Entangled Neurons

One of the questions that came up during my Theatre of the Mind interview with Kelly Howell last week was "how do we know when we're actually choosing different paths in the fifth dimension"? While quantum randomness means that small outcomes are being selected for us at every instant, one planck frame after another, those are virtually always going to be inconsequential to us out here at the macro world (unless you're unlucky enough to be the subject of the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment!). During the interview, I suggested that any event that we have a memory of represents an important fifth-dimensional "cusp" in the spacetime tree of our lives. Speaking of trees, the tree-like image pictured here represents a map of the brain's neurons and was found in an article published in New Scientist Magazine earlier this year: written by David Robson, the article was entitled "Brain 'entanglement' could explain memories".

I'd like to quote from that article shortly, but let's look at this idea of memory and the fifth dimension a little more first.

Our long-term memory of past events is most often really only in tiny visual snippets, although the practice of telling and re-telling the story of an important event can give us the feeling of it being more movie-like, of being more than just a few visual images or actions. One of the experiences most of us have had is of dangerous or intense moments when time seems to slow down: in Time is In the Mind, we looked at the work of neuroscientist David Eagleman, whose research indicates that the "slowing of time" experience is related to the formation of many more memories during that event - if the event had not been as intense, we wouldn't have formed as many sequential memories, so we wouldn't remember an experience of time slowing down.

"But Rob," some people have said to me, "the time slowing down effect wasn't something that occurred to me afterwards. It's something that happened to me during the event". And that's absolutely right. This is an instantaneous process we're talking about. The reason time didn't slow down for me while I was eating lunch today was because nothing remarkable happened, no specific memories were formed, and a month from now I will almost certainly not be able to tell you what I ate for lunch today.

Which returns us to the idea that any important choices or outcomes that stay in our memory represent fifth-dimensional branches, where our probability space shifts, and some new outcomes become possible while some other outcomes are rotated into the sixth dimensional "you can't get there from here" list. That's true for each of us individually, but it's also very true for us a population of humans sharing planet Earth: there are cusps where our world and the universe it's part of branches in important ways. Those branches are our shared experience, our consensus reality: for instance, on September 11 2001 our reality shifted, for almost all of us not through our choice but through the actions of others. But now, as people around the world find more and more ways to connect to each other, those branches are starting to be formed through shared intent, and we've talked about the acceleration that is taking place because of that a number of times now.

Last time, we looked at The Fifth-Dimensional Camera Project, which was based upon my ideas of the fifth dimension as the explanation for quantum entanglement and Everett's Many Worlds, and which used a number of professors from Oxford University as consultants. Is the fifth dimension as our probability space finally gaining mainstream acceptance from the scientific community now? That's my fond desire.

Interestingly, the cover story of the issue of New Scientist magazine that arrived in my mail yesterday is a compendium of some of the most mind-boggling quantum effects that seem to be so unfathomable when we believe there is nothing beyond the fourth dimension: the article as published online is called Seven Wonders of the Quantum World. As the magazine cover pictured here says: "Quantum theory is stranger than you can ever imagine". To which, of course, I would add "unless you're willing to accept that quantum effects occur within the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fifth dimension".

Now let's quote a bit from that New Scientist article I mentioned previously, about "entanglement" in the brain:

Subatomic particles do it. Now the observation that groups of brain cells seem to have their own version of quantum entanglement, or "spooky action at a distance", could help explain how our minds combine experiences from many different senses into one memory.

Previous experiments have shown that the electrical activity of neurons in separate parts of the brain can oscillate simultaneously at the same frequency – a process known as phase locking. The frequency seems to be a signature that marks out neurons working on the same task, allowing them to identify each other.

The article then describes the neuronal activity patterns studied by Dietmar Plenz and Tara Thiagarajan at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. They found surprisingly complex coherence patterns being formed almost instantaneously between different parts of the brain: physically separate groups of neurons would display the same pattern within a few milliseconds, and each of these uniquely complex patterns appeared to be associated with different memories. Here's one more brief quote from the article, please do go to the New Scientist website to read the full piece:

"The precision with which these new sites pick up on the activity of the initiating group is quite astounding – they are perfect clones," says Plenz.

Memory and the Fifth Dimension
Like M.C. Escher's image of the ants on the mobius strip (or the flatlander we looked at in the original animation), we are twisting and turning within an additional dimension but feeling like we are traveling in a straight line.

If these ants were 2D flatlanders, they would travel in what feels like a straight line on the 2D surface of the mobius strip, unaware that they are really rotating through the third dimension. In our reality, we feel ourselves to be riding the arrow of time, moving in a straight line forward in the fourth dimension: but actually we are each navigating through a fifth dimensional probability space. If we are forming memories only at branches in our spacetime tree, it doesn't seem so astonishing that neurons in the brain could be synced up so quickly during that activity - after all, the fifth dimension makes seemingly difficult-to-imagine functions like quantum entanglement easier to visualize, and these "entangled neurons" may be providing further evidence of our connection to the fifth dimension and the constructive interference that is happening there to create our observed reality.

Are the unique memories that each of us carry within us really nothing more than a map of the branches and cusps, the "splitting apart" moments where our journey through the fourth dimension took another branch in the spacetime tree of our fifth dimensional probability space? We'll talk more about that idea next time with Entangled Awareness and OBEs.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton