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I'd be very interested to know (more)

  1. Dec 28, 2003 #1
    A few figures... What is the average number of neurons in an adult human? What is the average number of ATOMS in an adult human? How many words are there in the English language? How many people do we meet, on average, every day? How many objects do we enter into memory, on average, every day?

    It just seems interesting to me (and probably all of us) that we hold such vast ammounts of information in such a small space, and operate at such incredible speed (assuming information is stored in the brain, of course). A computer can take hours searching for a given phrase or file... We do it in less than a second. We string together logical ideas and sentences nearly instantaniously. We can do an incredible number of complex things at the same time. How (not that anyone knows right now, heh)? It's incredible... Computers the size of buildings aren't as fast and efficient as the human brain, and we operate biologicly!
  2. jcsd
  3. Dec 28, 2003 #2
    I've heard that it's estimated we have close to 100 billion neurons. It's been said that we really use only 5 to 10 percent of the brain's capacity but I think that is just a myth. Most of the brain is devoted to handling sensory input. The rest is used for memory and thought. It may be that 5 or 10 percent is left over for memory and thought which leaves 5 to 10 billion neurons for this purpose.

    I think that the relationships between the neurons is important in explaining how we are able to do what we do. How do the neurons operate together. The patterns of activity. Do people with higher intelligences have more efficient configurations with respect to the neurons?

    Perhaps there are quantum effects at work in the brain that are not taken into account when using computers to model neural nets. The biological brain operates on the cellular level but perhaps there are things happening on a more fundamental level of which we are unaware.
    Last edited: Dec 28, 2003

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