What is the "Clock Speed" of our BRAIN?

#005
We regularly Dream! Basically every-time we sleep. They are like, pretty nice or sometimes horror- filled long movies, isn't it? You Are Absolutely WRONG.

Long is the wrong word to say. Dreams last for a few seconds or sometimes minutes, thats it. They are not too long to be movies. They seem to be long. That particular moment, our brain is like, too relaxed to go through short details. But wait, what actually are movies?

We all know that the movies that we watch are set of 24 pictures, well framed, passing by every second. Our brain gets tricked by such illusions and believe it as motion. Persistence of vision is the factor playing it's game here. Our brain can distinguish 16 frames per second. But that's too much. Every image taken by our eyes in 1/16th of a second is equivalent to 7 mega-pixels, costing about 7 to 8 megabytes of data. So, mathematically! 7.5x16=120 megabytes per second. Our visual lube works faster  than that. It has to manipulate the data to get a 3D interface. The brain is much faster.

Now we come to the point.

What is the "Clock Speed of Our BRAIN" ?

Hmm... Quite challenging. There is no proper explanation on how the brain works. The vision part, as explained earlier, is not exactly 120mbps fast. It's a horrible approximation of 600mbps or say 0.59 GHz processor working only to let us "see" things, 'cos we have to stitch various images to make one frame, costing nearly equal to a super HD image. That is faster than all the cameras available in the market. Understanding, manipulating those and adjusting the lenses is a different issue. That would rate 20 times faster than that.

This was what we see. Our brain takes the charge of many other things in the body. Hearimg is as important as seeing things. We are able to distinguish 20 to 20,000 Hz frequency easily. That simply means that we are able to make a meaningful definition to a maximum 20,000 fluctuations every second. We are also able to catch the variance in pitch. The nerves carrying the data transmit at an average clock speed of 3 to10 kbps. Slow! That is the nuron part. The section of brain that takes charge of hearing is running at a much higher speed. It would be very difficult to calculate the part as it is too sophisticated how the brain works so sharply with sound waves. It is somehow uneven function.

We are getting closer to the answer. But we still are away from it. We talked about eyes and ears but there are many sense organs working with more complications.

If you lay your skin tissues flat, they can cover an entire tennis court. That's big! More over, the skin responds to temperature, pressure, touch and galvanic changes. There are millions of neurons attached to the skin and they perform more than 4 functions. It is not possible (at least now) to find the speed of the processor behind skin as many times we perform reflex action controlled by the spinal cord and not the brain.

Well, two significantly amazing organs are our Nose and tongue. The olfactory receptors in nose send humongous data to the brain. One important part is our tongue. It helps us to taste the food we eat, speak, and even it helps us to eat. All these actions are controlled by our own brain. Computation load is not even felt.

Well this was the sensory part. The actual action of the brain is seen while dealing with memory! The human memory is estimated to be infinitely large. But we don't need to wait for a moment to recognize an object which we have already seen, regularly. The words you see on the screen are understood even if they are less used. The smell of a delicious food will be always recognized, even though you ate it months ago. And the structure of a spjere will be a sphere, even if you close your eyes.

Even if we don't remember something, exhaustive hints can make us remember memories used far back in time. Connect your simple small computer to Google's memory and it would betray you like never before. And, Google has a finite memory, not infinite like our brain. So, what say? How fast is your brain?

That question is pretty difficult to answer but, we can have an answer. Our brain has around 200,000,000,000 neurons in it. Two hundred BILLION neurons. They are pretty much fast at their own frequency. They fire approximately 200 times a second. And every neuron is connected to 1000 other neurons. So our brain goes,

2200,000,000,000×1000×200=

40,000,000 Ghz = 40 Peta-hertz.

Tianhe_2 or the milkyway_2 in chinese is the fastest computer on earth buring at 33.86 Petaflops at Nantional University of Defence Technology, Chansa, China. It's clock speed is just 8.465 Peta-Hertz. That's 4.7 times slower than our brain.

Congratulations! You still faster than Tianhe_2. But the Chinese are respectable, I just love their electronics.

So why can't we calculate as fast as Tianhe_2, even though we have a faster brain???

Our brain is busy with many functions of the body. Our heart pulse, breathing, digestion, excretion, natural intelligence, etc. Computers literally have zero IQ. While we take our own decisions. We dream of making computers which would make our lives easier but our brain is smart enough to act fool enough, so that we don't recreate ourselves. For the moment, that job can only be done by a mother.

Thanks for reading,
Good Day.