Computers are technology-based tools that only do what they are told (programmed) to do. Your brain, on the other hand, began life with a set of reflexes it was never taught. Your brain re-experiences things in order to for you to remember, but it doesn’t store those memories in anything that looks or acts like a computer’s storage device.
In short, your brain is not a computer.
Since childhood, I’ve been uneasy with the analogy that cognitive and neuroscientists have been foisting on the brain — that it is very much like a computer. As someone who’s been deep into computers all my life, it just never seemed to make much sense to me. Computers don’t think for themselves, they can’t do anything that you don’t explicitly instruct them to do, and they don’t have any inherent reflexes or skills wired into them. Computers are literally oversized doorstops if they don’t have an operating system.
Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, put my belief into a thoughtful, well-reasoned essay over at Aeon recently:
Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms — this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.
But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers — design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them — ever.
Alan Turing, for example, asked what it would take for a machine to “think”; writing in 1950, he predicted that by the year 2000 “one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” If machines could think like human brains, it was only natural to wonder if brains might work like machines. Of course, no one would mistake the gooey material inside your brain for the CPU inside your laptop—but beyond the superficial differences, it was suggested, there might be important similarities.
We asked the experts to tell us why they think we should—or shouldn’t—think of the brain as being “like a computer.” AGAINST: The brain can’t be a computer because it’s biological.
Everyone agrees that the actual stuff inside a brain—“designed” over billions of years by evolution—is very different from what engineers at IBM and Google put inside your laptop or smartphone. For starters, brains are analog. The brain’s billions of neurons behave very differently from the digital switches and logic gates in a digital computer. “We’ve known since the 1920s that neurons don’t just turn on and off,” says biologist Matthew Cobb of the University of Manchester in the UK. “As the stimulus increases, the signal increases,” he says. “The way a neuron behaves when it’s stimulated is different from any computer that we’ve ever built.”
Realistically, though, we still have a much longer way to go in order to answer even the most basic questions of brain functioning. This essay is a good reminder why we should only keep an analogy as long as it seems to fit with known facts. What we know about human behavior suggests it’s time to move on from believing our brains are like computers.
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