3 ms·

The side-to-side comparison is not very accurate. The brain consists of many structures, many of them involved in non-cognitive tasks.

• blattimwind 8y ago
  The "speed of basic operation" column is given as "10 GHz" for a computer and 1 kHz for a human brain, but later is clarified that the 1 kHz refers to the maximum observed frequency of a neuron's output. Arguably these are unrelated metrics. I don't think a thing like "speed of basic operation" can even be defined for a human brain, because fundamentally it's a programmable computer metric that simply doesn't transfer to a brain. Of course, one could go ahead and simply compare the conscious compute power of a human to that of a computer (e.g. FLOPS), but then that number would be something like "1/100 to 5 FLOPS".
  • gerbilly 8y ago
    >maximum observed frequency of a neuron's output. IIRC the frequency of a neuron's output is used to encode the magnitude of the signal. Take for example a neuron transmitting a pain signal, low frequency is used to transmit low levels of pain. High frequency, extreme pain.
  • partycoder 8y ago
    Another problem with the analogy in this article is that there is no division between memory and processing element in a nervous system. They're essentially the same. Imagine running a program on a computer where everything is somehow memoized, on a system that is always powered on.