Published in the print edition of Popular Mechanics
September/October 2026
Susan Lahey
The package was nondescript but contained a very pricey jar of powder. Nothing illicit, of course—it was roughly 5,000 times more expensive than cocaine anyway. This was a bit of cow’s brain—or bovine tubulin—freeze-dried, bottled, and sold online for about $800 per milligram.
Hundreds of thousands of these little jars are sold to research laboratories every year. When this one arrived at Italy’s Polytechnic University of Turin, researchers laid it alongside their other work equipment: syringes, liquids, and mixing vials. Then, the scientists commenced a 12-step process to reconstitute the powdered animal protein into functional microtubules.
Jack Tuszynski, PhD, a biophysics professor who divides his time between Polytechnic University of Turin and the University of Alberta, planned to use the bovine microtubules to investigate a theory about the nature of human consciousness, that subjective experience of “being” that converts data and action into a full-blown multidimensional experience. The question was whether it’s possible for “messy” meat like our brain to engage with the energetic fabric of quantum energy, the fundamental ripples in space-time geometry. If our consciousness could entangle itself with the universe.
Not that that’s how Tuszynski would describe it; such fanciful ideas are kryptonite for scientists. He just wanted to see if he could dislodge a popular bias that human brains and quantum activity are fundamentally at odds.
For nearly six decades, most physicists insisted that quantum activity could only ever occur in cold, pristine environments like space—not within the wet, warm, squishy brain where our neuronal brain cells live. But over that same time period, microtubules, which
are composed of bits of tubulin like the sample of cow brain on Tuszynski’s slides, had revealed increasingly remarkable capabilities.
drical shape, microtubules form the unique structures of all eukaryotic cells, not just those in the brain. The more scientists study microtubules, the more jobs they find them performing. They participate in cell division. They serve as the “roads” along which motor proteins travel, carrying neurotransmitters, proteins, and genetic information from one part of the cell to another. They generate, propagate, and amplify electrical signals, meaning they interact with electromagnetic fields.
But in looking at the quantum potential of microtubules, Tuszynski was not only examining their electromagnetic properties. He was also intrigued by their shape, which resembles synthetic structures designed to harvest light. Tubulin even contains an amino acid called tryptophan that absorbs and re-emits light. If he fired the tubulin with quantum packets of light energy, called photons, and that light energy didn’t immediately disappear, that could indicate quantum activity. So Tuszynski’s plan was to fire photons at the strands of tubulin using ultraviolet light that is not visible to the human eye, but that his lab’s spectrometers could pick up on.
In a non-quantum process, the light would last at most for a few picoseconds; that’s on the order of one one-thousandth of a nanosecond, which is one one-billionth of a second. But if an electron absorbed that photon, the electron would jump to a higher energetic state. However, quantum mechanics does not allow two electrons to occupy the same quantum state. If no higher-energy
Tuszynski’s team performed 22 different experiments, and the results were startling. The light lasted five nanoseconds—thousands of times longer than expected. Not only that, but it had excited electrons over six nanometers. These were nearly invisible objects operating on unimaginably small timescales.
The results, published in a journal of the American Chemical Society in January 2023, didn’t prove that your consciousness can con-nect with the universe’s vast, interconnected web of matter and energy. But, suddenly, the possibility of quantum states existing in our brains was firmly on the table.
NOBODY KNOWS WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS is. We never have. It’s possible we never will. But we do know two things about it. The first is the feeling of being conscious. We know what it is to have dreams and feelings and experiences that sometimes make sense and other times don’t—where we’re an observer and participant and passenger on a ride we didn’t devise, but that we’re strapped into. The second is that anesthesia seems to shut down or alter consciousness.
Connecticut dentist Horace Wells helped pioneer the use of general anesthesia during surgery. In 1844, after observing a demonstration of nitrous oxide, Wells asked a colleague to administer it to him and had his tooth extracted without pain. Since then, multiple types of anesthesia have been invented, but their mechanism is still a black box. We do know that when you administer anesthetics to an animal or a plant, it becomes unresponsive. A person appears to be in a deep sleep and doesn’t react to surgery. A plant droops and doesn’t respond to light or other stimuli (a Venus flytrap that’s been anesthetized doesn’t react to a nearby buzzing fly, for example).
But if anesthetics can render people and plants unresponsive to stimuli, does that mean either—or both—were conscious to begin with?
In the late 1960s, South African geneticist and medical scientist Anthony Clifford Allison discovered that all the things we can knock out with anesthesia have microtubules. Everything from the cleavage of sea urchin eggs to the ciliary beating of swimming embryos can be halted with anesthesia—and all of the cells in those processes have microtubules. Allison theorized that because of their abundance and their ability to generate and amplify electrical signals, these structures may be the reason we can act in response to impulses from the nervous system, something we can do only when we’re conscious. His focus was more on consciousness, as in awake or asleep, not consciousness as an aware being in the universe. But around the time Allison was publishing, Stuart Hameroff, a medical student at what was then Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia (now part of Drexel University), was looking for ways to study consciousness as a medical practitioner. In his third year of medical school, he observed microtubules during a research elective in a cancer laboratory. He later wrote that his observations convinced him that microtubules were the nervous system of all cells,
including nerve cells.
When Hameroff finished medical school, he was debating whether to go into neuroscience when he met Burnell Brown, the chair of the new anesthesia department at the University of Arizona. If Hameroff wanted to commit to consciousness,
Brown explained, he should figure out
how anesthesia works. “And he handed me [Allison’s] paper that said that anesthesia depolymerized microtubules in a tiny urchin. And it turned out that that was five times the amount you needed to put people to sleep.”
“This implies that the basic levels of cognition are within nerve cells, that cytoskeletal filaments are the roots of consciousness,” Hameroff wrote in his 1987 book, Ultimate Computing: Biomolecular Consciousness and NanoTechnology. He had been a practicing anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona, but now he was also dabbling in what would be the beginnings of artificial intelligence.
ULTIMATE COMPUTING EXPLORED THE idea of brain and computer interfaces through multiple disciplines, including biochemistry, cognitive science, and computer science. Around the time it published, Hameroff was attending forums on what it would take to create machine consciousness.
“They said, ‘When computers [can conduct] 1016 operations per second, they will achieve brain equivalence and do everything a [human] brain can do, including consciousness,’” Hameroff recalls. “And I would be the fly in the ointment and say, ‘No, no, no. Each neuron has about a billion tubulins switching at—we don’t know how fast—let’s just say 10 megahertz. So that’s 1016 operations per second per neuron. So you’ve got to multiply that by 1011 neurons, which is 1027 operations per second. So your target is way, way downstream. You’re not even close.’”
(That sounds complicated, but as it turns out, today’s exascale supercomputers can perform 1018 operations per second, which is well past 1016 but nowhere near 1027. And while AI can be uncanny, most experts would agree it’s not yet conscious.)
“But then one day, and this was really a turning point,” Hameroff recalls, “somebody came up to me and said, ‘Okay, Mr. Wiseass. Let’s say you’re right, 1027. How would that explain consciousness? You know—love, joy?’” He was dismayed to admit he didn’t know. Then, Nobel laureate physicist Roger Penrose recommended a book to him called The Emperor’s New Mind. He read it, understood only about 1 percent of it, but got the general idea.
Penrose, like Hameroff, believed that consciousness was more complex than our brains processing information like a computer does, with inputs in the form of stimuli and outputs in the form of thoughts and actions. Instead, he believed consciousness must connect the processes of the human body with something outside the body. And that something was the quantum universe.
Further, Penrose argued that consciousness doesn’t unfold as a continuous process. Instead, he proposed that each moment of conscious awareness emerges when a quantum wave of possibilities abruptly collapses into a single outcome—a process likely driven by quantum gravity. This phenomenon happens so constantly that we experience it as a continuous state. What Penrose didn’t know was how the brain, that precious three-pound lump of human tissue, could collapse the wave function. Hameroff thought he knew the solution. So, he wrote to Penrose and told him about microtubules.
For the next couple of years, the two met periodically, weaving together what Penrose knew about the universe and what Hameroff knew about microtubules, ultimately producing the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch
OR), which posits that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at once) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected), which would enable the human mind to experience consciousness as an instrument of the quantum energy field.
Their first paper in 1995 was widely panned. For years, it remained controversial, fringe. For Penrose, it was perceived as the quirky side quest of a brilliant physicist. But Hameroff was seen as a hack who had led Penrose astray. Penrose, as a theorist, could make the arguments, but proving the brain to be quantum required an experimental scientist. Somebody who could, say, order a vial of bovine tubulin, reconstitute it, and zap it with ultraviolet light.
Back in 1991, the Polish-Canadian physicist Jack Tuszynski had been captivated by new research about how energy is transferred in cells. Because of the way scientific funding works, he says, there was no way somebody would give him money to investigate anything so out of his wheelhouse as cellular energy transfer. But then he met Hameroff at a NATO Advanced Research Workshop at the
University of Arizona where they were both presenters. The first session, “What Is Life, and Where Is It Going?”, was the hit of the first night. At the conference, Hameroff gave Tuszynski a copy of Ultimate Computing, and Tuszynski stayed up all night to read it. This was before Hameroff met Penrose, and even then Tuszynski could see that Hameroff’s theories needed the input of a physicist. This would be Tuszynski’s “in” to the world of biology. It was the beginning of his journey into what he calls “planet tubulin.”
By 1993, Hameroff and Penrose had begun their collaboration, and Tuszynski had published his first paper on microtubules. He would go on to publish over 700 more—becoming possibly the most prolific lab researcher on the topic and ultimately proving photons within microtubules could generate quantum states, a step toward validating Orch OR.
That said, the world of those studying microtubules—especially in the context of quantum consciousness—is quite small. Like a couple-dozen-people small. And they pretty much all know each other. Mostly, they seem to get along, with the occasional eye-roll or sardonic comment. They’re hard scientists who can get curt when you use imprecise language or seem to be romanticizing what they’re up to. But some, notably Anirban Bandyopadhyay, have no qualms about being both philosophers and scientists.
ALL MATTER VIBRATES AT some frequency, including the proteins of the brain. When a signal at a specific frequency reaches an object that vibrates at the same frequency, they resonate, meaing the vibration amplifies. In a Tibetan singing bowl, for example, when you run the mallet around and around the inside of the bowl, it will at some point approach the frequency at which the metal vibrates, and the sound grows louder and louder.
Our bodies are subjected to wave after wave of energy—including quantum energy—passing around and through us. When those waves of energy have the same frequency as the proteins of our brains, the tubulin and microtubules also resonate. In
this way, we become a unit of consciousness. Or so says Bandyopadhyay, a senior scientist at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan.
Bandyopadhyay holds a master’s degree in physics and earned his PhD in supramolecular electronics in 2005. While his scientific credentials are unquestioned, his ideas are unorthodox. Recently, he proposed that water—which makes up most of the human body and the brain—created life because it wanted to be conscious. But perhaps he is best known for building an artificial brain that shows an interaction with electromagnetic frequencies that’s much more complex than scientists had thought possible. And microtubules are an intrinsic part of that design.
Historically, brain activity has been tracked using electroencephalograms (EEGs), which only measure activity in frequencies of about 1 to 300 hertz (Hz) and time signatures of milliseconds to seconds. The NIMS team considered that framework far too limited to accurately measure brain activity. So they made their own device: the Dodecanogram (DDG) that human test subjects wear on the head like a cap of brain probes. The device operates in two modes. In the first mode, it detects a wide range of frequencies from 6 terahertz (THz) to 1 millihertz (0.001Hz), creating a brain scan based on resonance. In the second mode, it uses picosecond pulses to capture potential surges, measuring their duration, intensity, and phase variation, revealing brain activity patterns. Both modes work simultaneously in the DDG device. To minimize environmental interference, the NIMS team used interconnected DDG devices on eight human brains.
Instead of a tiny band of frequencies, their DDG device picked up frequencies from hertz to terahertz. A terahertz signal can register things like vibrational levels in molecules and can cause the atoms of a crystal to vibrate at their resonant frequency. The team discovered that proteins transmit signals around the THz domain.
Then they took what they learned from the signals they collected from subjects wearing DDGs, along with brainscan data from other universities, and constructed a model for their artificial brain. The researchers found 12 parts of the brain with significant resonance patterns—including microtubules, the neuron, the axon, and the cerebral hemisphere. On the computer, these resonance patterns look a bit like different designs made by throwing paint against a canvas. Each of the brain components split the electromagnetic field in such a way that at certain frequencies, the magnetic field dominates, and at certain resonance frequencies, the elecric field dominates. This suggested to them that there’s a unified geometric pattern hidden in the vibrational frequencies of the brain components, which hold important information for the brain’s information processing.
Of all the components they studied, the microtubule was by far the most complex, which the researchers attributed to the lattice structure of the tubulin and the fully assembled microtubule itself. The scientists said the microtubule lattice structure can change its configuration in response to the resonance, modulating them over a wide frequency range.
The researchers also found resonance occurring at many different timescales. Think of it this way: If you swing on a swing, you have to get your legs pumping at the exact right rhythm to make the swing go. If you pump them too fast or slow, you can’t get the swing going. When you’re moving with the right force and trajectory at the right speed, the swing will go higher and higher. You and the swing are resonating, and you’re amplifying the signal. One cycle for a swing that is resonating at a high vibration would be the trip from the highest point behind the swing set to the highest point in front of it,
and back again. This takes a certain amount of time—say five seconds. At a lower vibration, the cycle would be quicker.
What this team found was that microtubules demonstrated three cycles at one set of resonances; three different cycles at different resonances; and three even shorter cycles within each of the second triplets. A triplet of triplets, or nine cycles, all told. Basically, we’re not processing all the energy our brain encounters in linear time, at the same rate; there’s a whole symphony going on in there. A quantum symphony.
In a study with Hameroff, Bandyopadhyay wrote that life may require these microtubule time crystals for consciousness. They thought this triplet of triplets system might be a fundamental property of all living systems—quantum biology—and the science of consciousness.
That was the model for their artificial brain. Bandyopadhyay’s team used DDG on their artificial organic brain replica 24/7 for over a year as well as on multiple human subjects before and after meditation. What they concluded was that most cognitive, perceptive, and emotional bursts occur at around 200 to 700 nanoseconds. Using their data, the group recreated all the components of a natural brain in their artificial one.
“The purpose of making the artificial brain is to replicate the triple triplet or complex set of vibrations that are starting from the molecular scale to the largest scale so that…by comparing with humans, we can isolate [the location of] the deviation,” Bandyopadhyay said. “Because consciousness should be something beyond the hardware.”
For Bandyopadhyay, the microtubule is a component in a universal consciousness in which the human is a participant. In this worldview, your microtubules could engage with the entire universe, implying the universe itself is conscious.
We’re a long way from proving such a thing. Or even disproving it. But there’s no doubt that scientists like Tuszynski, Hameroff, Penrose, and Bandyopadhyay are engaging in this research because they suspect something about the nature of our consciousness is a lot bigger and more mysterious and potentially mind-blowing than just data in and data out like a computer.
And thanks to their dogged efforts with powdered cow brains, human brains, and artificial machine brains over the last 30 years, we’ve gotten that much closer to a mind-blowing explanation.
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