From what I understand, quantum effects being essential to the process is a fringe belief. Penrose is probably the most famous 'serious person' (sorry Deepak Chopra) to espouse the idea, but I'm inclined to believe that might be a Linus Pauling/Vitamin C sort of scenario. Penrose started from the perspective of believing there must be quantum effects, then began fishing for physical evidence of it.
I was taught that the quantum theory of memory and cognition generally falls under Eric Schwartz's "neuro-bagging" fallacy [0]. That is:
>You assert that an area of physics or mathematics familiar to few neuroscientists solves a fundamental problem in their field. Example: "The cerebellum is a tensor of rank 10^12; sensory and motor activity is contravariant and covariant vectors".
So yeah, I feel that it's pretty fringe (as you suggested).
"The Secret of Scent" by Luca Turin [0] if I remember correctly goes into research that indicates that there may be quantum effects that explain how shape/chirality of molecules affect smell.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Scent-Adventures-Perfume-Scien...
So it is plausible that nature may have evolved to be affected by quantum effects.
I think you're recalling the end of this comic[1], which was on the front page of HN a couple weeks ago. So the quote is probably attributable to either Scott Aaronson or Zach Weinersmith.
