What actually happens to your consciousness when you’re put under general anesthesia — and how does a drug stop your brain from forming memories while a surgeon cuts into your body?
Professor Bruce MacIver is a Stanford researcher who has spent decades studying how anesthetics work at the cellular level. His lab discovered that anesthetics disrupt learning and memory by enhancing inhibition of specific GABAergic interneurons, and his recent work on microtubules provided key experimental support for the Penrose-Hameroff theory of consciousness. Together with philosopher Tam Hunt, he just published a paper reviving the electromagnetic field theory of consciousness — the idea that your mind is a physical energy field, not just neurons firing.
In this conversation, Paige and Bruce explore:
🩷 The terrifying phenomenon of anesthetic awareness — when you’re paralyzed and awake during surgery
🩷 Why anesthesia doesn’t replace natural sleep (and the one drug that actually can)
🩷 The full continuum of consciousness — from coma to psychedelic expansion
🩷 Whether plants have awareness and what that implies
🩷 How theta brain rhythms predict what you’re going to do hundreds of milliseconds before you do it
🩷 The binding problem: why you feel like one unified self despite billions of neurons
🩷 Can you train your brain into deeper states of consciousness through biofeedback?
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 — What Happens Under Anesthesia?
0:55 — How Anesthesiologists Define Unconsciousness
3:11 — How Anesthetics Block Memory Formation
5:08 — Acupuncture as an Alternative to Drugs
6:51 — Anesthetic Awareness: Awake But Paralyzed
11:23 — Can You Die From Pain Alone?
13:49 — Sleep vs. Anesthesia: The One Drug That Restores Sleep Naturally
18:13 — The Consciousness Spectrum: Coma to Psychedelic Expansion
20:19 — Do Plants Have Consciousness?
21:32 — Microtubules and the Penrose-Hameroff Theory
24:09 — What Are Microtubules and Why They Matter
29:41 — Is Consciousness Just Neuronal Activity?
30:17 — The Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness
39:00 — The Binding Problem: Why You Feel Like One Self
47:57 — Headphones, EMF Fields, and Your Brain
50:01 — Creating Thought-Like Activity in Disembodied Tissue
54:32 — Biofeedback: Training Your Brain for Deeper Consciousness
57:12 — Closing Thoughts
YOUTUBE + TRANSCRIPT:
The Terrifying Truth About What Happens Under Anesthesia - YouTube
(00:00) Professor Bruce MacIver, welcome to the show. >> Well, it’s a pleasure to be here, Paige. >> Um, okay. So, there is a bunch of really interesting questions that I want to try to get to the bottom with you in this podcast. We’ll see how we go. The things that I am really interested in are what actually happens when you go under a general anesthetic.
(00:21) Um, I also want to talk to you about a more specific area of your own research, which is plant consciousness. So, do plants have consciousness? And if they do then like what are the implications of this? I also want to talk about whether or not consciousness is something that can be created or recreated within a laboratory setting and then again like what are the implications of that and then hopefully by the very end of the conversation I I’ll get to ask you what your own personal opinion is on what consciousness is and where it comes
(00:51) from. All right cool let’s start with the general anesthetic stuff. So what is unconsciousness >> to anesthesiologists? We have it easiest of all because we just have a a behavioral measure. So the early stages of loss of consciousness, you just can’t uh respond when I say how are you feeling, Paige? Are you okay? Then it goes uh a little deeper when you can no longer respond to uh commands for uh volitional movement.
(01:24) So, for example, I might say, uh, squeeze my fingers. You know, normally you’ll respond with a a squeeze, but uh, eventually you’ll stop responding. So, that’s, uh, a pretty deep level of loss of consciousness, a little beyond sleep even. And then there’s the surgical uh, definition of loss of consciousness, and that’s having no recall of the experience of surgery.
(01:52) And that also is influenced by uh strong stimuli, painful stimuli like anesthesiologists have it pretty easy. If the patient can move um then they’re not unconscious. And I think in the more uh common use of the word of consciousness, I think even uh our daily sleep uh most of us would consider we are unconscious.
(02:17) It it sounds like there’s sort of like a continuum of of conscious of all the way from being conscious down to being sedated down to being um unconscious. And then along that continuum there’s these different plots of uh you know like your uh inability to respond physically, your inability to respond verbally and then there’s kind of like sleep is somewhere in there but it’s also sleep is different to being under general anesthetic.
(02:42) And then right at the very end of the spectrum is even when you’re having your um chest cut open and your your organs manipulated, you can’t feel it and there’s the inability to form memories, which is what I’m really interested in I is like how is it that when we get down that continuum um and right towards the general anesthetic end, how is it that you’re not able to form memories of some of of what could only be described in some surgeries as like full massacre to your body? Well, um that’s actually being looked at pretty intensely and um we’re starting
(03:17) to get a pretty clear picture of uh what happens at that stage where you can no longer form memories. And uh it’s turning out to be a direct anesthetic effect on uh inner neurons that uh control the activity of hundreds or thousands of of the parameal cells that we think are critical for forming the engram circuits that uh store memories.
(03:49) So the way that works is the uh inhibitory inner neurons uh appear to get depressed by anesthetics um in a way that um then prevents them from uh releasing inhibition of other inner neurons that would normally uh inhibit the parameal cells. So it’s a little more complicated than we were hoping >> in the beginning.
(04:19) We were hoping oh you just depress the parameal cells and the excitatory inputs to them and so those sinapses can’t undergo plasticity can’t strengthen themselves and hence store the information and that’s still uh true downstream but the upstream cause of the effect is a block of disinhibition by enhancing inhibition of a certain group of of gabaurgic inner neurons that then control other groups of inner neurons that control the parameal cells.
(04:56) So, and I’m sure you know the uh final story will even have more twists and turns, but right now that seems to be the general way that anesthetics disrupt learning and memory. I’ve I’ve heard stories of people um undergoing surgery with hypnosis and I don’t know if this is like twisted anecdotal ev evidence um and not you know these are like outlier cases but is that is it possible that you could get a person into a state of no memory no learning and no response to pain through something that isn’t a drug >> in our operating rooms uh for decades
(05:36) now they’ve in incorporating eastern u techniques for pain reduction and sedation through acupuncture and that’s uh become uh more and more routine and it allows um the anesthesiologists to back off on the concentrations of drugs they’re using to render you immobile and unconscious and that works. I mean it’s um there’s been papers written on it.
(06:10) Now usually a patient has to ask for it or state a problem they’ve had in prior surgeries or there’s some other factor physiological that precludes high doses of an anesthetic. So a lot of anesthetics depress your heart for example. if we can back off on the level of drugs so it doesn’t affect the heart but still puts your brain in a state that’s uh conducive to enhanced acupuncture and that’s a good thing.
(06:41) >> That’s incredible. I’ll remember that next time I have to go in for surgery and I like I’ve got a podcast straight after this. I need to be sharp. Just give me the acupuncture and less drugs. Or what goes wrong I suppose when people have an awareness under anesthetics that they aren’t able to communicate.
(06:57) So the the the phenomenon of anesthetic awareness, it feels like that would just be the worst possible thing that could happen to someone is that they could have an awareness of the surgical procedure that they’re undergoing and then not actually be able to communicate that. What is your understanding of that phenomenon? Um how common is it and like what what are what are researchers doing about trying to mitigate that risk? >> It’s uh not very common.
(07:21) It’s uh somewhere between one in 100 and onetenth 100. It’s fairly rare. >> I hope not. >> No. >> Uh but given that there are, you know, a million surgeries a day, that still translates into a lot of patients, thousands of patients. What happens um anywhere from you know mild irritation to full-blown um panic and catastrophe and um and making the uh surgery more difficult because the patients may have an autonomic response.
(07:57) blood pressure will shoot up, heart rate will shoot up because they’re experiencing pain and they are trying to tell anyone, you know, help me and they can’t. The people who have the worst responses will also have a post-traumatic stress um syndrome on top of that where they could have nightmares for weeks or months um afterwards.
(08:21) they’ll have to seek, you know, psychiatric or psychological uh help to try and get through that. So, that’s probably the the worst case scenario. I don’t think uh you know people don’t die from it, but uh it can be uh very debilitating >> to certain people. Again, that’s a small fraction of the people who have recall.
(08:46) So, we’re talking, you know, 0.001% 0001% of patients. Uh it can be completely debilitating to some people. Right now u about half the surgeries in the United States um involve monitoring EEG activity in the frontal cortex. There’s a lot of variability among patients. It’s um often um hard to get a good clean EEG signal in the operating room because there’s a lot of electronic equipment that can interfere.
(09:22) seems to remain the most promising approach um is using a combination of uh brain monitoring and preferably with some sort of stimulus to um drive the to raise your awareness to uh the kind of level you might um respond to pain with. But that’s rarely done. Many years ago they tried uh visual stimuli and auditory stimuli. Uh they they work pretty good.
(09:53) So you can do brain stem um auditory evoked potentials for example during surgery. The problem is is not all anesthetics and all people um exhibit the same responses. Patient variability is amazing. You know everybody thankfully can be anesthetized. The difference in level of drug administered can be fivefold from someone who’s super sensitive to someone who’s uh very resilient.
(10:24) If >> if you were a person that used seditive drugs in your like daytoday life often, would that be maybe one variable that could give you a higher tolerance to >> um anesthesia or is it more random than that? Well, it’s more random random than that, but that is uh definitely a proven uh factor.
(10:48) So, somebody who’s on uh chronic benzoazipines, for example, >> will have a higher anesthetic threshold. Alcoholics have a higher anesthetic threshold. So yeah, that’s a a known uh issue and uh that’s why uh patients are always screened for uh drug use before surgery. Yeah, that’s a a well-known phenomena that you can precondition your your nervous system to be anesthetic resistant.
(11:18) It makes me wonder for the people that experience the most horrific um versions of anesthetic awareness and are basically like fully cognizant for entire open body surgeries. It makes you wonder like about what pain actually is. And I I want to take the opportunity to talk to you about this because this is an area of your research at Stanford.
(11:38) You often think that you could die from being in so much pain. Is pain far more subjective than we give it credit for? I’m guessing that it’s a subjective experience and nonlifethreatening. However, the uh consequences increased blood pressure, increased heart rate could have life-threatening effects through heart attack, through stroke, through all the things that can go wrong if your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen.
(12:10) Could you die from pain alone? I think not likely, but through a secondary effect, if you had heart disease or a blockage somewhere, it could be exacerbated. >> You know, often like when I have conversations with people about things like death, uh I hear like, “I’m not afraid of death, but I’m afraid of the pain that might precede death.
(12:31) “ So, people tend to have this like really extreme fear around pain. And I I wonder if that’s because it’s connected to a fear of death as well or or or it’s like connected to a fear of having to have like a really intense and extreme experience. >> Interestingly, when you talk to uh people about their fears of uh anesthesia, it’s more about uh memory than it is pain.
(13:02) Uh fortunately, in modern medicine, pain is uh dealt with separately from the anesthetic. usually with an opiate analesic that’s going to really blunt your subjective experience of the pain. The anesthetic on top of that will diminish the intensity of the painful stimuli that’s getting up to the uh conscious level in the brain. Patients will complain about other things they experience during the surgery.
(13:32) So examples, a common example is voices and things people were saying and sounds in the operating room like drills and saws and stuff like that. Uh people will complain more about that. Uh rarely do they complain about pain. >> And we kind of talked about this before, but there is a big difference between sleep and unconscious. >> That’s exactly correct.
(13:55) And there is a big difference between um how you become unconscious in terms of uh restoring a sleep debt. So that’s been looked at uh fairly carefully in people and animals and anesthetics in general are not a a replacement for natural sleep. You don’t allow your brain to go through all the uh vaccinations it must go through to store memories and to put things in context.
(14:27) And there’s one anesthetic that seems to um be okay for this and that’s dex metatomdine. It acts through a a really unique mechanism on uh alpha adinuric receptors in the brain. It does produce more of a natural sleep and can reverse sleep debt that’s been built up by uh you know they do these uh these sleep tests where they can keep animals or people awake by poking them and waking them up to cause a sleep debt.
(15:03) So they interrupt their sleep rhythm so they can’t go through the all the stages that they need to to uh make a healthy brain. Oh my god, that just sounds like uh my second worst nightmare. First worst nightmare would be anesthetic awareness. Second worst nightmare would be poked and prodded and not able to get intom sleep.
(15:22) In your experience in research of of working with these drugs and looking at what they do, like what are some of the craziest stories or I guess the craziest story that you’ve heard um in the context of people using anesthetics and the experiences that that can induce? you remember the movie Flatliners? So, it was about a group of kids, you know, uh, college students that um would experiment with high doses of anesthetics.
(15:55) So, and they, you know, monitored their EEG and their goal was to get to a flatline, uh, which is brain dead basically, and then, you know, recover from that kind of a super trip, I guess. You know, anesthetics aren’t really abused much because it’s not a a pleasant uh euphoric experience in general. you usually uh black out and don’t have any real experience of it at all until you wake up.
(16:28) Now, >> yeah, it’s not a party drug. >> Now, there were ether binges back in the day. U but they were uh you know, inhaling relatively low doses of ether, so they didn’t even lose consciousness. They got all giggly and and stoned. And uh you can do that with anesthetics but uh they’re so potent that you have to really have control over the administration of the drug so that you can give precise uh doses and monitor the patient and watch them go to whatever kind of level.
(17:05) But nobody ever does that. it’s uh boom, you know, we give you a big bolus to knock you out because the first thing uh we want to do is intubate you >> and that’s a painful that elicits a gag reflex. And so um to avoid that, we give a high dose that u blocks that reflex long enough to get a tube down your throat.
(17:33) The anesthetists um are constantly monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, um autonomic signs and symptoms for a lightning of the anesthetic and then they can uh give more before you get to a point where you have recall and you know it induces all the post anesthetic problems. It’s interesting that that that if that was their idea of like let’s you know aniththetize ourselves to experience the cosmic oneness of the universe.
(18:03) Like normally um you know if I was going to do that I would go in the other direction and I would be wanting to um uh increase my awareness rather than decrease my awareness. um- which is interesting because you actually have a plot I I um I found a plot that you made uh of uh the different types of awareness and like right at the very end you have comeosse um and it’s it’s in one of those like xy axes I’m not like super great at interpreting or explaining these but for the audience like that right at the very end of it
(18:34) there’s like comeomaosse which is what we’re talking about which is you know what um anesthetics do and then you sort of travel up it and you go into like immobility and sleep and then light awareness and then awareness and and then loss of recall and then before that you’re awake and then you’re alert and then you’re hyper alert and then you get right up the end of like the the axis and there’s this expansion which is where things like psychedelics come in which is you know you have more you have more awareness um and that would be the
(19:07) direction that I would be wanting to go into uh if I was trying to experience I would be trying to expand and the level of my awareness. >> When you’ve got low responsivity and low awareness, you’re comeosse and when you’re uh on LSD or psilocybin or any of the hallucinogens, you actually experience uh a mind expansion.
(19:31) And thankfully that’s becoming more and more uh wellstudied these days since uh the federal government has uh u allowed more uh scientific research into drugs like ketamine and uh psilocybin and uh what are some of the more popular ones? I think that’s a good thing to be studying. That’s going to help us understand dimensions of consciousness that are largely unexplored right now.
(20:04) >> Um and they are studying a lot of uh plants being one AOGA which they create arbagane out of um psilocybin as you mentioned. Uh which sort of brings us to the next question around plants and their consciousness. Do you think that plants have awareness? >> We know they have awareness um because they respond uh you know sunflowers get their name for tracking the sun.
(20:33) >> You know they uh their growth patterns are uh dramatically influenced by light and in particular different wavelengths of of light. So they’re definitely uh aware of their environment. they’re aware of the chemicals that are coming in through their roots and can enhance their growth like fertilizers or inhibit their growth like uh you know herbicides.
(21:03) So yeah, they’re they’re u they’re responsive to their environment in uh a way that u you know it’s not a high level of awareness and I don’t think plants are exhibiting a high level of consciousness but I kind of put consciousness on u a spectrum that goes beyond the spectrum we talked about earlier down to things like uh even at an atomic level >> um For example, we’ve studied the effects of anesthetics on microtubules, >> which one theory, the uh uh Penrose and Hamarof theory of consciousness posits that microtubules um sense, gather and transmit um a
(21:54) quantum of consciousness every time there’s a collapse of the wave function. So in you and me in our brains uh we have thousands of wave function collapses every second. So lots of of this stuff and uh Amarof and Penrose uh suggests that the microtubules um can sense this through u their unique u ability to uh capture different wavelengths of energy.
(22:29) And uh we had a paper a few years ago where we showed we could anesthetize microtubules so they could no longer transfer energy supporting their their theory of consciousness. I think consciousness starts really at a subatomic level in some quant and their theory interestingly is the only one that actually has a physical mechanism for consciousness.
(22:57) And since they proposed that theory, there’s been a lot of support in the literature in the last five years in particular. Yeah, I think consciousness um can be expressed in even rocks and certainly plants and all animals. Um it’s just the degree of consciousness. If you’ve got a brain chalk full of microtubules, um you’re going to be more conscious than a uh neatode that just has a central >> ganglia.
(23:32) >> And u the same is is true if you have u billions and billions more neurons in your brain than a reptile has, you’re going to be more conscious than the reptile. It sounds like that’s a theory that’s going to satisfy the materialists and also satisfy the um the the pansyists. Um so, >> no, not so much. Not so much.
(23:57) >> No, because it’s still u linked to uh physical I mean material stuff, microtubules for example, >> right? >> Protein. >> Yes. Let’s explain. Can you explain what a microtubule actually is? They’re uh critical structural elements of all cells. They form the skeleton if you like um that dictates the shape of a neuron, the shape of a skin cell.
(24:29) And uh they serve as a transportation network much like railroads. They’re they’re like tracks upon which um these molecular motors scoot along with uh payloads like synaptic vicles for uh going out to uh the nerve terminal endings of neurons that have all the specialized proteins they need and have all the uh um goodies that can signal uh back and forth between the nucleus and individual science.
(25:05) synapses of which there are thousands on each neuron. So that’s a really fascinating thing that microtubules do. They’re critical to cell division. They form the uh spindle apparatus that pulls the DNA apart from the uh mother cells into the daughter cells. So they’re critical for all cell reproduction.
(25:32) they anchor uh critical membrane proteins in place like under a synaptic uh bouton you’ll have the receptors for the transmitter that’s being released by the sinaptic bhuton to talk across the sinapse to the post synaptic cell. So a good example is in our brains um ericlutamate sinapses all over the place. They get an action potential coming down through their bhuton, which it looks like a little bulb on the end of an axon.
(26:05) And when the action potential gets there, it causes the release of a chemical glutamate, an amino acid that acts on glutamate receptors that then open ion channels on the post synaptic cell to send the signal along or to add to the integrative properties of other signals coming in. So, uh microtubules are are uh critically important for um virtually all uh cellular processes.
(26:39) They dictate where proteins are shipped to, how they’re put together, how they’re anchored in place. So they they’re really pivotal in u all cells including plants and uh u parramian and you know the uh the thing that uh these little single cell organisms use to move around their fleella those are microtubule bundles put together so uh so you can see where u hammeroff and penrose would get to liking microtubules they’re in uh first of all they’re they make up a sizable amount of the protein in all cells. So I I don’t know if it’s
(27:24) 50% but probably 40% of all the protein are these structural proteins. >> Where where do they reside in the body? Are you I mean it sounds like you’re saying that they are all throughout the body of humans and that we have them in almost like abundance and then is it is it fair to say that implants they also have microtubules all throughout their structure? Um but they have less of them than humans? >> I don’t know about that.
(27:54) It’s a good question though. uh but they’re located in every single cell in your body and in plants. Anything that’s alive and is cellular has microtubules right from early stages of life forms they uh developed in order to uh segregate u components of the cell like mitochondria, the nucleus and stuff like that um and hold them in place where they’re supposed to be.
(28:27) somehow they’re uh they’re able to control shipments of uh vital uh proteins and signals that signal back to the nucleus to make more of this protein or less of it or whatever. So they’re they’re cool little little proteins and um you should really invite Stuart Hammer on to uh tell you about he loves to talk about microtubules.
(28:53) >> Yeah. Well, I have sent him an email. So, if he listens to this, um, check your emails. Um, yeah, he he I would love to have a conversation with him. I mean, because he’s also, um, his background is, uh, he’s a an ethetist, right? He’s a a physician >> until very recently. I think he just retired.
(29:13) Um, so he’s no longer doing clinical, uh, work. uh but he’s still very much involved in research and trying to anesthetic mechanisms and uh yeah and he he is uh really into consciousness too that’s uh one of his favorite subjects and like I say he and Penrose have a a one of the three major theories of consciousness. Would you say that then consciousness is not something that just arises from neuronal activity like consciousness is not a product of just the brain? Do we have consciousness throughout our entire body? >> Well, first of all, I I don’t u fully
(29:53) agree with them. I I there’s strong evidence for the uh integrated information theory which is the main theory that neuroscientists u I think hold dear and that just says put enough connections and circuits together and consciousness naturally arises out of that. My favorite theory u in fact we just published a paper uh this month uh uh Tam Hunt and I on the electromagnetic field theory of conscious and that was uh you know really a neglected theory.
(30:31) It had been thought to have been disproven back in like the 50s and early 60s and um that really kind of put it in in bad light to especially neuroscientists. If you look at it from a different point of view, it’s still I think the uh the most interesting theory of consciousness because it takes the mind out of the brain.
(30:59) It puts it >> uh electromagnetic field that the brain generates. So all the little neuronal activities mostly this uh synchronized synaptic activity generates these uh higher amplitude uh fields voltage uh changes and magnetic changes. And these emf fields could be um super good at processing information.
(31:28) They can go to unimaginable dimensions of processing things like we couldn’t achieve with all of the Amazon data centers in the world combined. And it puts the the mind as an energy field rather than a physical entity. Now in the old days, everybody kind of thought of it as a field that extended out from the brain to make like an aura.
(31:52) We can measure the magnetic and electric fields through the skull, you know. So, they’re definitely uh they they exist. They do project out from the brain, but more importantly, they also project into the brain because these are current loops and >> uh magnetic field loops. And so when you think of it as projecting into the brain down to the brain stem and through the phalamus and all of these fields that are generated largely by neoortex because that’s the biggest generator of synaptic activity in the brain. These are all
(32:33) going down into your brain stem where consciousness likely resides. Reptiles seem to be more or less conscious depending on how you you want to define it >> in a small way. You know, they’re little tiny reptilian brain consciousness. And >> when you get into uh higher organisms that exhibit higher levels of conscious behavior such as communication, you see these brains that have these massive infoldings in their neoortex.
(33:07) And the textbook story is, oh, they just needed more space. They needed to cram more uh uh neurons into the same uh skull cavity. But that also puts a lot of neurons close together that don’t talk to each other through connections through axons and sinapses, but can talk to each other through electric fields.
(33:32) So for example, if you look at the sensory motor uh sulsi in the human brain or any mamalian brain, the uh sensory homunculus, you know, your nose to your toes kind of thing aligns perfectly with the motor. >> What do you mean nose to your toes? Are you talking about um like the fascial the fascia network? >> The representation of your body on your brain.
(34:01) So your brain uh like in the auditory system the frequencies are arranged from high to low in a very orderly manner in the brain stem nuclei and on up to auditory cortex. U the same is true u in the visual system and in the smatoensory system in particular you have these homunculi where the top of your head is represented by this spot in your sensory cortex and then your nose by this spot and then all the way to your toes down here.
(34:37) So the sensory cortex has this uh map of all your body surface areas that are inervated. And the sensory homunculus aligns perfectly with the motor homunculus which are the motor neurons that then talk to lower motor centers in the spinal cord to actually make you move. So take an example of a uh baseball player. It’s kind of paradoxical how a baseball player can hit a 90 mph fast ball in the amount of time it takes for the ball to leave the pitcher to get to the batter.
(35:14) A lot of people have done the math on that and it doesn’t add up. You know, it takes 100 milliseconds to get here and then the information has to go from that group of cells to this group of cells. That takes another 100 milliseconds. pretty soon you’re into way longer time periods than um you can reasonably that they just don’t match up with reality.
(35:39) So, if you clock a batter, you know, he whacks that ball out of the stadium, hits a home run in uh less time than it takes for the neurons to transmit the data from the visual system um through associative cortex to pick out a a probable trajectory and then map that to the motor sequence needed to then swing the bat in the right place.
(36:09) So, all of that stuff takes time. You’ve got to go from the sensory side to some computing uh uh associational cortex thing, then back out to the motor cortex and down the spinal cord and so forth. Why would you put the sensory cortex adjacent to the motor cortex? Would that give you any advantage? Um >> because they could talk to each other quicker.
(36:35) >> Yeah, exactly. they talk to to each other instantaneously. So as soon as the uh the visual proprioceptive and um other stimuli hit the cortex, so they’ve already gone through two or three sinapses to get there, but as soon as they get there, they generate fields that can be experienced by their counterpart in the motor system across the uh the cell through non-synaptic, non-physical contacts, just pure energy, pure electric fields.
(37:11) Now the cool part is in the last uh 10 years really before that but it was poo pooed but the last 10 years now we seriously know that these fields generated by the neurons influence the firing probability of adjacent neurons. The sensory neurons that are experiencing the baseball coming can already prime their counterparts in the motor cortex and say, “Hey, here comes something.
(37:40) Get ready.” And so their level of excitability can raise just enough that uh the first little inkling of a motor output will be easier to trigger off. >> They’re like ready to catch it, >> right? And so that could speed up the whole neuronal calculation process uh dramatically, maybe cut it in half even. So uh that’s why um these electric magnetic fields could be very useful uh from an evolutionary point of view.
(38:15) They can uh your sensory system can prime your motor system before the motor systems had any uh feedback through normal synaptic circuitry. So there, you know, all they’re going, “Oh, pay attention. Listen up. There’s something coming.” So you spot a saber-tooth tiger behind that rock. you can already prime your uh motor neurons to get your legs moving, >> get your ass going, >> or better yet, get your spear, you know.
(38:46) >> Yeah. >> Uh so, uh that’s one of the features of the electromagnetic theory of consciousness that I think is is interesting. It’s also interesting because it instantaneously solves uh one of the hard problems of consciousness and that is how do we integrate all of this information from visual uh somatoensory smell auditory all of this stuff into the feeling of oneness the wholeness >> the so-called binding problem in philosophy >> well if your EMFs are projecting down into the core of your brain. That is the
(39:33) mind. It’s doing the calculations. It’s figuring out and it’s talking back to the neurons through these connections through pure energy fields in a way that’s way faster than any synaptic circuits will ever be. is we’re talking near light speed to transmit uh an electric field through brain tissue versus you know milliseconds of delay across sinapses.
(40:01) >> Where I want to go is that I want to talk about this paper that you published a month ago and the experiments you were doing in the lab where you were essentially um giving uh putting inducing theta activity into the tissue of rat brains >> um which I think is crazy. that’s like some Frankenstein level stuff happening there.
(40:21) So, I do want to talk about how that worked um in in in the lab. But I guess what’s really coming up for me um as we discuss this EMF theory and the fact that consciousness is like an inward job, an inside job is like why why and how does it feel like I have a subjective experience? Like why do I feel like I have a I am one person? I am one um continuous person with one separate identity.
(40:51) Why do I feel like that? And then why is it that like a plant or a rat or um you know a reptile probably doesn’t feel like they have an individuated identity? >> He’s got the same thing going on in his brain and it’s binding u all of his neuronal activity in uh an instantaneous time frame. That’s uh that is where the actual experience is being felt.
(41:18) >> Why would it be advantageous for humans then to feel like they have a personality? >> Ultimately, all of this has to come back to evolution. That’s why I brought up the idea of why did we develop brains that had all these infoldings that place neurons close together um that aren’t normally connected at all um through physical connections.
(41:47) Speed would be the natural uh advantage. Your brain can process information much faster in uh an energy field than it can through circuits that are diverse and divergent all over the brain. You know, how does that all come together like, you know, in an instantaneous way so that we feel like we’re seeing the world in a real time experience.
(42:16) I I can’t imagine how the brain can physically do that with just its uh you know connections. I think it has to involve a a higher level of processing that it goes beyond uh the physical. I mean it’s doesn’t go beyond it. It’s it integrates the physical because it comes from the physical and in turn it influences the physical through the uh electric field influences back on the neurons.
(42:47) Engineers and physicists have played with these electromagnetic fields for years and used them for all kinds of practical purposes such as TV and radio and uh transmission to satellites and whatever. And it turns out the fields can uh do remarkable things. So for example, if you uh tune in a radio station, um it’s receiving this uh you know Paul McCartney song that you love.
(43:20) You turn the volume up and you go, “Wow, that’s really cool.” because that Paul McCartney song is being delivered to my radio as a pattern of EMF vibrations, fields. >> So, how does that work? Where you can pull out this one song out of a a ether full of million radio stations. EMFs can be uh precisely tuned and used to transfer information.
(43:53) And why wouldn’t that occur in our brains too? The other thing that’s important here that’s often neglected is that uh the brain loves synchrony. U it loves to make certain frequencies that are recorded outside of the skull. So lots of neurons are synchronously doing the same thing to make theta rhythms and alpha rhythms and gamma rhythms that are uh like I say pretty darn large uh from the point of view of a single neuron.
(44:25) It’s experiencing these fields in a momentby-moment uh way and that will influence its firing probability moment by moment which gives you the kind of integrated aspect of the EMF theory that it’s a binding uh mechanism to pull multiensory systems uh together and uh and uh integrated into a whole.
(44:53) I’m happy to hear about the fact that our EMF um our field is strong. The one that our brain produces is strong because this conversation has really made me think about like how much we’re battling with. Um and I know you said before that like these, you know, it’s it’s a very clever and nuanced system and you can pull one thing from a sea of all the other things.
(45:13) What I’m trying to get to here is that like we live our modern lives, we are so surrounded by tech. Like even if I as I sit here with you now, it’s like there is so much technology surrounding me in this room and then when I walk out my door, it’s like the telephone poles. I was going to say how how’s our brain coping? But then if you look at modern life and you look at like how people are living and how people are feeling like people we aren’t coping.
(45:32) >> That’s not really interfering with the uh the brain uh generated EMFs. >> Yeah. I I I’m just I I want like some scientific explanation for how the amount of technology that we surround ourselves with in modern life could be affecting the the things like our consciousness or our electromagnetic field, our indogenous electromagnetic field.
(45:54) >> Well, fairly recently, the last year or two, um they ascribed uh these um diseases people get in embassies u around the world. Um they’re ascribing that to these EMF weapons. So pulsed uh EMF activity 24/7 at the embassies has caused people to develop these strange illnesses. Sleep deprivation, uh just males, you know, they just don’t feel right, >> brain fog, kind of like long COVID type stuff.
(46:36) The CIA released a report that confirmed that these were all consistent with EMF weapons that had been developed probably by Russia. That’s one example of where uh it seems like it it can be uh used in harmful ways. In terms of beneficial, I mean, our lives are tremendously enriched by uh the EMF we’re s we’re embedded in. Um all these radio and TV signals and outer space stuff um is all impacting us.
(47:10) Communicate in ways that our ancestors never were able to do in in real time like you and I right now. I mean >> you’re are you in Australia or you know normally on a phone the uh delay would be five six seconds between us and uh yet with this technology it’s uh like you’re in the town next door very close >> and u the variety of stuff we can be exposed to is huge through technology like it never was when when we were kids.
(47:54) I mean, we had TV and radio, but nothing like podcasts and uh you know, all the amazing things the internet’s provided. >> I guess sometimes I like to put my tinfoil hat on and think about you know like all these earphones like these earphones that I’m wearing at the moment, they’re EMF blocking. Um, but my my boyfriend sits in front of his computer screen all day with like Bluetooth um wireless headphones on and I just I’m always like, you know, hassling him uh about I’m like do some research like I don’t know if if if that’s if that’s going to like have some negative
(48:33) ramifications down the track that you’re going to be unhappy with. But thankfully um a lot of research on that’s been done. They’ve looked at the effects of EMF on brain development in fetuses and you know all regular people migraine sufferers and u they really found u there’s not a lot of um ill effects from even living under a high voltage power line.
(49:02) systematic studies of that have failed to show that um any of these fields are harmful so far, including um you know, headphones and cell phones. There’s a big thing 10 years ago with cell phones, you know, make don’t try not to hold them up to your ear because it’ll affect your brain. Well, it turns out they don’t seem to affect brains much.
(49:25) like you’re saying like studies have be done have been done to show that the um EMF extogenous EMF versus your own EMF is probably going to be fine but what’s what’s going to be more um detrimental to you down the track is like the fact that you’re sitting hunched over a computer and like your spine is compressed and your you know your your neck is like at an angle it shouldn’t be at so it’s not d the fluid from your brain isn’t draining properly like that’s probably actually more likely to be the thing that causes um >> absolutely >> disorders down the track. Let’s talk
(50:01) about your study that the EMF study that you did. Um I read through the paper and I did my best to try and understand it. It was a little bit above my pay grade, but what I got from it was that you essentially put um the same type of brain activity in in disembodied tissue from a rat brain and can and and created like thought like the the same the same brain activity that is responsible for for conscious thought in this tissue and then you tested um anesthetic drugs on it.
(50:36) Did I >> Yeah, kind of. I I don’t we can induce the rhythmic uh brain patterns that you see in a normal running around uh rat. They generate in particular a theta rhythm that’s been really well studied. Theta rhythm is a signature for uh learning and memory and for uh sensory motor integration. All these rhythms are uh generated naturally by rat brains and human brains.
(51:09) One of the things that’s cool about the theta rhythm is it can predict uh several hundred milliseconds before you make a movement what the movement will be which lends support to this EMF theory of integrated consciousness. you know, several hundreds of milliseconds before the brain neurons actually fire off to twitch your muscles, the theta rhythm is uh started up.
(51:39) And its uh frequency will predict the velocity of the movement you’re about to make and its amplitude will predict the uh effort of the movement, the magnitude of the movement. So whether you uh jump up to a low step versus a high step or >> uh leap you know three feet versus uh couple of >> inches step. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
(52:07) So the uh frequency codes for the velocity and the amplitude codes for the magnitude of the movement. But that’s just one small aspect of what theta does. It’s also critical for learning and memory. So the hippocampus is a major part of our brains that’s involved in learning and memory. If you destroy the hippocampus, you you can’t uh store new information.
(52:33) You can still remember stuff from before uh but you can’t store anything new. And the hippocampus generates a theta rhythm continuously when you’re exploring a new situation, when you’re learning. And it it u is very active during recall too. It seems like the uh the best support for an EMF theory of consciousness is that’s the tremendous way to make big EMF fields that can span the whole brain.
(53:06) So the hippocampus can let the neoortex know what it’s doing at the same time as priming the uh basil ganglia to make a movement and how fast it’s going to be and how big it’s going to be. So uh these fields that start hundreds of milliseconds before the actual movement um could be the mind making up its mind. Okay, we’re time to move and uh this is where we’re going to move and this is how fast we’re going to move and then it plays out through the neuronal circuitry um to the muscles and the movement is accomplished. All these uh interesting
(53:47) frequencies like the delta rhythm is so critical to restoring uh brain activity in sleep. It’s been shown that during sleep you replay a lot of stuff you’ve learned during the day over and over again probably probing different uh memory engrams throughout cortex to say do do you belong here? Nah, not really.
(54:12) What about over here? Well, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is where I need to this is the context I need to be stored in in that in that engram that I’ve learned previously. >> Yeah. Which storage which filing cabinet does it go in? >> Exactly. What drawer do we put it in? >> So what what does this mean for um learning and memory? If you wanted to learn something new, how could you put yourself in theta brain activity to be actual to to to to be able to actually learn it and then encode it and and be able to recall it?
(54:45) >> Well, that that’s a a good point. You can train your brain to make all of these rhythms through feedback training. You can learn to turn up your theta activity or your gamma activity or your delta activity through just BOF feedback. So your brain can learn to control its synchronized rhythmic activity just like it can learn to do anything.
(55:11) >> Short of being able to afford an an EEG machine in your home, how could you do it? Like you know, how could just the average person that doesn’t have access? you you can buy these um EEG bio feedback devices on the internet. They’re cheap, couple hundred bucks. Uh they’ll have two or three electrodes and uh feed into a little processor.
(55:35) And so like the early ones uh would just have a light uh >> like a green light that would come on whenever you’re in the theta range. And so you just watch the light and uh you oh I’m making theta oh I’m making more and then and you just learn to get better and better at it. Um no one knows how but >> but how do you get into like are you just supposed to hook them up to your brain or like hook them up to your head and then just sit there and think about things and then be like oh when I think about this I’m in theta. You know the
(56:08) Tibetan monks can generate different brain rhythms and have natural baseline differences than you or I or nonmedit. >> So when they’re really good at it, they can uh they can forego the whole uh BOF feedback thing and just go right into theta. It’s documented. It’s been uh you know verified.
(56:34) So u and when you’re in a meditative state u you definitely uh shift your whole frequency spectrum usually down uh to lower frequency bands as and same with sleep you generally shift down to lower frequency bands. So u the brain is capable of modifying or the mind is capable of modifying the brain’s behavior. I think again through these epic feedback mechanisms, the uh EMF field decides it’s time to make theta and it just activates the appropriate group of neurons to do that.
(57:12) >> Well, Professor Bruce Macyver, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Um, thank you so much for your time and knowledge and and wisdom. the um science of consciousness meeting um is one of my favorite venues for uh giving talks and they have several of the uh talks that I’ve um given andor moderated um on their YouTube channel.
(57:42) So uh but if you search MacIver and consciousness those will probably pop up in YouTube. >> Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Um, and yeah, I I hope we can keep in touch and um um you’re more than welcome for inviting me on. I appreciate the opportunity.
