Quantum Mechanisms of Plant Irritability: The Bose–Penrose Hypothesis of Orch OR in Microtubules as a Universal Biological Substrate
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866901745315086336 |
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| author | Aleksandrov, Pavel |
| author_facet | Aleksandrov, Pavel |
| contents | <p></p> <p>Volatile anesthetics reversibly suppress plant irritability — action potentials, habituation, and stimulus summation — with the same dose-dependent profile as in animal nervous tissue. This observation, documented by Jagadish Chandra Bose (1913–1926) and independently confirmed in peer-reviewed journals [Yokawa et al., 2018], lacks a mechanistic explanation: plants possess neither neurons nor synapses, the classical targets of anesthetic action.</p> <p>We propose the <strong>Bose–Penrose hypothesis</strong>: volatile anesthetics suppress plant irritability through the same molecular mechanism as animal anesthesia — binding to hydrophobic pockets within tubulin, disrupting quantum superpositions of tubulin conformational states as proposed by Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR; Penrose & Hameroff, 1996). Three independent lines of evidence support this claim. First, plant tubulin shares ~75% sequence homology with animal tubulin, and hydrophobic pocket geometry is evolutionarily conserved, as demonstrated by identical efficacy of colchicine, taxol, and nocodazole across plant and animal microtubules [Morejohn, 1991]. Second, the molecular mechanism of anesthetic action is specific to protein hydrophobic pockets, not lipid membranes: non-immobilizer compounds with high lipophilicity lack anesthetic activity; stereoisomers differ in potency; purified luciferase is inhibited by volatile anesthetics in the complete absence of membranes [Franks & Lieb, 1982; 1994; Koblin et al., 1994]. Third, volatile anesthetics alter collective THz oscillations of tubulin proportionally to clinical potency [Craddock et al., 2017], and the microtubule stabilizer epothilone B delays anesthetic-induced unconsciousness in rats [Pal et al., 2024].</p> <p>Furthermore, Bose's five phenomena constitute a <strong>four-level memory hierarchy</strong> spanning milliseconds to weeks — temporal summation (ms), Venus flytrap two-touch rule (~30 s), fatigue (min–h), and habituation (28 days [Gagliano et al., 2014]) — implemented entirely without neurons. The Venus flytrap two-touch rule is analyzed as a distributed quorum-detection problem: spatial summation across physically separated trigger hairs without a central integrating node. These observations make plants a uniquely clean model for studying the physical substrate of biological memory, precisely because the absence of neurons eliminates competing mechanisms.</p> <p>Critically, plant cells offer a methodological advantage unavailable in neurons: they lack GABA-A receptors, NMDA receptors, opioid receptors, and other classical neuronal anesthetic targets. Tubulin is thus virtually the exclusive molecular candidate for anesthetic action in plant cells — making plants a <em>cleaner</em> model system for testing the tubulin mechanism than neurons themselves.</p> <p>The hypothesis implies that neurons are not the unique substrate of quantum computation, but an evolutionary specialization of a mechanism universal to all eukaryotes. We formulate six testable predictions spanning molecular, biophysical, behavioral, and optical levels of analysis: (1) affinity of volatile anesthetics for plant tubulin predicts potency of irritability suppression; (2) <em>Arabidopsis thaliana</em> CRISPR mutants with modified hydrophobic pockets show altered anesthetic sensitivity; (3) plant microtubules exhibit a scale-invariant resonance hierarchy analogous to that described for neural microtubules; (4) microtubule-disrupting agents impair habituation in <em>Mimosa pudica</em>; (5) terpenoid microtubule stabilizers enhance, rather than suppress, plant irritability; (6) volatile anesthetics alter birefringence of microtubule networks in living plant cells, detectable by polarization microscopy without fluorescent labeling. None of these experiments have been performed. Their results — in either direction — will advance understanding of the molecular basis of eukaryotic irritability and may reframe the question of where, in the continuous spectrum of living matter, quantum computation begins.</p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_19153800 |
| institution | Zenodo |
| language | rus |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
| record_format | zenodo |
| spellingShingle | Quantum Mechanisms of Plant Irritability: The Bose–Penrose Hypothesis of Orch OR in Microtubules as a Universal Biological Substrate Aleksandrov, Pavel Orch OR plant irritability microtubules volatile anesthetics tubulin quantum biology Jagadish Chandra Bose Hameroff Penrose proto-consciousness eukaryotic irritability quantum coherence plant anesthesia Meyer-Overton correlation <p></p> <p>Volatile anesthetics reversibly suppress plant irritability — action potentials, habituation, and stimulus summation — with the same dose-dependent profile as in animal nervous tissue. This observation, documented by Jagadish Chandra Bose (1913–1926) and independently confirmed in peer-reviewed journals [Yokawa et al., 2018], lacks a mechanistic explanation: plants possess neither neurons nor synapses, the classical targets of anesthetic action.</p> <p>We propose the <strong>Bose–Penrose hypothesis</strong>: volatile anesthetics suppress plant irritability through the same molecular mechanism as animal anesthesia — binding to hydrophobic pockets within tubulin, disrupting quantum superpositions of tubulin conformational states as proposed by Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR; Penrose & Hameroff, 1996). Three independent lines of evidence support this claim. First, plant tubulin shares ~75% sequence homology with animal tubulin, and hydrophobic pocket geometry is evolutionarily conserved, as demonstrated by identical efficacy of colchicine, taxol, and nocodazole across plant and animal microtubules [Morejohn, 1991]. Second, the molecular mechanism of anesthetic action is specific to protein hydrophobic pockets, not lipid membranes: non-immobilizer compounds with high lipophilicity lack anesthetic activity; stereoisomers differ in potency; purified luciferase is inhibited by volatile anesthetics in the complete absence of membranes [Franks & Lieb, 1982; 1994; Koblin et al., 1994]. Third, volatile anesthetics alter collective THz oscillations of tubulin proportionally to clinical potency [Craddock et al., 2017], and the microtubule stabilizer epothilone B delays anesthetic-induced unconsciousness in rats [Pal et al., 2024].</p> <p>Furthermore, Bose's five phenomena constitute a <strong>four-level memory hierarchy</strong> spanning milliseconds to weeks — temporal summation (ms), Venus flytrap two-touch rule (~30 s), fatigue (min–h), and habituation (28 days [Gagliano et al., 2014]) — implemented entirely without neurons. The Venus flytrap two-touch rule is analyzed as a distributed quorum-detection problem: spatial summation across physically separated trigger hairs without a central integrating node. These observations make plants a uniquely clean model for studying the physical substrate of biological memory, precisely because the absence of neurons eliminates competing mechanisms.</p> <p>Critically, plant cells offer a methodological advantage unavailable in neurons: they lack GABA-A receptors, NMDA receptors, opioid receptors, and other classical neuronal anesthetic targets. Tubulin is thus virtually the exclusive molecular candidate for anesthetic action in plant cells — making plants a <em>cleaner</em> model system for testing the tubulin mechanism than neurons themselves.</p> <p>The hypothesis implies that neurons are not the unique substrate of quantum computation, but an evolutionary specialization of a mechanism universal to all eukaryotes. We formulate six testable predictions spanning molecular, biophysical, behavioral, and optical levels of analysis: (1) affinity of volatile anesthetics for plant tubulin predicts potency of irritability suppression; (2) <em>Arabidopsis thaliana</em> CRISPR mutants with modified hydrophobic pockets show altered anesthetic sensitivity; (3) plant microtubules exhibit a scale-invariant resonance hierarchy analogous to that described for neural microtubules; (4) microtubule-disrupting agents impair habituation in <em>Mimosa pudica</em>; (5) terpenoid microtubule stabilizers enhance, rather than suppress, plant irritability; (6) volatile anesthetics alter birefringence of microtubule networks in living plant cells, detectable by polarization microscopy without fluorescent labeling. None of these experiments have been performed. Their results — in either direction — will advance understanding of the molecular basis of eukaryotic irritability and may reframe the question of where, in the continuous spectrum of living matter, quantum computation begins.</p> |
| title | Quantum Mechanisms of Plant Irritability: The Bose–Penrose Hypothesis of Orch OR in Microtubules as a Universal Biological Substrate |
| topic | Orch OR plant irritability microtubules volatile anesthetics tubulin quantum biology Jagadish Chandra Bose Hameroff Penrose proto-consciousness eukaryotic irritability quantum coherence plant anesthesia Meyer-Overton correlation |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19153800 |