Stuart Hameroff
Stuart Hameroff MD is an anesthesiologist, professor at the University of Arizona, and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies. He is the co-founder and organizer of the biennial “Toward a Science of Consciousness” (The Science of Consciousness) conference series.
Drawing from his expertise in general anesthetics and their selective disruption of conscious awareness, Hameroff hypothesized that consciousness is mediated by quantum optical and vibrational resonances within cytoskeletal microtubules inside neurons. In the 1990s, he collaborated with mathematical physicist Roger Penrose to formulate the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory, uniting quantum gravity with molecular neurobiology.
Hameroff’s work challenges the conventional synaptic doctrine of neuroscience, proposing that the fundamental unit of computation and conscious experience in the brain operates at the terahertz and gigahertz scale of cytoskeletal lattices, far below the speed of classical action potentials.
Known for. Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) with Roger Penrose, microtubule quantum resonance, anesthetic mechanisms of consciousness
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Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.