Psience Quest

Quote:“The entangled photon interactions with the anesthetic drugs lead to signals that are so small, they’re not readily detectable by traditional means using classical laser light,” Goodson said.

Now, building on other research that showed entangled photons can transmit through brain tissue, Goodson and Mashour will use their quantum optical techniques to test the activity between entangled photons and live glial cells. These studies will be carried out in the presence and in the absence of the anesthetic drugs.

Understanding the biological and chemical processes important to the brain signaling process with this new tool may shed light on new mechanisms of how general anesthetics really work at a fundamental level, they say.

The researchers will use the information they learned while observing the interaction of the entangled photons with the anesthetics to track the signaling process in neurons and possibly within smaller structures in the brain tissue.