How are brains different from computers?

SafeBytes Software

We all use computers in our daily lives, one way or another. Be it through our smartphone, through our laptop or Chromebook or even through the computer that is inside of our car (even though that one is not technically the same as the others at all), they are ever present and ever so useful.

We may use our computer for completely benign purposes:

• Shopping (if you can think about it, you can probably buy it on the internet)• Chatting• Having a dating profile• Watching video on demand• Streaming musicOr we may use it for something that carries a little more responsibility:

• Office productivity (think Microsoft’s Office productivity suite, or OpenOffice)• Financial planning and exchange• Database management for businesses• International boardroom meetings

As you can see, the applications for a computer are as diverse as the people in the world, and the past two lists are nowhere near complete.

And there’s no denying that as time advances, computers become more and more advanced, being capable of handling such a variety of tasks as the ones listed before and some more specialized ones as well.

We talked in another article about the Folding@home project, which takes a single PC’s (belonging to a volunteer) idle processing power in order to uncover the secrets behind protein folding, a process that would take actual people enormous amounts of time and effort.

This information will hopefully lead to breakthroughs in treatment of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and even Cancer.

It’s easy to see that computers are some of the most advanced devices we have today, but have you ever wondered how much these machines are alike to humans? How is a CPU similar to a brain? How is the way our brains store memories and data similar to the way a hard disk does (did you know scientist estimate the human brain’s data storage capacity to be between 10 terabytes and 100 terabytes, for example)? Could it be possible to think of a person’s brain as a sort of computer that allows us to reason, calculate, store and retrieve information and so on and so forth?

Let’s take a moment to analyse the ways that we are similar to the machines we use daily:

• The first difference between our brains and computers is that our brains cannot be infected by viruses or malware of any kind. Not in the strictest sense of the words, anyway. Yes, Alzheimer’s or Senile Dementia could be said to infect our brain and severely impair their functions, with the terrifying “bonus” of not actually being able to be purged from the brain as a virus would. But the main difference here lies in the fact that these “infections” are a result of a somewhat natural degradation of the machine, not of someone actually maliciously infecting a person with them.

• Brains use content-addressable memories. Let’s get a bit more technical here. In computers an archive or other type of data (a memory, if you will) is accessed by looking for its precise memory address (also known as byte-addressable memory). The human brain on the other hand accesses memories via “spreading activation”, which means that one concept or thought can unlock memories to things that are related to them. An example of this might be thinking of “car” and activating memories related to both automobiles and train cars. This essentially means that our brains can access information with just a few cues, instead of precise commands.

• The brain is massively parallel, computers are linear. Human brains aren’t really divided into sections that handle certain tasks; every bit of it contributes to different things. As such there is no “language processing area” in a human brain, the way a language module would be in a computer. The previously thought of as “regions” of the brain, such as the hippocampus, have now been shown to handle not only memory, but also other areas as diverse as imagination and novel goal representations, for example.

• Processing is not a fixed number in the brain. Brains don’t have a clock speed like CPUs do. The speed at which our brain processes information is subject to quite a few constraints, such as the speed at which electrochemical signals travel through certain parts of a neuron, differences in synaptic efficacy, availability of neurotransmitters, and a ton of other factors, making a comparison to a CPU inaccurate.

• Processing and memory are not handled by separate parts of the brain. Computers process information from memory using CPUs, and then write the results of that processing back to memory. This distinction is not present at all in a human brain. As neurons process information, they modify their synapses. This means that retrieval of a memory alters the memory itself, usually making it stronger, although at times they can make them less accurate.

As you can see, the brain is indeed a complex machine, even more complex than the biggest supercomputer there is out there, so the comparison between a computer and a human brain is actually not completely out of base, but a little inaccurate.

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