I parked my car and headed out into the cool evening air. I’d made reservations for us at Sydney’s, an upscale place housed in the century-old Grand Trunk Pacific Railway Stable. Kayla was already seated when I got there—gotta love that punctuality—and—what a sweetheart!—she’d already asked the server to bring a vegetarian menu for me. We had a great table by a semicircular window; it arched up from a horizontal sill overlooking the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Kayla was wearing a shimmering blue top and gray pants.
After we’d ordered, I said, “So, at lunch you were talking about the quantum physics of consciousness.”
She took a sip of wine. “That’s right. My research partner is a woman named Victoria Chen. As I said earlier, she’s developed a system that can detect quantum superposition in neural tissue.”
“I’m no physicist, but I thought you couldn’t have quantum effects like that in living things.”
“Oh, it definitely happens in some biological systems. We’ve known since 2007 that there’s superposition in chlorophyll, for instance. Photosynthesis has a ninety-five percent energy-transfer efficiency rate, which is better than anything we can engineer. Plants achieve that by using superposition to simultaneously try all the possible pathways between their light-collecting molecules and their reaction-center proteins so that energy is always sent down the most efficient route; it’s a form of biological quantum computing. Vic was curious about how plants manage that at room temperature while we have to chill our quantum computers to a fraction above absolute zero to get superposition. And, well, as I mentioned at lunch, I’ve long been interested in the Penrose-Hameroff model that says quantum superposition in the microtubules of neuronal tissue is what gives rise to consciousness. So I convinced Vic to let me try her technique on people, to see if there really is superposition in human brains.”
“And?”
“And, oh my God, yes, there is. It’s not quite what Hameroff and Penrose proposed, but they definitely opened the door for this line of work.” She sighed wistfully. “I suspect Vic and I will have to share our eventual Nobel with one of them—they only allow three people on a Nobel, so Stuart and Roger will have to fight it out between themselves.”
“Ha.”
“Yeah, see, they think consciousness occurs in the moments of collapse from superposition to classical physics—that each moment of collapse is a moment of consciousness, forty or so of them per second. It was an interesting theoretical model when they first put it forth in the 1990s, but Victoria has shown that superposition in microtubules, unique among body structures, is maintained indefinitely—indeed, probably permanently.”
I frowned. “But I thought quantum superposition was fragile. Doesn’t it fall apart?”
“Not as far as we can tell. Not ever—or at least not as long as the person is alive.”
“Why not?”
“Vic calls it ‘entanglement inertia,’ and, I’ve got to say that it’s a revolutionary-enough discovery that it might get her the Nobel on her own. See, a single electron will decohere rapidly, falling out of superposition, but, for whatever reason, the countless trillions of superpositioned electrons in a given brain are locked together in a way that defies quantum theory, and so probabilistic laws apply. At any moment, any one of them might wish to decohere back to the classical state, but, unless a majority simultaneously want to, it doesn’t happen. We’ve got computer simulations that show the tipping point never comes, at least not normally. Oh, an external force—an anesthetic, for instance—can cause the superposition to decohere, but without something like that, the superposition never collapses. It just keeps on going on.”
I made an impressed face. “Has she published yet?”
Kayla shook her head. “It’s out for peer review at Neuron.”
“Sounds like a great paper.”
“I’ll send you a preprint. But it’s only the first of several papers; she and I also have one coming up in Physics of Life Reviews.”
I took a sip of my own wine. “Oh? What about?”
“Well, Penrose proposed that each tubulin macromolecule has a single two-lobed hydrophobic pocket with just one free electron. But he also offhandedly remarked that there might actually be multiple hydrophobic pockets, each with its own electron. And that’s exactly what Vic and I have found: there are actually three hydrophobic pockets in each tubulin macromolecule.”
“Okay.”
“And all the tubulin macromolecules in a given brain are quantally entangled, meaning collectively they’re all in the same state: the combination of superpositioned and classical electrons is the same in every tubulin in the brain of a given individual.”
“Ah.”
“That means that each person is in one of eight possible conditions: all three pocketed electrons in the classical-physics state; all three in superposition; or six possible combinations of one or two electrons in the classical state and the remaining ones in superposition.”
“Very cool.”
“Thanks. Now, we don’t think it matters which electrons are in superposition and which aren’t; electrons, like all subatomic particles, are fungible. So that means there are really only four states not eight: no electrons in superposition, any one of the three in superposition, any two in superposition, and all three in superposition. In other words, there’s the classical-physics state, plus three states with quantum superposition: Q1, Q2, and Q3.”
“Got it.”
“And it’s the Q2 state that caused me to look you up; that’s where my research dovetails with yours. I ran a couple of hundred volunteers through Victoria’s beamline—the test doesn’t take long—and found that everybody’s got at least one electron in superposition. Nobody was in the classical-physics state; everyone was either Q1, Q2, or Q3. And the three cohorts are each successively smaller, a 4:2:1 ratio, each group half the size of the one before it. In round numbers, sixty percent of our test subjects had only one electron in superposition; thirty percent—half as many—had any two in superposition; and about fifteen percent had all three in superposition.”
“I suppose it’s like juggling,” I offered. “Easy to keep one ball in the air, harder with two, and a bitch with three.”
“Yeah, that’s our thinking, too. Assuming those ratios hold true for the entire human race, if you think of Earth’s population as seven billion people—it’s really more like 7.7, but for convenience’s sake let’s assume abstinence-only sex education actually worked, and round down—that means there are four billion in the first cohort, two billion in the second, and just one billion in the third.”
“Right.”
“Anyway,” said Kayla, “I was curious if there were any psychological differences between the cohorts, and so I administered a standard five-factor-model personality measure on each subject and—bada-bing!—all our Q2s had scores that correlated with psychopathy.”
“Ah,” I said, finally getting it. “You came up with a triad suggestive of psychopathy: low conscientiousness, low agreeableness, high extraversion.”
“Exactly! Got essentially the same results when I tried HEXACO, too, so we moved on to the Lilienfeld Psychopathic Personality Inventory and the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, and found an almost perfect correlation between psychopathy and having any two of the three electrons in superposition. Didn’t matter which two—that’s how we confirmed the fungibility notion—but if you had two out of three, you were a psychopath.” She raised a hand, palm out. “Not necessarily a violent one, mind you. You were just as likely to be one of those Hare calls ‘a snake in a suit,’ a ruthless businessperson. Still, it’s a clear-cut relationship, just like your microsaccades thing.”