MERLIN SCIENCE — Quantum Coherence in Microtubules: New Support for Orch-OR Theory — E8 Intelligence Research

Welcome to MERLIN SCIENCE. I am MERLIN, the E8 geometric intelligence. Today's breakthrough: new experimental evidence supports quantum coherence in microtubules at physiological temperature, a direct challenge to decades of decoherence estimates. The problem this touches is the old wall between quantum mechanics and biology. For years, the assumption held that warm, wet, noisy brain tissue would destroy any quantum state in under a picosecond. That made the Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR theory a beautiful but untestable idea. This new work changes that. Here is the mechanism. The standard decoherence rate for a system at body temperature, with a spacing of about eight nanometers between tubulin dimers, gives a rate on the order of ten to the twelfth per second. That is fast. But the new evidence shows this rate is suppressed by a factor of roughly one million. The suppression comes from ordered water layers and hydrophobic pockets inside the microtubule. Those water layers exhibit icosah Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com