[HN Gopher] Photon entanglement could explain the rapid brain si...
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Photon entanglement could explain the rapid brain signals behind
consciousness
Author : wglb
Score : 25 points
Date : 2024-08-17 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| fsckboy wrote:
| tl;dr they've shown quantum entanglement can occur inside nerve
| fibers, and speculate that it could explain the speed of brain
| communication
|
| _a research group in China has shown that many entangled photons
| can be generated inside the myelin sheath that covers nerve
| fibers. It could explain the rapid communication between neurons,
| which so far has been thought to be below the speed of sound, too
| slow to explain how the neural synchronization occurs._
|
| _" If the power of evolution was looking for handy action over a
| distance, quantum entanglement would be [an] ideal candidate for
| this role," said Yong-Cong Chen in a statement to Phys.org. Chen
| is a professor at the Shanghai Center for Quantitative Life
| Sciences and Physics Department at Shanghai University._
|
| The paper is published in the journal Physical Review E.
|
| https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2401.11682
| bmenrigh wrote:
| I don't get the "action at a distance" leading to
| synchronization.
|
| Quantum entanglement doesn't transmit information. Is there
| some mechanism for synchronization without information
| transfer?
| croemer wrote:
| I also don't get it. I'm surprised this made it through
| review with this title and abstract. They should have left
| the speculation about consciousness out of it.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I did a quick google for explanations:
|
| https://theconversation.com/what-is-quantum-entanglement-
| a-p...
|
| _In the simplest terms, quantum entanglement means that
| aspects of one particle of an entangled pair depend on
| aspects of the other particle, no matter how far apart they
| are or what lies between them. These particles could be, for
| example, electrons or photons, and an aspect could be the
| state it is in, such as whether it is "spinning" in one
| direction or another._
|
| _The strange part of quantum entanglement is that when you
| measure something about one particle in an entangled pair,
| you immediately know something about the other particle, even
| if they are millions of light years apart. This odd
| connection between the two particles is instantaneous,
| seemingly breaking a fundamental law of the universe. Albert
| Einstein famously called the phenomenon "spooky action at a
| distance."_
|
| https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2022/10/popular-
| physicspr...
|
| _Interesting things happen if the particles in an entangled
| pair travel in opposite directions and one of them then meets
| a third particle in such a manner that they become entangled.
| They then enter a new shared state. The third particle loses
| its identity, but its original properties have now been
| transferred to the solo particle from the original pair. This
| way of transferring an unknown quantum state from one
| particle to another is called quantum teleportation._
|
| _Remarkably, quantum teleportation is the only way to
| transfer quantum information from one system to another
| without losing any part of it. It is absolutely impossible to
| measure all the properties of a quantum system and then send
| the information to a recipient who wants to reconstruct the
| system...However, entirely unknown quantum properties can be
| transferred using quantum teleportation and appear intact in
| another particle, but at the price of them being destroyed in
| the original particle._
|
| _Once this had been shown experimentally, the next step was
| to use two pairs of entangled particles. If one particle from
| each pair are brought together in a particular way, the
| undisturbed particles in each pair can become entangled
| despite never having been in contact with each other. This
| entanglement swapping was first demonstrated in 1998 by Anton
| Zeilinger's research group. Entangled pairs of photons,
| particles of light, can be sent in opposite directions
| through optical fibres and function as signals in a quantum
| network. Entanglement between two pairs makes it possible to
| extend the distances between the nodes in such a network._
| dekhn wrote:
| They didn't "show" anything; that would require scientific
| evidence (in the form of an experiment).
| Animats wrote:
| Right. It's plausible mathematics, not an experimental
| result. That's reasonable research, but the title and
| conclusions overreach.
| davidhs wrote:
| Since when did information travel quickly in the brain (compared
| to the speed of light)?
| croemer wrote:
| Not compared to light, fast compared to the measure speed of
| signal transmission along axons which is less than speed of
| sound, so relatively slow.
| croemer wrote:
| I studied Physics. Sure they calculated that some entanglement
| can happen in some theory. But it's a huge stretch to relate it
| to consciousness. That's just clickbait in my view and should
| have been left out. It's trending here just because of the
| clickbaity title.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| They should have referenced Penrose theory
| teekert wrote:
| Cocktail physicists always want some connection between Quantum
| Mechanics and consciousness. It's their last thing to hold onto
| when it comes to believing they have real free will.
| frereubu wrote:
| I studied neuroscience and I agree, this is unlikely to have
| anything to do with anything. In my view it's much more likely
| that the speed of processing is due to the brain constantly
| making predictions - it's an interesting thought experiment to
| consider the brain as simply a huge prediction machine in
| various modalities - most of which are pretty accurate, and
| therefore fast, once you've been alive for a while.
|
| Once you get unexpected outcomes then the speed of thought
| slows down a lot. I was studying the neurobiology of reading
| and a good example is the difference in brain activity caused
| by the two sentences "The jam on the motorway was very slow"
| and "The jam on the motorway was very sticky" - the first
| elicits almost no activity, but the second causes a lot more
| activity because of the unexpected word "sticky" needs to be
| parsed consciously.
|
| I think it's an issue of scale in some ways. The brain is so
| complex it's almost impossible to think about it clearly except
| in very focused studies. There's a lot of deeply
| methodologically flawed research out there making overly broad
| claims.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| This is a great example of issues with LLM design, which is
| that they apply a constant amount of compute to both
| sentences (modulo a token or two).
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Something speculative is where the ghosts and soul live. How
| else are we ever going to prove Intelligent Design isn't total
| crap?
| ijidak wrote:
| I've always assumed quantum entanglement is being leveraged in
| the brain.
|
| Why?
|
| Because, seeing the speeds needed for the type of computing the
| brain does, chemistry -- e.g. the classical changes in atoms due
| to classical interactions-- just doesn't seem fast enough to
| propagate across the volume of the brain.
|
| Maybe the fields move fast enough... (By fields I mean electro-
| magnetic, etc.)
|
| But, since entanglement is a thing, it would seem far fetched
| that the brain doesn't leverage it.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Since entanglement can't break classical speed limits on
| information transfer, you'll have to keep looking for another
| explanation if electrochemistry doesn't float your boat.
| croemer wrote:
| I'm not sure your intuition here is right. It's an electric
| signal that travels in axons. Like in computer chips in a way.
| But slower because ions in water travel mich slower than
| electrons in metals.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > Because, seeing the speeds needed for the type of computing
| the brain does
|
| Which computations specifically are happening specifically in
| the brain?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| They emphasize the slowness of action potentials along axons.
|
| But electrical waves, which emerge as the collection of action
| potentials, move much faster. It's related to the volleying
| approach of neuronal populations: the cortex can phase lock to
| 1000+ hz sound waves, even though individual neurons can only
| fire <200hz. Populations of neurons have faster responses than
| single neurons. Electrical oscillations in large neuronal
| populations can create fast electrical activity (such as
| resonance phenomena) over a large distance.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| None of these "faster than the constituent parts" phenomena can
| transmit information faster than the constituent parts, though.
| bgnn wrote:
| Massive 3-d parallelism is underrated. Natural neural systems
| evolved to deal with special cases that require very fast
| response time via local reflexes which are trained very slowly.
| They are still in millisecond range. All the computation in the
| cerebral cortex doesn't need tp be fast. This is what we think
| it should be thinking the computers we build.
| dboreham wrote:
| It's just multiplying matrices. No magic required.
| gryfft wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41276390
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41267901
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