How does a brain work? A neurobiologist will tell you that it is a collection of neurons that form bridges to create memories and act as CPUs. A psychiatrist will tell you that it is a complex mixture of emotions, experience, and information. This post is going to look at the brain at a human level and add a twist. It is going to discuss the functions of our brain by comparing it to the functions of a computer.

Let’s break the brain down.  Just like a CPU, a brain receives inputs from our senses, memories etc., processes that information based on an experience and outputs taking all these variables into account. A computer too does the same thing. I am going to take Androids autocorrect, an adaptive technology many of us are familiar with. Suppose you are telling someone your plan of the day. Generally, when you write ‘were’ in the beginning of a sentence, the computer as programmed, will change the ‘were’ will change to ‘Were’. But when you go ahead and correct that to “we’re” the computer will tweak its program, thus programming itself by experience, just like a human. A baby programs itself partly by experience, for example by learning that being stung by a bee is painful, and running away from it is advisable, and partly by inputs from its family. Our brains are, computers. Then comes the next interesting question. Are our brains better than a CPUs?

How big a number can you add? I think the biggest challenge is to remember 2 big numbers while adding them. A CPU's capacity to deal with large values while processing them is called RAM. Gaming machines have massive amounts of RAM. The numbers we forget are generally only a few bytes, and these machine have billions of bytes of RAM, allowing them to run, say, 8 gigabytes worth of software at the same time without forgetting anything. But with practice we can expand our RAM, which a computer can’t do yet. So let’s call this a tie.

How much memory do you have? Sometimes you forget when you are told to get milk from the store. But that doesn’t have much to do with your memory. It is more recalling power. Like our hard disk drive vs a computers solid state drives. Are memory storing mechanism is far more complex than a HDD. Are memories are bridges in neurons, so we don’t store all the details, we only store what might be important in the future, when stung by a bee, we would forget the details of where we were stung or what time of the day it was etc. But what you would remember is the fact that you should react when a bee is around you. Take a look at your bookshelf. Can you recall every book on the shelf? Probably not. But weeks later when you need to look for a book you’ll be able to locate on which shelf it is even if you weren’t able to back then. That makes the brains memory system much more efficient. What if you could do the same for a computer? If you could, say in a text document, only remember the keywords and fill in the rest with the computers knowledge of grammar.  A computer on the other hand, would simply remember every last bit of what it is told to remember something like rote learning a new language. Isn’t that amazing! The computer is more powerful, but a brain is smarter. More on that later.

A brain can store information in the form of neuron bridges. Therefore every memory affects the way we think. A computer can’t do that to some extent.

What’s the difference between a smart person and a knowledgeable person? A knowledgeable person has a lot of information. When told that the earth revolves around the sun, he would know that the earth revolves around the sun. A smart person would do one of 2 things. 1. He would ask if that applies to all other planets or 2. He would assume the same. Here’s when it gets amazing. A chapter of a book talks about solar systems. The first sentence is: ‘the earth revolves around the sun, and the sun is a star that is a part of a galaxy of millions of stars’. A knowledgeable person will remember these two sentences.  A smart person would use these two bits of information to make new ones. He would, after reading the same sentence assume,

Then he would use previously known information to add on to this,

So this way the smart person more than doubled his information. A computer cannot that do to well yet. A computer does not have wonder, it doesn’t question, or derive (it can to some extent) like a human yet.

Imagination and creativity. Imagination and creativity are still living thing only traits, perhaps the most interesting and puzzling ones. It is the solution of a problem, that hasn’t been solved this way before.

There is three levels of problem solving:

I personally believe that a new-born child has a mostly blank brain and no unique personality. As a great man or woman once said, “It’s our experiences that make us who we are.”

For example a bee sting will give it the fear of bees. Appreciation as a child will give it confidence.

Childhood experiences have a much bigger impact on our brains. This slowly decreases over time, and we refuse to let the times change us. This also makes them better learners than adults.

Here’s a fun fact. The more the times you recall a certain event, the more is the depletion of the details. So you may remember irrelevant things over relevant ones. This is because each time we recall something, the brain sends a protein to the respective neuron bridge, causing it to tweak the memory a little according to context.