Thus, the brain is both hardware and software. When we talk about computers, we refer to carefully designed machines based on logic, reproducibility, predictability, and mathematics on the other hand, the human brain is a confused, seemingly random jumble of neurons that behave unpredictably.īiology is a beautiful thing, and life itself is much smarter than computers. That doesn’t sound very much, but the world’s fourth-fastest supercomputer, the K Computer, took 40 minutes to crunch the calculations for a single second of brain activity!īrains are VERY different from computers. In 2014, some clever researchers in Japan tried to match the processing power in one second from one percent of the brain. Although it is impossible to calculate precisely, it is postulated that the human brain operates a t 1 exaFLOP, equivalent to a billion billion calculations per second. In contrast, our miraculous brains operate on the next order higher. That’s a huge amount of calculations, yet that doesn’t even come close to the processing speed of the human brain.
A petaFLOP is a quadrillion (one thousand trillion) floating-point calculations per second. This makes it seem as if computers are superior, but the truth is that the human brain is much more advanced and efficient and has more raw computing power than the most impressive supercomputers ever built.Īt the time of this writing, the fastest supercomputer globally is the Tianhe-2 in Guangzhou, China, and has a maximum processing speed of 54.902 petaFLOPS. One of the common phrases circulating for decades, promoting the idea of a “brain versus computer” argument, is “brains are analog, computers are digital.” Since the birth of the first computers, there has been a direct comparison between these “calculating machines” and the human brain. If you had asked the same question a few decades ago, there would be no question… the human brain could circle around computers, but is that still true? Has technology begun to catch up with the most remarkable and reverent organ in the human body? If you take the human brain’s ability against a computer at face value, it seems as if a computer is faster and smarter, but in fact, there is much more to the story. You have probably lost the chess game, and the computer has definitely beaten you in the math race. Have you ever tried to match your wits with a computer? Perhaps you’ve tried playing it in a game of chess or raced to perform a calculation before your laptop could spit out the correct answer. The human brain, on the other hand, is a tangled, seemingly random mess of neurons that do not behave in a predictable manner. When we discuss computers, we are referring to meticulously designed machines that are based on logic, reproducibility, predictability, and math. Brains are VERY different from computers.