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Updated: Nov 23, 2025

State-Dependency Effects on TMS: A Look at Motive Phosphene Behavior
Published on: December 28, 2010
Experimental evidence refuting the assumption of phosphorus-31 nuclear-spin entanglement-mediated consciousness
1Department of Anesthesiology, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 430030, Wuhan, P. R. China.
Abstract:
Phosphorus-31 nuclear-spin entanglements within Ca9(PO4)6 molecules (Posner molecules) have been proposed to be central for neural processing. However, this has yet to be proven experimentally. Relatedly, increasing calcium ion concentration in the cerebrospinal fluid has been proposed to enhance consciousness by accelerating Posner molecules' creation. A dependence on calcium isotope is also expected. Here we test these predictions experimentally by measuring the loss of righting reflex ED50 for mice to sevoflurane - an increase in loss of righting reflex ED50 indicates a higher level of consciousness and vice versa. Our mice's findings demonstrate that intracerebroventricular injection of EGTA enhances the sevoflurane-induced loss of righting reflex ED50 while injecting calcium-40 chloride or calcium-43 chloride causes an opposite effect. Further, the identical effects of calcium-40 and calcium-43 indicate an absence of calcium isotope dependence. Here, our findings disprove conventional proposals that calcium ion concentration correlates with consciousness.
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