What 'Architecture' is the brain?
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It's just the hardware that has reliability problems!
------------------------------------ To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day. W. Somerset Maugham 1925
Dalek Dave wrote:
It's just the hardware that has reliability problems!
Yes, but only while kept close (1 meter or less) to specimens of opposite sex. Turns out to be unpredictable. :) But never had an issue with doing manual transmission. Even in the presence of the said specimen, which actually enhances the capabilities. ;)
“Follow your bliss.” – Joseph Campbell
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It's just baroque'n'roll but I like it.
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
hey, don't you rock me Amadeus.
This signature was proudly tested on animals.
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As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
At least the higher level functions ("the human") are implemented in a huge, freely reprogrammable FPGA, also known as the cortex. The hardware elements are not uniform, there are special elements like spindle neurons which nontheless work more or less by the same principle. Unlike todays FPGA's, the nodes support fuzzy logic, can be reinforced / dampened on the fly / by read access. The lower level functions ("the animal") are distributed over the huge lump blow the cortex, work (in my understanding of what we know today) similar, but with different specializations and importance of initial state.
Personally, I love the idea that Raymond spends his nights posting bad regexs to mailing lists under the pseudonym of Jane Smith. He'd be like a super hero, only more nerdy and less useful. [Trevel]
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | µLaunch - program launcher for server core and hyper-v server -
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
Your brain can remember thousands of shapes, figures and faces. How much memory does a computer need for that?
Well I did say several hundred GBytes, maybe I should revise that to several hundred terabytes or even petabytes! Which also leads to another interesting question, can you exhaust the storage capacity of the brain or would it work like a FIFO system - First In, First Out?
According to this[^] it is between 1 and 1000 Terabytes (nothing like hedging your bets :) ) but is probably 3. Although I disagree, I calculate it as 3.85 TB. (I have been getting my neurons to number off whilst I was typing this.)
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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Tapsnapper wrote:
Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you
Party trick of mine in high school after using an associative memory recall technique. Haven't tried it in years and don't actively use the memory recall techniques any more. Close friends reckon I have "the memory of an elephant", I reckon I'm just genetically predisposed. Or something.
But fortunately we have the nanny-state politicians who can step in to protect us poor stupid consumers, most of whom would not know a JVM from a frozen chicken. Bruce Pierson
Because programming is an art, not a science. Marc Clifton
I gave up when I couldn't spell "egg". Justine AllenI find phone numbers quite easy, when properly divided into 3 then 2 then 2 digits.
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According to this[^] it is between 1 and 1000 Terabytes (nothing like hedging your bets :) ) but is probably 3. Although I disagree, I calculate it as 3.85 TB. (I have been getting my neurons to number off whilst I was typing this.)
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
Henry Minute wrote:
According to this[^] it is between 1 and 1000 Terabytes (nothing like hedging your bets Smile ) but is probably 3. Although I disagree, I calculate it as 3.85 TB. (I have been getting my neurons to number off whilst I was typing this.)
LOL. Hmmm, that makes for very interesing reading; thanks for the link. I especially find this bit very useful: "Each synapse possesses a variable firing threshold which is reduced as the neuron is repeatedly activated." This explains to some degree how the act of learning something is achieved. The more something is repeated, the better the connections involved become and hence, it becomes second nature.
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I find phone numbers quite easy, when properly divided into 3 then 2 then 2 digits.
That's how I do it to remember the phone number but I also associate the phone number to either a word or number (depending on my mood) so that I can associate them with a person/place. Not unlike PK/FK relationships in RDBMS's.
But fortunately we have the nanny-state politicians who can step in to protect us poor stupid consumers, most of whom would not know a JVM from a frozen chicken. Bruce Pierson
Because programming is an art, not a science. Marc Clifton
I gave up when I couldn't spell "egg". Justine Allen -
As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
Definitely RISC -- all those floating point operations have to be programmed later.
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Henry Minute wrote:
According to this[^] it is between 1 and 1000 Terabytes (nothing like hedging your bets Smile ) but is probably 3. Although I disagree, I calculate it as 3.85 TB. (I have been getting my neurons to number off whilst I was typing this.)
LOL. Hmmm, that makes for very interesing reading; thanks for the link. I especially find this bit very useful: "Each synapse possesses a variable firing threshold which is reduced as the neuron is repeatedly activated." This explains to some degree how the act of learning something is achieved. The more something is repeated, the better the connections involved become and hence, it becomes second nature.
Seems to me to be the only way in which the animal brain is remotely similar to our crude silicon imitations. A sort of Electro-Lithography instead of Photo-Lithography.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
We often wonder. :)
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." - Red Adair
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As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
Massively parallel!!! Yeah for sure!! For the amount of memory, my recollection would be the amount of synapses would be a couple of thousand of petabytes, assuming one byte per synapse, which is certainly too low, and by simply ignoring the bytes needed to describe the neurons themselves (which is then definitely gross). But as someone points out, this is only the visible part of the iceberg, given most of what we do is unconscious, there is a massive amount of processing power in the lower cortex. But how about about considering the immune system as a data processing unit? Given there are all kinds of distributed computing all over the body, we are still very far away from putting together that sort of computing power.
You can't turn lead into gold, unless you've built yourself a nuclear plant.
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As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
Rube Goldberg! Marc
I'm not overthinking the problem, I just felt like I needed a small, unimportant, uninteresting rant! - Martin Hart Turner
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As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
The human brain is divided into several regions, each composed of neural networks. The higher conscious brain is mostly the outer folded layer of the brain, a layer only found in mammals, and (obviously) greatly expanded in humans, thus allowing our relatively very high intelligence. Other parts of the brain regulate body functions, for example, controlling muscle movement. This is why you don't have to think which muscle to move and exactly how to move it - your higher conscious brain just says "do this" to that lower part of the brain, which translates "do this" into "contract this muscle by this amount" and "relax this muscle by this amount" etc. Some other parts control body temperature, moods, some reflexes, breathing, digestion, heart rate, and all that other stuff. And yet other parts process sensory information - like vision - and by the time it gets to the conscious part of the brain, its all "there's a car" and "that's a house" instead of wavelength amplitudes and stuff. And there are parts dedicated to indexing long-term memories, like the hippocampus, and yet other parts dedicated to language grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc processing (which explains why mentally disabled people can still talk in many cases - language is a "basic" function not requiring much intelligence). This is all built out of carbon-based chemicals. So the brain is a carbon-based architecture. It's so distributed it has no CPU. The "CPU" of the brain emerges from the billions of connections between individual neurons, which can be considered like a single node on a network whose topology is constantly changing. The firing of neurons in the brain is "controlled chaos". When your neurons aren't firing at all, your brain is dead. When the neurons are firing synchronously, in a repeating pattern, you're having an epileptic seizure. But when it's a combination of pattern and chaos, you're conscious and thinking. Pretty cool, huh?
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That's how I do it to remember the phone number but I also associate the phone number to either a word or number (depending on my mood) so that I can associate them with a person/place. Not unlike PK/FK relationships in RDBMS's.
But fortunately we have the nanny-state politicians who can step in to protect us poor stupid consumers, most of whom would not know a JVM from a frozen chicken. Bruce Pierson
Because programming is an art, not a science. Marc Clifton
I gave up when I couldn't spell "egg". Justine AllenI used to remember phone numbers by following techniques: 1) Splitting it into group of numbers 2) Taking an image snapshot and remembering the image (Ex: shop displays etc) 3) Using some algorithm Used to remember a lot of phone numbers about 10 years back, but now its very few. Looks like memory area is getting crowded with other feature/functionalities :)
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As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
Have a read of "Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers" by Rodney Cotterill[^] He asks the question will computers ever develop consciousness? Simple answer: yes. But along the way he also makes it very plain how computers and brains are fundamentally different. Unfortunately, he has now passed away so there's not much chance of him updating this work to put the latest references and research into it.
I just love Koalas - they go great with Bacon.
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As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
Interesting take--except for the small details of stuff like 1)emotion/irrationality and 2)ability to create new ideas.
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As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
Few million cores - more like a cloud of small computers. No bits - it's chemical and it is not binary. It has slow information transfer: it's only partly electrical, and in part it is chemical. It has true randomness though - without "pseudo" :) - including self-organising logic (damage a part - other will learn to do its job) In brief, nothing close to any computer.
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Have a read of "Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers" by Rodney Cotterill[^] He asks the question will computers ever develop consciousness? Simple answer: yes. But along the way he also makes it very plain how computers and brains are fundamentally different. Unfortunately, he has now passed away so there's not much chance of him updating this work to put the latest references and research into it.
I just love Koalas - they go great with Bacon.
Searching just now on Hameroff, using the query (( hameroff google marriage )) finds Hameroff's 2007-sept-21 "Google Tech Talk" "A New Marriage of Brain and Computer". He repeatedly uses "The Bing Experience" as a term, evidently "Bing" has long been a buzzword among neuro-philosophers, something I didn't know till just now. This talk is "different material", way different from the stuff which has been on his "Quantum Consciousness" page ( the Penrose-Hameroff microtubules ) for years - quite an entertaining talk really, nice slides.
pg--az
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As processor data and addressing widths have increased overtime from Intel's 4004 4bit processor to the now very common 64bit AMDs and Intels and then on to multicore, this got me on to thinking as to what 'architecture' the human brain might be; if it is at all comparable to a slice of silicon. My own thoughts on the matter are it must be at least a 16 bit/16+ core processor backed up with several 100 GBytes of memory, but with a poor memory management system! My reason for only 16bits is have you ever tried multiplying or dividing two 4 digit numbers in your head? Or tried to remember an eleven digit phone number someone has just told you; hence the poor memory management system? The 16+ cores; well when you think what the brain does consciously and unconsciously and all the parallel processing that takes place, one or two cores just wouldn't be enough.
As I understand it, only a small portion of the human brain is devoted to conscious thought - a massive part is taken up by sight alone, not to mention the subconscious processing your brain does on a constant basis. I don't think it's possible to classify the brain as a single system - it's more like a distributed network or machines that each carry out certain processes and have their own strengths and weaknesses depending on their function.
It definitely isn't definatley
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Dalek Dave wrote:
It's just the hardware that has reliability problems!
Yes, but only while kept close (1 meter or less) to specimens of opposite sex. Turns out to be unpredictable. :) But never had an issue with doing manual transmission. Even in the presence of the said specimen, which actually enhances the capabilities. ;)
“Follow your bliss.” – Joseph Campbell
Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
) to specimens of opposite sex. Turns out to be unpredictable
hmmm... or so predictable? :)
You can't turn lead into gold, unless you've built yourself a nuclear plant.