The Most Complex Object in the World?
Autism is frequently referred to as a mystery whose complexities underscore the complicated structure and workings of the brain. A February 15th post on Neuroevolution: Chronicling the Cognitive Revolution in Neuroscience attempts to demystify the brain:
- Most neuroscience writing touts statements like ‘the human brain is the most complex object in the universe’. This serves only to paint the brain as a mysterious, seemingly unknowable structure.
This is somehow comforting to some, but it’s not for me [M.W. Cole]. I want to understand this thing!
Here are some facts to demystify the brain (most points courtesy of Dave Touretzky and Christopher Cherniak):
- The brain is very complex, but not infinitely so
- A few spoonfuls of yogurt contain 1011 lactobaccillus bacteria: ten times the number of cortical neurons in a human brain
- There are roughly 1013 synapses in cortex. Assume each stores one bit of information: that’s 1.25 terabytes.
To put this in perspective, this 2.0 terabyte hard drive is readily available and costs less than $900.
Also, the Library of Congress (80 million volumes, average 300 typed pages each) contains about 48 terabytes of data. - Volume of the human brain: about 1.4 liters.
- Number of neurons in a human brain: 1012. Number of neurons in a rat brain: 1010.
- Number of neurons in human spinal cord: 109 [source]
- The total energy consumption of the brain is about 25 watts [source]
- “For all our neurocomputational sophistication and processing power, we can barely attend to more than one object at a time, and we can hardly perform two tasks at once” [source]
- What to take from all this? Simply that the brain is a real, physical object with real, physical limitations. [my emphasis]. As such, we really do have a chance to understand it.
……..
So, do you still think that the brain is “”most complex object in the world”—-and even if it is so, do you non-science types like me feel a little more knowledgeable after reading Neuroevolution and maybe even this post……
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POSTED IN: Education, Neuroscience, Science
1 opinion for The Most Complex Object in the World?
Ms. Clark
Mar 6, 2007 at 12:04 am
Wanna know how close they are to understanding consciousness? 10,000,000,000,000 miles away (I just made that up). They really don’t know why a brain is conscious. Is a liver conscious? Why does a brain produce consciousness when a 2 tetrabyte computer does not. I don’t think the human brain is smart enough, nor are all the human brains put together, smart enough to understand it. I think some of what people think they understand they don’t understand at all, it’s an illusion.
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