Neurons: Nature’s Computing Machines

Neurons and how they work

We said earlier that animal brains puzzled scientists, because even small ones like pigeon brains were vastly more capable than digital computers with large quantities of electronic computing elements and storage space running at frequencies much faster than fleshy, squishy natural brains.

Because of this, scientists began paying attention to the architectural differences between the two kinds of brains. Traditional computers processed data sequentially and in fairly exact concrete terms. There was no fuzziness or ambiguity about their calculations. Animal brains, on the other hand, although apparently running at much slower rhythms, seemed to process signals in parallel, and fuzziness was a feature of their computation. Let’s look at the basic unit of a biological brain—the neuron.