How is the Brain is different than a Computer:
To continue from last time, we are taking a different angle, and this time, highlighting the differences between a human brain and a computer brain. Human brains come built with much better “specs” compared to an average computer and are portable on top of all of that: the human brain has memory power of 100 teraflops (100 trillion calculations per second) and only needs 12 watts of power to function, while a computer has 100 million megabytes and need gigawatts of power to function [1]. The beautiful part about our brain is that it technically has infinite storage for our purposes, and it takes approximately 200 billion neurons to store 1 byte of information. A computer has long term memory and short term memory storage, but ends up losing all short term memory storage when it turns off. However, a human brain keeps all of it’s storage even when it’s not being used or idle. Some memories may take longer to recall, but it is buried in there and sometimes a trigger word or phrase brings it out. An example of that would be when you are taking a test and you don’t recall the answer to number 6 then and there, but when you wrap back around after the other questions, you suddenly recall it.
Our human brain also degrades more gracefully than computer brains, because if a part of a computer stops working, it can cease to exist. A human brain still functions mostly properly if parts of it shut down, because it is interconnected with our neurons via our synapses. We have nearly more than 125 trillion synapses in our brain to connect and relay information amongst our around 100 billion neurons in our brain [3]. Even though our brain is technically 10 million times slower than a computer, we are still more efficient for our case. That is true, because we are solving multiple things at once and have the power to do so without some extra user putting input for us. Our brain essentially thinks for itself, while a computer, for the most part, needs someone to give it instructions or write an algorithm to create more instructions for itself. Deep learning is essentially humans trying to simulate multiple layers via neural networks the way our brain does it and having it become automated. The human brain ends up being the easiest brain to study and is one of the most efficient mammal brains up there with the elephant and whale. We choose to study the human brain specially, because it is the most accessible.
References
https://techdifferences.com/difference-between-brain-and-computer.html [1]
https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.pdf [2]
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4812&context=ujmm [3]
— Aniket Mishra
