PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Cognitive Neuroscience
This article is part of the Research TopicQuantum and quantum-like effects across neuroscienceView all 5 articles
Nonlinearity, Complexity and Quantization Concepts in Biology
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Polytechnic University of Turin, Turin, Alberta, Italy
- 2Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy
- 3Grossman School of Medicine, New York University, New York, United States
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Founders of quantum mechanics (QM) anticipated that revisions to classical physics due to strange elements of quantum reality, would necessitate similar changes in biology. Complexity theory, systems biology and quantum biology provide possible solutions indicating that subject/object separation is a useful fiction for reductive science. Direct correlates to such QM observational/measurement issues as Complementarity and Uncertainty may justify the introduction of an analogue of Heisenberg's uncertainty and the Planck constant for living systems. The phase space of "adjacent possibles" for biological systems from which one "actual" is selected resembles the collapse of the QM wave function. Since biological systems are hierarchical, this occurs across organizational scales resulting in biological coherence. The location of a quantum/classical boundary is unclear due to complexity. Whether biological systems' characteristics arise directly from QM or are of a different origin remains unsettled. To combine nonlinear with quantum properties across biological scales we propose the Method of Coherent Structures (MCS), developed for quantum many-body systems. In MCS, a higher-level scale provides a classical envelope for quantum fluctuations at the lower scale. It yields a seamless transition from nonlinear classical fields to quantum excitations and accounts for the emergence of complexity by incorporating metabolic energy supply.
Keywords: Biological coherence, biological uncertainty, Complexity, Method of Coherent Structures, quantum biology, Systems Biology
Received: 29 Aug 2025; Accepted: 02 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tuszynski and Theise. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jack Adam Tuszynski
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