In the mid-1990s, cognitive scientist David Chalmers pondered what he referred to as the “hard problem of consciousness,” which (to put it simply) asked why humans have subjective experience—a far cry from the integration of information that can be described by modern neuroscience. In the ensuing three decades, scientists and philosophers alike have developed numerous theories that are a possible answer to this “hard question,” with names like Global Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory.
However, there are a subset of scientists and thinkers who think that the true answer lies in the quantum realm—more specifically, in our anatomical mind’s interaction with that realm. Nobel Prize-laureate Roger Penrose believed that these quantum interactions could explain consciousness, and the resulting theory (along with his work with Stuart Hameroff) eventually became Orchestrated Objective Reduction.
Now, a new study is proposing its own answer to the problem, but similarly relying on the quantum realm for its explanation. In the study published in the journal Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, Joachim Keppler (research director of the DIWISS Research Institute in Germany) suggested that macroscopic quantum effects could be at play in our minds. Specially, Keppler said, neurological circuits known as cortical microcolumns could be coupling directly with the zero-point field—the lowest-state of quantum fields, whose existence helps explain certain phenomena like the Casimir effect and why helium doesn’t freeze even at absolute zero.
“In this theory, the vacuum is not empty but filled with a fluctuating ocean of energy known as the electromagnetic zero-point field (ZPF),” Keppler wrote for Phys.org. “Quantum Electrodynamics-based model calculations demonstrate that specific frequencies (modes) of the ZPF can resonate with glutamate, the brain's most abundant neurotransmitter.”
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