It's a brain, not a computer

Analogies serve as great teaching tools.  They help you piece together how a system works by comparing to something you experience in everyday life.  I use heuristics all the time to help get the main points from my lectures in school.

But there's one comparison I hear in the every vernacular which sort of drives me crazy.  Your brain is not a computer.

Your brain can't be simplified to a few gears either.

I can appreciate people comparing the body to an organic machine.  Many of our systems are similar to something you'd see an engineer working on.  We have a bone structure like the metal frame of a building. We "burn" food through metabolic processes to make energy much like a car burns gasoline.

But a brain is so much more than a computer!  A computer can only fulfill the tasks it's programed to do. It can't rewire itself to account for damage or learn new behavior patterns.  True, the brain uses massive parallel processing which can make it slow as compared to the modern laptop or even iphone.  But part of what makes the brain so beautiful and amazing is its capacity for change.

This change happens at all levels, from full circuits partially or fully reconstituted after damage to the individual neurons.  In fact, recent research has found that individual synapses are capable of change.  You literally can rewire your brain by individual cells.

Today my class went into the mechanisms for some of this long-term/short-term potentiation and just how the ions (yep, more ions) lead the cells to physically change and make the signal stronger or weaker.

If our cells can change, why can't we?

But what I really take away from this is our capacity for change.  Too often I hear people use the excuse "this is just how I am."  But we are malleable creatures.  We live and thrive by continuing to change.  I take this scientific message to mean to me that I can change on even the most biological level.  And if that's possible, why can't I make a concerted effort to always have those changes push me to be a better person?

It's a philosophical take on a scientific phenomena but appreciable all the same I think.