Study suggests Spins of ‘Brain Water’ in Humans Brain could mean our minds use Quantum Computation.
In the ongoing work to realize the full potential of quantum computing, scientists could perhaps try peering into our own brains to see what’s possible: A new physics study suggests that the brain actually has a lot in common with a quantum computer.
The entanglement or relationship between the known systems can only happen if the mediating system in the middle – the unknown system – operates on a quantum level, too. While the unknown system can’t be studied directly, its effects can be observed, as with quantum gravity.
For the purposes of this research, the proton spins of ‘brain water’ (the fluid that builds up in the brain) act as the known system for humans brain, with custom magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans used to non-invasively measure the proton activity. The spin of a particle, which determines its magnetic and electrical properties, is a quantum-mechanical property.
Through this technique, the researchers were able to see signals resembling heartbeat-evoked potentials, which are a type of electroencephalography (EEG) signal. These signals aren’t normally detectable via MRI, and the thinking is that they showed up because the nuclear proton spins in the brain were entangled.
Source: https://www.sciencealert.com
