New research has looked at how anesthetics affect the behavior of small neuron structures and suggests that consciousness is underpinned by quantum processes in the brain, although the result is not definitive.
Consciousness is a process that science has not been able to explain until today: it is an enigma to think how the ability to become aware of oneself or our environment can arise from organic matter.
One of the exploratory paths of consciousness has been developed by the neurosciencewhich after many years of research has identified an area of the cerebral cortex that could be the gateway to consciousness.
In a study developed at the University of Michigan and published in the journal Cell Reports in 2021, researchers surprised the brain when, by processing sensory information, it opened the door to the conscious experience of that information.
This jump occurred in the so-called anterior insular cortex (AIC), which acts as a kind of gate that separates low-level sensory information from higher-level or conscious information.
Physical issue?
But the subject of consciousness has not only interested brain experts, but also physicists, who have opened a new path in the search for the ultimate origin of the neuronal processes that illuminate the fact of “realizing” things. what happen
Physicists start from the basis that, if Physics describes the universe, it should also explain consciousness, because it is part of and participates in everything that exists.
The French geneticist Albert Jacquard, who died in 2013, described consciousness in these terms: the human gaze is what makes things beautiful, and its acquiescence what makes them fair.
Physicists are intrigued with consciousness because, when they have studied the most basic levels of matter, just when it is confused with energy (quantum mechanics), they have been left wondering whether or not consciousness has the ability to shape to the reality in which we live.
quantum phenomena?
They have taken the question beyond neuroscience by suggesting that quantum phenomena, such as interlacing Hello state overlapcould explain the emergence of consciousness, since these phenomena would be involved in neuronal activity.
The greatest exponent of this controversial theory has been the physicist Roger Penrosewho, together with the anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroffproposed in an article published in Physics of Life Reviews in 2014, that the neural system of the brain forms an intricate network and that consciousness arises from it following the rules of quantum mechanics.
More specifically, they suggest that consciousness arises as a result of the breakdown of state overlap in which brain activity supposedly unfolds.
Superposition is a quantum phenomenon that allows two physical systems to exist in two different states or moments at the same time and, according to Penrose and Hameroff, the rupture of this superposition of states occurs when hollow microtubules present in neurons grow and reach a enough mass to break space-time: thus they make it possible for consciousness to appear. This hypothetical model has been called “orchestrated objective reduction” (Orch OR) and has proven very controversial.
Quantum consciousness?
However, a new experiment, reported in the journal NewScientist, strengthens the possibility that consciousness has a quantum substrate.
That experiment, led by Jack Tuszynskifrom the University of Alberta in Canada, discovered that there are drugs that change the behavior of the microtubules that Penrose was talking about: the light that shines on those microtubules is altered by anesthetics and is emitted very slowly over several minutes.
This implies that anesthetics, with the ability to activate and deactivate consciousness, can achieve this by influencing microtubules and altering the quantum processes from which, according to this hypothesis, consciousness would or would not arise.
This discovery would indicate that microtubules, as Penrose proposed, control consciousness at the level of individual brain cells and the quantum processes in which it would be involved.
Theoretical model
Tuszynski’s discovery actually came last year and ever since he has been building a theoretical model of microtubules to describe what he had observed.
Finally, this week his team presented the results of their work at the Science of Consciousness conference, which runs until April 26 in the US city of Tucson.
He showed that anesthetics shorten the time it takes for microtubules to re-emit captured light. Tuszynski suspects that this may turn off consciousness in the brain.
When consciousness returns, the atoms of the involved neurons emit light forming a chain reaction similar to that of a nuclear bomb: then the person wakes up from anesthesia and asks what happened? where I am?
Despite these results, no one, including Tuszynski’s team, claims that this is really the case, and that more studies will be needed to strictly verify that this assumption is true.
For the moment, it can only be said that the hypothesis of the quantum origin of consciousness is emerging more and more realistic, with the necessary reservations.