Author Description

Most of us never really think about the miracles our brain delivers 7 X 24 X 365 – we simply take it for granted. But sit back for a second and wrap your conscious mind around this; we are talking about a three-pound blob that is one-fourth to one-third the size of a soccer ball and yet outperforms a “cloud” (a facility that can be up to 25 acres large with thousands of computers) or even IBM’s Watson, which is a supercomputer that incorporates natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning and operates in a distributed computing environment and processes at a rate of 80 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) and accesses 90 servers with a combined data store of over 200 million pages of information and processes against six million logic rules and which can process 500 gigabytes, the equivalent of a million books, per second. And Watson and its data are self-contained in a space that could accommodate 10 refrigerators (or more than 270 times as large as the brain), excluding its environmental control apparatus and space. Just to provide one more data point, it is generally believed that the human brain has 100 billion (10⌃11) neurons and at least 100 trillion (10⌃14) synapses. That is a lot of potential storage space for memories. But, both neurons and synapses pale in comparison to the estimated number of tubulins (where I believe memories are stored) in the human brain - 10 quintillion (10⌃19). Numbers this large have little relevance for most of us, so let’s provide some perspective. Seconds since the Big Bang are4.32 x 10⌃17. Stars in the observable universe are 7 x 10⌃22. So, the number of potential storage areas within the brain in tubulins would be somewhere in the middle of the range bounded by number of seconds since the Big Bang on the low side and the number of stars in the observable universe on the high side. That is a lot of stuff to pack into a three-pound “meat machine,” as Marvin Minsky and others have described our magni