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 … [Read more...]