Warm Quantum Coherence and Orchestrated Objective Reduction in Biological Systems
Channel: Ben Tam
Date: 15/08/2017

Modern science has yet to resolve fundamental questions about the quantum world. Human consciousness itself is an even more unsettled topic in academia. Dr. Gooding will help our NeuroTechX audience navigate these uncertain waters by presenting an review of past and current experimental research in biology and quantum physics.

He will discuss the controversial and relatively obscure possibility that our brains make use of quantum mechanics to process information. Though the prevalent view in neuroscience communities is that the brain is too “warm, wet, and noisy” for quantum effects to be relevant, it has been discovered that warm quantum coherence is exploited by photosynthesis, bird navigation, and most recently by microtubules within our brains. Gooding will explore the implications of this quantum coherence for how we understand human thought, and how brains interact with machines. He will also point out how the observation of warm quantum coherence in microtubules relates to “orchestrated objective reduction(ORCH-OR),” a highly-speculative proposal advocated by Roger Penrose about non-computational thinking that was inspired by Gödel's incompleteness theorem. As a research colleague of Roger Penrose(father of ORCH-OR), Gooding provides an unique perspective of the ORCH-OR hypothesis. Currently Cisco is working on research in decoherence and quantum gravity.

Relevant Articles and Links

- Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory (http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1571064513001188/1-s2.0-S1571064513001188-main.pdf?_tid=3ada0350-4ef1-11e7-ae1f-00000aab0f26&acdnat=1497218544_cb4a108caa309c1e834624e5c2d7bbcd)

- Reply to seven commentaries on “Consciousness in the universe: Review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory” (http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1571064513001905/1-s2.0-S1571064513001905-main.pdf?_tid=a517c288-4ef2-11e7-8809-00000aab0f6c&acdnat=1497219151_5243a83ca7590fb3b92933e722fb0588)

- Interesting experimental finding in 2014 of Biological Microtubules and Quantum Vibrations. (https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-journals/discovery-of-quantum-vibrations-in-microtubules-inside-brain-neurons-corroborates-controversial-20-year-old-theory-of-consciousness)

Publications of PhD, Dr. Cisco Gooding:

- Five-Dimensional Black Hole Capture Cross Sections (https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.77.104026)

- Self-Gravitating Interferometry and Intrinsic Decoherence (https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.044071)

- Bootstrapping Time Dilation Decoherence (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-015-9939-9)