Quantum models of the mind: Are they compatible with environment decoherence?

Quantum Models of Mind: Are They Compatible with Environment Decoherence?

Quantum models of mind associate consciousness to coherent superposition of states in the brain. Some authors consider consciousness to be the result of a kind of internal quantum measurement process in the brain. In this paper we discuss the ideas of Hameroff Penrose and Tegmark and their calculation for an estimate of decoherence time. We criticize the Hameroff Penrose model in the context of...

Highly Nonclassical Quantum States and Environment Induced Decoherence Highly Nonclassical Quantum States and Environment Induced Decoherence

Prototypes are attractive because they are easy on the mind.

People tend to prefer highly prototypical stimuli--a phenomenon referred to as the beauty-in-averageness effect. A common explanation of this effect proposes that prototypicality signals mate value. Here we present three experiments testing whether prototypicality preference results from more general mechanisms-fluent processing of prototypes and preference for fluently processed stimuli. In tw...

Anomalous diffusion and environment-induced quantum decoherence.

Luca Bonci, Paolo Grigolini, Adam Laux, and Roberto Roncaglia Dipartimento di Fisica dell’Università di Pisa, Piazza Torricelli 2, 56127 Pisa, Italy Istituto di Biofisica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via San Lorenzo 26, 56127 Pisa, Italy Department of Physics of the University of North Texas, P.O. Box 5368, Denton, Texas 76203 Department of Solid State Physics, Loránd Eötvös Universi...

Environment-induced Decoherence in Noncommutative Quantum Mechanics

We address the question of the appearence of ordinary quantum mechanics in the context of noncommutative quantum mechanics. We obtain the noncommutative extension of the Hu-Paz-Zhang master equation for a Brownian particle linearly coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators. We consider the particular case of an Ohmic regime.