The Explosion of Consciousness: TSC Conference Tucson Arizona 2012 (by John K. Grandy): It may be said that TSC conference 2012 was an explosion of consciousness with a wide variety of presentations related to consciousness. The war of the worldviews was an interesting introduction to the conflict between the spiritual and material accounts of consciousness, but in the end there was a sense that more effort should be placed on establishing some common ground. There was a great deal of focus on neurology and NCC. This is likely due to the advances in the field of neuroimaging that allow the localization of brain function and the effects of connectivity. This conference also featured a new marriage between consciousness and fractals. New modalities of consciousness were also seen. There was also interesting research on precognition. In addition, there were many new and exciting topics in the poster presentations which ranged from quantum physics to plant sensitivity to human emotion. So overall, this was a well organized conference with many excellent presentations from many different areas that are moving toward a science of consciousness. Click Here.
A Proposal for Memory Code (by Matti Pitkanen): In an article in the March 8 issue of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, physicists Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski of the University of Alberta, and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona propose a mechanism for encoding synaptic memory in microtubules, major components of the structural cytoskeleton within neurons. The self-explanatory title of the article is "Cytoskeletal Signaling: Is Memory Encoded in Microtubule Lattices by CaMKII Phosphorylation?" Authors propose a memory code based on the representation of bit as the presence or absence of phosphorylation and represent empirical evidence consistent with 6-bit code analogous to genetic code. In this article a different interpretation of findings is proposed. The presence of phosphate is seen as an evidence for negentropic entanglement accompanied by ATP molecule making possible memory recall by sending negative energy signal to geometric past transforming ATP to ADP and thus using single metabolic quantum. Click Here.
