Matthew Fisher (University of California, Santa Barbara)

The effort to design and build quantum computers in the laboratory is now a billion dollar enterprise. But might we, ourselves, be quantum computers? Most scientists think that in the warm wet brain, this is highly unlikely; and certainly it would be at variance with what the medical profession believes. My strategy is one of reverse engineering, seeking to identify the biochemical substrate and mechanisms that could host such putative quantum processing. Remarkably, a specific neural qubit and a unique collection of ions, molecules and enzymes can be identified, illuminating an apparently single path towards nuclear spin quantum processing in the brain. If this is true, the implications for medicine and psychiatry would be very large.