PLANTS, BIRDS, AND YOUR BRAIN ARE ALL QUANTUM MACHINES

By Aamir Butt

Blog 5/12 of #QuantumSurvivalTheory series

When physicists hear “quantum effects in the brain,” most of them cringe. And historically, they’ve had good reason.

Quantum effects — superposition, entanglement, coherence — are famously fragile. They thrive in laboratories cooled to near absolute zero, isolated from every possible disturbance. The brain is the opposite: 37°C, soaking wet, buzzing with electrical and chemical noise. In 2000, physicist Max Tegmark calculated that any quantum effects in the brain would be destroyed in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Case closed. 

Except nature didn’t read Tegmark’s paper. 

💬 Evolution didn’t just stumble onto quantum mechanics. It mastered it billions of years ago. Plants, birds, and enzymes are all quantum machines. #QuantumSurvivalTheory

Quantum Photosynthesis

In 2007, a team led by Graham Engel published a stunning result in Nature. Using ultrafast laser spectroscopy on photosynthetic bacteria, they found quantum coherent energy transfer — energy moving through multiple pathways simultaneously via quantum superposition, finding the most efficient route with near-perfect accuracy.

At biological temperatures. In a wet, noisy, living system.

By 2010, the result had been extended to near-physiological temperatures. The mechanism was clear: evolution had discovered how to protect quantum coherence inside biological structures. The “too warm and wet” objection didn’t apply to living systems that had been engineered by four billion years of natural selection.

Quantum Navigation

Birds can sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate thousands of kilometres with astonishing precision. The leading explanation is the radical pair mechanism: light hitting a protein called cryptochrome in the bird’s eye creates pairs of molecules with quantum-entangled electron spins. The entanglement lasts long enough for Earth’s weak magnetic field to influence the spin states, giving the bird directional information.

This has been tested rigorously. Radio-frequency fields at specific quantum frequencies disrupt bird navigation. Knockout studies on the cryptochrome gene eliminate the ability. The birds are using quantum entanglement to find their way home.

Quantum Enzymes

Enzymes — the proteins that catalyse the chemical reactions of life — work faster than classical physics allows. The explanation: quantum tunnelling. Hydrogen atoms pass through energy barriers that classical mechanics says are impassable. Evolution uses quantum tunnelling to speed up the chemistry of life.

And Now, the Brain

Given that quantum effects power photosynthesis, bird navigation, and enzyme catalysis, the question becomes: did evolution deploy quantum mechanics everywhere except the most complex information-processing organ on the planet?

Recent evidence suggests it didn’t.

In 2022, researchers using advanced MRI techniques detected signatures of quantum entanglement in living human brains. The signals were present when subjects were awake, diminished during sleep, and correlated with cognitive performance. In separate studies, the drugs we use to erase consciousness — anaesthetics — were found to disrupt quantum processes specifically in microtubules, not just synaptic signalling.

Research from Japan has found coherent oscillations in isolated microtubules across multiple frequency scales at room temperature — oscillations with a scale-free structure characteristic of quantum coherence.

💬 Birds navigate by quantum entanglement. Plants photosynthesise by quantum coherence. Did evolution use quantum mechanics everywhere EXCEPT the brain? The evidence says no. #QuantumSurvivalTheory

The Old Objection Is Dead

The claim that biology is too warm and wet for quantum effects has been definitively refuted — not by theorists but by experimentalists. The question is no longer whether quantum biology exists. It’s how far it goes.

And if it goes all the way into the microtubule networks of your neurons, we have the foundation for a completely new understanding of what consciousness actually is.