Weve all heard of artificial intelligence, but how much like a PC is your brain? Jack Weber investigates.
Doug Quaid wanted a holiday on Mars. A holiday hed always remember. In the film T
Weve all heard of artificial intelligence, but how much like a PC is your brain? Jack Weber investigates.
Doug Quaid wanted a holiday on Mars. A holiday hed always remember. In the film Total Recall, Quaid, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, visits Rekall Inc, a company that can implant complete sets of memories into your brain so that youll always be able to remember the event exactly as if it had really happened. In Quaids case, memory and reality proved impossible to disentangle and it all went horribly wrong.
That image of the brain plugged into some sort of electrical machinery has been a staple of science fiction since Dr Frankenstein called out More volts, Igor! and his monster was brought to life by electricity. Today, its a bit more sophisticated, but are all those sci-fi characters jacking into cyberspace, discreetly slipping a chip into the socket behind their ear or brain-dumping their thoughts into silicon any more believable? Is the brain really just a computer, albeit a very complex sort, or are we a fundamentally different type of thinking machine?
The pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI) has directed a lot of effort into creating machines that can replicate some of the mental skills of the brain, with reasonable success in some areas and abject failure in others. A lot less has been heard about doing the opposite trying to understand the brain as a computer and seeking ways to integrate it into a computing environment.
Those two opposing approaches are intimately connected and help to support each other, but theyre not the same. The first is about how we can build more useful computers; the second is about how we can better understand ourselves and that is arguably the more interesting subject.
The notion of the brain as a form of computer has been in circulation for longer than computers. It has its roots in the evolution of the telephone system. Towards the end of the 19th century, as telegraph and telephone networks were beginning to expand, a Spanish scientist, Ramn y Cajal, revealed for the first time the essential structure of the brain. He found a mass of cells (neurons) with long extensions (axons) that connected to numerous other neurons some close by, others far away.