There’s a supercomputer between your ears

As I understand AI, it hoovers in everything from the internet so that you can shake useful stuff out of the dustbag. But our non-artificial intelligence is pretty good at hoovering too.

Think about what your brain has sucked in during your lifespan. Picture: istock

Two hundred billion trillion. Having little to do since my retirement from the ABC, I recently counted the number of stars in the universe and that’s the grand (and official) total I came up with: two followed by a helluva lot of noughts.

And it was easy to conduct the census given that my brain, like yours, contains around 86 billion neurons. I don’t know how that compares with the IQ of AI (if indeed AI has an IQ), but it’s enough to make human brains pretty brainy. Brainy enough, for example, to invent AI.

As I understand AI, it hoovers in everything from the internet so that you can shake useful stuff out of the dustbag. But our non-artificial intelligence is pretty good at hoovering too. Think of it as a Dyson between your ears.

Having little to do since my retirement from the ABC, I recently counted the number of stars in the universe. Picture: istock

Think what it has sucked in during your lifespan. Take faces. Facial recognition technology is nothing compared to your memory. Friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances. And actors – think of all the faces from movies and telly shows you know. Not just the stars but the extras. You look at an ancient episode of, say, Law and Order or Poirot, and dammit, you vaguely recall the visage of some nameless performer. Ditto the faces in portraits. E.g. the Mona Lisa’s.

(Not everyone recognises faces, of course. My old ABC colleague Dr Karl suffers from prosopagnosia, as did my friend Oliver Sacks.)

And it’s not just human faces that 99.9% of us recognise but the faces of flowers, of pets, of sundry animals from the marmoset to the moose. And streetscapes and landscapes – from the roads you’ve travelled to the aisles in the local Woollies. Again and again, we outperform satnav. And as we trundle our trollies, we also recognise the shapes of fruit and veg and the packaging of a thousand products. (It’s a wonder our head doesn’t explode from all that Dyson-ing. Surely there’s a build-up of cranial pressure? A limit? Perhaps that’s what causes dementia. Enough already! The brain simply, finally, surrenders.)

Think of all the smells you can identify, from farts to fragrances. Ditto sounds, from farts to fusillades. And think of all the words in your vocabulary, and all the tunes you know – the songs, and the lyrics. Spotify? Forget it.

I’m 86 but I can vividly recall, as if it were yesterday, my first memory. Of a thunderstorm. In Maryborough, Victoria, in 1941. Aged two.

Who needs an old-fashioned photo album? Or images stored in a smartphone? Each of us has an infinite supply of memories. And not just of actual events. We can recall dreams, fantasies, stories read to us by parents, and nursery rhymes from kindergarten. We particularly remember things we’d like to forget. Repressed memories? If only.

The world boasts two hemispheres: north and south. So does the brain: left and right. Containing, cramming in, those 86 billion neurons, continually fired by 100 trillion synaptic connections. Giving us a memory capacity of 2.5 million gigabytes, I’m told.

No wonder our brain consumes roughly
20 per cent of our total energy. It deserves more. Perhaps if we doubled that to 40 per cent we’d make better decisions. As individuals and as a species.

Because for all our brain’s braininess, we still behave with infinite stupidity.