This is the "Schrödinger's neurons" conjecture, and unpacking it works best by seeing why its two halves are supposed to be the same problem.

The binding problem as a physics problem, not a neuroscience problem

Classical neuroscience is good at feature detection: edge detectors, colour patches, motion processors, distributed across cortex. What it can't deliver is the unity of experience — why all that parallel processing is one phenomenally bound object (a red triangle in motion), rather than a mere aggregate of micro-events. Binding-by-synchrony offers correlation, but temporal correlation between classical spike trains is just correlation; nothing in the classical formalism corresponds to a single unified entity, so the psychophysical identity seems to fail at the level of the bound percept itself. On this proposal, that failure is diagnostic: the brain isn't a classical system at the relevant level. A perceptual object is encoded as a coherent superposition of distributed neuronal firing patterns — "Schrödinger's neurons" — where the phase relations between the components do what classical synchrony cannot: they formally are the unity of the percept. One formal state, one experience.

Why the superposition principle must never break down

Here's the inversion the proposal turns on. If QM's linear, no-collapse dynamics are fundamental, then classicality is emergent and effective, not basic. A bound experience of a determinate classical outcome is then possible precisely because the coherent layer underneath is doing the binding, and effective decoherence — measurement-like interaction with the environment — converts that bound superposition into a definite classical narrative. Observers "run subjectively classical simulations": definite objects, definite outcomes, no experienced blur. The classicality of experience is a product of the superposition principle, not an exception to it. Conversely, if the superposition principle did break down at neuronal scales — as in objective-collapse theories — then the CNS would be classical all the way down, and there would be no vehicle for binding at all: not unified experience, but an aggregate of micro-experiences. Classical minds would be binding-less. That's why the conjecture treats fundamental wavefunction collapse not just as optional but as inconsistent with consciousness-as-we-find-it.

The duality

Once you see that, the two problems become one problem viewed from two angles:

• Binding: many components → one unified experience.
• Measurement: many amplitudes → one definite outcome.

On this conjecture, both are solved by a single event: the effective measurement (decoherence) of a coherent neuronal superposition. The "one" of phenomenology and the "one" of classical outcomes share a mechanism. Definite classical experience isn't evidence that quantum mechanics stops at the skull — it's evidence of where and how the coherent layer gets resolved.

Where it stands

Its virtue is falsifiability: in-principle interferometry or Leggett-Garg-style tests on awake neural tissue should find interference at neurophysiological scales if it's true. Its main burden is Tegmark-style decoherence calculations, which put coherence times in warm, wet brain tissue far below anything plausibly functionally relevant — the conjecture takes that as a live falsifier rather than something to hand-wave. And notably, it claims no new physics: standard QM, plus the psychophysical identification, plus the observation that classical — digital or connectionist — systems fail to bind. The controversial weight is carried not by exotic dynamics but by the assertion that the binding problem has no classical solution at all.

In short: the proposal says what you experience as a definite classical world is the decohered readout of a quantum-coherent binding process, and that this one process — superposition resolved into definiteness — is simultaneously the solution to how minds are unified and to how outcomes become definite.