This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.
The Human Brain and Computer as Cascading Computation Welcome to the first edition of the Internet Knowledge Base newsletter.==THE COMPUTER ==
An average computer, like the one from which you are reading this message, also has a brain in a sense.
Computers hold pieces of data in a variety of different areas. (Technical: RAM, ROM, hard drive, CPU registers, BIOS, etc)
People press keys on the keyboard, move around the mouse, generating inputs for the computer. These create electric signals that pulse into the computer which sends the signals inside it, making changes to some of these pieces of data.
From the time you switch your computer on, until you turn it off, a power source is used to send a regular electrical pulse throughout the system at many thousand million times per second. With each beat of this pulse, a big element inside your computer, called the processor, takes a piece of data, and uses it as an instruction. A small calculation happens or a manipulation on one or more other pieces of data. With the next pulse the processor takes another piece of data from the pool, and the cycle continues.
The manipulation the computer makes is based on data, and the data manipulated can end up being used to determine yet other manipulations.
This process continues until the data associated with output devices is changed. When it does, electric signals are sent from it. The picture on the monitor changes, the speakers emit a sound.
==THE HUMAN-BRAIN & COMPUTER SYSTEM==
The parallels are obvious. The outside world affects the system. Stimuli are converted to electric pulses, and sent into the system. The system makes thousands of millions of on-going cascading little manipulations using electrical pulses. Some of these end up leaving the system as output.
Now, when a person sits on a computer what is happening? The output of the computer is converted to light and sound at the monitor and speakers. This then travels into the eyes and ears of the person. Electrical signals enter the brain, are processed, generating signals which travel down to the fingers. We press keys and move mice. These actions in turn are converted to electrical signals, enter the computer, and so on. The human brain and the computer brain are part of one big system.
Everyone sitting at the computer using it, looks pretty much the same. They stare ahead at the pretty lights and twitch their fingers and forearms a lot. Imagine for a second if we take someone from 2000 years ago and show them someone using a computer. What would they think was happening here? Most likely they would think we were in some kind of weird trance. The fact is you can't see what is happening inside the system, any more than you can look inside someone that is thinking to himself. The human and computer are closed in a loop together.
At least they used to be, now we have invisible electrical pulses or electromagnetic radiation that connect the human-computer system to other human-computer systems, through networks and the internet.
This is a simplified explanation of human brain function. There also are many incoming and outgoing neurons in the autonomic nervous system, a highly complex system that regulates the mostly unconscious, vegetative functions of the body, things like controlling heart rate and blood pressure, temperature regulation, digestion, sexual responses and the hormone secretion of various endocrine glands.
In fact, this cascading approach to processing is a very simplified example of human interaction or the underlying frameworks in which the mill of the universe itself grinds. Energy interacting with varying arrangements of itself. When you think about it, any interaction has a cascading effect on all future contaminated events
Neurons use a traveling charge differential (a depolarization) in their outer membrane caused by a sudden ionic exchange between the inside and the outside of the cell. So what difference does this make? It means a neuron transmits information much more slowly than an electrical device. A neuron is capable of firing at a maximum speed of about once every 60th or 70th of a second, whereas silicon based devices such as microprocessors work a speeds millions of times faster. The massive parallelism of a brain is what makes it possible for it to compete with the microprocessor. But for how long?
So which one is faster, human brain or computer? IBM BlueGene is a very fast computer. It is currently being used to simulate a neural column at the molecular level. A neural column is a 1,000,000th chunk of the human brain. So if you look at it like that, human brains are 1,000,000 times faster than a computer at this moment. How long will take until computers catch up? About 60 years, in terms of raw processing power.
The brain also has some key self-modifying abilities which are both little-known and difficult to replicate in a computer. Neurons physically move around in the brain as you learn, making and breaking connections according to need. The Glial cells make up 90% of the brain and serve some part in our cognition. They were thought to be inactive and are the source of that old 60s quote "you only use 10% of your brain". More recently they have been demonstrated to take part in brain activity on a chemical basis rather than on a half-chemical half-electrical basis. Interesting, their effect becomes much stronger when any given stimulus is repeated 3 times.
Until very recently, what was thought to be Junk DNA (that part of the DNA which appeared not to do anything) actually becomes activated in nerve cells in the brain and central nervous system. That is, not only our understanding of genetics missing great swathes of information, but genetics appears to directly affect how our brains adapt. Since the genetic code is comparable to a program (or operating system?) written in trinary, there are parallels (sci-fi?) with AI systems written in self-modifying code.
Things in common, would probably be..
Functions
Both have a purpose
Memory
Self maintenance
Brain evolves and computer updates
Signals
Thinking = CPU = processing calculations etc
short term memory = RAM = storing something in your head for a few second/minutes and then forgetting it
long term memory = hard disk = something you will never forget
My maths teacher once said that a computer can't understand the concept of "infinity". e.g. how many numbers between 0 and 1? Answer = infinite. How many numbers between 0 and 2? Answer = infinite (not 2 x infinity).
The reason is because computers calculate everything using formulae. Infinity is not a number, therefore a computer cannot understand it.
The brain can perform the same basic functions as a computer, but a whole lot better.
But a computer can perform these functions a whole lot quicker.
They both stored information!
how is the brain and computers alike?
there both are masd
computers are slower
No
Takes a brain to have one. Computers are not living, but machines and are programmed .
inproves the brain on society today event the world computers are technology and a computer is a huge brain
Computers can't think for themselves like humans. Computers fabricated, Humans are born. Humans we are breathing, living creatures and computers are just wires and programs. Humans have intelligent brain but computer does not have.
the human brain designed and build the computer... tgats very important but any way they are similar because both use electrical signals to send messages, both transmit information, both need energy to work both have evolved overtime both can be damaged differences The brain uses chemicals to transmit information; the computer uses electricity. Even though electrical signals travel at high speeds in the nervous system, they travel even faster through the wires in a computer. The human brain has weighed in at about 3 pounds for about the last 100,000 years. Computers have evolved much faster than the human brain. Computers have been around for only a few decades, yet rapid technological advancements have made computers faster, smaller and more powerful.
They are better for you because it helps brain fitness
Many times the human brain has been compared to the computer as a data processor with the human brain coming out on top but the importance of computers in our lives are undeniable. There are still many ways in which the computer is better than the human brain, including speed, accuracy and versatility, giving computers a myriad of very vital applications in modern living.'
Get a brain, simples.
Grey matter is on the surface of the brain - it is the computing side. White matter is in the cenre of the brain it is the wires that join the computers.