<div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 4:05 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
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From:<br>
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<a href="https://alleninstitute.org/news/why-is-the-human-brain-so-difficult-to-understand-we-asked-4-neuroscientists/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https://alleninstitute.org/news/why-is-the-human-brain-so-difficult-to-understand-we-asked-4-neuroscientists/</a><br>
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<h3><span>Can your brain understand
itself? </span></h3>
<p>Nearly 100 years
ago, physicist Emerson Pugh famously said, “If the human
brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would
be so simple that we couldn’t.” It’s a clever quote but, on
the face of it, seems to imply that human neuroscience is a
futile endeavour. That doesn’t mean it, or neuroscience, is
complete hogwash.</p>
<p>“Our brains are
probably more complicated than any one human intellect,” Allen
Institute neuroscientist Stephen Smith, Ph.D. said. “But you
also have to take into account the fact that we’re social
creatures.”</p>
<p>Like most other
scientists, modern neuroscientists don’t work alone. And
they also don’t start their research in a vacuum. All of
today’s experiments and data are built on the shoulders of
the research and methodology that came before them.</p>
<p>“Is a singular human
brain capable of understanding the brain? as opposed to: is
a collection of human brains capable of understanding the
brain? I think those are different questions,” de Vries
said. “We learn a lot not just through the neural processes
of learning, but through our interactions with other people
and through conversations and collaboration. I do believe in
the collective human ability to understand the human brain.”</p></div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Yes. I like to use the analogy of Microsoft Word.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Obviously the collective understanding across Microsoft understands it, or else they wouldn't be able to produce it.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">That said, Word is if such great complexity that no one programmer can ever hope to understand it fully.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Word contains 45 million lines of code. It would take a programmer (reading 3,000 lines of code a day) over 40 years to read it all. By the time he's finished, will he even still remember the first lines he read all those decades ago, and how they relate to the rest?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Word is a few Gigabytes of code.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">The human brain contains at least a few petabytes of information. That's 6 orders of magnitude greater than the size of word.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">So we might estimate, that converting synaptic connections to a human readable code, would result in around 45 trillion lines of code, which would take 40 million years to read.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But again we could imagine the design documents for Microsoft word might describe the high level elements of its various components, and this could be more easily read and fully understood by the software architects. Similarly, a neuroscientist may have some rough idea of what each of the 400 sub regions of the brain do, and how they're interconnected, without understanding anything of the implementation.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Jason </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div><div>
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<h2>Why don't we understand
the brain?</h2>
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<p>On a slightly more
pragmatic note, <a href="https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/about/team/staff-profiles/christof-koch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Christof Koch</a>, Ph.D.,
Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute’s MindScope Program,
points out that our understanding might come not from (or
not only from) our collective research, but from the
powerful computers we’ve built to help that research.</p>
<p>“It may well be
possible that while in principle we can sort of understand
how the brain works, given its vast complexity, humans may
never fully understand,” Koch said. “Maybe what it means to
understand shifts from the kind of classical model of
scientific understanding, like Newton’s apple or the double
helix of DNA. The details of the brain may be way beyond
human capacity and capability to understand, so we may more
and more need to rely on computer models to give us correct
answers without us knowing why those particular answers are
correct.”<em> </em></p>
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<p>I expect the same
applies to the rest of our biology, and to biology in
general. It's vastly more complex even than our brains, but
that's not a reason we can't make sense of it, and learn
what we need to, to be able to do useful things with it,
even to the extent of modifying and improving it.</p>
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<pre cols="72">--
Ben</pre>
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