Researchers find major clue to consciousness

i like conscious beings i even have a few conscious friends I believe but what is consciousness shouldn't we have a way to find out whether artificial intelligence becomes conscious today I want to talk about a group of researchers that looked at how humans can make decisions so quickly and now believe they've identified an essential ingredient to consciousness the human brain is both a wonder of nature and let's be honest somewhat of a letdown on the one hand we're capable of handling huge amounts of information making decisions in the blink of an eye and doing all

this powered by dark chocolate on the other hand we're pathetic with simple calculations like taking the square root of pi think about catching a ball mid-flight your brain figures out where the ball is going predicts where it'll land and tells your muscles to move all in a fraction of a second yet the neurons that power this process are super slow it takes 10 to 20 milliseconds for a signal to travel from one neuron to another today's computers for comparison perform hundreds of billions if not trillions of operations per second so how does the brain do

it the new study reveals that the brain's secret lies in its ability to teeter on the edge of chaos and not only this they say that the mathematics of quantum physics is a surprisingly good description for consciousness the edge of chaos is the range in which a system switches from orderly behavior to a chaotic one this transition regime is somewhat less poetically called the critical range and it's where interesting things happen the critical range is where emergent features develop and where complexity arises take immigration policies if immigration is generally forbidden we have perfect order but

a very rigid system with little complexity if everyone could immigrate wherever they wanted we'd have complete chaos but in between the two where some immigration is possible but not all we get cultural and educational relations we get complexity this is the world that we live in we seek a balance between order and chaos this is what criticality means and here is the important bit a critical system has long range correlations like those links between nations to be honest what I just said is pure conjecture we don't have the mathematics to describe how complexity actually arises

but this criticality is an idea borrowed from physics where we do have a rigorous definition for it one of the most amazing examples is a Bosey Einstein condensation in which the long range correlations create a quantum state for the entire condensate but we've also seen critical behavior for example in stock markets as they descend from an orderly to a chaotic regime to come back to the brain it's also a complex system so if the idea of the edge of chaos is correct then the human brain must also linger in the critical range between order and

chaos it can probably switch from the one to the other and use the long range correlations that come with the transition in the new paper now the authors say that this criticality is why the human brain can make surprisingly fast and accurate decisions even though the individual computational operations are so slow the long range connections of critical systems let different parts of the brain talk to each other it's not just fast but part of the reason why the human brain can function with so little power your average supercomput needs at least megawatt of power whereas

the human brain runs on typically 20 watts that's about what it takes to power a dim bulb wilder still they say they use the mathematics of quantum mechanics to develop a model for what's going on in the human brain and that allowed them to quantify how critical the state of a brain is they then used functional MRI brain scans from over 1,000 people and found that using this measure for criticality they could tell apart people who were awake from those who were sleeping it seems that criticality indeed tells us something about consciousness what does it

mean that they use the equations of quantum mechanics i don't know they use these equations because well they work they don't know why but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't mean that the human brain is a quantum computer i think that AI researchers haven't fully appreciated the relevance of criticality for the emergence of complexity because of that's right it means that to get to consciousness you need a system that can descend into chaos or as Frier put it you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star to me science is more

than a profession it's a way to understand the world and how to solve problems this is why I'm happy to work together with Brilliant whose mission is to help you learn science in the easiest and most engaging way possible all courses on Brilliant have interactive visualizations and come with follow-up questions what you see here is from their data science courses which they just released they all use realworld examples like what it means to go viral on X brilliant covers a large variety of topics in science computer science and maths from general scientific thinking to dedicated

courses on algebra or large language models just what I'm interested in and they're adding new courses each month i even have my own course on Brilliant that's an introduction to quantum mechanics it'll help you understand what a wave function is and what the difference is between superpositions and entanglement it also covers interference the uncertainty principle and Bell's theorem and after that you can continue maybe with a course on quantum computing or differential equations sounds good i hope it does you can try Brilliant yourself for free if you use my link brilliant.org/sabina or scan the QR

code that way you'll get to try out everything Brilliant has to offer for a full 30 days and you'll get 20% off the annual premium subscription so go and give it a try i'm sure you won't regret it thanks for watching see you tomorrow