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"extremely puzzling" artikkel her

"My entry into the biochemistry of the brain started when I decided
to explore how on earth the lithium ion could have such a dramatic effect
in treating mental conditions," Fisher says.

Lithium drugs are widely used for treating bipolar disorder. They work,
but nobody really knows how.

"I wasn't looking for a quantum explanation," Fisher says. But then he came
across a paper reporting that lithium drugs had different effects
on the behaviour of rats, depending on what form – or "isotope" –
of lithium was used.

On the face of it, that was extremely puzzling. In chemical terms,
different isotopes behave almost identically, so if the lithium worked
like a conventional drug the isotopes should all have had the same effect.
(...)

All the same, he is wary of being associated with the earlier ideas
about "quantum consciousness", which he sees as highly speculative
at best.

Physicists are not terribly comfortable with finding themselves inside
their theories.
Most hope that consciousness and the brain can be kept out of quantum theory,
and perhaps vice versa.
After all, we do not even know what consciousness is,
let alone have a theory to describe it.

It does not help that there is now a New Age cottage industry
devoted to notions of "quantum consciousness",
claiming that quantum mechanics offers plausible rationales
for such things as telepathy and telekinesis.

As a result, physicists are often embarrassed to even mention
the words "quantum" and "consciousness" in the same sentence.

But setting that aside, the idea has a long history.
Ever since the "observer effect" and the mind first insinuated themselves
into quantum theory in the early days, it has been devilishly hard
to kick them out.
A few researchers think we might never manage to do so.

In 2016, Adrian Kent of the University of Cambridge in the UK,
one of the most respected "quantum philosophers", speculated that
consciousness might alter the behaviour of quantum systems
in subtle but detectable ways.

Kent is very cautious about this idea. ...
But he says that it is hard to see how a description of consciousness
based purely on pre-quantum physics can account for all the features
it seems to have.