QMB: Further Developments and New Findings

The Process of Thinking: Deterministic-Chaotic Dynamics

Once the problem of memory capacity had been solved, the quantum model of the brain was logically complete. It became clear how memories are created and stored, and how they gradually blur and die. However, all this only concerned primitive reactions and instincts – that is, direct correspondences between external stimuli and the information accumulated in the brain. The next step was to move beyond these scattered memory fragments and understand the connections between them, the transitions from one to another, and, ultimately, associations, categorization, abstractions… It was also unclear what enables us to distinguish subtle details with such confidence – for example, how we recognize a familiar face in a crowd after only a brief, oblique glance at it from a distance. How a few carelessly sung notes can allow us to recall the entire melody; how a chance phrase in a conversation reveals all the weaknesses of a companion – even if we have never heard those exact words from them...

The stimuli are never identical; they are similar at best. Nevertheless, our brain infallibly and instantaneously retrieves the correct memories without confusing them with others. It navigates among its states with astonishing efficiency, and to understand the general principle behind this, researchers have examined the brain’s macro-dynamics in a multitude of experiments. Particular mention should be made of the work of Walter Freeman, especially his collaborations with Giuseppe Vitiello, in which they attempted to link this macro-dynamic behavior with the micro-world, that is, with the quantum model of the brain [15, 16].

As a result, it became evident that the phase trajectories describing the macro-states of the neocortex during brain activity – as revealed, for example, by a series of EEG recordings – satisfy the conditions of chaoticity. They converge toward so-called strange attractors, known from the theory of dynamical chaos. The brain, recalling a familiar smell or word, or, say, reanalyzing an idea that has already been formulated, moves through states that are close to those that were once formed and encoded in the quantum condensate. The brain’s accumulated experiences, as well as the thoughts linking them together, are mapped into a hierarchy of converging trajectories: attractors in the space of states, attractors in the space of attractors, attractors in the space of attractors within the space of attractors, and so on.

It is categorization, abstraction through the hierarchy of attractors, that explains both the incredible sensitivity of the brain to external stimuli and the flexibility of human thinking, the ability to form thoughts through associations and analogies. Events that evoke memories – for example, the flash of a face in a crowd, or the slightest trace of a smell – do not lead directly to the goal. They merely define the relevant regions (basins of attraction) in the attractors’ landscape at different levels of abstraction. And then the brain “swirls in,” as if through a funnel, into the desired area of the phase space, and enters the required dynamic mode deterministically and purposefully, obeying the laws of chaos, which is not chaos but the highest order. An order that defines the very laws of thinking!

An answer was also found to the question of how exactly the “mobility” of thinking is ensured – that is, how our brain transitions from one memory to another, from image to image, from word to word, “reselecting” attractors, moving from thought to thought. It turned out that in the firing of neuronal groups, agreement (coherence) is continuously formed and dissolved. It emerges across large brain regions, endures for a couple of hundred milliseconds, then vanishes for a brief period before reappearing in other areas, and so forth. In the stream of thoughts, there are constant pauses, moments of loss of coherence – a temporary return to disorder, thanks to which the brain can move freely from attractor to attractor at any level of abstraction. Dynamic modes replace each other abruptly, in rapid leaps. This opens the way for analogies and associations, generalizations or, conversely, for concentration on particulars. This also guarantees a constant readiness to respond to a new stimulus, to accept a new challenge from the outside world [17].

The "Dark Energy" of the Brain

A separate and long-known mystery is the brain's energy balance – and in recent decades, it has begun to attract increasing attention. The brain consumes an enormous amount of energy, and it is unclear where it all goes [18, 19]. For example, processing information coming from the external world through all sensory channels accounts for only a few percent of this energy. The rest goes toward some kind of internal work [20], and as to what this work entails, mainstream science has no confirmed hypotheses. Some prominent unconfirmed ones propose that it supports homeostasis (i.e., the coordinated operation of internal organs, including the brain's own systems [22]) or powers internal cognitive processes [20] involving both the conscious and the subconscious. However, as acknowledged in official reviews [21], the opinions of different scientific groups regarding the contribution of these hypotheses to the energy balance puzzle are in surprisingly poor agreement. The concept of "dark energy of the brain" was even introduced, by analogy with the well-known astrophysical term.

This fact, together with the quantum model of the brain, inspired one of the main concepts of the Ergo Mentis project. It aligns closely with the mainstream scientific view that the internal work constantly occurring in the brain – and consuming an enormous amount of energy – is specific to human mental activity [23,24]: it provides for internal thought and maintains a constant internal narrative, enabling the formation and restructuring of memories, ideas, and plans. Yet it remains unclear why the greater part of this work escapes direct detection – and the Ergo Mentis idea is that this undetectable portion arises from a new type of interaction with an external field whose nature is currently unknown to us.

Any cognitive process, including the aforementioned “internal narrative,” entails the creation of additional order. According to our hypothesis, higher-level “products” of the human mind correspond to a more intricate ordering of the brain’s dipole moment matrix. Put very crudely, the dipoles do not simply align in one direction – as in the case of elementary memories – but instead form more complex patterns (I say this purely for illustration, without suggesting actual quantum-physical processes). This capacity arises from the exceptional structural complexity of the human brain, especially its neocortex, which enables fundamentally new forms of quantum order. Thus, a quantitative leap in structural complexity leads to the emergence of a qualitatively new order, that is, to the spontaneous breaking of an additional symmetry. In “The Place of Quarantine”, it is linked to fractal dimensionality, meaning that the new ordering can be packed into fractal-type structures. This new symmetry breaking leads to the appearance of a new type of quasiparticle (which must appear, according to Goldstone's theorem), and these new quasiparticles may act as agents of interaction with the external field. Thus, the entire range of our cognitive processes may be mirrored externally, creating preconditions for a dialogue of the brain with itself, for a view of itself from the outside – which, on a mental level, leads to the mind's self-awareness and, ultimately, to the phenomenon of human consciousness.

It should be emphasized that the mechanism of non-equilibrium condensation, driven by an influx of external energy, provides a solid basis for this hypothesis. The link between “excess” energy and the emergence of additional order is not speculative – it is mathematically well-established!

From the Brain to the Entire Nervous System

In recent years, increasing evidence suggests that quantum-level coherence is maintained not only in the brain but also in many other tissues and organs, influencing their functioning. Based on spontaneous symmetry breaking and collective quantum oscillations (analogous to the Goldstone bosons of the quantum brain model), the following have been proposed: an alternative model of oncogenesis [25]; a mechanism for direct dialogue between the brain and the heart [26]; an explanation for how deep relaxation techniques affect the expression of specific genes, thereby reducing stress-induced inflammation [27], among others. All this together points to the next step: extending the quantum model from the brain to the entire organism to explore how quantum processes – through regulation of gene expression across diverse cell types – may govern overall physiology. In this context, particular interest lies in a quantum model of nervous tissue, uniting the brain with the rest of the nervous system.

Nerve fibers throughout the body share key properties with the cerebral cortex — for example, plasticity, which is the ability to quickly adapt and learn. Neurons form a communication network that provides the macroscopic boundary conditions for quantum-scale processes over large volumes. Moreover, the space inside and around neural cells is rich in filaments, protein threads, which provide the connection between the micro and the macro. The same is true of its functions: nervous tissue is always at the center of events! It is responsible for the interaction of the organs and the body’s systems, for their regulation. It receives external stimuli and transmits signals to the ‘center,’ to the brain — this is how sensations are formed and our connection with the environment is achieved. Thus, it is the nervous tissue — from our fingertips to the neocortex — that is our ‘I.’ Everything else in the human body is clothing, a dining room, a hospital for our real self, which is a collection of nerve cells. This idea is developed in “Cogito Man”.

Note: as described above, at the quantum level nature possesses and actively uses a universal mechanism that allows order to be introduced into a system via an inflow of external energy. In my view, this fact is an unambiguous hint: it is precisely the quantum model, extended to the whole body, that can and must show what lies at the foundation of the incredible ordering of our organisms.

The Position of Modern “Official” Science

All of the above (except for the brain’s interaction with something external) lie within the realm of peer-reviewed science: these are real results and theories published in reputable journals. They are backed by mathematics and experimental observations and cannot be dismissed as mere speculation or “pseudoscience.” It is important to emphasize that the quantum model of the brain is grounded in quantum field theory and has nothing to do with quantum mechanics – including analogies with quantum computers and the long-known (and rightly criticized) quantum mechanical model proposed by Penrose. Only quantum field theory (which describes the dynamics of an enormous number of quantum objects) can bridge the gap from the micro to the macro and explain the macroscopic properties of the brain as a whole.

The question of the orderliness of living organisms remains open despite significant progress in clarifying it [28]. The theory of complex systems with numerous feedback loops has provided substantial insights into self-organization, yet it has not yielded definitive answers [29]. The fundamental issue persists: order is established too quickly, and there is too much of it. In some cases (like the development of the human embryo), this "too much" is truly striking.

Interestingly, in the scientific discourse on the ordering of living systems, the concepts of symmetry and its spontaneous breaking have begun to appear with increasing frequency. From here, it's not a long leap to quantum field theory and Goldstone bosons...

As for the mechanisms of memory and thought formation (let alone self-awareness), mainstream science to this day persists in ignoring theories that propose profoundly new approaches. It insists that the existing official paradigm merely needs to be improved slightly, and all the mysteries will resolve themselves. The main efforts continue to be directed toward searching for “engrams” – local changes in synaptic connections between a few neurons, that is, static “memory imprints” in the brain's structure. Neurophysics and neurobiology take pride in the fact that, in a number of experiments on mice, they have identified individual neurons and synapses (those very engrams) whose activation leads to the retrieval of the correct memories of a reaction to specific sensory stimuli, even in the absence of signals from those stimuli. And conversely, blocking these engrams leads to a loss of memory of the original stimulation – for example, whether it was painful...

This is pretty much the level at which the proofs supporting the neural-engram paradigm are formulated. In my opinion, these "proofs" prove nothing. Yes, of course, the brain, thanks to its plasticity, adapts itself to the surrounding world. At the moment of the experiment, they managed to capture the current result of such an adaptation. Can such a memory trace endure for years? That is highly, highly doubtful. But what if we assume that the neural-synaptic structure merely forms the initial conditions for some deeper processes – for example, the activation (recollection) or formation (memorization) of a specific condensate of dipole waves... Today, one set of synapses might be responsible for this; tomorrow, a slightly different one; the day after tomorrow, another one still... All the while, the activated condensate itself (a specific type of joint oscillation of the brain's dipole matrix) remains the same; the memory fragment is stable. We can assume that certain neuronal groups will, over a lifetime, be more important for the formation/activation of many memories – and we can even call them "engrams" – but they will still be constantly undergoing changes. One simply cannot claim that the memory is stored in them!

In short, from the perspective of the quantum model of the brain, what are considered memory imprints are in fact just optimizations of the initial conditions for activating coherent quantum processes. This is a ‘map of the terrain,’ the result of the adaptation of brain tissue to recently dominant patterns of thoughts and currently prioritized mental tasks. Neurons and synapses evolve to ensure greater speed and clarity of thinking, structurally adapting to the most frequent and intense episodes of memorizations, recollections, and reflections. They are adapting but not coding: synaptic connections only reflect how adaptable, efficient, and skillful the brain has become. The more often a given brain engages in a particular dynamic process, the easier it is to re-enter it — this is learning, training. The more often you think about something, the longer you remember it and the faster you recollect it when needed. And this makes it easier to take a step further, toward new hypotheses and ideas... Memory and thinking are the hallmarks of a trained brain, not a brain ‘full of neural records’. And most importantly, memories and thoughts are dynamic processes, variants of movement from state to state – not static structures!

This is not my original formulation; many researchers have expressed similar views – including the authors of the quantum model of the brain mentioned above.

And I should also point out: the experiments "verifying" the neural-engram paradigm deal exclusively with the most primitive fragments of memory, those related to reactions to receptor stimulation. They are irrelevant to more complex cognitive processes. In my opinion, it's rather difficult to grasp the connection between the static structures of synapses and the formation of inferences – especially if these inferences involve many different memories at once. In summary, let me repeat: thinking and memory are dynamic processes that span a large part of the neocortex and occur orders of magnitude faster than the electrochemical interaction of neurons allows. The structural "imprints," the engrams, merely facilitate the rapid launch of these processes.

ЧLet's now address another fundamental problem: the nonlocality of memory, that is, the coordinated work of neurons and their groups across large regions of the brain. Here, mainstream science is in no better shape: it has no explanation for this phenomenon, while, of course, acknowledging that remote groups of engrams somehow communicate very quickly. The official view most often considers two mechanisms for such communication: inter-neuronal ion flows through so-called gap junctions – specialized protein channels that allow ions and low-molecular-weight substances to pass freely from one cell to another, bypassing the synapses – and ephaptic coupling, the direct influence of electric fields from ion currents in neurons on their neighbors. And mainstream science itself admits that these "explanations" explain nothing. Both mechanisms operate only over short distances and for very densely packed neurons. Furthermore, gap junctions are present only in certain neuronal types, and ephaptic coupling is very sensitive to its microenvironment: the distance between cells, the density of ion channels, and extracellular conductivity strongly affect its reliability. Overall, just as it was 60 years ago, the nonlocality of memory, which is naturally explained by the quantum model of the brain, remains an unsolvable mystery for the neural-engram approach.

Let’s summarize the relationship between mainstream science and the quantum model of the brain, supplemented by the Ergo Mentis hypothesis regarding the external field as an integral component of the human mind:

- The fact of the incredible orderliness of living systems is recognized and remains a focus of attention. Discussions increasingly invoke spontaneous symmetry breaking as a possible mechanism for it. Meanwhile, theories of complex systems with feedback loops have shed light on many aspects of the self-organization of living organisms. On many, but far from all.

- The neural-engram paradigm, despite enormous efforts and expenses, has failed to clarify the mechanisms of memory and, especially, thinking. Experiments have confirmed the importance of specific neuronal groups – and this does not contradict the quantum model of the brain. According to it, neurons and their firing are indeed important – as triggers that initiate processes at the quantum level.

- We still do not know what the brain spends so much energy on. Most likely, it is devoted to cognitive work that underpins the unique properties of our mind. This seems quite natural if we juxtapose the unique complexity of the human brain with the unique phenomenon of human consciousness, including the awareness of oneself and one's place in the world. It is logical to assume that the excess energy must be spent on something specifically related to this. The idea of a new interaction arises because, for some reason, we cannot explain this energy budget using the interactions we know (specifically, the electromagnetic one). And the "agents" of this new interaction are right at hand: they are provided by the quantum model of the brain, if we expand the set of symmetries that can be spontaneously broken...

- By the way, ideas about our brain interacting with an external "field" have been voiced for several millennia. In different forms and in different phrasings, but essentially repeating the same thing. The universe, in some sense, “whispers” to us; we “take dictation” from it. Just try telling a creative person (or, for instance, an advanced mathematician!) that this isn't so… One can, of course, indiscriminately deny this centuries-old collective experience of sensations. Or, one can attempt to offer hypotheses – specifics grounded in coherent physics and mathematics – that might account for these experiences... Well, to each their own.

- And finally, extending the quantum model of the brain to the entire nervous tissue looks logical – and promising in terms of explaining the many correlations between the body's various systems. Both theoretical and experimental works on this subject are represented in the official scientific field.

All in all, I would say that the concepts underlying the quantum model of the brain and attempting to shed light on the mysteries of human consciousness, for all their apparent fantastical nature, fit quite well within modern scientific thought.