The Field (17 page)

Taking pictures of the brain and soft tissues of the body with MRI is ordinarily a matter of getting to the water lurking in the various nooks and crevices. To do so, you need to be able to find the nuclei of the water molecules scattered throughout the brain. Because protons spin, like little magnets, locating them is often most simply accomplished by applying a magnetic field. This causes the spin to accelerate, eventually to the point where the nuclei behave like microscopic gyroscopes spinning out of control. All this molecular manipulation makes the water molecules that much more conspicuous, enabling the MRI machine to locate them and ultimately to extract an image of the brain’s soft tissues.

As the molecules slow down, they give off radiation. What Walter discovered is that this radiation contained encoded wave information about the body, which the machine can capture and eventually use to reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the body. The information that you extract is an encoded hologram of a slice of the brain or body part that you wish to examine. Through the use of Fourier transforms, and many slices of the body, you combine and eventually turn this information into an optical picture.

Schempp went on to help revolutionize the construction of MRI machines and wrote a textbook on the subject, showing that imaging worked as holography did, and he would soon become the world authority on the machine and functional MRI, which allows you to actually observe brain activity elicited by sensory stimuli.
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His improvements cut down the time required for a patient to sit still from 4 hours to 20 minutes. But he began to wonder whether the mathematics and theory of how this machine worked could be applied to biological systems. He had called his theory ‘quantum holography’, because what he’d really discovered was that all sorts of information about objects, including their three-dimensional shape, is carried in the quantum fluctuations of the Zero Point Field, and that this information can be recovered and reassembled into a three-dimensional image. Schempp had discovered, as Puthoff had predicted, that the Zero Point Field was a vast memory store. Through Fourier transformation, MRI machines could take information encoded in the Zero Point Field and turn it into images. The real question he was posing went far beyond whether he could create a sharper image in MRI. What he was really trying to find out was whether his mathematical equations unlocked to the key to the human brain.

In his quest to apply his theories to something larger, Walter came across the work of Peter Marcer, a British physicist who’d worked as a student and colleague of Dennis Gabor and gone on to CERN in Switzerland. Marcer himself had been doing some work on a computation based on wave theory in sound, and he was sitting there with a theory, which he intuitively sensed could be applied to the human brain. The problem was that the theory was abstract and general, and needed more mathematical rooting to make it concrete. In the early 1990s, he received a call from Walter Schempp, whose work threw a life jacket to his theory. It grounded his own work into something tidy and mathematical.

In Marcer’s mind, Walter’s machine worked on the same principle that Karl Pribram had worked out for the human brain: by reading natural radiation and emissions from the Zero Point Field. Not only did Walter have a mathematical map of how information processing in the brain may work, which amounted to a mathematical demonstration of the theories of Karl Pribram. He also had, as Peter saw it, a machine which worked according to this process. Like Pribram’s model of the brain, Schempp’s MRI machine underwent a staged process, combining wave-interference information taken from different views of the body and then eventually transforming it into a virtual image. MRI was experimental verification that Peter’s own quantum mechanical theory actually worked.

Although Walter had written some general papers about how his work could be applied to biological systems, it was only in partnership with Peter that he began to apply his theory to a theory of nature and the individual cell. They wrote papers together, each time refining their theories. Two years later, Peter was at a conference and heard Edgar Mitchell speak about his own theory of nature and human perception, which sounded serendipitously similar to his own. They spent several excited lunches comparing notes and decided that all three of them needed to collaborate. Walter would also correspond with Pribram, trading information. What they all discovered was something that Pribram’s work had always hinted at: perception occurred at a much more fundamental level of matter – the netherworld of the quantum particle. We didn’t see objects
per se
, but only their quantum information and out of that constructed our image of the world. Perceiving the world was a matter of tuning into the Zero Point Field.

Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist from the University of Arizona, had been thinking about how anesthetic gases turn off consciousness. It fascinated him that gases with such disparate chemistry as nitrous oxide (N
₂
O), ether (CH
₃
CH
₂
OCH
₂
CH
₃
), halothane (CF3CHClBr), chloroform (CHCl
₃
) and isoflurane (CHF
₂
OCHClCF
₃
) could all bring about loss of consciousness.
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It must have something to do with some property besides chemistry. Hameroff guessed that general anesthetics must interfere with the electrical activity within the microtubules, and this activity would turn off consciousness. If this were the case, then the reverse would also be true: electrical activity of microtubules that composed the insides of dendrites and neurons in the brain must somehow be at the heart of consciousness.

Microtubules are the scaffolding of the cell, maintaining its structure and shape. These microscopic hexagonal lattices of fine filaments of protein, called tubulins, form tiny hollow cylinders of indefinite length. Thirteen strands of tubules wrap around the hollow core in a spiral; and all the microtubules in a cell radiate outward from the center to the cell membrane, like a cartwheel. We know that these little honeycomb structures act as tracks in transporting various products along cells, particularly in nerve cells, and they are vital for pulling apart chromosomes during cell division. We also know that most microtubules are constantly remaking themselves, assembling and disassembling, like an endless set of Lego.

In his own experiments with the brains of small mammals, Hameroff found, like Fritz Popp, that living tissue was transmitting photons and that good penetration of ‘light’ occurred in certain areas of the brain.
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Microtubules appeared to be exceptional conductors of pulses. Pulses sent in one end traveled through pockets of protein and arrived unchanged at the other. Hameroff also discovered a great degree of coherence among neighboring tubules, so that a vibration in one microtubule would tend to resonate in unison through its neighbors.

It occurred to Hameroff that the microtubules within the cells of dendrites and neurons might be ‘light pipes’, acting as ‘waveguides’ for photons, sending these waves from cell to cell throughout the brain without any loss of energy. They might even act as tiny tracks for these light waves throughout the body.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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