By Ahmed Farag Ali, Nader Inan, Ruben Laukkonen and Pavlo Mikheenko
Edited by Lisa Lock, reviewed by Robert Egan
Conceptual illustration linking SU(3)-inspired vacuum geometry with coherent and dissipative brain activity.
Credit: Ahmed Farag Ali, Nader Inan, Ruben Laukkonen and Pavlo Mikheenko.
AI-generated illustration created with OpenAI's ChatGPT.
You sit down to meditate. A conversation returns, then thoughts. You bring your attention back to the breath. Sometimes, after many such returns, the effort eases. Thoughts lose their urgency, while awareness remains clear. Less occupies the mind, yet the moment still feels whole.
We are interested in what makes that wholeness possible. Even an ordinary moment brings together vision, memory, bodily sensation and attention. Their contents change constantly, but they belong to one experience. What physical organization allows the brain to hold them together, and what happens to that organization when experience itself appears to stop?
In our paper, "A Coherence–Dissipation Framework for Brain Dynamics and Consciousness," published in the journal Entropy, we approach these questions through the quantum phenomenon of superconductivity, symmetry, and the balance between coherence and dissipation. We propose a mathematical structure that could be sought in neural recordings, with meditation offering a setting in which to study how the relationship between activity and experience changes.
The brain continually spends energy to sense, respond and learn. That expenditure is part of being alive. At the same time, it must preserve enough coordination for changing signals to form a usable whole. Our model asks how these demands fit together: how the brain maintains integration while allowing experience to change.
Superconductivity offers a useful physical example. In a superconductor, electrons form pairs that participate in a collective quantum state, supporting electrical current without resistance. A material can contain both normal and superconducting contributions. We borrow this two-fluid picture to model ordinary dissipative neural processing alongside a proposed contribution that supports coherent integration.
Their relative influence could change with the brain's state. As attention settles into the present, some of the activity devoted to revisiting the past and anticipating the future may ease. We ask whether integration could then be sustained with less electromagnetic energy dissipated as heat. This gives the felt effortlessness of meditation a possible physical counterpart, one that requires measurements of both neural organization and energy use.
Our collaboration approaches that possibility from two sides. Work by Pavlo Mikheenko (co-author) reports superconductivity-like electrical and magnetic signatures in brain tissue and self-assembled microtubules, the protein structures inside cells (Mikheenko, 2019; Mikheenko, 2024); research by Ruben Laukkonen (co-author) on advanced meditation examines states in which ordinary mental content fades or experience appears to cease (Laukkonen et al., 2023; Chowdhury et al., 2023). Together, these lines of work invite us to investigate how physical organization might accompany profound changes in experience.
The same interest in collective order takes us to the quantum vacuum. In a 2024 Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics paper, Nader Inan (co-author) and Ahmed Farag Ali (co-author), with Kimet Jusufi and Abdelrahman Yasser, modeled dark energy as a superconducting medium for gravitational waves. Cosmic expansion was interpreted through an analogy with the expulsion of magnetic fields from a superconductor.
This leads to the cosmological constant problem: the enormous gap between some theoretical estimates of vacuum energy density and the small density inferred from cosmic expansion. In the superconductivity-inspired vacuum model motivating our proposal, the electromagnetic U(1) sector undergoes symmetry breaking while SU(3) remains intact (Ali, 2025). Ali (co-author) proposed a holographic resolution in which the cosmological horizon volume divided by an SU(3) confinement volume gives approximately 10¹²³, a factor the model uses to dilute the theoretical vacuum-energy density to the observed scale (Ali, 2025; Ali and Ali, 2025).
The connection we bring back to neuroscience concerns what survives a transition. In the vacuum proposal, a change in one sector leaves another structure intact. Could some neural organization likewise survive an interruption of experience, even as the coordination supporting awareness changes?
Quiet awareness and cessation offer two contrasting moments in this inquiry. Our framework associates conscious experience with a particular form of coherent neural coordination. As mental content fades, that coordination may sustain clear awareness; at reported cessation, experience appears to break, a transition recognized upon returning (Laukkonen et al., 2023; Chowdhury et al., 2023). What happens to the coordination during that interval becomes an especially revealing question.
Cessation brings us to a subtle question: does the interruption of experience also interrupt the continuity underlying it? The vacuum analogy, where a transition in the U(1) sector leaves SU(3) intact, invites us to consider what might persist. A remnant neural SU(3) structure could suggest an organization from which conscious experience emerges and into which it quiets. Philosophically, this opens a question about a deeper continuity of being as the familiar sense of being an observer falls silent. Physically, it directs us toward neural recordings that could distinguish the coordination associated with awareness from any structure surviving its interruption.
SU(3) gives this idea a precise target. Its eight generators divide into two commuting directions and six transition directions. We propose interpreting these as coherence-preserving balance and changes in the collective neural state. Researchers could reconstruct brain-state trajectories from EEG or MEG recordings and infer the operations governing their evolution. Their algebraic relationships and their connection to experience would provide the decisive tests (Ali et al., 2026).
The next step is to seek those relationships across datasets and compare their predictions with alternative models. Alongside this, electrical, magnetic and thermodynamic measurements could clarify the origin of the reported microtubule signals. These complementary investigations would examine both the proposed neural organization and its possible physical basis.
Behind these specific tests lies a larger possibility: Matter, the vacuum and conscious experience may be different manifestations of one underlying physical order. Shared mathematics gives that possibility a direction; measurements could reveal how far the connection reaches. Comparing quiet awareness with cessation could reveal what changes with experience and what carries through its interruption. Perhaps the deeper question of being begins here: how does an enduring physical organization give rise to the intimate presence of a moment?
No comments:
Post a Comment