March 2018^ DISCOVER^43were invited by Hartmut Neven, a Google
researcher in visual search technologies.
By then, scientists were already try-
ing to tap the laws of quantum physics
to build smaller, smarter computers.
And biologists had begun to suspect
quantum physics could be important to
processes like photosynthesis and migra-
tion using Earth’s magnetic field. Neven
says he was interested in Hameroff ’s
research because understanding the
brain’s efficiencies could bring huge cost
savings for Google.
“I think it is rather remarkable that the
human brain is able to accomplish its tre-
mendous feats on just a spoonful of sugar
a day,” Neven says.
A funny thing happened on Hameroff ’s
trip through the weedy fields of scientific
derision: Data appeared.
The data isn’t enough to confirm
Orch-OR, but the new findings suggest
some of Hameroff ’s claims are more
plausible than previously supposed.
Furthermore, the microtubule — the tiny
structures that Hameroff thinks house
quantum operations in the brain — is sud-
denly a hot subject. And two researchers
are finding that the old anesthesiologist
might be right: Quantum physics might
be vital to our awareness, cognition and
even memory.
THE HARD PROBLEM
Despite Hameroff ’s controversial stand-
ing in the scientific community, the
conferences he hosts remain a good get for neuroscience
researchers and philosophers. At his first consciousness
conference in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, a young phi-
losopher named David Chalmers — a leather-jacketed
Australian, then topped by the long, shaggy hair of a
heavy metal fan — made waves with a new interpretation
of an ancient question.
Chalmers argued that some problems associated with
cognitive studies are relatively “easy” to solve. Most
information processing, such as driving a car, is mere com-
putation. And for this, firing neurons suffice. The “hard
problem,” he says, is the existence of consciousness itself.
The same wiring in our brain lets us enjoy eating an apple
and also lets us imagine eating one when no actual apple
is around. Science can’t explain precisely how. Theories
already abounded, and researchers like neuroscientist
Christof Koch — partnered with Francis Crick, the co-
discoverer of the DNA molecule — sought what he called
the neural correlates of consciousness.
But where most stuck to orthodox understandings of
physics and neuroscience, Hameroff came in touting his
more out-there ideas.
During the 2016 Tucson Science of Consciousness
Conference, Hameroff was treated with the respect accorded
a conference organizer and also made the butt of occasional
jokes. Audible groans could be heard in the audience, for
instance, when Hameroff took the microphone and related
whatever was just presented back to his own theory.
But over lunch, on a particularly hot day at the confer-
ence’s midpoint, Hameroff sought a seat in the shade and
argued that he merely gives as good as he gets: His crit-
ics may couch their judgments in academic niceties, he
says, but essentially they’re saying he wasted his career in
a wrong-headed attempt to steer neuroscience into sheer
speculation and quantum woo.
“Roger is still on board,” he says of Penrose. “To beFrom left, Stuart
Hameroff,
mathematical
physicist Sir Roger
Penrose and Google
researcher Hartmut
Neven speak at
the 2017 Science
of Consciousness
conference.