Human Brain Cells on Chip for Sale – First biocomputing platform hits the market

Well, there are humans, and then, there are former US presidents. I never regarded "Hot Shots" as a documentary, but, i was young, when i first saw it.

Seriously brains are neither analog nor digital, they use spike-trains. Very comparable to "clockless" digital circuits. To what we use in chips, synchronized tick-based calculation: it's not comparable. Judging by human but especially animal reaction times: one way to quantify it is to say it has about 10000 flop per second. technically the human head has 2 speeds: one type of cells with 1000 synapses, that can calculate about 10 times per second (the "animal brain" or reptile brain, the cortex). And there are cells with 10000 synapses that fire on average 1 time per second (the "human brain", the neocortex), which should be roughly the same capacity. Of this network type it is known that more synapses means more accurate, more long-term planning. Faster firing means faster responses. Reptiles are stupid, but despite reptiles being cold blooded we mammals have zero chance to respond in time to an attack. It's not happening. And yes, cats have a built-in trick that gives them a fighting chance, but is only ever going to work in small animals (you need muscles powerful enough to throw yourself several body lengths into the air, and you need to be small and light enough that you survive being thrown in the air several body lengths without coordination, and land without injury. Both properties that humans, or any animal 1m or bigger will never have. And of course, that reflex is an incredible source of youtube videos)

The problem with spike trains is that it's tough to say if a zero signal means anything. On the one hand, all zeros means the cell isn't using energy, and that is incredibly efficient (nanowatt, not even multiple nanowatts). Everything about your mind is designed to almost always be all zeros. A spike means milliwatt power usage for .15-.2 seconds after the spike. Given the amount of neurons, our brain would rapidly cook itself if the average firing rate even just double, in fact that is exactly what happens with epilepsy patients.

The above calculations only apply if all zeros means the network isn't doing anything. If that assumption is wrong, you should probably multiply those figures with the temporal accuracy of the spikes, which is incredible, 3-4 nanosecond. So you'd have to multiply the figures by 300 million, at which point the human mind still is 1000 times stronger than even a full stargate deployment. That sounds incredible, but it really isn't.

If you want to see incredible figures, figure out how much calculations natural selection does for a simple ocean-based bacterial species (assuming 1 cell division = one calculation, if you assume a more reasonable 1 allele combination = 1 flop, you're another 3-5 orders of magnitude higher). Bacteria do hundreds of orders of magnitude more thinking than all humans combined.