Actually, from a physiological standpoint at least, the human brain is very much a digital instrument...basic neurophysiology is based on the idea that neuron gates can be either open or closed/charged or uncharged...a binary system if I ever saw one...
Actually, from what I understand of it, at least from my basic psychology class, the brain doesn't so much store hard data as memories, but rather reconstructs images and sounds and such in real time as you access them...sorta like the difference between storing a full motion video file on your hard drive vs rendering a scene on a 3d-accelerator card...
On a side note, there's some interesting work being done, very theoretical at present, on the storage capacity of DNA as a possible replacement for traditional storage media...just think, instead of a hard drive, you could have a vial of nucleic acids that were assembled and read by nanomachines which would then relay the base pair information to the processer...I believe they were talking about terabyte levels in the same amount of space as 1-2 gigs of normal magnetic media...of course, if we were using DNA as our storage medium, would that mean that we would be reading off data in a four bit as opposed to a two bit system?
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Actually, from a physiological standpoint at least, the human brain is very much a digital instrument...basic neurophysiology is based on the idea that neuron gates can be either open or closed/charged or uncharged...a binary system if I ever saw one...
Actually, from what I understand of it, at least from my basic psychology class, the brain doesn't so much store hard data as memories, but rather reconstructs images and sounds and such in real time as you access them...sorta like the difference between storing a full motion video file on your hard drive vs rendering a scene on a 3d-accelerator card...
On a side note, there's some interesting work being done, very theoretical at present, on the storage capacity of DNA as a possible replacement for traditional storage media...just think, instead of a hard drive, you could have a vial of nucleic acids that were assembled and read by nanomachines which would then relay the base pair information to the processer...I believe they were talking about terabyte levels in the same amount of space as 1-2 gigs of normal magnetic media...of course, if we were using DNA as our storage medium, would that mean that we would be reading off data in a four bit as opposed to a two bit system?