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Consciousness Can
Interact With the
Whole Universe,
Scientists Believe
A recent experiment suggests the brain is not too warm
or wet for consciousness to exist as a quantum wave
that connects with the rest of the universe.

BY SUSAN LAHEY PUBLISHED: OCT 18, 2023

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W hen people talk about

consciousness, or the mind, it’s
always a bit nebulous. Whether we create
consciousness in our brains as a function
of our neurons firing, or consciousness
exists independently of us, there’s no
universally accepted scientific explanation
for where it comes from or where it lives.
However, new research on the physics,
anatomy, and geometry of consciousness
has begun to reveal its possible form.

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In other words, we may soon be able to

identify a true architecture of
consciousness.

The new work builds upon a theory Nobel

Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose,
Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart
Hameroff, M.D., first posited in the 1990s:
the Orchestrated Objective Reduction
theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that
consciousness is a quantum process
facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s
nerve cells.

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Know Your Terms: Microtubules

Penrose and Hameroff suggested that

consciousness is a quantum wave that
passes through these microtubules. And
that, like every quantum wave, it has
properties like superposition (the ability to
be in many places at the same time) and
entanglement (the potential for two
particles that are very far away to be
connected).

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Plenty of experts have questioned the

validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the
story of the scientists working to revive it.

Across the Universe

To explain quantum consciousness,
Hameroff recently told the TV program
Closer To Truth that it must be scale
invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a
never-ending pattern that can be very tiny
or very huge, and still maintain the same
properties at any scale. Normal states of
consciousness might be what we consider
quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for
example. But when you have a heightened
state of consciousness, it’s because you’re
dealing with quantum-level consciousness
that is capable of being in all places at the
same time, he explains. That means your
consciousness can connect or entangle
with quantum particles outside of your
brain—anywhere in the universe,
theoretically.

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An illustration of the brain’s network of neural axons

transmitting electrical action potentials. (Getty Images)

Other scientists had an easy way to discard

this theory. 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. Take quantum particles out
of that environment and the wave broke
down, leaving behind isolated particles.
The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s
quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore,
consciousness couldn’t remain in
superposition in the brain, the thinking
went. Particles in the brain couldn’t
connect with the universe.

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But then came discoveries in quantum

biology. Turns out, living things use
quantum properties even though they’re
not cold and controlled.

Know Your Terms: Quantum biology

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Photosynthesis, for example, allows a

plant to store the energy from a photon,
or a quantum particle of light. 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. But to get to the
reaction center, it has to navigate
structures in the plant—sort of like
navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en
route to a dentist appointment. In the end,
the exciton must arrive before it burns up
all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to
find the correct path before the particle’s
energy is used up, scientists now say the
exciton uses the quantum property of
superposition to try all possible paths
simultaneously.

GIVE YOUR BRAIN A WORKOUT

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Unraveling the Marvels of

Quantum Entanglement

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New evidence suggests microtubules in our

brains may be even better at guarding this
quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One
of the scientists who worked with the Orch
OR team, physicist and oncology professor
Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted
an experiment with a computational
model of a microtubule. His team
simulated shining a light into a
microtubule, sort of like a photon sending
an exciton through a plant structure. They
were testing whether the energy transfer
from light in the microtubule structure
could remain coherent as it does in plant
cells. The idea was that if the light lasted
long enough before being emitted—a
fraction of a second was enough—it
indicated quantum coherence.

Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated

sending tryptophan fluorescence, or
ultraviolet light photons that are not
visible to the human eye, into
microtubules. In a recent interview,
Tuszynski reports that, across 22
independent experiments, the excitations
from the tryptophan created quantum
reactions that lasted up to five
nanoseconds. This is thousands of times
longer than coherence would be expected
to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than
long enough to perform the biological
functions required. “So we are actually
confident that this process is longer lasting
in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says.
The team published their findings in the
journal ACS Central Science earlier this
year.

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Put simply, the brain is not too

warm or wet for consciousness
to exist as a wave that connects
with the universe.

Tuszynski notes that his team is not the

only one sending light into microtubules. A
team of professors at the University of
Central Florida has been illuminating
microtubules with visible light. In those
experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed
re-emission of this light over hundreds of
milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical
human response time to any sort of
stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains.
Shining the light into microtubules and
measuring how long the microtubules take
to emit that light “is a proxy for the
stability of certain … postulated quantum
states,” he says, “which is kind of key to
the theory that these microtubules may be
having coherent quantum superpositions
that may be associated with mind or
consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not
too warm or wet for consciousness to exist
as a wave that connects with the universe.

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While this is a long way from proving the

Orch OR theory, it’s significant and
promising data. Penrose and Hameroff
continue to push the boundaries,
partnering with people like spiritual leader
Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of
consciousness in the universe that they
might be able to identify in the lab in their
microtubule experiments. This sort of
thing makes many scientists very
uncomfortable.

Still, there are researchers exploring what

the architecture of such a universal
consciousness might look like. One of
these ideas comes from the study of
weather.

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The Architecture of
Universal Consciousness
Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical
physicist at Oxford who specializes in
chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of
Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws
of physics must be fundamentally
geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his
explanation of how the quantum world
works. Among other things, it suggests
that quantum consciousness is the result of
the universe operating in a particular
fractal geometry “state space.”

That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means

we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic
fractal shape that is shared by other
realities that are also stuck in their
trajectories. This notion appears in the
final chapter of Palmer’s book, The
Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of
Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand
Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the
possibility that our experience of free will
—of having had the option to choose our
lives, as well as our perception that there
is a consciousness outside ourselves—is
the result of awareness of other universes
that share our state space. The idea starts
with a special geometry called a Strange
Attractor.

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