Last time, I wrote about Geniuses a Product of Innate Abilities or of Environmental Factors, and I became fascinated by the fact that some people could acquire fluid intelligence faster than others. This made me very fascinated by the brain, and I thought about it and how it works. I am not talking about in terms of medicine but in terms of neuroscience. I started to take a good look at the brain, and I wonder why will people use the analogy comparing the brain to a computer. The computer might be able to process things very fast but it isn't anywhere close to the brain. The mind is the substrate that I could look to compare the framework of computers, even though the mind does more. The brain is a very complex organ but the ability to use the brain up to scale like we use the computer hasn't been identified. If we were to look at depression, I am not sure we could find a computer word to use as an analogy, the best we could use is a black hole but this isn't a computer word but a space world. So the brain is very complex and can take a lot or
A computer is a passive device that follows the Cabbage in and Cabbage out model, that just receives instruction and produces information. The computer has no mind of its own, it doesn't have the ability to do random thoughts. AIs today are not even close to being active devices as they still improve from the instructions and information that they get in I guess this is different from the tabula rasa by Alan Turing that says the brain of a newborn is like a white paper that things are needed to be prescribed into them. This could mean the brain also deals with cabbage in and out, but unlike the computer, the brain is a self-organized system.
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The brain is complex no doubt, and its different areas perform different activities and carry electrical activities around. The temporal lobe and the motor cortex (Broca's area) for instance are responsible for speech and sentence formation. The brain's neural activity is responsible for controlling the movement of the mouth, the lips, and the tongue during a conversation, determining vowels and consonants. Creating words would require the activations of areas in the brain. This is completely different from robotic or AI talking which is focused on one chip and a set of codes.
One confusing aspect of the brain is the memory imprinting process or storage process and retrieving memories. it is regarded as the encoding, storage, and retrieval process. You know, unlike the computer that is ready to give back information when requested, the brain could be very funny. have you had an experience where you are sure that you stored this information properly, in fact, it pops up regularly when you are doing nothing (like a person's name that comes to your mind at every point in time) but it becomes very difficult to remember the information when you need it the most? or cases where to recite a list of 10 birds and flowers for hours and then you are asked to come to recall the birds and flowers only to remember just 6 or 7 of them. Do we say the brain didn't store those data properly or we are having difficulty searching for those memories in the brain, or was the recalling of those data to give information poor? Cognition and prioritizing is a very important factor in memory for humans, it is very important to know that plants do not have any brains, but then the CPU of the computer does not require cognition to be able to harness and store memories. The prefrontal cortex does a lot of cognitive control, and the ability for humans to retrieve information.
While I would not agree with the brain being metaphorically called a computer in the case of depression. Depression is a medical condition that has to do with the brain. When the brain is being scanned, there can be different areas of the brain expressing abnormal higher and lower activities, which isn't found in computers.
After mentioning these things that make the brain more compared to a computer, it is important to look at what the computer can do and why the brain can't. Computers are very good at solving arithmetic problems provided they have been programmed to do so, they can play chess even far better than the best chess player in the world. The fact remains that there are so many things that the brain can do that we are not consciously aware of currently.
The brain is still being researched and much about the brain hasn't been known but the brain is still very much active in thought, something that computers do not do. Thought is dependent on neural impulses that the brain reads and drives the muscles in the body. The brain can be used to complement machines in other to help people who have broken connections between their brains and their limbs, or other parts of the body (such as in cases of stroke, accident, and so on). Research is being done in centers and organizations such as CyberKinetics Inc. where the brains are able to send electrical impulses to the machine, thereby allowing the machine at the part where it is needed to perform the actions that the brain asks it to perform. Over the years, I believe humans will be able to harness more of their brain ability and will be interacting with machines to solve some problems.