The physical basis of information flow in neural matter: a thermocoherent perspective on cognitive dynamics

Abstract

Information flow is central to contemporary accounts of cognition, yet its physical basis in living neural matter remains poorly specified. Here, we develop a multiscale resource-theoretical framework motivated by the \textit{thermocoherent effect}, where heat flow is reciprocally coupled to a delocalized information flow carried by shared coherence and not reducible to local subsystem variables. Extending this line of work in light of recent results on correlation-enabled Mpemba-type thermal relaxation, we argue that the operational relevance of correlations depends less on their taxonomy than on their dynamical accessibility under the underlying interaction geometry. Relational structure encoded in the state of a single composite system -- including quantum entanglement, quantum discord, and classical correlations -- may therefore act as a usable physical resource that remains hidden from local subsystem descriptions. We propose that electrical, chemical, ionic, and thermal transport processes in neural matter may, under suitable microscopic conditions, generate or transduce partially hidden relational resources whose mutual coupling can progressively build larger-scale thermocoherent organization across spatial or spatiotemporal partitions in neural tissue. Ion-channel interfaces, hydrogen-bonded proton networks, aromatic $π$-electron architectures, and phosphate-rich motifs emerge as plausible substrate classes in which such resources may arise, become transiently accessible under environmental coupling, and leave coarse-grained signatures in neural dynamics. The resulting picture is neither a claim of macroscopic quantum cognition nor a reduction of cognition to abstract coding, but a falsifiable framework in which microscopic relational resources can bias transport, relaxation, signaling, and cross-scale neural coordination.