Biophoton Research

We will explore the astonishing discovery that the human brain produces light; biophotons, measurable and real, and that this light may be the physical substrate of conscious experience. The bridge between the photon in the physics laboratory and the light that every mystical tradition describes as the essence of awareness. Your brain glows, not metaphorically, not symbolically, physically. Your neurons emit photons, particles of light at a rate of roughly 1 to 100 photons per second per square cm of neural tissue. These photons are not visible to the naked eye. They are ultra weak, a billion times fainter than the light you can see. But they are real. They are measurable. They are produced by every neuron in your brain. And a growing body of research suggests that these photons called biophotons may be the physical basis of consciousness itself. If this is true, then the ancient claim that consciousness is light, a claim made by Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and mystics of every tradition for thousands of years, is not a metaphor. It is a literal description of the physics of awareness. The light of consciousness is actual light; photons. The same timeless, spaceless, eternal particles we have been exploring. The same particles that connect the past to the future that mediate every force between every atom that hold the material universe together. The light in the laboratory and the light in the monastery may be the same light.

In 2010, a team of researchers led by Masaki Kobayashi at the Tohoku Institute of Technology in Japan used ultra sensitive cameras, photo multiplier tubes, and cooled CCD cameras capable of detecting individual photons to image biophoton emissions from the human body. They found that the body emits light that follows a diel rhythm, brighter during the day, dimmer at night, mirroring the fluctuation of metabolic activity across the sleepwake cycle. They found that the face emits more biophotons than other parts of the body, particularly the area around the eyes, the forehead, and the mouth. And they found that the emissions correlated with metabolic activity. Areas of higher metabolic rate emitted more photons. The brain, which consumes 20% of the body's energy, despite comprising only 2% of its mass, is among the most metabolically active tissues in the body. If biophoton emission correlates with metabolic activity, the brain should be one of the brightest organs. And indeed research on animal brains has confirmed significant biophoton emission from neural tissue.

In 2014 a study by Tang and Dai demonstrated that rat brain slices produce biophotons that can be detected quantified and correlated with neural activity. The glutamate neurotransmitter system the most important excitatory system in the brain was shown to be directly involved in biophoton generation. When glutamate activity increased, biophoton emission increased. When it decreased, emission decreased. This is significant because glutamate is the neurotransmitter most associated with conscious processing. The neural correlates of consciousness, the brain activity patterns that track conscious experience are predominantly glutamatergic. The system most closely associated with consciousness is also the system most closely associated with biophoton production. 

The coincidence is difficult to ignore, but the most significant research on brain biophotons came from a 2011 paper by Majid Rahnama and colleagues who proposed that biophotons produced inside neurons could serve as a communication channel within the brain. Their argument, the conventional model of neural communication, electrical signals traveling along axons and chemical signals crossing synapses is too slow and too limited to account for the speed and complexity of conscious processing. A typical neural signal travels at 1 to 100 m/s. A photon travels at 300,000 km/s. If neurons can communicate using biophotons, if light can carry information through the neural tissue, then the brain has access to a communication channel that is millions of times faster than electrical signaling. Rahnama and colleagues proposed that the medium for this optical communication is the microtubule, the same structure that Penrose and Hameroff identified as the site of quantum consciousness in their (Orch OR) theory. Microtubules are hollow cylindrical proteins that form the structural skeleton of every cell. They are 25 nanometers in diameter, roughly the wavelength of a photon in the ultraviolet range. This means that microtubules could in principle act as wave guides for biophotons channeling light through the interior of neurons the way fiber optic cables channel light through telecommunications networks.

In 2017, a team led by Travis Craddock and Jack Tuszynski at the University of Alberta published a computational analysis showing that microtubules can indeed support the propagation of photons. Their simulations demonstrated that the geometric structure of the microtubule, its lattice of tubulant proteins, its hollow interior, its precise dimensions creates conditions suitable for channeling light in the ultraviolet and visible spectrum. The microtubule is not just a structural scaffold. It is an optical device, a biological fiber optic cable engineered by evolution or by something else to carry light through the interior of the cell. 

Anirban Bandyopadhyay, the physicist at the National Institute for Material Science in Japan, whose work on quantum resonance in microtubules we discussed in the consciousness series, has found evidence that microtubules can transmit electromagnetic signals across a range of frequencies, including those in the photonic range. His experiments suggest that microtubules form a network, a connected system of resonating structures within and between neurons that could support both quantum coherence and photon transmission simultaneously. The implication is staggering. Your brain may contain a fiber optic network, a network of light running through the microtubules inside every neuron carrying quantum coherent photons at the speed of light, connecting neurons in ways that the electrical model cannot explain. Consciousness, the hard problem, the mystery that has defeated every materialist explanation, may be a phenomenon of light, not electrical activity, not chemical signaling; light. Actual photons traveling through actual waveguides inside actual neurons producing the integrated unified instantaneous field of awareness that you are experiencing right now.

Modern neuroscience has confirmed that meditation produces measurable changes in brain function. Gamma wave activity, the fastest type of neural oscillation operating at 30 to 100 hertz and associated with higher cognitive functions, sensory binding and conscious awareness increases dramatically in experienced meditators. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin Madison measured gamma activity in Tibetan Buddhist monks with over 10,000 hours of meditation practice and found levels of gamma synchrony that were in Davidson's words off the charts the highest ever recorded in healthy human subjects. The monk's brains were oscillating in coherent gamma rhythms across vast neural networks, binding distant brain regions into a single synchronized unified pattern of activity and gamma oscillations have been associated with biophoton production in neural tissue. 

A 2010 study by Bókkon and colleagues proposed that biophotons produced during neural activity may be the physical carrier of conscious visual imagery. that when you imagine a scene, your visual cortex literally produces photons that represent the image. A 2016 study published in the journal Brain Research found a correlation between neural activity levels and biophoton emission in rat brains. Higher activity produced more photons. And a 2020 study by Zarkeshian and colleagues demonstrated that individual neurons can conduct photons along their axons, suggesting that biophotonic communication between neurons is not just theoretically possible but physically demonstrated. The connection is now more than suggestive. Deep meditation increases gamma activity. Gamma activity increases biophoton production and deep meditators consistently report experiencing light brilliant luminous overwhelming light that they describe as the most real thing they have ever perceived. 

The light of meditation may not be metaphorical. It may be the subjective experience of increased biophoton activity in the brain. The brain's own light perceived from the inside. You are not imagining the light. You are seeing it with the inner eye. The eye that is made of the same light it perceives.

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