Re:Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking a...
by joshmarlow on Wednesday April 06, 2022 @01:40PM
(#30935200)
> My laptop has several orders of processing power more than my brain, whose neurons fire around ~200 milliseconds.
The classic counter-point to the speed difference here is that biological brains are massively parallel - no synchronized system clock, every logical element acting async and in parallel - so that the number of operations per second per element may be tiny (say 10s per second) while the throughput of the entire system is massive.
It's similar logic to deeply pipe-lined processor architectures - pipelining may slow down execution of a particular instruction but allow greater global throughput.
Also, the logical operations performed by neurons (I believe neuron behavior is modeled using differential equations) appear significantly more complex than the boolean switching behavior of the logic gates in CPUs. So the amount of computation may be significantly larger than it appears.
The classic counter-point to the speed difference here is that biological brains are massively parallel - no synchronized system clock, every logical element acting async and in parallel - so that the number of operations per second per element may be tiny (say 10s per second) while the throughput of the entire system is massive.
It's similar logic to deeply pipe-lined processor architectures - pipelining may slow down execution of a particular instruction but allow greater global throughput.
Also, the logical operations performed by neurons (I believe neuron behavior is modeled using differential equations) appear significantly more complex than the boolean switching behavior of the logic gates in CPUs. So the amount of computation may be significantly larger than it appears.