Consciousness, Cognition and the Neuronal Cytoskeleton – A New Paradigm Needed in Neuroscience

Abstract

Viewing the brain as a complex computer of simple neurons cannot account for consciousness nor essential features of cognition. Single cell organisms with no synapses perform purposeful intelligent functions using their cytoskeletal microtubules. A new paradigm is needed to view the brain as a scale-invariant hierarchy extending both upward from the level of neurons to larger and larger neuronal networks, but also downward, inward, to deeper, faster quantum and classical processes in cytoskeletal microtubules inside neurons. Evidence shows self-similar patterns of conductive resonances repeating in terahertz, gigahertz, megahertz, kilohertz and hertz frequency ranges in microtubules. These conductive resonances apparently originate in terahertz quantum dipole oscillations and optical interactions among pi electron resonance clouds of aromatic amino acid rings of tryptophan, phenylalanine and tyrosine within each tubulin, the component subunit of microtubules, and the brain’s most abundant protein. Evidence from cultured neuronal networks also now shows that gigahertz and megahertz oscillations in dendritic-somatic microtubules regulate specific firings of distal axonal branches, causally modulating membrane and synaptic activities. The brain should be viewed as a scale-invariant hierarchy, with quantum and classical processes critical to consciousness and cognition originating in microtubules inside neurons.

Consciousness and inward electromagnetic field interactions

“…This view also supports the idea that EMFs focused into the brain would provide stronger ephaptic connections to the brain’s neural circuits. Providing a stronger coupling between energies of the brain and the mind, from quantum energies of photons and particles, to atoms, molecules, microtubules, synapses and circuits of cells; to energy fields and conscious thought; and back again ( Hameroff and Penrose, 2014 ; McFadden, 2020 ; Hameroff, 2022 ).…”

Torsion Geometry 5-Fold Symmetry, Anholonomic Phases, Klein Bottle Logophysics, Chaos, Resonance: Applications Towards a Novel Paradigm for the Neurosciences and Consciousness

“…Thus, they constitute the logical gates for which any possible operation on a quantum computer can be expressed as a finite sequence of them. The notion that neuron microtubules would support quantum computations has been raised by Hameroff and Penrose, yet they were mainly concerned with microtubules as a Boolean gate architecture and the Hadamard gate was not considered in their models [72][73][74][75][76]192]. This is quite remarkable since it is the Hadamard gate which may bring a single qubit into a superposition state, the latter being the qubits which their theory of consciousness deals with.…”

“…Furthermore, under certain conditions this interoceptive attention can be literally turned inside-òut, becoming a real world if not hyper-real, the focusing and control of attention playing a crucial role ). Hameroff acknowledges this problem and offers for possible explanation: "… abrupt transition from unconscious, or subconscious possibilities to consciousness, and causal selection of particular actions and perceptions, may be seen as "quantum state reduction," or "collapse of the wavefunction" (Hameroff & Penrose [76]). In other words, anaesthesia which elicits the "dark side of consciousness" -as Hameroff calls it-actually comes with the need of showing that its "darkness" is not to be confused with "blackout", at all.…”

“…Coherence theories of anaesthesia suggest that general anaesthesia act by disrupting coherent neuronal activity in critical brain structures. They do by preventing the protein conformational changes which participate in the normal functioning of neurons [75,76] . In other words, anaesthesia blocks the multiconformational states of molecules, only the one in action is preserved.…”

Sustained attention induces altered effective connectivity of the ascending thalamo-cortical relay in obsessive-compulsive disorder

“…Of particular interest is the characterization of causal or directional interactions between brain network constituents ( 4 ). Recovering causal relationships within the brain is a central challenge in neuroscience, largely because the activity of network constituents is generally not driven by single causes, and network constituents do not exert mono-causal effects on each other ( 6 , 7 ). Rather, network interactions emerge from partitions of neuronal states over progressively coarser scales and that retain a measure of directionality ( 8 ).…”