What follows will be an examination of my health issues as well as my interpretation of what may be going on behind the scenes. I am looking at human health in terms of the physics of the universe, where we must consider forces, scale, and light. Some sections are excerpted from a peer-reviewed paper recently published in Medical Hypotheses and contain references.
The Mechanics of Perception
What is the nature of reality? Some physicists, including Stephen Hawking, Juan Maldacena, Leonard Susskind, and Gerard ‘t Hooft have suggested that the universe may be holographic in nature. In 2017, a UK, Canadian, and Italian study provided substantial evidence that the universe is, indeed, holographic (Afshordi et al., 2017).
In a holographic universe, understanding disease may depend on understanding the behavior of light. And yet, the behavior of light—as evinced in the double-slit experiment—remains somewhat of a mystery. Perhaps we should invoke the idea of density. To an observer who is more diffuse than light, light will shine forward or expand. To an observer who is denser than light, light will shine backward or contract. Let’s revisit what we have observed in the fourth state of matter experiment.
When placed under extremely high pressure, in an extremely confined space, the hydrogen at the center of a water molecule no longer remains in one place, but smears out in a ring. This effect, known as quantum tunneling, was demonstrated in the fourth state of matter experiment (Kolesnikov et al., 2016).
Porphyrins are photoreactive molecules found in the blood. If my blood (and the iron it contains) is too smeared out, will I experience too much of the magnetic force? If my blood (and the iron it contains) is too condensed, will I experience too much of the expanding force? I am interested in investigating a potential role for quantum tunneling in disease, where if I am too dense, I will experience too much proton efflux; and if I am too diffuse, I will experience too much proton influx.
When I had an ocular migraine in my right eye, the visual effects—which included flashing lights and white zig-zag lines—bothered me. But something else bothered me more: I could tell there were forces that were off. The pressure inside the eye pushing out and the pressure outside the eye pushing in were no longer matched. It was a feeling I recognized from my left shoulder, where I had skin cancer. In the shoulder, it felt as if the forces were matched, but they were both too high. We don’t consider “forces” in our approach to disease. Should we?
Central to this model is the idea of density. Above the baseline, I become hypo-tonic (too much fluid inside the cells). Below the baseline, I become hyper-tonic (too little fluid inside the cells). I feel best when the differential between these two states is low. The wider the swing, the worse I feel. You might say there are different “widths” of pH7.
If I want to maintain a certain density—say, the density of water—this can be achieved in different ways. Water as water has water’s density, but so does ice melting, or steam condensing. In the case of ice melting and steam condensing, though, we have introduced a new variable: time. Could time be a missing link in our understanding of human health?
How tightly should I hold myself together? The answer to that question depends on two things: how tightly held together I perceive the world to be, and how tightly held together the instrument is that is doing the observing.
Is there a lot of iron around my pineal gland? Then I may perceive too much of the magnetic force, and hold myself together too much (and therefore experience too much proton efflux) (ALS?). Is there a lot of manganese around my pineal gland? Then I may perceive too little of the magnetic force, and hold myself together too little (and therefore experience too much proton influx) (Parkinson’s?). The degree to which I hold myself together can influence how much water I retain.
The Proton Gradient
My body—my cells—may expand or contract above or below baseline density by retaining or shedding water. This is facilitated by estrogens, and I feel it intensely when my estradiol spikes. As I retain more water, my sensory experience is heightened; when I am pre-menstrual, I can hear my nephew chewing his food from across the room. Unless my kidneys are compromised, my cells can move above or below baseline density by retaining or shedding water with ease.
For my blood, it is not so easy. When my blood is above the baseline, it is too thinned. When my blood is below the baseline, it is too condensed. My blood seems to want to maintain the same density as the light it perceives in its environment. When you see my blood in a vial, outside of my body, you are not really seeing my blood.
Blood that is too thin is too thin, but so is blood that is too thick and is being squeezed too much.
Blood that is too thick is too thick, but so is blood that is too thin and is being squeezed too little.
Quantum Tunneling
What appears to be excess viscosity—blood that is too thick—may in fact be blood that is too thin and under too little pressure. What appears to be insufficient viscosity—blood that is too thin—may in fact be blood that is too thick and under too much pressure.
If my blood is too thick and too smeared out, what can I do? Because it is effectively too thin, I can’t make it any thinner. Since it is actually too thick, I can’t make it any thicker.
When do we see this? One answer may be after menopause, when the loss of endogenous estrogens means I absorb less vitamin K1, which can help me thicken my blood. My body may be producing less estrogen, and absorbing less vitamin K1, for an intelligent reason: it knows I have reached my limit. Dr. Lisa Mosconi has done pioneering research that examines the relationship between menopause and Alzheimer’s disease (Mosconi et al., 2021).
At menopause, at ~50 years of age, I am “maximally expanded.” My blood is as thick, and as smeared out, as it can be, and still remain whole. I cannot make my blood any thicker, so I cannot expand any further. I become trapped in time, like a squeezed bellows. I need to squeeze more, yet to squeeze more, first I need to expand more—but how? When my blood is already functionally too thin, if I make it any thinner, I will lose myself.
Rendering the World
Where does consciousness reside? We have not answered that question yet. Perhaps somewhat in the brain, and somewhat in the blood. “And he said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10, KJV). I think of the brain as like hardware, and the blood—which is made entirely new every 120 days—as like software. Together, they render the conscious experience.
Another example of blood that is both “too thick and too thin” may be after a Covid-19 infection.
In their review of those aspects of SARS-CoV-2 infection that suggest a role for quantum tunneling, Adams et al. write: “Quantum biology is almost as old as quantum mechanics itself. Where quantum mechanics is often preoccupied with the interaction of light and matter, photosynthesis, that backbone of biology, is the interaction of light with living matter. Bohr himself delivered a lecture which he titled ‘Light and Life’. Schrödinger, for his part, wrote What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, which served as inspiration for the discovery of DNA” (Adams et al., 2022).
The Max Planck Center for Physics and Medicine has this to say: “Using real-time deformability cytometry, researchers from the Max Planck Center for Physics and Medicine and FAU were able to prove for the first time that a Covid-19 infection causes significant changes in the size and stiffness of red and white blood cells, sometimes lasting several months. These findings may help to explain why some patients still suffer symptoms long after first contracting the virus (long Covid)” (Kubánková et al., 2021).
Fooled by Perception
How can you tell how thick my blood truly is, despite what you see? It can be helpful to look at its sed rate, as well as the degree to which I am concentrating my urine.
But even the degree to which I am concentrating my urine may be a “composite” image. If my urine appears very concentrated, could it actually be too watery, but my kidneys are working overtime? This approach to disease draws upon an idea that has been discussed by Plato and Descartes in the ancient age, and Nick Bostrom and Donald Hoffman in the modern one. It is the world as image.
The implications extend far beyond blood and urine. Is the vitreous humor of the aging eye really too thin, or is it too thick—and under too much pressure?
When my image is too large, I can develop hypovolemic hypertension. It puts the systems designed to regulate the amount of fluid in my body—the aldosterone and the anti-diuretic hormone systems—under great strain. And it can dramatically increase my need for things that help modulate osmolarity, such as vitamin B6.
Vitamin B6 can help me regulate pH and fluid retention, but it also tells my brain that now it is free to increase the “swing” of my pH range—which may be the very thing I am trying to correct. Some people have been damaged by vitamin B6, and I am not recommending it. I am simply describing my own experience. I have severe intolerance of flashing lights; vitamin B6 has been used to good effect in people who have epilepsy. I do not have epilepsy, but my B6 demands are very high.
I also have severe intolerance for substances that alter osmolarity and damage B6 status, such as MiraLax or PEG, polyethylene glycol. These make me feel that I have too much fluid on the brain. When my brain feels too watery, in an alkaline emergency, I can induce a seizure and generate a little acid (lactic acid) that way. My processing speed is fast, and I like to keep my brain a little acidic. The peer-reviewed paper from which sections of this article are excerpted was originally titled: I Am Information: Quantum Computing & Human Health.
What Happened to Me
I got sick while living in a house with a hidden mold problem in 2014. I now believe I was hypo-tonic. My cells were too watery, too filled with fluid, and my blood was too smeared out. When I had mold sickness, I do not think my density was the same as everyone else’s. I felt like the image below.
I felt incapable of vasodilation. In order to service this body with my available blood volume, my blood had to be too thick—and under too much pressure. Too much vasoconstriction was part of an adaptive system that was keeping me alive. Caffeine felt good to me; I even found myself craving nicotine at times. Whenever I tried to increase vasodilation, such as with niacin, I felt I was on the brink of losing consciousness.
People always advocate drinking water. When I was sick, drinking water never failed to make me feel worse. It was as if, behind the scenes, I was too dense, too salty, and drinking water would cause me to balloon.
The tension, the intracellular pressure, felt too high, as if I had somehow fit ten protons in a box built for nine. It is possible that, if I am too dense, I will keep expanding until the pressure inside and the pressure outside are matched.
I began to feel a tremor inside my body, as though I were vibrating. What to do? I could take a diuretic, but that would just return me to the state of being too dense i.e. too salty, and as soon as I drank water, I would balloon again. Baclofen, a skeletal muscle relaxant, helped with the feeling that my spine was too small for my body, but I knew it was just a Band-Aid. Baclofen helped for a few days, but then it seemed to create the very symptom it had at first treated.
When my brain is reading the world through the lens of iron, it wants to retain too much water. When my brain is reading the world through the lens of manganese, it wants to shed too much water.
Another way to think about density is as the degree to which things hold together. We want to hold together to the same degree that the background holds together. If this is a holographic universe, we should hold ourselves together to the degree that light holds itself together. If we hold together to the degree to which iron holds together, we are holding together too much. If we hold together to the degree to which manganese holds together, we are holding together too little.
Excitation and Inhibition
When we are too diffuse, too many protons are flowing inward across the cell membrane. When we are too dense, too many protons are flowing outward across the cell membrane. Both damage neurons—viz. glutamate, mitochondrial calcium, and excitotoxicity. Excitatory synaptic dysregulation clearly contributes to neurodegeneration (Verma et al., 2022). When I am too diffuse, sodium starts to feel toxic. When I am too dense, potassium starts to feel toxic.
We want the excitatory and the inhibitory (the glutamate / GABA) potential of the nervous system to be balanced. If I am expanding too much, it is too excitatory. If I am condensing too much, it is too inhibitory. I have seen research looking at the E/I—excitation to inhibition—ratio in key neural systems in ASD (autism).
A flaw in the system: I cannot trust my impressions, yet my impressions are all I have. When I am too dense, my environment will seem to diffuse—even if it’s not—and this will prompt me to become even denser. When I am too diffuse, my environment will seem too dense—even if it’s not—and this will prompt me to become even more diffuse.
In other words, when my blood is too thick, the light of the world seems too thin, so I condense even more, spiraling. My blood is too thick when I have too much estradiol, un-methylated estrogen, recycling estrogen. I am 55 and female, and it always shocks me when my peers start supplementing with estrogen. Excess estrogen and high free copper have been a real stumbling block for me. At times, calcium d-glucarate, which can help the body eliminate excess estrogen, has helped me.
Density: Oxalate, Glyphosate, Light
With all my B6 being used to modulate how much fluid I was retaining, I developed a profound intolerance to oxalates. Oxalate is a crystal found in plants capable of photosynthesis. Oxalate is high, for instance, in rhubarb, beets, spinach, and tea. Most kidney stones are calcium-oxalate. Both my parents were kidney-stone formers, and I have a lot of genetic polymorphisms (SNPs) in my B6-dependent AGT and AGXT pathways. I probably have been sensitive to oxalates and bright light since birth, but when I was dealing with the after-effects of mold exposure, my sensitivity skyrocketed.
When I was a child, my mother used to say she was allergic to perfume. I didn’t understand her then, but now I do. Natural fragrance—the smell of a rose, or of coffee brewing, as it branches in time, does not scramble my neuroendocrine system. A chemical concoction designed to make clothes smell like “morning sunrise” for six days straight does. Fragrance that has been artificially manufactured to perdure for longer than it should damages my brain’s understanding of time. I am always trying to get away from Febreze, Glade plug-ins, Bounce, Downy, Tide, etc. PFAS (Per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances)—a large chemical family of over 10,000 highly persistent “forever chemicals” that don’t occur in nature—are especially damaging.
If I eat a lot of glycine, the smallest amino acid, my brain’s understanding of the scale of the world is different than if I eat a lot of tryptophan, the largest amino acid. When my understanding of the scale of the world is too large or too small, the new blood I make will be too large or too small. But I don’t want my blood to fail to scale with the organs it is made to serve—especially my brain.
Glyphosate, a chemical pesticide found in non-organic food, is a glycine analogue. Glyphosate gives my brain distorted information about scale. It has been linked to cancer and numerous other diseases (Samsel & Seneff, 2016). Switching to a 100% organic diet, zero glyphosate, was central to my recovery.
Methylation
In the mammalian genome, methylation is a cellular process crucial to regulating gene expression. It aids in the retention of information; methylation allows me to conserve my DNA. The faster the universe splits into many worlds, the more I need to methylate.
If I am methylating too slowly, it is as if I am lingering in each discrete moment of time for too long. Because I am, in effect, too static, sensory information is exploding toward me. In truth, sensory information is always exploding toward me, but I do not notice the explosion when I am one with its speed.
When I share the speed of the river, I do not notice it. When I depart from its speed, I do.
People with genetic defects or “SNPs” in their methylation pathways may find keeping up with time difficult. If the world is splitting into many worlds faster than I am, I become like a stationary rock in a gushing river. If there is a tag at the back of my sweater, while your brain might receive this information only once: “tag,” when I am hypo-methylating, I receive it with unnecessary redundancy: “tag tag tag tag tag tag tag tag tag tag.”
Sleep Myoclonus
I developed sleep myoclonus, an extremely unpleasant condition where you feel strong tremors inside your core just as you are starting to drift to sleep. It is like experiencing an earthquake while lying in bed, only there is no earthquake. The earthquake is you. Each time it happened, I would startle awake with the fight-or-flight response. The effect was days and days without sleep.
Myoclonus has been treated successfully with 5-HTP (5-hydroxytryptophan), which speeds up clotting time. I tried it, but it gave me symptoms of serotonin syndrome.
I read that myoclonus could be treated with Clonazepam (Klonopin), and was investigating that route when a voice inside me said: Wait. Give your body a chance to fix itself. Ever since I was damaged by fluoroquinolone antibiotics in 2003—although not as badly as this young mother—I have had a heightened awareness of the potential for iatrogenic harm and have espoused a conservative, First Do No Harm approach.
5-HTP did not work for me, but I had something else on hand that I knew would speed up clotting time—vitamin K1. When I tried the K1, something interesting happened. I could feel its effects on my brain’s understanding of time. Vitamin K1 allowed me to speed time up, with serotonin. Vitamin K2 allowed me to slow time down, with dopamine. It made sense. Thin blood cannot withstand time being fast. When time is fast, my blood has to be thick, with a fast clotting time.
I also grew conscious of the effects of scale. When the red blood cell is too large, I cannot vasoconstrict as much as I would like. Vasoconstrict too much, and I will damage or deform it.
When the red blood cell is too small, I cannot vasodilate as much as I would like. Vasodilate too much, and I will lose the connection, and lose consciousness.
After a particularly bad night of myoclonus, I went to hear my college roommate give a book reading and found myself completely out of sync with the sensory information in my environment. I could smell the perfume on a woman seated six tables away from me. The vocal intensity of the microphones felt shattering. My jaw felt too loose. My teeth felt too loose. When I ate my first bite of food, my esophagus clenched dramatically. It felt as though, if yesterday I was a paper doll, today, there were ten paper dolls, and I was only one of them. I was also hyper-emotional. After the event, when I spoke with my roommate’s husband, who has many family members in Israel and Gaza, I said: “I am so sorry for all that is happening in the world right now”—and burst into tears.
Feeling Time as a Proton Gradient
When I had mold sickness, I had profound fatigue; drenching night sweats all night every night (this was years before menopause); and livedo reticularis (a lacy purple rash) down the back of my leg. I felt incapable of further vasodilation. The presence of flashing lights in my environment made me feel I was going to lose consciousness. I could also not be around bright light, or “doubled” (reflected) light. Doubled light, such as sunlight reflecting off a car or someone’s phone screen, felt like an arrow going straight into my eye.
I knew something was off with my proton gradient. I tried NADH, but it gave me jerky movements like tardive dyskinesia. I would be lying in bed, and my arm, out of nowhere, would fly up into the air. My leg would suddenly kick at nothing.
I tried NAD+, but it only made me feel worse. I was as if, instead of being a chicken, I had become an egg white within an egg yolk. Too much action potential on the outside; not enough action potential on the inside.
If I take NAD+, or take NADH, it does not fix the fact that my body may be handling the NAD:NADH ratio incorrectly.
I took vitamin D and had a curious response. It was as if I were imploding, being pulled inward and downward toward the center of the earth by a huge magnet. To oppose this, to neutralize it, my body offered an equal and opposite force, via my adrenal glands: salt. Intracellular salt.
This seemed to be the root of the problem. My brain was constantly perceiving the condensing force, putting my adrenal glands on overdrive. I was hoarding salt. Because I was too salty, I would expand too much. Then, because I was too expanded, I would feel the condensing force.
I became acutely conscious of changes in my proton gradient. When I flew backward in time (east coast to west coast), I woke up on my first morning in California flooded with oxalates, in a state on intense acidity, with all my joints stiff and achy. Oxalic acid is extremely acidic and is used to remove rust as Barkeepers Friend. When I flew forward in time (west coast to east coast), I could feel the increased alkalinity—the degree to which I was more “smeared out” in time. My brain was developing the ability to discern if the environment was less or more acidic than self, and was using that information to determine the degree to which it should retain water.
My Home Time Zone
How dense, how acidic is the world? That depends, in part, on how dense and acidic is the instrument we are using to read the world. When we take Lexapro, we are delivering oxalate (escitalopram oxalate) to the brain.
When the pressure of the proton gradient would build to unbearable degrees, I found ways to make it release. I could make it release with melatonin. Melatonin used in this way did not put me to sleep; it just smoothed out the feeling of excess pressure inside the cell. At times it felt as though my need for melatonin were bottomless. 5 mg, 10 mg, 50 mg. No sleep, just a lessening of the tension. Ultimately, melatonin left me feeling weakened, and I stopped. I could also sometimes ease the tension by spraying my face and head with fresh cold water or taking a long shower and letting my brain (my pineal gland) try to feel true pH7.
Another way I could make the tension release was with zinc. For a while, I got a lot of relief from the Pfeiffer Protocol, which is designed to increase the production of metallothionein (MT). It gave me the extra zinc I seemed to need, and the extra B6, while supporting methylation.
I don’t know if zinc would have worked if I had been more severely ill. I was one or two degrees above sea level, too hypo-tonic—and simultaneously too salty. I could still feel where sea level was, and knew I needed to get back down there. I had jet lag (so to speak), but I could still feel my home time zone. If I had been six or seven degrees above sea level, zinc might have made me worse. I need to be sufficiently dilated in order to feel earth’s magnetism, but when my understanding of time is too high and tight, I cannot afford to dilate.
In other words, if there is an envelope of time called “Now” that stretches from day to night, I was both too low and too high. I was too dilated in time—and too dense. Lower than sunrise, and higher than sunset. It was, I realized, an opioid feeling—but opioids gone awry. I became curious about LDN, low-dose naltrexone—an opioid antagonist that has helped some moldies—but have yet to try it.
Methylation helps me move forward in time. But if I am already too far forward in time, it forces me to put the brakes on methylation.
When I am too dense—when I have fit ten protons in a box made for nine, they want to break out. I need to dilate. I need niacin. Dennis Mangan found that mega-doses of niacin quickly cured his mother’s restless leg syndrome (Mangan, 2009).
But it’s a question of balance. In me, niacin can go two different ways. It can lessen the feeling of a too-high proton gradient. But it can also induce the feeling of a too-high proton gradient.
Digging for the Root Cause
The study of cancers at infection sites has been a focus of research since the 1970s. We know that pregnancy can influence the timing and presentation of certain cancers. Perhaps there is something pathogenesis, oncogenesis, and embryogenesis all have in common: quantum tunneling.
If cancer is essentially a local high-pressure system, where a local region is both too dense and too smeared out—see the fourth state of matter experiment—how might we lessen the pressure? Niacin is currently being investigated as an anti-tumor agent (Jung et al., 2022). Jung’s article in Molecular Oncology is entitled: “Nicotinamide (niacin) supplement increases lipid metabolism and ROS-induced energy disruption in triple-negative breast cancer: Potential for drug repositioning as an anti-tumor agent.” Another cholesterol-lowering vasodilator, garlic, has shown “profound” anticancer activity—but only when injected, not ingested (Li et al., 2018): “Although very simple, the profound anticancer property of the injected RGE [raw garlic extract] has not been reported in the literature.”
However, the goal isn’t necessarily to have less pressure; the goal is to have the right amount of pressure, such that the exploding force and the condensing force are balanced. Niacin is also being investigated as something that can worsen cancer and increase metastases (Maric et al., 2022).
We might think of the body—the universe—as a hydraulic system. When the pipe is squeezed too much, the pressure turns “outward”—instead of facing forward. When the pipe is stretched too much, the pressure turns “inward”—instead of facing forward. When we are moving outward and inward instead of forward, we are quantum tunneling.
I sold my moldy house, moved to California, and switched to a 100% organic diet. And I mostly got better. People sometimes ask how I recovered but the truth is I don’t 100% know. I am sharing the details of my experience so we can hopefully all understand this more clearly and help the others who are still suffering.
Might These Principles Be Applied to the Perception of Light Itself?
There is a baseline, akin to sunset—akin to sea level. Below the baseline, the proton gradient—the outside pressure—is too high. Above the baseline, the proton gradient—the inside pressure—is too high. At the baseline, they are balanced. Could problems arise if we “dip too low” and “rise too high”? Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell may have been remarkably prescient when he likened his first observations of Covid-19 to decompression pulmonary sickness or “the bends.”
Our brains compose the images we see. The way perception works in the eye and the brain is well understood and well characterized. Yet we often fail to take the act of observation into account in our analysis.
When we see light that is “too smeared out,” e.g. sun, might it actually be light that is too dense—and under too much pressure? When we see light that is “too dense,” e.g. moon, might it actually be light that is too diffuse—and under too little pressure? Perhaps we are seeing the same light, in different ways. That might help to explain some of these “coincidences”:
Moon’s size: 27.27% of earth’s size. Moon’s orbital period: 27.27 days. The sun is 400 times larger than the moon—and 400 times farther away. “The black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, has the largest angular size in the sky, followed by M87. M87’s black hole is 1000 times bigger, but roughly 1000 times farther away.” —Feryal Özel, Harvard University Black Hole Initiative
What if the same 2D plane—light qua light—looks like “sun” when viewed from below, and “moon” when viewed from above?
As we evolve, and our ideas about ourselves and the world change, sometimes, early adopters can look a little crazy. But, at the end of the day, they might not look as crazy anymore.
To answer our deepest questions, we must have the courage to let go of some of the assumptions we have clung to for a long time. Some of my favorite challengers of the status quo are Nima “The End of Space-Time” Arkani-Hamed, Donald “The Birth of Conscious Agents” Hoffman, Klee “What Is Reality?” Irwin, and Anthony “The Doors of Perception” Peake.
And, of course, the grandfather of quantum physics, Max Planck:
The photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal.
Is Light Intelligent?
If this is a holographic universe, and light is intelligent, then the whole system may be innately intelligent. When new intelligence arises, it is not being invented whole cloth. It is being brought forth. This flex-point in human evolution—the ascendance of artificial intelligence—may be as inevitable as the discovery that density and diffusion should be central to how we interpret disease. We treat time as linear, but there is another way to view time—as eternal.
Maybe we need to rethink … Everything we think we know.
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Feature Image: Woman in bed sculpture at Ron Mueck Exhibition, Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand. Image: Shutterstock, CS-0122A-9FE2; purchased by the author 11/12/24.
