Actually, the mental trip from quantum to classical and micro to macro is far harder than the trip to the quantum world. Some very good physicists and chemists have gotten into major trouble on that trip. The quantum world is a world with a deterministically evolving wavefunction, where all the atoms of a sample beat together coherently for infinite time. That does happen, as I've mentioned, in superfluid helium, where an entire container of liquid helium flows in a single coherent quantum state; it happens with the conduction electrons in a superconductor, where they don't 'trip over' the lattice vibrations that ordinarily cause electrical resistance. Why doesn't it happen, say, in a glass of water or a current in an ordinary wire, where atoms and electrons 'forget' their quantum coherence in a matter of nanoseconds? The answer is almost invariably because the system itself is exposed to stochastic (random) impulses from the outside, which damp out the quantum coherences. Figuring out how to connect the classical stochastic dynamics of a solvent, for example, with the quantized vibrations of a dissolved molecule, is a tough problem, and it's a hot area (so to speak) of theoretical chemistry.
This is my major problem with the quantum brain type theories and with a lot of conceptually related theories that appear intermittently in the biophysical literature. In real biological matter, quantum phenomena have lifetimes of picoseconds, before the random motion of water molecules totally destroys them. The only notable exception is nuclear magnetism (MRI is a quantum based technique), and that exists because the magnetic dipoles of nuclei are so weakly coupled to their environment that it takes seconds for them to get 'thermalized'.
This may seem an idle question, but it's something I've been wondering about -- though I'm not sure how to put the question "technically." Well, I'll do my best, here goes:
What if we were to say that material brains, manifesting quantum phenomena, were finite on an organic basis -- i.e., subject to space and time -- yet consciousness itself were not bound by space-time constraints; i.e., hypothetically it is part of an infinite manifold (i.e., a field of its own type). If it's infinite, it seems (?) that the speed of light would not be a limit for it. Not being subject to space/time constraints, consciousness could move at speeds faster than the picosecond rates of quantum-event "lifetimes." And thus "marry up" (somehow) to the physical brain at the quantum level, thereby enabling thinking that can work to direct the activities of the human (or other) organism.
Does this scenario even make any sense? Or is it just a totally wild, baseless speculation?
Although I cannot "explain" the workings of the brain, most of the problems associated with comparing brains with electronic computers go away if you hypothesize that at least some of the computing in a brain is analog.
I have a textbook from the 1970s that says the central dogma of neurophysiology is that neurons either fire or the don't. But that ignores the fact that neurons have a significant latency, a period during which they cannot fire, and that this is affected by chemistry and other factors that are not at all digital in nature. I have always favored a hypothesis that the most important bit of information about a neuron is its rate of firing. There are some rather simple experiments you can do that seem to confirm this. the Fechner-Benham Disc makes an alternating black and white surface appear to have colors. The only variable here is the rate of alternating light and dark. Interestingly, the apparent color shifts up or down the spectrum depending on the direction of rotation.
Hypothesizing analog computing solves some sticky problems about the brain: the fact that it can do pattern matching very quickly despite having a slow clock rate, the fact that it is generally bad at formal logic, and the fact that it jumps to conclusions and sees patterns in ambiguous data, and the fact that it manages to "instantly" integrate zillions of simultaneous processes.