Quantum computers offer many orders of magnitude of efficiency by a (handwavy) 'searching the whole solution space' sort of ultimate parallelism.
The new field of Quantum Biology[1] shows that many biological processes exploit quantum effects, e.g. enzymes exploiting quantum tunelling to unknot proteins, robin's direction sense, photon pathfinding to reaction centre in photosynthesis.
It is therefore not entirely unlikely that brain's exploit various quantum effects to make thinking much more efficient.
I feel like the paper and the books are really asking the first question and not the second.
The second question is also very interesting! If quantum effects are involved then a classical computer might never be able to "think" efficiently.