Quantum effects in mesoscale brain responses?
It is unclear whether quantum phenomena can be observed in brain recordings because of thermal noise causing decoherence, that is, quantum superpositions and entanglement quickly collapsing into classical, i.e. non-quantum states. In our new paper we demonstrate that neuronal noise of the Brownian motion type is mathematically equivalent to a wave-particle description of the kind predicted by a fundamental equation in quantum mechanics known as the Schrödinger equation. We then consider noise in the more realistic FitzHugh-Nagumo model which has been widely used to describe neuronal dynamics and show that quantum effects might be hiddern in mesoscale brain dynamics.
