The Most Complex Object in the World?
March 5, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Education, Neuroscience, Science
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……
Jeff Stimpson
Jill Cornfield
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.