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:comparisons

[suitepotato]

"By 2015, we'll have computers as smart as humans."

And given the people I deal with as customers in tech support, this is not an improvement. Quite the opposite really.

"I don't know what the IP address is Dave and I don't care. I just want you to make me work or I'll e-mail your supervisor with a nasty complaint."

The Network is the Computer

[Doc Ruby]

Each neuron is like a tiny, slow analog DSP, feeding back FM around a base frequency (eg. about 40Hz in the brain's neural tract). The neurons have feedback among themselves locally, and send out some larger feedback in fiber bundles, signalling other clusters along the way. It's like a teeming kazoo symphony, without a conductor.

Fascinating

[Vengeance]

The idea that our brains might work like biological organisms is a real breakthrough.

Next week's research topic: Do farts stink?

Missing Comma

[Doc Ruby]

More like:

Our Brains Don't Work, Like Computers

Wow

[CardiganKiller]

I've been waiting for a scientist to tell me that I'm capable of thinking in abstract and fuzzy terms for years. Things I can now forget thanks to the brilliant scientist:

1.) The GPS coordinates of each key on my keyboard.
2.) The streaming audio of my name and all of my friends and families name.
3.) The bio-mechanical force sequences for the hundreds of muscles used in picking up a glass every morning.

Beer will no longer render my circuits useless!

Tomorrow on the "Painfully Obvious"

[ugen]

Birds do not fly like airplanes, they continuously wave their wings - and do not have turbines or propellers.

Sure hope my taxes don't pay for that "research".

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.

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.