Submission + - fMRI Data Reveals the Number of Parallel Processes Running in the Brain (technologyreview.com)
The human brain carries out many tasks at the same time, but how many? Now fMRI data has revealed just how parallel gray matter is...
...The results make for interesting reading. Although the analysis is complex, the outcome is simple to state. Georgiou says that independent component analysis reveals that about 50 independent processes are at work in human brains performing the complex visuo-motor tasks of indicating the presence of green and red boxes. However, the brain uses fewer processes when carrying out simple tasks, like visual recognition.
That’s a fascinating result that has important implications for the way computer scientists should design chips intended to mimic human performance. It implies that parallelism in the brain does not occur on the level of individual neurons but on a much higher structural and functional level, and that there are about 50 of these.
“This means that, in theory, an artificial equivalent of a brain-like cognitive structure may not require a massively parallel architecture at the level of single neurons, but rather a properly designed set of limited processes that run in parallel on a much lower scale,” he concludes..."
Full paper link:
“Estimating the intrinsic dimension in fMRI space via dataset fractal analysis – Counting the `cpu cores’ of the human brain” (arXiv:1410.7100v1 [cs.AI])
