Quantum physics and the biological brain

Josh Roeloffs

Herbert S. Green, T. Triffet

Nicolas Francisco Lori, José Machado

Abstract An assessment is made of the role of quantum entanglement in biological neuronal circuitry, in agreement with previous experimental evidence, which indicated that quantum tunneling plays an essential role in the occurrence of the sense of smell. It is here described how that can be physically realistic. Then, it is analyzed how the occurrence of quantum entanglement in multiple scales allows for the occurrence of consciousness in biological systems. We obtain that quantum mechanics (QM) allows for coherence to be maintained in living brains for regions in the scale of the minicollumn, but not much more. The QM waves can then be amplified into classical waves along the brain that transmit information, which existed in the quantum wave at minicollumn scale. For the quantum wave to be able to exist at the minicollumn scale at the temperature of a living brain, several physiological constraints need to occur within the neuronal circuitry. Here, we assess what those constraints are and propose forms for realistically theorizing that those constraints can occur in a living brain at the minicollumn scale. This analysis of the effects of quantum entanglement in biological neuronal circuitry assists in suggesting a new approach to neuronal nets, which we call a multidepth quantum neural net. We then analyze in what way it is likely that in the future a multidepth quantum neural net will be capable of achieving consciousness.

Christof Koch A, Klaus Hepp

Susan Gaidos, Nicolle Rager Fuller

Takaaki Musha, Toshiki Sugiyama

R. Penrose and S. Hameroff have proposed an idea that the brain can attain high efficient quantum computation by functioning of microtubular structure of neurons in the cytoskelton of biological cells, including neurons of the brain. But Tegmark estimated the duration of coherence of a quantum state in a warm wet brain to be on the order of 10>–13 </supseconds, which is far smaller than the one tenth of a second associated with consciousness. Contrary to his calculation, it can be shown that the microtubule in a biological brain can perform computation satisfying the time scale required for quantum computation to achieve large quantum bits calculation compared with the conventional silicon processors even at the room temperature from the assumption that tunneling photons are superluminal particles called tachyons. According to the non-local property of tachyons, it is considered that the tachyon field created inside the brain has the capability to exert an influence around the space outside the brain and it functions as a macroscopic quantum dynamical system to meditate the long-range physical correlations with the surrounding world. From standpoint of the brain model based on superluminal tunneling photons, the authors theoretically searched for the possibility to realize the brain-computer interface that allows paralyzed patient to operate computers by their thoughts and they obtained the positive result for its realization from the experiments conducted by using the prototype of a brain-computer interface system.