So much more for us without some go. Out with a brand new full round up for you in an hours time thank you for watching the international. Manager he has been searching for. Years. Finally on the past to finding them im joined by doctors. Director. For consciousness studies. Dr stuart hamer us anna says ya just iraq sure of center for consciousness studies its really great to have you here with us today consciousness is like one of my favorite topics so i cant wait to dig into your brain so you said that some concepts of consciousness are not what concepts and why are they not. Most people would say that the brain is a computer of neurons acting as bits like individual on off states and that if you get sufficient complexity in competition that consciousness emerges the really theres no evidence for that that consciousness is an emergent property of computation its an assumption that the brain is a computer but theres no evidence for that and i think its a its a poor assumption for example it assumes that each neuron is a simple on off switch yes or no but a single cell neurons or cells in a single cell like a paramecium swims around finds through defines a mate has sex can learn it escapes from a capillary tube faster and faster its intelligent it may not be conscious but its intelligent so if a single paramecium or even an amoeba which can solve problems can be that intelligent why should we think that a neuron is just a one or a 0 so i think we need to go deeper inside the neuron she to another level and figure out how the paramecium does it and that turns out to be using structures called microtubules inside all cells including brain cells neurons that are capable it seems a processing information and maybe Quantum Computers and we have to get to my car to villas but before i have just a couple of questions because since youre setting consciousness i want to understand from what side youre sort of starting to beginning to learn it because science is a method of learning about the world by measurements experiment and consciousness can be really measured so why mess and why does scientists bother because i mean there is no institute that is actively researching the whereabouts of god for instance because thats a matter of belief why bother with consciousness isnt it also a matter of belief. Well im conscious i see your conscious its true we cant measure it but one thing we do know it goes away under anesthesia and comes back when the patient wakes up from in a seizure and my approach has been by looking at how anesthesia works to selectively in reverse simply prevent consciousness the brain is still active under anesthesia we use the boat potentials where we stimulate the leg or the arms and record from the brain or we stimulate the brain and record motor signals so the brain is functioning its processing information a consciousness is missing so thats the approach that i take if we can figure out how in a seizure selectively blocks consciousness without affecting other functions of the brain that would tell us what consciousness is and thats what ive done for most of my career study how anesthesia selectively and recursively prevents consciousness so when you say it once again i want to dig deeper when you were a cave anesthetics at the end the consciousness is a raised what happens when we come out of the anesthetics point when and when it dissipates is it like what do get like a whole new consciousness or is it like a switch on and off like you put on a t. V. Or what happens to the consciousness well it depends on what how you believe that the anesthetic works but however it works that the gases are breathed and so long as into the blood and go to the whole body including the brain and go into the brain and act only by very weak quantum forces they dont form chemical bonds like other drugs they form only very weak quantum interactions. And when you turn off the vaporizer and turn off the gas they float out of the brain and into the lungs and then out and when you remove them consciousness resume. And its the same you because you have memory and you have yourself and a resume so your consciousness is kind of in in suspension or its inhibited by your memories and everything that makes out you yourself is its usually called is still there and then resumes is the same question can be acted as why youre the same person from moment to moment and its because of memory and youre the self which is trouble way hard wired in the brain and actually theres good evidence that memories encoded in microtubules and that consciousness is happening in the same the same medium that consciousness occurs so what about that leg really complex brain surgeries that uses anesthetic which is not shut in consciousness down when a patient speaks to doctors touring the procedure with on the senses being unarmed but not awareness what happens to consciousness then. Yeah well if youre talking about neurosurgery brain surgery while the patients await you can respond which is if you want to be very careful that you dont disturb something important and just want to take out the tumor or the bad to show then you do it under local anesthesia thats not general anesthesia you numb up the scalp youre numb the. The layers that going down to the skull the perry asked him around the skull and then the men in g. s the lining of the brain but then once you get into the brain the brain actually doesnt doesnt sense pain so in those cases thats not general anesthesia thats what we call local anesthesia just around the area where the a hole is where the certain kind of you can approach and the patient is still awake so thats not thats not really anesthesia thats what we call a local anesthesia so that by that i still dont get it what happens to consciousness when its under anaesthetic youre so if youre saying we dont really erase consciousness where does it go while youre under influence like in your own words in fact really simple where its what happens to consciousness while youre asleep or tearing under anesthesia its kind of like sleep also except under when youre sleeping you can dream so dream asleep or anaesthesia consciousness suspended its its its not its not happening its im bake a sion its its the it course it depends what causes consciousness which i think are quantum dipole oscillations and these quantum dipole out a selection stop at a certain frequency but the membranes and other activities continued so you can have brain function without consciousness. I also speak in my influence what happens to consciousness when youre drunk and like completely unaware of the fact that youre dancing house naked on a bar. I would know that but it depends on the drug and alcohol at lower concentrations is excited tori its disinhibiting you get happy and get ate and then if you keep drinking you get sedated and can fall asleep other drugs psychedelics for example were the other way and increase increase your level of consciousness and i think this relates to consciousness having a frequency having actually have a number of different frequencies kind of like music that are interval then and and resonate together and when you use alcohol 1st the frequency goes up and then it goes down and you become the surgical and and drop but before that youre all excited happy and giddy in the other and an anesthesia slows things down also it goes all the way and so much further than alcohol can and theres no corner oscillations nobody graysons at all and youve slowed everything down and consciousness goes away the opposite would be psychedelic which increases the frequency and expands consciousness increases the awareness increases the depth of phenomenal experience right increasing the frequency. So alice baking to henry marsh im sure you know who he is hes the world renowned brain surgeon and i ask him whether he thinks consciousness exists and is like no i dont because i operate people every day open their eyes open their skulls and i know that there are billions of billions of neurons that are connected to each other in a very unique way and we can never know too much about them because its impossible to really know all about those billions of neurons and each person in particular he goes said that is consciousness that is what we call consciousness the unknown connection of billions of neurons that each person has in its own way what would you say to his explanation thats the wrong explanation looking good interactions among neurons is is saying the brain is a computer neurons are no different than bits gates switches synapses switches and gates and if you get enough computation or enough complex today then you have consciousness best of major assumption in neuroscience in Artificial Intelligence and there is an psychology but after all these decades of studying it they dont have a clue how they could produce consciousness and therefore you get these neal is the dancers like you just said oh well it must not exist if i can explain it by the way i dont look at it it must not exist but theyre looking at it the wrong way they have to look at it at a deeper level where you get the quantum effects which give you consciousness i think quantum effects specifically in microtubules are necessary for consciousness. I also spoke to neurobiologist roberts of policy and hes thinking is that quite likely Human Behavior is biology not what we do our decisions and choices is if that is to be believed right what good is consciousness for i mean it really doesnt translate into free will but only serves to make us good at executing our biological program. I dont agree with supposedly i like his work on other things but not on that and the problem is that if you look at just at what you can measure with electrical activity at the level of neurons and you and i are talking you Say Something and i answer your back immediately as best i can if you were to measure the activity in my brain the corresponds with what you said it happens after i respond so people will say suppose that im act im responding now im consciously and have a have an an illusion an illusion after the fact that i was in control now in the quantum approach we get around that because the quantum collapses can send quantum information backward in time so even dont be activity is going to happen at a fraction of a 2nd afterwards it goes backwards in time so that when im speaking im speaking consciously of my consciousness is in control so. What suppose he said would make consciousness and the epi phenomenon merely along for the ride and having an illusion of being in control and thats what most neuroscientists think because they look at the brain as a computer but if you look at the brain as a quantum quantum computer you can have backward information and therefore consciousness can happen in real time and you can be in it you can have free will in fact i have a paper called a quantum bio brain biology can rescue conscious very well by this backward time back try granting a short break right now when were back well continue talking to dr cyril tamar astana says yall exists and director of the center for consciousness studies talking about black consciousness stay with us. So what weve got to do is identify the threats that we have its crazy. Let it be an arms race in spearing Dramatic Development only closely im going to resist i dont see how that strategy will be successful very critical time to sit down and talk. In the troubled 19 seventies a group of killers rampage through parts of Northern Ireland that was coordinated loyalists attacks on the catholic population tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes and what was striking to put these attacks was that the or you see the Police Actually took part in the attacks so instead of preventing it they were active participants in the burning of the streets in belfast i think more than a 100 innocent civilians were. You can see in yours and we found out more i was surprised about the extent. To which the collusion was involved in some of those cases the killers would lead to be named. I think it went to do very very top i think it is. The water where all the tastes and you. Give the go ahead. And were back with dr sure tamar of talking about whats consciousness stuart lets talk about the Central Point of your theory and that is our consciousness is born into so called microtubules what are they where they are located. Theyre all your cells there and all of neurons brain cells but also all you other cells and in fact theyre found in all a living cells in animals and even plants and bacteria and and other similar has may have something very similar so theyre there in all Living Systems basically and they are part of the cytoskeleton so they they supply bone white support to the cell and they also do things inside the cell for example Cell Division they pull the chromosomes apart and create the daughter cells and and this has to be done perfectly or else you get. Development or cancer so they do all these all highly organized orchestrated things and in neurons they establish the connections they establish the shape of the cell and they do things that seem to require intelligence which is what got me interested in them in the 1st place back in the seventys i was studying cancer and looking at celebration and everybody else got interested in the genes in the chromosomes and i got interested in how these structures actually performed a dance almost and pulled the chromosomes apart they seem to have some intelligence and at that time it was discovered that there are also founded neurons are quite plentiful in durands and since i was interested in consciousness i got the idea that might be processing information at that level and if you look at their structure they actually look like a computer is like at like a matrix of states of units connected in a lattice which can interact and can trust us information and i spent a lot of time looking at how they could trust this information going models and simulation and with businesses showing that theyre capable at least theoretically of trust information and they do things that seem to require information so its legible that they are not just the bony still of the support of the cell but also the nervous system of the cell kind of like the brain of the nervous system within each cell. What makes you think that the process going on inside the microchip builds are actually consciousness and not Something Else. Right very good question so i spent about 20 years studying microtubule Information Processing going around to neural net an Artificial Intelligence meeting telling people that if they want to simulate the brain theyve got to go much deeper than the level of neurons and each neuron has about a 1000000000 trivial and subunits of microtubules which can oscillate and switched at about 10 megahertz so the Standard Approach an Artificial Intelligence of neuro science is that we have about 100000000000. 00 nerve cells switching at about a 1000 said abscess switching about 100. 00 hertz Something Like that which gives you 10 to the 16th operations per 2nd so the singularity neuroscientists Henry Markram and everybody said well if you can have a computer do 10 of the 16th operations per 2nd it will be conscious because thats what the brain is brain does and the brain produces consciousness therefore a computer like that would well weve already reached that and it does it and but i didnt know why and i was one day in about 990 somebody said to me its ok lets say youre right and theres all this Information Trust us in going how and then explain consciousness how that explain joy feelings the shade of blue paint in this entity all these ceilings and emotions whats now known as the hard problem consciousness and i really didnt know but fortunately that person suggested i read a book by Roger Penrose called the emperors new mind which attacked the idea that consciousness is a computation and he used girls theorem and basically argued that Something Like understanding knowing somethings right need something outside the system to prove it either mathematical proof or just understanding something and computers are very good at brute force calculations and playing chess but they dont really understand anything so our rogered. Yes or there was Something Else that was required for a force for understanding and other types of feelings in consciousness and that he if he said at that time was a type of collapse of the way function a point instead reduction a solution to the measurement problem in Quantum Mechanics and when i read that i was kind of blown away by it because it seemed so far afield to go from the brain to 2 and he said that these collapses were due to fluctuations in structure of the universe so that was seemed pretty strange but when i read it more and more it made sense it was logical and it was and still is the only actual mechanism proposed for consciousness other than emergence leading to complex computation and somehow consciousness happens roger said that when these types of collapses these types of quantum state reductions you do have ject a threshold object a reduction when nat happened and its have that caused a moment of consciousness and that would be happening everywhere in the environment and a very low level but these moments of consciousness would be what he called toto conscious because they wouldnt have any meaning they would have the self they would have the memory they would be random and just come and go and what he needed was something in the brain they could organize these objective reductions these these simple trinity of moments of consciousness there were didnt have any meaning and put them together and to give the kind of consciousness we have and i look at that is kind of like the oh are moments that are happening everywhere in the environment and Something Like they have they have claudia they have experienced Something Like if you go to the symphony and the orchestra is warming up and each musician is is tuning his or her instrument so you hear this year all these sounds of noise but it but its its a constant a its disorganized and then the band the or. Mr place and you get music so what the brain does and what the microtubules do is is organize or orchestrate these quantum collapses use objective productions to give Something Like mu