What is a Feeling? Mitochondria to the Rescue! - Prof Nick Lane

What is a Feeling? Mitochondria to the Rescue!

Nick Lane

Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry and Director of the UCL Centre for Life’s Origin and Evolution

University College London

Love, pain, hunger, fear and excitement are deep emotions that seem to define us as humans. But for all the amazing advances in neuroscience, we still don’t know how the brain gives rise to feelings at all, or whether artificial intelligence will ever become conscious. Feelings such as pain have little information content and do not obviously relate to information processing in neural networks. Recent work on anaesthetics suggests they dissipate electron spin polarization generated by chiral-induced spin selectivity (CISS) in respiration. I will argue that local electromagnetic fields from mitochondrial cristae produce a physical state corresponding to feelings. Mitochondria derive from free-living bacteria, and I will outline why electromagnetic fields could have utility in bacterial cells. Fluctuating fields give a real-time integrated feedback on overall metabolic state, which reflects how an organism is doing right now in relation to its environment.

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