A Single Human Brain Cell May Be a Tiny Computer, Not Just…

A Single Human Brain Cell May Be a Tiny Computer, Not Just an On Off Switch For decades, scientists have looked to sheer size, nearly 100 billion neurons connected in an enormous web, to explain why the human brain supports abilities like language, imagination, and mathematics. A new study published in PNAS suggests part of the answer may lie somewhere much smaller, inside the computational power of individual brain cells themselves. Neurons are often thought of as simple switches, either firing or not firing, essentially on or off. This new research suggests that's a significant underestimate, at least for human cortical neurons. How researchers actually measured a neuron's computing power: Researchers developed a genuinely creative method to measure computational complexity. They used advanced computer modelling combined with artificial intelligence to determine how difficult it would be for an artificial neural network to learn and reproduce the exact relationship between what goes into a neuron and the response it produces. The logic is straightf