Is the brain quantum critical?

Sabine Hoosenfelder had an interesting posting (see this) telling about a real progress in understanding consciousness (see the article Complex harmonics reveal lower-dimensional manifolds of critical brain behavior).

The first basic mystery is that the brain can react extremely rapidly in situations, which require rapid action such being in jungle and suddenly encountering a tiger. This rapid reaction extremely difficult to understand in the standard neuroscience framework. A lot of signalling inside brain and between brain and body is required and the rate of neural processing of information seems to hopelessly slow. You could not generate a bodily expression of horror before you would be dead.

Second mystery is the extremely low metabolic energy rate of the brain: about .1 kW and extremely small as compared to the power needed by ordinary computers. Supercomputer uses a power which is measured in Megawats. This is one of the key problems of the AI based on classical computation: nuclear power plants are proposed of being built to satisfy the needes of large language models. The extremel low dissipation rate of the brain suggests that long range quantum coherence is involved. But this is impossible in standard quantum theory.

For decades (since 1995 when I started to develop TGD inspired theory of consciousness) I have tried to tell that quantum coherence in the scale of brain could be part of the solution to the problem. The entire brain or even entire body could acts as a single coherent whole and act instantaneously.

Unfortunately, standard quantum theory (or should one say colleagues) does not allow quantum coherence in the bodily nor even brain scale. Quantum coherence at the level of the ordinary biomatter is not needed. Nonquantal coherence could be induced by quantum coherence at the level of field body, the TGD counterpart of classical fields in TGD, having much larger size than the biological body. This would explain EEG, which in neuroscience is still seen often as somekind of side effect although it carries information.I t is difficult to see why brain as a master energy saver would sent information to outer space just for fun. But so do many neuroscientists believe.

Quantum criticality induces ordinary criticality in the TGD Universe

Quantum criticality implies long range quantum fluctuations and quantum coherence: the entire system behaves like single quantum unit. The TGD Universe as a whole is quantum critical fractal structure with quantum criticality realized in various scales. The degree of quantum criticality and its scale depends on the parameters of the system and can be assigned with field body of a system carrying h_eff> h phases of ordinary matter at it. These phases behaving like dark matter (but not identifiable as galactic dark matter in TGD) have higher IQ than ordinary biomatter and control it. Field body itself is a hierarchical structure.

Quantum criticality is perhaps the basic aspect of TGD inspired theory of consciousness and of living matter. The number theoretical vision of TGD predicts a hierarchy of Planck constants h_eff=nh₀, where h₀ satisfying h=(7!)²×h₀, is the minimal value of h_eff. This gives rise to a hierarchy of phases of ordinary matter behaving in many respects like dark matter but very probably not identifiable as galactic dark matter. The role of metabolism is to provide the energy needed to increase the value of h_eff, which spontaneously decreases. The physiological temperature is one critical parameter.

The complexity associated with the quantum criticality corresponds to the algebraic complexity assignable to the polynomials determining the space-time surface. The degree of polynomials equals to the number of roots and the dimension of extension of rationals corresponds to the order of Galois group given by n=h_eff/h₀.

Algebraic complexity can only increase since there the number for systems more complex than a given system is infinitely larger than the number with smaller complexity. This reduces evolution to number theory and quantum mechanics. For the mathematical background of TGD inspired quantum theory of conscious and quantum biology, see for instance this , this , this , this , and this.

Classical signaling takes place with light velocity

Also the classical processing of information might take place much faster then in neuroscience picture. The existence of biophotons has been known for about century but still neuroscience refuse to take them seriously. TGD indeed suggests also that neuroscience view about classical information processing is wrong (see for instance this , this this, this). Nerve pulses need not be the primeary carriers of sensory information. The function of nerve pulses could be only to serve as relays at the synaptic contacts. This would make possible the real information transfer as dark photons (photons with large value of h_eff) along monopole flux tubes associated with axons and also leading to the field body of the brain. Biophotons, whose origin is not understood, would result in the transformation of dark photons to biophotons (see this).

The brain could use dark photon signals propagating along monopole flux tubes carrying information. The information would be coded by the frequency modulation of the Josephson frequencies associated with the cell membranes with large value of h_eff making the Josephson frequency small. The signal would be received at the field body of appropriate subsystem of the brain by cyclotron resonance and the signal would give rise to a sequence of pulses, which would define the feedback to the brain and possibly generate nerve pulses. Light velocity is by factor 10⁶-10⁷ higher than the velocity of the nerve pulses about 10-100 m/s. This allows a lot of data processing involving forth and back-signalling in order to build standardized mental images from the incoming sensory information (see this).

In TGD, this would allow classical signalling with a field body of size scale of the Earth in time scale shorter than .1 seconds (alpha frequency), which is roughly the duration of what might be called chronon of human conscious experience. After this signal is received by the field body, a phase transition generating quantum coherence at the level of field body takes place and induces coherence in the scale of brain or even body.

Zero energy ontology predicts time reversals in the counterparts of ordinary state function reductions

Also zero energy ontology in which “big” state function reductions (BSFRs) as the TGD counterparts of ordinary state function reductions change the arrow of time can make the information processing faster and the proposal is that the motor responses involve signals propagating with the reverse arrow of geometric time so that the response would start already in the geometric past. Libet’s findings that volitional action is preceded by brain activity support this view.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.

Source: https://matpitka.blogspot.com/2025/04/is-brain-quantum-critical.html