I continue my posts taken from Chapter Five in The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story, expanding on each where appropriate by including explanations based on more current neuroscientific investigations. My two earlier blogs entitled “Waves in Our Brains,” Parts One and Two, include more current neuroscientific findings that relate quantum mechanics and wave functions to synaptic transmission. These are complex processes, and in subsequent blogs I will introduce even more recent interpretations of these processes of dualist interactionism.
What explains the triggering mechanism that induces molecular conformational movements within synaptic vesicles, their vesicular pores that open into synaptic clefts and within ionic channels so that the release of synaptic transmitters, the process of exocytosis, is stimulated? Each of these structures consists of molecular configurations of proteins and lipids. Eccles developed the concept that operations of the synaptic microsites involve probabilistic displacements of particles so small that they were in the range of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The vesicle was identified as the key structure on which quantum tunneling caused the release of neural transmitters across synaptic clefts. Eccles and his associate, Friedrich Beck, presented evidence that exocytosis is governed by a trigger mechanism involving quantum level transitions between metastable molecular states. The mechanism involved the motion of a quasiparticle, an electron, possibly carried within a traversing quantum wave of nonmaterial energy at a specific frequency and amplitude. The process corresponds with electronic transitions, such as electron transfer or changes in molecular bonds. The electrochemical process would generate nerve impulses propagated across the synapses of neural networks in which voltage potential barriers are crossed by the quantum tunneling of waves and electrons. Impulses within the spike trains of action potentials are now believed to involve synchronization of propagated wave amplitudes and frequencies comprising neural codes. Part Two of “Wave in Our Brains” addresses this most complex process.