Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer by Robert Epstein

I liked this article and agree personally that the metaphor of the human brain as a computer or information processing machine feels intuitively off-base to what I experience (both as a human and, albeit, amateur computer enthusiast and writer-of-code).

I found rather interesting the author’s examples of how human metaphors for the brain's inner workings have changed drastically over time (none yet seem to have adequately explained the phenomenon):

The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.

The author concludes that, at some future day, the metaphor of the human brain as a computer will seem as ridiculous as this notion of the brain as a hydraulic machine does now. One example of how a computer is a poor metaphor for the mind is found in the idea of “storing memory”:

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.

He continues:

Because neither ‘memory banks’ nor ‘representations’ of stimuli exist in the brain, and because all that is required for us to function in the world is for the brain to change in an orderly way as a result of our experiences, there is no reason to believe that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience. If you and I attend the same concert, the changes that occur in my brain when I listen to Beethoven’s 5th will almost certainly be completely different from the changes that occur in your brain. Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed over a lifetime of unique experiences.

If you start paying attention, you’ll notice how pervasive the metaphor of “human brain as a computer” is. In fact, I admit (somewhat ashamedly) that when my first son was born I was kind of in shock that during his nine months of development in the womb, there wasn’t some kind of bug that worked its way into his biological system (a weird nose, an immune deficiency, etc). Thousands of babies must be born everyday, most of them likely in “normal working order”. How is that possible? I can’t even ship a single piece of code without some underlying a bug. I suppose I’ve been spending too much time writing software.