There have been several proposals in the past that mind might influence matter by exploiting the randomness of quantum events. Here, calculations are presented how mental selection of quantum mechanical scattering directions of ions in the axon hillock of neuronal cells could influence diffusion and initiate an action potential. Only a few thousand ions would need to be affected. No conservation laws are violated, but a momentary and very small local decrease of temperature should occur, consistent with a quantum mechanically possible but extremely improbable evolution. An estimate of the concurrent violation of the second law of thermodynamics is presented. Some thoughts are given to how this hypothesized mental intervention could be tested.
There have been several proposals in the past that mind might influence matter by exploiting the randomness of quantum events. Here, calculations are presented how mental selection of quantum mechanical scattering directions of ions in the axon hillock of neuronal cells could influence diffusion and initiate an action potential. Only a few thousand ions would need to be affected. No conservation laws are violated, but a momentary and very small local decrease of temperature should occur, consistent with a quantum mechanically possible but extremely improbable evolution. An estimate of the concurrent violation of the second law of thermodynamics is presented. Some thoughts are given to how this hypothesized mental intervention could be tested.
Abstract. It is shown that if mental influence can change a position or momentum coordinate within the limits of the uncertainty principle, such change, when magnified by a single interaction, is sufficient to order the direction of traveling molecules. Mental influence could initiate an action potential in the brain through this process by using the impact of ordered molecules to open the gates of sodium channels in neuronal membranes. It is shown that about 80 ordered molecules, traveling at thermal velocity in the intercellular medium in the brain, can break an ionic or covalent bond, and that the number needed to initiate an action potential is relatively small. If mental influence can act within the brain, it is reasonable to suppose it can act to some extent outside of it. If mental influence could not only order the direction of individual molecules, but coordinate this effect to produce a longitudinal pressure wave which is reasonably coherent across a macroscopic surface, only 104 molecules need be simultaneously affected to produce a detectible sound wave. Such an effect is not ordinarily observed, which suggests that if mental influence acts by ordering the direction of molecules, it acts at the level of individual molecules, but does not coordinate their motion.
For the past 20 years and more, arguments about the role of quantum mechanics in consciousness and mind theory have been mounting. On the one side are traditional neuroscientists who believe that the way to understanding the brain is through looking at the nerve cells. On the other side are various physicists who suggest that the laws of quantum mechanics may have an influence on the dynamics of consciousness and the mind. At the same time however, consciousness and the mind cannot be separated from matter. They originate in the microscopic world of the human brain. There can be no definite separation between mind and matter; there is no ‘mind’ without ‘matter’, and no ‘matter’ without ‘mind’. In terms of cognitive neuroscience, we know a great deal about the working of nerve cells. For example, we understand quite well about the formation of action potential, ion exchange, energy use, axonal transport, the vesicle cycle, and formation, oscillation and breakdown in nerve transmission. But we still do not understand how experience is formed in our material brain (color, sound, smell, taste, pain, imagination, decision, dreams, love, or orgasm) and how consciousness arises in an unconscious material organ. The insufficiency of these answers no doubt arises from the insufficiency of the methods used by cognitive science.
The nervous system is a non-linear dynamical complex system with many feedback loops. A conventional wisdom is that in the brain the quantum fluctuations are self-averaging and thus functionally negligible. However, this intuition might be misleading in the case of non-linear complex systems. Because of an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, in complex systems the microscopic fluctuations may be amplified and thereby affect the system's behavior. In this way quantum dynamics might influence neuronal computations. Accumulating evidence in non-neuronal systems indicates that biological evolution is able to exploit quantum stochasticity. The recent rise of quantum biology as an emerging field at the border between quantum physics and the life sciences suggests that quantum events could play a non-trivial role also in neuronal cells. Direct experimental evidence for this is still missing but future research should address the possibility that quantum events contribute to an extremely high complexity, variability and computational power of neuronal dynamics.
For the past 20 years and more, arguments about the role of quantum mechanics in consciousness and mind theory have been mounting. On the one side are traditional neuroscientists who believe that the way to understanding the brain is through looking at the nerve cells. On the other side are various physicists who suggest that the laws of quantum mechanics may have an influence on the dynamics of consciousness and the mind. At the same time however, consciousness and the mind cannot be separated from matter. They originate in the microscopic world of the human brain. There can be no definite separation between mind and matter; there is no ‘mind’ without ‘matter’, and no ‘matter’ without ‘mind’. In terms of cognitive neuroscience, we know a great deal about the working of nerve cells. For example, we understand quite well about the formation of action potential, ion exchange, energy use, axonal transport, the vesicle cycle, and formation, oscillation and breakdown in nerve transmission. But we still do not understand how experience is formed in our material brain (color, sound, smell, taste, pain, imagination, decision, dreams, love, or orgasm) and how consciousness arises in an unconscious material organ. The insufficiency of these answers no doubt arises from the insufficiency of the methods used by cognitive science.
Abstract. A new event is defined as an intervention in the time reversible dynamical trajectories of particles in a system. New events are then assumed to be quantum fluctuations in the spatial and momentum coordinates, and mental action is assumed to work by ordering such fluctuations. It is shown that when the cumulative values of such fluctuations in a mean free path of a molecule are magnified by molecular interaction at the end of that path, the momentum of a molecule can be changed from its original direction to any other direction. In this way mental action can produce effects through the ordering of thermal motions. Examples are given which show that the ordering of 104-105 molecules is sufficient to (a) produce detectible PK results and (b) open sufficient ion channels in the brain to initiate a physical action. The relationship of the above model to the arrow of time is discussed.
If non-material mental events, such as the intention to carry out an action, are to have an effective action on neural events in the brain, it has to be at the most subtle and plastic level of these events. In the first stage of our enquiry an introduction to conventional synaptic theory leads on to an account of the manner of operation of the ultimate synaptic units. These units are the synaptic boutons that, when excited by an all-or-nothing nerve impulse, deliver the total contents of a single synaptic vesicle, not regularly, but probabilistically. This quantal emission of the synaptic transmitter molecules (about 5000-10 000) is the elementary unit of the transmission process from one neuron to another. In the second stage this refined physiological analysis leads on to an account of the ultrastructure of the synapse, which gives clues as to the manner of its unitary probabilistic operation. The essential feature is that the effective structure of each bouton is a paracrystalline presynaptic vesicular grid with about 50 vesicles, which acts probabilistically in vesicular (quantal) release. In the third stage it is considered how a non-material mental event, such as an intention to move, could influence the subtle probabilistic operations of synaptic boutons. On the biological side, attention is focused on the paracrystalline presynaptic vesicular grids as the targets for non-material mental events. On the physical side, attention is focused on the probabilistic fields of quantum mechanics which carry neither mass nor energy, but which nevertheless can exert effective action at microsites. The new light on the mind-brain problem came from the hypothesis that the non-material mental events, the 'World 2' of Popper, relate to the neural events of the brain (the 'World 1' of matter and energy) by actions in conformity with quantum theory. This hypothesis that mental events act on probabilistic synaptic events in a manner analogous to the probability fields of quantum mechanics seems to open up an immense field of scientific investigation both in quantum physics and in neuroscience.