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 bo... (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 bo... (read more)