By the time that Hameroff began formulating his theory, many of Pribram’s ideas, which had been so outrageous when he had first formulated them, were being taken up in many quarters. Scientists in research centers around the globe were beginning to concur that the brain made use of quantum processes. Kunio Yasue, a quantum physicist from Kyoto, Japan, had carried out mathematical formulations to help understand the neural microprocess. Like Pribram, his equations showed that brain processes occurred at the quantum level, and that the dendritic networks in the brain were operating in tandem through quantum coherence. The equations developed in quantum physics precisely described this cooperative interaction.35 Independently of Hameroff, Yasue and his colleague Mari Jibu, of the Department of Anesthesiology, Okayama University, in Japan, had also theorized that the quantum messaging of the brain must take place through vibrational fields, along the microtubules of cells.36 Others had theorized that the basis of all the brain’s functions had to do with the interaction between brain physiology and the Zero Point Field.37 An Italian physicist, Ezio Insinna of the Bioelectronics Research Association, in his own experimental work with microtubules, discovered that these structures had a signaling mechanism, thought to be associated with the transfer of electrons.38
Eventually, many of these scientists, each of whom seemed to have one piece of the puzzle, decided to collaborate. Pribram, Yasue, Hameroff and Scott Hagan from the Department of Physics at McGill University assembled a collective theory about the nature of human consciousness.39 According to their theory, microtubules and the membranes of dendrites represented the Internet of the body. Every neuron of the brain could log on at the same time and speak to every other neuron simultaneously via the quantum processes within.
Microtubules helped to marshal discordant energy and create global coherence of the waves in the body – a process called ‘superradiance’ – then allowed these coherent signals to pulse through the rest of the body. Once coherence was achieved, the photons could travel all along the light pipes as if they were transparent, a phenomenon called ‘self-induced transparency’. Photons can penetrate the core of the microtubule and communicate with other photons throughout the body, causing collective cooperation of subatomic particles in microtubules throughout the brain. If this is the case, it would account for unity of thought and consciousness – the fact that we don’t think of loads of disparate things at once.40
Through this mechanism, the coherence becomes contagious, moving from individual cells to cell assemblies – and in the brain from certain neuron cell assemblies to others. This would provide an explanation for the instantaneous operation of our brains, which occurs at between one ten-thousandth and one-thousandth of a second, requiring that information be transmitted at 100 – 1000 metres per second – a speed that exceeds the capabilities of any known connections between axons or dendrites in neurons. Superradiance along the light pipes also could account for a phenomenon that has long been observed – the tendency of EEG patterns in the brain to get synchronized.41
Hameroff observed that electrons glide easily along these light pipes without getting entangled in their environment – that is, settling into any set single state. This means they can remain in a quantum state – a condition of all possible states – enabling the brain eventually to finally choose among them. This might be a good explanation for free will. At every moment, our brains are making quantum choices, taking potential states and making them actual ones.42
It was only a theory – it hadn’t undergone the exhaustive testing of Popp and his biophoton emissions – but some good mathematics and circumstantial evidence gave it weight. The Italian physicists Del Giudice and Preparata had also come up with some experimental evidence of Hameroff’s theory that light pipes contained coherent energy fields inside them.
Microtubules are hollow and empty save for some water. Ordinary water, from a tap or in a river, is disordered, with molecules that move randomly. But some of the water molecules in brain cells are coherent, the Italian team discovered, and this coherence extends as far as 3 nanometres or more outside the cell’s cytoskeleton. Since this is the case, it is overwhelmingly likely that the water inside the microtubules is also ordered. This offered indirect evidence that some sort of quantum process, creating quantum coherence, was occurring inside.43 They’d also shown that this focusing of waves would produce beams 15 nanometres in diameter – precisely the size of the microtubule’s inner core.44
All of this led to a heretical thought, which had already occurred to Fritz-Albert Popp. Consciousness was a global phenomenon that occurred everywhere in the body, and not simply in our brains. Consciousness, at its most basic, was coherent light.
Although each of the scientists – Puthoff, Popp, Benveniste and Pribram – had been working independently, Edgar Mitchell was one of the few to realize that, as a totality, their work presented itself as a unified theory of mind and matter – evidence of physicist David Bohm’s vision of a world of ‘unbroken wholeness’.45 The universe was a vast dynamic cobweb of energy exchange, with a basic substructure containing all possible versions of all possible forms of matter. Nature was not blind and mechanistic, but open-ended, intelligent and purposeful, making use of a cohesive learning feedback process of information being fed back and forth between organisms and their environment. Its unifying mechanism was not a fortunate mistake but information which had been encoded and transmitted everywhere at once.46
Biology was a quantum process. All the processes in the body, including cell communication, were triggered by quantum fluctuations, and all higher brain functions and consciousness also appeared to function at the quantum level. Walter Schempp’s explosive discovery about quantum memory set off the most outrageous idea of all: short- and long-term memory doesn’t reside in our brain at all, but instead is stored in the Zero Point Field. After Pribram’s discoveries, a number of scientists, including systems theorist Ervin Laszlo, would go on to argue that the brain is simply the retrieval and read-out mechanism of the ultimate storage medium – The Field.47 Pribram’s associates from Japan would hypothesize that what we think of as memory is simply a coherent emission of signals from the Zero Point Field, and that longer memories are a structured grouping of this wave information.48 If this were true, it would explain why one tiny association often triggers a riot of sights, sounds and smells. It would also explain why, with long-term memory in particular, recall is instantaneous and doesn’t require any scanning mechanism to sift though years and years of memory.
If they are correct, our brain is not a storage medium but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of ordinary perception. The brain retrieves ‘old’ information the same way it processes ‘new’ information – through holographic transformation of wave interference patterns.49 Lashley’s rats with the fried brains were able to conjure up their run in its entirety because the memory of it was never burned away in the first place. Whatever reception mechanism was left in the brain – and as Pribram had demonstrated, it was distributed all over the brain – was tuning back into the memory through The Field.
Some scientists went as far as to suggest that all of our higher cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Zero Point Field.50 This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity – and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes in fragments but often as a miraculous whole. An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in The Field.
The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world. It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand. It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality – our very sense of separateness. If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world begin? Where was cons
ciousness – encased inside our bodies or out there in The Field? Indeed, there was no more ‘out there’ if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected.
The implications of this were too huge to ignore. The idea of a system of exchanged and patterned energy and its memory and recall in the Zero Point Field hinted at all manner of possibility for human beings and their relation to their world. Modern physicists had set mankind back for many decades. In ignoring the effect of the Zero Point Field, they’d eliminated the possibility of interconnectedness and obscured a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles. What they’d being doing, in renormalizing their equations, was a little like subtracting out God.
Part 2
The Extended Mind
You are the world.
Krishnamurti
CHAPTER SIX
The Creative Observer
IT IS STRANGE WHAT CLINGS to your mind from the flotsam and jetsam of the everyday. For Helmut Schmidt it was an article in, of all places, Reader’s Digest. He’d read it as a 20-year-old student in 1948, at the University of Cologne, after Germany had just emerged from the Second World War. It lodged in his memory for nearly twenty years, surviving through two emigrations, from Germany to America and from academia to industry – from a professorship at the University of Cologne to a position as a research physicist at Boeing Scientific Research Laboratories in Seattle, Washington.
Through all his changes of country and career, Schmidt pondered the meaning of the article, as though something in him knew that it was central to his life’s direction even before he was consciously aware of it. Every so often he would engage in a bit more reflection, take out the article in his mind’s eye and examine it in the light, turning it this way and that, before filing it away again, a bit of unfinished business he wasn’t yet sure how to tend to.1
The article had been nothing more than an abridged version of some writing by the biologist and parapsychologist J. B. Rhine. It concerned his famous experiments on precognition and extrasensory perception, including the card tests which would later be used by Edgar Mitchell in outer space. Rhine had conducted all of his experiments under carefully controlled conditions and they had yielded interesting results.2 The studies had shown that it was possible for a person to transmit information about card symbols to another or increase the odds of a certain number being rolled with a set of dice.
Schmidt had been drawn to Rhine’s work for its implications in physics. Even as a student, Schmidt had had a contrary streak, which rather liked testing the limits of science. In his private moments, he regarded physics and many of the sciences, with their claim to have explained many of the mysteries of the universe, as exceedingly presumptuous. He’d been most interested in quantum physics, but he found himself perversely drawn to those aspects of quantum theory which presented the most potential problems.
What held the most fascination of all for Schmidt was the role of the observer.3 One of the most mysterious aspects of quantum physics is the so-called Copenhagen interpretation (so named because Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, resided there). Bohr, who forcefully pushed through a variety of interpretations in quantum physics without the benefit of a unified underlying theory, set out various dictums about the behavior of electrons as a result of the mathematical equations which are now followed by workaday physicists all over the world. Bohr (and Werner Heisenberg) noted that, according to experiment, an electron is not a precise entity, but exists as a potential, a superposition, or sum, of all probabilities until we observe or measure it, at which point the electron freezes into a particular state. Once we are through looking or measuring, the electron dissolves back into the ether of all possibilities.
Part of this interpretation is the notion of ‘complementarity’ – that you can never know everything about a quantum entity such as an electron at the same time. The classic example is position and velocity; if you discover information about one aspect of it – where it is, for instance – you cannot also determine exactly where it’s going or at what speed.
Many of the architects of quantum theory had grappled with the larger meaning of the results of their calculations and experiments, making comparisons with metaphysical and Eastern philosophical texts.4 But the rank and file of physicists in their wake complained that the laws of the quantum world, while undoubtedly correct from a mathematical point of view, beggared ordinary common sense. French physicist and Nobel prize winner Louis de Broglie devised an ingenious thought experiment, which carried quantum theory to its logical conclusion. On the basis of current quantum theory, you could place an electron in a container in Paris, divide the container in half, ship one half to Tokyo and the other to New York, and, theoretically, the electron should still occupy either side unless you peer inside, at which point a definite position in one half or the other would finally be determined.5
What the Copenhagen interpretation suggested was that randomness is a basic feature of nature. Physicists believe this is demonstrated by another famous experiment involving light falling on a semi-transparent mirror. When light falls on such a mirror, half of it is reflected and the other half is transmitted through it. However, when a single photon arrives at the mirror, it must go one way or the other, but the way it will go – reflected or transmitted – cannot be predicted. As with any such binary process, we have a 50 – 50 chance of guessing the eventual route of the photon.6 On the subatomic level, there is no causal mechanism in the universe.
If that were so, Schmidt wondered, how was it that some of Rhine’s subjects were able to correctly guess cards and dice – implements, like a photon, of random processes? If Rhine’s studies were correct, something fundamental about quantum physics was wrong. So-called random binary processes could be predicted, even influenced.
What appeared to put a halt to randomness was a living observer. One of the fundamental laws of quantum physics says that an event in the subatomic world exists in all possible states until the act of observing or measuring it ‘freezes’ it, or pins it down, to a single state. This process is technically known as the collapse of the wave function, where ‘wave function’ means the state of all possibilities. In Schmidt’s mind, and the minds of many others, this was where quantum theory, for all its mathematical perfection, fell down. Although nothing existed in a single state independently of an observer, you could describe what the observer sees, but not the observer himself. You included the moment of observation in the mathematics, but not the consciousness doing the observing. There was no equation for an observer.7
There was also the ephemeral nature of it all. Physicists couldn’t offer any real information about any given quantum particle. All they could say with certainty was that when you took a certain measurement at a certain point, this is what you would find. It was like catching a butterfly on the wing. Classical physics didn’t have to talk about an observer; according to Newton’s version of reality, a chair or even a planet was sitting there, whether or not we were looking at it. The world existed out there independently of us.
But in the strange twilight of the quantum world, you could only determine incomplete aspects of subatomic reality with an observer pinning down a single facet of the nature of an electron only at that moment of observation, not for all time. According to the mathematics, the quantum world was a perfect hermetic world of pure potential, only made real – and, in a sense, less perfect – when interrupted by an intruder.
It seems to be a truism of important shifts in thinking that many minds begin to ask the same question at roughly the same time. In the early 1960s, nearly twenty years after he’d first read Rhine’s article, Schmidt, like Edgar Mitchell, Karl Pribram and the others, was one of a growing number of scientists trying to get some measure of the nature of human consciousness in the wake of the questions posed by quantum physics and the observer effect. If the human observer settled an electron into a set state, to what extent did he or she influence reality on a large scale? The
observer effect suggested that reality only emerged from a primordial soup like the Zero Point Field with the involvement of living consciousness. The logical conclusion was that the physical world only existed in its concrete state while we were involved in it. Indeed, Schmidt wondered, was it true that nothing existed independently of our perception of it?
A few years after Schmidt was pondering all this, Mitchell would head off to Stanford on the West Coast of the USA, gathering funding for his own consciousness experiments with a number of gifted psychics. For Mitchell, like Schmidt, the importance of Rhine’s findings would be what they appeared to show about the nature of reality. Both scientists wondered to what extent order in the universe was related to the actions and intentions of human beings.
If consciousness itself created order – or indeed in some way created the world – this suggested much more capacity in the human being than was currently understood. It also suggested some revolutionary notions about humans in relation to their world and the relation between all living things. What Schmidt was also asking was how far our bodies extended. Did they end with what we always thought of as our own isolated persona, or ‘extend out’ so that the demarcation between us and our world was less clear-cut? Did living consciousness possess some quantum-field-like properties, enabling it to extend its influence out into the world? If so, was it possible to do more than simply observe? How strong was our influence? It was only a small step in logic to conclude that in our act of participation as an observer in the quantum world, we might also be an influencer, a creator.8 Did we not only stop the butterfly at a certain point in its flight, but also influence the path it will take – nudging it in a particular direction?
The Field Page 13
