No that is completely wrong and it is a common mistake made by people at all levels. The available pathways inside a computer, whether at the CPU level or in me

No that is completely wrong and it is a common mistake made by people at all levels. The available pathways inside a computer, whether at the CPU level or in memory, or the system bus do not change no matter which program you run (barring exceptional cases of malware which destroy the computer). What changes when you run a computer program is which pathways turn on and off, and these change based on reading the instruction set, which causes one operational circuit in the CPU to turn on and the results of that operation are stored for the next operation. RAM is simply a series of switches that can be "read" from the bus and passed to parts of the processor. The only thing that may, arguably, work like that is writing to a storage medium like a hard disk or tape, and even then the circuitry around the medium does not change, just the magnetic or other impression stored on the disk itself. Neurons are completely different in that they are made up of different connections to other neurons and it is these connections that make up both the storage medium, and the processing medium is what occurs when different neurons fire together. [edit] The bottom line is that the brain can create new "instructions" on its own by physically rearranging the groupings of neurons. For a computer to do the same requires a new CPU with a different instruction circuit baked into the chip.