TOWARD A SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS 2011  - STOCKHOLM

MAY 1-8, 2011

WORKSHOP - QUANTUM BIOLOGY

Sunday, MAY 7, 2011  (Afternoon) 2-6p

Time and Location: TBA

Quantum and classical ion motion in the channel proteins

Gustav Bernroider,  Johann Summhammer, Giuseppe Vitiello, Harmut  Neven

       Gustav Bernroider                       Johann Summhammer               Giuseppe Vitiello                         Hartmut  Neven

       University of Salzburg                   University of Vienna                      University of Salerno                   Google
       Dept. Organismic Biology            Atom Institut                                   Theoretical Physics                     Dir., Engineering, Visual Search
       Neurosignaling Unit                                   

With the progress made in nano-scaled biological chemistry during the last decade, it has now become increasingly established and accepted that quantum physical properties can play a decisive role in the study of a variety of important biological processes. In particular, the new findings show that highly correlated protein environments can maintain electronic coherences at warm temperatures that are essential for diverse biological processes, ranging from energy harvesting and trapping in photosynthesis to sensory signal detection in receptor and nerve cells. These findings have become highly supportive for the previously proposed ideas about a possible role of quantum coherences in higher level brain phenomena including conscious perceptions.

The unique quantum and non-classical attribute that is at the center of interest is the phase-relationship (‘coherence’) between the states of single or multiple systems (entanglement) which allows for interference between the constituent parts of these systems. In this workshop we will show a novel method to analyse, simulate and visualize these phase relations and quantum interferences by a computer based demonstration. We will set out with a demonstration of the critical signatures that usually characterize biological quantum systems, i.e. system-environment partitions provided by single quantum systems interacting with confining potentials in proteins. We then apply these concepts to the study of proteins that control the exchange of ions across cell membranes. We focus our demonstration on the conduction and hosting of single ions in the filter-region of channel proteins. We demonstrate solutions of the Schrödinger equation that represents the interaction of a single potassium ion with the surrounding carbonyl dipoles in the Berneche-Roux model of the KcsA model channel. All demonstrations will be set to a frame that is also accessible to non-specialists in quantum physics.

The present analysis goes beyond traditional functional density and ab initio molecular dynamic studies. By comparing classical models with our quantum model we can show that, depending on the surrounding carbonyl derived potentials, alkali ions can become highly delocalized in the filter region of proteins. The ions wave function can extend over essential parts of the protein and becomes locally ‘cooled’ by giving off its energy to the surrounding environment or by electro-magnetic radiation (‘photons’). These effects can be expected to be important for the functional state of the entire protein (the gating kinetics and ion selectivity of the channel protein), thus influencing and shaping classical conductances in electrically excitable membranes.

Together with the other parts of the workshop we finally discuss the key question of quantum properties in neuroscience: as coupling to the environment usually destroys the phase relations between the states of the system, what are the possibilities that  unique quantum correlations can survive and evolve into coherent large-scaled modes that characterize a perceptive state? To provide possible answers we will demonstrate recent advances in the study of environment-induced dynamics of entangled states, such as dynamic- oscillatory entanglement, system interactions with mutually dependent and independent environments and the application of entanglement measures and macroscopic entanglement witness states in brain signaling studies.

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Gustav Bernroider  is Associate Professor for Neurobiology, University of Salzburg, Austria.  He is leading a research unit for Neurosignaling and Neurodynamics studies that focuses on neural correlates of higher level brain functions. Bernroider considers the phenomenon of consciousness as a perceptive property. He argues that the physical relation to the phenomenon is basically provided by the transition dynamics from quantum to classical properties of various cellular components in the brain.  In particular this involves ion conduction and ion hosting in membrane channel proteins. He has published his concepts in a series of papers since the mid 90s.

Johann Summhammer is Associate Professor for Experimental Physics at the Atom Institute of the Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria. He has carried out numerous experiments and theoretical studies on quantum mechanical phenomena  employing beams of neutrons, electrons and ions. He also applied his quantum physical concepts in diverse experimental fields including research on solar cells. More recently he has developed a focus on quantum effects in biological systems, in particular in fields where these effects can provide explanations to processes building on Darwinian advantage.

Giuseppe Vitiello is Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Salerno, Italy. His research is focused on spontaneous breakdown of symmetry in elementary particle physics, in condensed matter and in brain modelling. He studies the quantum field dynamics underlying the living matter phenomenology since the early 80s. In a series of papers and in the book “My Double unveiled” he has formulated the dissipative many-body model of brain where coherence and dissipation play a central role. In its continuous interaction with the environment the brain constructs its own image of the external world as its “Double”. Consciousness arises as the permanent dialog with the Double.

Harmut Neven, Google, Director of Engineering,Visual Search - Harmut Neven studied Physics and Economics in Köln, Paris, Tübingen, Aachen, Jerusalem and Brazil. He wrote his Master thesis on a neuronal model of object recognition at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics under Valentino Braitenberg. In 1996 he received his Ph.D. from the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, for a thesis on "Dynamics for vision-guided autonomous mobile robots" written under the tutelage of Christoph von der Malsburg. Dr. Neven was assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California at the Laboratory for Biological and Computational Vision. Later he returned as the head of the Laboratory for Human-Machine Interfaces at USC’s Information Sciences Institute. Neven co-founded two companies, Eyematic for which he served as CTO and Neven Vision which he initially led as CEO. At Eyematic he developed real-time facial feature analysis for avatar animation. Neven Vision pioneered mobile visual search for camera phones and was acquired by Google in 2006. Today he manages a team responsible for advancing Google’s visual search technologies and is the engineering manager for Google Goggles. Teams led by Neven have repeatedly won top scores in government sponsored tests designed to determine the most accurate face recognition software. In 2006 Neven started to explore the application of quantum computing to hard combinatorial problems arising in machine learning. In collaboration with D-Wave he developed the first image recognition system based on quantum algorithms which was demonstrated at SuperComputing07. At NIPS 2009 his team demonstrated the first binary classifier trained on a quantum processor.

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