Multitasking in Our Brain, Can it be Compared to a Computer?

There have been quite a lot of similar news posts about researches and other papers available about how the worse creation of God was, as a comparison to that of the creation of His creation. Some news suggest that the brain is no good compared to a CPU. The funny part about this is that most of these authors are from Universities, playing their much vital (and respectful) role as a professor in psychology or computer science sections. I know, it is a great way to inspire people and gain recognition by giving away a thesis paper or a post with a “Science research” tag on it, most engaging I believe.

But we’re actually missing many things. Our computer machines were built right on the base of our body; human anatomy I am talking about. What do you think made the pioneers call a CPU, the brain of a computer? All of the underlying concept sand functionality are similar. It is only the broader look of the machine that attracts you to the goodness of machines. I have not yet quite possibly seen any difference until now. Let us walk through a quite scenarios to talk about the differences, or more specifically the similarities of a brain to a CPU, a computer’s brain.

What Multitasking is

It would be better to first define the term Multitasking itself before going on to a comparison of what they are in a brain and a CPU. Multitasking is a term coined by computing, in which different (or quite generally and possibly) processes or functions or programs are executed (or performed) simultaneously (concurrently at the same time). You can use the example of this in your modern graphical user-interface based operating systems, where you can run different software at the same time without having to worry about the underlying stuff, such as memory management or clock ticks by the CPU. An Operating system does all of this stuff for us, all we must do is, click on the program to run another program.

At a broader level

Now that the actual concept of multitasking has been shared, it is time to judge a brain’s capability to that of a CPU’s. Let us first talk about the broader level of comparison.

A brain, well; let me talk about my brain when I am writing this article.. I am listening to Eminem’s Rap God; awesome song by the way, I am writing this article, I am also chatting with 2 friends of mine and yeah I am also having another article in the queue for code reuse. All of these right at the very same time. I am not being puzzled, neither am I tripping or losing the grip from any of these processes; especially that Eminem’s song process. Now let me talk about CPU, my CPU (Intel i5) is performing, well many underlying process. But I will talk about those that I am running (because the brain also manages the blood, body temperature, sensors and all and I won’t try to count them similarly to the OS-based processes that are not relevant here), such as I am installing the Android SDK, I am playing the music, I am writing this article and I am also having that other article stored and waiting for me to get back onto it and complete it.

From this preceding paragraph, it is clear to see that at a broader level of comparison, they’re totally alike. There is no difference among any of them, and you can say a CPU works as brain.

At a micro level

Now let us talk about what happens at a micro level in both of these objects; CPU and brain. We all know, most of the devices (more specifically CPUs) can execute one command at a time; it can be better described by the machine cycle, that is:

1. Fetch: from RAM to the CPU registers
2. Decode: Into operator and operands
3. Execute: perform the operation
4. Store: It can be a display operation, or to store the data in the RAM back.

The preceding can describe how the CPU works, and how it executes one command. To be specific, it also takes 4 steps to add 1 with 1; 1 + 1 = 2. We make it better, through pipelining to allow the processor to process 4 commands in one cycle. the same thing happens with a brain, a brain performs one task at a time, but all of this happens in a very fast (but not very fast). According to this very clear and fine research and calculation, our brain, can perform 20 million billion calculations per second. Intel’s i7 processor is capable of performing 298,190 million instructions per second; please see the Wikipedia page for more.

Personal views

Now this section might be about my personal views about science research now a days. But you should read it anyways.

I would like to disagree with the professors that believe that the human brain is not capable of doing anything. Are you serious? What you think helped humans create these high-speed computers you’re trying to embrace now. No matter how fast you can build the machine, it can never even touch or demonstrate the greatness of the creator. Since it has been made clear enough that on the macro level they both act similar, or might even look like a CPU is being fast enough to handle a multitasking approach, but it is not the case. At the micro level, you will determine that the brain is faster. How then does the CPU win the race at the macro level?

That is because we.Humans of this age are just too lame to be fast enough. I have a very solid excuse for this statement. We, at a very tender age try to ask for a calculator when we need to multiply 23 with 4. I know that is somewhat confusing, but if we focus on it then we can easily get the answer, 92. Just a little focus can enable our mind capabilities that have been sleeping ever since our primary education, because of a computer, the calculator. Although the performance of our mind can be decreased with age, but that still is not the case when CPU can exceed our capabilities. Not only this, stress can also reduce the muscle to a low performance stage, after all it is a muscle, a genius one.

Although computer scientists believe that a dual-core is capable of performing two tasks at a time, well, two brains can then perform two separate actions simultaneously. What’s the big deal then? Nothing. No matter how better they perform, how fast can they try to make their CPU and machines, they can never reach the strength that a human brain can act. Our brain is the fastest intelligent thing on this planet, we just need to blow away the dust of laziness from our brains. Also, what did Eminem say in his Oscar winning song, Lose yourself?

“You can do anything you set your mind to man!”