“These words information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers do not exist in the brain.” Such statements flood the internet, but no one tells us, what are the words true for the brain.
Microtubule is the gateway to the understanding of the brain, thanks to its water channel inside. It is not the only component, but, just like DNA holds the key to genetics and evolution, microtubule holds the key to thermodynamics and acquired information by a living system. However, microtubule has never received the honor it should get, in spite of its magical contributions, throughout the entire living species in the planet. However, I feel that there is a bigger problem with our overall approach to biology. Our perception regarding the information is holding us back and if we do not know what is information in Nature, we know nothing. We always get an answer to a query, but, the form of the question determines the nature of answer.
I think there is always an attempt to see proteins and any biosystems like a transistor or a switch, as if from proteins to brain everything is a circuit made of elementary electronic devices. We blindly force the biological systems as if they are electronic devices found in the conventional electronic shops. Design experiments accordingly, and undoubtedly get the results satisfying our faith. This is not only a very wrong idea for the common people; you would find such an erroneous understanding even in the scientists. A Google search would get you several papers in Nature and Science suggesting that the protein is a transistor and a switch and like OP-AMP. I agree that this is an easy route to publish papers, but so many varieties of biological systems are there and without investigating what those devices want to be, we carry out simple experiments to tag them as handful of known devices used in electronic chips, it has become a religious faith now. In addition, if some scientists want to seem radical, they tag it as a quantum system, one mystery to support another mystery. Therefore the mindset masks the true quest, “bits” has not impacted “in a bit” but in a massive way to the free thinkers.
You would also see that there are two groups of peoples, one that believes that our brain is a computer, or brain is a Turing machine. In addition, there is another group, which suggests that brain is not a Turing machine, but do not tell us what is that unknown device actually the brain is or the biological system represents. Opposition to mainstream should be done sensibly. Toppling the world of “logic” that started with Bertrand Russel’s “principles of mathematics” in 1903, is not so easy or fun. Criticizing the mainstream science is good but not without an alternative in our hand that is concrete. Those who challenge the mainstream science (brain is a computer, neuron is a switch, all information processing happens through the skin of neuron body or membrane, but everything inside neuron is just a blank, neural network is a circuit etc), they are mostly not serious. If the brain is not Turing machine, then tell us what is that elementary machine? Well, in the last 100 years of development of logic, no one talked about making decisions without “logic”. Note that everyone tried to topple the logical world, but failed. Why? The inverse of “logic” is “illogical” which means “nonsense” to us for the current science. Making sense in an illogical way is the way to go. But the question is how?
Microtubule showed the way to us. With a decade long research on brain and biomaterials, we never tried to forcefully tag biomaterials and biosystems as electronic shop equipments. We felt that instead of screaming “everything is wrong”, we should carefully observe the biosystem and find what kind of systems do they make. Our papers are technical, but here is a summary of what we found.
We found that the biological systems while building living machines, does not make a switch or circuit, it wants to make a clock inside a clock inside a clock…. in a nested structure. The wiring we observe in the brain and at several biological structure is an illusion, every single biological machine is a frequency wheel, just like a clock the wheel is played as a music. Every biological system is a musical device of a very new kind. Unlike Tuning forks, they have several fundamental resonance frequencies, and they select those frequencies to play music, and those musical notes are such that they represents geometric shapes and information, so it is not harmonic, but an anharmonic device. This discovery is not “simple” as it appears. Just imagine, music representing banana and apple are being played in a device as two simple pieces of music in a loop, then if one activates an apple by synchrony or resonance, the other is played. Thus, there is no reduction of decisions like we see in the logic gates and hence “time cycle” to replace “bits” and “qubits”. There is no collapse. This is what we learnt from microtubule and applied on the entire human brain.
Thus, we reject “bits”, or “qubits”, we say that our experiment suggests, that we should not be debating whether brain is a quantum or classical or chaotic, those concerns are irrelevant, debates are unnecessary. There is something much more interesting and profound, that is the true nature of information. “Time cycles” as suggested above gets nested, we have verified this in neuron cells, at least 7 proteins.
Our discovery of nested clocks led to “Fractal tape” to replace the “Turing tape”. A very simple decision, “every single cell of a Turing tape has a Turing tape inside”, this statement alone collapses the foundation of a century old concept of Turing machine. We have repeated our experiments of resonance frequency measurement with the state of the art technology for various proteins and their complexes. For example we have studied “tubulin”, actin, beta spectrin, ancyrin, clathrin, collagen to understand the role of electromagnetic resonance frequencies. We found that they have a composition of resonance frequency bands. Mostly we found triplet of triplet bands that connects all.
Brain is a clock inside a clock inside a clock… there is no end to it. This particular finding changes the basic understanding about our brain. The old believes that neuron skin or membrane does everything falls apart. Neuron skin is just one of 300 different types of cavities that we have in the brain. Microtubule is also one of those 300 types. Therefore, cavity inside a cavity inside a cavity makes a resonance chain which is best arranged in the form of a frequency wheel is the machine that creates rhythms to operate.
In summary, we have not restricted ourselves to the microtubule alone, or single protein studies, or even to a few live neuron cells. We have built a series of technologies like atom probe noise free electrode system to see what is happening to the single cell when we see them simultaneously using various clocks. With 26000 proteins and more than a few hundreds of different types of cavities we have engaged into building a comprehensive model that disregards the existing massive brain building projects.
We cannot understand the dynamics of a river by mapping the wave shapes of ripples on its surface. One cavity, the neuron skin can take 100 billion new forms in 8 billion humans, mapping all neuron geometries would not tell what is our brain. However, we realized only way to go forward to let one cavity say neuron geometry to come under the influence of trillions of cavities below and millions of cavities above, and evolve geometry in 10^11 ways, then, information of music will let the neuron to dance, and that would be the way to understand the information processing in the brain.
We understand that developing geometric musical language, fractal cavity resonator model of the brain, doing experiment with neurons, proteins, complexes, and neuron clusters are not simple and easy task, but if we model it properly, we will be able to give the world of science a new way to look into the basic understanding of information. Only then perhaps people would understand, that our basic definition of information re-defines everything. Transition from “bit” to “time cycle” and providing every single cell of a Turing tape to hold a tape inside could transform everything we know about the operations of a biological system.
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