• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

If the human brain was a computer what would its specs be?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
AndroidVageta said:
Anyways, thanks for all the other useless posts...dont understand why its so hard for people just to answer a question...ATOT...sigh...you have failed me again...
Click to expand...

I don't really know what you were expecting.

It's impossible to reply seriously, considering there is not yet a single reasonable hypothesis as to the capabilities and limitations of the human brain.

It can be argued there will be some equivalence to hardware specifications, but considering biologists have yet to uncover any foundations as to memory capacity, processing capability, or anything else... how can one compare the mind to current hardware?

About the only computer part that we could reasonably compare to proposed brain capacity, would be RAM, which one could compare with short-term memory.
What storage capacity one would say the average brain has for short-term memory, I have no idea.
 
destrekor said:
I don't really know what you were expecting.

It's impossible to reply seriously, considering there is not yet a single reasonable hypothesis as to the capabilities and limitations of the human brain.

It can be argued there will be some equivalence to hardware specifications, but considering biologists have yet to uncover any foundations as to memory capacity, processing capability, or anything else... how can one compare the mind to current hardware?

About the only computer part that we could reasonably compare to proposed brain capacity, would be RAM, which one could compare with short-term memory.
What storage capacity one would say the average brain has for short-term memory, I have no idea.
Click to expand...

Short term memory is about 5-10 things based on the person. 😛
That isn't that many bits, though it is usually sound and visual data.
 
Neuron action potentials actually fire much like computers - in a digital manner, 0 or 1.
Action max action potential frequency is capped at 500Hz due to the absolute refractory period, an which is an attribute of voltage gated sodium channels that describes the period that it takes for sodium channels to open again once closed.

Most of the time, action potentials would probably be firing at less than 100Hz, depending on the intensity of the stimulus. But many neurons can work in parallel to code for the same stimulus intensity, so that high action potential firing is not always required.
However, the brain contains nearly 10-100billion neurons, which is far more than the number of transistors on even the fastest CPU, a core i7, for example, contains 730million transistors.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/AniciaNdabahaliye2.shtml

Memory on humans is essentially infinite, however it's storage isn't as effective as computers 😉
And this is often for a good reason. You want to store memories that are salient to you that can help you attain your goals or help you survive. Useless memories are useless and thus tend to wither away. People with eidetic memory often have many deficits in other areas in their life.

Currently, the human vision system operates nothing like how computer graphics work. It largely deals with object recognition and detection of motion. It makes up a lot of data depending on context and cues.

To sum it up, brain works almost nothing to how a computer works.
 
Last edited:
You ask an incredibly dumb question and then bitch that no one takes you seriously? Unplug yourself from life, because you are a waste of time. Everyone knows this.
 
guyver01 said:
My brainpower is the equivalent of 42 networked Pleiades supercomputers.

pleiades_2.jpg


The Pleiades supercomputer is an SGI Altix ICE system with 12,800 Intel Xeon quad-core processors (51,200 cores, 100 racks) running at 487 teraflops on the LINPACK benchmark. Pleiades also features the world's largest InfiniBand interconnect network. The LINPACK run also measured electrical power consumption - Using a total of 2.09 megawatts, or 233 megaflops per watt.
Click to expand...

yeah, but based on the quality of your posts, i bet that thang aint even plugged in
 
Matthiasa said:
Short term memory is about 5-10 things based on the person. 😛
That isn't that many bits, though it is usually sound and visual data.
Click to expand...

Exactly, and therein lies the problem: how would one calculate the sound and visual data in bytes?
How many megapixels will our eyes see? When that is stored as memory, is there any compression? Same for audio data.
Also likely, our short-term memory storage is often just filled with database references and compression algorithm information:
Memory A: Reference brain sectors 0X142, 1F299, 4242A
Memory B: 10su in short-term = 4200su in brain-sector01100 (su= storage unit)

Who knows how that shit in our brain works. 😛

But really, how much data is actually moved, and how much is simply presented as a reference link to data in long-term storage?

If it hasn't been placed into long-term storage, then that is a different matter. That's when we have to figure out how much data the information from sensory inputs actually represents.
Text, like remembering the words someone said, or what to write down on a piece of paper when you reach it - not much data.
The visual scene, or the details of something heard - quite a bit more data.
 
SandEagle said:
yeah, but based on the quality of your posts, i bet that thang aint even plugged in
Click to expand...

most of my processing power is busy trying to figure stuff out.

for example...

did you know... that apparently.... 1 in 12 people are unaware of a certain ornothological statement?
 
A human being has about 100 billion brain cells. Although different neurons fire at different speeds, as a rough estimate it is reasonable to estimate that a neuron can fire about once every 5 milliseconds, or about 200 times a second. The number of cells each neuron is connected to also varies, but as a rough estimate it is reasonable to say that each neuron connects to 1000 other neurons- so every time a neuron fires, about 1000 other neurons get information about that firing. If we multiply all this out we get 100 billion neurons X 200 firings per second X 1000 connections per firing = 20 million billion calculations per second.
Click to expand...
http://www.ualberta.ca/~chrisw/howfast.html
 
I'm guessing trillions of cores, each very slow compared to a computer CPU. Mildly impressive, however, the software is impressive as shit.
 
The human brain in its totality is far more powerful than any single computer or processor.

The conscious human mind isn't very fast compared even to a cheap calculator, but that's the very surface of what we have access to in terms of processing power. In the background there are many autonomic processes needed for survival, and even seemingly simple tasks - like balancing - require some resources allocated by our brains.

We haven't even begun to comprehend higher order functions of the brain yet.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top