What Does Quantum Biology Have to Do With Me?

“Quantum biology.”

Yeah, I know.

It sounds like something involving a chalkboard full of equations that nobody outside a university physics department wants to look at.

That wasn’t what interested me about it.

I wanted to know one thing:

What does any of this have to do with me?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Light.

Sleep.

Electricity.

Timing.

The sun.

The environment around your bed.

When you eat.

When you go outside.

What your cells use for energy.

Even where you live.

Those aren’t abstract physics problems.

That’s everyday life.

And that is what eventually pulled me into quantum biology.

I Was Ready to Try Anything

I didn’t go looking for quantum biology because I thought it sounded interesting.

I needed answers.

By that point, I had already been through four back surgeries and a hip replacement.

I had been taking opiates for pain for years.

My neck felt like it was going to be the next surgery.

My entire schedule revolved around doctors, appointments, prescriptions, tests and procedures.

At some point I stood in front of two surgeons and told them:

“I don’t want any more pills and I don’t want another surgery. I want to know what is causing the problem so I can deal with that instead of just living from surgery to surgery.”

Both of them raised their hands and scratched their heads.

Seriously.

That moment stayed with me.

I wasn’t asking how to manage the next problem.

I wanted to know why the problems kept happening.

That scene eventually made it into the project I submitted to the Quantum Biology Collective.

I was in such bad shape from all the ongoing surgeries that I was ready to try almost anything to escape the surgical treadmill I had landed on.

So I started with diet.

I followed Dr. Steven Gundry’s approach from The Plant Paradox.

Within weeks, I was getting results that surprised me.

That got my attention.

So naturally, I started researching more.

A lot more.

And while I was watching health videos on YouTube, one person kept appearing in the suggested videos.

Jack Kruse.

I kept seeing him.

And seeing him.

Eventually I thought:

Fine. Who is this guy?

I clicked on one of his videos.

That was when I discovered quantum biology.

And when I started applying what I was learning, that was when my health really switched gears.

That’s the best way I can describe it.

It switched into high gear.

The diet had already shown me that changing what I was doing could produce noticeable results.

But now I wasn’t just looking at food anymore.

I was paying attention to sunlight.

Artificial light.

Circadian timing.

Grounding.

My electrical environment.

Sleep.

And eventually, where I lived.

Suddenly I was looking at the whole environment my body was trying to function inside.

That opened a much bigger door.

So What Is Quantum Biology?

Here is the simplest way I know how to explain it.

Quantum biology looks at how physics operates inside living systems.

Think about your body for a second.

You have a human body.

Your body is made of organs.

Your organs are made of tissues.

Those tissues are made of cells.

Cells are built from molecules.

And molecules are made of atoms.

Now keep zooming in.

Atoms contain electrons, protons and neutrons.

At that point, you’re no longer looking at a heart, a liver, a muscle or even a cell.

You’re looking at physics.

Electrons moving.

Protons being transferred.

Light interacting with molecules.

Electrical charges.

Energy changing from one state to another.

That is where quantum biology starts to enter the picture.

Quantum biology asks what happens when events at that incredibly small scale influence what happens farther up the chain—in molecules, cells, organs and eventually the entire human being.

That was the part that grabbed me.

Because most of us were taught to think about health from the top down.

Bones.

Organs.

Blood.

Hormones.

Genes.

Food.

Drugs.

But if you keep drilling down far enough, biology and chemistry eventually run straight into physics.

And the body can’t somehow escape the laws of physics just because we call it “biology.”

My original QBC project was built around this distinction between looking only at the material structure of the body and looking at the energetic processes underneath it.

Then I Started Looking at the Environment Differently

It took a while, but I learned how much attention I had not been paying to environmental inputs.

Some are obvious.

Sunlight.

Temperature.

Darkness.

Noise.

Others are invisible.

Grounding.

Magnetism.

Electromagnetic fields.

The Schumann resonance.

You can’t see any of those things.

Then again, you can’t see gravity either.

That doesn’t mean gravity isn’t there.

I began thinking much more seriously about the way invisible physical forces and environmental conditions interact with the molecules and cells that make up the body.

That was a huge change in the way I thought about health.

I stopped seeing the body as some sealed-off machine operating by itself.

The body is always living inside an environment.

And that environment is constantly interacting with it.

That is where quantum biology became practical for me.

Not as some abstract physics lesson.

But as a way of asking:

What is my environment doing to my biology all day long?

I Had Been Looking at the Body as a Collection of Parts

My parents were in medical school when I was little.

One of my favorite books on their shelf was Gray’s Anatomy.

While other preschool kids were doing whatever normal preschool kids did, I was staring at pictures of muscles, organs and body parts.

I loved it.

But that also gives you a pretty good picture of the way most of us learn to think about the human body.

Here is the heart.

Here is the spine.

Here is a nerve.

Here is the liver.

Something goes wrong?

Find the bad part.

That model is useful.

Obviously.

But quantum biology made me ask a different question:

What makes all of those parts work?

Not just:

What are they made of?

But:

What powers them?

What coordinates them?

What tells one process that it is morning and another that it is nighttime?

What happens when the signals coming from the environment no longer resemble the environment in which human biology developed?

Those questions were much more interesting to me.

The Electrical Part Made Sense Immediately

I had an advantage here.

My specialty in the military was avionics.

I repaired aircraft computers, navigation systems, infrared equipment, radar, weapons systems, wiring and connectors.

Later I worked for Pacific Bell phone company.

So electricity wasn’t mysterious to me.

Voltage.

Current.

Fields.

Signals.

Radiation.

Equipment.

Wiring.

None of that sounded exotic.

What was strange was realizing how little anyone had ever encouraged me to think about electricity in relation to biology.

We were trained how not to electrocute ourselves.

Good advice.

We knew not to operate radar with somebody standing directly in front of it.

Also good advice.

But that was basically where the biological discussion ended.

Years later, when I started looking at electromagnetic fields from the biological side instead of the technician side, I had one of those:

Wait a minute...

moments.

I had spent years working around electrical systems and had never really thought about the body itself as an electrical system living inside an electrical environment.

My original QBC project went into that background in detail because it was one of the reasons the electrical side of quantum biology clicked so quickly for me.

Then I Found Robert Becker

One of the people who really sent me down the rabbit hole was Dr. Robert O. Becker.

Becker was an orthopedic surgeon who became deeply interested in bioelectricity, healing and regeneration.

Why does a salamander regrow a limb?

Why don’t we?

What electrical processes are involved in healing?

Those are fascinating questions.

His work, and later Andrew Marino’s, opened up an entirely different way for me to think about biology.

I wasn’t suddenly deciding chemistry didn’t matter.

Of course chemistry matters.

I was realizing that biology also has electrical properties.

Your heart produces electrical activity.

Your nervous system uses electrical signaling.

Cells maintain electrical potentials across their membranes.

There is an electrical side to life.

What interested me was how far that idea goes.

Becker and Marino became a major part of my reading because they were asking questions about bioelectricity and environmental fields long before I knew anybody was asking them. My QBC project spent considerable space on their work for exactly that reason.

The Invisible Stuff Is Easy to Ignore

Here is another problem.

You can’t see most of it.

You can’t see an RF field.

You can’t smell Wi-Fi.

You can’t walk into a bedroom and look at a wall and see an electric field coming off the wiring.

So it is easy to ignore.

Then you turn on a meter.

Now things get interesting.

Suddenly one side of the room measures differently from the other.

Move closer to a router and the reading changes.

Shut something off and it changes again.

I like that.

I don’t particularly enjoy arguing over invisible things.

I’d rather measure them.

That eventually became part of the way I evaluate houses and sleeping environments.

Where is the bed?

What’s behind the wall?

Where is the Wi-Fi router?

What are the RF levels?

What are the electric and magnetic fields?

Can any obvious source be moved or turned off?

You don’t have to imagine anything.

Measure the environment.

Then decide what you want to do with the information.

Light Was the Bigger Revelation

Electricity was easy for me to understand.

Light was the bigger surprise.

Most people think light has one job:

Help you see.

Dark room?

Turn on a light.

Problem solved.

Except light is not just illumination.

Light is biological information.

The body responds differently to light depending on wavelength, intensity and timing.

And timing is huge.

Morning is not midnight.

Sunrise is not an LED ceiling fixture.

A bright phone six inches from your face at 1:00 a.m. is comparable to the same environmental signal as sunlight outside at noon.

Once I really absorbed that, modern indoor life started looking bizarre.

We spend huge amounts of time indoors during the day.

Then illuminate our houses at night.

Then stare at screens.

Then go to bed.

Then wonder why sleep is a mess.

Your Body Has a Clock

This is where circadian biology comes in.

Your body does not do everything at random.

Biological processes follow timing.

Sleep and wakefulness.

Hormone secretion.

Body temperature.

Metabolism.

Gene expression.

Lots of things change depending on the time of day.

The brain’s suprachiasmatic nucleus—the SCN—plays a central role in coordinating circadian timing.

In my original project I compared it to the conductor of an orchestra.

I still like that analogy.

Your cardiovascular system is one section.

Hormones another.

Metabolism another.

Sleep another.

Immune activity another.

Everybody is supposed to be following the conductor.

Light is one of the major signals telling that conductor what time it is.

Then you blast bright artificial light into your eyes at 2:00 in the morning.

In my way of looking at it:

Mozart just turned into Metallica.

The orchestra is still playing.

It just isn’t following the same score anymore.

The Strange Part Is That I Had Already Noticed This

This is one reason light became particularly interesting to me.

Before I had a quantum-biology explanation for it, I already knew something about artificial light bothered me.

Bathroom lights at night felt horrible.

Bright headlights.

Artificial lighting when I was already feeling bad.

Then much later, while going through old medical records, I found a note from a VA emergency-room visit.

February 14, 2018.

The nurse had written:

“Lights dimmed to provide more comfort for pt.”

I had to chuckle at the memory of griping about the bright lights in my hospital room.

Because the experience came first.

I wasn’t reading about artificial light and then deciding retroactively that it bothered me.

It had already bothered me enough for somebody else to document it.

The explanation came later.

That is a pattern I pay attention to.

Morning Light Started Looking Very Different

Once you understand that light is part of the body’s timing system, going outside in the morning doesn’t look quite as trivial anymore.

For most of human existence, sunrise happened whether anybody wanted it to or not.

Nobody needed an app.

Nobody needed a morning-light protocol.

Nobody needed a $300 biohacking device.

The sun came up.

Then the sun went down.

Night got dark.

Modern life gives us the ability to reverse almost all of that.

Stay inside during the day.

Blast artificial light at night.

Watch a bright screen in bed.

Then buy supplements because we feel terrible.

I started doing the opposite.

Get outside.

See morning light.

Spend more of the day outdoors.

Make nighttime darker.

Remarkably inexpensive.

Then There Are Mitochondria

This is another word that gets thrown around constantly in health circles.

Mitochondria are usually described as the “powerhouses of the cell.”

That is not a terrible place to start, although the actual biology is much more interesting.

What mattered to me was realizing that energy production is not some side issue.

It is fundamental.

Every biological process costs something.

Repair costs energy.

Movement costs energy.

Maintaining gradients costs energy.

Running a brain definitely costs energy.

The original QBC project used an electrical analogy: if mitochondria are part of the cellular energy system, then continually focusing only on food while ignoring other environmental inputs misses a big part of the picture.

I still think the analogy works.

Imagine the electricity goes out in your house.

You start rearranging the furniture.

New couch.

Move the table.

Different curtains.

The lights are still off.

That doesn’t mean furniture is useless.

It means you are working on a different problem.

That is how I eventually started thinking about diet.

Yes, diet matters.

But food isn’t the only input the body receives.

Light is an input.

Timing is an input.

Temperature is an input.

The electrical environment is an input.

Sleep is an input.

Location is an input.

Diet Is Not the Whole Universe

This is where I started separating myself from a lot of normal health conversations.

Something goes wrong and one of the first questions is:

“What are they eating?”

Fine.

Good question.

But why does the conversation so often stop there?

What time are you sleeping?

Do you ever see sunrise?

Are you outside during the day?

Is your bedroom dark?

Is it quiet?

What is the temperature?

What electrical device is next to your head when you sleep?

Are you staring at a screen until midnight?

Are you living in a climate that keeps you indoors all day?

Those questions became at least as interesting to me as:

Shrimp or beef?

Keto or vegetarian?

Carbs or no carbs?

People can fight that war without me.

Grounding Was Another Idea That Suddenly Seemed Less Weird

Grounding can sound mystical if somebody explains it badly.

I don’t think it needs to be mystical.

Take your shoes off.

Stand on the ground.

Walk on wet sand.

Put your feet in the ocean.

Humans spent nearly all of our existence in much more direct contact with the natural environment than we do now.

Today we can go from an insulated house to rubber-soled shoes to a car to another insulated building and barely touch the earth all day.

My interest is practical.

I prefer places where being barefoot and outside happens naturally.

That is much easier than turning another health idea into a complicated ritual.

If I live near a beach, I don’t need to schedule “grounding.”

I go to the beach.

This Is Where “Where Do I Live?” Became a Health Question

Once I started putting all these pieces together, location looked completely different.

Where you live isn’t just:

Weather.

Restaurants.

Taxes.

Beaches.

Cost of living.

Those things matter.

But now I also wanted to know:

How much usable sunlight am I actually getting?

Can I see sunrise easily?

How dark is it at night?

How noisy is it?

Can I sleep without air conditioning?

What is the RF environment?

What are the electrical fields?

Can I walk barefoot?

Can I get outside every day?

Will the climate make me spend twelve hours indoors?

Can I swim?

Can I reach medical care when I genuinely need it?

Do I have people around me I actually enjoy?

Suddenly location itself became part of the health equation.

That eventually took me to Mexico.

Then different parts of Mexico.

Islands.

Beach towns.

Mountains.

Cities.

Rural areas.

Eventually Nicaragua.

And I learned something important along the way:

You Don’t Live at a Latitude. You Live at an Address.

Two houses five minutes apart can be completely different environments.

One bedroom can be quiet, dark and electrically uneventful.

Another can have a router behind the wall, a streetlight in the window, nightclub bass until 4:00 a.m. and a bedroom that never cools below 80 degrees.

Same city.

Same latitude.

Not remotely the same place to live.

That is one of the main reasons Healthy Latitude exists.

Did Quantum Biology “Cure” Me?

I wouldn’t reduce my entire health history to a sentence like that.

Human biology is more complicated than that.

My own medical history certainly is.

What I can say is that learning this material changed my behavior dramatically.

I changed how much time I spent outside.

I changed the way I used artificial light.

I became interested in sunrise and circadian timing.

I started measuring the electrical environments where I lived.

I became far more deliberate about where I slept.

I moved to climates where outdoor living was easier.

And I began paying attention to what happened.

My original QBC project describes how dramatic that period felt to me: after years involving multiple surgeries, long-term pain medication, CPAP and constant medical care, I had become convinced that changing my environment was a major part of why my life had changed.

Several years later, I am actually more interested in documenting those experiences carefully than making sweeping claims about them.

What changed?

What didn’t?

What can I measure?

What do the medical records say?

Where does my memory match the records?

Where doesn’t it?

If the records contradict my memory, the records win.

That is much more useful than arguing.

Quantum Biology Changed the Questions I Ask

This may be the most important effect it had on me.

Before, the questions were mostly:

What drug?

What surgery?

What supplement?

What food?

Now I also ask:

What light?

What time?

What environment?

How much sleep?

How much sun?

What temperature?

What electrical exposure?

How much time outside?

What is happening around me every day that I have stopped noticing because it is “normal”?

Those are very different questions.

And sometimes changing the question changes everything.

This Article Started as My Quantum Biology Project

The first version of this article was not a blog post.

It was the project I submitted to the Quantum Biology Collective as part of the requirements for completing its quantum biology practitioner course, along with the required testing.

I wrote it last year.

And I was considerably angrier.

Reading it again now, that is obvious.

I had been through years of surgeries, pain, prescriptions and medical appointments and had just discovered an entirely different framework for thinking about biology.

My reaction was basically:

Why in the hell did it take me this long to hear about any of this?

Fair enough.

But today I am less interested in convincing somebody that everything they were taught is wrong.

If you’ve spent any time reading my story, you already understand why I went searching for something different.

I’m more interested in what we can actually learn by looking at biology through a wider lens.

So, What Does Quantum Biology Have to Do With Me?

Actually, quite a bit.

You wake up under some kind of light.

You spend your day under some kind of light.

You live inside electrical and electromagnetic environments.

Your biology operates according to timing.

Your cells require energy.

You sleep somewhere.

You eat at particular times.

You live in a particular climate.

Your body is continuously interacting with an environment whether you think about that environment or not.

That, to me, is where quantum biology becomes practical.

It isn’t about sitting around discussing quantum mechanics.

It is about recognizing that:

The Human Body Does Not Exist in Isolation.

You live somewhere.

And “somewhere” has properties.

Light.

Darkness.

Heat.

Cold.

Noise.

Electricity.

Wireless signals.

Sun.

Water.

Air.

People.

Sleep.

All of it becomes the environment in which your biology is trying to function.

Once I understood that, I stopped asking only:

What should I put into my body?

I started asking:

What Is My Environment Telling My Body All Day Long?

That question changed how I live.

It changed where I live.

And eventually it became one of the foundations of Healthy Latitude.

Where Healthy Latitude Fits Into This

Healthy Latitude is not based on the idea that there is one magical healthiest place on Earth.

There isn’t.

The better question is:

What environment fits you?

Your health.

Your sleep.

Your tolerance for heat.

Your need for sunlight.

Your need for medical care.

Your social life.

Your electrical environment.

Your lifestyle.

And ultimately the actual address where you are going to spend your days and nights.

That is why I don’t care much about another generic list of the “10 Healthiest Places to Retire.”

You aren’t going to live in a list.

You’re going to live in a bedroom.

In a house.

On a street.

In a climate.

Inside a real environment.

That’s where things get interesting.

Want to Look at a Location This Way?

A Healthy Location Strategy Session is a one-on-one look at the environment you would actually live inside every day.

Sunlight.

Sleep.

Climate.

RF and electrical exposure.

Healthcare.

Lifestyle.

Community.

And the specific places you are considering.

This is not conventional relocation consulting.

I’m not here to sell you a house or send you toward somebody else’s idea of paradise.

I’m here to help you look at the environment you would actually live inside every day.

Learn About a Healthy Location Strategy Session →