‘Computers are no competition for the incredible power of the human brain’

We always tend to think of modern computers as being very clever, able to do most of the things the human brain can do, but a lot quicker and a lot more efficiently. Just stop and think about that for a moment and you realise the computer has a very long way to go, before it can really compete with us!

Here’s a quick list of all the things I can think of that the human brain does, mainly working in the background, without any conscious instruction from us, and many of them accomplished all concurrently and 24 hours a day, whether we are awake or sleeping. It’s a pretty long list, but I do think it’s interesting and bear in mind that I doubt if I have included many other functions that I don’t even know about.

Starting with the major functions, there is the control of our ribs and diaphragm to give us breath; then the beating of our heart, pumping thousands of litres of blood around our bodies, every day of our lives; and the working of the many muscles we possess, including the ones that are continually adjusting our stance by tiny amounts, to stop our very top-heavy bodies from over balancing and depositing us flat on the ground. More subtly, our brain manufactures and delivers the tears that keep our eyes moist; the saliva and hydrochloric acid that assists in the digestion of our food; the sweat that cools us on hot days and the oils that keep our skin soft and pliable. It also manufactures a myriad other chemicals and hormones, each one with a special job around the body, and the red and white corpuscles that carry oxygen to our muscles and act as defenders when we are attacked by foreign bodies.

When we get really cold, our brain makes the muscles of our body quiver at high speed to generate heat — we call it shivering — it also causes slow ripples throughout our intestines, to push digesting food through to the disposal unit and it passes all our blood through our kidneys many times a day, to filter out the impurities, manufactured during the process of living. If something is wrong with our systems, the brain has several ways of warning us, such as pain, nausea, itching and in some severe cases, temporary paralysis. It operates our senses, so that we can see where we are; hear the environment around us; smell the atmosphere we breathe and touch anything to discover its texture or temperature; and if any of those senses indicate danger, the brain can immediately, by what we call reflex actions, take the necessary measures to provide protection. It causes our hair, nails and skin to grow all the time and it is always rebuilding every part of our body, as older parts wear out (I remember reading somewhere that we grow a complete new body about every eight years of our lives).

Then there are the more abstract functions of our brains, like speech for instance. In conversation with another person, the brain is, in a genuine split second, able to search the enormous library of words we have stored in our heads, pick the appropriate ones with which to create an answer and then turn them into spoken words by controlling our lips, tongue, throat and vocal cords, all in an instant and while still performing all the work I have listed in the previous paragraph! But let’s take the abstract function a stage further too — suppose for a moment you are playing a game of darts and you require a double-top to win, imagine the terrific amount of calculation the brain has to go through, in about half a second, to work out how much effort needs to be put into your arm, for the dart to just get as far as the board, then it has to calculate further the exact moment the dart needs to be released from your hand so that it travels through an arc that finishes at the double-top panel on the board, an oblong smaller than a cigarette, and at a distance of about 8 feet!

I’m sure I’ve only covered a tiny percentage of what our brains are capable of, but I hope I have painted an adequate sketch of just how powerful it is. (Talking of painting and sketches, I’m reminded of yet another of the brain’s accomplishments — creativity; painting, drawing, music, acting and dancing to name just a few, and still all done while the rest of the jobs above are being done!)

There’s no doubt about it, we have something truly wonderful tucked inside our heads — may it keep working well, right to the end of our lives!

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