why your brain might be a quantum computer, sort of. kinda. maybe...

Scientists discovered that the signal linking between our hearts and brains has the telltale sign of quantum entanglement. Now what?

Any scientist, no matter how skeptical or jaded will agree that the brain is greater than the sum of its parts and we’re not entirely sure why. While we generally visualize some neurons firing, there’s a lot more happening than that. Glial cells do cleanup and basic maintenance. Quiet electrical buzz from cells called astrocytes helps regulate the flow of signals among clusters of neurons. Neurotransmitters flow between receptors with billions of chemical messages. Different cortices perform different functions but sync up together to accomplish complex tasks. In short, the brain is chaos that manages to collapse into a symphony of memory, consciousness, dreams, and logic.

How exactly all that happens is still a mystery, one that’s vital to figuring out the limits of artificial intelligence, the biochemistry of reasoning, and allow us to offer real help to those suffering from mental illness, ADHD, dementia and Alzheimers, or traumatic brain injuries, so researchers are supremely interested in trying to solve it. One of the most popular hypotheses says that the secret sauce to consciousness and thought is quantum mechanical in nature, but it’s been very difficult to test this idea. Until now, when a team of researchers in Ireland borrowed techniques used in studying particle physics and applied them to the link between the heart and the brain.

Our hearts are very important, so much so that the brain and heart will constantly talk to each other. It makes sense, since the heart is the organ responsible for keeping the brain flush with nutrients and oxygen and sends its status using the HEP signal, or the heartbeat potential, after every heartbeat with a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. Interestingly enough, advanced ancient cultures seemed to understand that this link may exist contrary to popular belief. Doctors in Ancient Egypt knew the heart couldn’t function without the brain and vice versa, and the only reason the brain was removed first during mummification is because it decayed so quickly after death.

“spooky action” inside our bodies

Back in the modern world, the aforementioned researchers armed themselves with a modified MRI able to detect quantum fluctuations and scanned regular HEP pulses in 40 test subjects. Sure enough, the device detected a signal consistent with quantum entanglement, a phenomenon in which two or more particles act as if they’re one and the same no matter the distance between them. That means this critical link between the two vital organs is doing something involving some sort of quantum process. Now, what exactly that is remains a mystery. We only know that entanglement is happening, not how, why, or if it has a direct effect on consciousness and thought.

This might all sound like an intro for some New Age nonsense technobabble in which I’m now supposed to tell you that modern science has proven ancient intuition about the heart, mind, and soul correct. Rest assured that I will absolutely not be doing that, and if you ever see anything even remotely similar on this newsletter, you can safely assume that it’s either a joke or I’m having a mental breakdown. But at the same time, we shouldn’t be surprised that naturally occurring quantum processes can show up in collections of trillions of trillions of atoms otherwise known as life, and carry out useful functions. In fact, we could owe our existence to a quantum process.

Once again, I’m not talking about New Age fluff like “energy” and “vibrations” but the very mundane process of photosynthesis. After decades of research, it turns out that quantum mechanics may be the only way to explain the efficiency with which plants and zooplankton use the energy of sunlight to trigger the biochemical Rube Goldberg machines responsible for the creation of sugars and proteins, and allow them to serve as the base of all food chains on the planet’s surface. Other weird phenomena we see in countless living things may also rely on some difficult to detect quantum process to create something greater than just the sum of its parts and basic chemistry.

a reality check on quantum biology

So, what does all that mean for us? It’s too soon to tell. It could be nothing. After all, if the same process forcing electron clouds jumping into lower orbits around the nuclei of an atom to give up energy as a pair of photons in the process, those photons act as a single, decentralized particle and changing one instantaneously alters the other in a complimentary way. What the team in Ireland detected could be just a byproduct of a normal electrical pulse during a heartbeat. Or it could indicate that communication in and with the brain may have an undercurrent of quantum entanglement or coherence that plays some small, but important role in maximizing how our brain cells work.

If the latter is true and we, much like photosynthesizing organisms, rely on an invisible boost from quantum mechanics, any effort to understand or emulate the brain would require a detailed understanding of these processes and a quantum computer at the very minimum. Likewise, there may be more than one signal to the brain with a stream entangled photons or electrons and it’s possible that all those entangled particles are their own system providing holistic feedback to the brain. A lot of questions about the physics of how the brain communicates with the rest of the body and inside itself on a quantum level quickly start to appear.

In short, there’s a lot more we need to learn about the frequency, distribution, and the overall relevance of these quantum mechanical signatures in the various signals that make functioning as a living organism possible. It’s important not to look too deep into what they might mean on a philosophical level because “quantum” has been a slightly more acceptable way of saying “magic” in movies, TV shows, and New Age babble on the web, when in reality all it means is the most basic interactions of the simplest and most elementary particles. But just as with photosynthesis, it’s important to follow up on this initial research to truly understand what really makes us tick.

See: Kerskens, C. M., Pérez, D. L. (2022) Experimental indications of non-classical brain functions, J. Phys. Commun. 6 105001, DOI: 10.1088/2399-6528/ac94be