Howdy,
I'm "Bill Gates" that asked the neurotransmitter question before (I
was on a public computer). Thanks for all the comments...they were
quite informative. I have a pretty simple question that's kind of
bugged me for quite some time. If it's in a FAQ somewhere, please send
me the location. You hear a common citation that we only use 10% of our
brain. Where does that come from, and what do they mean by "use 10%"?
My guess is that "they" mean only 10% of the neurons in the brain are
firing at any one time, or that 10% of the total possible glucose
consumption is observed at any one time. If it's the former, then I
wouldn't ever want to use 100%, because I would definitely be in a very
chaotic and fairly useless state of mind. If it's the latter, then I
still wouldn't want to use 100%, or my brain would probably look like an
anti-drug commercial. Who's to say what the "capacity" of the brain is,
anyway?
I roughly estimated that if each neuron had on average, say 100
connections, and each connection stored, say a 32-bit floating point
value (the synaptic "weight" of the connection), and there were say, 10
billion functional neurons in the brain, then you could say that the
brain roughly has a capacity of 4 TeraBytes (TB) of data. And if the
average neuron could fire, say, 300 times per second, and you considered
one firing event to be 99 summations plus a comparison operation,
resulting in 100 floating-point operations, then you could say that the
brain has a "peak operating capacity" of around 300 TeraFLOPS (TFLOPS).
That's some pretty serious power! I think that's several hundred of
the fastest supercomputers in existence.
So, then, I suppose, based on average firing rates and connections,
one could come up with a third computation for "average utilization",
and try to show that it is 10% of the peak, but this seems to me to be
the least likely explanation. What's the deal?
Dave
--
David Held, Chief Programmer "As far as the laws of mathematics refer
Business Computing Solutions to reality, they are not certain; and
email: dheld at uswest.net as far as they are certain, they do not
web: www.uswest.net/~dheld refer to reality." - Albert Einstein
