File:A NMR quantum correlation protocol signals' changes during falling asleep possibly related to consciousness.jpg

English: "Pattern observed in participant who had reported falling asleep. (A) Wake period. (B) Asleep, ZQC burst signals declined coincident with an increase of the S/N level. At 34 s, the peak resulted from short head movement."

"In seven participants, from whom two had reported to have fallen asleep, we found that the signal pattern declined as shown in figure 5. For the final data acquisition, all participants had been asked to stay awake during the imaging protocol. At this point, we no longer detected a sleep pattern. In a case study, we observed the pattern change over a period of 20 minutes which showed a gradual transition from awake to asleep as shown in the appendix at figure A4."

"Proton spins of bulk water, which most likely interfere with any brain function, can act as the known quantum systems. If an unknown mediator exists, then NMR methods based on multiple quantum coherence (MQC) can act as an entanglement witness. However, there are doubts that today's NMR signals can contain quantum correlations in general, and specifically in the brain environment. Here, we used a witness protocol based on zero quantum coherence (ZQC) where we minimized the classical signals to circumvent the NMR detection limits for quantum correlation. For short repetitive periods, we found evoked signals in most parts of the brain, whereby the temporal appearance resembled heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs). We found that those signals had no correlates with any classical NMR contrast. Similar to HEPs, the evoked signal depended on conscious awareness. [...] Now, we are in the position to address the question whether the brain can mediate entanglement, experimentally. Based on the above considerations, we explored if the conscious-aware brain may use entanglement during computing. As indicators of brain computation, we focussed on electrophysiological brain waves, which can be observed in the conscious-aware brain at rest. We acquired MRI time series which were highly saturated and which were able to detect zero quantum coherence (ZQC ). Based on the maximal temporal resolution of our method (< 5 Hz), we focussed on Heartbeat Evoked Potentials (HEPs) [27], which like other electrophysiological signals are far below the detection threshold of conventional MRI sequences [20, 21]."

The other images from the study are also CC BY; Figure A4 is recommended/similar to this one.

Note that this is just a hypothesis and early experimentation which can turn out to be false or faulty.