Stuart Hameroff
@StuartHameroff
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I am an Astrobiologist, retired Anesthesiologist and lead The Science of Consciousness conferences at The University of Arizona.
Tucson, Arizona
Joined December 2010
New results but same misinterpretation in my opinion. Asserting different mechanisms of anesthesia flaunts the Meyer-Overton discoveries that all anesthetics act on a common target, are additive, and soluble in olive oil (where quantum optics reign). Membrane proteins or.
New results! Similar destabilization of neural dynamics under different general anesthetics.Different anesthetics induce unconsciousness through distinct mechanisms, but cortical destabilization may be their common effect. #neuroscience.
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New paper: Low intensity transcranial ultrasound neuromodulation promotes neuronal regeneration.They don’t know the mechanism ( promoting microtubule reassembly ) but have lots of supportive evidence. IONS clinical study.
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With Google Quantum AI chief and good friend Hartmut Neven at his new house (under construction) above Malibu.
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That’s what everybody says. But what’s the motivation for purposeful behavior in animals without feelings? Darwin would have had feelings in Origin of Species but there was no conceivable mechanism until Penrose came along. Read this then whine:.
@VeniceLove5 @ISLAND_THUNDER @StuartHameroff A priori fallacy of argument , life or living is not synonymous with consciousness, they are two separate categories.
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Open questions, yes, but there are some answers. The flow of time in biology and physics both depend on quantum state reductions ratcheting forward. In biology they are (self-referential) conscious moments occurring in all living systems. And microtubule time crystals transcend.
New preprint: "Open Questions about Time and Self-reference in Living Systems" . by Samson Abramsky, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Leo S. D. Caves, Michael Levin, Penousal Machado, Charles Ofria, Susan Stepney, Roger White.
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It explains why anesthesia blocks phototropism and Venus flytrap behavior. Plants have microtubules, just not too many. They’re conscious but at very low frequencies.
@ISLAND_THUNDER @StuartHameroff The theory is well known in consciousness circles, but almost no one sees a way forward there, not least because it implies plants are conscious, which is silly and of course suffers from what most theories do, explains almost nothing that needs to be explained.
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We had a great talk by Marjorie Woollacott on Terminal Lucidity in the ‘End of life brain activity’ plenary session at the Barcelona ‘The Science of Consciousness’ conference last month. Here’s the video. As for the mechanism, I’d say consciousness goes.
@StuartHameroff How do you explain cases of advanced Alzheimer's disease when some individuals experience a phenomenon known as terminal lucidity or paradoxical lucidity, where they unexpectedly regain mental clarity and the ability to remember shortly before death?.
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Tau doesnt cause cognitive dysfunction either. It’s the microtubules disintegrating and dislodging tau which is normally attached to the microtubules. Tau tangles are a sign of loss of microtubules and thus memory, neuronal volume, synapse, brain volume. All reversible by.
@StuartHameroff Just because tau correlates better with cognitive decline doesn’t necessarily suggest that amyloid doesn’t cause Alzheimer’s. The build up of amyloid happens decades before symptoms, but may initiate tau pathology.
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But you’re still only looking at slow hertz frequencies, missing the kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz from collective actions of microtubules inside neurons. Megahertz detectable from scalp easily.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Since the 1960s, it is held that when a neuron fires, a nerve spike passes only through the selective branches, the calculated choice is a key to learning by rewiring. It is argued by chemically...
Our EEG just got a brain transplant → faster insights, rock-solid data, and a platform that's ready for AI. This isn't just a massive code update but a glimpse into the future of neurotech. 🧵
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Hi Michael.Do you agree that the mainstream assertion that Alzheimer’s is due to amyloid plaques is wrong?.The evidence shows a much better correlation with neurofibrillary tangles of tau protein dislodged from disintegrated microtubules, the real cause of cognitive dysfunction.
To the transhumanists, extropians, & immortalists who ask me "don't you want to live 500 years Shermer?" I respond:."Get me to 100 without dementia, senility, Alzheimer's, cancer & heart disease & we can take it from there, one year or decade at a step".
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Thank you. I know. But that’s what Anirban called the self-similar dynamics in microtubules 3 orders of frequency apart in microtubule time crystals. 32 kHz to 6-26 megahertz is 3 orders roughly. What’s really amazing is that they are polyatomic time crystals so the kHz.
@StuartHameroff 32khz is not an octave below a typical 2 to 15 megahertz ultra sound.
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I’ve been touting this paper by Steen Rasmussen et al (including me) from 1990 as an example of intra-neuronal predictive coding in anti-parallel microtubules. Guess who showed up on the Santa Monica pier! On the right is the ‘Great Dane’, Steen himself
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Here’s a link to one of a flurry of recent papers showing reversal of senescence at cellular level with low frequency ultrasound. They use 32 kilohertz, one octave below megahertz ultrasound which we’ve been using and suggesting at low intensity into the brain for dementia.
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Orch OR conscious events can occur in terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz which are part of microtubule time crystal, like an orchestra with multiple scales. Orch OR events are like chords and notes in music, resonating, interfering, fluctuating in spacetime geometry where qualia.
@StuartHameroff Your model may explain how anesthetics disrupt awareness via terahertz effects, but it doesn’t address the hard problem of consciousness, why should quantum processes in microtubules produce subjective experience at all, rather than merely neural computation or functional states?.
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I don’t think so. First their multiscale hierarchy starts in hertz and synapses and gets slower and larger. It should also go inward, deeper into faster, quantum oscillations in kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz in microtubules.acting as entangled fractal time.
The brain may generate macroscopic patterns that predict themselves without relying on micro-level neural activity. That’s Friston’s brain, but discovered bottom-up from data, not imposed top-down. Emergence ≈ self-modeling dynamics.
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Pyramidal neuron cell bodies have largest collection of mixed polarity microtubules suited for interference beats and predictive coding.
What makes human pyramidal neurons uniquely suited for complex information processing? How can human neurons’ distinct properties contribute to our advanced cognitive abilities?
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This is like the 2012 Carhart-Harris study of resting subjects with IV psilocin and flat EEGs. Probably psychedelic effects best correlated with megahertz and gigahertz oscillations from microtubules. Can be detected from scalp. fMRI blood flow change could be for local.
New research shows psilocybin alters blood flow in the brain without changing neural activity.🧠.This challenges how we interpret fMRI data in psychedelic studies. Neural signals ≠ BOLD signals.Functional connectivity might be overestimated.
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Isnt the dual action due to .1)analgesic/anesthetic effects on microtubules, and .2) dissociative effects on NMDA receptors? .Ketamine binds to both. All anesthetics bind and act on microtubules.
Does ketamine reduce pain by disconnecting us from our bodies and sense of self?. In our new preprint (👋) we show these effects, analgesia and dissociation, are behaviorally independent and arise from separate neural mechanisms. 📄
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You may be right but I don’t care for Bayesian nor thermodynamics approaches. Consciousness is non-computable (Platonic influence) not probabilistic. And thermodynamics is wrong for subject/object split which is collapse of the wavefunction by Penrose OR. That IS consciousness.
@VFD_org @GenAI_BioReads @drmichaellevin @StuartHameroff Most interesting to me is the Bayesian thermodynamic relationship between subjective/objective states and “computable structures”. It appears that all computation in physical systems is a consequence of the causal loop between subjective/objective states. And what we call.
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Great, but you’re only hearing the ‘low frequency bass and percussion’ in membrane spikes and bursts. Tune into the kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz coming from microtubules inside neurons. Megahertz triplets detectable from scalp in Anirban’s DDG.(Dodeconogram).
@SimsYStuart @VFD_org @drmichaellevin @StuartHameroff Really fascinating! I’m a neuronal electrophysiologist by training, studying the “music and rhythms” of neurons through their spikes and bursts. My perspective is a bit different from the paper you sent, but I found it a very interesting read.Thank you for the paper.
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