tl;dr they've shown quantum entanglement can occur inside nerve fibers, and speculate that it could explain the speed of brain communication
a research group in China has shown that many entangled photons can be generated inside the myelin sheath that covers nerve fibers. It could explain the rapid communication between neurons, which so far has been thought to be below the speed of sound, too slow to explain how the neural synchronization occurs.
"If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for this role," said Yong-Cong Chen in a statement to Phys.org. Chen is a professor at the Shanghai Center for Quantitative Life Sciences and Physics Department at Shanghai University.
The paper is published in the journal Physical Review E.
I also don't get it. I'm surprised this made it through review with this title and abstract. They should have left the speculation about consciousness out of it.
In the simplest terms, quantum entanglement means that aspects of one particle of an entangled pair depend on aspects of the other particle, no matter how far apart they are or what lies between them. These particles could be, for example, electrons or photons, and an aspect could be the state it is in, such as whether it is “spinning” in one direction or another.
The strange part of quantum entanglement is that when you measure something about one particle in an entangled pair, you immediately know something about the other particle, even if they are millions of light years apart. This odd connection between the two particles is instantaneous, seemingly breaking a fundamental law of the universe. Albert Einstein famously called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.”
Interesting things happen if the particles in an entangled pair travel in opposite directions and one of them then meets a third particle in such a manner that they become entangled. They then enter a new shared state. The third particle loses its identity, but its original properties have now been transferred to the solo particle from the original pair. This way of transferring an unknown quantum state from one particle to another is called quantum teleportation.
Remarkably, quantum teleportation is the only way to transfer quantum information from one system to another without losing any part of it. It is absolutely impossible to measure all the properties of a quantum system and then send the information to a recipient who wants to reconstruct the system...However, entirely unknown quantum properties can be transferred using quantum teleportation and appear intact in another particle, but at the price of them being destroyed in the original particle.
Once this had been shown experimentally, the next step was to use two pairs of entangled particles. If one particle from each pair are brought together in a particular way, the undisturbed particles in each pair can become entangled despite never having been in contact with each other. This entanglement swapping was first demonstrated in 1998 by Anton Zeilinger’s research group. Entangled pairs of photons, particles of light, can be sent in opposite directions through optical fibres and function as signals in a quantum network. Entanglement between two pairs makes it possible to extend the distances between the nodes in such a network.
We know from the No Communication theorem that quantum entanglement does not transmit information between classical observers who have no role in preparing the initial state of the entangled elements. Why should one think that this No Communication theorem is applicable to the phenomenological description of brain behavior? It seems that the speed of nerve conduction is at odds with the time constants of brain synchronization. If we are to doubt that quantum entanglement plays a role in accounting for this discrepancy, then what are the assumptions that underlie this doubt, and are they reasonable?
I studied Physics. Sure they calculated that some entanglement can happen in some theory. But it's a huge stretch to relate it to consciousness. That's just clickbait in my view and should have been left out. It's trending here just because of the clickbaity title.
Roger Penrose proposed that there are three distinct worlds: matter, consciousness and nous (forms or ideas, like mathematics).
I love this idea. It is actually very old. The Pythagorean Philolaus (5th century BC) taught that the soul is mathematical and that it loves the material body, because without the body, the soul cannot feel (be conscious).
What’s interesting about this is that the soul is not consciousness itself, which it is often equated with. In fact, many other Platonists (like Iamblichus) taught that the soul does not feel (also, gods don’t feel!).
So, the idea is that the soul is the immaterial, eternal, mathematical forms of our being. The noetic soul, then, interacts with the body to produce sensation (consciousness). In other words, consciousness emerges from the resonance between the material body and the immaterial world of nous. It’s a really fascinating perspective.
Cocktail physicists always want some connection between Quantum Mechanics and consciousness. It’s their last thing to hold onto when it comes to believing they have real free will.
I thought the last thing people held on to was that we have the perception of making choices and physics only states that observed states of systems follow the distribution of the wavefunction.
You need some more cocktail, less physics :) I'm talking people that say: When we don't observe them, photons can be in two states at the same time, ergo when you don't look at the moon, is it even there? No! It's not rendered, we live in a simulation. You know, Deepak Chopra style.
I studied neuroscience and I agree, this is unlikely to have anything to do with anything. In my view it's much more likely that the speed of processing is due to the brain constantly making predictions - it's an interesting thought experiment to consider the brain as simply a huge prediction machine in various modalities - most of which are pretty accurate, and therefore fast, once you've been alive for a while.
Once you get unexpected outcomes then the speed of thought slows down a lot. I was studying the neurobiology of reading and a good example is the difference in brain activity caused by the two sentences "The jam on the motorway was very slow" and "The jam on the motorway was very sticky" - the first elicits almost no activity, but the second causes a lot more activity because of the unexpected word "sticky" needs to be parsed consciously.
I think it's an issue of scale in some ways. The brain is so complex it's almost impossible to think about it clearly except in very focused studies. There's a lot of deeply methodologically flawed research out there making overly broad claims.
Don't LLMs do some degree of search and backtracking if they end up in a dead end (with limits, a couple of tokens at least). Sometimes you'd see ChatGPT hanger words it had already output.
Actually I am not very familiar with the internals, I am mostly repeating what Yann Lecun said in an interview a few months ago about autoregressive models.
Seems like a reach. However there does seem to be growing support for quantum interactions in the brain. Originally it was thought the brain was much to warm and wet to support quantum behavior.
Apparently Roger Penrose had a crazy idea about quantum consciousness, with precious little to support it. But there's been several papers since that provide interesting hints. One is "Ultraviolet Superradiance from Mega-Networks of Tryptophan biological networks".
Another noticed by Suart Hameroff (Arizona university) noticed that some anethesias do not have an explained mechanism. Especially noble gases that are inert and generally do not chemically interact with the body, but do work as an anethesias. Turns out they do interact with tryophan rings, changing the quantum properties.
trypophan can form tubules, which are VERY common in the body, and do seem to have strange quantum properties.
More info, including links to papers at on youtube, search on "Experimental Evidence No One Expected! Is Human Consciousness Quantum After All?" by Anton Petrov.
I've always assumed quantum entanglement is being leveraged in the brain.
Why?
Because, seeing the speeds needed for the type of computing the brain does, chemistry -- e.g. the classical changes in atoms due to classical interactions-- just doesn't seem fast enough to propagate across the volume of the brain.
Maybe the fields move fast enough... (By fields I mean electro-magnetic, etc.)
But, since entanglement is a thing, it would seem far fetched that the brain doesn't leverage it.
Since entanglement can’t break classical speed limits on information transfer, you’ll have to keep looking for another explanation if electrochemistry doesn’t float your boat.
The gap between the speed at which atoms move at room temperature and the speed of light is massive.
Also, I didn't mean to imply that faster than light travel is necessary, just faster than the speeds with which electrochemical signals can flow in the wet medium of the brain.
That's why I said maybe the fields move fast enough. As in, the quantum fields.
I'm not sure your intuition here is right. It's an electric signal that travels in axons. Like in computer chips in a way. But slower because ions in water travel mich slower than electrons in metals.
They emphasize the slowness of action potentials along axons.
But electrical waves, which emerge as the collection of action potentials, move much faster. It’s related to the volleying approach of neuronal populations: the cortex can phase lock to 1000+ hz sound waves, even though individual neurons can only fire <200hz. Populations of neurons have faster responses than single neurons. Electrical oscillations in large neuronal populations can create fast electrical activity (such as resonance phenomena) over a large distance.
Yes they can. Changes in an electrical field travels much faster than the chemical propagation. At the level of a neuron, the field change is weak. But many neurons can create a meaningful change in electrical field potential that propagates much faster than the action potentials.
Massive 3-d parallelism is underrated. Natural neural systems evolved to deal with special cases that require very fast response time via local reflexes which are trained very slowly. They are still in millisecond range. All the computation in the cerebral cortex doesn't need tp be fast. This is what we think it should be thinking the computers we build.
37 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threada research group in China has shown that many entangled photons can be generated inside the myelin sheath that covers nerve fibers. It could explain the rapid communication between neurons, which so far has been thought to be below the speed of sound, too slow to explain how the neural synchronization occurs.
"If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for this role," said Yong-Cong Chen in a statement to Phys.org. Chen is a professor at the Shanghai Center for Quantitative Life Sciences and Physics Department at Shanghai University.
The paper is published in the journal Physical Review E.
https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2401.11682
Quantum entanglement doesn’t transmit information. Is there some mechanism for synchronization without information transfer?
https://theconversation.com/what-is-quantum-entanglement-a-p...
In the simplest terms, quantum entanglement means that aspects of one particle of an entangled pair depend on aspects of the other particle, no matter how far apart they are or what lies between them. These particles could be, for example, electrons or photons, and an aspect could be the state it is in, such as whether it is “spinning” in one direction or another.
The strange part of quantum entanglement is that when you measure something about one particle in an entangled pair, you immediately know something about the other particle, even if they are millions of light years apart. This odd connection between the two particles is instantaneous, seemingly breaking a fundamental law of the universe. Albert Einstein famously called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.”
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/10/popular-physicspr...
Interesting things happen if the particles in an entangled pair travel in opposite directions and one of them then meets a third particle in such a manner that they become entangled. They then enter a new shared state. The third particle loses its identity, but its original properties have now been transferred to the solo particle from the original pair. This way of transferring an unknown quantum state from one particle to another is called quantum teleportation.
Remarkably, quantum teleportation is the only way to transfer quantum information from one system to another without losing any part of it. It is absolutely impossible to measure all the properties of a quantum system and then send the information to a recipient who wants to reconstruct the system...However, entirely unknown quantum properties can be transferred using quantum teleportation and appear intact in another particle, but at the price of them being destroyed in the original particle.
Once this had been shown experimentally, the next step was to use two pairs of entangled particles. If one particle from each pair are brought together in a particular way, the undisturbed particles in each pair can become entangled despite never having been in contact with each other. This entanglement swapping was first demonstrated in 1998 by Anton Zeilinger’s research group. Entangled pairs of photons, particles of light, can be sent in opposite directions through optical fibres and function as signals in a quantum network. Entanglement between two pairs makes it possible to extend the distances between the nodes in such a network.
I love this idea. It is actually very old. The Pythagorean Philolaus (5th century BC) taught that the soul is mathematical and that it loves the material body, because without the body, the soul cannot feel (be conscious).
What’s interesting about this is that the soul is not consciousness itself, which it is often equated with. In fact, many other Platonists (like Iamblichus) taught that the soul does not feel (also, gods don’t feel!).
So, the idea is that the soul is the immaterial, eternal, mathematical forms of our being. The noetic soul, then, interacts with the body to produce sensation (consciousness). In other words, consciousness emerges from the resonance between the material body and the immaterial world of nous. It’s a really fascinating perspective.
Once you get unexpected outcomes then the speed of thought slows down a lot. I was studying the neurobiology of reading and a good example is the difference in brain activity caused by the two sentences "The jam on the motorway was very slow" and "The jam on the motorway was very sticky" - the first elicits almost no activity, but the second causes a lot more activity because of the unexpected word "sticky" needs to be parsed consciously.
I think it's an issue of scale in some ways. The brain is so complex it's almost impossible to think about it clearly except in very focused studies. There's a lot of deeply methodologically flawed research out there making overly broad claims.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lHFUR-yD6I
Apparently Roger Penrose had a crazy idea about quantum consciousness, with precious little to support it. But there's been several papers since that provide interesting hints. One is "Ultraviolet Superradiance from Mega-Networks of Tryptophan biological networks".
Another noticed by Suart Hameroff (Arizona university) noticed that some anethesias do not have an explained mechanism. Especially noble gases that are inert and generally do not chemically interact with the body, but do work as an anethesias. Turns out they do interact with tryophan rings, changing the quantum properties.
trypophan can form tubules, which are VERY common in the body, and do seem to have strange quantum properties.
More info, including links to papers at on youtube, search on "Experimental Evidence No One Expected! Is Human Consciousness Quantum After All?" by Anton Petrov.
Apparently microtubules are common and
Why?
Because, seeing the speeds needed for the type of computing the brain does, chemistry -- e.g. the classical changes in atoms due to classical interactions-- just doesn't seem fast enough to propagate across the volume of the brain.
Maybe the fields move fast enough... (By fields I mean electro-magnetic, etc.)
But, since entanglement is a thing, it would seem far fetched that the brain doesn't leverage it.
Also, I didn't mean to imply that faster than light travel is necessary, just faster than the speeds with which electrochemical signals can flow in the wet medium of the brain.
That's why I said maybe the fields move fast enough. As in, the quantum fields.
And yet massively parallel, which means an incredible amount of synchronization of information feeding into different parts of the brain.
Which computations specifically are happening specifically in the brain?
But electrical waves, which emerge as the collection of action potentials, move much faster. It’s related to the volleying approach of neuronal populations: the cortex can phase lock to 1000+ hz sound waves, even though individual neurons can only fire <200hz. Populations of neurons have faster responses than single neurons. Electrical oscillations in large neuronal populations can create fast electrical activity (such as resonance phenomena) over a large distance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41276390
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41267901