7 ms·

Photon entanglement could explain the rapid brain signals behind consciousness

31 points by wglb 2y ago

fsckboy 2y ago
tl;dr they've shown quantum entanglement can occur inside nerve fibers, and speculate that it could explain the speed of brain communication a research group in China has shown that many entangled photons can be generated inside the myelin sheath that covers nerve fibers. It could explain the rapid communication between neurons, which so far has been thought to be below the speed of sound, too slow to explain how the neural synchronization occurs. "If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for this role," said Yong-Cong Chen in a statement to Phys.org. Chen is a professor at the Shanghai Center for Quantitative Life Sciences and Physics Department at Shanghai University. The paper is published in the journal Physical Review E. https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2401.11682 https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2401.11682
- bmenrigh 2y ago
  I don’t get the “action at a distance” leading to synchronization. Quantum entanglement doesn’t transmit information. Is there some mechanism for synchronization without information transfer?
  - croemer 2y ago
    I also don't get it. I'm surprised this made it through review with this title and abstract. They should have left the speculation about consciousness out of it.
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    I did a quick google for explanations: https://theconversation.com/what-is-quantum-entanglement-a-physicist-explains-the-science-of-einsteins-spooky-action-at-a-distance-191927 https://theconversation.com/what-is-quantum-entanglement-a-p... In the simplest terms, quantum entanglement means that aspects of one particle of an entangled pair depend on aspects of the other particle, no matter how far apart they are or what lies between them. These particles could be, for example, electrons or photons, and an aspect could be the state it is in, such as whether it is “spinning” in one direction or another. The strange part of quantum entanglement is that when you measure something about one particle in an entangled pair, you immediately know something about the other particle, even if they are millions of light years apart. This odd connection between the two particles is instantaneous, seemingly breaking a fundamental law of the universe. Albert Einstein famously called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.” https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/10/popular-physicsprize2022-3.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/10/popular-physicspr... Interesting things happen if the particles in an entangled pair travel in opposite directions and one of them then meets a third particle in such a manner that they become entangled. They then enter a new shared state. The third particle loses its identity, but its original properties have now been transferred to the solo particle from the original pair. This way of transferring an unknown quantum state from one particle to another is called quantum teleportation. Remarkably, quantum teleportation is the only way to transfer quantum information from one system to another without losing any part of it. It is absolutely impossible to measure all the properties of a quantum system and then send the information to a recipient who wants to reconstruct the system...However, entirely unknown quantum properties can be transferred using quantum teleportation and appear intact in another particle, but at the price of them being destroyed in the original particle. Once this had been shown experimentally, the next step was to use two pairs of entangled particles. If one particle from each pair are brought together in a particular way, the undisturbed particles in each pair can become entangled despite never having been in contact with each other. This entanglement swapping was first demonstrated in 1998 by Anton Zeilinger’s research group. Entangled pairs of photons, particles of light, can be sent in opposite directions through optical fibres and function as signals in a quantum network. Entanglement between two pairs makes it possible to extend the distances between the nodes in such a network.
  - cfgauss2718 2y ago
    We know from the No Communication theorem that quantum entanglement does not transmit information between classical observers who have no role in preparing the initial state of the entangled elements. Why should one think that this No Communication theorem is applicable to the phenomenological description of brain behavior? It seems that the speed of nerve conduction is at odds with the time constants of brain synchronization. If we are to doubt that quantum entanglement plays a role in accounting for this discrepancy, then what are the assumptions that underlie this doubt, and are they reasonable?
- dekhn 2y ago
  They didn't "show" anything; that would require scientific evidence (in the form of an experiment).
  - Animats 2y ago
    Right. It's plausible mathematics, not an experimental result. That's reasonable research, but the title and conclusions overreach.
    - croemer 2y ago
      Peer reviewers were asleep at the wheel apparently. I'd expect better from Physical Review
davidhs 2y ago
Since when did information travel quickly in the brain (compared to the speed of light)?
- croemer 2y ago
  Not compared to light, fast compared to the measure speed of signal transmission along axons which is less than speed of sound, so relatively slow.
croemer 2y ago
I studied Physics. Sure they calculated that some entanglement can happen in some theory. But it's a huge stretch to relate it to consciousness. That's just clickbait in my view and should have been left out. It's trending here just because of the clickbaity title.
- ripped_britches 2y ago
  They should have referenced Penrose theory
  - dr_dshiv 2y ago
    Roger Penrose proposed that there are three distinct worlds: matter, consciousness and nous (forms or ideas, like mathematics). I love this idea. It is actually very old. The Pythagorean Philolaus (5th century BC) taught that the soul is mathematical and that it loves the material body, because without the body, the soul cannot feel (be conscious). What’s interesting about this is that the soul is not consciousness itself, which it is often equated with. In fact, many other Platonists (like Iamblichus) taught that the soul does not feel (also, gods don’t feel!). So, the idea is that the soul is the immaterial, eternal, mathematical forms of our being. The noetic soul, then, interacts with the body to produce sensation (consciousness). In other words, consciousness emerges from the resonance between the material body and the immaterial world of nous. It’s a really fascinating perspective.
- teekert 2y ago
  Cocktail physicists always want some connection between Quantum Mechanics and consciousness. It’s their last thing to hold onto when it comes to believing they have real free will.
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    And even then free will is useless, but then again desperately wanting there to be a free will is part of determinism and was bound to happen.
  - 2y ago
ijidak 2y ago
I've always assumed quantum entanglement is being leveraged in the brain. Why? Because, seeing the speeds needed for the type of computing the brain does, chemistry -- e.g. the classical changes in atoms due to classical interactions-- just doesn't seem fast enough to propagate across the volume of the brain. Maybe the fields move fast enough... (By fields I mean electro-magnetic, etc.) But, since entanglement is a thing, it would seem far fetched that the brain doesn't leverage it.
- didgeoridoo 2y ago
  Since entanglement can’t break classical speed limits on information transfer, you’ll have to keep looking for another explanation if electrochemistry doesn’t float your boat.
  - ijidak 2y ago
    The gap between the speed at which atoms move at room temperature and the speed of light is massive. Also, I didn't mean to imply that faster than light travel is necessary, just faster than the speeds with which electrochemical signals can flow in the wet medium of the brain. That's why I said maybe the fields move fast enough. As in, the quantum fields.
- croemer 2y ago
  I'm not sure your intuition here is right. It's an electric signal that travels in axons. Like in computer chips in a way. But slower because ions in water travel mich slower than electrons in metals.
  - ijidak 2y ago
    Yes, but as you said much slower. And yet massively parallel, which means an incredible amount of synchronization of information feeding into different parts of the brain.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  > Because, seeing the speeds needed for the type of computing the brain does Which computations specifically are happening specifically in the brain?
dr_dshiv 2y ago
They emphasize the slowness of action potentials along axons. But electrical waves, which emerge as the collection of action potentials, move much faster. It’s related to the volleying approach of neuronal populations: the cortex can phase lock to 1000+ hz sound waves, even though individual neurons can only fire <200hz. Populations of neurons have faster responses than single neurons. Electrical oscillations in large neuronal populations can create fast electrical activity (such as resonance phenomena) over a large distance.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  None of these "faster than the constituent parts" phenomena can transmit information faster than the constituent parts, though.
  - dr_dshiv 2y ago
    Yes they can. Changes in an electrical field travels much faster than the chemical propagation. At the level of a neuron, the field change is weak. But many neurons can create a meaningful change in electrical field potential that propagates much faster than the action potentials.
- bgnn 2y ago
  Massive 3-d parallelism is underrated. Natural neural systems evolved to deal with special cases that require very fast response time via local reflexes which are trained very slowly. They are still in millisecond range. All the computation in the cerebral cortex doesn't need tp be fast. This is what we think it should be thinking the computers we build.
dboreham 2y ago
It's just multiplying matrices. No magic required.
gryfft 2y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41276390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41276390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41267901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41267901

31 points by wglb 2y ago

tl;dr they've shown quantum entanglement can occur inside nerve fibers, and speculate that it could explain the speed of brain communication a research group in China has shown that many entangled photons can be generated inside the myelin sheath that covers nerve fibers. It could explain the rapid communication between neurons, which so far has been thought to be below the speed of sound, too slow to explain how the neural synchronization occurs. "If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for this role," said Yong-Cong Chen in a statement to Phys.org. Chen is a professor at the Shanghai Center for Quantitative Life Sciences and Physics Department at Shanghai University. The paper is published in the journal Physical Review E. https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2401.11682 https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2401.11682

bmenrigh 2y ago
I don’t get the “action at a distance” leading to synchronization. Quantum entanglement doesn’t transmit information. Is there some mechanism for synchronization without information transfer?
- croemer 2y ago
  I also don't get it. I'm surprised this made it through review with this title and abstract. They should have left the speculation about consciousness out of it.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  I did a quick google for explanations: https://theconversation.com/what-is-quantum-entanglement-a-physicist-explains-the-science-of-einsteins-spooky-action-at-a-distance-191927 https://theconversation.com/what-is-quantum-entanglement-a-p... In the simplest terms, quantum entanglement means that aspects of one particle of an entangled pair depend on aspects of the other particle, no matter how far apart they are or what lies between them. These particles could be, for example, electrons or photons, and an aspect could be the state it is in, such as whether it is “spinning” in one direction or another. The strange part of quantum entanglement is that when you measure something about one particle in an entangled pair, you immediately know something about the other particle, even if they are millions of light years apart. This odd connection between the two particles is instantaneous, seemingly breaking a fundamental law of the universe. Albert Einstein famously called the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance.” https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/10/popular-physicsprize2022-3.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/10/popular-physicspr... Interesting things happen if the particles in an entangled pair travel in opposite directions and one of them then meets a third particle in such a manner that they become entangled. They then enter a new shared state. The third particle loses its identity, but its original properties have now been transferred to the solo particle from the original pair. This way of transferring an unknown quantum state from one particle to another is called quantum teleportation. Remarkably, quantum teleportation is the only way to transfer quantum information from one system to another without losing any part of it. It is absolutely impossible to measure all the properties of a quantum system and then send the information to a recipient who wants to reconstruct the system...However, entirely unknown quantum properties can be transferred using quantum teleportation and appear intact in another particle, but at the price of them being destroyed in the original particle. Once this had been shown experimentally, the next step was to use two pairs of entangled particles. If one particle from each pair are brought together in a particular way, the undisturbed particles in each pair can become entangled despite never having been in contact with each other. This entanglement swapping was first demonstrated in 1998 by Anton Zeilinger’s research group. Entangled pairs of photons, particles of light, can be sent in opposite directions through optical fibres and function as signals in a quantum network. Entanglement between two pairs makes it possible to extend the distances between the nodes in such a network.
- cfgauss2718 2y ago
  We know from the No Communication theorem that quantum entanglement does not transmit information between classical observers who have no role in preparing the initial state of the entangled elements. Why should one think that this No Communication theorem is applicable to the phenomenological description of brain behavior? It seems that the speed of nerve conduction is at odds with the time constants of brain synchronization. If we are to doubt that quantum entanglement plays a role in accounting for this discrepancy, then what are the assumptions that underlie this doubt, and are they reasonable?
dekhn 2y ago
They didn't "show" anything; that would require scientific evidence (in the form of an experiment).
- Animats 2y ago
  Right. It's plausible mathematics, not an experimental result. That's reasonable research, but the title and conclusions overreach.
  - croemer 2y ago
    Peer reviewers were asleep at the wheel apparently. I'd expect better from Physical Review

davidhs 2y ago

Since when did information travel quickly in the brain (compared to the speed of light)?

croemer 2y ago
Not compared to light, fast compared to the measure speed of signal transmission along axons which is less than speed of sound, so relatively slow.

croemer 2y ago

I studied Physics. Sure they calculated that some entanglement can happen in some theory. But it's a huge stretch to relate it to consciousness. That's just clickbait in my view and should have been left out. It's trending here just because of the clickbaity title.

ripped_britches 2y ago
They should have referenced Penrose theory
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  Roger Penrose proposed that there are three distinct worlds: matter, consciousness and nous (forms or ideas, like mathematics). I love this idea. It is actually very old. The Pythagorean Philolaus (5th century BC) taught that the soul is mathematical and that it loves the material body, because without the body, the soul cannot feel (be conscious). What’s interesting about this is that the soul is not consciousness itself, which it is often equated with. In fact, many other Platonists (like Iamblichus) taught that the soul does not feel (also, gods don’t feel!). So, the idea is that the soul is the immaterial, eternal, mathematical forms of our being. The noetic soul, then, interacts with the body to produce sensation (consciousness). In other words, consciousness emerges from the resonance between the material body and the immaterial world of nous. It’s a really fascinating perspective.
teekert 2y ago
Cocktail physicists always want some connection between Quantum Mechanics and consciousness. It’s their last thing to hold onto when it comes to believing they have real free will.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  And even then free will is useless, but then again desperately wanting there to be a free will is part of determinism and was bound to happen.
- 2y ago

ijidak 2y ago

I've always assumed quantum entanglement is being leveraged in the brain. Why? Because, seeing the speeds needed for the type of computing the brain does, chemistry -- e.g. the classical changes in atoms due to classical interactions-- just doesn't seem fast enough to propagate across the volume of the brain. Maybe the fields move fast enough... (By fields I mean electro-magnetic, etc.) But, since entanglement is a thing, it would seem far fetched that the brain doesn't leverage it.

didgeoridoo 2y ago
Since entanglement can’t break classical speed limits on information transfer, you’ll have to keep looking for another explanation if electrochemistry doesn’t float your boat.
- ijidak 2y ago
  The gap between the speed at which atoms move at room temperature and the speed of light is massive. Also, I didn't mean to imply that faster than light travel is necessary, just faster than the speeds with which electrochemical signals can flow in the wet medium of the brain. That's why I said maybe the fields move fast enough. As in, the quantum fields.
croemer 2y ago
I'm not sure your intuition here is right. It's an electric signal that travels in axons. Like in computer chips in a way. But slower because ions in water travel mich slower than electrons in metals.
- ijidak 2y ago
  Yes, but as you said much slower. And yet massively parallel, which means an incredible amount of synchronization of information feeding into different parts of the brain.
nkrisc 2y ago
> Because, seeing the speeds needed for the type of computing the brain does Which computations specifically are happening specifically in the brain?

dr_dshiv 2y ago

They emphasize the slowness of action potentials along axons. But electrical waves, which emerge as the collection of action potentials, move much faster. It’s related to the volleying approach of neuronal populations: the cortex can phase lock to 1000+ hz sound waves, even though individual neurons can only fire <200hz. Populations of neurons have faster responses than single neurons. Electrical oscillations in large neuronal populations can create fast electrical activity (such as resonance phenomena) over a large distance.

schmidtleonard 2y ago
None of these "faster than the constituent parts" phenomena can transmit information faster than the constituent parts, though.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  Yes they can. Changes in an electrical field travels much faster than the chemical propagation. At the level of a neuron, the field change is weak. But many neurons can create a meaningful change in electrical field potential that propagates much faster than the action potentials.
bgnn 2y ago
Massive 3-d parallelism is underrated. Natural neural systems evolved to deal with special cases that require very fast response time via local reflexes which are trained very slowly. They are still in millisecond range. All the computation in the cerebral cortex doesn't need tp be fast. This is what we think it should be thinking the computers we build.

dboreham 2y ago

It's just multiplying matrices. No magic required.

gryfft 2y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41276390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41276390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41267901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41267901