Stuart Hameroff is an impish figure — short, round, with gray hair and a broad, gnomic face. His voice is smoke — deep and granular, rumbling with the weight of his 70 years. For more than two decades, he’s run a scientific conference on consciousness research. He turns up each day in rumpled jeans and short-sleeved shirts. The effect is casual bordering on slovenly. But up close, he is in charge, and to his critics, he comes off as pugnacious.
He may not care so much about how he’s dressed. He cares a great deal about how he and his theories are addressed.
Hameroff is best known for serving as a kind of gadfly in the fields of neuroscience and philosophy. He emerged in 1994 from the windowless bowels of the Arizona hospital where he still works as an anesthesiologist to put forward what seemed — at the time — some of the more outlandish ideas about the human brain.
Most neuroscientists say thoughts are born from brain cells called neurons. Hameroff suggests the most meaningful action happens at the impossibly small quantum level, where subatomic particles like photons and electrons exhibit bizarre behavior. Quantum physics drives consciousness, he believes.
If Hameroff proposed these ideas himself, he might have been ignored, but his co-theorist was Sir Roger Penrose, an esteemed figure in mathematical physics. Their theory, dubbed “orchestrated objective reduction,” or Orch-OR, suggests that structures called microtubules, which transport material inside cells, underlie our conscious thinking.
