At the very beginning of Hameroff's career, while he was at Hahnemann, cancer-related research work piqued his interest in the part played by microtubules in cell division, and led him to speculate that they were controlled by some form of computing.

[2] The main substance of this book dealt with the scope for information processing in biological tissue and especially in microtubules and other parts of the cytoskeleton.

Separately from Hameroff, the English mathematical physicist Roger Penrose had published his first book on consciousness, The Emperor's New Mind, in 1989.

[citation needed] Penrose saw the principles of quantum theory as providing an alternative process through which consciousness could arise.

Penrose was interested in the mathematical features of the microtubule lattice, and over the next two years the two collaborated in formulating the orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) model of consciousness.

[6][7] Rick Grush and Patricia Churchland, argued that "physiological evidence indicates that consciousness does not directly depend on microtubule properties in any case".

[8] In 2000, physicist Max Tegmark calculated that quantum states in microtubules would survive for only 10−13 seconds, too brief to be of any significance for neural processes.

Mindville is a feature-length motion picture that combines live action with animation and effects to present a journey into the mysteries of human consciousness.