Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays
aeon.coSaved by Charlie Gedeon and
Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays
Saved by Charlie Gedeon and
“It’s common in our culture to compare the brain to a computer, but this is a deeply flawed analogy.”
A conventional computer also stores a sizable batch of information in a kind of holding pen but has to shoot it, one small bit at a time, through a processor where the real work of computation and comparison is accomplished. This is called serial processing. Neural nets function in a radically different way. They don’t use the narrow, railroad-trac
... See moreThe Big Idea, the conceptual breakthrough of the last thirty years of psychology, is that the brain is a kind of computer. That’s the basis of the new field of cognitive science. Of course, we don’t know just what kind of computer the brain is. Certainly it’s very different from any of the actual computers we have now.