The human brain has about a 100 billion neurons. That’s an impressive number (it’s greater than the stars in our universe) but it’s not exactly mind-blowing. However, the number of synapses, well, that is mind-blowing. It is exponentially larger, something like 100-500 trillion. And all these neural systems are themselves composed of information processing biological cells, each one acting as its own impossibly complex nano-machine working on an intricate biomolecular level. All told we have something like 39 trillion of them working tirelessly in our bodies.
The weird thing is the stochasticity of the whole shebang. Even our neural processes are invariably stochastic, with order and predictability only emerging as we... (read more)
The human brain has about a 100 billion neurons. That’s an impressive number (it’s greater than the stars in our universe) but it’s not exactly mind-blowing. However, the number of synapses, well, that is mind-blowing. It is exponentially larger, something like 100-500 trillion. And all these neural systems are themselves composed of information processing biological cells, each one acting as its own impossibly complex nano-machine working on an intricate biomolecular level. All told we have something like 39 trillion of them working tirelessly in our bodies.
The weird thing is the stochasticity of the whole shebang. Even our neural processes are invariably stochastic, with order and predictability only emerging as we... (read more)