Why the Most Advanced Computer Is Still No Match for the Human Brain

As we spend millions of dollars on developing huge supercomputers and use enormous amounts of energy (fueled by non-renewable resources) to power our devices, the comparatively tiny, efficient, and affordable human brain outperforms the best computers in many ways.

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It is a humbling thing in this era of advanced science to realize that the human brain remains an enigma. 

Furthermore, as we spend millions of dollars on developing huge supercomputers and use enormous amounts of energy (fueled by non-renewable resources) to power our devices, the comparatively tiny, efficient, and affordable human brain outperforms the best computers in many ways. 

It takes 82,944 processors and 40 Minutes for a supercomputer to simulate a single second of human brain activity.

Last year, the K supercomputer was used by researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Technology Graduate University in Japan and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany in an attempt to simulate a single second of human brain activity.

The computer could accommodate a network model of 1.73 billion neurons (nerve cells). The human brain has, however, some 100 billion neurons. To put that in perspective, the human brain has about as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way.

Though the computer succeeded in simulating one second of brain activity, it took 40 minutes.

An employee of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information checks the supercomputers at the research institute in Daejeon, South Korea, Nov. 5, 2004. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images