(Please follow me at @MayerSpivack on Twitter for further articles and discussion)
Perhaps I am overreacting to a query at the end of an article discussing the implications of Quantum entanglement in organic environments—Technology Review by K. Birgitta Whaley et al. at the Berkeley Center for Quantum Information and Computation as published in Quantum Physics — but writing from the bottom of my limbic system, here goes —.
If there ever was an organ that might benefit from quantum entanglement it is the brain. If there is a system in the brain that would benefit most from entanglement it will involve associative process. Consider:
Quantum entanglement for information storage at the origin and terminus of nerve fibers in the brain might allow instantaneous signal processing at multiple locations within the brain that have in the past become associatively categorized and connected. This would make the brain operate as a far more energy-efficient organ. It could run cooler, require less sugar-fuel, and have a faster response-time and be free of the time-lag that is a product of transmission speed as a function of nerve fiber length. Cells located a few inches apart could be called upon to fire instantaneously (speed of light? no measurable speed?) and perhaps also to act simultaneously (seizure? migraine? consciousness?).
Pushing the envelope of the possible, credible and the probable:
Were it possible that
entangled particles could be found at both ends of nerves, and that this
entanglement could be produced not only in entangled pairs, but among great
entangled families or multiples (think of: neural web), in other words—that
they could be replicated, and their tangled-together potential to interconnect could
be maintained over time by some yet unknown and unobserved mechanisms—then—quantum
entanglement might yield advantages in associative processing power and speed within the brain.
Assume that associative memory and recall processing, (including processes of attention direction, memory formation, and memory recall) involves a great number of cerebral cortex end-point locations that are discrete and separate cells. The origins (in space, time, and entanglement) of these connections would lie somewhere among sensory systems and within the limbic lumps.
For associative connections to be made among many such end-points, transmission and process speed would benefit from (and perhaps require) multiple simultaneous real-time connections among a plurality of distal end-points that were first entangled when sensory, attention or thought stimuli first originated at a sensory organ or from within somewhere in the limbic system, or within the cerebral cortex itself (as in the case of thought and imagination).
Linear/logical processes (think of: tax accounting) would not require such massive investment in cellular connections or wiring as would associative / syncretic processing (think of: scientific hypothesis-making, art, invention).
Hypothesis: most untrained (unschooled), or ‘native’, ‘spontaneous’ thought process is associative, not linear.
A corollary hypothesis: education deals with almost exclusively with teaching and training in linear / logical processing at the expense of associative / syncretic processing.
This emphasis on logic eventually suppresses associative / syncretic processing, causing associative neural connections to devolve or disappear.
If quantum entanglement among a myriad of endpoint memory cells and attention systems or cortical cells were possible, then it might allow the communication structure of the brain to bypass the expensive problem of wiring and wire-maintenance among all these points. This would mean that the actual dissectable structure of the brain would diverge from how information travels within it. The brain is complex enough already and we are still stumped by it all.
This divergent independent network of fast linkages would allow a kind of 'wireless neurological network' with instantaneous interconnections and throughput to create what we call thinking and consciousness (two quite different phenomena, neither of which has been proven to exist, at least for many people).
There is nothing outrageous about a suggestion that quantum entanglement may be operating within the brain, except that I am the clearly unqualified person discussing it with you.
What may be unique about my spin (intentional pun) on the subject is that I emphasize the advantages for the highly interconnected requirements of associative processing and memory as differentiated from logical, cognitive, or other operations.
Mayer Spivack