Liqun Luo, professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and professor, by courtesy, of neurobiology, at Stanford University, published this interesting essay about human brain efficiency and how massive parallelism lifts the brain’s performance above that of AI. The brain is complex; in humans it consists of about 100 billion neurons, making on the order of 100 trillion connections.
Both the brain and the computer contain a large number of elementary units – neurons and transistors, respectively – that are wired into complex circuits to process information conveyed by electrical signals
The highest frequency of neuronal firing is about 1,000 spikes per second. The fastest synaptic transmission takes about 1 millisecond. Thus, both in terms of spikes and synaptic transmission, the brain can perform at most about a thousand basic operations per second, or 10 million times slower than the computer.
A pro tennis player can follow the trajectory of a ball served at a speed up to 160 mph. The calculations performed by the brain, however, are neither slow nor imprecise.
Read to learn more interesting facts about human brain and how engineers have taken inspiration from the brain to improve computer design. Top notch!
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