HOW BRAIN MEMORY DIFFERS COMPUTER MEMORY

1. 53

   LANSTEINposted 15 years ago

   HOW BRAIN MEMORY DIFFERS COMPUTER MEMORY

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2. 75

   Nick Bposted 15 years ago

   Very little actually.
   
   Both the human brain and the computer, store different information in different areas.
   
   For instance, the way a human rides a bike comes from different parts of the brain and programs on computer come from different parts of the hard drive, network or whatever.
   
   The information to tell your body how to get on a bike and ride it are stored in one area of the brain as are the rules for riding safely  etc, just as the information for printing on a computer.
   
   The printer itself will hold some information on how to put the ink on the paper, just as your limbs hold information on how to behave when mounting a bike or riding it.
   
   The computer hard drive will hold other information on how to encode the information to be sent to print, just as your brain will have an area that tells you the directions from place 'A' to place 'B'.
   
   How they work though is totally different.
   
   The brain can deal with about ten 1,000,000 point images per second, but at the same time, the human being can be walking, talking and processing all sorts of other information all at the same time.
   
   The difference here is the architecture.
   
   The computer is based on Von Neuman architecture, which means it can only do one thing at a time. Although it may well apear that the computer is running things all at once, it is achieved by what is known as time slicing. This is where the computer sends bits of information from many processes, calculating them all individually cyclically, but at such speed as it appears to us that we can be typing a document whilst listening to music and even keeping up with news on a live feed - all at the same time.
   
   Whilst scientists have suggested (though they don't actually know for sure) that the human brain is slower than a computer chip, it can multi task, running many computations, calculations etc simultaneously.
   
   We can walk, talk, think, see, hear, touch, taste and smell all at the same time, so whilst it may be true that the human brain is slower, consider how much it is doing compared to a computer and think again.

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