Traffic Jams In Your Brain

An anonymous reader writes "Carl Zimmer's latest foray into neuroscience examines why the brain can get jammed up by a simple math problem: 'Its trillions of connections let it carry out all sorts of sophisticated computations in very little time. You can scan a crowded lobby and pick out a familiar face in a fraction of a second, a task that pushes even today's best computers to their limit. Yet multiplying 357 by 289, a task that demands a puny amount of processing, leaves most of us struggling.' Some scientists think mental tasks can get stuck in bottlenecks because everything has to go through a certain neural network they call 'the router.'"

Comments

Re:Pulling it between layers of abstraction.

[h4rm0ny]

I don't think it's processing power or inability at all. I thnk it's lack of working memory. We can all work out 357 multiplied by 289 easily with pencil and paper. Very easily. And we could do it in our heads just as well if we could casually remember all the intermediary stages: e.g. 9 times 7 is 63, 9 times 50 is 450, 9 times 300 is 2,700, sum all three numbers and remember the result, now begin with 80 times... etc. But it's not easy for most people to do that. The computation is easy. But we need more registers.

Re:Pulling it between layers of abstraction.

[ultranova]

Couldn't it just be that we do not really have direct access to the raw computational capacity of the brain?

Probably. You can scan a crowd because you have a hardware-level implementation for that; you can't multiply efficiently because that has to go through multiple levels of emulation, at least one of which has a severe lack of reliable memory.

We shouldn't forget that abstract thought is actually a very new evolutionary hack; we've only had a real culture for a 10,000 years or so. Before that, it was cave paintings for a 100,000 years. You can't expect a very experimental feature to be thoroughly optimized, yet.

An analogy

[goodmanj]

Here's an analogy to illustrate the category error people make when comparing the human brain to a computer:

"A Sony Walkman can record and play music in realtime, fast-forward and rewind, and store an hour's worth of music. These tasks require a 75 Mhz processor and 100 megabytes of memory on an iPod Shuffle. Therefore, a Sony Walkman has a 75 Mhz processor and 100 megabytes of memory."