Last updated: January 11, 2019. Brains are like computers, computers are like brains—you'll often hear people comparing the most advanced bit of kit nature has produced with the best that mankind has managed so far. Sometimes the comparison gets personal and competitive. Since Kasparov lost to the big bluethe Internet has moved center-stage in many of our lives—and a lot of people are now asking a subtly different question: if lots of people are my brain is like an internet browser up to one another by a giant worldwide computer network, do they work together in a brain-like way. In short, is the Internet becoming a kind of worldwide brain. Why compare Net and brain. Is there any value in comparing two things as unlike as the and the human brain. One of the first was French philosopher-priest 1881—1955 ; a radical and controversial thinker, he anticipated the Web over 50 years ago when he imagined a new stage of human evolution with people linked together to form a kind of collective, densely interconnected mind, heading for a union with the divine. It's worth remembering that two of the great movements in 20th century were similarly inspired by metaphors. In the eager hands of cognitive psychologists, the mind's tight and rusty screws were prised open and internal mental processes once again laid bare. Both metaphors proved to be —powerful but recognizably imperfect working models—that moved psychology, still a relatively young science, much further forward. Does it help us to discover more about the brain or the Internet and to move brain science and Internet technology forward. Anatomy First off, what can we learn by comparing the way brains and computer networks are made. The Brain Artwork: If you were to cut vertically through the middle of your head, from top to bottom, through a line that passes through the center of your nose, you'd see a cross-section of the brain's main functional areas like this. Most of us have a basic grasp of brain anatomy. Each hemisphere is divided into four regions called lobes, which neuroscientists suggest play differing roles in different kinds of behavior. So, for example, it's known that the temporal side lobe plays my brain is like an internet browser important part in memory, the frontal lobe is involved with planning our actions, and the parietal and occipital lobes at the middle and back of the brain are where we process information from our eyes and other senses. The Internet When we talk about theit's important to be clear that we really mean the Internet the global network of interconnected computers and not the the multimedia library of text,videos, and other stuff that we access over the Net, for example, when we Google or use Wikipedia. The Web is only one of many applications that use the Internet, including email, Internet telephony, such as Skypetelevisionand P2P file-sharing applications. There's actually a value in comparing the brain to both the Internet and the World Wide Web, but it's important to distinguish between the two and be clear. The Internet is hundreds of millions of computers including computing devices such as and all kinds of automated machines that communicate over the Net. The Web is hundreds of millions of websites, most of which contain links once known as hypertext links—though that's now starting to sound impossibly old-fashioned to other pages on the same site and other websites entirely. If you send an email or browse a webpage, packets of data travel over something like six to ten links between your computer a browser or client and the distant computer you're communicating with at the other end a server. Comparisons It's easy to make crude anatomical comparisons between the brain on one hand and the Web and the Net on the other. Where the brain has cells firing across synapses, the Net links computers over cables, cables, or links, and the Web uses hypertext links to connect one page to others. Now all computers on the Net are not equally important. There are major links between continents, for example, my brain is like an internet browser in a relatively small number of hugely important undersea cables; if one of those fails, vast amounts of Internet traffic are slowed down as they reroute across the world via longer and less direct routes. In the same way, some web pages are more important and authoritative than others. Google built its success on using an algorithm called to rate more highly pages that were more densely interlinked, supposing that they were more important than less-linked pages. So its own homepage, Google. The sudden loss of Google would initially be a major blow to the Web, though we'd quickly find alternatives; the loss of a PageRank 3—4 site or page wouldn't bother us at all. Does the brain operate the same way. It's certainly true that aspects of our behavior are controlled by circuits of activity within the brain. So, for example, neuroscientist Joseph Le Doux has devoted much of his career to fathoming out the complex circuits involved in emotions such as fear. Cognitive neuropsychology is the fruitful field that marries cognitive psychology the computational theory of the mind with the actual anatomy of the brain, and it uses two main approaches. One is to observe patients with particular patterns of brain damage often small-scale lesions damaging relatively specific brain areas to see what kind of cognitive problems they have, and then use those to refine cognitive theories such as memory, perception, and attention. The other is to look at a cognitive model of something like memory or perception, speculate what might happen if part of it becomes damaged, and try to find a real-world patient with exactly those symptoms. Summing up, what do we see from a crude anatomical comparison. The brain is modular, with some degree of specialization between different regions, and works in parallel. The Web and the Net are similar: you can damage relatively large my brain is like an internet browser of either without affecting the operation of the whole thing—and Web or Net it's likely that it will rapidly recover from damage by relocating the things it used to do in the damaged areas to other, intact places. Our brains have the same kind of plasticity, especially when they're young somewhat less so when we're older. Communication Send an email to a friend and it's very different from mailing them a letter. While you're letter travels in one piece along one particular though not necessarily predictable route, your email will be broken up into many separate packets, each with its target address attached, and each traveling over whatever route seems best at the time. Packet switching, as this is known, has proved to be a hugely efficient way to send huge amounts of data around the world. One of its main advantages is that it can usually but not always route traffic around damage or congestion on the My brain is like an internet browser. Picture: Moving house by packet switching: you'd dismantle your home and mail the bricks separately. After they traveled in parallel by potentially separate routes, you'd reassemble them once they reached their destination. Read more in our article on. At the very least, they argue, that shifts the focus away from the computational emphasis of cognitive psychology what happens inside the flowchart boxes of the mind to greater consideration of how different parts of the brain actually communicate how the boxes link together. More radically, they suggest there might be something to be gained by exploring whether the brain shuffles information in a similar way to how the Net switches packets between discrete domains. No single mechanistic description has achieved more than a rudimentary description of perceptual or cognitive systems. The brain and the Net are essentially linear. You can't send an email from London, England to someone in Tokyo without it traveling through various intermediate domains though it's important to remember that Net traffic doesn't flow as the crow flies, much less how the boat sails or even how the call is routed. In the same way, if you see something, information has to pass in a certain sequence from the retinas in your eyes to the in your brain in the occipital lobe of whichever eye is seeing at the time. The same is not true of the Web. Any Web page can link to any other without passing through any intermediate page or pages, though there is usually some meaningful connection: links are generally not random. This spontaneous connectivity is one of the things that's made Twitter so popular and successful. And nothing much changes in the world. But if your tweet catches their attention and they tweet you in return, follow you, or ask their followers to follow you, you can find yourself suddenly followed by hundreds or thousands of people who never previously knew of your existence. A direct new link has been made from one side of cyberspace Stephen Fry to the other you without passing through anything or anyone in between. The spontaneous creation of links between previously unrelated parts of the Web is one of the most creative and exciting possibilities of cyberspace—and one that remains largely unexplored. Functions It's easy to get carried away with fanciful comparisons between brain, Web, and Net—unless you remember that they're designed to do completely different jobs. Although we might have high-flying notions about philosophy and poetry, the blunt truth is that our brains are designed to run our bodies, nothing more and nothing less. The Internet and the Web obviously have no body to control: the Internet's purpose is to carry information from one computer to another, while the Web is a highly dynamic repository of human knowledge. Push behaviorism aside, and start to ask how exactly the brain controls the body, and it's immediately clear that brains have internal functions that resemble those of both the Net and the Web: they carry information like the Net and they're active repositories of knowledge like the Web. Now it's easy to see obvious parallels between, say, human memory and ; but, instead, let's explore the comparison further by considering something less obvious, perception and pattern recognition, which is one of the human brain's most important functions. Processing sensory information—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching something—is largely about recognizing patterns, which is why it's fair to say that much of what we see happens in the brain rather than the eye. From recognizing faces to reading written language, visual perception is substantially a problem of pattern recognition. You can train a neural network to recognize things by presenting it with many different examples. So if you show it a hundred pictures of dogs and a hundred pictures of cats, and explain which is which, it should be able to tell you whether a picture of an unknown animal is either a cat or a dog. Photo: A neural network recognizes patterns using interconnected layers of input units redhidden units blueand my brain is like an internet browser units yellow. The weights of the connections between the units represent, in distributed form, the things the network learns. Can the Net or the Web recognize patterns in similar ways to the brain, using something like a neural network. It's hard to see any comparison with the Net. The domains between which packets of information are switched are not linked by connections whose weight changes. The Net doesn't change the way it carries information according to the meaning of the information it carries. Indeed, the whole reason the Net has been such a successful design is that it takes no account whatsoever of the type of information it carries. Technically, this is known as the end-to-end principle, which means that the inner structure of the network hasn't been designed according to what the network itself is carrying, and it's related to the similar concept of Net neutrality, where all Internet traffic is treated the same way. But what about the Web. Does that function as a neural network. It's certainly true that the Web consists of discrete points websites connected to other discrete points other domains by weighted links. So the Web has some of the structure of a neural network, but can it function the same way. There's a key difference between a neural network and the Web that we've not yet considered. In the diagram up above, information flows through the network as it does in a computer, from input through processing hidden units to output as drawn, from left to right. The Web corresponds to the hidden units in the middle of a neural network: it has no obvious input or output. Not only that, but it's not arranged to process information in a linear fashion, like a neural network. It's more like a sphere built entirely from hidden units, where any hidden unit can, in theory, connect with any other and not just the units either side, as in a simple neural network. But can we stretch the analogy just a little more. We might consider whether certain units of the Web can act as inputs and outputs. Blogs, for example, often pick up exciting topical developments from the real world, which are then discussed and disseminated by other blogs and other websites before, occasionally, prompting dramatic real-world events of their own. After much heated online debate, the now-amplified story was eventually picked up again by mainstream journalists and so much attention was focused on Lott that he decided to stand down. Was this an example of the Web acting like a neural network. my brain is like an internet browser Attentive websites had served as the inputs, the interlinked network of blogs, websites, and social networkers discussed and disseminated my brain is like an internet browser inputs, hyping them up or playing them down, and finally, the network as a whole somehow arrived at an aggregated conclusion an output that prompted very real action. So if the Web is, in any sense, a neural network, it's a very special kind of neural network where the input, hidden, and output units are in a constant state of flux. Abnormalities Brains are complex and wobble about, dangerously exposed, on the tops of our heads. If they're lucky enough not to suffer physical damage through something like a head injury, they have to survive mental illness which affects a third of us at some point of our livesand gradual deterioration as we get older. The field of abnormal psychology considers behavioral changes caused by psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and depression, while neurology and neuropsychology probe the various cognitive disorders caused by brain damage such as following a stroke. It's intriguing to consider whether the Net and the Web could suffer analogous problems. my brain is like an internet browser It seems to stretch the analogy too far to consider the Net or the Web developing similar problems. As we've already considered, there's more mileage in thinking about whether the Net or the Web can be degraded by localized damage—and how they might react and respond. To a certain extent, that's true: websites, for example, are specialized and dedicated to particular topics. If the most authoritative website about dogs say a site that most dog owners relied on for all their information disappeared overnight, we might expect the Web to experience something akin to highly selective amnesia. But it would still have perfect knowledge about cats and other animals, some knowledge of dogs would survive dispersed across other websites, and, sooner or later, someone else would reconstruct the original dog knowledge on a different website, maybe even better than the original. Emotions Libraries are sober zones where even talking may be forbidden; emotions are cooled, calmed, dispersed, and dissipated. Individual books might be ranting polemics, but a library as a whole has no overriding opinion on any subject. Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia embody a similar spirit with a policy known as : articles have to show balance without obviously favoring one argument or another. The Internet is a neutral place too: thanks tothe traffic that travels from A to B speeds or chugs from domain to domain irrespective of whether it's the President's State of the Union address or a vile example of racist hate speech; in a democracy with a right to free speech, that's exactly what we might expect. The Web, on the other hand, is quite different. Happy, angry, elated, or sad, websites can certainly convey an emotional tone, but it's static—and not quite the same thing as the ever-changing emotions that flood through our own brains. Blog posts can obviously be emotional too, and here the tone can fluctuate from day to day or even minute to minute. Still, although the emotions are variable, the emotions expressed in any one post are essentially frozen in time: whether it's a happy post or an angry post, that's what it will always be. Is there any kind of analog for the fluctuating, responsive emotions in the human mind. The aggregated emotions of what's called the blogosphere and the Twittersphere come closer. Does this collective chit-chat amount to anything that could be described as an emotional response. Maybe we should ask that question on Twitter. Let's say it's an ability to improvise generalize or abstract a novel response from previous experiences to solve some problem you've never previously encountered. The human brain is intelligent, by definition; we deem it so just by having invented the concept of intelligence. But is there any sense in which the Internet or the Web could be considered intelligent. The question has no obvious meaning where the Net which is merely concerned with communication is concerned. But what about the Web. What about things like the blogosphere and the Twittersphere. Do they have an intelligence beyond the intelligence of their individual users. The very existence of those terms suggests there's a meta level on which the Web now operates; that, in turn, raises the possibility of meta-phenomena such as intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness which may or may not be the same thing. Isn't that taking the analogy too far. I think it probably is. But I can't be conscious on your behalf that you're reading the words; and, in the same way, I can't be conscious, as a blogger, on behalf of something called the blogosphere; even if I'm an active part of it, I might just as well be a passive commentator. A conscious Web would be something entirely different. Consciousness would be quintessentially meta: something above, beyond, and entirely apart from the Web itself, something that we, as mere constituents, would presumably have no more way to experience than an individual brain cell could experience human consciousness. Photo: Self-awareness: Is there anybody out there. It's easy to comprehend things smaller than you are, but harder to grasp that you're part of something bigger—like a galaxy of stars or even the entire universe. Would we, could we, be aware of the Internet's or Web's self-awareness, if it ever did occur. Is the possibility of a conscious Web good, bad, or ugly. Harvard Business School Press, 2009. A 14-minute discussion by the publishing pioneer, covering roughly the same ground as this article. New York Times, 4 August 2012. How we're relying on online information and search engines to supplement our own imperfect memories. New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011. A thoughtful review of the books by Jaron Lanier and Michael Chorost mentioned in the final section. For a review of Hebb's work and legacy, see by Richard E. Milner, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4, 1013—1019 December 2003. Install it on your computer and type in a remote domain such as google. If you're using Linux or Unix, the command does the same thing. Google now places much less emphasis on PageRank and actually uses over 200 different signals to rank the websites it lists for you when you search. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23:2, pp. SeeOxford Dictionaries Online Blog, 1 June 2011. Best known is the classic work ofreported in his paperBehavioral and Brain Sciences, 12, pp181-187. Also worth a look is his book Harvard University Press, 2004. For a quick, interesting little summary of the problem of studying consciousness, see by Susan Blackmore, New Scientist, 22 June 2002, p 26—29. The quoted sentence is on p196.
