Your Brain Is A Quantum Time Machine

think about this in your life have you

ever had a premonition of an event that

ended up happening you just kind of knew

something was going to happen before it

did these key elements in that dream

he'd had almost three decades earlier

came true in his life and he never

acknowledged that that dream was a

premonition maybe it was the passing of

a loved one thinking about somebody

right before they call or re-enter your

life having a gut feeling that you know

you need to quit that job take that

other job travel somewhere get back in

touch with someone even though it made

no rational sense to at the time it just

felt like a download you got a gut

feeling patients would bring him

precognitive dreams all the time because

people have these dreams all the time

have you ever had a dream that's turned

into a reality have you ever seen

somebody else predict an extremely low

probability Black Swan event with

bizarre precision and accuracy well if

you answered yes to any of these You are

not alone this happens literally all of

the time and thanks to this guy we're

discovering the science behind it right

now trying to predict the future is a

discouraging and hazardous

occupation but before we get into his

work and who he is let's go through all

of the insane examples of modern

prophecies American fiction author Dean

coun wrote a novel called The Eyes Of

Darkness it's centered on secret

experiments involving the perfect

bioweapon developed at a lab near Wuhan

China called Wuhan 400 the novel is set

in 2020 exactly like Co the only thing

is the novel was written in

1981 author Morgan Robertson wrote an

1898 Nolla called futility or wreck of

the Titan futility tells the story of

the Titan the largest and most luxurious

ocean liner ever built in the novel The

Titan hits an iceberg in the North

Atlantic on an April night and sinks but

before that catastrophe the ship was

described as Unsinkable and the largest

liner in the ocean ring a bell well

because wreck of the Titan was written

about 14 years before the Titanic the

most luxurious ocean liner built at the

time described as unsn able with Elite

families like the Asters on board both

ships were almost identical in size and

features the Titan was 800 ft long

whereas the Titanic was 882 ft long both

vessels were traveling at high speeds

around 24 to 25 knots while they were

crossing the North Atlantic in April at

the time of their collision with an

iceberg they both disregarded ice

warnings and both lacked a sufficient

amount of lifeboats on board in 1952

former Nazi and father of the American

Space Program wner Von braa published a

science fiction book titled project Mars

a technical Tale in this novel he

predicted a future mission to colonize

Mars led by a figure referred to as Elon

and what about this 1958 Western called

trackdown in which a man named Trump

with Magnetic Charisma and a cult-like

Following comes to a town promising to

save it by building a wall you ask how

do you build that wall you ask and I'm

here to tell you one of the town's

people comes was after him accusing him

of fraud you're a liar

Trump what about Trump's recent

assassination

attempt did anybody predict that and

then I saw an attempt on his life this

bullet flew by his ear and it came so

close to his head that it busted his

drum

[Music]
eardrum the Great American novelist Mark

Twain even predicted his own death born

on November 30th 1835 just as Haley's

Comet was passing by Earth he would

often say to people that he expected to

go out with the comet upon its return

just as he predicted he died in 1910

just one day after the comet made its

closest approach to Earth and finally

maybe the most Eerie prediction of all

Michael Richards was a talented prolific

African-American sculptor in New York

Michael Rolando Richards was a sculptor

like all of his Works were like obsessed

with flight and in the sculpture that

made him most famous he portrayed

himself as a Airman standing vertically

erect and levitating off the ground and

being impaled by airplanes and the

sculpture is called Tar baby versus St

Sebastian and St Sebastian was the

Medieval Saint who you know was always

depicted like pierced by arrows so he

depicted himself pierced by planes as a

martyr pierced by planes you know on the

basis of the strength of his work

including I assume that sculpture he was

awarded Studio space for 6 months in the

Twin Towers the lower Manhattan cultural

Council uh had been uh issuing Studios

to like a CO you know cohorts of 15

artists like for six months you know so

two cohorts a year he alone among those

artists uh had stayed in the studio the

night of September 10th and was killed

on the morning of September

[Applause]

11th the examples of modern prophecies

are endless Alex Jones say what you will

about the guy as far as so his other

beliefs but are you familiar with he he

had an on air call or if you let some

terrorist group drew it like the World

Trade Center we know who to blame and if

there was an outside threat like a Bin

Laden who was a known CIA asset in the

80s he's the boogeyman they need it's

just this absurd like you know literally

what happened I could go on forever

survivorship bias you say people make

crazy predictions pontificate all the

time if we gave air time to all of the

wrong historical predictions made we'd

be sitting here all day but then I'd

come back and I'd say but the level of

detail in many of these predictions is

beyond probability and then you might

come back and say but the probability of

a bunch of eily accurate predictions

over a long enough time scale and with

the internet at your disposal is

actually more likely than you're

presenting it Jesse we can go around in

Endless circles on these arguments how

do we get to the bottom of them

scientifically I mean it's not like the

government looked into this stuff

systematically for 20 years employing

hundreds of psychic spies to find

hostages drop nuclear basis and predict

military obstacles oh wait they did do

all of that there was in fact a CIA and

Dia backed program called Stargate which

ran from 1972 to 1995 the official

American psychic spy program every year

it got refunded because it was useful

there are hundreds of successful remote

viewing cases from the program many

coming from the program's Pride enjoy

remote viewer remote viewer number one

Joseph mcmonagle mcmonagle used remote

viewing to identify Soviet nuclear bases

predict key critical events and he even

helped locate kidnapped American General

James doer in fact mcmonagle even won

the prestigious Legion of Merit for his

work in the psychic spy program adding

to intelligence in over 200 critical

National Security cases in 1979 he was

tasked with remote viewing an

impenetrable building in a shipyard off

the coast of the White Sea in Russia he

described a massive nuclear submarine in

the works I spoke to mcmonagle's

colleague and fellow psychic spy Paul

Smith about it and everybody thought

that was crazy and it was pretty well

dismissed 8 months after that those Pro

those sessions were done the Russians

floated out the typhoon the biggest

submarine ever built and its missile

tubes were in front of the super

structure on the crazy exactly as Jo Joe

described it that same year the Russians

and the Americans were in a race trying

to find a downed tu22 Russian spy plane

in Africa there was some very precious

cargo on board highly sensitive Russian

cryptic equipment Dale graph who ran the

psychic spy program at the time had a

woman named Rosemary Smith remote view

the plane she was given all of Africa as

a possible Target she ended up drawing a

3 square mile area in zier even

President Jimmy Carter recalls this

being the most miraculous thing that

occurred during his 4-year presidential

term we located the plane where she said

it was it's the only time that I have

ever experienced something that was

inexplicable who all I was presid okay

all of that's kind of remarkable but

again real science involves collecting

large amounts of data and surely no

independent well-regarded statisticians

have looked at the Stargate psychic spy

data well that's actually not true a

statistician named Jessica UTS who was

president of the American statistical

Society reviewed all of the Stanford

Research Institute psychic spy data and

a whole lot of other psychic experiments

as well UT uh did an analysis of a lot

of uh evidence for psychic functioning

not just the Stargate program I don't

believe uh and she found overwhelming

evidence and she's been very very vocal

about this she based her studies on

basic probability specifically P values

in scientific terms this means using

statistics to compare the observed

results to what would be expected by

Chance the P value basically answers the

question if chance were the only Factor

How likely is it that we'd see results

this strong or stronger when the P value

is very small researchers are more

confident in ruling out chance as the

explanation for findings say you have

four cards face down you know one of

those cards is an ace of diamonds the

probability that you guess which card is

an ace of diamonds is 25% or has a P

value of 0.25 a commonly accepted

practice in the field of statistical

analysis is to say that A P value of

less than 5% so 05 would rule out chance

as an explanation in these cas cases

results are statistically significant

but that's not sufficient obviously low

probability things still happen just by

chance so replicating these non- chance

results across a lot of Trials and

collecting a lot of data is very

important okay hopefully you're

following me here basic probability hard

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a all right back to the show back to

Jessica UT's statistical assessment of

psychic spying first she diligence the

experimental protocols making sure that

they were sound protocols like this the

experimentor takes a set of 200

photographs sourced at random from the

pages of National Geographic Magazines

now they take a participating remote

viewer who hasn't seen seen any of these

photographs the remote viewer is then

placed in a completely isolated room

during the experiment away from the

experimenter and away from the photos

the experimentor then randomly selects a

batch of five photos acting as a kind of

Beacon or sender of the information the

remote viewer would then be tasked

withdrawing each photo that was picked

in tightly controlled conditions a well-

tested randomizer would be used to

select the photos and the experimenters

or even anybody in contact with with the

experimenters was not allowed to

communicate at all with the remote

viewer a final third person then judges

what the remote viewer draws and see how

it matches the batch of randomly

selected photos these photos are

incredibly wide ranging they could be

something like a mountain view or a cat

sleeping in a car the study of these

attempts found that there was an overall

hit rate of 35% a number that was found

to be repeatable over and over again but

there's more corroboration similar

numbers were found in the trials done at

the University of Edinburgh and the Ry

Research Institute at Duke in North

Carolina so how did Jessica UTS shake

out in her statistical study what was

her overall assessment well I'll just

quote her using the standards applied to

any other area of science it is

concluded that psychic functioning has

been well established the statistical

results of the studies examined are far

beyond what is expected by chance

arguments that these results could be

due to methodological flaws in the

experiments are soundly refuted strong

words she said you know this is the

quality of the evidence is so strong

that if it were in any other field

nobody would question this yes making

UT's conclusions even more meaningful is

the fact that she partnered with

psychologist Ray Heyman Hyman was a

total skeptic of the Paranormal going

into this and eager to find methodology

issues and other rational explanations

for the data in fact Heyman was a friend

and colleague of perhaps the most

prominent skeptic at the time James

Randy himman even wrote for the

skeptical Inquirer in fact he had

previously written a report commissioned

by the government two decades earlier

that was highly critical of the famous

psychic Yuri Geller while Heyman did

have some minor disagreements with UT he

agreed with her basic take the psychic

experiments were free of obvious flaws

and the data was too large and

consistent to be dismissed as

statistical flukes something unexplained

was going on even in heyman's skeptical

opinion but you don't need to take my

word for it the study has been made

publicly available and the report goes

into far more detail than I've covered

here the link for the PDF is in the

description of this video unfortunately

when it comes to psychic phenomena we

can't turn them into math repeatable

processes or technology so we just

conveniently ignore them even if we have

statistically significant data backing

these studies Jessica UTS actually

captured this sentiment well saying that

it would be a waste of resources to

continue to look for proof of psychic

phenomena and instead resources should

be directed to the real pressing matter

of how this ability works just look at

the history of even conventional science

we couldn't explain black body radiation

when it was discovered in the 1860s we

needed Max Plank's Quantum revolution in

1900 we also couldn't explain Mercury's

orbit with Newtonian physics we needed

Einstein's SpaceTime curvature to

accurately predict its path when we

discovered these anomalies these

observations were never fake or worthy

of being ignored we just couldn't

explain them with math or theoretical

physics at the time psychic phenomena is

just the same it's unexplainable not

always repeatable and can't be turned

into math but it's real like

statistically significant real and by

many accounts far more replicable than

Fields like psychology as the great

Arthur C Clark once said any

sufficiently advanced technology is

indistinguishable from Magic well

cutting to the chase thanks to this

week's amazing American Alchemist Eric

Wargo the ability of the mind to predict

the future in Eerie ways is increasingly

moving from Magic to science Wargo has

constructed a biological computational

and physics-based model to describe

exactly how our brains might have access

to the Future and it's not woowoo or new

Agy at all in fact while it's still

theoretical it's very hard-headed

logical and it actually makes sense even

in a materialist Universe what is

wargo's thesis your brain is a

time-traveling quantum computer okay

that sounds kind of insane but here hear

me out for a quantum computer to work it

generally needs to maintain coherence or

the ability to maintain multiple States

at once in order to do that you usually

need to maintain extremely cold

environments with very little noise or

signal interference in the system and

fortunately human and animal bodies are

full of blood water mucus and skin

they're the last thing from cold and

precise they're warm wet and noisy so

people assume our bodies don't have

Quantum capabilities but there's a new

field called Quantum biology uncovering

all sorts of biological processes that

involve Quantum effects the creation of

enzymes involves Quantum tunneling

robins and other migratory birds have a

protein in their eyes called a

cryptochrome that uses electron spin to

sense the Earth's magnetic field acting

as a Quantum compass and helping them

navigate home you have Quantum biology

you have um you know enzyme creation

using Quantum tunneling you have Birds

navig getting home using the cr4 protein

spin you have you have other examples as

well absolutely and plant photosynthesis

might depend on quantum entanglement but

what about the brain and everyday human

perception well theorists as prominent

as Nobel prizewinning physicist Roger

Penrose have hypothesized that the brain

is actually a room temperature Quantum

system what does this mean practically

and how does this allow our brains to

predict the future well in quantum

mechanics you of course have Einstein's

spooky action at a distance or spatial

non-locality everybody likes to talk

about this entangled Photon pairs across

the world seeming to mirror each other

in ways that break Einstein's speed

limit of light but to me perhaps the

even more mind-blowing thing about

quantum mechanics is that you don't just

have spatial non-locality you have

temporal non-locality spooky action

across time say you entangle two photons

with each other Photon a and Photon B

you then run the classic double slit

experiment with Photon a wait to few

days and run another double slit

experiment with Photon B if you don't

observe either Photon in the experiment

you'll get an interference pattern for

both Photon B and Photon a If You

observe Photon B in the second double

slit experiment it will collapse into a

particle State and go through one of the

slits but here's where things get crazy

it looks like the measurement and

collapse of photon B is causing the

collapsing of photon a into a particle

State 2 even though the double slit

experiment with Photon a is happening

before the experiment with Photon B in

other words the two photons are

entangled not only across space but

across time this looks a whole lot like

either retrocausality or dare I say it

time travel but this basic principle in

quantum mechanics actually probably

applies to quantum computers too in fact

instead of the bits ones and zeros that

classical computers operate on quantum

computers operate on these things called

cubits that exist in superpositional

States cubit can take on superp

positions of states right and so what a

lot of people in popular culture Popular

Science butcher when they describe super

positions is that they say that the

Cubit is both one and zero at the same

time that's not true it's not in the one

state it's not in the zero State it's

not in the one and zero State either

it's also not not in the one and not in

the zero State it's in a super position

State well it turns out that you can

actually reverse Cubit positions in

Quant Quantum computations so in a

working quantum computer it's been

hypothesized even by some of the people

building quantum computers right now

that you can send information back in

time and if the brain is a Quantum

system as Roger Penrose thinks it is

then maybe the brain can access its

future knowledge State maybe the brain

can send information back in time or

have a pre-memory if you will maybe that

explains why humans can have incredible

intuition humans in their bodies often

just instinctively know when certain

things are about to happen you come out

of the womb with like you know a fear of

snakes and with a chomski and preg

grammar for certain things and that's

not how a classical computer works

because it's that informational time

travel that's already happening you can

look at biological systems as models for

how it works uh and yeah in a quantum

computer you can theoretically scale up

the the that causal indeterminacy that's

happening on the the quantum level and

you scale that up uh in a quantum

computer server that you leave plugged

in for many years uh it really opens the

doorway to actually communicating across

time but this is a really important

distinction Wargo doesn't really believe

in woow woo mind over matter he doesn't

think a psychic can simply view a downed

airplane halfway across the world they

can only remote view that airplane if in

the future they are given confirmation

that that plane crashed in a specific

location once that knowledge state is

confirmed in stored in the person's

brain it could be sent back in time

feedback may be important Beyond just

training remote viewers that you know

maybe

maybe maybe that's what remote viewers

are really seeing they're seeing that

feedback in the future that's really

interesting point I actually spoke with

the founder of the CIA psychic spy

program Hal put off he was very open to

Wargo being right that confirmatory

feedback is required for the remote

viewing to work and there's actually a

reason to believe that the ability to

send information back in time would be

extremely adaptive for survival

explaining why humans are most intuitive

around life and death situations penr

just has a theory and he's a theoretical

physicist not an experimentalist what

evidence do we actually have that the

brain might be a Quantum system well

penrose's collaborator anesthesiologist

steuart Hammer off thinks he has a

candidate tiny cylindrical structures

found in the cytoplasm of plant and

animal cells called microtubules these

structures have tiny indle Rings

distributed throughout tubulin that

hamov thinks could maintain Quantum

coherence when you turn the microtubules

off with anesthesia the rest of the

brain functions completely normally it's

only the microtubules that shut off and

the person becomes unconscious it's

almost as if these micro structures are

the on and off switches to our conscious

perception the Penrose thing you know

this idea that he he wrote in the

emperor's new mind that the microtubules

um I guess that was the fall but the

emperor's new mind with hammer off the

microtubule is our Quantum sensor that

collapses the wave function into an igen

State I have some sympathy for going

along that direction so you think

there's some sort of quantum sensor in

the in the brain and do you have a top

candidate for the specific structure

well I can't rule it out I mean they

certainly started from a very

fundamental thing is and that is if you

can get rid of Consciousness by using an

anesthetic then however you're doing it

must have something to do with

Consciousness but we have microtubules

throughout the body where in the brain

would Quantum processing actually be

happening I give you Gary Nolan a

tenyear Stanford Professor who believes

that the neuronal density in the kodate

and paman of the brain's basil ganglia

determines a person's psychic ability in

fact if you hook an fmri up to the brain

and track a person's blood flow while

they're playing the game of Go it seems

like this part of the brain the kodate

nucleus in paman lights up when a person

makes a move purely based on intuition

in fact these moves often seem

irrational when they're made but they

somehow work out for the players that

make them in looking at the MRIs of some

of these people we noticed a area of the

brain that seemed to be disturbed let's

say or different in many of these

individuals uh so it's an area that I've

talked about before between the head of

the CATE and the paman that had

increased neural density and it was

larger than all these individuals and so

you asked the question okay what's

unique about these individuals well

they're all highly functioning and you

have to make snap decisions what is that

that's intuition one way to explain it

would be Intuition or just highly

intelligent and then surprisingly when

we looked in the family members we found

that the family members had it mhm which

was fascinating so that means that

structure had a genetic component that's

I think how the brain works via

intuition have you ever made a decision

in your life that feels totally

irrational incrementally like with the

data you have it makes no sense but it

makes sense in the context of an end

point that you know happens later to me

that is your future knowledge State

sending information back in time that

system is part of the reward system um

and so it's it's involved in our uh

registration of rewards our learning

based on rewards our predictions based

on past rewards

um uh and that system system I think is

Central you know it's Central it's kind

of the Central classically in that

classical computer uh model uh in terms

of the organism you know changing its

Behavior based on rewards and getting

excited about possible future rewards

and anticipated rewards and all that

thanks to this week's amazing American

Alchemist Eric Wargo the ability of the

mind to predict the future in Eerie ways

is increasingly moving from Magic to

science we should definitely study the

microtubules in the cadate nucleus in

paman that could be the specific part of

the brain responsible for intuition and

responsible for sending future Quantum

information back in time but there's

more evidence have you heard of a

Russian scientist with the last name

liberman two friends of mine denil and

David liberman their father knew uh

hamov and or I think knew Penrose rather

and was uh really interested in

cytoskeletal learning fim Libra is the

father of my two friends David and denil

Lieberman and he was the foremost

researcher in Consciousness in the

Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s even

before Penrose was doing his work epim

conjectured that Quantum effects in

which cytoskeletal membranes of cells

which is where the microtubules exist

communicate to one another and even

encode semantic information a lot of

this is centered around an experiment he

did with goldfish he took four goldfish

the first he just froze right off the

bat with nitrogen the second he spun in

a centrifuge and then froze the fish

with nitrogen while spinning it the

third he would spin in a centrifuge then

give the fish a little time to reorient

and then freeze it with nitrogen and

finally he put the fourth fish to sleep

spun it in a centrifuge and then froze

it he then let the frozen fish thaw back

to room temperature keeping them alive

and letting them swim around after the

experiment what he found was nothing

short of fascinating basically all of

the fish had their cytos skeletons and

neurons intact and they could all

continue swimming and navigating the

water normally except for the second

fish that poor fish's cytoskeletons had

completely disassembled because the

nitrogen had Frozen it while it was

being spun around and so when it was

brought back to normal temperature it

couldn't swim normally at all it

couldn't compute its environment or

calculate where it was spatially just

another point for cytoskeleton and

microtubules being essential for

conscious awareness I think we have to

be open to this quum you know prec

cognizance of The Future model

absolutely I mean I think that uh you

know steuart Hammer off I'm sure you

know his work on microtubules I think

that's you know that's going to be the I

think microtubules are probably going to

be the the mechanism here a lot of

people simplistically say oh the brain

is a quantum computer it's not that

simple it's a it's a hybrid it's a

hybrid of classical and Quantum systems

you know meshed in the world of constant

hype around artificial intelligence I

hope you come out of this episode with

new faith that the human mind will be

very hard to replace with robots sorry

Optimus yeah we might lose to them at

chess our recall isn't as good and we'll

never be able to do mental math as fast

as a calculator but we can predict the

future so let's lean into our very human

differences and develop this Sixth Sense

what is at least for now our unbeatable

intuition as the great Marshall mclen

once said every media extension of man

is an amputation if our brains are in

fact quantum computers we shouldn't

merge with classical computers we should

rigorously investigate the growing field

of quantum biology and not let the cult

of Silicon Valley transhumanism or the

desire to escape our human bandwidth

limitations make us Overlook the magic

of our own biology so this interview

with Eric Wargo was an absolute blast I

felt like I needed to turn this part

into a video essay the concepts here are

so complex that I felt like they needed

to be kind of cogently synthesized there

are all sorts of crazy stuff that we

spoke about in our interview that we

didn't get into in this essay here I

just wanted to flesh out the basic

concepts and make a scientific

compelling case for how the mind works

that is distinct from artificial

intelligence and classical computers I

also wanted to make a case for psychic

functioning to Scientific Skeptics but

stay tuned for my completely unfiltered

raw conversation with Eric Wargo that's

going to come in about a week we get

into all sorts of other crazy stuff it's

going to be a lot of fun until next week

my name is Jesse Michaels and this is

American Alchemy