Do you see parallels between the human brain and computers?

Are you saying we’re like computers??
Cause that’s deep, man

Our brains are like a computer that uses not only 0’s and 1’s, but every combination of numbers from 0 to 100 as one ‘bit’. I get this from the fact that in a computer it can either be true or false, but each neuron in our brain has hundreds of synapsis (connections) and can fire any combination of them in response to a stimuli.

Computers have a long way to go, but they got the basics down.

Well, sure. But carrying the parallel too far misleads our thinking. I think what’s interesting about our brains is the ways they are not like computers, and vice versa.

No. I can’t do parallel processing. ;D

I would say our brains are much more sophisticated than computers, but we don’t understand how to fully utilize them. The complex web of synapses and neurons and superfast electrical impulses between them…we’ve got years and years and years before we make a computer that powerful.

Whoever makes it will be obscenely rich, so I’m hoping that’ll be me.

@pikipupiba To a “layperson” like me, I find your answer fascinating and enlightening.
@Jeruba I agree with you that ”..carrying the parallel too far misleads our thinking.”
I hope we can avoid doing so. But the parallel does obviously exist, and is worthy of exploration in its own right. As I’m sure you would agree.
I’m interested also, in what books are to the brain, in relation to what programs are for computers. And any similar parallels.
@teh_kvlt_liberal Come on. What’s your real and considered answer?
@kyanblue I wouldn’t disagree with your answer, apart from the length of time that you are espousing. If it is you, the I hope you spend wisely.
Lurve for your cool avatar. (-:

Of course. A computer and the brain are very much the same. The way a computer works is basically when you hit a key it sends a signal to the into he cpu and it processes it then the cpu then send that information on the screen.

The way the brain works is when your eyes see something or you hear something it sends a signal to your brain and synapses fire off. Then that information is then sent to another part of your brain where you “see” it.

Its the same thing really, with the keyboard being like your eyes/hands and the electrical currents like synapses.

If you want the really nerdy definition then the brain is an organic computer but a highly advanced one by our standards.

After all what is the brain but just a bunch of cells connected together like a circuit in a mainframe?

The brain is a biological computer, I think. It’s just much more complex than human-made computers.

@kyanblue The brain does parallel processing all the time. Each neuron is like a tiny single processor and each stimulation you perceive activates hundreds if not thousands of neurons.

We actually use artificial neural networks to make computers act much more like the human brain. Neural networks have the ability to classify similar inputs as relating to certain outputs and store information within the structure of the network. Our brains do the very same thing but on a much grander scale.

@Shuttle128 have a link for us? I would love to read more about that.

@pikipupiba Well, most of what I wrote is off the top of my head. I’ve been reading about neural networks for a while. The wikipedia article on Neural Networks is a good place to start. Though it doesn’t do much in the way of explaining the similarities between neural networks and the brain. I read a very good article similar to this one that explained things very well.

The more interesting types of neural networks that demonstrate the similarities are the Perceptron and Hopfield networks.

The conscious brain has very severely limited processing ability. The human brain can’t remember more then seven things at a time and recall them correctly, obviously the computer exceeds that. But the conscious brain perceives past and future, the computer anticipates it by probability.
I have read the conscious brain processes about 2000 bits of info/second, but the non conscious brain processes about 400,000,000,000 bits of info or four hundred billion bits of info per second-I am not sure if computers are there yet.
Computers are striving to, and successful at becoming more intelligent, but they are long way off to replace human brain power.

The brain can also deal quite confidently with maybes and shades of gray and can correctly infer a whole from a very small part of a pattern. These are some of the interesting differences.

@Jeruba Inferring and classification are both caused by the neural network configuration your brain is in. Both are very hard to do with a Von Neumann style computer but are easily accomplished by some of the simplest neural networks.

We’ve spent less time using neural networks for processing information than with stack architectures like a digital computer because it takes training rather than programming to develop neural networks. You can develop programs to train artificial neural networks but making a true neural network is something we haven’t quite come to master yet. Right now Von Neumann computers are preferred because of their high speed in executing lots of single bit operations. In time we may get a true neural network computer up and running that is close to par with the human brain.

Yes, both are able to tell you the result of 7 times 8. But they way they do it is different.