Eps 7: If my charger breaks than I'm going to tell people that my brain does not process information like a computer
| Host image: | StyleGAN neural net |
|---|---|
| Content creation: | GPT-3.5, |
Host
Randy Adams
Podcast Content
There are things computers can do that humans cannot, and the same way that cars, cars, cars, planes, they can all be done that humans cannot. Computers are really good at some aspects of chess, but even now--more than 20 years after Deep Blue--there are things that human players can do that computers cannot. Computers, in turn, are still learning from humans, who have experienced chess in ways no machines have.
For over a half-century, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists, and other experts in human behavior have maintained that the human brain functions as a computer. A handful of cognitive scientists--notably Anthony Chemero at the University of Cincinnati, author of the book "Radical Embodied Cognitive Science" --now reject completely the idea that the human brain works like a computer. Many alternatives to the mind=brain equation appear to be counterintuitive or bizarre. Some propose that mind reaches beyond the brain, to include all the body, or even parts of the environment, or that the mind is unconstrained by physical laws.
As difficult as this may seem to accept, we must admit that consciousness is simply a physical brain doing what brains do. By focusing on sight, we have developed a very limited view of what the brain does, and how it does it. It moves into our short-term memory only when we are paying attention to information.
Many of those short-term memories are forgotten pretty quickly, but our brains continually replay them when the task is uncompleted, keeping the information alive. Essentially, when we have a task that is not completed, we cannot help but torture ourselves to remember it, again and again, in order to retain it in our short-term memory. While remembering big chunks of information, short breaks actually can work in your favor: It signals your brain something is unfinished.
I reached out to Dr. Roma Kumar, a psychologist with over 30 years experience and founding partner at Emotionally.in, to figure out what really happens in our brains when we are left with incomplete tasks. Reverse engineering the computer is frequently used as a thought experiment to demonstrate how, in principle, we can possibly understand the brain. People of the future are likely to think of a similar analogy for computers. We still use phrases like the wheels are turning, but chances are that you would not consider your brain to be like a mechanical watch, for instance, because it is ridiculous.
We do, however, constantly compare ourselves to computers, and this leads us to overlook how our minds are different. Things like creativity, empathy, and improvisation are uniquely human--and computers may be making us better at things like creativity. You can configure systems to handle the mundane tasks, giving you more time to focus on things humans are good at.
The human brain does not hold most of the things that humans believe it does -- even simple things like memory. Whereas computers actually retain accurate copies of data - copies that can remain unmodified over a very long time, even after power is turned off - the brain retains our intelligence only for so long as we keep it alive. In the computer, software and hardware are separated; our brains and minds, however, are made up of what might be better described as a kind of "wetware" where what happens and where it happens are entirely intertwined.
A subject may wish to improve working memory, for example, and needs to strengthen the network of the brain involved. Worse, even if we had the capacity to capture snapshots of all the 86 billion neurons of a brain, then model the states of these neurons on a computer, this massive model would not make sense beyond the brains own bodies, which generate it. To even begin to envision how this could work in practice, we would need both a knowledge of neural functions far beyond anything we can now envision, and would need both unimaginably massive computing power and a simulation that accurately emulated the brains structures in question. Failed suggests that, despite the appeal of the computer metaphor, and the fact that brains really do process information and somehow represent the outside world, we still have significant theoretical leaps to make any headway.
In short, Aron Barbey believes exercise and nutrition may offer lasting, holistic benefits that simply stimulating particular brain networks will probably never deliver. Barbey knows that his work fuels an alternative vision for the future, one in which individuals, in private settings as well as in for-profit settings, could regularly hunker down to a session to recharge their brains. Aron Barbey resisted the notion that malls and airports would be lined with commercial brain-charging stations, updated versions of massage booths today, but if this future comes to pass, his work would play a crucial role in making it happen.
Building on this knowledge, Aron Barbey, with various co-authors, has gone on to publish a terrific set of papers that identifies the brain networks that underpin general intelligence, emotional intelligence, cognitive flexibility, working memory, and so much more. Spurred on by later advances both in computing and brain science, a multidisciplinary, ambitious effort to understand human intelligence slowly evolved, strongly grounded in the notion that humans are, like computers, information processors. Every day, we hear of new discoveries shedding light on the workings of brains, alongside promises -- or threats -- of new technologies that would allow us to do such far-fetched things as reading minds, or tracking criminals, or even being uploaded to computers.