Nicholas P. Timms
Submitted: December 2025 : Published: 19th February, 2026
Abstract
This report introduces a novel quantitative framework to describe biophysical energy transport within neuronal microtubules (MTs), applying a unified model of solid-state phonon dynamics to the experimentally observed phenomena of exciton diffusion and the quantum theories of consciousness. A formal analogy is established, mapping the “phonons” described in the unified solids model to the vibronically-coupled “exciton-polarons” whose coherent diffusion (diffusion length nm) was experimentally verified in MTs. The “local modes” or “scatterers” central to the unified model are identified as the tryptophan-rich hydrophobic pockets within the tubulin protein subunits. This allows for the first quantitative parameterization of the MT lattice, linking the solid-state “mean free path” (and its associated parameter ) to the experimentally measured exciton diffusion length.
The central thesis of this analysis is that anesthetic action can be modeled as a quantifiable, physical mechanism. The binding of general anesthetic molecules to these hydrophobic “local modes” alters their resonant properties, which is quantitatively represented as an increase in the system’s damping parameter . By leveraging the “phase diagram of non-Debye anomalies”, it is proposed that the biophysical substrate of consciousness relies on the MT lattice maintaining a delicate, low- vibrational phase, hypothesized to be the “Boson Peak (BP) + Van Hove Singularity (VHS) coexistence” state. Anesthesia, by increasing , induces a vibrational phase transition out of this coherent state and into a damped, disordered “single Boson Peak” state, which corresponds to unconsciousness. This framework provides the first quantitative, first-principles mechanism for the anesthetic “dampening” and “disruption” that has been experimentally observed and theoretically proposed.
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