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

The brain is not a computer

[Space cowboy]

Does anyone *really* think that computers and the brain work in the same way ? Or even in a significantly similar fashion ?

Like them, we can do several things 'simultaneously' with our 'processors.'

Well, by 'processors', I assume you mean neurons. These are activated to perform a firing sequence on output connections dependent on their input connections and current state, heavily modified by chemistry, propogation time (it's an electrical flow through ion channels, not a copper wire), and (for lack of a better word) weights on the output connections. To compare the processing capacity of one of these to a CPU is ludicrous. On the other hand, the 'several' in the quote above is also ludicrous... "Several" does not generally correspond to circa 100 billion...

No-one has a clear idea of how the brain really processes and stored information. We have models (neural networks), and they're piss-poor ones at that...

• There's evidence that the noise-level in the brain is critical - that less noise would make it work worse, and the same for more noise. That the brain uses superposition of signals in time (with constructive interference) as a messaging facility.
  
• There's evidence that temporal behaviour is again critical, that the timing of pulses from neuron to neuron may be the information storage for short-term memory, and that the information is not 'stored' anywhere apart from in the pulse-train.
  
• There's evidence that the transfer functions of neurons can radically change between a number of fixed states over short (millisecond) periods of time. And for other neurons, this doesn't happen. Not all neurons are equal or even close.
  
• Neurons and their connections can enter resonant states, behaving more like waves than anything else - relatively long transmission lines can be set up between 2 neurons in the brain once, and then never again during the observation.
  

The brain behaves less like a computer and more like a chaotic system of nodes the more you look at it, and yet there is enormous and significant order within the chaos. The book by Kauffman ("The origins of order", I've recommended it before, although it's very mathematical) posits evolution pushing any organism towards the boundary of order and chaos as the best place to be for survival, and the brain itself is the best example of these ideas that I can think of.

Brain : computer is akin to Warp Drive : Internal combustion engine in that they both perform fundamentally the same job, but one is light years ahead of the other.

Simon.