Our Brains Use Binary Logic, Say Neuroscientists (sciencedaily.com)

"The brain's basic computational algorithm is organized by power-of-two-based logic," reports Sci-News, citing a neuroscientist at Augusta University's Medical College. hackingbear writes: He and his colleagues from the U.S. and China have documented the algorithm at work in seven different brain regions involved with basics like food and fear in mice and hamsters. "Intelligence is really about dealing with uncertainty and infinite possibilities," he said. "It appears to be enabled when a group of similar neurons form a variety of cliques to handle each basic like recognizing food, shelter, friends and foes. Groups of cliques then cluster into functional connectivity motifs to handle every possibility in each of these basics. The more complex the thought, the more cliques join in."

Comments

Misleading title on TFA

[ShooterNeo]

Summary of the TFA : the actual method of brain signaling is primarily all or nothing electrical impulses. The timing is analog - THEORETICALLY a difference in an electrical impulse arriving down to the planck-second could have an effect.

This research does not change any of this. The brain is still analog at the individual synapse level, it just follows certain patterns that are related to binary math for setting up arrays of neural circuitry.

In practice, like any analog system, true resolution is finite because there is noise. So the system merely needs to be quantized down to the level of resolution of noise and you can replicate it's behavior exactly in a digital equivalent. Remember analog PIDs and other simple analog computers, the ones that used vacuum tubes and were used from ww2 and a few decades after? Those systems also had finite effective resolution even though analog systems theoretically have infinite resolution. That was because of all the various forms of noise in the actual physical equipment. In practice if you replace an analog system with a digital system you can get BETTER resolution because all the intermediate processing steps do not introduce additional noise. (while each vacuum tube op amp you solder in picks up extra noise that is added to the signal)