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.

We recall that Eccles called the neural synapse a “frontier” across which interaction flows in both directions, and that the flow is comprised of information, not of classical electrochemical energy. The discussions in blogs to follow can lead one to consider how the form of energy relates to the power of the Holy Spirit. In 1 Corinthians 2:4 the Apostle Paul declared, “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power.” The energy discussions that follow offer support for communion between the Holy Spirit and the mind of Man through the human spirit via the synaptic networks of the brain.

Quantum tunneling has been identified as a “trigger” for directed synaptic transmission when the immaterial mind activates selected encoded programs in the SMA’s (also pre-SMA’s according to more recent studies). Hiley and Pylkkanen have proposed a relationship between wave functions and quantum tunneling that will be discussed in blogs to come. Based on their proposal it can be asked if the immaterial mind activates the “trigger” by generating quantum wave functions that transmit quasiparticles, including electrons, by tunneling through the voltage potential barriers of synaptic networks in the cerebral cortex and associated regions of the brain. We are seeing that mind and matter interact and are coming closer to understanding the process.

I am including a detailed discussion of the supplementary motor area (SMA), a bilateral region of the cerebral cortex that functionally includes what Eccles termed the liaison brain. It is now well known that the mental act of intention acts on the SMA’s where there is an inventory of a vast number of the stored, encoded subroutines of all learned motor programs, including those for speech. It provides an entre into specific motor activities that implement particular intentions. More specifically, a mental intention stimulates appropriate modular programs so that nerve impulses are activated from the library, or archive, of encoded programs, the liaison brain of Eccles. The mere thought of a motor action in the absence of a deliberate motor response, such as moving a finger or limb, bilaterally stimulates the SMA’s. This relationship has been confirmed by transcranial magnetic stimulation during PET imaging. It is a prime example of interaction between the immaterial mind and the neuron based codes of the physical brain.

In both of my books I cite John C. Eccles’ use of the term “liaison brain.” At the time of his writing and research on mind-brain interaction the precise explanation of what the liaison brain is was not known. I offer in my writing based on further research in neuroscience that it most likely corresponds with the ensemble of linguistic neural codes, the immense diversity of patterned, or structured, neural impulse activities with semantics, or meaning, and purpose.

The neural synaptic process gives a central role to the experienced unity of the Self and the interpretive function of the immaterial mind. The self-conscious mind integrates what it reads out perceptually from an immense diversity of encoded neural activities transmitted through what Eccles called the liaison brain There is displayed before the mind from instant to instant the entirety of the complex neural transmissions. Through directed attention, intention or will it selects from this vast ensemble of encoded, synchronous neural impulses within the liaison brain. It coordinates and interprets in coherent fashion the meaning of linguistic codified readouts from many different areas of the cerebral cortex and other functionally associated regions of the brain. in this way the self-conscious mind achieves a unity of experience.

Sir Eccles defined the Self as an experienced unity linked by the memory of conscious states experienced over an entire lifetime. For the Self to exist there must be some continuity of mental experiences that bridges the gap of unconsciousness. Self-consciousness achieves public status by symbolic communication through language between individuals.

Specified information that is encoded within the transmitted spike trains of action potentials emanates from the cognitive mind of a human or the Mind of God. Since humans were created with the unique capacity for advanced language the codes transmit linguistic information in multiple manifestations. These include concepts, intuition, dreams, visions, discernment, verbal communications and intentions. All are linked with cognitive or physical action. As with the Morse code, the codes must be learned over a lifetime and remembered, being archived in memory.

Eccles hypothesized that the brain’s neuronal network structure enters into a liaison with the immaterial mind and serves the function of a “detector.” Active pyramidal neurons of cerebral cortical modules of the neuronal network interact with the unique function of human cognition. The modules act as “detectors” selectively scanning for consciously willed influences with which they are in synchrony in terms of wave frequency, amplitude and shape. An intention expresses itself through the generation of a pattern of encoded neuronal impulses initiated within pyramidal modules with meaning and with which the mind is in liaison. The pattern generated is as a neural code that provides for operative effectiveness by its transmission through semantically integrated, coherent synaptic networks of the brain. (See Part Two of the blog “Waves in Our Brains” above for further explanation.)

Eccles hypothesized that the immaterial Self can effectively control the brain through intentions and attentions. Neural responses are induced by mental action by increasing the quantum probability of exocytosis, or the release, of the contents of synaptic vesicles from presynaptic vesicular grids (PVG). The vesicular contents are neurotransmitters that are released into and across very narrow synaptic clefts, a process that has been observed by electron microscopy. Their release is from the opened pores of vesicles that are docked on the PVG and occurs in a semantically integrated fashion within neural networks associated with specified intentional thoughts and actions. Their release stimulates adjacent postsynaptic densities of neurons to induce action potentials that are transmitted as encoded spike trains that the immaterial mind interprets through a process of lifelong learning archived in memory. These induced spike train impulses are transmitted downstream along the axonal efferent pathways of synaptic networks in coherent, synchronized fashion in terms of wave frequencies, amplitudes and shapes. In Part Two of my blog entitled “Waves in Our Brains” this activity is discussed in detail. It is a complex process, but neuroscientists are gaining increasing understanding of it.