Our Brains Don't Work Like Computers

Roland Piquepaille writes "We're using computers for so long now that I guess that many of you think that our brains are working like clusters of computers. Like them, we can do several things 'simultaneously' with our 'processors.' But each of these processors, in our brain or in a cluster of computers, is supposed to act sequentially. Not so fast! According to a new study from Cornell University, this is not true, and our mental processing is continuous. By tracking mouse movements of students working with their computers, the researchers found that our learning process was similar to other biological organisms: we're not learning through a series of 0's and 1's. Instead, our brain is cascading through shades of grey."

Comments

comparisons

[sound vision]

And it is for this reason that I loathe comparisons of computing power to brain power. "By 2015, we'll have computers as smart as humans." What kind of bullshit comparison is that? They're two completely different processes.

Re:comparisons

[NoImNotNineVolt]

"By 2015, we'll have computers sufficiently powerful to simulate a full working model of a human brain in enough detail to be functionally equivalent" would be what is actually being predicted. Because we have no convenient way of quantifying human smarts, like you said we cannot effectively compare how "smart" a computer is with respect to a human. That doesn't mean that computers will not be able to be functionally equivalent to biological intelligences, and there's no logical reason to suspect that they won't be in due time.

Re:The brain is not a computer

[Lemuridae]

Finally, a few good comments.

The point under discussion in this article is summed in this quote:

"More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."

The goal is to forcefully point out (using an experiment) that the one way we think about mental processing, the digital computational model, is not very useful even at the trivial level of mental signal processing.

It's interesting how all the sarcastic comments about the "biological organism" reference completely miss the point. The point is that the signal is being processed in a way that could be modeled by the way a biological organism moves through space. It sniffs here, then there, then jumps to the solution. The signal processing itself exhibits emergent properties.

The reference to the dynamical system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system) is key. (I think people frequently fail to gloss the additional "al" and think this refers to some sort of generic "dynamic system"). Dynamical systems, although deterministic, are a foundational tool for developing chaos theory.

For me the interesting idea is that the default state of thought is in-betweeness. We stay jittering back and forth in an unresolved state until, suddenly, we aren't.