|
Coherent Energy, Liquid Crystallinity and Acupuncture
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
Talk presented to British Acupuncture Society, 2
October, 1999
A medical physicist in the United States, Cho Zang-Hee, who pioneered
the proton emission tomography (pet) scanner, had his curiosity aroused 6
years ago, when he injured his back and found almost instant relief with
acupuncture treatment. So he started carrying out experiments with
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) on the usual human
guinea-pigs - volunteer medical students. He flashed a light in front of
them and, as expected, the visual cortex of the brain lit up on the fmri.
Then, Cho had an acupuncturist stick a needle into one of the acupoints at
the side of the little toe, which are supposed to be connected with the
eye. In one person after another, the visual cortex lit up, just as if
they had been stimulated with a flash of light. Inserting the needle into
a non-acupoint in the big toe had no effect (see Dold, 1998).
Cho also found that on repeated stimulation of the same acupoints, some
subjects gave increasing response in the visual cortex, while others gave
decreasing response. One of the acupuncturist said it was due to yin and
yang, and without seeing the data, correctly identified which subjects had
an increase (yang) and which had a decrease (yin) in 11 out of 12 cases.
The only explanation for acupuncture in the west is that the nerves
underlying the muscles are stimulated by the needle, which then sends
impulses to the limbic system of the brain, the mid-brain and the
pituitary, leading to the release of endorphins and monamines, chemicals
which block pain perception. This is the accepted basis for anaethesia
induced by acupuncture. But it does not explain other effects. It
certainly does not explain what connects the acupoints in the foot
directly to the visual cortex of the brain.
The meridian theory of traditional Chinese medicine recognizes a vital
energy, qi, circulating in nature and in our body. Within the body, qi is
said to circulate through channels known as meridians. The meridians
interconnecting the viscera and limbs, the deeper and superficial layer of
the body in a branching network of increasingly fine mesh. The meridians
and their acupoints have no known relationship with anatomical systems in
western medicine, despite many attempts to search for correlations (see Ho
and Knight, 1998).
Until quite recently, I have thought little about acupuncture. Instead,
I have been involved, since 1985, in trying to understand living
organisation from the perspective of contemporary physics, especially of
non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum theory. At the same time, I was
developing and using new experimental approaches to investigate organisms
non-destructively, as they are living and developing. As a result, I have
now come to an understanding of the organism that is beginning to connect
with the meridian theory, and, I hope, in due course, with holistic health
systems of all other cultures. I have outlined a tentative theory of the
organism in the second edition of my book, The Rainbow and The Worm,
The Physics of Organisms (Ho, 1998). Let me briefly describe it and
then show how it may link up with the meridian theory.
Many physicists have puzzled over how organisms seem able to resist the
second law of thermodynamics which says all systems tend to evolve towards
thermodynamic equilibrium - a state of maximum disorder in which all
useful energy has degraded into a random, useless form referred to as
entropy. Instead, organisms can summon energy at will in a perfectly
coordinated way, and to maintain and reproduce its exquisite organisation.
Everyone knows that because the organism is an open system, it does not
actually violate the second law, because the environment provides
raw materials and useful energy and becomes more disordered as
organisation is built up and maintained in the system, and entropy
exported out of it. But how does the organism actually do it?
It turns out that the key to living organisation is not so much energy
flow as energy storage under energy flow. Furthermore, the organism has
somehow managed to close the loop of energy storage to become a
self-maintaining, self-reproducing life-cycle (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
The organism is thus a system in which energy is stored in a
coherent form, the energy remaining coherent as it is mobilized
throughout the system. Notice that I have substituted ‘coherent
energy’ for the usual concept of ‘free energy’. Coherent
energy, as I shall explain presently, is stored in a range of space-times
in which it remains coherent, and is tied to the characteristic
space-times of natural processes. I say ‘characteristic space-time’
instead of the usual ‘characteristic time’ because in the new
physics since Einstein's relativity theory, space and time are no longer
separable. (Indeed, organic space-time is very different from the linear,
homogeneous, space and time of Newtonian physics (see Ho, 1998).) ‘Free
energy’, on the other hand, has no relationship to space or time, and
is a notoriously vague concept.
Coherent energy is energy that comes and goes together so it can do
work, as opposed to incoherent energy which cancels itself out. Anyone
ever hit by a wave on the seashore will know what coherent energy is as
opposed to the random motion of say, molecules of air in this room.
Coherent energy is mobilised within the organism with minimum dissipation,
which means it generates minimum entropy. This depends on a symmetrical
coupling of energy yielding and energy requiring processes within the
living system. Symmetrical coupling involves a complete reciprocity, so
that the effects of one process on the other are the same, and
furthermore, they can reverse roles so the giver of energy becomes the
receiver and vice versa. How is that achieved?
Practically all living processes are organised in cycles. The organism
is thick with biological rhythms ranging from periods of split seconds for
electrical activities of brain cells to seconds such as the heart-beat and
respiration, to periods which are circadian and circannual. But no one has
ever been able to explain why that should be. The answer is provided by
thermodynamics. It turns out that symmetrically coupled cycles are the key
to both the conservation of coherent energy and compensation (or
cancelling out) of entropy within the system so that living organisation
is maintained. I have represented a miniscule fraction of all the coupled
cycles in the living system intuitively in Figure 2, the sum total of
which make up the life-cycle. The way to think about it is that as one
cycle of activity is running down, it is charging up a second cycle, so
that the role can be reversed later. Similarly, as disorder is created in
some part of the system, a kind of superorder appears in elsewhere, which
can restore order to the first part.
Figure 2
Each cycle of activity has a characteristic space-time and together,
they span all space-times from the very fast to the very slow, the global
to the local. Each cycle is hence a domain in which coherent energy is
stored, as said earlier. Of course, neither the conservation of coherent
energy nor the compensation of entropy is perfect, otherwise, no one would
ever need to eat, nor would ever age. But such a dynamic structure of the
system is the key to maximising the storage of coherent energy and the
speed and efficiency with which coherent energy can be mobilised (see Ho,
1995). Thermodynamically, then, the organism is a dynamically closed
system of minimally dissipative coupled cycles feeding off the one-way
energy flow, so that the unavoidable dissipation is exported to the
environment (Figure 3).
Figure 3
The special energy relationship in the organism, therefore, is what
enables it to mobilize energy at will, whenever and wherever required and
in a perfectly coordinated way. In the ideal, the organism can be
conceived as a quantum superposition of coherent activities, with
instantaneous (nonlocal) noiseless intercommunication throughout the
system. The flow of qi in meridian theory corresponds rather well to the
mobilisation of coherent energy. Coherent energy is vital energy, and it
is arises because the organism is especially good at capturing energy,
storing and mobilising it in a coherent form.
Let us look more closely at the mobilisation of coherent energy.
Coherent energy is stored everywhere within the system over the entire
range of space-times. Consequently any subtle influence arising anywhere
within the system will propagate over the entire system and get amplified
to global effects. In other words, the system, by virtue of being full of
coherent energy everywhere, will be ultrasensitive to very weak signals.
This may be the basis of all forms of subtle energy medicine.
Quantum coherence in living organisms was still firmly rejected by
mainstream biologists when I proposed it in 1993 (Ho, 1993). I was in turn
inspired by the idea that organisms may store energy as 'coherent
excitations', which originated with solid-state physicist Herbert Fröhlich
in the 1960s (see Frohlich, 1980). Later on, quantum physicist turned
biophysicist, Fritz Popp, suggested that organisms are quantum coherent
photon fields (see Popp et al, 1970; 1992). Today, mainstream
scientists including physicist Roger Penrose (1995) have begun to invoke
quantum coherence to account for the macroscopic, phase-correlated
electrical activities observed by neurophysiologists in widely separated
parts of the brain (see Freeman, 1995; Ho, 1997).
I must emphasise that the theory of the organism just presented is
firmly based on empirical experimental findings from our own laboratory as
well as from established laboratories around the world. Many of the
findings are published in scientific journals, but there is little or no
satisfactory explanation for them within conventional mainstream biology.
I won't have time to describe all the experimental results which have
built up a picture of coherence in the organism (see Ho, 1998). Perhaps
the most suggestive evidence is our discovery in 1992 that all organisms
are liquid crystalline.
What we actually discovered was a novel noninvasive optical imaging
technique based on the polarised light microscopy (Ho and Lawrence, 1993;
Newton et al, 1995; Ross et al, 1997). It is a technique
that earth scientists and other have used for studying mineral crystals,
and more recently liquid crystals; in other words, any material with
molecular order. But crystals have static order, so how can living, mobile
organisms be crystals? Indeed, the imaging technique demonstrates that
organisms are so dynamically coherent at the molecular level that they
appear to be crystalline (Ho and Saunders, 1994; Ho et al,
1996). That is because light vibrates at 1014Hz,
much faster than the molecules can move coherently together, which is at
most 1010 Hz. So long as the
motions among the molecules in the cells and tissues are sufficiently
coherent, they will appear to be statically ordered, or crystalline, to
the light passing through. This is analogous to the ability of a very fast
film to capture the image of a moving object as a sharply focussed ‘still’
picture. This imaging technique is telling us that the living organism is
coherent beyond our wildest dreams, with dynamic order that extends from
the molecular to the macroscopic.
There is a dynamic, liquid crystalline continuum of connective tissues
and extracellular matrix linking directly into the equally liquid
crystalline cytoplasm in the interior of every single cell in the body
(see Ho, 1997; Ho, 1998; Ho and Knight, 1998, and references therein).
Liquid crystallinity gives organisms their characteristic flexibility,
exquisite sensitivity and responsiveness, thus optimizing the rapid,
noiseless intercommunication that enables the organism to function as a
coherent, coordinated whole. In addition, the liquid crystalline continuum
provides subtle electrical interconnections which are sensitive to changes
in pressure, pH and other physicochemical conditions; in other words, it
is also able to register ‘tissue memory’. Thus, the liquid
crystalline continuum possesses all the qualities of a ‘body
consciousness’ that may indeed be sensitive to all forms of subtle
energy medicines including acupuncture.
The connective tissues of our body include the skin, bones, tendons,
ligaments, cartilege, various membranes covering major organs and linings
of internal spaces. We tend to see them as serving purely mechanical
functions to keep the body in shape, or to act as packing material.
Actually, connective tissues may also be largely responsible for the rapid
intercommunication that enables our body to function effectively as a coherent
whole, and are therefore central to our health and well-being.
The clue to the intercommunication function of connective tissues lies
in the properties of collagen, which makes up 70% or more of all
the proteins of the connective tissues. Connective tissues, in turn form
the bulk of the body of most multicellular animals. Collagen is therefore
the most abundant protein in the animal kingdom.
There are many kinds of collagens - all sharing a general repeating
sequence of the tripeptide, (X-Y-glycine), where X and Y are usually
proline or hydroxyproline (reviewed in Ho and Knight, 1998; Haffegee,
1999; Zhou, 1999). They also share a molecular structure in which three
polypeptide chains are wound around one another in a triple-helix (rather
like an electric flex) with the compact amino acid glycine in the central
axis of the helix, while the bulky amino-acids proline and hydroxyproline
are near the surface. In the fibrous forms, the triple-helical molecules
aggregate head to tail and side-by side into long fibrils, and
bundles of fibrils in turn assemble into thicker fibres, and other more
complex three-dimensional liquid crystalline structures. Some collagens
assemble into sheets constructed from an open, liquid crystalline meshwork
of molecules. All these structures are formed by self-assembly, in
the sense that they need no specific 'instructions' other than certain
conditions of pH, ionic strength, temperature and hydration (Zhou et
al, 1996; Haffegee, 1999). The process is predominantly driven by
hydrophilic interactions due to hydrogen-bonding between water molecules
and charged amino-acid side-chains of the protein. Hydrogen bonds is a
special kind of chemical bond in which a hydrogen atom is shared between
atoms such as oxygen and nitrogen. It is the most important and ubiquitous
chemical bond in living systems. If you don't know anything else, you must
know the hydrogen bond. A water molecule is made of one oxygen atom and
two hydrogen atoms and each of the two hydrogen atoms can make a hydrogen
bond with another the oxygen belonging to another water molecule or a
protein molecule. And the oxygen atom of the water molecule can accept two
other hydrogen atoms in hydrogen-bonds.
But collagens are not just mechanical fibres and composites. Instead,
they have dielectric and electrical conductive properties that make them
very sensitive to mechanical pressures, pH, and ionic composition and to
electromagnetic fields (reviewed in Ho, 1998; Ho and Knight, 1998; in
particular, Zhou, 1999). The electrical properties depend, to a large
extent, on the bound water molecules in and around the collagen
triple-helix. X-ray diffraction studies reveal a cylinder of water
surrounding the triple-helix which is hydrogen-bonded to the
hydroxyproline side-chains. Nuclear magnetic resonance studies and Fourier
Transform InfraRed (FTIR) spectroscopy have both provided evidence of three
populations of water molecules associated with collagen. These are interstitial
water, very tightly bound within the triple-helix of the collagen
molecule, and strongly interacting with the peptide bonds of the
polypeptide chains; bound water, corresponding to the more loosely
structured water-cylinder on the surface of the triple helix; and so
called free water filling the spaces between the fibrils and
between fibres. Typically, there is a layer of water some 4 to 5 molecules
deep separating neighbouring triple-helices. This biological water is
integral to the liquid crystallinity of collagens (Zhou et al,
1999) and other composites such as the extracellular matrix, the cell
membrane and the 'cytoplasm'.
The existence of the ordered network of water molecules, connected by
hydrogen bonds, and interspersed within the protein fibrillar matrix of
the collagens is especially signicant, as it is expected to support rapid
jump conduction of protons, ie, hydrogen atoms without its electron, which
constitute positive electric charges. This jump conduction is a kind of
semi-conduction and is much faster than ordinary electrical conduction or
conduction through nerve fibres. That is because it does not actually
require any net movement of the charged particle itself. It is passed
rapidly down a line of relatively static, hydrogen-bonded water molecules.
Jump conduction of protons in collagen has been confirmed by dielectric
measurements. The conductivity of collagen increases strongly with the
amount of water absorbed (from 0.1 to 0.3g/g collagen), in accordance with
the power-law relation,
s(f) = XfY
where f is the water content, andX and Y are
constants. The value of Y is found to be 5.1 to 5.4, and is a
function of the collagen fibrillar structure. These results suggest that
continuous chains of ordered water molecules join neighbouring
ion-generating sites enabling proton jumps to occur. The high value of the
exponential suggests that up to 5 or 6 neighbours may be involved in the
jump conduction. Based on these findings, it is estimated that
conductivity along the collagen fibres is at least one-hundred time that
across the fibre.
A major factor contributing to the efficiency of intercommunication is
the structured, oriented nature of collagen liquid crystalline fibres.
Each connective tissue has its characteristic orientation of fibrous
structures which are clearly related to the mechanical stresses and
strains to which the tissue is subject. This same orientation may also be
crucial for intercommunication.
Aligned collagen fibres in connective tissues provide oriented channels
for electrical intercommunication, and are strongly reminiscent of
acupuncture meridians in traditional Chinese medicine. As collagen fibres
are expected to conduct (positive) electricity preferentially along
the fibres due to the bound water, which are predominantly oriented along
the fibre axis, it follows that these conduction paths may correspond to
acupuncture meridians. By contrast, acupoints typically exhibit 10 to
100-fold lower electrical resistances compared with the surrounding skin,
and may therefore correspond to singularities or gaps between
collagen fibres, or, where collagen fibres are oriented at right angles to
the dermal layer. The actual conducting channels may bear a more subtle
relationship to the orientation of the collagen fibres, as conductivity
depends predominantly on the layer(s) of bound water on the surface of the
collagen molecules rather than the collagens themselves. So-called free
water may also take part in proton conduction as the result of induced
polarization, particularly as water molecules naturally form
hydrogen-bonded networks. This would be consistent with the observed
increase in conductivity of collagen as hydration increases to a level
well beyond the bound water fraction, around 0.15g/g; and with the fact
that the normal hydration level of tendon is about 65%.
The hydrogen-bonded water network of the connective tissues is actually
linked to ordered hydrogen-bonded water in the ion-channels of the cell
membrane that allow inorganic ions to pass in and out of the cell. There
is thus a direct electrical link between distant signals and the
intracellular matrix of every single cell in the body, leading to
physiological changes inside the cells, including all nerve cells. This
electrical channel of intercommunication is in addition to and coupled
with the mechanical tensegrity interactionsbetween the connective tissues
and the intracellular matrix of every single cell, a continuum that always
changes as a whole. Any mechanical deformations of the protein-bound water
network will automatically result in electrical disturbances and
conversely, electrical disturbances will result in mechanical effects.
As mentioned earlier, proton jump-conduction is a form of
semi-conduction in condensed matter and much faster than conduction of
electrical signals by the nerves. Thus the ‘ground substance’ of
the entire body may provide a much better intercommunication system than
the nervous system. Indeed, it is possible that one of the functions of
the nervous system is to slow down intercommunication through the ground
substance. Lower animals which do not have a nervous system are
nonetheless sensitive. At the other end of the evolutionary scale, note
the alarming speed with which a hypersensitive response occurs in human
beings, or how rapidly they can respond to an emergency. There is no doubt
that a body consciousness exists prior to the ‘brain’
consciousness associated with the nervous system.
I have argued that a body consciousness possessing all the hallmarks of
consciousness - sentience, intercommunication and memory - is distributed
throughout the entire body. Brain consciousness associated with the
nervous system is embedded in body consciousness and is coupled to it (Ho,
1997; 1998).
Under normal, healthy conditions, body and brain consciousness mutually
inform and condition each other. The unity of our conscious experience and
our state of health depends on the complete coherence of brain and body.
Traditional Chinese medicine based on the acupuncture meridian system
places the emphasis of health on the coherence of body functions which
harmonizes brain to body. This makes perfect sense if one
recognizes the brain as part of the body. Western medicine, by contrast,
has yet no concept of the whole, and is based, at the very outset, on a
Cartesian divide between mind and brain, and brain and body. Because there
is no concept of the organism as a whole, there is, in effect, no theory
of health, only an infinite number of disease models, each based on the
supposed defect of a single molecular species. There is an urgent need to
develop a theory of health for proper delivery of healthcare in the next
millenium.
Acknowledgment
Peter Saunders, Fritz Popp, Franco Musumeci, Kenneth Denbigh, Geoffrey
Sewell, John Bolton, David Knight and Stephen Swithenby have taught me a
lot of what I did not know about mathematics, physics and chemistry, and
shared their insights with me, some of them over many years. Stephen Ross,
Julian Haffegee, Zhou Yu-Ming and Richard Newton were my collaborators on
many of the experimental projects. Without their enthusiasm, ingenuity and
support, the work described in this paper would never have been done.
References
Dold, C. (1998). Needles & Nerves. Discover September,
58-62.
Freeman, W.J. (1995). Societies of Brains. A Study in the
Neuroscience of Love and Hate, lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hove.
Fröhlich, H. (1968). Long range coherence and energy storage in
biological systems. Int. J. Quantum Chemistry 2, 641-649.
Haffegee, J. (1999). Collagen self-assembly and alignment in vitro.
M. Sc. Thesis, Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory, Open University.
Ho, M.W. (1993). The Rainbow and The Worm. The Physics of Organisms,
World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W. ed. (1995b). Bioenergetics, S327 Living Processes, Open
University Press, Milton Keynes, especially Chapters 3, 5, 7, 8.
Ho, M.W. (1997a). Quantum coherence and conscious experience. Kybernetes
26, 265-276.
Ho, M.W. (1998). The Rainbow and The Worm. The Physics of Organisms,
2nd. Ed. World Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W. and Knight, D.P. (1998). The acupuncture system and the liquid
crystalline collagen fibers of the connective tissues. Am. J. Chinese
Medicine 26, 251-263.
Ho, M.W. and Lawrence, M. (1993). Interference colour
vital imaging: A novel noninvasive microscopic technique. Microscopy
and Analysis September, 26.
Ho, M.W. and Saunders, P.T. (1994). Liquid crystalline
mesophase in living organisms. In Bioelectrodynamics and
Biocommunication (M.W. Ho, F.A. Popp and U. Warnke, eds.)World
Scientific, Singapore.
Ho, M.W., Haffegee, J., Newton,R.H. Ross, S., Zhou, Y.M. and Bolton.
J.P. (1996). Organisms as polyphasic liquid crystals. Bioelectrochemistry
and Bioenergetics 41, 81-91, 1996.
Newton, R.H., Haffegee, J. and Ho, M.W. (1995).
Colour-contrast in polarized light microscopy of weakly birefringent
biological specimens. J. Microscopy 180, 127-130.
Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of Mind, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
Popp, F.A., Li, K.H. and Gu, Q. eds. (1992). Advances in Biophotons
Research, World Scientific, Singapore.
Popp, F.A., Ruth, B., Bahr, W., Bohm. J., Grass, P., Grohlig, G.,
Rattemeyer, M., Schmidt, H.G. and Wulle, P. (1981). Emission of visible
and ultraviolet radiation by active biological systems. Collective
Phenomena 3, 187-214.
Ross, S., Newton, R.H., Zhou, Y.M., Haffegee, J., Ho, M.W., Bolton, J.
and Knight, D. (1997). Quantitative image analysis of birefringent
biological materials. J. Microscopy 187, 62-67.
Zhou, Y.-M. (1999). The optical properties of living organisms, Ph.D.
Thesis, Open University, Bioelectrodynamics Laboratory.
Zhou, Y.M., Newton, R.H., Haffegee, J., Brown, J.Y.,
Ross, S., Bolton, J.P., Ho, M.W.: Imaging Liquid Crystalline Mesophases
in vivo and in vitro: Measuring Molecular Birefringence
and Order Parameter of Liquid Crystals. Bios Journal,
1996.
Zhou, Y,-M., Newton, R.H., Haffegee, J.P. Meek, K. and Ho, M.W. (1999).
Effects of different solvents on collagen birefringence and structure. (in
preparation).
| |
|
