I was just about to comment upon the inclusion of Hameroff in the author list. Penrose and Hameroff are pushing a notion that the brain utilizes quantum coherence to perform computation inside these microtubules, resulting in human consciousness.
There is very little evidence for this conjecture, but Penrose and Hameroff are convinced. Make sure to keep Hameroff's bias in mind when reading this paper...
Regarding bias, I read somewhere that Numenta claims that the can built conciousness.. however regardless of that it's still quite interesting to see progress in Neural Networks.
They say: They found the key for a new learning algorithm that automatically finds patterns in streams of data and predicts what is likely to occur next.
There is very little evidence for this conjecture, but Penrose and Hameroff are convinced. Make sure to keep Hameroff's bias in mind when reading this paper...