Neuroquantology, the Ultimate Quest - Brain Theory from a Circuits and Systems Perspective - page 157

To mimic trapped ions, tubulins would require minimal thermal vibration,
usually achieved for ions with liquid helium cooling, although there may be other
ways. Alternately, there may be some other type of quantum system, as yet
undiscovered, other than combined phonon-spin states.
Requirement 2
Initialization must be possible: In the case of trapped ions, they are cooled using
processes termed trapping and optical pumping to put them into their thermal and
spin ground states. Subsequently, states would have to be selectively excited with
lasers to represent data. This cannot be done in practice yet for more than a few
qubits.
Initialization is a fundamental issue; a system will not work without proper
initialization. In the case of tubulins, it might be reasonable to assume that they
naturally decay to a zero state. Then each unit merely needs to be excited to be a
true for those true attributes, to represent significant amounts of data.
Attributes of an image might be entered at the synapses of a given neuron. Then
each synapse might exert control so as to set, as required, each corresponding
internal tubulin to true.
If corresponding synapses and tubulins are fairly close physically, special-
purpose receptors could send signals, or possibly electrons to tubulins. It is at
least conceivable that tubulins can be initialized to hold a mental image, although,
of course, this has never been verified experimentally.
Requirement 3
Quantum information must be appropriately transformable: Ions in ion traps are
manipulated using exactly positioned and finely tuned laser beams, giving, we are
told, most of the standard qubit operations. Practical calculations with qubits would
necessitate a long sequence of laser operations. For tubulins, smaller traveling
molecules with special codes have been proposed and this concept awaits experi-
mental verification.
The amount of required qubit manipulation is significant. When a previous
chapter studied simulated qubits, a sequence of codes had to be taken from a special
read-only section of long-term memory. If images can be initialized onto
microtubules, then perhaps manipulation codes, taken from long-term memory,
can also be applied. This has not been observed experimentally, but it is a possibility.
Requirement 4
The readout method must be appropriate: Readout in a quantum computer under the
Copenhagen interpretation means the qubits must be physically observed. At the