Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?
I assume there are some neuroscientists here. I was trying to imagine how the brain thinks, and how it comes to conclusions and taps into a breadth of information so quickly.<p>One way I tried to conceive of it was that when the neurons in your brain fire, they compose patterns. These patterns -- the orders and timing of neurons firing -- might be likened against something like a hash table, wherein you represent data as a serialized pattern.<p>For instance, when I think of a dog, my brain fires some base neurons that are associated with the size of a normal dog, and some of its most basic attributes: 4 legs, fur. These could also be the same regions of the brain that would fire when I think of a cat, or a raccoon.<p>Does this in any way represent how the brain actually works?