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One of the most amazing things about the brain is how incredibly slow it is. Nerve impulses travel extremely slowly compared to the speed of electricity, and our fastest neurons can fire *a few* times per second . Compare that to the clock speed of a modern CPU, ~10M times faster
Yet we can produce complex behaviors in response to unexpected events in about 400-500ms (like catching an incoming object). Including muscle-brain roundtrip. This implies that each neuron involved in the computation fires at most a couple of times.
This inherent slowness, coupled with the constraint of real-time responses, must have shaped the algorithms developed by the brain in profound ways (in particular, this is likely why we need *so many* neurons). Intelligence developed on a computer might look very different.
In particular, we are unable to brute-force any problem. We solve constraint satisfaction problems via intuition and analogy. A chess master evaluates millions of times fewer positions than a computer program at a comparable level.
Our biological and experiential limitations *force* our brains to be *intelligent* -- to learn from few examples, to generalize strongly, to build complex solutions in few trials. Everything that is out of reach for AI today.
Maybe it's a set of programmed options like a limited fast food menu. Something unexpected causes us to choose from a limited set and we run the program. It works or it doesn't.
I’ve heard that humans are actually too slow to catch an object we drop by accident even though we manage to. Implies the brain is actually a prediction engine allowing us to function in real time.
Or perhaps the brain isn't the one preparing the response /thinking at all.
Isn't this a hierarchical process? Not a neuroscientist, but I've read that sensor signals don't always reach cortex and still get a muscle response (and much faster than 400ms). E.g. blinking when something gets unexpectedly close.
You're making the common mistake of assuming that neurons only process when firing, whereas there are concentration gradients of dozens of neurotransmitters flowing in both directions even when the cell is resting.
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