Johnjoe McFadden: https://johnjoemcfadden.co.uk/
John Gribbin Schrodinger's Cat: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/71855/in-search-of-schrodingers-cat-by-john-gribbin/
ALICE: Today we’re speaking with Johnjoe McFadden, scientist, academic and Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, in the United Kingdom.
McFadden wrote the popular science book, “Quantum Evolution”, which examines the role of quantum mechanics in life, evolution and consciousness. The book has been described as offering an alternative evolutionary mechanism, beyond the neo-Darwinian framework.
ALICE: John, what is your background, and what are you working on today?
McFADDEN: My name is Johnjoe McFadden, and I've been a researcher for most of my professional life. And I started off as a biologist, a biochemist, and I drifted off into looking into infectious disease. And that took me into looking at molecular genetics of bacteria
In the 1990s, I read John Gribbin's Schrodinger's Cat, and all of that was normal. All of that was nothing compared to how weird the world is, if you take quantum mechanics seriously. The world is very, very weird at its fundamentals. And we just don't see it.
As a biochemist, I knew that, actually, science is about the motion of atoms, particles, and molecules. And we go through our biochemistry textbooks, and we say, ah, well, a proton here is moved over to here. Quantum mechanics says, no, it isn't. It isn't moved over there. It's both here and there at the same time
So I started thinking that quantum mechanics has a much more general role in biology, particularly as you start thinking about enzymes. And they're the kind of engines of biology. They do all the action, like make all the macromolecules in your cell. And they just move atoms and particles and protons and electrons. So they're engineers at the quantum scale.
ALICE: In 2000 you wrote a book, Quantum Evolution. And your book had a whole chapter on the research of consciousness
McFADDEN: a theory that was out there at the time, by the very eminent mathematician, Roger Penrose-- Oxford-based mathematician who has recently had the Nobel Prize for his work-- and the anesthetist, Stuart Hameroff, who came up with this fascinating theory about quantum mechanics and the brain, and trying to explain consciousness as quantum mechanical phenomenon in the brain.
I didn't feel I could make a case for this quantum mechanical idea. But what I got out of their work was the conviction that consciousness is a field.
ALICE: Wow. Ok. So, consciousness is a field. What do you mean, a field?
McFADDEN: What a field means in science and physics is a space in which something has different values in different places.
So fields have this extraordinary property that they unify everything. And in consciousness, there's a big problem in understanding what's called the binding problem. And that is if you stare-- just look at a visual field, for example. But it works for other things as well. But I can look out the window. I see tree. It's waving slightly in the autumn breeze. It's got lots of colors-- green and browns and some grays and yellows. When all that stuff reaches my retina, from the light hitting my retina, then all of the information in the tree, all of that kind of stuff is stripped apart from the image. And it all goes down different tracks in your brain, and different neuronal pathways.
And then it doesn't come together. Just the computations along these independent pathways will eventually come up with some kind of output-- oh look, there's a tree. But there's nowhere in the brain where all the information comes together. If you look at the neurons, that's all just distributed, They're all going-- all of the information is going along lots of different wires. So then you come to the problem, the binding problem, of understanding where is this binding happening.
It seems to be though, visual field and idea is a kind of big, whole, complex thing. And yet, our brain doesn't seem to operate in that way. It strips things down, rather like a computer does, and analyzes different bits individually. And it can't really correspond to our conscious mind, which seems to be instantaneous, containing a lot of information all bound together. Hence, the binding problem. Where does the binding happen?
Fields could potentially provide that, I thought. And this is what Penrose and Hameroff had argued. And they argued it, saying that it was a matter field-- a field of matter in the brain. And to do that, they needed the matter to be in a quantum mechanical state.
ALICE: So it seems that a matter field in our brain is what binds all the information we take in. How would you describe this matter field? And is it electromagnetic?
McFADDEN: We all have these mobile phones, which download a signal, which is being transmitted miles away. And if I can download the signal here, and if I move a mile away, I can still download the same signal, because it's part of a field.
And again, it's an electromagnetic field. It encodes lots of information, and I can watch a movie on there. So from a tiny antenna right in here, I can encode, I can download this entire movie-- highly complex information. And I can do that a mile away, as well. And that's kind of remarkable. It tells you that that same information is at two points in space, separated by a mile, or many miles.
And it just occurred to me, that's where it's got to be. That's where consciousness has to be-- there. And it makes so much sense.
It's actually dealing with something that we know exists in the brain. And it's the brain's electromagnetic field, that we measure it EEG and MEG. So it just occurred to me, wow, that's-- obviously, it's the right place.
ALICE: Wait—the brain has an electromagnetic field! Several episodes earlier, in an archival interview with physicist Fritz Albert Popp, we learned that, “we are swimming in an electromagnetic ocean.” Could our consciousness be part of the electromagnetic field?
McFADDEN: It occurred to me that if a consciousness was, as I describe it, electromagnetic-- electromagnetic influences go as waves.
If you just, kind of, toss a pebble into a pond, a still pond, you'll see the waves coming out. Toss two pebbles, and you'll see the wave patterns interfering with each other, where the wave of one pebble meets the wave of another.
And at some points, they cancel each other out. Because the peak of one wave has met the trough of another wave, and when you add them together, you get zero waves, in the middle. So at some points they'll cancel out-- in fact, at most points they'll cancel out-- because mostly they'll be asynchronous, if you like. But at some points, they'll be waving together where the amplitude peak of one meets the peak of another, and the trough of one meets the trough of another.
There was a prediction of a theory that, if it was right, it would predict that synchronous firing of neurons sho...
