A new study shows that information in neurons is transmitted not as a code, but as a physical flow inseparable from heat. Quantum Thermodynamics Has Reached the Brain
When neurobiologists talk about information in the brain, they usually mean something like a code: patterns of neuron activation, electrical signals, chemical markers. Information as an abstraction that is simply "written" into matter. A new paper by Professor Onur Pusuluk of Kadir Has University in Turkey, published on arXiv, offers a radically different view. Information in neurons is not an abstraction. It is a physical process inseparable from the very matter of the brain. And the key to this process is heat.
Pusuluk draws on the so-called thermocoherent effect, a phenomenon in which the heat flow and the information flow in a system are mutually linked through quantum coherence. When heat flows through neural tissue, it carries with it not merely energy but a relational structure distributed across many neurons simultaneously. This structure belongs to no single neuron. It is invisible to a local observer, whether a neighboring neuron or a measuring device. It exists only as a whole. In this picture, the brain is not a computer processing code. It is a living quantum-thermodynamic system, where thought and heat flow are two sides of a single physical process.
What makes this work especially interesting is its connection to what we already know about the quantum nature of consciousness. If information in the brain is transmitted through distributed quantum coherence, this means that the brain uses precisely the type of organization that quantum physics considers fundamental to the nature of space and matter themselves. Pusuluk proposes a concrete, testable mechanism, through ion channels, hydrogen-bonded proton networks, and phosphate-containing molecules in neurons, by which microscopic quantum interactions scale up and influence the cognitive dynamics of the brain as a whole.
It is important that Pusuluk deliberately avoids loud claims. The work is published as a preprint on arXiv and has not yet undergone peer review. The author does not claim that the brain is a quantum computer, and explicitly distances himself from speculative theories of macroscopic quantum consciousness. He proposes something more precise and more intriguing: between microscopic quantum physics and macroscopic cognitive dynamics there exists a physically grounded and testable bridge. Thinking is not merely computation. It is a thermodynamic process in which quantum relations between the parts of a system become a resource as real as energy or matter. Information is not simply stored in the brain but flows through it, together with heat.
