Physics of decision processes

Abstract.

We provide evidence that information processing in linguistic elaboration entails an uncertainty relation and entangled states, without having to strictly rely on quantum processes. Thus far, reported evidences of quantum effects in human brain processes lack a plausible framework, since either no assignment of an appropriate quantum constant had been associated, or speculating on microscopic processes dependent on Planck’s constant resulted in unrealistic de-coherence times. In the human brain formulation of linguistic processes, a word coded as a neuron spike sequence is compared with a previous word retrieved via the short term memory; comparison yields a judgment. Synchronization of the finite neuron spike sequences (SFSS), coding the two words, is the way two brain regions compare their content and extract the most suitable sequence. It consists of an inverse Bayes procedure. In SFSS, an uncertainty relation emerges between the bit size of a word and its duration. This uncertainty affects the task of synchronizing spike trains of different duration representing different words, entailing the occurrence of entangled sequences (ES). ES justifies the inverse Bayes inference that connects different words in a linguistic task. ES decays after a finite de-coherence time. The behavior here exhibited provides an explanation for the previously reported evidences of quantum effects in decision processes.