McFadden’s CEMI Field Theory: Consciousness IS the Brain’s Electromagnetic Field

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The Radical Proposal That Consciousness Is Not What Neurons Do — It Is What Neurons Generate

In 2002, Johnjoe McFadden — a Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, a specialist in quantum biology and tuberculosis, and decidedly not a New Age mystic — published a paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies that proposed one of the most radical and testable theories of consciousness in the history of neuroscience.

The theory: consciousness is not a product of neural computation. It is not an emergent property of complex information processing. It is not a mysterious “extra” that somehow arises when neurons fire in certain patterns.

Consciousness IS the brain’s electromagnetic field.

Not a correlate of it. Not caused by it. Not dependent on it in some indirect way. Identical to it. The electromagnetic field generated by the synchronized firing of billions of neurons IS the conscious experience — the felt quality of seeing red, hearing music, tasting coffee, and knowing that you exist.

McFadden called this the Conscious Electromagnetic Information (CEMI) field theory. And despite its apparent simplicity, it may be the most important idea in consciousness science — because it is one of the few theories that actually solves the binding problem, makes testable predictions, and provides a physical substrate for the unity of conscious experience.

The Binding Problem: The Mystery CEMI Solves

To understand why CEMI matters, you must first understand the binding problem — the central mystery of consciousness science.

When you look at a red apple, different aspects of the experience are processed by different brain regions: color (V4), shape (inferotemporal cortex), spatial location (parietal cortex), semantic meaning (temporal lobe), emotional association (amygdala), and motor planning for grasping (premotor cortex). These processes occur in neurons that are physically separated by centimeters of brain tissue, connected only by axons that transmit signals at speeds of 1-100 meters per second.

Yet your experience of the apple is unified. You do not experience color separately from shape, or shape separately from location. You experience a single, integrated percept: a red apple, there, within reach, desirable. How does the brain bind these distributed processes into a single unified experience?

This is the binding problem. And despite decades of work, no purely neural (spike-based) theory of consciousness has solved it.

The synchronization hypothesis — the idea that binding is achieved by synchronizing the firing of distributed neurons at a common frequency (typically 30-70 Hz, the gamma band) — partially addresses the problem but does not solve it. Synchronization tells you which neurons are firing together but does not explain how their joint firing becomes a unified experience.

The global workspace theory (Bernard Baars, Stanislas Dehaene) — the idea that consciousness arises when information is broadcast to a “global workspace” accessible to multiple brain systems — provides a functional architecture but does not explain how the broadcasting creates subjective experience rather than just information sharing.

McFadden’s CEMI theory offers a solution that the neural theories cannot: the electromagnetic field.

The Physics: How Neural Firing Creates an EM Field

Every time a neuron fires an action potential — a brief electrical pulse that travels along the axon — it generates an electromagnetic field. This is basic physics: moving charges (the flow of ions through the neuron’s membrane) create electromagnetic fields. The field is weak (on the order of millivolts per millimeter) but measurable.

When millions of neurons fire simultaneously, their individual electromagnetic fields superimpose — they add together, creating a composite field that is the vector sum of all contributing neural fields. This composite field fills the volume of the brain and extends beyond it (which is why EEG can measure it through the skull).

The critical property of the electromagnetic field for solving the binding problem is this: it is a unified, integrated entity. The EM field at any point in the brain is the sum of all contributions from all firing neurons. It does not have separate “channels” for color, shape, and location. It is one field, carrying information from all sources simultaneously, integrated by the physics of electromagnetic superposition.

This is what makes the EM field a candidate for the substrate of consciousness: it is the only physical entity in the brain that is inherently unified. Neural firing is distributed — it happens in separate locations, at separate times, in separate neurons. The EM field is unified — it is a single, continuous, spatiotemporally extended entity that integrates information from all neural sources.

The CEMI Framework: Four Key Claims

McFadden’s CEMI theory makes four specific claims:

Claim 1: The brain’s EM field is conscious. The subjective experience of consciousness — qualia, feelings, thoughts, perceptions — is identical to the spatiotemporal pattern of the brain’s electromagnetic field. When you see red, the redness IS a specific pattern in the EM field. When you feel pain, the painfulness IS a specific pattern in the EM field.

This is a radical identity claim, analogous to the identity between water and H2O. Water is not caused by H2O. Water does not emerge from H2O. Water IS H2O. Similarly, consciousness is not caused by the EM field. It IS the EM field.

Claim 2: The EM field carries more information than neural spike patterns alone. Neural spike patterns encode information in the timing and frequency of action potentials. But the EM field encodes additional information in the phase relationships between oscillating neural populations, in the spatial gradients of field strength, and in the complex interference patterns created by superimposing millions of neural contributions. This “field information” is not reducible to spike information — it is a qualitatively new level of information processing that exists only in the electromagnetic domain.

Claim 3: The EM field influences neural activity. This is the claim that makes CEMI a causal theory rather than an epiphenomenal one. McFadden argues that the brain’s EM field is not merely generated by neural activity — it feeds back and influences neural activity. Specifically, the EM field can bias the firing of neurons whose dendrites are oriented with or against the field lines, can modulate the threshold for action potential generation, and can influence the release of neurotransmitters at synapses.

This claim is supported by a growing body of experimental evidence:

• Anastassiou et al. (2011, Nature Neuroscience) showed that extracellular electric fields — of magnitudes comparable to those generated by neural activity — can influence the timing and probability of action potentials in cortical neurons.
• Fröhlich and McCormick (2010, Neuron) demonstrated that endogenous electric fields in the brain are sufficient to synchronize neural activity — meaning the EM field generated by neural firing can, in turn, coordinate the firing of the neurons that generated it.
• Francis et al. (2003, Journal of Neuroscience) showed that applied electric fields can modulate long-term potentiation (LTP) — the cellular mechanism of learning and memory.

Claim 4: Consciousness is the EM field’s way of computing. The CEMI theory proposes that the brain has two information-processing systems operating in parallel: the neural spike system (electrochemical computation in neural circuits) and the EM field system (electromagnetic computation in the brain’s field). Consciousness is associated with the EM field system, while unconscious processing (reflexes, autonomic functions, habitual behaviors) is associated with the neural spike system.

This dual-processing architecture explains why some brain processes are conscious and others are not. Processes that contribute to the EM field (synchronized, large-scale neural activity) become conscious. Processes that do not contribute to the EM field (local, asynchronous activity) remain unconscious. The EM field acts as a “selection filter” — only information that is represented in the field enters consciousness.

Why CEMI Is Better Than the Alternatives

CEMI has several advantages over competing theories of consciousness:

It solves the binding problem. The EM field is inherently unified. It integrates information from distributed neural sources by the physics of electromagnetic superposition. No additional mechanism is needed to “bind” distributed processes into a unified experience — the physics does it automatically.

It explains the unity of consciousness. You have one conscious experience, not billions. Despite having 86 billion neurons firing independently, you experience one unified stream of consciousness. CEMI explains this: you have one EM field, and consciousness is that field.

It explains the relationship between neural complexity and consciousness. Simple neural systems (invertebrate ganglia, brainstem reflexes) generate weak, incoherent EM fields and are presumably not conscious. Complex neural systems (mammalian cortex) generate strong, coherent EM fields and are presumably conscious. The correlation between neural complexity and the EM field provides a physical basis for the intuition that consciousness correlates with brain complexity.

It makes testable predictions. The most important predictions:

• Disrupting the brain’s EM field (without disrupting neural firing) should disrupt consciousness. This prediction is partially supported by the observation that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can transiently disrupt conscious perception.
• Enhancing the brain’s EM field coherence should enhance consciousness. This prediction is consistent with the observation that meditation increases EEG coherence and is associated with enhanced subjective clarity.
• Anesthesia should work primarily by disrupting EM field coherence rather than by blocking neural firing. This prediction is testable and partially supported by evidence.

It provides a physical substrate for free will. If the EM field influences neural activity (Claim 3), then consciousness is not epiphenomenal — it is causally effective. The EM field (consciousness) can influence the brain (neural activity), which in turn produces behavior. This provides a physical mechanism for conscious agency that is absent from purely neural theories.

The Quantum Biology Connection

McFadden is also a leading figure in quantum biology — the study of quantum phenomena in biological systems. His 2014 book “Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology” (co-authored with Jim Al-Khalili) documented evidence for quantum effects in photosynthesis, enzyme catalysis, avian navigation, and olfaction.

The connection to CEMI is suggestive: if quantum effects operate in biological systems, they could influence the brain’s EM field in ways that classical physics does not predict. Quantum coherence in neural microtubules (as proposed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory) could contribute to the EM field’s information content, potentially enriching the field with quantum information that is not available from classical neural firing patterns.

McFadden has been cautious about making this connection explicit, but the implication is clear: CEMI and quantum biology together point toward a picture of consciousness as an electromagnetic phenomenon with quantum characteristics — a picture that is far richer and more mysterious than the simple “consciousness is computation” model that dominates mainstream neuroscience.

The Criticisms and Responses

CEMI has faced several criticisms:

“The EM field is too weak to influence neural activity.” This was the primary objection when McFadden first published. But the experimental evidence (Anastassiou, Fröhlich, Francis, and others) has since demonstrated that endogenous EM fields can and do influence neural activity at biologically relevant field strengths. The objection is now empirically refuted.

“The EM field is an epiphenomenon — it does not do anything.” This is the epiphenomenalism objection: the EM field is generated by neural activity but does not causally contribute to it. McFadden’s response: if the EM field can influence neural firing (as the experimental evidence shows), it is not epiphenomenal. It is a causal agent in brain dynamics.

“How does an EM field become conscious?” This is the “hard problem” objection: even if consciousness is identical to the EM field, we still do not understand why an EM field should feel like anything. McFadden acknowledges this but argues that CEMI reduces the hard problem to a more tractable form: instead of asking “why does complex computation feel like something?” we ask “why does an EM field with specific information content feel like something?” The second question, while still unanswered, is more constrained and more amenable to empirical investigation.

“EEG patterns correlate with consciousness but do not prove identity.” True. Correlation does not prove identity. But McFadden’s claim is not based solely on correlation — it is based on the physical properties of the EM field (unity, information integration, causal efficacy) that match the properties of consciousness better than any other known physical entity in the brain.

The Implications: Consciousness as a Field

If CEMI is correct, the implications extend far beyond academic neuroscience:

Consciousness is a physical phenomenon. It is not mystical, not supernatural, not outside the domain of physics. It is an electromagnetic field — the same kind of field that carries radio signals, light, and X-rays. It is subject to the same physical laws. It can be measured, modulated, and studied with the same instruments used to study any other electromagnetic phenomenon.

Consciousness can be influenced by external EM fields. If consciousness IS an EM field, then external EM fields can interact with it directly. This provides a physical mechanism for phenomena that are currently considered “fringe”: the effects of electromagnetic pollution on mental health, the reported sensitivity of some individuals to EM fields, and the potential effects of strong EM fields (from MRI machines, TMS devices, or natural geomagnetic sources) on consciousness.

Consciousness may extend beyond the skull. The brain’s EM field does not stop at the skull. It extends into the space around the head, diminishing with distance. If consciousness is this field, then consciousness is not strictly confined to the skull — it extends, weakly, into the immediate environment. This provides a potential physical mechanism for phenomena like “sensing someone’s presence” or the reported effects of physical proximity on mood and cognition.

The heart’s EM field contributes to consciousness. The heart generates an EM field approximately 100 times stronger than the brain’s (as measured by the HeartMath Institute). If consciousness is an EM field phenomenon, the heart’s field may contribute to the overall conscious experience — providing a physical basis for the “heart intelligence” reported by contemplative traditions and for the emotional and intuitive functions attributed to the heart.

McFadden’s CEMI theory is not the final word on consciousness. But it may be the most important word spoken so far — a theory that is physically grounded, empirically testable, and capable of solving the binding problem that has stumped neuroscience for decades. It places consciousness squarely within the domain of physics while preserving its causal efficacy and its unity.

The brain’s EM field is not a byproduct. It is not waste heat. It is not an epiphenomenon to be ignored while we study the “real” neural computation.

It is you.