Penrose’s vindication: In a broad philosophical sense. His intuition that quantum effects might play some role in cognition seems less far-fetched now than it did 30 years ago.
But vindication of Orch OR specifically (microtubule-based quantum gravity collapses driving consciousness) not yet.
The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation:
Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells.
Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
That the brain uses electrical/chemical signals is crank science about subatomic particles messing with your aura in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
If that were not so, electrical/chemical engineers could upgrade our brains with their knowledge of electricity/chemistry.
Scientific progress is thinking about stuff. And my Occam's razor is leaning toward "if just arithmetic could yield consciousness we would have figured it out by now".
Wow, this is such an odd response. There’s plenty of research that link microtubules to consciousness. I don’t understand this pushback other than one being sped in a certain scientific dogma that doesn’t allow new thoughts or questioning to creep in.
Just say that Penrose is a crank is way off chart in my opinion
How does this vindicate Penrose in any slight sense?? This is using "nanotubular" in the sense of "ultrathin membrane bridges" that serve as "long-range intercellular transport" for macro objects in the um range, NOT "polymers of tubulin" that "provide platforms for intracellular transport" with an inner diameter in the low nm range. (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule)
More importantly, these are transporting things that can plausibly impact other neurons, instead of possibly interacting with things that are far too small to ever impact a neuron in any way we've ever seen before (AKA without magic).
IMHO, this vindicates Penrose and Hamerhoff in no way whatsoever; nonetheless, I'm sure there will be a flood of YouTube videos subtly conflating the two senses of the term "nanotube" in order to promote the idea of a universal noosphere that ties us all together through the magic of quantum entanglement and positive vibes. Fun...
(More on topic: anyone with access to Science know why these are called "nanotubes" if they transport things in the micrometer range? Microtubules are named for their length, but it doesn't really make sense in reverse to have a tube 1000 times as wide as it is long... Maybe they're elastic? Or does "nano" just mean "really small" here?)
And you’re talking about transporting “things” and microtubules are not about transporting things in Penrose theory, but rather serving as quantum machines that are linked across the brain.
If you’ve listened to anything he’s said in the last few years he doesn’t hold very tightly to the microtublule explanation.
Paraphrasing what he said in a video from a year ago or so: it’s an interesting theory that he’d like to see tested, but he has no idea whether it’s correct or not.
I don't see why this idea is controversial at all; of course intelligence would evolve to leverage every possible physical mechanism and property inherent in matter, from classical structures like dendritic nanotubular networks facilitating intercellular communication, to potentially quantum effects that support intricate computation and the emergence of thought, since that's the nature of evolution: massively exploring the possibility space.
It's controversial because of how specific the hypothesis is, now novel the physical mechanism would be if it existed, and how little evidence there is that it exists. I don't think it's controversial because people that evolution couldn't possibly explore that possibility space. The fact that evolution explores a very large possibility space doesn't mean that anything you can conceive of must exist. I mean humans aren't even capable of biological flight, and we know that has evolved multiple times!
There is a question if there is actual physical possibility to do useful quantum computation with tools available to biological systems. Cells are very noisy environments and nonclasical states are very fragile.
Because there's no evidence and the fundamental claim isn't boring "how it works", but the idea that this "quantum magic" is what binds a soul/consciousness to your body and gives rise to "free will" that deterministic physics very clearly does not allow for.
Wheels and motors and jet engines and electrical transmission lines are also physically possible, but they are completely missing from the animal world (I believe there is one known unicellular organism that has a locomotion method that is similar to a motor or at least a propeller, but that is still completely unique).
sure. but there are very tangible bounds on the sorts of physical interactions that can cause any effect.
for instance, lots of people love the idea of "brain waves". in general, neurons are event-driven, not given to "waving". indeed, the mystique of brainwaves is counter-physical, in that when there is synchronized activity, it produces EM signals that are fairly hard to pick up (EEG, MEG have gains O(1e6)). a neuron simply lacks a physical mechanism to be affected by such a wave.
not unlike Tegmark pointing out that the brain is dense and warm and that means short/fast decoherence.
I agree. I'm pretty sure both photosynthesis (superposition) and our sense of smell (quantum tunneling) involve quantum effects, so it's not that wild to think that quantum effects are at play in the mechanistic operation of the brain and therefore contribute to the phenomenon of consciousness.
No, nothing to do withPenrose’s idea. No quantum effects just the traditional use of microtubules for transport of cargo — in this case between adjacent dendrites.
I agree, and I was about to post the same thing. The idea of quantum processes fueling consciousness is my latest obsession. Specifically because I have genetic polymorphisms in the DNM3 gene that help maintain the functionality of these microtubules.
And let’s just say my experience of reality, or my consciousness, is quite unusual. My gene polymorphisms in DNM3 are linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have.
Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field, and not anything solid, but rather a femoral and affected by electromagnetic forces inside and outside of our brain
Interesting. I don't know that it's a literal electromagnetic field, but it does seem to be a dynamic pattern. I don't personally think I have enough information yet to guess at what medium that pattern is encoded in (I mean, except, broadly, "Brain stuff").
Not long ago, I suffered the first bout of unexpected unconsciousness I'd ever experienced; a series of unfortunate events caused me to pass out from pain (which I didn't quite understand was really a thing before then... Haha no that's real, you can get your brain shorted out from too much pain signal). The experience was a little... Cosmologically-reframing. It wasn't like sleep; it was a missing-time experience. Like, post-event me is acutely aware of a lack of me in that period of time; the body was there (I assume; I couldn't see it but there's nowhere for it to have gone), the thing I'd call myself seems to have completely 404'd for about a half hour.
Put lots of thoughts of my own mortality in my head. Not sure I'd recommend it.
> I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field
Well, this is almost certainly true in some very vague sense - I mean, it seems much more unlikely to meaningfully categorize it as a gravitational phenomenon, or a strong interaction phenomenon or a weak interaction phenomenon. Though it would be cool if somehow it turned out our minds had color charge.
Of course, this is only the same sense in which Linux and McDonalds and potatoes are also electromagnetic fields, or phenomena related to it.
I've had a weird thought that it might be that consciousness is the result of a quantum field that collapses to instantiate a consciousness when enough feedback mechanisms are present to allow for its function. Of course, this is likely not true, but it would explain a few things.
that seems kind of pointless to speculate about? unless you were into reading this sort of thing a long time ago and it is interesting to you? aren't there more convincing modern models of consciousness that don't rely on spookiness?
Would do a lot to explain many's understanding of the brain as a non-deterministic machine (or, their reasonable resistance to the idea that it is a deterministic one)
yes, it's microtubules, but there's no sign of any weirdness here. and Penrose's whole theory is "quantum is weird and I think brains are weird, so brains must be quantum. so where can we find some quantum stuff?"
> Synaptic connections mediate classical intercellular communication in the brain. However, recent data have demonstrated the existence of noncanonical routes of interneuronal communication mediating the transport of materials including calcium, mitochondria, and pathogenic proteins such as amyloid beta (Aβ). Using super-resolution and electron microscopy, Chang et al. identified and characterized structures called nanotubular bridges that connect dendrites in the brain (see the Perspective by Budinger and Heneka). These bridges mediate the transport of calcium ions, small molecules, and Aβ peptides, and may contribute to the spreading and accumulation of pathological Aβ in Alzheimer’s disease. —Mattia Maroso
does super-resolution refer to the image processing technique of interpolating/hallucinating higher resolutions? if so, is this a common/respected part of evidence gathering?
Super resolution refers to imaging below the refraction limit, more or less by having the receiving sensor within a wavelength or two of the material being imaged, allowing you to use the nearfield (which doesn't have a diffraction limit, but which also doesn't propagate beyond a couple wavelengths) instead of the farfield (which does, and does).
It's unrelated to the nvidia marketing term for ai filtering of images.
But they say they used ML analysis too in the abstract
> Using super-resolution microscopy,25
we characterized their unique molecular composition and dynamics in dissociated neurons,26
enabling Ca 2+ propagation over distances. Utilizing imaging and machine-learning-based27
analysis, we confirmed the in situ presence of DNTs connecting dendrites to other dendrites28
whose anatomical features are distinguished from synaptic dendritic spines
To paraphrase the great Noam Chomsky: cognitive science is in a pre-Gallilean stage.
Many thousands of incredible scientists have done amazing work over the past ~century, but cutting-edge neuroscience still doesn't have the conceptual tools to go much farther than "when you look at apples this part of your cortex is more active, so we'll call this the Apple Zone".
Sadly/happily, I personally think there's good reason to think that this will change in our lifetime, which mean's we can all find out if trading the medicalization of mental health treatment (i.e. progressing beyond symptom-based guess-and-check) for governmental access to actual lie detecting helmets (i.e. dystopia) is worth it...
There's a new theory that we might actually gain a greater understanding of the human mind by studying the AI systems we create, because we can basically get a perfect X-ray of their neural nets at any particular state.
When we look at the "apple zone" part of an AI model that lights up, we see it in way higher resolution than our best scans of the human brain, and this might tell us something about how apples are perceived by both systems, or how language is represented neurally, or any number of other things.
Of course, that's specifically about human anatomy. In this case we're talking about a feature that I'd bet is present in other animals too, so the factors discussed here don't all apply. In this case though there seems to be a straightforward answer -- the structures involved are very small! The post I linked is largely talking about larger structures we failed to find...
Until we both discover everything down to the Planck length, and then prove somehow that the Planck length is truly the smallest "unit", then we have not discovered everything. And we have probably hardly discovered anything, relatively.
Good reminder... Presumably, the lab phases were completed before 2025. In February of this year, a neuroscientist at John Hopkins said of the political spending cuts “This is simply the end.” https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/trumps-nih-budg...
The same thing is hypothesized for most tissue in the body and a source of how cancer seems to spread without direct connectivity. It's been classified so often as just background curioso that it never was investigated further.
Hopefully finer grained imaging will elludicdate this stuff.
One of the neat and mindnumbing things about the brain is the number of information passing pathways. There are so many and as this discovery evidences, we're still finding new ones.
Not sure our ANNs will ever be able to model them all.
Our ANNs have abandoned any similarity with brain neural networks basically right after they appeared. As we've learned more about neuro-biology, the gap has simply grown larger.
The Big question is: WHERE is the Complexity? If Complexity is Fixed in a System, it must be Somewhere. (you can see this at play any time you look at a large software system.) Do you have simple 'blocks' and many of them? OR, do you have more complicated blocks (requiring more computons), but fewer of them? I think this is an exciting research area right now.
I still think there's a good chance that evolution has figured out some way to leverage quantum computation, probably in a very different way from the way we're trying to do it with ultra-cold low noise quantum digital circuits. If this is the case it's going to be some kind of high temperature noisy analog stochastic way of harnessing QC. The phrase "stochastic analog quantum computer" comes to mind.
It's how little energy the brain uses, especially for learning. The brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI on a classical computer, not to mention still beating it in terms of performance and versatility. Transistors do not use millions of times more energy than synapses, and processor feature sizes are not millions of times larger. Something else is going on.
Either the brain is leveraging QC or our AI training algorithms are just really really horrible compared to whatever is happening in biology. Maybe biology found learning methods that work thousands of times better than differential backpropagation.
I like the possibility of QC in brain. However, explaining why brain is much more efficient that computers does not need QC. Computers and Brain evolved in two completely different ways. For the brain, simple cognitive functions emerge first, supporting more complex life behaviours, starting with very simple multi celular life forms. Logical reasoning emerges much later, and is pretty expensive. Then we made computers to do logical computation and they are incredibly efficient at it: a modern low power processor is much more efficient than human brain in this kind of workload, by orders of magnitude.
Now we are trying to implement what the mind is naturally good at with systems designed to do logic well. This is the main reason it's so inefficient. Emulation is costly. It is costly when brain does logic, and is costly when computers do AI.
In theory, we should be able to build computing devices designed for AI workloads, and they can be as efficient as brain or even much better.
> The [human] brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI
I don't know about that... I've consumed quite a few calories in my lifetime directly, plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet) and I still only have a minuscule fraction of the information in my head that a modern LLM does after a few months of training.
Translated into KWh, I've used very roughly 50,000 KWh just in terms of food calories... but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4... GPT5 itself needing about 25x to 30x as much energy to train... certainly not 100s of thousands to millions of times as much. And again, these LLMs have a lot more information encoded into them available for nearly instant response than even the smartest human does, so we're not really comparing apples with apples here.
In short, while I wouldn't rule out that the brain uses quantum effects somehow, I don't think there's any spectacular energy-efficiency there to bolster that argument.
> plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet)
To be fair, this is true of LLMs too, and arguably more true for them than it is for humans. LLMs would've been pretty much impossible to achieve w/o massive amounts of digitized human-written text (though now ofc they could be bootstrapped with synthetic data).
> but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4
But if we're including all the energy for supporting infrastructure for humans, shouldn't we also include it for GPT? Mining metals, constructing the chips, etc.? Also, the "modern" is carrying a lot of the weight here. Pre-modern humans were still pretty smart and presumably nearly as efficient in their learning, despite using much less energy.
That’s why I said it would look nothing like the quantum-digital style of QC we are aiming at. It would be some analog stochastic way of leveraging quantum processes to accelerate information processing, possibly indirectly through their effects.
The brain and all biology is analog not digital. It’s really nothing like computers or discrete electronic circuits.
The brain 'stores' data without using power. Under classical synapse structure, it modifies the butons to modulate the charges and neurotransmitters passing and being received. This is memristance.
It's very low energy to do this and it keeps for decades (probably). It's not a quantum effect.
Be aware though, this is a 'classical' synapse understanding. The neurons are doing all kinds of other things too, they are alive after all. And the glia, the glia and astrocytes affect memory too, but we're still trying to understand how.
Look, don't jump to quantum stuff with the brain.
It's just really hard to get data, low sample sizes, and desperate need of grant funding.
The brain too learns from scratch. From birth through death, it's acquiring information, integrating that information, and using it. LLMs do this in a shorter time period.
Readit News
But vindication of Orch OR specifically (microtubule-based quantum gravity collapses driving consciousness) not yet.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.1998.025...
Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells.
Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
He’s very very careful to say that it’s just something he’d like to see tested and he has no idea whether it’s true or not.
That very much distinguishes it from Crank science.
https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#references
That the brain uses electrical/chemical signals is crank science about subatomic particles messing with your aura in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.
If that were not so, electrical/chemical engineers could upgrade our brains with their knowledge of electricity/chemistry.
Scientific progress is thinking about stuff. And my Occam's razor is leaning toward "if just arithmetic could yield consciousness we would have figured it out by now".
Just say that Penrose is a crank is way off chart in my opinion
From "Concept cells help your brain abstract information and build memories" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42784396 :
> the regions of the brain that activate for a given cue vary over time
"Representational drift: Emerging theories for continual learning and experimental future directions" (2022) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943882...
>> Future work should characterize drift across brain regions, cell types, and learning.
How do nanotubules in the brain affect representation drift?
There is EMF to cognition given that, for example, "Neuroscience study shows the brain emits light through the skull" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44697995
Aren't there certainly quantum effects in the EMF wavefield of and around the brain?
More importantly, these are transporting things that can plausibly impact other neurons, instead of possibly interacting with things that are far too small to ever impact a neuron in any way we've ever seen before (AKA without magic).
IMHO, this vindicates Penrose and Hamerhoff in no way whatsoever; nonetheless, I'm sure there will be a flood of YouTube videos subtly conflating the two senses of the term "nanotube" in order to promote the idea of a universal noosphere that ties us all together through the magic of quantum entanglement and positive vibes. Fun...
(More on topic: anyone with access to Science know why these are called "nanotubes" if they transport things in the micrometer range? Microtubules are named for their length, but it doesn't really make sense in reverse to have a tube 1000 times as wide as it is long... Maybe they're elastic? Or does "nano" just mean "really small" here?)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221137971...
And you’re talking about transporting “things” and microtubules are not about transporting things in Penrose theory, but rather serving as quantum machines that are linked across the brain.
Paraphrasing what he said in a video from a year ago or so: it’s an interesting theory that he’d like to see tested, but he has no idea whether it’s correct or not.
for instance, lots of people love the idea of "brain waves". in general, neurons are event-driven, not given to "waving". indeed, the mystique of brainwaves is counter-physical, in that when there is synchronized activity, it produces EM signals that are fairly hard to pick up (EEG, MEG have gains O(1e6)). a neuron simply lacks a physical mechanism to be affected by such a wave.
not unlike Tegmark pointing out that the brain is dense and warm and that means short/fast decoherence.
https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q9UQ16/entry
And let’s just say my experience of reality, or my consciousness, is quite unusual. My gene polymorphisms in DNM3 are linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, which I have.
Like Penrose said, I believe our consciousness is an electromagnetic field, and not anything solid, but rather a femoral and affected by electromagnetic forces inside and outside of our brain
Not long ago, I suffered the first bout of unexpected unconsciousness I'd ever experienced; a series of unfortunate events caused me to pass out from pain (which I didn't quite understand was really a thing before then... Haha no that's real, you can get your brain shorted out from too much pain signal). The experience was a little... Cosmologically-reframing. It wasn't like sleep; it was a missing-time experience. Like, post-event me is acutely aware of a lack of me in that period of time; the body was there (I assume; I couldn't see it but there's nowhere for it to have gone), the thing I'd call myself seems to have completely 404'd for about a half hour.
Put lots of thoughts of my own mortality in my head. Not sure I'd recommend it.
Well, this is almost certainly true in some very vague sense - I mean, it seems much more unlikely to meaningfully categorize it as a gravitational phenomenon, or a strong interaction phenomenon or a weak interaction phenomenon. Though it would be cool if somehow it turned out our minds had color charge.
Of course, this is only the same sense in which Linux and McDonalds and potatoes are also electromagnetic fields, or phenomena related to it.
Careful around magnets my friend, your consciousness will change a lot if you're right.
yes, it's microtubules, but there's no sign of any weirdness here. and Penrose's whole theory is "quantum is weird and I think brains are weird, so brains must be quantum. so where can we find some quantum stuff?"
> Synaptic connections mediate classical intercellular communication in the brain. However, recent data have demonstrated the existence of noncanonical routes of interneuronal communication mediating the transport of materials including calcium, mitochondria, and pathogenic proteins such as amyloid beta (Aβ). Using super-resolution and electron microscopy, Chang et al. identified and characterized structures called nanotubular bridges that connect dendrites in the brain (see the Perspective by Budinger and Heneka). These bridges mediate the transport of calcium ions, small molecules, and Aβ peptides, and may contribute to the spreading and accumulation of pathological Aβ in Alzheimer’s disease. —Mattia Maroso
It's unrelated to the nvidia marketing term for ai filtering of images.
But they say they used ML analysis too in the abstract
> Using super-resolution microscopy,25 we characterized their unique molecular composition and dynamics in dissociated neurons,26 enabling Ca 2+ propagation over distances. Utilizing imaging and machine-learning-based27 analysis, we confirmed the in situ presence of DNTs connecting dendrites to other dendrites28 whose anatomical features are distinguished from synaptic dendritic spines
Many thousands of incredible scientists have done amazing work over the past ~century, but cutting-edge neuroscience still doesn't have the conceptual tools to go much farther than "when you look at apples this part of your cortex is more active, so we'll call this the Apple Zone".
Sadly/happily, I personally think there's good reason to think that this will change in our lifetime, which mean's we can all find out if trading the medicalization of mental health treatment (i.e. progressing beyond symptom-based guess-and-check) for governmental access to actual lie detecting helmets (i.e. dystopia) is worth it...
When we look at the "apple zone" part of an AI model that lights up, we see it in way higher resolution than our best scans of the human brain, and this might tell us something about how apples are perceived by both systems, or how language is represented neurally, or any number of other things.
Of course, that's specifically about human anatomy. In this case we're talking about a feature that I'd bet is present in other animals too, so the factors discussed here don't all apply. In this case though there seems to be a straightforward answer -- the structures involved are very small! The post I linked is largely talking about larger structures we failed to find...
The amount of anti-education/anti-school rhetoric on HN these days is worrying.
Until we both discover everything down to the Planck length, and then prove somehow that the Planck length is truly the smallest "unit", then we have not discovered everything. And we have probably hardly discovered anything, relatively.
I genuinely wouldn't.
Deleted Comment
:(
Hopefully finer grained imaging will elludicdate this stuff.
Not sure our ANNs will ever be able to model them all.
The Big question is: WHERE is the Complexity? If Complexity is Fixed in a System, it must be Somewhere. (you can see this at play any time you look at a large software system.) Do you have simple 'blocks' and many of them? OR, do you have more complicated blocks (requiring more computons), but fewer of them? I think this is an exciting research area right now.
It's how little energy the brain uses, especially for learning. The brain seems to be hundreds of thousands to millions of times more energy efficient than any kind of current AI on a classical computer, not to mention still beating it in terms of performance and versatility. Transistors do not use millions of times more energy than synapses, and processor feature sizes are not millions of times larger. Something else is going on.
Either the brain is leveraging QC or our AI training algorithms are just really really horrible compared to whatever is happening in biology. Maybe biology found learning methods that work thousands of times better than differential backpropagation.
Now we are trying to implement what the mind is naturally good at with systems designed to do logic well. This is the main reason it's so inefficient. Emulation is costly. It is costly when brain does logic, and is costly when computers do AI.
In theory, we should be able to build computing devices designed for AI workloads, and they can be as efficient as brain or even much better.
I don't know about that... I've consumed quite a few calories in my lifetime directly, plus there is all the energy needed for me to live in a modern civilization and make the source material available to me for learning (schools, libraries, internet) and I still only have a minuscule fraction of the information in my head that a modern LLM does after a few months of training.
Translated into KWh, I've used very roughly 50,000 KWh just in terms of food calories... but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4... GPT5 itself needing about 25x to 30x as much energy to train... certainly not 100s of thousands to millions of times as much. And again, these LLMs have a lot more information encoded into them available for nearly instant response than even the smartest human does, so we're not really comparing apples with apples here.
In short, while I wouldn't rule out that the brain uses quantum effects somehow, I don't think there's any spectacular energy-efficiency there to bolster that argument.
To be fair, this is true of LLMs too, and arguably more true for them than it is for humans. LLMs would've been pretty much impossible to achieve w/o massive amounts of digitized human-written text (though now ofc they could be bootstrapped with synthetic data).
> but a modern human uses between 20x and 200x as much energy in supporting infrastructure than the food calories they consume, so we're at about 1 to 10 GWh, which according to GPT5 is in the ballpark for what it took to train GPT3 or GPT4
But if we're including all the energy for supporting infrastructure for humans, shouldn't we also include it for GPT? Mining metals, constructing the chips, etc.? Also, the "modern" is carrying a lot of the weight here. Pre-modern humans were still pretty smart and presumably nearly as efficient in their learning, despite using much less energy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_biology (on a phone so can't link the exact section, but it's the section on mitochondria under energy transfer).
The brain and all biology is analog not digital. It’s really nothing like computers or discrete electronic circuits.
https://www.pbs.org/video/was-penrose-right-new-evidence-for...
Just cause we don’t understand it yet does not mean it’s not possible.
The brain 'stores' data without using power. Under classical synapse structure, it modifies the butons to modulate the charges and neurotransmitters passing and being received. This is memristance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
It's very low energy to do this and it keeps for decades (probably). It's not a quantum effect.
Be aware though, this is a 'classical' synapse understanding. The neurons are doing all kinds of other things too, they are alive after all. And the glia, the glia and astrocytes affect memory too, but we're still trying to understand how.
Look, don't jump to quantum stuff with the brain.
It's just really hard to get data, low sample sizes, and desperate need of grant funding.
It's not quantum.
The brain too learns from scratch. From birth through death, it's acquiring information, integrating that information, and using it. LLMs do this in a shorter time period.