Information on the Brain

Remember that post about how DNA stores a tremendous amount of information, and there are biomimetics efforts to develop DNA for data storage? Well, this ain't it. It's been known for a long time that there is a great deal of information stored and processed in the brain, but discoveries of what's happening at the cellular level show that there is more going on than was ever dreamed of.

Image credit: Pixabay / geralt

Y'all probably know that the Web has a passel of people all over the world sending, receiving, sharing information, right? That's a lot of computing power and memory going on. Your brain has more power than that. Instead of 1 and 0, the brain transfers 26 levels of synaptic information, and is inspiring ideas of biomimetics for future computer development. Let's face it, cells could not possibly have evolved from simple organisms into such specified complexity — which is still not fully understood. No, the Creator was behind all this.

Whoever said the human brain is the most highly organized collection of matter in the universe was more correct than they could have known. New research modeled tiny structures within nerve cells and discovered a clever tactic brains use to increase computing power while maximizing energy efficiency. Its design could form the basis of a whole new and improved class of computer.

Neurobiologists from the Salk Institute of La Jolla, California, and the University of Texas, Austin, collaborated to build 3-D computer models that mimic tiny sections of rat hippocampus—a brain region in mammals where neurons constantly process and store memories. One of the models, published in the biological journal eLife, helped reveal that the sizes of synapses change within minutes.

To read the rest, click on "Your Brain Has More Memory Than the Internet". Also, I recommend "Hi-Tech Human Brain Better Than Thought". The first part is a brief mention of the article featured here, then it goes on into some very interesting material.