The Inaccuracy of Electronic or Mechanical Metaphors for the Brain

Humans love to try to make metaphorical comparisons for things in biology,  but most of these metaphors give the wrong idea. Often an organism or one of its organs is compared to something that humans made. But you vastly underestimate what a wonder a large organism is when you compare it to some mechanical device humans made. This is because human mechanical devices don't make copies of themselves. There is no airplane that splits itself into two working airplanes, and no car that reproduces itself.  So every large organism is something vastly more impressive than anything humans have made. 

Scientists like to compare the brain to some work of human invention. The most common metaphor is one in which the brain is compared to a computer.  But this is not a correct comparison. For one thing, computers are controlled by software. We know of nothing in the brain that is equivalent to software. For another thing, computers have information storage devices unlike anything in the brain. 

Consider a computer with a hard drive.  Such a system is a stable data storage system in which newly acquired information can be permanently stored for many years.  Such a system includes a read mechanism and a write mechanism, such as a read/write head that can be positioned to read or write at any location on a storage disk.  Such a system also includes an addressing system allowing data to be stored at some exact location on the storage device, and allowing data to be very quickly read from some other exact location. 

The brain has nothing like any such things.  We know of neither a read mechanism in the brain nor a write mechanism in the brain. The brain seems to have no place where learned information could be permanently stored for many years, or even a single year.  The most common claim about neural storage of memory is that memory is stored in synapses. But the proteins in synapses have average lifetimes of only two weeks or less, only about a thousandth of the maximum length of time that humans can remember things.  

Since your computer has a filing system, you can add a named file to some particular directory on your computer. The brain has nothing that is equivalent to files. Because brains completely lack any coordinate system or position notation system, if you stored something in your brain you would never be able to quickly find it.  Writing to the brain would be like throwing an index card into a swimming pool filled with index cards.  Under such a system there is no way to quickly retrieve some exact piece of information you previously wrote. Since none of the locations of the brain have any addresses or coordinates, you could never retrieve something from the brain by doing something kind of like, "Okay, let me retrieve what I stored at neural address #73428234." No such addresses exist. 

Another reason why the "brain as computer" metaphor is inappropriate is that humans have lives, consciousness and experience, a "life flow," which computers don't have. And contrary to the misleading term "artificial intelligence," computers don't actually understand anything (although they can process information). So you cannot explain your mind by saying it's caused by a computer between your skull.  Your brain bears virtually no resemblance to a computer. 

An alternate idea was presented long ago before computers were invented. William James wrote an 1898 book in which he wrongly asked us to assume that "thought is a function of the brain," something for which there was no good evidence for either in his time or today.  He then presented a theory that imagined the brain as kind of a "receiver" that somehow in some sense receives mentality or thought transmitted from some external source. It is probably no coincidence that this theory came three years after Marconi invented the radio. In 1898 radios were the cool new gadget, so there might have been a certain appeal to comparing the brain to such a thing. 

While there may well be truth in the idea that our mental capabilities come from some mysterious external source, the analogy between mental activity and radio reception was never a good one.  A radio passively receives whatever is being transmitted on some particular frequency. But a human mind is a very active and thoughtful and creative reality, unlike the entirely passive and uncreative and thoughtless machine that is a radio receiver.  So trying to draw an analogy between human minds (or human brains) and radio receivers was never a very good idea. 

A recent article in Discover magazine gives us another example of trying to compare the brain to a mechanical device.  The article is entitled "You brain is not a computer. It is a transducer." Again, we have a misguided analogy comparing the brain to a mechanical device.  A transducer is usually a fairly simple device converting some analog signal into electrical signals.  Do a Google image search for "transducer," and you'll see some little gadgets looking like this:

The author (a psychologist named Robert Epstein) dares to contradict the unfounded dogma of neural memory storage, one that has been stated so many times in Discover magazine (a bastion of biology groupthink). Mentioning someone (Barenboim) who has memorized incredibly large amounts of musical information, Epstein states the following:

"Do you think all this content is somehow stored in Barenboim’s ever-changing, ever-shrinking, ever-decaying brain? Sorry, but if you study his brain for a hundred years, you will never find a single note, a single musical score, a single instruction for how to move his fingers — not even a 'representation' of any of those things. The brain is simply not a storage device."

I am very pleased that we can read in the very mainstream Discover magazine the same contrarian idea that I have advanced for several years on this blog, that brains do not store human memories.  Unfortunately, Epstein's article is so rambling and disorganized that I cannot recommend it for much other than getting links that may point you to interesting anomalies worth reading about further. At one point Epstein rather seems to suggest the very silly idea that maybe mind is kind of sent to you from a parallel universe imagined by speculative physics. There is no good evidence for any such universes, and no explanatory need to believe in them. If such universes existed, they would not be a credible source for any of the main human mental phenomena. 

We can seem to see in the article the effects of the mainstream's thought taboos.  Epstein seems very interested in anomalies that cannot be explained by conventional claims about the brain.  But he seems to forbid himself from discussing the best-documented anomalies of this type: things such as ESP, apparition sightings, out-of-body experiences and inexplicable successes by mediums.  Instead he draws our attention to interesting but less-established anomalies such as terminal lucidity (when those with dementia suddenly regain normal mentality shortly before dying) and near-death experiences of the blind. But why should we study such things and avoid studying the evidence for ESP, apparition sightings, out-of-body experiences and inexplicable successes by mediums, when the evidence for such things is much better and more voluminous than the evidence for terminal lucidity or near-death experiences of the blind?  

It is as if Epstein is carrying around in his pocket a list of taboo things he is forbidden from discussing, for fear of being deprecated by his colleagues who never studied such things but have negative opinions about them; and it is as if Epstein feels free to mention other anomalies that discredit conventional ideas about the brain, only because his academia colleagues haven't yet got around to declaring such things taboo. 

I regard Epstein as someone who might become a solid thinker about minds and brains once he gets his thoughts more organized and starts making a much wider study of anomalies that cannot be explained under "your brain makes your mind" ideas, without paying attention to which topics have been declared taboo by his colleagues.  I recommend that he lose his "brain as transducer" idea, which makes little sense, and also recommend he discard his weird claim that he has "decapitated consciousness" by showing that it is not mysterious.  The more we learn about the mind, the more mysterious it seems. 

The brain cannot be accurately compared to any mechanical or electronic device. Discarding all the unfounded claims made about brains (so often contradicted by low-level facts we have learned about brains), we can have a good minimalist concept of the brain: that the brain is a helper organ that helps other parts of your body do their jobs. So the brain helps your eyes see, your muscles move, your ears hear, and your lips speak; and also the brain helps your lungs to keep breathing at the right rate, and your heart to keep beating at the right rate; and your brain helps your pain receptors alert you of pain.  There is no electronic or mechanical device that acts in all those ways. As for the human mind, it cannot be compared to any device humans have created, not even to computers which don't actually have lives or experience or understanding.