EMQM17_35_Stuart Hameroff

Thank you all for being here and it's a great privilege and honor and also a challenge to follow
Rogers talks are so interesting I'm going to talk about some of the work that we've done together.
Consciousness Boehm and Penrose now both David Bowman Roger Penrose have invoked quantum
of quantum effects and consciousness David bone by equating more or less mental and physical to is
implicated and explicate orders and also describing conscious thought as distributed and non-local
and of course Roger has invoked objective reduction as a solution to the measurement problem in
causing resulting in consciousness rather than consciousness causing collapse 180 degrees
differently and in the background of the slide you see a neuron with the yellow of the microtubules
that I'll be talking about and most use of the brain look at neurons strictly from the surface all this
money for brain mapping is looking just at the surface it's kind of like looking at all of medicines or
dermatology and I think that's a big mistake so we're going to go inside the neuron a little bit but 1st
ask what is consciousness and we take it for granted that when we open our eyes. The world out
there appears inside our heads being if you will of being during this talk will mean having subjective
conscious experience and its approach to various modellers neuroscientists neuroscience artificial
intelligence art is that excess physics Schrodinger's cat psychiatry anaesthesia and that looks a little
bit like me and I'm going to talk about anesthesia as a tool to understand consciousness meditation
and philosophy but let's let's talk a little bit about anesthesia it's what I've been doing for my living
for 43 years and I wrote a chapter in the book at the millennium on the greatest invention
supposedly of the past 2000 years and anesthesia is 1st alphabetically. Yes And when you think
about it it's a great it's a great thing because imagine if we didn't have it and you broke your leg or
birthday or appendix things would be a lot different your outlook would be a lot different so what do
we know about industry and what can it tell us about consciousness because under under anesthesia
the brain is still active What's gone is consciousness the brain is still active we used the book we use
evoke potentials to look at spine integrity and so forth. So in the 1900. Some gases were discovered
which had low concentration caused euphoria and giddiness and here we see laughing gas living
Made Easy and this is politically very correct prescriptions for scolding wives just give them some
money. And subsequently ether was used for ether frolics but higher concentrations subjects
became unconscious and if you don't go too far they kept on breathing and woke up when you when
you removed it and this was used for surgery under anesthesia and this is the 1st successful
anesthesia at the Mass General in Boston. Now in the 19th century was discovered that breathing
certain gases were all breathing gases right now roughly 80 percent nitrogen 20 percent oxygen in
that a mixture a small Mr 0 bunch of other gases and they found these other gases that when mixed
with their oxygen you still need oxygen immobilised or enough of the ties all animal studies
mammals and 50 ns insects fish warm even plants can be anesthetized and strangely the gases
varied tremendously in chemical structure including ethers halogen ated hydrocarbons no interest
oxide and the inert element which isn't shown here chemically quite different had the same same
effect and the necessary concentration breathing when equilibrated in lungs blood and brain to
immobilize. Or nest the ties all the animals was precisely the same for each gas from insects to
elephants and equilibrium takes the same amount of anaesthesia to put a horse or cow or pig to
sleep as it does a human or an insect or a salamander and it's quite amazing this became known as
the minimal alveolar concentration or Matt inversely related to potency the more anesthetic you
need the higher the Mack the weaker the anesthetic. Now a common factor was sought for the
seemingly unitary mode of anesthesia among disparate chemical structures and such a factor was
found at the turn of the 20th century related to solubility where these anesthetics would would bind
her dissolved in the body and it turned out to relate on the old saying oil and water don't mix Hans
Meier in 1907 and Charles over 10 in 2001 working independently looked at a whole bunch of gases
with a whole bunch of animals and over time put this graph together in which the they found that
the potency of an anesthetic shown on the on the left is as Max So the the higher the Mack the
weaker the anesthetic so the lower here the stronger the anesthetic with oxy flare and being the
most potent anesthetic was literally proportional over many many orders of magnitude to solubility
in olive oil so the more the more soluble an olive oil the more potent the anesthetic this seemed very

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strange. Now too if you think about it if you look at the body or the brain as pharmacologist do as a
as a collection of compartments a side ability compartments you could grind up a body if you will
and put in a bunch of different containers then you would see and plotted on this on the graph we're
going this way is more polar so out here would be polar solvent like water or blood so something out
here would be highly sizeable in the blood moving this way less valuable in blood but highly soluble
in fat and orderly tissues including the brain the brain has a lot of. Material that is is oil like a non-
polar. So that means that industry Asia acts and consciousness therefore arises from areas that are
highly non-polar like aromatics and Halifax shown here and tell you when and benzene this is where
anesthesia binds and acts and presumably were consciousness arises now how would that happen.
Well specifically and bind it by quantum level vendor balls London forces in regions of the oil like
regions of Hildebrand solubility coefficient lambda a $15.00 to $19.00 units indicating a non-polar
environment akin to olive oil with pilot trying to residents clouds. Now Pi resonance rings this is the.
Familiar 6 sided carbon ring the basis for organic chemistry were made of these kinds of rings life is
the pens on these kinds of arrangements with 3 extra electron which aren't shown here but they
form these electron clouds residence clouds called residence above and below the ring and you form
this non-local d a localized cloud of electrons above and below the ring and these rings these clouds
support electric and magnetic dipole oscillations x. Of tons charge transfer phone photons
fluorescence London force dipoles and spin states so this is where the quantum stuff happens or can
happen now if you take 2 of these rings by themselves benzene for example Fenner rings are called
biology they tend to attract by vendor falls attractions London forces and they get to a critical
distance call the vendor Vols radians radius and the electrons in one form a cloud which repels the
other cloud and these clouds oscillate back and forth in terror herds and ambient temperature Katie
at 10 to the 12 this is terror heard saw salacious So if you put these things together they're going to
oscillate in terror herds Now if you take most most bio molecules or emf apathic so they have a non-
polar ring with the 3 extra electron clouds and then a polar tail with charges that bind in water and
so they have a non-polar rings in the polar tails and they tend to coalesce all in water don't mix and
the non-polar rings stick together and formed by the end of all the forces and form kind of a deal
localized region or original deal localised electron clouds that are called My cells and with the pole
are sticking out to be soluble in water and operand back to the 920 s. I believe called these my cells
as the 1st form of cells and this may have been how biological systems formed and proteins fold in
this way they have a non-polar region inside that that's Or like in a polar region on the outside. Also
lifted by layers membranes have the very similar with a non-polar regions in the middle and the
polar tail sticking outside the cell and inside the cell and nucleic acid d.n.a. and r.n.a. the same thing
with the pie step where the appearance imprint is lined up so lip is. Membranes nucleic acids
proteins all have this non-polar interior conducive to quantum effects on the interior which means
that a quantum underground underlies biomolecules and living States in general since all the major
biomolecules have this inside so the mystery of quantum biology may be solved by the fact that it's
happening in deep inside the cells were it's hard to probe and away from polar charges that might
cause decoherence also molecules that are psychoactive that cause mental state changes including
neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin have these aromatic rings these pirates and springs
as do the psychedelic drugs l.s.d. d.m.t. And so aside they have these these pirates and it's clouds
and they cause mental states the opposite of anaesthesia you might think that they expand
consciousness so then the question is in which by molecules and cells structures that exact. There's
a long history of this research in 846 Claude Bernard showed that amoeba Here's that amoeba in the
background which streams along in the Boyd movement that the a me boy cytoplasmic streaming
enemy boy movement was reversible inhibited by the anaesthetic chloroform you put chloroform
over it and stop moving and you blew it off and. Resume moving and this was shown in the 30s to be
due to affect on the cytoplasm inside the cell rather than on the membrane. In 1968 Allison and not
John none from from the u.k.. Tested effects of anaesthetics on microtubules using this this
organism. Theory I'm which has all these spiky things coming out x. And names and if you cross cut
one of them you see that they're made of these double helix arrays of microtubules I'll tell you a little

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bit more about microtubules subsequently and they found that in the presence of how the thing that
these acts and names disappear they dissolve they depolarize the microtubules disassembled and
they published in Lancet that anesthesia was due to deepen the relation of microtubules however
and fortunately that occurs at about 5 times the amount of anesthetic required to put anyone or any
animal to sleep 5 Matt So add proper anesthetic concentrations it's very unlikely that anaesthesia is
de plume rising and he was microtubules However repeated anesthetics and elderly people tend to
cause Alzheimer's like dementia so it may be that repeated and excessive use of anaesthetic over
over time may actually contribute to your bike with people falling apart so take care you
microtubules Now how did so that was not accepted as a theory of of anesthesia but. In the night in
the most 20th century people realize that the membranes were a work site a ball and and they
thought and since anesthetics were lip insoluble. It was assumed that as they get. The lip and phase
and block excitability membranes but then it was realized that that proteins are responsible for the
excitability of membranes and Jim sure Dell among others tried to rescue the liquid hypothesis by
saying anesthetics act in the limit phase and prevented ion channels from opening and closing that
turned out to be wrong also because those effects could be mimicked by a slight temperature change
so. Subsequently Franks and believe bed here in London show that and ascetics acted directly on
proteins by acting in non-polar hydrophobic regions inside them with these pirates and clouds with
the ends which gave off light so they were able to measure light emission with a way on a static and
found a nice miter Overton correlation directly without any membranes in the picture so therefor I
anesthetics can act directly proteins so at that point time there was a fork in the road scientists and
they had a say and a set of mechanism could go back to go back to cytoskeleton proteins like Claude
Bernard and John Nunn or membrane proteins but most of the field went towards membrane
proteins and looked for effects of anaesthetics on. Receptor is for Sarah toning glycine Esto colon
Gabay receptor is the most common receptor Nick Franks was responsible for this for both the gases
and other anesthetics profile the time of day and ketamine but to make a long story short it didn't
work there was a mixed bag some would make them more excitable some less excitable some didn't
bind it all and this editorial so they were double edged sword they could both stimulate and excite
and in a series of papers. Into the 2000 a bunch of papers basically kind of gave up on the idea that
anesthetic to act on membrane proteins. In 200620088 group at Penn began to study systematically
anesthetic actions and found that they bind to about 70 different proteins in neurons half in the
membrane half in the cytoplasm and this group is. Going to house group show that using Juno mix
and proteomics that the effect seemed to be mostly on. With some other proteins need the rich were
involved in signalling so there proteomics and you know mix pointed to microtubules They also
looked at facts of this anesthetic which is fluorescent on movement of tadpoles using up their
genetics and the anesthetic is only active when illuminated with fluorescent light when it fluoresces
so they get temples have conveniently transparent head so they can swim around they eliminated
with that with the ultraviolet light and they would suddenly become anesthetized and and and so
they concluded that and then they showed that the bound to the microtubules and they concluded
that this anaesthetic at least acted on microtubules consistent with our theory which they called
quantum mobility theory not quite the right name a close enough. So and ascetics appeared to
specifically prevent consciousness but binding to microtubules where in the brain do anesthetics act
on microtubules and what do they do there. Well here's a slice of cortex which is probably the most
likely place and inputs from Salim Isco do several layers which all converge on layer 5 with these
giant pyramidal cells and these are the most likely place for consciousness not that it might not
about other neurons but the den drugs which rise to the surface give rise to e.g. the outputs Axon go
to move your arms and do things and exert causal action in the world and if we look inside these
giant pyramidal neurons we see in the cell bodies microtubules which are uniquely arrayed in mixed
polarity networks of interrupted networks now my computer is part of a cytoskeleton if you think
they're there for structural support it be a mystery why they're broken interrupted you wouldn't
break your femur bone in half for skeletal support and they're also a mix polarity pointing up and
down adjacent weight and this may be to optimize resonance and interference an idea of the Roger

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came up with in one of our our later papers so. Brendel source of a best bet for source of
consciousness and anesthetic action and if we look at it to be a lead So here's a microtubule and if
we take one tubular protein we see that it has 8. Trip the fan rings which have these pirates and
clouds and this is very similar to the resonance groups in photosynthesis proteins which have been
shown to implement quantum coherence So there could be some similarity there and if we look more
deeply at tubular and in addition to the trip the fan shown in the blue and look at the federal felony
and Tyrus. All of which have residents there's a total of $86.00 and it's groups in one to Dillon and in
the red you see where anesthetics binds to and if they do bind in a confluence of these groups and
this is shown by tribes Craddock and myself and others in 2012 so anything's bonded to Bill and
there's plenty of pie residence there so where do we go from there well I'm going to tell you about a
recent study we did and it started from the fact that in the 1990 s. Some other gases were
discovered oddball douses which bind in non polar regions according to Meyer Overton but don't
cause anesthesia or immobility given to an animal and we know they're bound in the same place of
the anaesthetic the animals keep on behaving and doing what they do and they're called There's a
couple of 6 and try Flora methyl benzene and then another one which is both anaesthetic and
convulsing it's a convulsed in a low doses but anaesthetic in regular doses and these can be used to
test effect of anaesthesia because they're binding in the place they were and it's the end of studies
spine but they don't cause anaesthesia so here's all of them together so in this study we used these 8
anesthetics showing up here these 2 not anesthetics and the one convulsed in their color coded so
blue pink and green. So we 1st show that and statics Here's the reference from nature scientific
reports. Late August we 1st showed that anesthetics and non anesthetics which do bind to the side
of anesthetic anesthetic action correlate with potency and polarize ability that is to say the non and
ascetics don't have any potency and don't have changes in in polarized ability so for example here
we plot Max minimal alveolar concentration so the lower the number the more potent the anesthetic
with oxy flouring it's not methamphetamine it's with oxy floor and no f. Is the most potent anesthetic
it's highly highly sayable in. Olive oil and the weakest which would be nitric oxide about 100 percent
at 100 percent so you have to breed almost 100 percent nighters you have to do it at high pressure
to at oxygen but the t.f.m. b. And the f. 6 which are not anesthetics are off the charts in terms of
math 10 time 10 atmospheres which is basically impossible and the convulsive anaesthetic is right
on the line because it is an anaesthetic so Ok so that so polarized ability which might affect Pyra
sentence of bonds clouds is a key factor so we learned that and this pretty much tells is the same
thing the polarized ability. Is off the charts and doesn't correlate with potency if you reject this you
see where they're Well the word should be but they don't they don't have any effects and here's
polarized polarized ability vs ability. Ok we then used this fancy simulation Travis Pratik and his
colleagues. Predictions docking quantum chemistry and modeling and found that k.t. that and we
applied this to all 86 where they did all 86 by residents groups into Poland and we found that it k.t.
there was a spectrum of collective dipole oscillations among these 86 pirates in its groups in
2000000000 with a common mode peak at 613 terahertz which is in the blue light region it's not to
say that the brain is giving off blue light this is internal There may not be photo excited states but
there's these oscillations in the in the blue region of the spectrum with then looked at the same
simulated effects of the 8 anesthetics the 2 non anesthetics and the one anesthetic convulse and on
these collected dipole oscillations of all $86.00 and this is what we found now this is a subtraction
plot we started with the spectrum without any anesthetic or at a gas and then added the gas and
took the difference so what you see here is what is missing from the normal spectrum for each
anaesthetic and so. For dust filler and for example you can see the 613 peak here and here and here
and here and here and here and here and here but it's missing from Met of 6 and it's missing it
actually goes up in t.f.m. b. But it's there in flu influence which is the anesthetic and also in other
words all the anesthetics including the anesthetic convulse and abolish the $613.00 tear heard speak
but the non anesthetic which are binding in the same place does not do enough therefore this 613
terrorists peak must be important for consciousness and it goes away with anaesthesia. And here's
another way to look at that that if you look at the. Things are way over there and the set the

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frequency shift of the 613 herds so basically anesthetics take it away and and the non anesthetics do
not despite them being in the same place so energetic action on consciousness correlates with
dampening of terror hurts oscillations into subunit of microtubules So what does that tell us so
here's a guy kind of the big picture that we have. Because as Max Tegmark pointed out yesterday we
don't operate at 10 of the minus 10 of the 21st Hertz and 10 minutes 21 seconds however we do
operate I think at 10 to 12 Hertz here even though electrophysiology is down here in Hertz and
maybe 100 hertz But what happens if so here's the terrorists' oscillations in the in the Pi resonance
dipoles in 2000000000 So let's start here we have a pyramidal cell we take one microtubule and
then we take a rope microtubules we have these collective dipoles across these this roll of to balance
which by the way follow the Fibonacci jump around the microtubule and we block and and then we
get down to the individual dipoles and the end is that it blocks these dipole oscillations So that's the
point they block the Terence oscillations down to the nitty gritty level of terror $10.00 to $12.00
thirds and that slows everything else done going upwards in scale and faster so we think that there's
a kind of cat hierarchical caste frequency cascade which to me is more like music thing computation
with interference beats occurring in various frequency levels and in fact in our recent paper Roger
came up with the idea that interference speeds may give rise to the g. Now been used for a 100
years and is very useful clinically but nobody really knows where it comes from and why specific
bands correlate with this or that and how it's globally coherent over the whole brain despite its
clinical utility it still. Somewhat of a mystery so we propose that e.g. is actually an interference beat
coming beats coming from faster by British and in microtubules inside all those neurons because all
those neurons including the parental cells from which he comes from have microtubules within them
oscillating in megahertz and so forth megahertz kill Hurt's. Bigger herds so terror herds bigger
herds mega herds and kill hurts now there's is experimentally supported by the work of on on a bond
buying party and his. Colleagues in Japan who applied nanotechnology at ambient temperatures to
neurons here using electrodes and then individual microtubules and then and then rows of to be a
lens and found these what they did was they applied alternating current and and measured
conductivity and the microtubule was is a good insulator. But when you apply alternating current
They found that at certain critical frequencies of applied a c. The microphone became highly
conductive almost superconductive and they then plotted these frequencies these resonant
frequencies and they found very similar triplet patterns going from the bottom in terror herds
gigahertz and mega herds from individual to billions then moving up to a microtubule gigahertz
megahertz and killing herds them moving up the level of neurons mega herds killing herds and hurts
so if you can put those all together and that's how we came up with this graph of this cascade of
megahertz of Terence gigahertz megahertz killer herds and herds oscillations. Skipping rope
roughly 3 orders of magnitude but having some similar patterns suggesting some kind of resident
hierarchy going from Terra herds all the way out to e.g. and maybe even slower. Ok so how does this
relate to consciousness why would this cause consciousness and for that I'm going to turn back to
the measurement problem and bring in Roger's work and as you all know quantum objects can be in
superposition of multiple states or locations simultaneously for example Schrodinger's cat both dead
and alive this is the example common used to resolve this paradox but 1st what is superposition and
Roger mentioned this in this talk but basically he quoted. Spacetime curvature to mass position and
he used these 2 dimensional space time she should say it is but the Emperor's New Mind 989 which I
read was heavily influenced by and he basically said that a particle in this position would be this
coverage or if you move the particle it's this curvature and a particle oscillating between 2 positions
would be basically spacetime curvature oscillating back between between 2 locations in space time
and a superposition therefore would be both curvatures with the particle in both positions at the
same time and 2 curvatures Now you might imagine that. Ok you might imagine that. Ok why don't
we see definite states that are perceived world well the conscious observer effect let me just go back
and say that I think I missed one slide which is kind of a moment or not if these continued you would
have if each curvature continued you get multiple universes so. We have a conscious observer effect
where the observer suppose that causes collapse this is been around for a long time and has some

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proponents nowadays but it puts consciousness outside of science consciousness becomes some
mysterious entity and outside of science it doesn't answer the question of multiple worlds in which
the spacetime curvature is would separate and bifurcate but it's popular but in my view untestable
and unnecessary and if you have collapse itself collapse in particular the bone pilot wave which may
die particles and where to go and there's actually been models of Bohmian microtubule effects.
Errants but I think this may be encompassed by Penrose objective reduction because it's happening
in the universe all around us and what Max Tegmark was saying yesterday decoherence acting as a
server he may just be parroting what Roger has been saying about objective reduction and then
finally wave function self collapse where objective reduction is causes or is consciousness where we
have the superposition separation and here it is if the separation were to continue would have
multiple worlds and parallel universes but instead what happens at time t. Was h. Over g. Which is
the indeterminacy principle at this time there's the collapse one disappears and this one continues
bang and this is a moment of conscious awareness so instead of consciousness causing collapse
collapse or so collapse by objective reduction causes consciousness Now these would be occurring
everywhere ubiquitous random and proto conscious light decoherence and would have some
subjective subject pivoting but would be random and no memory and not really add up to anything
and therefore somewhat like pan psychism. And the point is that objective reduction is the only
specific mechanism for consciousness ever proposed of an hand-waving arguments and emergence
theory without any specifics so but Roger needed a quantum computational mechanism which could
orchestrate this these into these processes terminate by objective reduction and regulate functional
Ronal and synoptic activities and the answer I proposed to him and he agreed was microtubules and
we teamed up in the early nineties here we are the 1st to some countries in the Grand Canyon
there's Roger there's just colics and David Chalmers a few other people there's me and we began to
cook up this theory which basically says that when you reach a threshold for object for objective
reduction here there's a conscious moment which correlates with something happening in spacetime
geometry we approach the hard problem of. The redness of the rose by saying the conventional view
is would say that being was happening due to a pattern of activity we would say that it's due to
reproducing or perhaps and tangling with the particular configuration of spacetime geometry that
corresponds to the redness of the rose and we have a sequence of moments bing bang bang bang for
example 40 hertz or could be much much faster along with backward time of facts which comes from
our own often also supported by limits experiments of backward information which I think is is
necessary for free well because the activity that happens when we act consciously happens after
we've acted which causes neuroscientists to say that consciousness is epiphenomenal which I think
is a mistake. And so over by equals a to over t. This is some we considered superposition of 3 levels
and the dominant effect turns out be atomic nuclei firmly length separation 10 in the. Superposition
separate gives a domino effect that's going to control the object a reduction and some problems and
Chris. Systems with or core of the risen over the years. For example the cube it isn't realistic the
conformational change which we had the original was due to electron. Was unfeasible and we
actually didn't need that it was a nice cartoon but it's been replaced by these dipole oscillations
which are more like top logical or geometric cubits and there's no conformational change the. The
86 clouds are acting collectively and it's enough to move the nuclei for all those atoms by their
diameter do the Mossbauer effect or some other effect and that gives rise to a geometric cubits top
logical sequence perhaps the 2nd brain to warm white noisy 25 milliseconds too long to avoid
decoherence and Max Tegmark. That so it Max said that. Decoherence. From microtubule attend the
minus 13 seconds 10 of the 21st 21 for a whole neuron to minus 13 for a micro to go but he used a
superposition separation which is in the denominator of his decoherence time of 24 nanometer
based on. Moving along $33.00 tubular whereas we use the Fermi length and this was an error of 7
orders of magnitude compared to what we had proposed and Scott Haig injector since Can I use
Max's own decoherence formula corrected the separation we found 2 other errors a kind of for 2
more magnitude and calculated 10 to the minus 4 seconds and we published results one year later in
the same journal fizzer of the. In the 10s of minutes for the coherence time has been experimentally

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shown by bond to Pani as I showed you previously and it turns out we don't actually need that fast so
here's the 1010 minus 4th would be killers. So it turns out we don't need that fast because if Oracle
was happening here. Which would give too few neurons in our 2014 paper we suggest the Oracle or
could occur for example 10 megahertz and that interference slightly different could could could give
rise to slower b. Frequency so we only really need terror hertz or maybe megahertz maybe even
terror which we already know happens and this would require a lot more to be a lens and which
makes a lot more sense to have the 6 neurons which is predicted by other models and then altered
states for example the residence groups of the psychedelics and so forth might increase the
frequency and push push push the other way so we beat you because the opposite of anaesthesia so
we have an enhanced consciousness So in conclusion or in 998 we rode 20 testable predictions
which reviewed in 20146 had been validated not refuted experimental evidence. Supports all core
from anaesthesia and quantum vibrations. In quantum underground pervades living systems and life
may be intrinsically quantum quantum biological effect at its root covering neurobiology quantum
physics relativity and philosophy or core I claim is the most complete and verified theory of
consciousness yet per for yet put forth that hasn't been severely challenged including by Max's
incorrect assertions and addressing quantum vibrations in microtubules offer therapeutic
opportunities for mental and cognitive disorders for example we're we're doing clinical trials of
putting ultrasound megahertz into the brain for dementia and traumatic brain injury and opioid
addiction and will stay tuned for that and finally let me just mention the conference that John
Connelly mentioned which will be coming up in April and you should all come thank you very much.