“A fascinating blend of personal history and rigorous science.”
“Not only is his science top notch, but his ability to write for a popular audience is impeccable.”
A new book by Tamlyn Merryan Hunt · Imprint Academic
About Consciousness and Everything Else
A consciousness researcher raised on hippie communes goes looking for the science behind "it's all vibrations, man," and finds that a surprising amount of it checks out. The rest gets an honest, sometimes painful, reckoning. Tam also looks at the back-to-the-land movement, the promise and perils of AI, and the peace movement’s responses to constant war. And the final question the book answers: What would Love do meow?
Why this book, why now
Far out, and well cited
How does wet, electrical meat produce the taste of mango and the ache of missing someone? Hunt and longtime collaborator Jonathan Schooler offer a concrete answer: General Resonance Theory, where consciousness is synchronized vibration, not a mere correlate of it.
From the OM of the Upanishads to quantum fields, theta-gamma coupling, and brain-wide electric fields that move thousands of times faster than synapses, the book shows where the counterculture's intuitions line up with current physics and neuroscience.
If resonance is how minds come together, then it's also how people, movements, and maybe AIs come together. The last third turns to peace, power, artificial intelligence, and Love with a capital L, as a working principle for how to live.
Bonus track 1 · from Chapters 4 & 6
Pick up a guitar, man
A plucked string is resonance you can hear: one vibration, a stack of harmonics, and a wooden body that rings along. Choose a player, pick a chord, and sweep your cursor (or finger) across the strings. Every lick here is an original, written for this page.
Keyboard: click the guitar, then 1–6 picks a chord, space strums, L plays a lick.
Bonus track 2 · from Chapter 4
Make Tam even more of a hippie
Tam was raised on communes, then rebelled by joining the Army and going to law school. Help him find his way back. Tap an item to put it on, then drag it wherever it looks most groovy.
Tip: drag any accessory to move it. Double-click (or double-tap) to snap it back.
Bonus track 3 · from Chapter 11
Carrier pigeon vs. fiber optic
How does your brain pull a whole moment of experience together fast enough? These are real numbers, not hippie hand-waving. Ruffini and colleagues (2020, PLOS Computational Biology) calculated how fast electric field changes travel through brain tissue: about 47 km/s in gray matter and 57 km/s in white matter at alpha frequencies (around 10 Hz), and 3–4 times faster at 100 Hz, roughly 140–230 km/s.
Race a signal across 20 cm of brain, the same distance Ruffini's team used in their table.
Both field runners finish before the starter's pistol stops echoing. Hit Start.
The speed ladder (log scale, meters per second)
Why nested rhythms care about speed
Brain rhythms nest inside one another. Slow theta waves (4–8 Hz) carry bursts of fast gamma (30–100 Hz), the way a big ocean swell carries ripples. One gamma cycle at 40 Hz lasts just 25 milliseconds, and anything that wants to join that beat has to arrive inside the window.
A signal on an unmyelinated cortical axon, crawling at about 0.1–0.3 m/s, covers only about half a centimeter in 25 ms, and every chemical synapse along the way adds more delay: about 0.15 ms at the fastest mammalian synapses, longer at most others. Even the fastest myelinated axons (up to about 150 m/s) need more than a millisecond to cross 20 cm, and the callosal axons that link the two hemispheres of the human brain average only about 8–10 m/s. A field change crosses the same 20 cm in about 4 millionths of a second: in principle, several thousand times within one gamma cycle. That is a big part of why General Resonance Theory looks to the field, not just the firing, to bind distant regions into one coherent, nested rhythm.
Speed isn't the same as reach. Field strength falls off quickly with distance, which is why Ruffini's team focused on nearby and folded patches of cortex, where opposite walls of a groove sit millimeters apart.
Sources: Ruffini G. et al. (2020), "Realistic modeling of mesoscopic ephaptic coupling in the human brain," PLOS Computational Biology 16(6): e1007923, S1 Text, Table A. Hirsch J.A. & Gilbert C.D. (1991), Journal of Neuroscience 11(6): 1800–1809, and Gerard-Mercier F. et al. (2016), Journal of Neuroscience 36(14): 3925–3942 (unmyelinated horizontal cortical axons, ~0.1–0.3 m/s). Meeks J.P. & Mennerick S. (2007), Journal of Neurophysiology 97: 3460–3472 (hippocampal axons, 0.3–0.4 m/s). Purves D. et al., eds. (2001), Neuroscience, 2nd ed., Sinauer (myelinated axons up to 150 m/s). Caminiti R. et al. (2013), "Diameter, length, speed, and conduction delay of callosal axons in macaque monkeys and humans," Journal of Neuroscience 33(36): 14501–14511. Sabatini B. & Regehr W. (1996), "Timing of neurotransmission at fast synapses in the mammalian brain," Nature 384: 170–172.
Bonus track 4 · from Chapter 17
What would Love do meow?
The book's closing question, posed to a small oracle who has achieved enlightenment and also wants second breakfast.
From Chapter 13 · the scorecard
What they got right. What they got wrong.
In the summer of 1983, the Love Family commune split apart. Tam was twelve. He watched the adults who preached that "we are all one" tear each other apart over money, power, and sex, while the man at the top lived in comfort and families below him went without. That memory gives the book its spine. It's a love letter to the counterculture's vision written by someone who saw what happens when the vision isn't lived.
Right
- ✓Reality is vibration, all the way down. Physics now describes the world as fields, not tiny billiard balls.
- ✓Mind didn't appear out of nowhere. Some spark of experience may run through nature, in vastly simpler forms.
- ✓The edges of the self are softer than they seem, and they can move.
- ✓Love is more than a feeling. It's an organizing force worth building a life around.
- ✓Altered states can be data, not just noise.
Wrong
- ✗Trusting charismatic leaders who said "oneness" and practiced hierarchy.
- ✗Spiritual bypassing: cosmic love on Sunday, neglected kids on Monday.
- ✗Throwing out social wisdom along with social constraints.
- ✗Dropping out entirely. Bodies still need food, shelter, and care.
- ✗Rocks. Rocks are not conscious. Their atoms might have a flicker. The rock does not.
Tune in, turn on
Podcasts!
Footnotes2Plato · with Matthew David Segall
The Hippies Were Right! About Consciousness and Everything Else
Watch or listen on Substack →
1:27:33
Brainforest Café · McKenna Academy · with Dennis McKenna
The Brain Is a Field Computer, Not a Digital Chip
Listen at McKenna Academy →
1:07:33
The Rose Woman · with Christine Marie Mason
Love Is the Physics: Tam Hunt on Resonance, the ʻĀina, and the AI Reckoning
Listen on Acast →
More conversations are on the way. Check back, man.
What people are saying
Rave reviews (none from rocks)
"A fascinating blend of personal history and rigorous science."
Christof Koch, neuroscientist, former Chief Scientist, Allen Institute
"Not only is his science top notch, but his ability to write for a popular audience is impeccable."
Jonathan Schooler, Distinguished Professor, UC Santa Barbara
From the book
In the beginning was the word, and the word was Ommmmmm.
I'm a black sheep son of two black sheep (which makes me a rainbow sheep?).
What the hippies got wrong wasn't their vision but their integration.
…as mind-expanding as any acid trip, but probably more verifiable.
It's like comparing a text message sent by carrier pigeon to one sent by fiber optic cable.
So, what would Love do meow?