Lived Experience Forum

[Sehnsucht]

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

Whaaaaaaaaaat is this logical reasoning that I have not yet come across before? My human mind just imploded and had to readjust everything it thought it knew about itself.

Such an interesting read.
We still know so little about our brains.

[Former-Member]

Wild to think we have no idea of how we remember things. The dollar note exercise interesting. I guess if we were further along in understanding the brain we would also be further along in understanding Alzheimer's and other brain diseases, disorders. I came across this a while ago about aphantasia http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054 the inability to visualise something in your mind. I discovered that I think I have this. I was struggling with all the imagery mindfulness tasks. This helped me to understand why. The brain is an amazing organ.

[Sahara]

Hi @Sehnsucht and @Former-Member,

in all the reading I've done over the years about the human brain and from all the documentaries I've watched about neuroscience, I never did get the impression that our brains were much like computers.

I only know that research on the brain is still in it's infancy and many theories we once held are now in serious question.  

I just thought that calling the brain 'the computer' of the body was an easy way to explain it's function to children!  Seriously, that's as far as I thought the comparison went. 

Even though my own brain is seriously dysfunctional, I still marvel at it's abilities. I think the ability we have to feel emotion, compassion and to be creative and feel awe is what makes us human. Creativity, in particular, is something a computer will never have any use for.  (Of course I realize that computers can be programmed to generate what we might label random "creative" images, but the computer can't make any decisions about what looks good, when deciding among these images. They are a meaningless novelty.)

This is off the topic, but I always laugh when people say "computers might one day take over the world". Because a computer has no will- it doesn't desire power. A computer is inert; lifeless. It has no motivation to take over the world. It doesn't even have the concept of what the world is. It can't even conceive of it's own existence, anymore than what a vacuum cleaner can! 

[Kurra]

@Sehnsucht
I've never really thought about the brain as a computer per se.
Putting that concept aside, the thing that did spark my interest was memory as in say words or Beethoven's 5th. If you consider how a baby/small child learns their mother tongue they are remembering sounds not words as such. Over time those individual sounds come to represent a person/thing etc.
Thi of course would also include visual recognition combined with the matching sound.

I recall learning to touch type and cursing that stupid typewriter (yes typewriter not computer keyboard ) because each key should have had a different sound. That way I would only need to learn the sound sequence. Then I would have no need to look at the written sequence because the sounds would tell me if I were right or wrong.

OK I'm rambling on but it is a different take on the idea.

[Appleblossom]

I liked your ramble @Kurra it made me smile as I did have similar feelings.

Great article @Sehnsucht.  I remember when I first started using IP metaphors.

Metaphors and analogies are only useful so far .. and cant be pushed to extremes as there will always be differences between different things... So its important to keep arguments in context too.

Digital on and off ... is so different to the curly circuituous paths of nueronal connections.  It kinda makes me feel normal now when I read how far some individual nueron stems actually grow within the brain matter.

So maybe we need to be patient with language expressions and the odd ramble ...