Your Consciousness Can Connect With the Whole Universe, Scientists Say

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Top Highlights

• microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll

• consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells

• These are tubes made of protein lattices, and they form part of the cell’s cytoskeleton, which is its structural network

• Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules

• superposition

• entanglement

• quantum consciousness

• must be scale invariant, like a fractal

• Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments

• The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy

• consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain

• living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled

• The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center

• exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying

• to find the correct path

• exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously

• computational model of a microtubule

• imulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure

• coherent

• tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules