信不信這是科學？——物理學家談人腦的量子奧秘

知識 10-09

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學術報告

題目： Quantum Cognition: Neural processing with nuclear spins

報告人：Matthew Fisher

Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Member of the US National Academy of Sciences

Professor, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, UC Santa Barbara

時間：2016年10月17日13:00-14:30

地點：北京大學生命科學學院鄧祐才報告廳

主持人：湯超教授

摘要

Putative quantum processing with nuclear spins in the wet environment of the brain would seemingly require fulfillment of many unrealizable conditions: for example, a common biological element with a long nuclear-spin coherence time to serve as a qubit, a mechanism for transporting this qubit throughout the brain, a molecular scale quantum memory for storing the qubits, a mechanism for quantum entangling multiple qubits, a chemical reaction that induces quantum measurements on the qubits which dictates subsequent neuron firing rates, among others. My strategy, guided by these requirements, is one of reverse engineering seeking to identify the bio-chemical substrate and mechanisms hosting such putative quantum processing. Remarkably, a specific neural qubit and a unique collection of ions, molecules, enzymes and neurotransmitters is identified, illuminating an apparently single path towards nuclear spin quantum processing in the brain.

報告人簡介

Matthew Fisher received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986, and went on to become a Visiting Scientist and then a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (1986-1993). Dr. Fisher joined the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Physics Department of the University of California in 1993. In 2007, he was on leave from the UCSB physics department, and joined Microsoft"s Station Q as a research physicist. During the academic year 2009-2010, Dr. Fisher was on the faculty at Caltech, returning to the physics department at UCSB in summer 2010. In 1995, Dr. Fisher received the Alan T. Waterman Award bestowed by the National Science Foundation, and has also been the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research (1997). He was elected as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.