I think Kevin's tongue-in-cheek point was that any such estimate will be as
equally wrong as the other. For example, the churchland/sejnowski estimate
could suggest that one should be able to run Windows NT with reasonable speed
on a housefly's brain (and linux would of course be much faster, but all the
really hip flies would run FreeBSD...). Make of that what you will.
There is a fringe-y web site that discusses this issue and concludes that the
number is between 10^13 and 10^16 for the human brain
(http://www.merkle.com/brainLimits.html). God bless the web.
Cheers,
russ
Luca Finelli wrote:
> Dear SPM community,
>
> >The answer is 784,100,297. Unfortunately this email is too small to
> >contain the proof...
>
> I apologize, probably I was not clear enough...
> I'm dealing with global brain activity and I'm looking for a precise
> REFERENCE (i.e. PUBLICATION) dealing with the ESTIMATED number of
> operations the human brain performs per second.
> On the book by Churchland and Sejnowski (1992), The Computational Brain,
> p.9 it is given that the brain of the common housefly performs about 10e11
> operations/s, but unfortunately no reference is given.
>
> Anyone could help me?
>
> With many thanks in anticipation.
>
> Luca Finelli
--
Russell A. Poldrack, Ph. D.
Assistant Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School
MGH-NMR Center
Building 149, 13th St.
Charlestown, MA 02129
Phone: 617-726-4060
FAX: 617-726-7422
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web Page: http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~poldrack
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