June 21, 2025 • 15 mins
Today we talk some more about the fascinating structures within your neurons called microtubules. Are they an antenna for consciousness?
Buy my book with this link: https://a.co/d/7CI89rv
Buy the Audiobook: https://www.audible.com/pd/Gods-Eye-View-Audiobook/B0F55K2GT1?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp
Want to publish a book? Check out my publisher https://hemisphericpress.com/
Check out our ad free substack: https://hemisphericpress.substack.com/
Buy my book with this link: https://a.co/d/7CI89rv
Buy the Audiobook: https://www.audible.com/pd/Gods-Eye-View-Audiobook/B0F55K2GT1?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp
Want to publish a book? Check out my publisher https://hemisphericpress.com/
Check out our ad free substack: https://hemisphericpress.substack.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to the Gods I View podcast. I'm your host,
Trevor Man. It's been a crazy week. I've been making
the rounds doing podcast interviews. I got to do a
really cool one with Mark from my family Thinks I'm Crazy,
And a couple weeks before that, I did one with
one of my favorite podcasts, the Brothers of the Serpent podcast.
(00:35):
And I think that's coming out. I'd lost track of time.
It's either coming out tomorrow or a week from tomorrow.
I'm not quite sure. But did that a couple of
weeks ago. And that was a weird one because I
brought slides, and I never know how slides are going
to go. They can be boring if you're not careful.
(00:55):
So I'm hoping hoping that turns out okay. But at
the very end of that at I put a few slides.
My dog is trying to get in the door. Hopefully
you can't hear that. I put a few slides at
the end about microtubules. And microtubules are not something, especially
(01:15):
three weeks ago, that I knew a ton about. I
mean I knew the basics. They were a couple slides
in like a PowerPoint presentation. I used to teach like
a pre med anatomy and physiology class that I taught,
but really I didn't know. I didn't know like the
ins and outs. But I had come across this guy
(01:39):
Stuart Hammerhoff, who is just got these really cool theories
about consciousness and that microtubules resonate at these crazy oscillations
like in the terror Hertz range, and there may be
quantum entanglement and everything I'm hearing about these microtubules there
(02:00):
implicated in consciousness because anesthetics bind to them. They're clearly
very important. There are complex microtubual networks in the cerebral cortex.
Could they be the seat of consciousness? That's really that's
a question. And there's all these theoretical frameworks you can
try to fit them in, Like you could fit them
(02:21):
into sort of a computational model where they're doing quantum computation,
which is cool. You know, the question becomes how to
quantum computers of all that's incredible? Or is it more
of a transmission theory where they're acting like an antenna
and they're tapping into the quantum field and the subjective
experience in our minds is quantum in nature? And maybe
(02:43):
it's entangled with some information source, it just it boggles
in mind. It's fun. But I was not really an
expert in that. I'm still not, but I know a
bit about related topics, and brought that up on the
Brothers of the Serpent podcast, and of course, because who
(03:04):
wouldn't be, that's the topic they're probably most most interested in.
So I've been try I've kind of been trying to
explore it since then, because it is obviously the most
interesting aspect of this conscious conversation. Because it's mechanistic, you
can test it, you can design experiments around it. So
I reached out to doctor hammer Off just to get
(03:25):
his take on some things, and he replied right away,
which was cool. Now, part of it is because I
do have a very official sounding email and signature line
like I'm affiliated with the research institution, a good one
and I'm in a strong department and blah blah blah
blah blah. So that helps me kind of get access
(03:46):
to people that I want to talk to. But I
realized really quickly that that wasn't the reason. I mean,
maybe that was the reason he noticed my email, but
he's just a genuinely I don't know just he clearly
is passionate about this topic. It's a it's not a professional.
(04:08):
What people don't realize about academic research is you're focused
on your career. You know, you're trying to publish the
papers that bring your career to the next level, and
you're very aware of what's like popular and what consensus
is around a certain topic. You don't get into quantum
(04:32):
microtubules being the basis of consciousness. If you care about
your career, you do it because you're passionate about it.
And he's an older guy, he's a professor emeritus, so
he's he gets to be open minded, which is a
great place to be. I've just decided to take huge
career risk and be open minded right at the jump.
(04:52):
So we'll see how that goes for me. But anyway,
he got back to me and he laid out his
ideas and he made a comment which just stuck with me.
I've not been able to get it out of my
head because we were talking about TAW and for folks
who don't know, how is a protein that we believe
(05:16):
or I guess if I'm going to foreshadow a little bit,
we used to believe stabilized microtubules. And it's interesting because
TAW in Alzheimer's disease undergoes this change where it stops
sticking to the microtubules and it starts sticking to itself,
and it starts to show up in the blood in
(05:37):
this cerebrospinal fluid, so you can it's a biomarker of
Alzheimer's disease, and TAW is a really good biomarker. It's
you know, once TAO shows up, you're in trouble. And
there's certain TAU markers like p TAO two and seven
that show up really early on and they're just clinically relevant,
very important biomarkers, and right off, the bat alarm bell
(06:00):
should be going off, like, wait a second, A microtubule
protein is the best biomarker for Alzheimer's disease, Well, then
clearly microtubules are important, right, maybe even the most important
aspect of neurodegeneration and cognition and consciousness, And yeah, they are.
(06:22):
The mainstream view is that they're important. But the mainstream
view is that they're important because once the microtubules collapse,
you no longer get vescicular trafficking, which is the ability
of motor proteins to transport neurotransmitter to the end of
the axon, and once the axon doesn't have no transmitter,
(06:45):
it's non functional. So it's a perfectly mechanistic, normal, classical,
non quantum explanation for why microtubules are important. But Stuart
Hammeroff's work has shown that no, no, no, well there's clearly
something else going on here. If you block the binding
sites on microtubules and anesthetics don't work as well, that
(07:09):
doesn't make any sense if the role of microtubul is
simply as a passive road for protein to be transported.
If that doesn't make sense unfortunately for right now, just
take my word on it. I probably didn't do a
good job explaining it, but we can come back to it.
But he made this comment about Tao, and he said
(07:30):
that Tao, he thinks, acts like frets on a guitar,
which is a cool idea because if you look at
a microtubule, you could sort of envision it as like
a string on an instrument, like a guitar string, and
we know they resonate, and they resonate at these really
(07:51):
high frequencies. So it's kind of a cool idea that
taw placement could sort of be like memory somehow. I mean,
this is not really well flushed out, in my opinion,
but it's still a cool idea. It's especially a cool
idea given this new theory about how that's emerging, which
(08:14):
I think fits really well into his ideas. I mentioned
it to him. I don't you know, it would require
a lot of reconceptualization of certain ideas he has, So
I think I think he he's open to it, but
I don't. I don't know if it was necessarily like
an Aha moment for him, but I think it is
kind of an Aha moment. So let me try to
explain it to you all and let me know what
(08:37):
you think. At God's Eye view Book at gmail dot com. Sorry,
my dog is really determined. He hears my voice and
he's determined to get in here. He's like pawing at
the door. But anyway, okay, So remember earlier I said
how we think taw stabilizes the microtubule and that when
(08:59):
taw falls off, the microtubule dissolves. That last part is
probably true. You know, microtubules do disintegrate once the Tao
pathology gets really bad. But I think there's kind of
like some intermediate steps. And there's this research group that's
done this really cool research where they show how does
it stabilize microtubules. It increases their lability and let me,
(09:25):
it makes it more laybile. And what that means is
they're like more fluid and they can actually resonate more
easily when TAO is normal and non pathological. And there's
a certain portion of each microtubule that's laybile and a
certain portion that's stable. And so if you picture like
(09:46):
a guitar neck, the top of the strings are stabilized
and then at the bottom they're stabilized and everything else
is able to resonate. So you can kind of think
of that as the laybile region. Microtubules are kind of
like that, and what happens when tao starts to fall off,
the laybile region begins to shrink. And so it's as
(10:10):
if you know those clamps people put on a guitar
on the neck, and it kind of changes the stable region.
It makes a stable region bigger and the laybyle region smaller.
And I need to talk to a musician, but it
would make everything higher pitch. I suppose that's essentially what
(10:31):
happens when Tao pathology sets in. Well, that's interesting, right,
Like this a completely new concept that no one's investigated.
And so I'm discussing some of these ideas with Stewart,
and I've managed to loop in my boss, who's an
incredible individual and he's very he's professionally serious, so I
(10:58):
expected him to not be interested in these topics, but
he was. So that was exciting, and you know, may
end up doing some work in this area professionally, which
would be very The synchronicities abound. It's unbelievable. I would
not believe, like two years ago that I might be
actually doing real experimental work on this stuff, but seems
(11:20):
like it might happen. So anyway, we'll see what whatever
my boss decides on that topic will be the right decision,
because I've learned to trust his judgment. But this Tao
stuff is very interesting. And so if you're a musician,
and actually Kyle, one of the hosts of Brothers of
the Serpent that I did that interview with, he is
(11:43):
a musician, a really talented musician, and he noticed that
the the resonance frequency, the peak resident frequency the microtubule
was an octave of C sharp. I think he said,
this is just kind of a cool thing to know.
I never would have thought of it in those terms.
And then so at the time I didn't know about
(12:03):
this tawel ability thing. So now it's like, essentially what's
happening is the note that your microtubules are playing changes
in Alzheimer's disease. That is just such a profound reconceptualization
of what Alzheimer's disease is. And it's not a framework
(12:25):
we typically used to talk about disease, which is why
I would never put it in a paper, I would
never bring it up at a conference. But you know,
it's interesting and if our microtubules are sort of like
an antenna tapped into something, then maybe even a better
(12:46):
metaphor than a guitar string. And this is another metaphor
that Kyle used from Snake Bros. Brothers of this erpit.
Maybe it's more like turning the radio dial, like the
tuning knob. We're sort of changing the station we're dialed into.
And maybe human experience embody, you know, a spirit embodied
(13:08):
in flesh. It might require the station being tuned to
a particular range of frequencies and when we get that
tau pathology, it could be that we're turning it up
to a frequency that just is not relevant to human experience.
(13:29):
So make of this what you will. This is speculative.
It is sort of just my inner thoughts made public.
But there is something here. There's something to doctor Hammeroff's work.
(13:50):
And you know his colleagues are Roger Penrose, They're onto something.
I don't expect them to be exactly right, you know,
the first version of a theory is never correct. But
they're on to something super important, and so it would
be cool to help figure out what the next step
(14:13):
for that theory is. And it'd be cool if you
guys have ideas to explore, so please feel free to share.
In the meantime, please buy my book God's Eye View
on Amazon. Check it out. I've got a new blurb
from John C. Devorak. He's from the No Agenda Show,
if you guys know who that is. So I'm excited
(14:36):
to update the cover. If you buy, let's see today's
June twentieth. If you buy like June twenty third or after,
you'll get the updated cover with his blurb. If you
care about that sort of thing. But go to Amazon.
Type in God's i View, look for the book with
the big black hole on the cover and an author
named Trevor. If you'd like to discuss any of these
(14:59):
topics or anything else, please email me at God's Eye
View book at gmail dot com. If you would like
to write a book, if you have some interesting ideas,
even if you haven't started writing yet, please reach out
to my publisher, Hemispheric Press at hemisphericpress dot com. And
(15:20):
they also have a substack that I write for at
hemispheric Press dot substack dot com. All right, everybody, talk soon.
Welcome to the Gods I View podcast. I'm your host,
Trevor Man. It's been a crazy week. I've been making
the rounds doing podcast interviews. I got to do a
really cool one with Mark from my family Thinks I'm Crazy,
And a couple weeks before that, I did one with
one of my favorite podcasts, the Brothers of the Serpent podcast.
(00:35):
And I think that's coming out. I'd lost track of time.
It's either coming out tomorrow or a week from tomorrow.
I'm not quite sure. But did that a couple of
weeks ago. And that was a weird one because I
brought slides, and I never know how slides are going
to go. They can be boring if you're not careful.
(00:55):
So I'm hoping hoping that turns out okay. But at
the very end of that at I put a few slides.
My dog is trying to get in the door. Hopefully
you can't hear that. I put a few slides at
the end about microtubules. And microtubules are not something, especially
(01:15):
three weeks ago, that I knew a ton about. I
mean I knew the basics. They were a couple slides
in like a PowerPoint presentation. I used to teach like
a pre med anatomy and physiology class that I taught,
but really I didn't know. I didn't know like the
ins and outs. But I had come across this guy
(01:39):
Stuart Hammerhoff, who is just got these really cool theories
about consciousness and that microtubules resonate at these crazy oscillations
like in the terror Hertz range, and there may be
quantum entanglement and everything I'm hearing about these microtubules there
(02:00):
implicated in consciousness because anesthetics bind to them. They're clearly
very important. There are complex microtubual networks in the cerebral cortex.
Could they be the seat of consciousness? That's really that's
a question. And there's all these theoretical frameworks you can
try to fit them in, Like you could fit them
(02:21):
into sort of a computational model where they're doing quantum computation,
which is cool. You know, the question becomes how to
quantum computers of all that's incredible? Or is it more
of a transmission theory where they're acting like an antenna
and they're tapping into the quantum field and the subjective
experience in our minds is quantum in nature? And maybe
(02:43):
it's entangled with some information source, it just it boggles
in mind. It's fun. But I was not really an
expert in that. I'm still not, but I know a
bit about related topics, and brought that up on the
Brothers of the Serpent podcast, and of course, because who
(03:04):
wouldn't be, that's the topic they're probably most most interested in.
So I've been try I've kind of been trying to
explore it since then, because it is obviously the most
interesting aspect of this conscious conversation. Because it's mechanistic, you
can test it, you can design experiments around it. So
I reached out to doctor hammer Off just to get
(03:25):
his take on some things, and he replied right away,
which was cool. Now, part of it is because I
do have a very official sounding email and signature line
like I'm affiliated with the research institution, a good one
and I'm in a strong department and blah blah blah
blah blah. So that helps me kind of get access
(03:46):
to people that I want to talk to. But I
realized really quickly that that wasn't the reason. I mean,
maybe that was the reason he noticed my email, but
he's just a genuinely I don't know just he clearly
is passionate about this topic. It's a it's not a professional.
(04:08):
What people don't realize about academic research is you're focused
on your career. You know, you're trying to publish the
papers that bring your career to the next level, and
you're very aware of what's like popular and what consensus
is around a certain topic. You don't get into quantum
(04:32):
microtubules being the basis of consciousness. If you care about
your career, you do it because you're passionate about it.
And he's an older guy, he's a professor emeritus, so
he's he gets to be open minded, which is a
great place to be. I've just decided to take huge
career risk and be open minded right at the jump.
(04:52):
So we'll see how that goes for me. But anyway,
he got back to me and he laid out his
ideas and he made a comment which just stuck with me.
I've not been able to get it out of my
head because we were talking about TAW and for folks
who don't know, how is a protein that we believe
(05:16):
or I guess if I'm going to foreshadow a little bit,
we used to believe stabilized microtubules. And it's interesting because
TAW in Alzheimer's disease undergoes this change where it stops
sticking to the microtubules and it starts sticking to itself,
and it starts to show up in the blood in
(05:37):
this cerebrospinal fluid, so you can it's a biomarker of
Alzheimer's disease, and TAW is a really good biomarker. It's
you know, once TAO shows up, you're in trouble. And
there's certain TAU markers like p TAO two and seven
that show up really early on and they're just clinically relevant,
very important biomarkers, and right off, the bat alarm bell
(06:00):
should be going off, like, wait a second, A microtubule
protein is the best biomarker for Alzheimer's disease, Well, then
clearly microtubules are important, right, maybe even the most important
aspect of neurodegeneration and cognition and consciousness, And yeah, they are.
(06:22):
The mainstream view is that they're important. But the mainstream
view is that they're important because once the microtubules collapse,
you no longer get vescicular trafficking, which is the ability
of motor proteins to transport neurotransmitter to the end of
the axon, and once the axon doesn't have no transmitter,
(06:45):
it's non functional. So it's a perfectly mechanistic, normal, classical,
non quantum explanation for why microtubules are important. But Stuart
Hammeroff's work has shown that no, no, no, well there's clearly
something else going on here. If you block the binding
sites on microtubules and anesthetics don't work as well, that
(07:09):
doesn't make any sense if the role of microtubul is
simply as a passive road for protein to be transported.
If that doesn't make sense unfortunately for right now, just
take my word on it. I probably didn't do a
good job explaining it, but we can come back to it.
But he made this comment about Tao, and he said
(07:30):
that Tao, he thinks, acts like frets on a guitar,
which is a cool idea because if you look at
a microtubule, you could sort of envision it as like
a string on an instrument, like a guitar string, and
we know they resonate, and they resonate at these really
(07:51):
high frequencies. So it's kind of a cool idea that
taw placement could sort of be like memory somehow. I mean,
this is not really well flushed out, in my opinion,
but it's still a cool idea. It's especially a cool
idea given this new theory about how that's emerging, which
(08:14):
I think fits really well into his ideas. I mentioned
it to him. I don't you know, it would require
a lot of reconceptualization of certain ideas he has, So
I think I think he he's open to it, but
I don't. I don't know if it was necessarily like
an Aha moment for him, but I think it is
kind of an Aha moment. So let me try to
explain it to you all and let me know what
(08:37):
you think. At God's Eye view Book at gmail dot com. Sorry,
my dog is really determined. He hears my voice and
he's determined to get in here. He's like pawing at
the door. But anyway, okay, So remember earlier I said
how we think taw stabilizes the microtubule and that when
(08:59):
taw falls off, the microtubule dissolves. That last part is
probably true. You know, microtubules do disintegrate once the Tao
pathology gets really bad. But I think there's kind of
like some intermediate steps. And there's this research group that's
done this really cool research where they show how does
it stabilize microtubules. It increases their lability and let me,
(09:25):
it makes it more laybile. And what that means is
they're like more fluid and they can actually resonate more
easily when TAO is normal and non pathological. And there's
a certain portion of each microtubule that's laybile and a
certain portion that's stable. And so if you picture like
(09:46):
a guitar neck, the top of the strings are stabilized
and then at the bottom they're stabilized and everything else
is able to resonate. So you can kind of think
of that as the laybile region. Microtubules are kind of
like that, and what happens when tao starts to fall off,
the laybile region begins to shrink. And so it's as
(10:10):
if you know those clamps people put on a guitar
on the neck, and it kind of changes the stable region.
It makes a stable region bigger and the laybyle region smaller.
And I need to talk to a musician, but it
would make everything higher pitch. I suppose that's essentially what
(10:31):
happens when Tao pathology sets in. Well, that's interesting, right,
Like this a completely new concept that no one's investigated.
And so I'm discussing some of these ideas with Stewart,
and I've managed to loop in my boss, who's an
incredible individual and he's very he's professionally serious, so I
(10:58):
expected him to not be interested in these topics, but
he was. So that was exciting, and you know, may
end up doing some work in this area professionally, which
would be very The synchronicities abound. It's unbelievable. I would
not believe, like two years ago that I might be
actually doing real experimental work on this stuff, but seems
(11:20):
like it might happen. So anyway, we'll see what whatever
my boss decides on that topic will be the right decision,
because I've learned to trust his judgment. But this Tao
stuff is very interesting. And so if you're a musician,
and actually Kyle, one of the hosts of Brothers of
the Serpent that I did that interview with, he is
(11:43):
a musician, a really talented musician, and he noticed that
the the resonance frequency, the peak resident frequency the microtubule
was an octave of C sharp. I think he said,
this is just kind of a cool thing to know.
I never would have thought of it in those terms.
And then so at the time I didn't know about
(12:03):
this tawel ability thing. So now it's like, essentially what's
happening is the note that your microtubules are playing changes
in Alzheimer's disease. That is just such a profound reconceptualization
of what Alzheimer's disease is. And it's not a framework
(12:25):
we typically used to talk about disease, which is why
I would never put it in a paper, I would
never bring it up at a conference. But you know,
it's interesting and if our microtubules are sort of like
an antenna tapped into something, then maybe even a better
(12:46):
metaphor than a guitar string. And this is another metaphor
that Kyle used from Snake Bros. Brothers of this erpit.
Maybe it's more like turning the radio dial, like the
tuning knob. We're sort of changing the station we're dialed into.
And maybe human experience embody, you know, a spirit embodied
(13:08):
in flesh. It might require the station being tuned to
a particular range of frequencies and when we get that
tau pathology, it could be that we're turning it up
to a frequency that just is not relevant to human experience.
(13:29):
So make of this what you will. This is speculative.
It is sort of just my inner thoughts made public.
But there is something here. There's something to doctor Hammeroff's work.
(13:50):
And you know his colleagues are Roger Penrose, They're onto something.
I don't expect them to be exactly right, you know,
the first version of a theory is never correct. But
they're on to something super important, and so it would
be cool to help figure out what the next step
(14:13):
for that theory is. And it'd be cool if you
guys have ideas to explore, so please feel free to share.
In the meantime, please buy my book God's Eye View
on Amazon. Check it out. I've got a new blurb
from John C. Devorak. He's from the No Agenda Show,
if you guys know who that is. So I'm excited
(14:36):
to update the cover. If you buy, let's see today's
June twentieth. If you buy like June twenty third or after,
you'll get the updated cover with his blurb. If you
care about that sort of thing. But go to Amazon.
Type in God's i View, look for the book with
the big black hole on the cover and an author
named Trevor. If you'd like to discuss any of these
(14:59):
topics or anything else, please email me at God's Eye
View book at gmail dot com. If you would like
to write a book, if you have some interesting ideas,
even if you haven't started writing yet, please reach out
to my publisher, Hemispheric Press at hemisphericpress dot com. And
(15:20):
they also have a substack that I write for at
hemispheric Press dot substack dot com. All right, everybody, talk soon.
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