at least one electrical circuit that is called a two way switch. A two way switch enables the circuit to be turned on or off using either of two switches. When someone enters the home he/she turns the light on from the switch in the entry and turns it off from other switch located in say- the living room. These actions of turning the switches on and off leaves the switches in one of the two possible positions during the day. Most circuits are often wired in a way that if both switches point in opposite direction the light is on.
Now imagine our quantum agent Linda, who is not familiar with electricity or light she is watching this from a place far far away in the kingdom of darkland using a very powerful telescope and the telescope can only show the state of switches and nothing else and that too when light is on.
When light is off Linda has no idea of state of the switches, so from her perspective switches could be in either on or off. When the light is turned on she finds that one of the switch is in on position, and if she looked at the other one at that time, she will find that to be in off position.
After observing this for some time she might conclude that there is something spooky going on between these switches, and they are somehow entangled. Now she will be able to predict the position of one of the switches by simply watching the position of other switch.
So we cans say that the switches exist in some sort of a superimposed state all the time, once a measurement of a switch is made, i.e. its position is known, the superposition is lost or in other words its wave function has colland and now we have a switch in one known state.
When we look at our hypothetical quantum system (electric circuit in this case) position of an individual switch has no significance of its own, the state of circuit can’t be determined until we look at the system as a whole, so we can say it is the quantum coherence between entangled particles ( switches) that determine the quantum state of the system ( light is on or off).
“Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently — instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole.”…. Wikipedia
Now you might ask that is all good, how does this relate to consciousness ? Before we go any further let’s look at what consciousness is….
Simply put consciousness is a state of awareness, awareness of self, awareness of surrounds and awareness of our relationship with surrounds.
One thing peculiar about consciousness is that we are always conscious of something, there is no awareness without an object being at its centerpiece or at least we can’t tell if there is one.
So how is this awareness generated ?
Plethora of studies about human perception have revealed that our sensory instruments receive a large amount of data every second, perhaps in excess of 11 million bits, this includes roughly 10 millions bits from eyes, about a million bits from skin sensations, hundred thousand bits via ears and an equal amount via nose and about thousand bits via taste receptors.
Now that is a lot of noise and it is marvel of consciousness that appear to neatly carve the contours of this incoming data and discern it into useful objects. Objects that we can not only see, touch, taste, feel, hold and build our world with but also objects that we can hold in our heads to build unicorns and fairies.
No doubt this would require a lot of number crunching and to be of value to this body it has to be really really fast. The estimates suggest that there are approximately 86 billion neurons in the human brain doing just that i.e processing all the incoming data and generating our everyday experience. How do these neurons coordinate and achieve such feat is mind boggling.
But where does the quantum fit in?
It is now a well known fact that neurons form synaptic connections to communicate with each other, most of the signaling mechanisms are reasonably well understood, chemicals that mediate such interactions have been identified, isolated and many are targets for modern day medical interventions to fix all sort of ailments of mind and body.
Recently a new study has suggested that there is another way that these neurons could transmit information from one place to another. Dominique Durand and his team at Case Western Reserve University have detected neural spikes travelling at much lower speed in the brain to be explained by any conventional signalling mechanisms.
They suggested that the signal originates with in one cell, excites and activates immediate neighbors, which in turn excite and activate their immediate neighbors, and so on across the brain at a rate of about 0.1 meter per second.
Now you may say, What is so novel about this we already know brain waves, EEG has been used for ages to measure these signals. What is new here is that EEG was always thought of as an “epiphenomenon”, a byproduct of normal brain function, but not a signal in itself. There was no evidence to support that brain uses EEG to communicate.
Although it is still to be determined what information is carried via these signals but it is the first report of the propagation of brain signal via electrical field.
So If this is heading in the right direction, it is first report of its kind that experimentally supports a rather unconventional theory of consciousness called orchestrated objective reduction.
Orchestrated objective reduction suggests that consciousness in the brain originates from processes inside neurons, and not from connections between neurons through a process called objective reduction that is orchestrated by molecular structures called microtubules.
Interesting enough in another significant breakthrough scientists have also identified EEG rhythms (brain waves) resulting from deeper level vibrations in microtubule, validating the biological plausibility of Orchestrated objective reduction theory.
But what the heck are microtubules ?
Microtubules are components of the cytoskeleton inside neurons and are made from cylindrical lattice polymers of protein called ‘tubulin’. Microtubules are also believed to be responsible for encoding memory, regulating synapses and act as tiny quantum compute machined generating consciousness. More about microtubules later.
This is a significant find and challenges the conventional wisdom because the quantum states are very fragile in nature. Even in laboratory conditions, atoms are super cooled to near–absolute-zero temperatures to preserve entanglement lasting few milliseconds. So far biological systems like brain were considered too “warm, wet and noisy” to support any delicate quantum functions.
This quantum connection has much wider implications beyond undressing phenomenon of consciousness, manipulating microtubule vibrations could very well end up being a new line of therapy to address debilitating cognitive conditions like alzheimer’s disease.
So may be one day the “spooky action at a distance” can explain the spookiness going on between our ears.
Originally published at scriptgrandeur.wordpress.com on January 22, 2016.
