I'm sure you've heard this one before:
The human brain is like a computer.
However, you may not have heard the sharp slap of my palm hitting my forehead immediately after this particular pop psychology claim is uttered anywhere near my vicinity. A similar thunderous facepalm is heard whenever someone says "humans are like animals" for the exact same reason.
Humans ARE animals and biological brains ARE computers.
They are not LIKE, they ARE.
Duhhhr.
What follows from the initial utterance of the phrase is an obscene conversation where all involved pretend to know what they hell they're talking about. As far as I'm concerned the participants might as well be saying nothing but "Fuck fuck fuck" repeatedly. After all, those participants don't really care about what they're talking about as long as they sound smart, just as I don't care about this illustration as long as I get to write the word "fuck" repeatedly. (It brings me great joy.) [1]
Now that I've got my ranting out the way, here's how to understand that your brain is a computer.
Because yer smart, and not someone who rambles on endlessly about things you don't know about, you already know that it's a really good first step is to fully understand the meaning of the word "computer": A computer is a thing that computes. It's that simple. (I really don't get how people misunderstand this. It boggles my brain meats computer.)
By necessity, the computer has to take some input (the stuff to calculate) and give back some output ( what you get back.) This entire structure can be diagrammed as a black box for easy understanding.
INPUT --> [COMPUTE!] --> OUTPUT
Our nervous system, not just our brain, also has this structure.
SENSORY NEURONS --> [SPINE/BRAIN] --> MOTOR NEURONS
Information only moves one way through our nervous system just like it does in a computer through it's CPU. It comes in through our sensory nerves, some calculations are made, and the output comes out as behavior of some kind. Make no mistake that this is a super simplified diagram[2], and even so, it's accurate to say "information goes in, action comes out."
And there you have it. The human brain IS a computer. It's a different type of computer that performs the same function as any other computer (it computes).
Again, the human brain isn't LIKE a computer, it IS a computer.
Duhhhr.
[1] Fuckkity fuck fuck.
[2] I've used motor neurons (neurons projecting out to the skeletal muscles) as the sole output for simplicity. It's much more accurate to replace [MOTOR NEURONS] with some category representing any neurons that project out to anything that does something. "information in/action out"
