How else would they be stored if not physically?

All I know is that I watched this video about a brain surgeon who got a very bad bacterial disease, it spread to his brain, made him go into a coma, destroyed the part of the brain capable of producing memories, yet he miraculously recovered but said he experienced the afterlife, despite scientifically unable to because of his severe situation.

if we could apply quantum mechanics to neurology

I'm sure your efforts are sincere but this is the type of catch-all phrase thrown around by laymen that think one can just 'quantum mechanics' their way to any solution.

We'd like to believe the memory is stored in neuron cells, but there simply isn't any place in the cell where that would happen.

The individual neurons send a unique signal that, in series with other neurons, produce a unique combination resulting in memory recall.

What specifically does quantum mechanics have to do with any of it?

Quote from: SexyPiranha on October 25, 2014, 10:02:13 PM

For quantum effects to govern memory, or anything mental really, aspects of the brain would have to behave quantum mechanically. A brain, hell even a neuron, quantum mechanically speaking is a very large system and(as far as we know) barring extremely low temperatures(fractions of a degree above absolute zero) large quantum systems tend to approximate classical systems, meaning quantum effects shouldn't play a role unless we are missing something insane.

OP you may be interested in Roger Penrose's quantum mind theory. Absolutely no experimental support for it, theoretical objections are similar to the one I raised but I thought I'd just throw it at you.

I wouldn't necessarily say that we're dealing with macroscopic quantum phenomena. In fact the point is that the quantum behavior is not obvious enough for us notice it. Could it not be possible that this particular function of the brain is partitioned off from the rest of the system, or at least confines its interaction with the rest of the system to a very small degree?

I did add in the neuron bit as well, which would make it microscopic but I see your point. How do you suppose it's partitioned? It would have to be partitioned in such a way to keep what causes quantum states in a brain to decohere(namely, interaction w/ other quantum states), from causing it to also. That would imply that the quantum systems of the rest of the brain shouldn't be able to interact at all with whatever has been partitioned. What I was getting at was that when a quantum system approximates a classical one(decoheres) the quantum behavior of the individual smaller systems tends to be cancelled out on average and tends towards classical behavior on the whole. This would seem to indicate that whatever quantum behavior that is "too small for us to notice" would be too drowned out by classical noise to be useful for anything.

Well an easy way to show you would be the effect of certain neurotransmitters on recollection proving that there's some form of connection between neurons/synapses and memory. I don't understand what your problem is with the current model tho-

How is that memories can be stored in one physical location anyway? We're organic, meaning unique chemical structures are the only way to hard wire that kind of information in a physical manner (correct me if I'm wrong, but how else can organic matter store information?).

... you should definitely look into neural encoding. It's too vast a concept for me to explain in a series of replies, but I think you'll find more than a few answers if you know what you're looking for.

Goji, what are you studying?

Comp sci and pure math! I just read other things which interest me in my spare time XD