Is the Brain a Computer

INTRODUCTION

“These days computer technology is advancing fast and computer developers are coming out with computers that imitate the brain every year. The more computer scientist study the brain to see if thought can be replicated in a machine, the more they get to know about the brain and the more the brain is understood as a mega computer.

Before we can investigate whether or not our brain is a computer, it is necessary to establish what exactly the definitions of a brain and a computer are. According to Webster’s online dictionary a computer is: one that computes; specifically: a programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data.

Computers have surpassed us in information processing quickly, just like humans; a computer remembers, thinks and says what it thinks. A computer therefore has a brain, a memory, and the ability to communicate and receive orders. The computer’s brain is its processor, which gives it its thinking power.

Definition of a brain:: the portion of the vertebrate central nervous system enclosed in the skull and continuous with the spinal cord through the foramen magnum that is composed of neurons and supporting and nutritive structures (as glia) and that integrates sensory information from inside and outside the body in controlling autonomic function (as heartbeat and respiration), in coordinating and directing correlated motor responses, and in the process of thinking вЂ" In other words:

It also stores, retrieves and processes data. Let’s explore the process of “thinking” as defined in the 1950s by artificial intelligence pioneers Allen Newell and Herbert Simon at Carnegie-Mellon University:

(1) Thinking is information processing;

(2) Information processing is computation, which is the manipulation of symbols; and

(3) Symbols, because of their relationships and linkages, mean something about the external world.

So comparing the definitions of 1) brain, and 2) computer, we have to conclude that the processing of information integrating in controlling autonomic functions is the same in the brain and computer.

The most often heard answer to the question: “Is our brain a computer” is a heartfelt “No! I am not a machine!” But there is so much we don’t know about our brain. For centuries, people thought the brain was for вЂ?cooling the blood’. Later it was thought that a brain’s intelligence was determined by its size and that someone's personality could be predicted by the bumps on their skull. Humans have made more mistakes about their own brains than any other organ. We may have learnt more in the past 10 years than in the previous 1000 years put together. However, we still know very little about so many aspects of our brains like sleeping, dreaming and how memories are stored.

In a review of biological computer models of the brain appearing in the 2003 Oct. 6 edition of the journal Science, psychology Professor Randall O'Reilly of the University of Colorado at Boulder explains that a region of the human brain that scientists believe is critical to human intellectual abilities surprisingly functions much like a digital computer. According to him “many researchers who create these models shun the computer metaphor," O'Reilly said. "My work comes out of a tradition that says people's brains are nothing like computers and now all of a sudden as we look at them, in fact, in a certain respect they are like computers." Digital computers operate by turning electrical signals into binary "on and off states" and flexibly manipulating these states by using switches. O'Reilly found the same operating principles in the brain “The neurons in the prefrontal cortex are binary -- they have two states, either active or inactive -- and the basal ganglia is essentially a big switch that allows you to dynamically turn on and off different parts of the prefrontal cortex," O'Reilly said. However, the computer-like features of the prefrontal cortex broaden the social networks, helping the brain become more flexible in processing new information, a process just like the Internet. This finding could help researchers better understand the functioning of human intelligence.

Another claim that’s disputes that our brain is to be compared to a computer is the fact that people tend to say “I’m me. I'm alive. And you're never going