Energy harvesting by photosynthesis in "brainless" plants and green algae is identified as the root non-trivially quantum process powering neural correlates of consciousness in humans and other "brainy" animals. Thermofield attributes of solar energy flow through the biosphere's food chain are suggested as a "bottom up" mediator between quantum-coherent aspects of photosynthesis and emergent dynamical architectonics of transmembrane electrical potentials in neurons. This quantum-ecological approach to energetics of brain function as part of an open dissipative world system offers a segue, experimentally grounded by empirical evidence for photosynthetic coherence, into qualitatively gauged links between quantum tunneling and the Hard Problem of consciousness. (Globus, 2003;Hagan et al., 2002;Hameroff and Penrose, 1996; Jibu and Yasue, 1995;Penrose, 1989;Penrose, 1994;Umezawa, 1993;Vitiello, 2001) that experiments will someday prove the existence of functionally nontrivial in vivo Bose Einstein coherent processes firmly linked to the sentient brain (Palermo Declaration, 2013;Tarlaci and Pregnolato, 2015). However, so far no unequivocal demonstration has been forthcoming Corresponding author: Donald Mender Address: Lecturer in Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, USA. e-mail onald.mender@yale.edu Relevant conflicts of interest/financial disclosures: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Received: September 27, 2015; Accepted: November 1, 2015 (Mender, 2013a;. In this regard quantum olfaction, quantum avian compasses, quantum genetic coding, quantum enzyme folding, sustainably orchestrated quantum tubulin superpositions, and ordered water to date all remain merely theoretically tantalizing proposals with at best debatable and in many cases no experimental support. At present one must consider the real possibility that experiments may never (Mender, 2013a;Tegmark, 2000) generate the kind of ironclad examples of overt quantum neurodynamical coherence imagined as a future vindication of existing quantum brain theories.However, there is currently available one functionally significant example of nontrivial quantum coherence that is experimentally on fairly firm ground in what seems at first glance to be a systematically non-neural domain of biology, i.e. photon energy harvesting by the photosynthetic Z-process (Engel et al., 2007) in