Is quantum brain dynamics involved in some neuropsychiatric disorders?

In this paper we review the evidence for quantum phenomena underlying neuropsychiatric disorders. Existing data can be explained only by resorting to non-local correlations within brain activity, such as the ones predicted by quantum theory. Such a situation suggests that perhaps a quantum description may be the best description of interrelationships between neural and cognitive phenomena.

Simulating prosopagnosia through a lesion of lateral connections in a feed-forward neural network.

We show that particular features of prosopagnosic impairment can be simulated by a connectionist model trained with an unsupervised learning procedure. In particular we describe a Kohonen's neural network which is able to correctly recognize and categorize a series of digitized pictures of faces when learning is characterized by certain parameter values, but which shows a prosopagnosic behavior when lateral connections are lesioned. We discuss the relationship between this result and some neurophysiological hypotheses about prosopagnosia.