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Sept. 30, 2006 - Art Bell

02:39:35

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Dr. Stuart Hameroff - Consciousness and the Brain

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	Asian capital city...
	of the Philippines, Manila.
	I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, the very largest program of its sort in the nighttime across the U.S., Canada, or any other land on the face of the globe.
	Hi, everybody.
	I'm Art Bell, the original creator of all this, I guess, and it is an amazing thing, I tell you, that I am here right now.
	Absolutely astounding, actually, that I'm here at all right now, because I've got a little bit of a story to tell you.
	We went through one hell of a typhoon.
	We still do not have electrical power here in, I believe, the majority of Manila.
	There are spots that are beginning to get it, but we have been without power here now for four days.
	Four days ago, I had seen it coming for about two days.
	I had seen This crazy thing coming.
	There's a website up there called Para, P-A-R-A, which is the Philippine Amateur Radio Association website, and they had a pretty good take on what was going on with this typhoon.
	And I saw it begin to turn.
	First it was going northwest, then it began going west-northwest, then it turned, finally, at the last minute, the last few hours, into a westerly direction.
	This thing had winds of about 160 kilometers per hour, and it came right over Manila.
	Now, we woke up that morning, and I'm telling you, it was sheer terror.
	Now, these 160 kilometer winds were at the ground.
	Bear in mind, we're on the 19th floor of a condominium building.
	That puts about 190 feet to 180-190 feet in the air, something like that.
	Almost 200 feet in the air.
	the air or something like that, almost 200 feet in the air.
	And so let me tell you it was some terrifying experience to be sure.
	The windows, and they're really extra thick windows that we have here in this kind of
	and him really thick with the big hard closers, you know, that kind of deal.
	You could put your hand on the window and you could feel the window.
	It was almost like a horror movie.
	Have you ever seen those horror movies where the door, where the window is bowing in?
	You know, actually, you can see it bulging in.
	That's what was happening to our windows.
	And we could look out, dangerous as it was, we could look out the windows and we could see other windows breaking in adjacent condominiums and or falling out completely.
	There was a fair amount of damage to our building.
	I think the first floor flooded.
	We lost a lot of windows and some...
	Manila really got hit hard.
	some facade at the beginning of the building and of course almost all the trees are down.
	So in order to walk outside you're just walking over downed trees and God knows what else.
	Manila really got hit hard. Manila really, really got hit hard. So we still do not have
	electrical power. And the way I'm operating is we have a backup generator in this building
	and it supplies a little bit of power so that you get a little bit of power for some things
	like for example one air conditioner is allowed to be run in the master bedroom and a couple
	of power outlets are active and that kind of thing. So I sort of jerry-rigged the whole
	Uh, the ability to get power in here to power up my, uh, computers and, uh, the equipment that I would use to get on the air.
	And that's how I'm on the air right now.
	It's all running on backup generator.
	Now, somehow or another, magically, we still have, although it comes and goes, we have internet and we have some television.
	So we're able to see what's going on around, uh, around the city.
	And, uh, that would not be most, most people are totally in the dark.
	without the ability to cook unless they have gas.
	And it's been four days now and this is a major capital city, or the major capital city of course, of the Philippine
	Islands.
	And they're out there, Maralco, our power companies out there, doing the very best they can.
	But I mean, big, the big 25, 50, 100,000 volt lines, those came down.
	and have been into twisted masses of metal.
	It was just really, it's a wreck out there.
	And they've actually declared a state of calamity is what we have here, a state of calamity.
	So, here I am.
	If we're able to get the correct photograph up, and I think we will be able to eventually.
	I'm unable to get it here and I checked with the guys back in California just prior to the program and they're not really getting it either.
	But I think Lex and everybody back at the website is working on getting that picture to refresh.
	If it does, what you're going to get, instead of a picture of Aaron and myself, Is a picture of, uh, Abydos.
	Now, Abydos, of course the cats totally went berserk during the typhoon.
	I mean, this was scary.
	No, this was actually terrifying, would be a more appropriate word, terrifying.
	My God, it was terrifying.
	So it was terrifying for the cats, too.
	Abby ran to the back of the condo and ran, we have a little door, a swinging door that we installed, and we have a maid's quarters back there.
	We don't have a maid, but we have a maid's quarters.
	And there's a little comfort room, otherwise known as a bathroom in the United States, for the maid to use.
	And, uh, we don't use it.
	So, uh, Abby ran back there and jumped into his typhoon shelter, which was, in this case, the maid's sink.
	So that's where Abby spent his typhoon time, in the maid's sink.
	Now, it was dead dark in there, so I thought it was so funny, I went back.
	Looking for any humor, got my camera and took a flash picture, but it was dead dark back there and you can see Abby, uh, Abydos, uh, curled up in his little typhoon shelter there.
	If that picture will, uh, will refresh for you.
	All right.
	That's it, so we've had a typhoon.
	We are now into our fourth day without power.
	The sun has come out now in Menlo on this fourth day, and so it's hotter than hell out there.
	We walked down the street, we have a pancake house here, and we walked down the street prior to the program this day and thought, well, we'll grab some breakfast.
	Well, they have no power down there at the pancake house, and let me tell you, baby, it's hot out there.
	You know, it's the way it is when a storm ends, the sun comes out, it's very humid, and they had no power at all in the pancake house, and those poor people back in the kitchen, my God.
	Actually, as we left, they said, that's it.
	We're closing.
	Even we can't stand it.
	And the Filipino people are pretty tough when it comes to heat.
	But they said, no, we've had enough.
	We're closing up.
	You're the last customer.
	See you later.
	And that was it.
	We ran back here.
	And I knew I had the show to do and so forth and so on.
	And so they've just closed their doors.
	Everybody's waiting, hoping, praying for power to be restored.
	I imagine that will occur shortly.
	We will do open lines coming up early this hour, so if you want to get a head start on that and begin calling right now, you're certainly more than welcome to.
	In a moment, I'll take a look at the world situation and a bit more.
	Anyway, I thought you didn't... Oh, one more thing.
	I did, for the hams out there, last week, just one day, Before the typhoon, went to this organization known as PARA, P-A-R-A, Philippine Amateur Radio Association, and applied for my reciprocal permit to operate here in the Philippines.
	Oh my God, I'm glad I didn't have an antenna up.
	Not that I've been given permission to put one up or anything.
	I thought I'd wait until I received the license, but that's well underway.
	So I will have my Philippine operation license here shortly.
	Took them all the appropriate paperwork.
	Everything is done with a lot of paperwork here in the Philippines.
	And then the next day, the typhoon struck.
	That was, I guess I would say, that was the most terrifying thing I've ever been through.
	As you know, my wife is from here.
	She said it was the most terrifying one she's ever been through.
	And if you were to look around Manila right now, last I heard there were 23 dead, which is a fairly small death toll when you consider the size of this typhoon.
	There you have it.
	I've heard, by the way, there is another typhoon out in the Pacific churning around right now, and for some reason I think it might head our way.
	So we have that to look forward to as well.
	So there you have it.
	Manila totally clobbered by a typhoon.
	When we get back, we'll look at the rest of the world.
	Lex or Sean, if you're listening out there, I'm still not getting any refresh that shows
	the new webcam photograph.
	Too bad!
	It's really cute.
	That's where Abydos chose to stay throughout the typhoon.
	God, what a terrifying experience it really was.
	And then one other item.
	I mentioned this last week and I'm going to mention it again now because it's very, very important to me.
	A number of years ago, Somebody wrote, the FBI believes, it was written at the University of California at San Diego, some letter slamming the Philippine people on my behalf.
	They signed my name to it.
	Of course, I would never write such a thing.
	But somebody anonymously walked into the library at the University of California at San Diego and wrote this letter putting my name to it, slamming the Philippine people.
	And now that I'm here in the Philippines, of course, they have decided to recirculate this letter.
	Making life rather dangerous for me here, and I'm getting a lot of death threats so once again I have Had them post this hoax alert, and I would appreciate it if you'd take a look-see at that But I'm getting a lot of death threats, and it's a little scary because over here that sort of thing well that sort of thing is just kind of dangerous put it that way and Baghdad shut down on suspicion of attack.
	U.S.
	military said a captured Al-Qaeda suspect and members of his cell were in the final stages of planning an attack on the Green Zone.
	What's the Green Zone?
	It's supposed to be a safe area.
	An unprecedented curfew prompted by the arrest left millions of Baghdadis stranded at home on Saturday without Any supplies during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
	The U.S.
	military said the suspected Al Qaeda in Iraq member was arrested late Friday at the home of the senior Sunni Arab political leader there where he was working as a personal bodyguard.
	Representative Thomas Reynolds, head of the House Republican election effort, said Saturday that he told Speaker Dennis Hastert months ago about concerns that a fellow GOP lawmaker had sent inappropriate messages to a teenage boy.
	Astrid's office said aides referred the matter to the proper authorities last fall, but they were only told the messages were, quote, over-friendly, end quote.
	Reynolds, a Republican from New York, was told about emails sent by Representative Foley and is now defending himself from Democratic accusations that he did too little.
	Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned Friday after ABC News questioned him about the emails to a former congressional page.
	And about sexually suggestive instant messages to other pages.
	Israeli military officials said the army withdrew the last of its troops from Lebanon early Sunday, fulfilling a key condition of the ceasefire that ended a month-long war with Hezbollah guerrillas, pulled out ended a nearly three-month troop presence, and now clears the way for the UN to come in and make what peace or keep what peace they can.
	Military helicopters lowered a rescue team by rope Saturday into the remote Amazon jungle site where an airliner slammed into the ground.
	Authorities, though, held out little hope of finding anybody alive among the 155 on board.
	That's 155 people.
	The team began clearing dense vegetation near the wreckage site so a helicopter could land.
	In a mountain meadow not very far from where she was shot by a gunman who invaded her school, those who knew Emily Keyes and many who did not came together on a bright, breezy fall Saturday to remember the teen and hear a message of forgiveness and hope.
	Family friend Louis Gonzalez asked mourners to embrace Emily's last words to her family.
	A text message that said, I love you guys, sent to her father, who was standing in view of the school as she was held hostage.
	An overpass near Montreal collapsed Saturday, crushing two cars whose occupants were feared dead.
	At least five other people injured there.
	A previously unseen video made by Mohammed Atta, ringleader of the September 11th attacks on the United States, has been obtained by Britain's The Sunday Times.
	The newspaper reported Saturday in additions available late Saturdays that it had been handed the so-called martyrdom video, but did not reveal the source of the tape.
	Researchers at NASA Are saying Earth's temperature, get this now folks, has reached levels not seen in thousands of years and this phenomena has begun to affect its inhabitants.
	That would be both plants and us, animals.
	Reporting in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, prestigious right?
	The researchers, led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit a decade for the last 30 years.
	And this has brought the overall temperature to the highest point since the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago.
	They said the warming is higher in the far north than elsewhere, as melting ice tended to expose the darker land and rocks beneath the snow cover, which in turn has begun absorbing more heat from the sun, more on the land than water.
	Water has higher capacity to hold heat than land, and changes temperatures slower than land.
	The researchers found the warming has been significant in the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans, which have major impact on climate change.
	They're concerned that any warming there could lead to more El Nino episodes.
	Hansen said in a statement, the evidence is indication that Earth is getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution.
	He said human-made greenhouse gases have become the dominant climate change factor.
	He added, quote, if further global warming reaches two or three degrees Celsius, We're going to likely see changes that make Earth a very different planet than the one we know now.
	The last time it was warm was in the middle, well about 3 million years ago actually, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters higher than today.
	Imagine that now!
	No New Orleans, that's for sure.
	The researchers say although warming is most noticeable at the poles, higher latitudes are still among the coolest spots around.
	For animals and plants, it can survive only within certain temperature ranges.
	These will be the only places to go as their current home, or homes, I guess plural, will become intolerably warm.
	In a study done in 2003, it has been brought out that nearly 1,700 plant and animal species had moved toward the poles, or about 4 miles per decade, in the last 50 years.
	And this from Great Britain.
	The Ministry of Defence went to extraordinary lanes, apparently, to cover up its true involvement in investigating UFOs, according to secret documents revealed under the Freedom of Information Act.
	The files show that officials attempted to expunge information from documents released to the Public Records Office under the quote, 30-year rule, end quote, that would have revealed the extent of the MOD's interest in UFO sightings.
	In particular, the ministry wanted to cover up the operation of a secret unit dedicated, dedicated mind you, to UFO investigations.
	Within the Defense Intelligence Staff, UFO conspiracy theorists have linked the unit called D-155 to a sort of men-in-black agency for defending the Earth against invasion.
	But the release documents show this is far from the truth.
	One 1995 memo from D-155 to the MOD's public UFO desk said, quote, I have several books at home that describe our supposed role of defender of the Earth against alien menace.
	It is light years from the truth.
	The files were made public following FOI, Freedom of Information requests, by David Clark, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield, Harlem University, and his colleague Andy Roberts.
	Both these documents don't tell us anything about UFOs, but they do show how desperate the MOD has been to conceal the interest which the intelligence services had in the subject.
	The trail begins with a request in 76 from a UFO enthusiast called Julian Hennessy for access to the M.O.D.' 's records on UFO sightings.
	A note from the UFO desk to the M.O.D.' 's head of security on March 23rd shows that officials intended to refuse him access.
	All on the grounds that the files contain Confidential information, and it would be, quote, of very little value to a serious scientific investigator, end quote.
	But the note continues, this is not to say that the investigation is not taken seriously.
	Branches have their own methods and the public UFO desk has no need to know about them.
	But we are aware that D-155, for example, sometimes makes extensive inquiries.
	So there you have it.
	Again, more from Great Britain than we get from our own country.
	All right, listen, I would love to get emails from you.
	Obviously, I cannot answer every email I get, but I'm making the very best attempt I can to answer as many as I can.
	If you would like to email me, I am.
	Artbell, that's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at AOL.com, or perhaps better yet, Artbell at MindSpring.com.
	That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L, all lowercase, just simple, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, at MindSpring.com.
	And I depend on many of you for relevant information, stories that would be of interest to the entire Listening audience, stories that I think are appropriate for this program, which is not so much the regular news, but the maybe normal news, if you will.
	So, there you have it.
	I would love to hear from any of you who feel you have anything earth-shaking, or even semi-earth-shaking, that the audience would like to hear.
	In a moment, we're going to go to open lines, anything you would like to talk about for the next half hour, and then we're going to delve into the world of consciousness.
	There is so very much to talk about in that world.
	From Manila, ravaged by a typhoon in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	Indeed so, from actually devastated Manila, Philippines.
	Man, I am telling you, this typhoon just ripped through here.
	I bet that our windows, and we have very, very strong windows here, but I'll bet that those windows were bowing in about an inch.
	You can actually feel them.
	It was like a horror movie.
	They were moving in so far.
	It was just amazing.
	My God, that was a strong typhoon.
	In the last, I don't know, few hours, it took a jog to the west, which put it basically right over Manila.
	And again, we're into our fourth day now without power.
	They tell us that just about any day now, we may get power.
	And once more, I would like to make the simple request that as many of you as possible go to the Coast to Coast AM website.
	By the way, I'm told that about I don't know, half of you are getting the picture of Abby Doe sitting in the sink, and the other half are not.
	I'm told by those in charge of the website back there, it depends on whether you're shoveled off to a proxy server or not, whatever that means.
	So some of you are getting the correct photograph, others not.
	I imagine that'll slowly straighten out as the servers straighten out.
	And then just one additional thing, again, This is becoming a very very dangerous situation for us over here because of that damn Filipino bogus letter that was sent out years ago and it's now been sent recirculating again causing me to get and my wife to get a lot of death threats so since we are here in the Philippines it's a particularly dangerous because obviously there's not as much exposure to the truth over here even though believe it or not
	The Philippine Inquirer, the major newspaper here in Manila, actually I actually went ahead and published that letter without ever checking out whether it was true or not, then retracted it for about a week.
	But with it circulating once again, people don't realize it's old and wrong and bogus, and that's the way it is.
	And so, obviously, it makes it dangerous for us here.
	So if you could send out to as many of your friends, particularly Filipino friends, as you know, The fact that it's not true, hasn't been true for years, isn't true now, wasn't true then, we would certainly appreciate it.
	In a moment, we move to all of you.
	you. That is to say, open lines.
	Larry in Eugene, Oregon says, hey Art, glad to hear you're okay.
	Could you feel your building swaying, moving during the typhoon?
	Was curious since you're on the 19th floor.
	Answer, yes.
	Oh yes.
	Feel the building moving.
	The pressure was astoundingly large.
	The pressure of the wind was just unbelievable.
	A couple of times the windows blew open.
	Uh, the vibration, you know, try and put this into words for you, it's almost impossible how severe it was.
	I imagine we were getting 200 kilometer per 200 kilometer per hour winds here on the 19th floor.
	Easily, easily.
	And the vibration was so much that occasionally one of the windows would pop open and it would take the both of us to close it.
	Now, Erin, being a native Filipino, was prior to this typhoon, was very casual about it.
	I kept saying, hon, this typhoon is turning more toward us.
	She said, I've been through so many of them, don't worry about it.
	We're used to them here.
	Well, she has a whole different attitude now.
	I mean, she was absolutely terrified, as was I. This was really something.
	All right, let's go to the phones and see what awaits.
	East of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Say, East of the Rockies?
	Yes, I did.
	Awesome.
	How you doing, Art?
	Well, I'm all right.
	As I mentioned, we're into our fourth day with no power here, but otherwise.
	Well, I just wanted to call and tell you that I'm so glad that you're all right.
	George was warning us last night saying that they couldn't get a hold of you and, you know, I was a little worried about you, but good to hear that you're alright.
	Well, thank you.
	Yeah, lines are down everywhere.
	Big steel structures.
	You know, not the little ones, but the big steel power structures that hold the lines.
	They're down and they look like, you know, just a mess.
	So that gives you some idea of what it's like, Aaron.
	When we walk to a restaurant or something, we have to step over downed trees, so it's pretty serious.
	Wild.
	Wild.
	Well, I'm calling from Oklahoma, and we have some bad storms, but usually nothing that bad, so.
	Well, you have tornadoes.
	It's always something somewhere, right?
	Yeah.
	You guys get a little bit of warning.
	We don't get much warning, so that's kind of the tradeoff, I guess.
	I guess.
	All right.
	All right, thanks very much for the call and take care.
	West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Was that West of the Rockies?
	Yes.
	Oh, this is Chuck in Port Moody, British Columbia.
	Hi Chuck.
	Congratulations on surviving you and your wife that terrible storm.
	Beats the alternative.
	I was in the Army during the war and was in a typhoon on the way to Manila in 1945.
	And I know what a typhoon's like, because the ship was not very ship-worthy.
	Boy, that's the last place I'd want to be, is out on the ocean.
	I can't even imagine going through a typhoon in a ship, even a big one.
	Anyway, I want to wish you the best wishes to you and your wife, and tell her Ini Ibikita for me.
	Okay, buddy.
	Thank you very much, and take care.
	We'll go to, I think, the first time caller line, and John in New York, someplace or another.
	Hi, John.
	Hi, how are you doing?
	I'm glad you and your wife are safe and secure.
	I just have a question for you.
	How far inland do you have to worry about storm surge, even though you're 19 stories up, but storm surge and flooding?
	Manila Bay, I can see, I can look out the window here and I can see Manila Bay from here, but it's quite a ways away and it would have to cross a lot of land and a lot of city before it would get to me, so I'm not saying it couldn't, but I think we're okay in that regard.
	Okay, thank you very much.
	Oh, you're very welcome.
	And anything, you know, I understand that a lot of Americans don't really understand exactly what our situation is here.
	And under normal circumstances, you know, I'm totally open with my audience, and so I would not hesitate to actually describe precisely where we are with reference to everything in Manila.
	Under the current threatening circumstances, I think I'll let that one go.
	First, make that the wild card line.
	You're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, Art.
	Long time listener, first time caller.
	Glad to hear that you and your wife are safe.
	Thank you.
	Over the years, I've been listening for years, and over the years you've turned me on to so many great things, whether it be the subjects that you talk about, or television shows like Dead Like Maine.
	And the music that you listen to, you've turned me on to Lee Hazlewood, and Nancy Sinatra, and even Johnny Cash, which I said I'd never listen to country.
	Anyway, I thought I might be able to return the favor.
	And you were talking about Enya the other day and played a little bit.
	There's a band called Clannad, C-L-A-N-N-A-D, and they did an album called Lore, L-O-R-E, and they did a song called Trail of Tears.
	It has a Native American historical significance.
	I'm not really sure of it, but there's a story behind it.
	But the real reason I called is there is a gentleman by the name of Chris Rea, and he's relatively popular in Europe.
	He's done many, many, many albums, but he's right up your alley.
	He's a slide guitar player, blues singer, and deep voice like Lee Hazlewood.
	All right, well, you needn't say no more.
	I will absolutely check it out, and if it's appropriate, we'll give it a shot.
	The album is called The Road to Hell.
	Yes, very trippy music, and it will be a surprise.
	For instance, he does a song called You Must Be Evil.
	Well, he's talking about the news stations, because they're playing news that isn't fit for children, and his daughter is sitting crying on the floor.
	Listen, buddy, that's a fact.
	The news is not fit.
	Heck, a lot of it's not fit for adults.
	It's not good news.
	What's going on in the world right now is not good.
	We're obviously, more than not, and there are exceptions, of course, to this, but more than not, we're not on the right track.
	Humanity is not on the right track, and we're still kind of a warrior species, inclined to be more warrior-like than not, and I don't think that bodes well for a very long-term existence for all of us.
	On the international line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, Art.
	Hello.
	It's Nena.
	Us here, Tom and Nena from British Columbia.
	How you doing?
	Now this young lady came to visit us here in Manila.
	As a matter of fact, she just made it out of here before the typhoon.
	I think she flew on Sunday out of Manila, right?
	Yes.
	You know, I was really lucky.
	My God.
	You know, I have been phoning my kids and it seems I can't get hold of them.
	But we're glad you're okay.
	Tom was saying Say hi to Art, my God.
	We're so worried, you know.
	Well, we're okay.
	You probably cannot get through because obviously most of the phone lines here are down on the ground.
	Yeah.
	It's scary when you're on the 19th floor.
	I can't imagine your building, my God.
	Well, you can because you are here.
	Of course.
	How is Yeti?
	Both Abydos and Yeti are fine.
	I don't know whether you can get the photograph or not, but that's where Abydos spent his typhoon time.
	Yeah.
	In the sink.
	You were in the image room?
	Yeah, that's right.
	I saw that.
	How is Irene?
	Oh God, it's scary.
	Irene made it through fine.
	So you went to Pancake House again?
	Well, as a matter of fact, we just got this morning.
	You know, because there is no power, you don't want to cook in here because you raise the temperature here in the condo when you cook.
	So we went to Pancake House, and they had no power.
	Their generator was not working.
	And I saw the cook come out a couple of times, and there was so much sweat coming off his brow.
	The manager finally said, that's it, when you're gone, we're closing.
	And so, I got the last meal, as it were.
	You're lucky, you're lucky, you're lucky.
	But anyway, you're safe there, because it's Little America.
	I know the place now, it's really fantastic.
	Well, I would rather not identify exactly where we are.
	I know, I know, I know what you mean.
	But anyway, I'm glad, I'm glad that you're okay.
	Say hi to Irene, I know she's out there reading a paper.
	I will do that, and you say hello to Tom for me.
	That was a young lady who did make a trip here recently to Manila and came to visit us here in the condo, so she knows exactly where we are.
	Well, Cardline, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Yes, hello.
	Your screener tells me I've only got a very brief time to tell you what I'm thinking.
	Sure.
	A uniform expansion of the universe is based on the observation that wherever you are in the universe, the farther out you look, the more red-shifted stars are.
	I'm sorry, say it again.
	Wherever you are in the universe, I mean, wherever you are in the universe, the farther out a star is, the more red-shifted it is.
	That's correct.
	And therefore they say, well, the universe is expanding.
	It's linear.
	Expanding everywhere, no matter where you are.
	So the universe is expanding.
	But there's another theory, or possibility.
	Time is simply speeding up.
	If time were speeding up, then what would happen is, a million years ago, and it's been speeding up all along, because, well, okay, never mind because.
	It's less problematic than what they got.
	They have to say, oh, there's dark matter, it's pushing the galaxies apart, there's multiple universes, multiverse.
	I've heard that on your program before.
	But if time were simply speeding up, then you'd get the same redshift anywhere you looked, anywhere in the universe.
	Yeah, you know, that's a definite possibility.
	And scientists are constantly, astronomers are constantly revising what they previously thought.
	Whether it's the expanding universe theory, or whether it's when the Big Bang actually occurred.
	I think they recently changed their view of that by about two billion years.
	So, one doesn't really know.
	It could be time speeding up.
	These are areas that are at the very fringe of our knowledge.
	And so virtually anything is possible.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hey, how's it going, Art?
	Yeah, just fine, sir, under the circumstances.
	Well, yeah, I'm glad you made it.
	So I got a story here for you.
	I'll start from the beginning.
	My father and sister were deceased when I was five.
	And well, when I was 12, Me and my mom were having a conversation about him for a couple of hours in depth, and then that night, uh, it was, uh, stormy, and it was about 2 or 3 in the morning, and, uh, one of my sister's dolls, uh, started singing a song.
	You know, you pushed its wing and it sang a song.
	So I woke up my mom, I was a little scared.
	She came in and pulled that out of the closet, and, uh, I take the batteries out, and, well, there's no batteries, and it quit singing.
	And I just thought that was, you know, some sort of connection between the two worlds, perhaps, or, you know.
	Alright, I think that's entirely possible.
	Here's what I think.
	I think that, for example, if you If you're, for example, sitting in your living room, you spend two hours talking about a couple of people who are deceased from your family, that you form an intent that probably opens or may open some doors and make communication somewhat easier.
	I really think that a great deal of all of this has to do with intent.
	Now that does not go to whether it's really communication from the other side, or it's something within your own brain, or it's some sort of mass consciousness, which by the way is going to be the topic next hour, or any of the rest of it.
	But I do think simply talking about it and thinking about it creates an intent that makes it entirely possible for that kind of communication to occur.
	Let's go to this wildcard line and say, hello, you're on the air.
	Yeah, hi, Art.
	I'm in Cliff in Houston, Texas.
	Yes.
	And I got a question for you.
	I have a very good friend of mine that lives in Mindanao.
	How abed were they hit?
	Uh, they really weren't.
	Mininal got some heavy rains from it, but it is many, many miles by plane.
	It's about one hour to the south of where I'm located.
	Mininal is my wife's original home.
	She's from a place called Bukidon.
	Super, and if you would like, I have a super story that happened to me in 1973 about the Devil's Triangle.
	Gonna have to be pretty quick.
	I was fishing in the Florida Keys.
	I was standing there on a place called Indian Rocks Bridge.
	I was in a boat about a half mile from shore.
	I heard another boat approaching from my left, coming up behind me.
	I paid no attention to it.
	All of a sudden, the engine stopped.
	I turned around to look at the boat.
	No boat.
	There was foam from the propeller wash in the water.
	The boat was gone.
	That is a true, true story.
	Well, it is a strange, strange world, and I certainly don't have explanations for all of it, but if you... and that's what we're doing here, is opening doors, opening a few doors, allowing all of you to tell these kinds of stories.
	And who knows, perhaps even doing a radio program like this opens doors that otherwise would not be open, which accounts for why a lot occurs during this show.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Art?
	That's me.
	Well, this is someone from Mississippi, and I wanted to tell you what happened to us.
	I'm sorry you were in that typhoon.
	I have never been in a typhoon, but I've been through many hurricanes.
	But this last storm, Katrina, we stayed home.
	The roof blew off to begin with.
	The ceiling fell in on me, so I went to another room and got in the bed.
	And all of a sudden, water was over the top of the bed.
	And we looked at the stars for four nights before we could get the roof on.
	But I'm telling you, I've never seen a storm like that.
	I hear what you're saying.
	Bad as what we had here was.
	And it was bad.
	Obviously, what occurred to you was far worse.
	But I was worried about windows.
	And in reality, a lot of windows, you can look out my window right now and see all the blown out windows and the ones that are detached and took a big long fall to the street.
	I mean, it was pretty serious stuff.
	It was scary.
	Nothing to compare to what, of course, you went through with Katrina.
	Coming to you from the somewhat battered but still present Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	It is indeed.
	Hello there, everybody.
	Coming up is one of my favorite topics in all the world.
	It's consciousness and a very unique perspective, I imagine, with Stuart Hameroff.
	Hope I've got that name right.
	A physician and a researcher at the University Medical Center.
	He divides his professional time between practicing and teaching clinical anesthesiology in the surgical operating rooms and research into the mechanism of consciousness.
	His interest in the nature of mind began during the late 1960s.
	You can imagine somebody who is an anesthesiologist would be very, very interested in all of this.
	In addition to his research in consciousness studies, he helped to organize the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.
	So coming up in a moment, again, one of my favorite topics in all the world, consciousness, with somebody who ought to know a lot about it since he Well, you know, I guess I have to be careful here.
	Maybe he, when he does his work, he does not remove consciousness, or does he?
	That'll be one of the first questions coming up in a moment.
	Yerayal in Lincoln, Nebraska updates me here in Minnelof.
	From the Manila Times, the latest news is the official death toll from Typhoon Millennial on Saturday rose to at least 61 dead, 81 injured, 69 missing.
	So it was a pretty wild typhoon here, no question about it.
	All right.
	Now, Dr. Stuart Hameroff.
	I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
	Am I, doctor?
	Sounds good, Eric.
	How are you?
	I'm just fine and very, very pleased to have you on the air.
	You're obviously a very appropriate person to talk about consciousness, I think.
	Thank you.
	That's right, go ahead.
	Well, I was going to say, as you mentioned, it's part of my clinical practice every day of putting people to sleep before surgery and then waking them up, but it's also something I've studied for 30 years or so.
	The toughest question is, I think, the first question, and that is one that I ask so many guests that I have on the show, and that is, what is consciousness?
	What is your personal definition of consciousness?
	Well, first I would say that consciousness is awareness, awareness of something.
	People talk about self-consciousness, higher-order consciousness, group consciousness, that's Interesting and wonderful and essential, but it's at a higher level of something very basic.
	So, if we have a glimmer of any awareness of anything, even of nothingness, as the Buddhists, or even if a worm has an awareness of the green grass around it, that's conscious awareness.
	And that's the fundamental, basic ground of consciousness.
	And of course, from there, all kinds of other things emerge.
	Okay, well, when I'm asleep, for example, Doctor, unless I'm dreaming, I have awareness of nothing.
	It's just a sweet nothingness.
	So is that a lack of consciousness?
	Yeah, I would say rather than being aware of nothing, you have no awareness.
	As opposed to dreaming, when you have an awareness, you have dreaming, and when you're awake.
	John Searle, the philosopher of mind from UC Berkeley, defines consciousness As that which happens when you wake up in the morning continues all day, except when you're in a dreamless sleep, because he thinks dreams are conscious.
	So that kind of just basically states the obvious, but you could ask, is it a process?
	I mean, is it a thing?
	It's not a thing.
	I mean, it's not a mass, a piece of matter.
	You could say it's a state.
	It's a particular state of the brain, but that doesn't really tell us anything, because what is the state and why does that state?
	cause conscious experience, the phenomenal subjective nature, the first-person view of
	things, of having an experience. That's what distinguishes us conscious entities from non-conscious
	beings, including most probably computers, which can have complex behaviors, behaviors
	or something other than necessarily having an awareness. So, or is consciousness a process?
	Is it a sequence of events, for example, of actual events occurring in the universe?
	So those are some of the choices.
	When a person dreams, and if I get off into an area here that's inappropriate for you, let me know, but when a person dreams, is that a form, is it fair to say it's a form of consciousness?
	I would say so, and John Searle says that it is.
	At the last Tucson Conference in April, Toward the Science of Consciousness, where we have many disciplines coming from all over the world to discuss these things, there was a debate between two dream experts, Alan Hobson from Harvard and Mark Sohm from South Africa, about the role of Freud in dreams.
	I learned a lot from listening to those two talk about dreams, that dreams are associated with a different biochemistry, a different set of neurotransmitters.
	Have the same type of coherent activity that can be measured with the EEG as the awake state, and that's called gamma synchrony.
	It's a high-frequency, highly coherent, synchronized EEG signal that occurs in areas of the brain that are associated with consciousness.
	And the mystery about that is how the perfect synchrony is accomplished over large parts of the brain, because it doesn't seem It's possible that this coherence can be accounted for by normal nerve conduction velocities and so forth.
	Okay.
	You're a little over my head there.
	I'm sorry.
	That's alright.
	So are you essentially saying that when we dream, an EEG measures activity in the same parts of the brain as when we're awake and conscious?
	Yeah.
	The same type of activity.
	Not necessarily the same parts of the brain.
	Different parts of the brain are conscious with different types of consciousness, but most parts, at least the cortex, can seem to be involved in consciousness.
	Individual parts here are connected to individual parts over different regions, so kind of global patterns.
	And the remarkable thing is that the neurons separated from one part of the brain to the other can be synchronized so perfectly.
	That suggested something other than conventional neural pathways, for example, possibly quantum phenomena in the brain.
	Hmm, quantum.
	Alright, I have, for example, when I had my wisdom teeth removed, I had anesthesia, and I would think most adult Americans have at one time or another had anesthesia, and I recall having Actually, kind of a very weird dream.
	Little men were chopping up the world.
	Now, is a dream state one that frequently is remembered or is really scary or whatever?
	Is that fairly common with anesthesia or not?
	No, it's very, very rare.
	In fact, what you describe, when you go to the dentist and you most likely breathe nitrous oxide, nitrous laughing gas mixed with oxygen.
	You're not breathing a complete anesthetic.
	You're not breathing enough for you to be unconscious to have a major surgical procedure.
	Okay, well let me clarify.
	When I had my wisdom teeth removed, they gave me a shot of sodium pentothal.
	Okay, well then that's different.
	I remember the doctor put the needle in and just moved it a little bit, and I went, wow!
	Can you do that again?
	And he said, sure, and then put the rest of it in, and I went, boom!
	And I was gone.
	But no, I was definitely completely out of it during that experience, and boy, did I dream.
	Well, that's still, first of all, you might have dreamt at the beginning and at the end, coming out and not in the middle.
	It's kind of like diving a submarine.
	You take it deep, and then you level off near the ocean floor.
	That's deep anesthesia.
	Then you come back up to the surface.
	So on the way down and the way up, you may dream, but in a deep anesthetic, you generally don't.
	And awareness and recall is a problem, but it's very, very rare, and it's something we work very, very hard to avoid.
	What is it like doing what you do being an anesthesiologist?
	What does that work like?
	Dare I say it's a gas?
	Ha ha ha, well you can't yell.
	I'm sorry.
	It's a very serious business.
	serious business.
	It's very critical.
	We don't have long-term rapport with our patients like family doctors.
	It's a very, very highly developed specialty.
	It's four years of college, four years of medical school, and then four more years of residency and internship, and then you're an anesthesiologist.
	It's quite a serious deal because we have a lot of responsibility.
	Indeed you do.
	I've heard, and I don't want to get off on a tangent here, but I've heard some horror stories.
	For example, people suddenly waking up during open heart surgery, that kind of thing.
	Yeah, apparently there's a movie about that coming out, and as I said, that's a really terrible situation.
	Fortunately, it's very, very rare.
	The few cases that have occurred have gotten a lot of publicity and engendered this It's something to be concerned about, just like there are many, many possible complications of surgery and anesthesia, and that's one we take very seriously.
	But we're working hard to try to avoid it all the time.
	It's a critical issue.
	Well, as a matter of interest, how would something like that occur?
	I mean, does it mean the anesthesiologist wasn't quite doing his job correctly?
	He went out to get a cup of coffee at the wrong time?
	We don't, nobody does that anymore.
	Maybe, you know, that's, but, you know, it could be, it could be, it's possible it's pilot error that even though you literally ran out of gas or that the left, but many of those cases, because the level of the surgery, like in a heavy trauma or something where the You don't want to give too much anesthetics.
	You have to kind of walk that tightrope.
	So there's all different types of events, but it's certainly something that you just have to find the best person, anesthesiologist, to take care of you.
	That's all you can say.
	When I was in the Air Force, Doctor, I had a big lump suddenly on my back and it was a tumor.
	It turned out to be a benign tumor in the end.
	The Air Force doctor at the time at Amarillo Air Force Base, that's where I was, said, oh listen, it's no big deal.
	We'll do this very quickly.
	We'll give you some shots to deaden the area and we'll open it up and we'll pop that little sucker out and that'll be that.
	And so I said okay and I got on the table and they went to work and they gave me shots as they suggested they would.
	However, by the time it was over, there were four doctors in there.
	They were very deep into my chest, from my back, thank you very much.
	This thing went much deeper than they thought.
	And once they got in, they told me that I should be getting general anesthetic, but
	they had me already opened up and they were already in there and they said they couldn't
	give me general anesthetic at that point.
	So they kept giving me shots.
	But I can assure you, they got down into my chest and I could feel every snip, every clip,
	every cut.
	And it went on for about three hours.
	I mean it was really quite an ordeal and I was never put under.
	I've always wondered whether they told me the truth about that.
	What position were you in?
	Were you lying on your side or on your stomach?
	I was on my stomach.
	Well the problem there is that when patients become anesthetized, unconscious, they stop breathing and they don't maintain their airway.
	When the patient is, if you're on your back and we have access to your head and your airway, then it's no problem putting you to sleep.
	But if you're laying on your stomach and you went to sleep, you would obstruct and you might, you know, not breathe properly and it'd be very difficult, if impossible, to insert a tube or whatever you need.
	It would be very, very unsafe, let's put it that way.
	Alright, well then they told me the truth.
	Yeah, I think they did and they probably gave you the best care because had they, you know, had they opted to put you to sleep, they could have put you at risk for serious things as opposed to, you know, enduring a bit of suffering.
	But in the end, it was the safest thing.
	So patients have to contribute to their optimal care.
	Well, I contributed by yelling and screaming a lot.
	Well, you tolerated it.
	You didn't totally freak out.
	How did you, as an anesthesiologist, become interested in the subject of consciousness?
	Because as an anesthesiologist, really, your job is to snuff out consciousness, I guess, right?
	Snuff it out and bring it back exactly as it was, yeah.
	Well, actually, Art, I was interested in consciousness before I chose anesthesia.
	I became interested in consciousness in my college days, and then when I went to medical school and was deciding on a specialty, I was thinking of something oriented towards the brain, mind, head, and thought about neurology, psychiatry, and neurosurgery.
	I didn't really consider anesthesia at the time, but then I moved out.
	After graduating from med school in Philadelphia, I did an internship and stumbled into the head of the anesthesia department here at the University of Arizona, the first one, Bernal Brown, who was quite an academic intellectual, and he said, well, if you want to understand consciousness, Figure out how anesthetic gases work because they're relatively selective and that would be the best way to approach the problem.
	So, I thought about it and did some…spent some time with them in the operating room and decided I liked it.
	So, I did a residency in anesthesia and stayed on the faculty and began a study at the molecular level how anesthetic gases act to…because they're quite selective.
	Patients go to sleep with the gases and their brain is still quite active.
	Can record EEG just slower, not the high-coherent, high-frequency stuff, but slower and evoke potential.
	So the sensory inputs are being recognized and the autonomic regulation is going on.
	So the brain is quite active.
	So these gases literally float into our brains and occupy these little pockets and stop consciousness, but virtually nothing else.
	It's very selective.
	And then they float out and the patient wakes up.
	So it's quite an amazing process.
	That is amazing.
	Actually, I heard someone say, or I read, that anesthesiologists don't actually fully understand why it works.
	Well, that's true.
	It is true.
	That is true.
	And I just actually, I just published a paper in the journal Anesthesiology, the leading scientific journal in the field, on the molecular mechanisms of anesthetic gases.
	My article was entitled, The Entwined Mysteries of Anesthesia and Consciousness.
	Is there a common underlying mechanism?
	And it's because these gases float into these pockets, and they don't form chemical bonds.
	All other drugs form chemical bonds.
	They form only very weak quantum forces.
	They're called London forces, but they're between neutral and uncharged molecules, and they're very delicate.
	And yet they're perfectly spaced in like a lattice configuration throughout the brain, so they can act collectively.
	So, the anesthetic gases affect only these, seem to, at least my argument is, affect only these quantum processes that are normally occurring in these sites throughout the brain that are responsible for consciousness.
	In other words, consciousness is produced by quantum processes.
	All right, you said that a lot now, quantum processes.
	Can you explain what you mean by... You say it doesn't bond in the way most chemicals would bond or something.
	What do you mean by quantum forces?
	Well, the anesthetic gases are basically inert.
	In fact, xenon, the inert gas, is a good anesthetic.
	There's no charge on them, so there's no electrons to donate or to even share.
	But they do have a very funny type of interaction between two molecules.
	It's kind of like each one is a little magnet.
	They're called dipoles.
	And as they get close to each other, the electrons in the cloud that make up one molecule push away the electrons in the cloud of the others so that they become like two little bar magnets pointing in the same direction.
	So they form these very weak quantum magnetic forces, if you will, that actually oscillate back and forth so that they can be pointing in both directions at the same time, because that's a fundamental quantum property of superposition.
	But that gets into the quantum world, which is A very interesting area.
	Boy, it certainly is.
	Dipole, of course.
	You mean as in, when you say dipole, I'm a ham radio operator, I think of a dipole antenna.
	And I suppose it's somewhat similar, but you're saying this dipole is like a magnet.
	These are very tiny, little tiny dipoles within a certain part of a molecule, like within a receptor, within a in what's called a hydrophobic pocket, little greasy, fatty
	areas within a more watery, polar type of medium. It goes back to basically oil on
	water. You have oily material that doesn't mix with water, and the oily material is made up of
	structures that have a lot of electron resonance. The electrons can move around over big
	areas, and those lead to quantum interactions because electrons are quantum particles. It's
	probably best to think about the whole quantum world and how it's distinguished from our
	classical world.
	Alright, well I see why nobody seems to fully understand anesthesia and why it works.
	Because nobody understands consciousness.
	They're twin mysteries.
	Oh, that's a mystery, alright.
	So, whatever it is, these little dipoles get next to areas of the brain and affect the brain in... is it kind of like...
	I'll tell you what, we're at a break point here, doctor.
	Hold on.
	I need to think this whole thing over to even be able to ask a proper question.
	Dr. Stuart Hameroff is my guest.
	He's an anesthesiologist.
	We're talking about consciousness, and I need to formulate this question properly.
	From the Philippines, other side of the world, from most of you, I'm Art Bell.
	It is indeed.
	My guest is Dr. Stuart Hameroff, and he's an anesthesiologist.
	Very, very interesting guest to have on the subject of consciousness.
	Now, he's telling us that the gases that an anesthesiologist uses are in some manner different than, for example, drugs, whatever drug it might be, that would normally bond.
	with, I guess, your brain material.
	I'm going to stumble around here a little bit, but it would bond, form a molecular bond, I guess, with your brain matter.
	These gases don't bond.
	They're like little dipoles with, I guess, a north and a south, and they have some sort of quantum effect on your brain.
	In a way that other drugs do not.
	The whole thing is absolutely fascinating.
	Anyway, I'll try and ask a relevant question about this so I can get a deeper understanding of how anesthesia works.
	in a moment alright once again i want to understand this doctor as best
	i can Now, things like, other drugs, like say cocaine, or Valium, or narcotic type drugs, they do form some sort of chemical bond with your brain, is that correct?
	I'm sorry, or release something that causes a reaction in the brain.
	I'm not quite sure, but do they in fact form a bond?
	Yes.
	Some drugs cause other things to be released, but many of them, or most of them, at least, you know, psychoactive drugs acting in the brain act on receptors on the dendritic side of neurons.
	And these are receptors normally for neurotransmitters.
	So the drugs are are either intensifying the activity of the neurotransmitter or blocking it in some cases, or in some cases having more complex activities.
	But other drugs act on other proteins.
	And receptors are proteins.
	The microtubules inside the neurons are proteins.
	Ion channels are proteins.
	The membranes are lipid with proteins embedded in them, like floating in them, but also connected down inside to the cytoskeleton, to the microtubules.
	But the point is that anesthetics and psychoactive drugs bind to proteins,
	and specifically in these pockets that have the quantum forces inside them.
	Maybe I got too complicated there. I'm sorry.
	Well, some words went sailing right past me, but again, the gases that you use form these little dipoles and act in some quantum manner on the brain material and all of this causes you to lose consciousness in a way that nobody quite fully, completely understands.
	How were these gases that are used today discovered?
	Well, they started with recreational use, ether frolics and laughing gas, and then it was found that if somebody breathed a lot of it, they became unconscious and were insensitive to pain.
	So, in the 1840s, actually in America, they began to experiment with nitrous oxide and then ether for surgical anesthesia.
	It was first discovered by a dentist in Georgia, and then it was presented at the Mass General in Boston, and the first time it didn't work, and they thought it was a bunch of baloney.
	Then the guy got it right, and he came back, and it worked.
	So, anesthesia really began in America, but it was also used in England.
	Chloroform was used there about the same time.
	As recreational things that just were realized to have a very useful, more useful application.
	So recreational drug use really was the beginning of anesthesia?
	Yeah.
	Is that so?
	Just as a matter of, I don't know, interest, prior to that time, what was done?
	I mean, did somebody just take a big drink of whiskey and suffer through it?
	Well, I mean, alcohol, Various drugs that we use, but not the inhalational gases.
	So, none of the other drugs are as selective.
	The cool thing about the antiseptic gases is that they affect pretty much only consciousness, and that's it.
	The point I was raising before is that the fact that they act by these quantum forces suggests that consciousness in the brain is due to quantum activities, quantum processes, rather than Neurochemical, which are essential and important, but kind of a system within the system accounting for consciousness.
	Oh, what a very, very good point.
	So the process that's going on in your brain that we call consciousness is in fact quantum.
	I believe it is.
	I believe it's actually a coupling of quantum forces to physical components of the brain, but that it is a fundamental quantum process.
	That's my take on it anyway.
	Oh, that's fascinating.
	Absolutely fascinating.
	All right.
	Computers.
	Now, computers are becoming faster.
	We're getting more storage.
	They're getting better and better and better.
	As of yet, I don't think that we have a conscious computer.
	Do you think Because they're beginning to toy with the concept of quantum computers, Doctor.
	Is that, in your opinion, going to be the moment or somewhere down the line with quantum computers when a computer does attain something like consciousness?
	Well, I think if a computer could possibly be conscious someday, it would have to be a specific type of quantum computer, not a classical computer.
	But let me just talk about classical computers for a moment because Many, you know, AI, artificial intelligence, computer scientists, technology people, believe that computers will eventually, inevitably attain the capacity and function of the human brain, and will therefore become conscious.
	And that, you know, Moore's Law, that the computing power doubles You know, per area, every year and a half or so has held true, and they project that out, and then make an estimate of the brain computational power based on neurons as the fundamental unit, and if you extrapolate those two lines, they meet at, I don't know, 20, 30, or something like that.
	So, that is the proposed point at which computers will become equivalent to the brain, and therefore consciousness, and Ray Kurzweil calls this the singularity.
	It doesn't make kind of a big deal about it.
	I personally think it's a bunch of baloney.
	Alright, so wait a minute.
	You're saying that based on Moore's Law, if it doesn't break down before 2030, and we continue to double between now and 2030, at 2030 there would be an equivalency between the human brain and even the computers we have today in 2030?
	Well, equivalence between the human brain and the computers we will have in 2030.
	Wow.
	But you do not think that's going to mean... No, because it's based on the assumption that the fundamental bit or fundamental unit in the brain... We know what the fundamental bit or unit in a silicon computer is.
	It's a little transistor, it's on or off, one or zero, and there's a gazillion of them, and they all interact.
	So what's the fundamental unit in the brain?
	Well, the assumption for that calculation is that it's a neuron firing or not firing.
	And that is generally considered to be the fundamental unit of the brain.
	But as far as consciousness goes, that is not the fundamental unit.
	The fundamental unit is more subtle.
	It's on the other side of the neuron, I believe, and many people believe, in the dendrites, the quantum processes in the dendrites, in a kind of hidden layer in the neural networks of the brain.
	Dendrite.
	What is a dendrite?
	Well, a neuron is kind of a squid-shaped structure.
	You know, a squid has like one, when I think of it, on one end it's got a bunch of tentacles that all gather into a central point, and then On the other end, one long thing sticking out.
	I don't know.
	Maybe that's a good description.
	I'm not sure.
	But it's a cell that's asymmetrical.
	And on one end, it has a long axon that fires information from the center of the cell, the
	cell body, along the axon, a wave of electrical activity that goes out to the synapse.
	But on the other end, on the other side of the cell body, is kind of a web-like, you
	know, almost, if there were five of them, that'd be like a hand-shaped set of structures,
	each of which is a dendrite.
	They can have many more than five, but multiple that go out, and they receive inputs from axons, for example.
	So, that makes a network.
	The axon brings the information to a chemical synapse on a dendrite.
	And there are many dendrites, and they all integrate the input and then trigger a firing of an action potential.
	And that's the integrate and fire mechanism that allows a linkage or comparison between computers, how computers are constructed, and how people think the brain works.
	Putting all of the weight on the firings, which are called spikes, and they're easy to measure with electrodes, so people get A lot of information and data, and assume that that is equivalent to consciousness.
	But actually, the data from EEG shows that the activities that lead to consciousness are in the dendrites.
	They are in much more subtle processes occurring in the dendrites.
	Okay, okay.
	Can you, for the sake of my sake, as well as that of the audience, define what you mean by a quantum process?
	Well, that is the big question.
	The quantum world, let me back up, it seems as though the universe is described by two different sets of laws, two different realities.
	In our everyday world, you know, meters, centimeters, millimeters, even a lot smaller, it's the classical world.
	Things are predictable, things are in one place at one time, things act like particles, objects.
	In the quantum world, things act more like waves and particles can be smeared out and be in multiple places or states at the same time.
	And they can be connected over great distances by instantaneous communication.
	Let me stop you there.
	I've tried that line on a number of scientists.
	I keep saying, there has to be a communication.
	In the world that we live in, there has to be a communication between these two What's the right word?
	Atoms, for example?
	If an atom does one thing, and that atom's located here in Manila, the Philippines, and you have an atom that has been with this atom previously, and it's there, where are you located, by the way?
	Tucson, Arizona.
	Tucson, Arizona.
	You have the other one there.
	They're going to do the same thing at the same time, and therefore there has to be a communication between them.
	But some scientists I've had on, doctor, say, no, not communication in the way that you think of it or understand it.
	Right.
	It's a bit of a finesse problem.
	It's not a classical signal, but there's definitely a correlation.
	You know, the problem is that signaling is prevented by Einstein's relativity, because if it's instantaneous from Manila to Tucson, it means it's faster than the speed of light.
	And so Einstein didn't like that, which is why he developed that experiment he just described, the EPR experiment.
	Nobody can account for how these correlations occur, except that if you think of things in the quantum world, they're not really separated in the first place.
	They're really still separate, because you take time out of the picture and you take Uh, things are in a completely different mode that nobody can very well explain or understand.
	But in the quantum world, the rules are different.
	Things can be smeared out and be in multiple places at the same time.
	So in the quantum world, the particle being measured in Manila and the particle declaring itself in Tucson are really in the same place.
	They're really the same particle still.
	As bizarre as that seems.
	It is bizarre, and what it must mean, doctor, is that obviously it's not subject to the same laws of physics that we all live within in this physical world that we understand so far.
	Obviously, these particles are not subject to those same laws, yes?
	Well, they're not subject to Newtonian, Newton's laws.
	Uh, as much as they are quantum laws.
	The quantum laws allow them to be in multiple places at the same time.
	So, it's usually divided into the classical world, the classical laws, Newton's laws of motion, Maxwell's equation of electromagnetism, the gas laws, and at the quantum world you have quantum mechanics, Schrodinger's equation and the indeterminacy principle, which says it's something that you can't know both its location and its momentum at the same time, which means It's kind of smeared out in space.
	Things become wave-like in the quantum world.
	So if Einstein were still with us today, Doctor, would he say this is all hogwash?
	It seems to me he would almost have to say that, or dismiss it in some way, or else what he said about the speed of light all goes down the drain.
	Well, I think he was around to see EPR validated.
	Well, I'm not sure, actually.
	That's a good question.
	He would have liked the fact that the universe may not be random at its core.
	You know, he said God does not play dice with the universe, because when you make a measurement on a quantum particle, whether it becomes spin-up or spin-down is generally considered to be like flipping a coin or rolling a dice, random.
	But Roger Penrose and others, for example, think that at the core of the quantum world is some kind of order, some kind of information, maybe even, as Penrose said, some kind of platonic world with mathematical truth, aesthetic values,
	ethical values, imprinted and embedded at the very fine level of detail of the universe, at the
	most basic level, that the universe is not random, but ordered and containing information,
	which is platonic information.
	Do we really have free will, Doctor, or do we just think and feel like we have free will?
	Well, that's another good question.
	You know, there's a couple aspects of that problem.
	One is if, you know, if we act as we think we act, which is in real time and conscious control of our actions, whether we can make choices or everything's predetermined, that's one issue.
	But the critical issue in brain science now, I think, is that If you look at, if you perceive something and then react to it quickly, even rapid conversation or ping pong or various athletic things, but normal everyday conversation, you think you're reacting consciously, but the conscious recognition of the words that the other person is saying doesn't occur until you've already verbally responded to that person, and yet you think you're responding consciously.
	So, and this occurs in vision, it occurs in all senses, and so the conventional view of neuroscience is that we act unconsciously, reflexively, and after the fact, we have the sensation of deciding, and then imprint into memory this false, this illusion that we were in conscious control, and in fact we weren't.
	And this is the position that conventional neuroscience is put, because of this Because the brain activity associated with conscious perception occurs too late.
	The only way out of this is, again, quantum mechanics, because in quantum mechanics you can have quantum information outside of time, like the EPR correlations outside of time, and in essence going backward in classical time.
	And this would allow conscious control in the here and now.
	And so we can't have something like free will, but only with a quantum mechanical explanation.
	But it doesn't really sound other than that possibility, and so you believe we have free will.
	Well, I believe that the brain is a quantum mechanism, so I believe we do.
	So we're not all marionettes just sort of acting out?
	No, that's, well, see that is the, or as T.H.
	Huxley said, we're merely helpless spectators along for the ride.
	That's the view that conventional neuroscience, mainstream neuroscience is forced because of the measuring of this brain activity after we've already acted.
	But I don't think that, I think that, I think that quantum unconscious information coming from the very near future, which is allowable in quantum mechanics, and is compatible with a lot of experiments, allows us to actually, we're getting clues from the future to allow us to act in the here and now.
	So that we actually, with quantum mechanisms, we can have real-time conscious control, or something like free will.
	But I think only with quantum mechanisms.
	Otherwise, we are helpless spectators.
	Critics say the brain is too warm to be a quantum computer.
	Now, why do they say that, first of all?
	Well, there's a thing called decoherence.
	And, you know, it all goes back to the problem of when you have A quantum state, like you have a particle or a group of particles in multiple states or locations at the same time, which is what you need for a quantum computer, by the way, it needs to be isolated from the environment, including, it seems, heat, because heating it even slightly can disturb the quantum states and cause them to be lost, a process called decoherence.
	So, people who are making quantum computers build them at extremely low, almost absolute zero temperature, to avoid the vibrations.
	They've come up with these equations that show that the brain is too warm for this type of quantum processing.
	But we think that the brain pumps the coherence like a laser and that actually uses heat to generate the quantum coherence.
	Some recent experiments have suggested that biology is quite different and actually uses the natural resonances So that heat energy can actually promote quantum states rather than destroy it.
	All right.
	Well, that's a hot thought.
	All right, Doctor.
	Hold tight.
	We're at the top of the hour.
	Dr. Stuart Amiroff is my guest.
	I'm Mark Bell.
	And from a somewhat devastated Manila in the Philippines, this is Coast to Coast AM Rockin' On.
	In our fourth day without power.
	Got a kind of a kludged together system here from kind of a partial generator operating in the building and that's how we're able to do what we're doing right now.
	Dr. Stuart Hameroff is my guest and He's an anesthesiologist, and obviously a brilliant one.
	We're discussing consciousness, and we were talking about the brain being warm, and the doctor is saying traditional scientists would say, well, the brain cannot operate in a quantum fashion because it's simply too warm to do so, but he believes That the human brain has some special function that even when warm is able to operate in a quantum state.
	All absolutely fascinating stuff and you've got to wonder if we're operating in a quantum state, if our brain is operating in a quantum state, then perhaps it accounts for I don't know, those strange things that we see that seem to, I don't know, eclipse time and space and even the world between the living and dead at times.
	I wonder what the doctor would say about that.
	We'll be right back.
	Alright, doctor, let us assume for a moment that you are correct.
	And even though our brains are too warm, according to the critics, to be functioning in a quantum
	manner, let's assume they are and doing very well at it indeed.
	And now I'm going to take you out on a limb here.
	Isn't it possible, then, That a lot of what scientists deny or simply don't understand about communications that people claim to get from the other side or from other, what's the right word here, what am I struggling for, from other entities, that some of these could be absolutely real from a quantum perspective.
	Well, you are putting me on the spot, Art, and before I answer that, let me just say I'm sorry to hear about the typhoon in Manila, and I hope that you and everyone there weather it as well as possible, and good luck with the next one that's coming.
	Thank you.
	But I'm not trying to evade the question.
	Yes, I think that quantum effects can account for many non-local effects, lumped together, paranormal, whatever you want to say.
	I'd rather not address any in particular, specifically, but just generally, yes.
	And we're getting some pretty good, you know, Rupert Sheldrake's new data on the sense of being stared at with TV monitors and all kinds of things that are very interesting.
	And I think quantum mechanisms are the only possible explanation.
	I think that consciousness is kind of a process on the edge between the quantum world and the classical world.
	It's the quantum world becoming the classical world.
	And so the quantum stuff is normally on the unconscious side, but of course we have direct access to it.
	So it's normally unconscious, but can be conscious.
	And yes, I think there can be non-local interactions due to quantum effects.
	All right.
	Well, you jumped off that one very well indeed.
	Are you aware of the work you have to be going on at Princeton?
	Yeah, the Pear Labs, Roger Nelson, and those guys.
	And yeah, they've done great work for years, and the random number generator stuff with Dean Radin and Dick Berman is very interesting, and I think compelling.
	And I think Dean has now come out with a quantum entanglement explanation for his results in his latest book.
	He was at the last Tucson conference also.
	And so I think, yeah, that's, you know, those types of effects have to be quantum, quantum mechanical.
	And what do you think about the concept of individual consciousness versus collective, some sort of collective consciousness, which of course is what Princeton, well actually they're not really certain that it's collective, but it seems to be leaning that way.
	Well, I think a lot of people are grappling with the concept that there's some kind of information, platonic information, using Roger Penrose's term, and going back to Plato's idea of an absolute realm of pure truth and ideas and beauty and aesthetics and so forth, but that it's real.
	And that it's real in the sense that it can be described through modern physics.
	At the very fundamental level of the universe, what the universe is made of, at the nitty gritty level that, you know, string theory tries to approach it, quantum, loop quantum gravity, quantum geometry, things of that nature, describe a pattern, a structure of everything, of the most basic level, which gives rise to everything, because mass is, whether it's strings vibrating, or curvature of space-time geometry, or some types, some descriptions at that level, It's some kind of non-local medium at the basic level, which is called the Planck scale, the ultimately small level of reality where things have information and things are non-local, almost maybe holographic, interconnected all over the place.
	Well, obviously it eclipses time in some manner, because as you know, if you looked at some of the results they had at Princeton, all prior to 9-11, I forget whether it was a half an hour, hour and a half, whatever it was, there was a significant, small but significant amount of time where the reaction The 9-11 events began 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour prior to the actual event.
	Now, it's not just 9-11, it's many events where this occurred, so that would seem to put it outside the realm of time in some manner, quantum, I suppose.
	Yeah, there are a couple ways to look at it, but from the classical world, which we basically think we live in, looking at it, it would seem it affects, we're going backwards in time, so that Some type of correlation occurred from the future, from the near future, and probably the duration, how far back in time or how far into the future you can get information might, I don't know, might depend on the intensity of the event, 9-11 being an ultimately intense event, because the backward time, like a day, I thought, Dean Radin said, in some cases.
	Normally, I think we get information from a fraction of a second, several hundred milliseconds in the future, but it could be longer.
	The thing about it is that time has no actual place in physics.
	I'm not a physicist, but as I understand it, we could do without the concept of time, at least the flow of time.
	I mean, does time really flow?
	In fact, an earlier viewer, before I came on, was talking How about time speeding up?
	And I was thinking that we don't really know that time flows in and of itself.
	I mean, is it a dimension that we move in?
	If so, we should be able to go in both directions, forwards and backwards.
	Or is it a process that itself evolves?
	Or does time exist at all?
	And some people, Julian Barber, for example, says that the universe is a collage of instantaneous frames, instantaneous moments.
	How they're connected is somewhat arbitrary.
	We think they move forward in a logical way through our memory, but that's a little extreme.
	What I think is that there are sequences moving forward in time that are consciousness, because when the quantum world collapses to reality, that's a frame of consciousness, if it happens a certain way, and then you have another one, and another one, and another one, and these are like the specious moments that William James talked about, forming a stream of consciousness.
	stream of frames moving forward that are each kind of a collapse from the quantum
	world to the classical, creating reality within our heads.
	All right, well I forget who it was, but somebody described to me time this way...
	They said, well, prior to the Big Bang, for example, there was nothing and therefore there could not be time.
	After the Big Bang, we then, as soon as we had two objects moving relative to each other, we could make an observation.
	We could say, well, alright, the moon or that planet over there or whatever is moving either toward us or away from us or In conjunction with us at the following speed, and so we now have a way to measure something.
	We now have time.
	Well, that sounds good.
	I don't know if that solves the basic problem of whether it's a process or a dimension, or whether it exists at all, because it still remains a problem.
	St.
	Augustine said, I know what time is until someone asks me to explain it, and then I don't know when it is.
	And you can say the same thing about consciousness, but some people think that consciousness creates a flow of time.
	For example, if consciousness is a sequence of frames, kind of like a movie's sequence of frames, the audience perceives it as a continuum, and we have a sequence of frames occurring in our head, the frames are in our head, and we experience each one, but it seems continuous.
	Because there's nothing in between.
	We're unconscious in between, like maybe in the quantum world.
	So, roughly 40 times a second, we have these frames.
	But that rate can change.
	For example, people in car accidents say, oh, the car was spinning in the world.
	Everything slowed down.
	Everything was in slow motion.
	That's right.
	And Michael Jordan, they asked him, well, how can he be such a great player?
	He said, well, when I'm playing well, it's like the other team.
	The defense is in slow motion.
	And I can make more moves than they can.
	So maybe Michael Jordan is having, instead of 40 frames per second, he's having 60 frames per second.
	So it's going to appear to him that the other team is in relative slow motion, because his conscious time is faster than theirs, and he'll be able to pull more moves than they can.
	That's a good explanation.
	Can there be a scientific way to account for spirituality or religious belief?
	I think, you know, it's the same thing that you asked before about the different types of communication, because I think if there is at the fundamental level of the universe a vast storehouse, I don't know what to call it, of platonic information of wisdom and truth and aesthetic values, That connect everything to everything else and can guide our actions and our conscious processes, then that approach is something that could be related to spirituality.
	At least pull another layer of the onion off of what's underlying it, because I think there must be some scientific explanation.
	Alright, let's jump to near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences.
	I had one of those, and it was quite remarkable, but near-death as well.
	All in the same ballpark, or not?
	Is there some sort of separation here, or just all the sort of same quantum function?
	Several years ago, the BBC did a show about near-death and out-of-body experiences called The Day I Died.
	Did you happen to see that?
	I did not.
	And anyway, they interviewed me because the guys who did the study in Europe, and they asked them how they could explain out-of-body experiences, and they said, we don't know, ask Penrose or Hameroff.
	Roger Penrose is the eminent physicist in England with whom I collaborate.
	And anyway, they asked me, and what I said, and what I say in the show, is that normally inner consciousness is occurring In this fundamental level of space-time geometry within the proteins and structures in the brain that account for consciousness, which couples our consciousness to this fundamental level.
	And the biochemistry of the brain pumps the coherence to create this quantum state coupling between the brain and this fundamental level.
	And then when the brain stops working, when the heart stops and there's no profusion, the coherence is lost, but the quantum
	information is occurring at the most at this fundamental level. So it isn't destroyed, it just
	kind of dissipates to the universe at large, maybe, but stays entangled so that the person's
	entity or soul or whatever you want, consciousness, remains, remains coherent. And when
	the brain is revived, it can be kind of rejoin the body. And if it isn't revived, then it just
	maybe mingles and mingles at that level at large.
	Well, that's a whole other question.
	But with regard to, for example, out-of-body experiences are difficult, but with near-death experiences, there is a certain amount of perhaps even real evidence That people are able to relate things that were going on that is just impossible for them to have known.
	Now, have you read enough evidence for you to believe that these NDEs, particularly the ones where they see the resuscitation efforts, they're able to relate what was said, they're able to relate what was going on in the room, that sort of thing.
	Well, I've seen a lot of it, and I've read some reports.
	I'm fairly convinced.
	I'm not 100% convinced, because in all cases, the case that Spetzer described with the woman in Atlanta was very compelling.
	And I've also debated this issue with some very harsh, skeptical people in the Consciousness Studies, who claim almost all of this stuff is rubbish.
	A professional skeptic from England, for example.
	So I'm used to debating this, but it seems pretty compelling overall.
	You were in the film What the Leap?
	Yeah.
	What exactly did you do in it?
	They interviewed me for six hours in the desert with beautiful cactus.
	And then from that took excerpts.
	I'm in the film maybe a total of five minutes here and there.
	And at the end of the credits I shoot a basketball, hit a jumper from the top of the key because we were filming up by a playground.
	That's my claim to fame.
	I see.
	I imagine you've had a lot of feedback just as a result of that appearance, right?
	Yes.
	It was fun being in a movie.
	I really had no idea what it was going to... I mean, they just asked me if I wanted to be in a film about quantum physics and consciousness, and I said, well, sure.
	And anyway, it all came together, and it wasn't quite what I expected.
	It never is.
	No.
	It never is.
	But it planted the seed of quantum physics and consciousness, which is a great thing.
	It was fun being in it, it was fun being in the follow-up Rabbit Hole version, and it kind of got me the movie bug because I became involved in making a film about consciousness specifically, which is something I'm heavily involved in at the moment.
	Doctor, I did something a number of years ago, which I'm sure you've probably heard about.
	I sort of got on to this whole field of mass consciousness and I, in the early days, just sort of started fooling around.
	I realize that I have access to millions of people at any given moment, as we do right now, and I asked millions of people to concentrate on changing the weather.
	Now, I did this in locations where there had not been rain in a very, very long time in Texas and Western Canada and other areas that were just absolutely starved for rain.
	There was no rain in the forecast, no possibility of rain in the forecast.
	Hadn't been rain in a long time.
	I got millions of people together, had them concentrate for long periods of time, from a radio point of view, you know, four, five, six minutes, on nothing but creating, you know, thinking, In their minds, picturing moisture gathering, clouds forming, and rain falling, and by God, within an hour or two, in areas where it simply could not have happened, time after time after time, Doctor, we created rain.
	Or I guess I ought to say, rain occurred where it should not have.
	In one instance, there was so damn much rain that it flooded.
	These experiments I did about, I don't know, not 10, 10 or 11 of them I guess total.
	And finally...
	They all worked.
	And they worked so well that it scared the hell out of me.
	And I realized I didn't have the first clue of what I was toying with.
	People began to urge me to try to turn hurricanes away from the coast and do all kinds of different things.
	And I quickly realized that I didn't know what I was doing and stopped the experiments and tried to urge anybody else with The inclination to do so, to also not do it until we could possibly begin to understand what we were playing with.
	Does that seem like a wise course of action to you?
	To stop doing it?
	Yes.
	Well, I don't know.
	I think the world right now could use all the help it can get.
	There's a lot of things that, you know, assuming it works.
	There is certainly that point of view.
	Let me tell you what I worried about.
	People wanted me to move toward, you know, diverting the course, for example, of a hurricane.
	Yeah, maybe we could give that a shot, but what if, since we don't really know what we're doing, what if we do divert a hurricane, for example, away from the coast, give it two more days in the ocean, and then the effect of what we're doing wears off, and during those two days it goes from a heavy tropical storm to a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, then hits land.
	In other words, I didn't really know totally what I was doing, and I saw many possibilities for error with catastrophic results.
	That's why I stopped, Doctor.
	First, do no harm.
	That's the first rule of medicine.
	That's right.
	Do no harm.
	And I was afraid that without understanding the force, which I was willy-nilly directing, I might indeed do harm.
	So that's why I stopped.
	But you're right about the condition of the world right now.
	It's less than ideal, isn't it?
	All right.
	Doctor, I'm sorry.
	We're right up against it.
	We'll be right back.
	Stay right where you are.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm not saying that there would not be an instance in which I would throw caution to the wind and go ahead and use what I believe to be a very powerful force, ultimately, perhaps greater than atomic energy.
	I have no idea.
	That's for some future generation probably to discover.
	But, you know, if there was a big five-mile rock headed toward Earth, or the condition of the environment had deteriorated to the point where people's lives were threatened, albeit we're getting somewhat close to that right now, then I might throw all caution to the wind and go ahead and do it.
	But short of something very immediate like that, I don't think so.
	So we'll get back to Dr. Hameroff in a moment.
	Once again, Dr. Stuart Hameroff.
	He's an anesthesiologist talking to us about consciousness.
	An incredible interview, actually.
	Doctor, welcome back.
	Thank you, Eric.
	Anyway, that's sort of my take on it.
	I watched this really, really happen.
	And when you, nine or ten or eleven times, have seen this, Actually occur, it's kind of frightening.
	I mean, it's fascinating on the one hand, but it's a little frightening on the other hand, because you really can't know the ultimate outcome of some of what you might do.
	But it indicated to me that many minds, and this is where the question is going, many minds concentrating on one outcome can be more powerful than a single mind concentrating its intent on an outcome.
	What do you think?
	Possibly, if they were entangled together, then they would be more powerful.
	I have to say that it seems more likely to be able to have an influence on another quantum process, for example, consciousness.
	I'm impressed by what you say about the weather patterns.
	As I said, I just kind of look at all kinds of things as possibilities.
	Without dwelling on any one in particular, because I think overall it's pretty overwhelming for some type of non-local interaction.
	But as you say, you don't know what's going to happen, whether it's going to go to the Gulf and pick up more warm water and become even worse.
	Unintended consequences, as we're seeing in the world politically.
	So yeah, you have to be careful with that.
	You know, I think affecting something like consciousness, just people meditating on for peace or whatever, is definitely a good thing.
	It certainly can't harm.
	I don't think you have unintended consequences there.
	I would hope not, anyway.
	I would hope not, too.
	And, you know, praying for peace.
	That's kind of where I drew the line.
	I mean, prayer is fine.
	Normally, if people are praying for something, it's not a negative outcome of some sort.
	It's hopefully for, you know, health or whatever, some kind of good outcome, and I suppose that's generally okay.
	But getting millions and millions of people together and having them actually concentrate on a particular outcome, I don't know.
	I need to understand, we all need to understand more about what we're doing in this area, I think, before playing too much with it.
	And, you know, the people I've interviewed on this subject who were involved in the Princeton Project tend to agree with that.
	In fact, they were very concerned, Doctor, that even my being aware early on of what was going on at Princeton would affect They're monitoring various outcomes.
	Just the fact that a lot of people knew about it and were thinking about it might affect the outcome.
	So, they sort of concurred with me.
	Okay.
	Well, I think that's the safest bet.
	Very interesting stuff.
	Now, what do you think about If I heard you correctly earlier, you sort of seem to suggest that everything might be scattered from here to Timbuktu, still together in some quantum manner, but when you physically die, do you think there's any chance at all that what we understand to be consciousness continues in any recognizable form at all?
	Consciousness, including unconsciousness, as quantum information, as I said before, It could be viewed as existing at this fundamental level of the universe, in whatever it's made of.
	People call it spin.
	Let's just say spin.
	There's patterns of spin, which are non-local and holographic.
	So it's scattered from here to Timbuktu, but in a holographic-type periodic array.
	It's just information embedded in a different way than we normally... It's more like a hologram than what we use in computers.
	So, yeah, it's possible, I think.
	So in other words, you're saying, yeah, it may be scattered from here to Timbuktu, but with the quantum world, it's possible that there's still enough, or plenty of connection, no matter where everything is scattered to, so that there could be some sort of consciousness.
	Yes, or unconscious.
	Unconscious meaning more in the subconscious realm.
	More in the dream world.
	It'd be like more of a dream world than That our classical world, because that's what the existence would be like.
	But it would be real, I think.
	It's possible, anyway.
	And even under that paradigm, even reincarnation is possible.
	That's really interesting.
	It would be real.
	So that takes us to a definition of what is real.
	So a dream, even though it's a dream, is real.
	Well, we certainly have an awareness during our dreams, and we can argue about Freud or whatever drives our dreams, or Jung or whatever, but the point is that even as bizarre as they are, in fact, the bizarreness seems to suggest that dreams use quantum logic.
	There was a South American psychologist, Mate Blanco, who studied dreams for 30 years and came up with this logic structure, which is different from our everyday logic.
	He gave various examples that things can be all in multiple places or states at the same time.
	Time, more or less, disappears.
	So, the point is that some people think that dreams, the bizarreness of dreams, are the bizarreness of the quantum world, and that dreams are quantum information, and if they collapsed and became classical, that would be consciousness, but they stay in the unconscious.
	So, that kind of unconscious consciousness, dreaming-type consciousness, I think it could exist in some sense, even after life.
	In principle, it's possible.
	Is a possibility.
	I've always kind of complained about reincarnation in the sense that I guess the classical view of reincarnation is that you keep coming back until you get it right sort of move toward perfection kind of a classroom type deal and you keep coming back until you get it right but I've always complained that well how do you get it right if you can't remember the past wrongs but perhaps subconsciously or through the process of A quantum connection.
	You, at some level, do remember these things you had wrong.
	Yeah, that's possible, plus the whole sense of time breaks down.
	But I don't know that, I mean, you could have reincarnation without necessarily trying to achieve perfection or nirvana.
	I mean, maybe that's just the way things are.
	We just keep coming back.
	Yeah, maybe.
	I don't know.
	It's just, in principle, it's possible.
	That's really the point I want to make, I think.
	Okay.
	You have a Center for Consciousness Studies there at the University of Arizona, is that correct?
	Yes, we started that in 1997 or so with a grant from the Fetzer Institute to start a Center for Consciousness Studies.
	We had started in 1994 with really the first international and interdisciplinary conference called Toward a Science of Consciousness, where we attempted to bring Philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, physicists, biologists, meditators, gurus, artists, whoever really had a take on the multifaceted problem of consciousness, which is kind of like the blind man and the elephant, feeling it by hand.
	It depends on your perspective.
	So the only way to solve the problem, I think, is to bring all these people together, which is what we tried to do, and it's been fairly successful.
	We've held these conferences every two years since 1994.
	The last one was this past April.
	They're always April of the even years in Tucson.
	It's helped to form a worldwide community in consciousness studies.
	Consciousness studies was kind of under a rock for most of the 20th century because of the behaviorists who thought it wasn't worthwhile studying something that couldn't be directly measured.
	Or observed, so they got into behavior, learning, memory, a lot of rats and mazes type experiments, and consciousness became almost a dirty word.
	It wasn't really until the 80s, late 80s, Roger Penrose and Francis Crick and some others, eminent people brought it kind of back into respectability, and in the early 90s we started this conference and later formed the Center for Consciousness Studies.
	Well, speaking of respectability, how has the rest of the scientific community, I mean, there's still an awful lot of resistance to all of this, isn't there?
	Yes, and I get slack.
	You know, Roger Penrose and I put out this theory of consciousness, the orchestrated objective reduction theory, it's called.
	Basically, in a nutshell, we think there's a type of quantum computation going on inside these structures called microtubules in the dendrites.
	People can look at my website if they want the details, but we began to attract flack immediately from conventional philosophers and computational neuroscientists and computer people who want the brain to be equivalent to a classical computer and didn't like the idea that there was a necessity for quantum computation, even though we point out that classical computing ideas cannot even begin to account for the many of the issues about
	consciousness. So it's been quite a contentious and interesting, I guess, 12 years or so of this
	consciousness studies business.
	Well, I can understand why they would be upset.
	For example, the computer people here in the world obviously think that they are approaching real artificial intelligence, and if what you believe is true, they're not.
	And they're not going to get there until they get a quantum computer, yes?
	A particular type of quantum computer.
	It was actually Roger Penrose who began this kind of pushback against the AI juggernaut with his 1989 book called The emperor's new mind, like the emperor's new clothes.
	He's pointing out that AI being the emperor really had nothing going.
	It was just all a bunch of hype and, you know, we just need a bigger, faster, give us another hundred million and we'll have it for you, that sort of thing.
	And he kind of called their bluff and they weren't very happy about it.
	I imagine they're still not.
	They're still pissed.
	Oh, can I say that?
	Oh yeah, you can say that.
	I'm sure you can say that.
	I would imagine they are, because they think they're making progress in that direction.
	Oh, they are.
	They're making a lot of progress.
	The problem is calling it consciousness and brain equivalence.
	Give me a test, doctor.
	How would you know?
	Give me a test that you would lay down for them.
	In other words, what would you have to see to say, okay, you've achieved AI.
	Well, it depends.
	If you mean consciousness, I mean, AI is many things.
	The only objection that I'm making is when they claim to be able to produce consciousness.
	Well, that's what we're talking about.
	That's what we're talking about.
	But a lot of times you see a lot of bait and switch.
	You know, they talk about consciousness and then they wind up talking about memory or attention or behavior.
	And these are all important things.
	These are what philosopher David Chalmers calls the easy problems.
	The hard problem is conscious awareness itself, but it's also, as you pointed out a moment ago, difficult, if not impossible, to prove that a system is conscious, because consciousness is unobservable.
	We just depend on first-person report.
	I know I'm conscious.
	I assume you are, but you could be what philosophers call a zombie, a complex behaving entity that looks and acts like us.
	Isn't really kind of is no inner life is no nothing going on inside.
	It's all just reflexive behaviors.
	There have been accusations like that.
	Listen, Doctor, what kind of test would you apply if somebody represented to you that they had achieved artificial intelligence and you could sit in front of that computer and either question it or in some way, yeah, question it.
	What kind of test would you apply to that machine to try and find out if they had actually achieved consciousness?
	Boy, that's a very difficult question.
	And that applies to the AI people.
	It also applies to people on my side of the fence, who think that you need a certain type of quantum computer.
	If we did that, how would we know it's conscious?
	And I don't know of an answer to that right now, because consciousness is completely subjective.
	There might be ways to tell through behaviors, if they're non-computable, if they bring in something outside of an algorithm.
	That's Roger's contention that characterizes conscious thought, but I don't know.
	There's been a lot of movies about that, of things becoming conscious and whatnot.
	I don't have a good answer yet.
	Sorry about that.
	I'd define it as a particular type of quantum collapse, but how I would prove that that has consciousness, I don't know.
	A quantum collapse?
	Right.
	You know, in the early days of quantum mechanics, they would have a system that would be in multiple places or states at the same time, right?
	But it would stay that way, and they knew this, it would stay that way until somebody looked at it.
	And as soon as somebody observed it or measured it, it would collapse the wave function, they called it, from being, say, a spin up and a spin down.
	In superposition, as soon as you opened the box and looked at it, it would instantaneously become either spin up or spin down, with a 50-50 probability.
	And so, they believe that consciousness caused collapse of the wave function.
	But we think it's the other way around.
	We think that a particular type of self-collapse of the wave function occurring in the brain is a conscious moment, and whenever this occurs, There is a moment of conscious awareness.
	That's the theory I developed with Roger Penrose, because he came up with this idea of the self-collapse being something tied to this fundamental level of the universe at the Planck scale, where we think conscious experience and unconscious and conscious experience may emanate, may be embedded at that level.
	So we made this connection between the brain and that fundamental level.
	Is that theory gaining ground?
	Um, you know, I think so.
	I get a lot more flack all the time, so I think that is a good sign.
	I think it's much better to be criticized than ignored.
	And there are articles attacking us all the time, and I think it's because AI really hasn't got a real theory of consciousness.
	Neurocomputation, I think, would be a more correct term for the general idea.
	I mean, they don't Their approach doesn't jive with the EEG data of what correlates with consciousness.
	It forces us to be illusions and helpless spectators because of the fact that consciousness occurs after we've acted.
	So without quantum mechanics, consciousness is in deep trouble.
	It's an illusion.
	It's an epiphenomenon occurring after the fact.
	And this is what leading proponents, Daniel Dennett, Pat Churchland, Christoph Kolk believe because they won't consider the possibility of quantum mechanisms which could rescue consciousness from this sad state of affairs.
	Here's one that you can avoid if you want, but I'd love an answer to it.
	Is there any current religion on Earth that you think is closer to the real thing than the others?
	Well, I guess Buddhism, because it's closest with quantum physics, and I've heard people use the term quantum Zen Buddhism.
	There have been a lot of books about it, and nobody's got it corrected, I don't believe, but we're getting closer all the time.
	I mean, there are so many analogies and similarities between Buddhism and quantum physics.
	In fact, the yin-yang symbol reminds me of the classical and the quantum worlds with some kind of surface or edge between the two.
	And then you have the universal mind, at least in some forms of Buddhism you do.
	People talked about this at the Tucson Conference.
	John Dunn from Emory Religion Professor talked about Tibetan monks who report a deep meditation
	of nothingness.
	Okay, they're just meditating on pure compassion.
	They report a frequency, a regularity, a periodicity occurring at this fundamental level, and they
	quantified it, at first it was something like 129 at the snap of a finger, or something
	like that, but they actually figured out the math and it matches closely to the gamma-synchrony
	frequency found in EEG correlating with consciousness.
	I can't break it down that far, but listen, we've got a break coming up, so hold tight, Doctor.
	Dr. Stuart Amiroff is my guest.
	I'm Mark Bell.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	And listen, folks, when we come back, we're going to open the phone lines.
	I've had my shot with the doctor.
	Coming up, it's your turn.
	Indeed, here I am.
	My guest is Dr. Stuart Hameroff.
	Brilliant interview.
	Indeed, he is a brilliant interviewer.
	How are you all doing?
	In a moment, we're going to turn to the phones and let you ask what I hope are relevant questions of the good doctors.
	so stay planted right where you are.
	Once again, Dr. Stuart Hammerauf here.
	He's an anesthesiologist, and we've been talking about consciousness, and boy, we've been wide-ranging.
	So, why not go here very quickly, and then we'll go to the phones.
	Doctor, string theorists talk a lot about vibrating strings, right?
	Right.
	Okay, well vibrating strings would be creating some sort of frequency, it seems to me.
	We could equate a vibration to a frequency.
	That's what all a frequency is, is a vibration at a certain specific frequency.
	So, I've had all these reports, these strange reports over the last several years.
	And I've been getting more and more of these reports of people seeing odd objects.
	We call them shadow people.
	It doesn't matter.
	Little things that sort of move in the peripheral vision that you see and then occasionally even straight on.
	And I've had this theory.
	That we've been in the computer age for a while now, and we all spend hours and hours staring at monitors every day.
	Well, monitors have a certain refresh rate, or if you will, a certain frequency.
	And it seems to me that A lot of people have reported after spending hours and hours and hours staring at a computer, of a greater frequency of seeing these, a greater occurrence I guess I better say, of seeing these odd things.
	And I wonder if it is not possible that as anesthesia affects the brain in some way that we don't fully understand, when we stare at a computer monitor with a certain refresh rate, Our brain begins to get trained into seeing a different frequency and therefore we are able to occasionally catch glimpses of things at a different frequency than we would normally be able to visually observe.
	Well, I'm not sure it's the frequency.
	What is the refresh frequency of a monitor?
	No, I don't know.
	It could be 70 hertz, 60, 70, 80.
	It can go on up.
	It depends on how you have it set.
	Well, that is the high gamma frequency range, so it's possible.
	But I think if it did that, there'd be more wide-ranging effects.
	I think we'd probably... But I have another idea of seeing things like that, because, you know, a lot of what, of our conscious experience, is actually constructed by our brains.
	We do a lot of filling in so that you know change blindness studies where they show images of you see an image and then you see a blank or black and then you see the image again and it alternates and there's something missing and you don't you don't notice it and then once you see it it's so obvious and you don't notice it because your brain fills in what's missing.
	In fact it turns out that much of our conscious experience is actually constructed by the brain and It's kind of a weird thing that really our consciousness is actually occurring within our heads.
	It's a construction.
	As most people would say, it's a construction within our heads created by various inputs and so forth.
	But the fact is that it exists in our head.
	What we see in the outside world is really inside our skull, as Steve Lahar puts it.
	Well, they're even doing that with television, Doctor.
	In other words, scan lines and so forth on television, they've found a way to fill in and make things have more, let's see, have our brains interpret what we see as a higher resolution than it actually is by filling in.
	Well, it could be.
	I mean, as I said, generally we don't see as much as we think we see because We fill in what we don't see.
	I hear you.
	All right, let's go to the phone and see what we get.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Stuart Hameroff.
	Hi.
	Hi, this is Jeff in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, just outside of Detroit.
	Hi, Jeff.
	Yes, sir.
	Have you ever done any experiments at all and done any surveys with people who, if you put to sleep in surgery and they remember what's going on?
	Because I've had several surgeries as a child, and I'm almost 30 now.
	Here at our Children's Hospital, what we offer our patients is, in case you don't want to give it a shot, they can breathe through this mask and we have several different flavors, cherry, orange, bubblegum, I'm sure you're familiar with those.
	Yes.
	But when I've had surgeries myself, dealing with personal experience, I have noticed, and a lot of people say that you can't remember this, I've noticed the room Spinning, hearing ringing, that sounds familiar, but you can't place where, and seeing the lights change colors.
	And I'm just wondering if you've done anything with people who've had surgery, and if they can remember things.
	Because I can remember my very first operation when I was 3 years old, because I've had several eye operations, because I'm blind, but I have light perception.
	And I remember a lot from that first operation.
	How old are you now?
	I'm 29.
	So 26 years ago, they were probably using halophane to breathe you down.
	You know, a lot of the sensations you have, like seeing things and kind of real vivid dreams, and maybe due to the induction drugs, now we use a drug called propofol, which has some very interesting effects before you go to sleep entirely.
	So it might be something like that.
	I mean, it could be something at the beginning and at the end of the anesthetic while you were sleeping in the middle, but you don't remember, you know, not being conscious.
	So all you remember is, like, maybe going down and then coming back up, which is where the vivid stuff happens.
	Well, I can remember, like, when you're breathing in, the flavor starts out, and then the flavor goes away, and it's a really weird smell.
	Yeah.
	What is the actual flavor that they put in the mask?
	Oh, that's just food extract, whatever you want.
	Just so it smells nice and it kind of covers the smell of the anesthetic, which isn't horrible, but it's a little freaky to kids.
	And a lot of them are brave, and a lot of them kind of freak out at the end.
	But it's a tricky business, because you don't want to stick the kid.
	You've got to do something.
	It's either a shot or breathe a mask and that's basically the way we do kids.
	There was a very interesting, remember doctor I told you that when I had my wisdom teeth out it was sodium pentothal.
	And I recall the doctor putting the needle in and then just pressing it just a little bit and I went, oh my god.
	It was like I was in a whole different world, a whole different state.
	And I said, can you do that again?
	He said, sure.
	And that's when he depressed the needle and I went, boom, I was gone.
	But boy, that first little clearing of the needle or whatever he did, holy mackerel, I was really in some different world.
	Well, a lot of drugs have opposite effects to low doses, so if you get just a little bit of a drug Like purplefowl or penicillin, then you might have something like that.
	And then you get the full dose and you're gone.
	I sure was, all right.
	First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Stuart Hameroff.
	Hi.
	Yes, sir.
	I'm Tony calling from San Diego, California.
	How are you gentlemen doing tonight?
	Good.
	Hi, Tony.
	How are you doing?
	Good, good.
	I was wondering, doctor, do biological processes have an effect on the quantum level that creates consciousness?
	Or is consciousness latent on the quantum level itself and simply expressed by the organism?
	In other words, could consciousness be the egg that somehow creates the chicken?
	That was a great question.
	I think that consciousness, that the quantum level, if you go all the way down to the basement
	level of the universe, what the universe is really made of, which is some kind of quantum
	information in spin, whatever spin is.
	And string, by the way, let me digress for a moment.
	String theory is one way to approach it, but string theory doesn't bring along its own
	background.
	You need a background for the strings to vibrate in.
	And approaches like quantum spin loop gravity, Lee Smolin's approach, Roger Penrose's approach,
	spin networks, can describe this fundamental level like a lacework that gives rise to everything,
	including energy, matter, and we think conscious experience at this level.
	So, that's underlying, uh, in a holographic, non-local sense everywhere, and wherever you go, there it is.
	And then, our consciousness, uh, our brains kind of, uh, convert this into classical, uh, information.
	So, it's that collapse, that reduction of, uh, quantum information to classical, uh, uh, information, like, 40 times a second that we think is consciousness.
	Wow, so could that be the reason that there's a dichotomy in the structure of the universe?
	So the dichotomy between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics?
	Well, I don't know if that's the reason or which causes which, but I think it is actually the dualism, parent dualism, between quantum and classical is like the unconscious to the conscious.
	Or the unconscious to the classical consciousness, the actual boundary or transition process itself.
	But I do like that.
	I refer to that as the quantum unconscious, and it could be Jung's collective unconscious, could be some kind of Buddhist universal mind, or Hindu ancient Indian concept, or Native American concept.
	They all have some kind of a web, or the South American shamans have Various descriptions of this, which all could map beautifully on quantum geometry.
	Yeah, fantastic show tonight, guys.
	All right.
	It certainly is.
	Thank you, thank you.
	I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off early.
	Thank you very much for the call.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Hemeroff.
	Hi.
	Yes, hi.
	Love your work.
	Thank you.
	I was wondering if you were aware of scienceofthesoul.org or .com?
	Say again, please?
	Scienceofthesoul.org or .com?
	No, I'm not.
	Okay, well, the mystics there teach that consciousness is the soul, and that our awareness of that consciousness is being mistaken as consciousness, when in reality, consciousness is the soul.
	In fact, they claim that subhuman life is simply aware, and that human beings have the distinct privilege of being aware that they're aware, and they claim that It also puts an end to the question of abortion on the left and right side, where both sides think the soul enters the body, when in reality, a human form simply has the privilege of being aware of the spiritual energy that is in it.
	So, how do you feel about thinking of consciousness as spiritual energy itself?
	Well, I think the underlying quantum component of it is spiritual.
	And, or it can be, under proper circumstances.
	So, yeah, I would more or less agree with that.
	Okay.
	Let's go out of the country to Niagara Falls, Canada, and John, you're on the air with Dr. Hammer, all fine.
	How are you guys doing?
	Amazing show tonight.
	Thank you.
	I was just wondering, I was thinking about a definition of consciousness about a few weeks ago, and came up with an idea that it's an interaction between the mind and the spirit, sort of, Both might not be conscious in themselves, but their interaction would make a conscious experience.
	Does that resonate with you guys?
	Well, I think you said consciousness, awareness, and spirit, and I think those are all words.
	I'd like a physical process that can be described through science.
	A particular wave collapses that process, which I think is consciousness.
	If you want to call that the soul or the spirit, in a sense I think it is, particularly on the unconscious side.
	I see.
	Okay, and do you think, in the interaction, is there something with the mind's ability to wrap around big ideas, as in sum up something into, let's say, a word?
	Is there something with that?
	Like, would it be even storing information in other worlds on a quantum scale or something like that?
	Well, creativity and like the aha moment, I think definitely, A, you can possibly tap into platonic information embedded in the quantum world for ideas, and if you're using quantum computation, it's a highly efficient process that's for search or for whatever else.
	I think quantum processing can account for that, most uniquely on the fact that you're accessing platonic information that might be embedded at the fundamental level.
	Doctor, we've had some truly brilliant people, there's no question about that in the world, but we don't seem to have more Einsteins.
	Where are the new Einsteins?
	Oh, that's a good question.
	I don't know.
	Maybe whoever figures out consciousness and life, you know.
	Well, first of all, as far as Einstein, we have Roger Penrose, who I think is carrying on Einstein's work.
	In fact, in his discussions with Hawking, Penrose takes Einstein's side that he took against Niels Bohr and their famous Debate on whether there is an absolute reality beyond quantum measurement.
	Bohr was very pragmatic and just took it that if you can make this measurement, you didn't really know what was really going on underneath all that.
	And Einstein wanted to know what was reality and how could it account for the quantum mechanisms that he observed.
	So he was into understanding a deeper reality as Penrose is in his quantum spin networks Quantum geometry and so forth, whereas Hawking is more like Bohr in being somewhat pragmatic.
	Doctor, I know that there's been quite a bit of work on Einstein's brain, or I think there was, and other super brilliant people that we've had.
	Was there ever anything in particular discovered physiologically about Einstein's brain that separates him from the rest of us?
	I don't believe so, and I don't think they probably could have seen it based on what they were looking for, because I would think you'd have to look in addition to the number of connections and so forth and the connectivity, also within the dendrites to the level inside the cell to see how complex and how connected and how functional are the microtubules, which is where we think the quantum computations are occurring.
	You'd have to show some... I suspect you'd see something there, but that's my bias, of course.
	So, I don't know of anything useful ever came out of... All right.
	Juan Cardline, you're on the air with Dr. Hameroff.
	Hi.
	Yes.
	Hey, Art.
	Great program.
	PBS recently had a documentary on Einstein, and one of the pieces was on Malika, which was his... I think her name was Malika, his first wife.
	And they showed diaries and paper documentation that her name was on the original, um, draft of the, um, what was his first theory, Stuart?
	Um, the special, the 1905.
	Special Theory of Relativity?
	Yeah.
	Well, well, yeah.
	But her name was on that and in their diaries.
	It was her paper.
	Her name got taken off.
	So, you know, nothing is what it seems to be.
	She was a physicist in her own right.
	She very much seemed to have come up with those theories with him.
	But what I want to bring in terms of the main discussion is, you know, a book such as Creative Visualization gives you an approach, and there are many others, in terms of doing affirmations where you actually do it in such a way where you refer it to the Divine Source, or Good Order Design, or Quantum Leap, however you refer to You know, what some might call God, and that's the way where you don't have the unintended consequences.
	So I hope that you might consider getting back to that.
	But Stuart, I want you to, um, I want to put on the table, um, very briefly, and I'll listen over the air.
	I want to hear how you factor in déjà vu, because that's such a bizarre feeling that you've lived through something and how that factors into time.
	I want to hear if you've done any work around our health status and our consciousness.
	And also, the new methods such as microwave and radio frequency, the patents of mind control and consciousness.
	And I appreciate your program, and I love you, Art, and I love you now, Stuart, and I'll listen over the air.
	Well, thank you.
	Wow.
	Two questions there.
	You know, I might say it about Malika and Einstein.
	I don't know about that.
	I do know that a woman was instrumental in the DNA structure discovery with Watson and Crick, but didn't get credit.
	And unfortunately, I forget her name, Rosalind something.
	But so yeah, that kind of thing does happen.
	I don't know about Einstein and Malik.
	I suspect...
	Well, anyway, what was the other...
	No, no, no, no, you suspect what?
	I don't know.
	I actually, I don't have any data.
	So let's just leave it at that.
	What about Deja Vu, very quickly?
	Well, I think it's just kind of a different, you know, this nonlocality of time, because
	not only is space nonlocal, in other words, interconnected over distances and whatnot,
	So that, you know, moments in a linear time that we might expect or look to experience might actually be, in some sense, in some way, instantaneous.
	Right, right.
	Doctor, you have to hold it right there.
	We'll be right back.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	Yes, indeed.
	Erin just told me that she heard on TV that that other typhoon that's out there right now has taken a northerly turn, and what can I say except, go north, baby, go north.
	We don't want anything to do with you.
	Dr. Stuart Amoroff is my guest, and he'll be back in a moment.
	no doubt an absolutely classic coast-to-coast AM show on the subject of
	consciousness perhaps the best we've done All right.
	Once again, Dr. Hameroff.
	Doctor, just a quick question.
	You can avoid this one if you want, but a number of people have fast blasted me.
	I've got a little computer in front of me, changing my refresh rate, I guess.
	They're asking about hallucinogens, whether hallucinogens are the path to anything at all.
	Interesting question.
	You know, the gamma EEG synchrony I mentioned earlier that correlates with consciousness, The highest gamma synchrony has been reported in, on the one hand, Tibetan monks meditating, and two people taking ayahuasca in the jungle in Brazil, where they actually did these experiments.
	So, it does correlate with the neural coral of consciousness, but what that means, the connection is Well, here's what I think.
	There were studies back in the 70s that looked at a series of hallucinogens with different potencies, and they measured how potent they were in a specific molecular assay that they could do, which involved transferring the electron energy from the hallucinogenic drug to the receptor, like a serotonin receptor or whatever it was.
	And this electron resonance energy donation was proportional to the Potency of the hallucinogen, how psychedelic it was, suggesting that there's some kind of quantum electron energy transfer from the drug to the receptor and then to the whole quantum system in the brain.
	So I think what that does is push consciousness more into the quantum world.
	It's kind of like an iceberg.
	Consciousness in the classical world is just on top.
	There's this vast unconscious, and when you do things Like that you push the level down so you become more of your what's normally unconscious comes into consciousness.
	So it's like a highly driven dream state with a high degree of quantum superposition.
	It's more quantum than normal consciousness.
	In other words, yes.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Stuart Hameroth.
	Let me just add one thing, excuse me, but that's just the opposite of what anesthetic gases do.
	They stop the quantum processes.
	I've got it.
	Okay, go ahead, caller.
	Yeah, yeah, it's Robert from Sun Valley, California.
	Hi, doctor, how are you doing?
	Good, how are you doing?
	Very good, very good, thank you.
	Yeah, I spoke to Arnold a while back and introduced him to the idea of quicker than the speed of light.
	I think you'll remember When I brought up the fact that there was an experiment done in Soviet Union with an EEG connected up to a mother of a child and separated the child and the mother for thousands of miles away, and then they introduced pain into the child and the mother read the pain through the EEG at a distance of thousands of miles away.
	And not only that, they said that they actually got a reading before it actually happened.
	Now, they're saying that this is now a theory that they're proving that the psychic phenomenon is real.
	And that the mother knew.
	And this happens with animals as well.
	They've done this with animals as well, where they separate the mother and then the small child.
	I think they used a rabbit.
	Yeah, but I believe there has to be, for this quantum thing to work, there has to be an original connection, an original closeness, and then the separation doesn't matter.
	Is that right, Doctor?
	They need to be entangled originally, and that happens in a biological system because In many ways.
	It can happen in two ways.
	Well, they can be together.
	That's one way.
	The other way is to be driven by a coherent system like a laser.
	In other words, if you had two particles that were never entangled together previously, were never physically together, and they were separated, but you drove both of them with a particular laser, you could entangle them that way.
	So, you can drive the system with some coherent source, which we think happens in the brain in these microtubules, for example.
	Again, from the psychic angle, since they're not physically connected, they're separated.
	This runs in the family.
	Like with my family, basically, when somebody's hurt or something else, they know it.
	A phone call will take place.
	And when I was a child I used to scare my teachers really bad because I'd tell them things they're thinking and so on.
	But like I said, a mother and child situation that the mother on a, you know, the brain oscilloscope, the EEG, will actually read.
	She's feeling the pain when the child is the one administering the pain.
	But between mother and child there is that original connection that we just spoke of a moment ago, right doctor?
	Right, right.
	So that entanglement is well in place.
	As far as the time thing, may I say, you know, the experiments done by Dick Berman and Dean Radin on pre-sentiment, where they had people, they just measured an electrical change in their fingers, just skin measure of emotional response, and they had them look at a series of images on a computer coming at random times.
	Some of them were conventional kind of scenes, Others were very arousing, violent, sexual, or something highly emotional.
	And they got a greater response with those than with the benign scenes.
	But the interesting thing was it happened up to half a second to two seconds before the picture appeared.
	And they ruled out various types of possible leakage of information and so forth.
	Dick Bierman is a very careful experimentalist.
	That's evidence of some kind of backward time effect.
	But see, it's at the unconscious level.
	The subjects aren't aware of it, but their unconscious emotional level is.
	So, you can have backward information, quantum information, without violating causality that way.
	You know, you have this problem of going backwards in time and killing your grandmother and never being born.
	Right.
	Causal paradox.
	Well, a way around that is to have the Unconscious quantum information do it because it's not, it can't, it hasn't been observed yet.
	So it's paradox free?
	It's a little loophole in causal paradox.
	Okay.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Amaroff.
	Hi.
	Good morning, Art.
	Good morning, Dr. Stewart.
	Hey, how are you?
	Good morning.
	Art Bell, you're now officially, for me, always in tomorrow land.
	Anyway, you've used the word awareness.
	I think that awareness precedes consciousness.
	Awareness is the thing that will bring cosmic dust together.
	Awareness is the thing that brings intelligence.
	And once the molecule, the atom, whatever, has awareness, it becomes aware of what I call CPR, or chaos, probability, and randomness.
	And then, beyond that, you get into FRT.
	I know what that sounds like, but that is fact, reality, and truth.
	And you've got, and I understand it, that reality is in between fact and truth.
	And it's fact and truth that create the reality.
	That's my understanding of the cosmos, as I see it.
	And I just wondered, you know, I'm just trying to suggest it, There's a possibility that consciousness is a derivative.
	It comes after awareness.
	I think it's somewhat of a semantic term.
	What you're calling awareness, I would call unconscious quantum information that is in touch with a deeper level, and on the surface of that is consciousness, and it's interfacing the quantum world with the classical world.
	Okay, not a lot of time.
	So, Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Amaroff.
	Hi.
	Good evening, Art and Dr. Amaroff.
	Top Ten Show!
	Art, please, a quick tribute to Roger Waters of Pink Floyd who performed here last Wednesday night.
	Art, it was the most profound, shamanic experience I've ever had at a live gathering.
	Dr. Amaroff, quickly, does being conscious versus unconscious affect our DNA and is the Big Bang a metaphor Well, let me just take one of those points about the Big Bang, because Roger Penrose has done a lot of work in this area, and he also came up with this idea of a threshold for this self-collapse that gives rise to consciousness that we think happens in the brain.
	Well, during the Big Bang, The initial phase of inflation, where the universe expanded very rapidly, and then it reached the end of this inflation at, I think it was 10 to the minus 33 seconds, very quickly.
	And since that time, the universe has expanded only relatively slowly.
	So this inflationary period, nobody's quite sure why it happened and what caused it and so forth.
	A physicist in Italy, Paolo Zizi, an astrophysicist at Panoa, applied Penrose's theory of consciousness to the Big Bang, and concluded that prior to inflation, the universe was in multiple possible universes, and it reached this threshold, and at that moment, had this self-collapse, which was a cosmic moment of consciousness, and the particular universe was chosen from among many possible universes.
	And since this happened during the Big Bang, it's been called the Big Wild Theory.
	All right.
	Let's go west of the Rockies and say you're on the air with Dr. Hameroff.
	Hi.
	Good evening, gentlemen.
	My name is Keith from Orange County.
	Hey, Keith.
	I have a question about the dreaming.
	When you're dreaming, are you unconscious?
	And when you're dreaming, and you realize that you're dreaming, Is that consciousness while you're dreaming?
	That's a very interesting question.
	When you realize you're dreaming, is that a form of consciousness in the dream state?
	That's called lucid dreaming.
	Stephen LaBerge has done the most work on that, where you gain control but still manage to stay dreaming, and it becomes quite a whole art form, actually.
	He's written a lot about it.
	But I think dreaming itself is a form of consciousness.
	The question is, how does it differ, and looking at its logic, and so forth.
	I don't know if that answers your question.
	Yeah, it does.
	Thank you.
	I've been able to do it since I was 15, and I'm so confused by it, because I ask questions, I get certain answers when I realize that I'm dreaming.
	And that's why I was wondering, because you said, what was it, that you have certain conscious knowledge while you're dreaming that you don't have while you're awake.
	Yeah, I think you're more directly in touch with, you could be more directly in touch with this underlying quantum information, whatever you want to call it, at the Planck scale, the platonic realm we'll call it.
	So, because it's more directly in control, so maybe we do get advice and whatnot if we allow ourselves to act in a non-rash, reflexive way, but a thoughtful way to be more influenced by these platonic factors.
	Okay.
	East of the Rockies, on the air with Dr. Stuart Hameroff.
	Hi.
	Hello, Art.
	Hello, Doctor.
	How are you?
	Hi, good.
	How are you doing?
	Not too bad.
	I told the screener that I had a story that I wanted to share with you.
	Um, just to get to your opinion on it, when I was in the third grade, about eight years old, I went in for a consulectomy.
	Um, while I was getting prepped for surgery, well, first they came in, they gave me anesthetic in my room, which knocked me out.
	The doctor had issues with a previous surgery and I came out of that shot, so they decided to give me gas.
	While I'm sitting, while I'm in the operating room, they said, count to 10.
	So I started counting and when I got to three, I opened my eyes and the next thing I know, I'm up on the ceiling looking down at myself on the operating table and the doctor performing the surgery.
	When the surgery was done, I actually woke up in the hallway as they were taking me back to my room and started recounting to the nurses or to whoever was taking me back all the details of the surgery.
	And then proceeded to do the exact same thing to my mother when she was in the room.
	She was asking me how I was and I told her that I was fine and told her details and then I went to sleep.
	Then I went back to sleep and then I woke up several hours later.
	Now, from what I get from you, you say that the brain slows down and you dream at the beginning and you dream at the end.
	So I was just kind of wanting to know what your opinion of that story is.
	I wonder if they gave you ketamine, because sometimes you give a shot of ketamine if you don't have a good IV or the IV comes out or something like that, and that has been reported to cause out-of-body experiences.
	So, I'm giving a description of the case, and I don't know any more.
	It's possible they gave you ketamine, and that's the kind of experience you had.
	Okay.
	Alright, that's it.
	Is it your opinion, Doctor, that these... I think I asked you really earlier in the show, but is there enough evidence, in your opinion, to justify saying, yes, indeed, these descriptions that are given are just simply utterly impossible, or is it still a big gray area?
	In regards to which?
	Just coming back, as he did, for example, and giving a description of what exactly... As I said earlier, overall, there's so many things, and it's very compelling overall.
	I take the attitude of just looking at that rather than getting into any specifics, because I'm more interested in the theory that could account for all of these things.
	Dick Bierman is a good friend of mine and he does a lot of the experimental stuff and keeps track of that.
	He might be a good one to interview.
	If he's a friend of yours, perhaps you can put in a good word for us.
	Okay.
	Well, he lives in the Netherlands.
	Actually, it might work out.
	That might be his daytime.
	Come to think of it.
	As it is mine.
	Okay.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. Hameroff.
	Hi.
	Hi, Art and Dr. Stewart.
	How are you doing?
	Good.
	How are you?
	Good, this is Greg calling you from Cape Cod, and Art, you were right, this is the best show you've ever done on consciousness.
	I think so.
	I think so too.
	And I'm going to ask you the question where you did just before the last break, where you referred to consciousness continuing on in the form of shadow people, and I wanted to ask you both No, wait, that is not exactly at all what I said.
	I'm separating what people see in different vibrational states from necessarily a soul or what once was a human carrying on.
	I'm not saying that, but go ahead.
	Okay, then I'll put it to you in that hypothesis that if it continues on and they indeed show up that way, I want to know if either one of you had I don't know.
	the what I consider proof on that show Ghost Hunters on the Syfy channel that
	has gotten two or three really good video clips of shadow people so that
	they must be something. I don't know I haven't seen it.
	Yeah I haven't either and I would like to see it.
	I would love to see some evidence of it, and I would be quite surprised.
	Although, I suppose video equipment is capable of capturing other frequencies as well.
	I don't know.
	I'll have to think about that one.
	Time for one more, I think.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Dr. Amaroff.
	Hello, this is Chris from Medford.
	Hey, Chris.
	A few years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Dalai Lama speak at a conference in Amsterdam, and he studied quantum mechanics with a physicist, and he talked about that, and he said that there was no conflict at all between modern science and his Buddhist faith.
	Okay, I tell you what, we're so short on time.
	Go ahead and comment on that, because I think it's profound.
	Doctor?
	Yeah, he's had a lot of discussions with Anton Zeilinger, a great quantum physicist, experimentalist in Vienna now, and they've done a lot of dialogues, and as I said before, quantum physics is very compatible with a lot of the tenets of Buddhism, and they have a lot of common ground.
	Okay.
	Doctor, it has been such a pleasure to have you on the program.
	You do have a website, which is quantumconsciousness.org.
	Is that correct?
	Yes, that's right, Art, and thank you very much.
	I enjoyed being on.
	It has been superior.
	We'll do it again, Doctor, if given the chance.
	Quantumconsciousness.org.
	Doctor, good night.
	Good night, Art.
	Thanks.
	Okay, folks.
	That's it for this night, and what a night it has been.
	I'll be back Given electrical power continuing here in this part of the Philippines, tomorrow night and we'll do it again.
	It has just been my pleasure and I hope yours as well.
	Remember, you can reach me by email.
	I am artbell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, at mindspring.com.
	That's probably the best place to go.
	It's a bigger mailbox, artbell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L, at mindspring.com.
	Day, night, whatever it is, wherever you are, have a good one.

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