If the human mind was a CPU what Ghz speed would it be running?

Question

I have always believed that the mind is a bio CPU controling our bodies thru electral inpurses.

Answer 1

Imagination is more important than knowledge.OK, so what's the speed of dark?

Answer 2

I'd say it's at least 100Ghz with like 20 GB of RAM. The body has alot of idle programs running in the background.

Answer 3

Pretty slow actually.  I'm thinking like 650 khz.

Answer 4

Of course there is no parallel between the way a computer CPU works and the human thought processes.  But if they did work in any comparable way, you would have to remember first of all that while electrical signals in logic circuits travel at the speed of light, or 186,000 miles per second, nerve impulses require changes in cellular chemistry, and thus travel much, much more slowly.

Nerve impulses travel at about 600 feet per second, or about 1/9 of a mile per second, as compared to the electrical speed of 186,000 miles per second.

So we are talking about very different orders of physical magnitude.  The "processor speed" at which thoughts are processed would not approach even one megaherz, not to mention even approaching a fraction of a gigaherz.

Our thoughts seem instantaneous to us, because we have no way of being aware of shorter time intervals than those generated by our own senses.  The human brain and nervous system are actually very slow.

Sorry.

Answer 5

the speed at which the brain processes information and the hundreds of different programs it runs near constant, I'd have to guess it operates on a terahertz speed with about 4 GB of RAM

Answer 6

they say the human mind uses only about 10 per cent of its capability. 1 more per cent and we turn out to be either freaks or geniuses. talking about speed - i think it depends on our daily moods. sometimes we go fast, and other times, we pull over. all things being equal, probably about 3 GHZ - just a little over most computers today, no wonder we want the next better laptop, coz we work faster than what we have - but not too fast; just a work in progress, as we catch up with speed technology.

Answer 7

Faster than any CPU we got existing at the moment. Our neurons are really fast.

The human mind cannot be compared with a computer because we are actually smarter (Hellooo! We MADE computers!)

Answer 8

Well, its' not exactly like there are direct comparisons. Basically computers do one thing at a time, we are just starting to make computers that parallel process (Danny Hillis' Thinking Machine) from back in the 1980's  was one of the first, so when you think about it like that, Ghz breaks down fast. By raw measures, the thinking machine was slow by todays' standards (made of nothing but souped up not even 286s or something similar, but you had hundreds or thousands of them  and presto - you're moving right along now.

Measured in billions of transactions (since brain-cells don't "do" long division), you have to think of each cell firing and decharging and firing again as a tiny transaction. The brain has billions of cells, with trillions of connections, (10's or a couple of dozen for each cell to every other cell in a radius).

Lets' also therefore set a limit and say there were some arbitrary limit on the number of transactions each cell could perform (lets say 3 seconds per transaction) thats' still trillions or actually quadrillions of transactions a day so roughly speaking the average brain is going to have alot of Ghz.

So by that math, at any given moment, your brain is running at something like 1,000,000 Ghz or so.

And that's asuming brain cells fire alot slower than they actually do so you could add maybe another couple of orders of magnitude there and know that the human brain won't be getting outclassed by a "single" computer for at least another 7 or 8 years or so. It's probably the case that if you got all the worlds computers working together and had them working in concert you might have something approaching the complexity of a few individual people's brains but probably not more than 5 or 6 or so at most.

Put another way, as far as we can tell, our brain is the most complex structure we know of.

Answer 9

The human brain - We can only estimate the processing power of the average human brain as there is no way to measure it quantitatively as of yet. If the theory of taking nerve volume to be proportional to processing power is true we then, may have a correct estimate of the human brain's processing power.

It is fortunate that we understand the neural assemblies is the retina of the vertebrate eye quite well (structurally and functionally) because it helps to give us a idea of the human brain's capability.

The retina is a nerve tissue in the back of the eyeball which detects lights and sends images to the brain. A human retina has a size of about a centimeter square is half a millimeter thick and is made up of 100 million neurons. Scientists say that the retina sends to the brain, particular patches of images indicating light intensity differences which are transported via the optic nerve, a million-fiber cable which reaches deep into the brain.

Overall, the retina seems to process about ten one-million-point images per second.

Because the 1,500 cubic centimeter human brain is about 100,000 times as large as the retina, by simple calculation, we can estimate the processing power of a average brain to be about 100 million MIPS (Million computer Instructions Per Second ). In case you're wondering how much speed that is, let us give you an idea.

1999's fastest PC processor chip on the market was a 700 MHz pentium that did 4200 MIPS. By simple calculation, we can see that we would need at least 24,000 of these processors in a system to match up to the total speed of the brain !! (Which means the brain is like a 168,0000 MHz Pentium computer). But even so, other factors like memory and the complexity of the system needed to handle so many processors will not be a simple task. Because of these factors, the figures we so childishly calculated will most probably be a very serious underestimate.

By estimation, the brain has about 100 million MIPS worth of processing power while recent super-computers only has a few million MIPS worth in processor speed. That said, the brain is still the winner in the race. Because of the cost, enthusiasm and efforts still required, computer technology has still some length to go before it will match the human brain's processing power.

Answer 10

8080 system with 4 MB RAM.

Answer 11

It is not a CPU.

It is the ONLY processing unit.

Answer 12

Ghz? What person can do mathematical calculations as fast as the slowest computer? What computer has a mind, a sense of self or consciousness? You are comparing apples and oranges. We are nothing like the machines we can make. Nor do we understand ourselves enough to make machines in our image. Speed of operation will not bring a machine to the level of a human mind. Our architecture is wrong and most people in Artificial Intelligence know it, but they don't know how to fix it.

Answer 13

well

your belief is partially accurate.

The electrical impulses are chemical based

and there are other forms of communications for different purposes,

including chemical hormones and enzymes.

Many things contribute to the functionality of life.

Now as for the basic brain-wave functionality, we could associate a comparable processing speed based on the functionality of a computer...

Only issue here is, there is not one single "processor"

There are at least 36 individual processors in 2 seperate hemispheres that operate at variable rates for specific purposes.

Each one of these "processors" may very well be equivical to multiple computers interlinked, performing seperate duties towards a common function.

In short, It is nearly inconceivable as the the full power of our minds.

We don't tend to use them at more than 3% of their theoretical capacity for work.

But the thing you must understand is that <speed of electrical waves> is measured in Hertz.

A hertz is just a single cycle of occillation within a wave length.

The higher the herz the faster the energy travels.

Now the limitations of this speed within the brain fall upon the properties of chemical electrical pulses generated by salt ions.

What makes our thought power fast is not accountable to speed of signal, but capacity for multiple signals at once.

If your 2.4 GHz can move data from point a to point b quickley, but it relys upon RAM (random access memory) to put things together, then

without any memory (not to mention limitation presented by little arms moving readers across magnetic disks that spin...), the processor can't do anything at all.

What we have is tremendous storage of amazing organization that can be called upon instantaneously from infinite locations all at once.

We have small sections of the brain that are dedicated to processing senses, movements, thoughts, speech, visual recognition, fine motor movements (like writing or controlling a videogame...) and all of these occur independantly of eachother, without limitation.

The only thing the brain relies upon as a whole to function, is energy/nutrient.

One part of the brain can consume so much of the bodies energy that there is none left for other parts...

but this would relate to the draw of amperage a computer create on the household current.

This is limited by the delicate circuits which will overheat if too much power is directed through them at once.

The brain has blood vessels to transport everything, and regulate temperature.

I could go on and on with this subject, but I feel that my answer is a bit disorganized and long running as it is.