Who is Dr. Stuart Hameroff?

Dr. Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist and a professor at the University of Arizona.

Early in his career, when Dr. Hameroff was doing some research on cancer, he became interested in the role that microtubules played in cell division. This led him to speculate that microtubules in brain cells may somehow account for self-consciousness in living organisms. He wrote about this in his book Ultimate Computing which he published in 1987.

Meanwhile, Sir Roger Penrose was also doing a lot of thinking about self-consciousness, and felt that it could never be achieved by a computer, such as a Turing Machine. He wrote about this in his book The Emperor’s New Mind which he published in 1989. (The Excel files that you can download from this website were built using the explanations in this book.) Penrose further speculated that any explanation of consciousness would have to somehow involve Quantum Physics.

In 1992, Hameroff met with Penrose and suggested that it might be worth considering what role Quantum Mechanics might play within the microtubules of brain cells. This led to a collaboration between Penrose and Hameroff resulting in a new theory called Orch OR. This new theory is explained in the book Shadows of the Mind that Penrose published in 1994, and which may be regarded as a sequel to his book The Emperor's New Mind.

There is a slide show from Daily Digest that suggests that Orch OR may lead to a scientific discovery of the immortal soul.

Dr. Hameroff appeared in the documentary film What tнē #$*! D̄ө ωΣ (k)πow!?

---

When you think about it, I guess it’s not surprising that an anesthesiologist, such as Dr. Hameroff, would be interested in finding out as much as possible about how the brain can make someone self-conscious. After all, it is the anesthesiologist who makes a person unconscious before a medical procedure such as surgery, and then makes that person conscious again after the procedure, and he does this as safely and as well as he possibly can.