I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I am not a scientist, nor do I pretend to be one. However, that’s never going to stop me from asking serious questions to those people who do claim or pretend to be professional scientists.
Recently an atheist friend (probably former friend, to be technically correct. I think he “unfriended” me after this exchange) asserted in our discussion as a statement with authority that neuroscientists have pretty much figured out how the human brain works.
Really? I thought. It’s been my considered opinion for some time now that we humans aren’t nearly as smart as we think.
So I asked my now-former friend what I thought was a pretty simple and straightforward question: how does our brain store a memory?
I do know how computers manage the feat but for humans, I can only guess.
Most people understand that computers mimic the human brain in several respects. However, as a former developer, I know quite a bit about how computers go about performing their job, and the ways in which computers and the human brain are quite different.
Computers and humans both have memory, meaning an ability to recall historical information for use in current and future decision-making.
When we work in a computer program, our efforts are only stored temporarily in that computer’s memory. For our work to become persistent and thus made available for future use, we must take specific action to save our effort in the current session to the computer’s hard drive.
Otherwise, when we close the browser and turn off the machine, our work is lost forever. Furthermore, if we tell the machine to delete something we told it to remember, we must jump through hoops to recover the deleted information.
If it was never saved to the hard drive, that information is gone for good.
Conversely, sometimes things get stuck in human memory for which we have no “delete” button. Ever get a song stuck in your head? It isn’t easy to willingly “forget” something after you’ve learned it.
With a computer, the storage solution is relatively straightforward–human words are translated into the computer’s native machine language and physically written to a storage device called a hard drive.
Where is the “hard drive” in the human brain? How is it that we can we wake up today with not only a memory of yesterday, but memories of something that happened even twenty or more years ago?
Machine language is nothing but a stream of zeroes and ones that form a numerical pattern that can be mapped rather easily back to the human equivalent upon retrieval.
For example, consider that the following stream of information bits:
0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0111
actually represents one byte of information in machine language containing the numeric value “7” on a computer with a 32-bit processor.
So where is the hard drive in the organic tissue that comprises my brain? How is it that I can remember certain things, for example that today is my granddaughter’s birthday?
We know how cells in our bodies store inherited information. That’s fairly easy to explain — DNA is the ultimate “source code.”
One of the most remarkable things that any man of science has ever said to me came from an orthopedic surgeon about to stick pins in my finger in order to immobilize it.
When I said that I didn’t understand how a removable pin would solve the problem he replied, “The body wants to heal itself.”
How does “the body” meaning my body, know how to do something “I” don’t know how to do? Where are these self-repair instructions written?
An even better question: Who wrote them?
But perhaps more importantly for today’s question, how does our brain store learned information?
How does the organic tissue inside my skull remember that 12 x 12 is 144 almost five decades after my mother taught me that information using flash cards?
I no longer have the cards, but I can still recall the information that was on them.
As I see it, there are two possibilities — one possibility is that a currently unknown or unidentified physical attribute of a brain cell somehow allows learned information to be stored in it.
For example, perhaps the microtubules and microfilaments in our brains actually form some sort of networked nano-storage device that link brain cells together into a fully functional, organic computer.
Presumably another alternative is that all our learned information is written into that ethereal data cloud we call a soul.
It seems that all that we can safely say for certain is that we don’t really have any idea how our brains allow us to function, think, and remember.
And now given this food for thought, where and how will you store it?
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