YOUR BRAIN POWER
1 How fast does the brain work?
Brain speed is difficult to measure, but scientists from MIT think they have an answer. To test the processing power of the visual cortex, they flashed images for fractions of a second to see if people could recognise them. Before the test, they expected the brain to take 100 milliseconds to decode the information. But afterwards, it became clear that our brains can work almost ten times faster, decoding entire pictures in as little as 13 milliseconds. How does that compare to a supercomputer? Current estimates from benchmarking experts suggest that the brain is up to 30 times faster than IBM’s Sequoia.
2 How does the brain store memories?
Memory retrieval
The brain reactivates the connections written into the cortex by the hippocampus, retrieving the pattern stored by the original experience.
Writing the memory
The cerebral cortex passes the information to the hippocampus, which controls the writing of episodic memories.
Memory storage
The hippocampus encourages neurones to make or strengthen their connections, linking the areas that form the experience.
Incoming information
Incoming sensory and emotional signals light up sets of brain cells in different parts of the cerebral cortex.
The brain’s short-term memory storage is in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain behind the centre of the forehead. The left side of this region lights up when we’re working with words and the right when we’re remembering spatial patterns. Longer-term memory storage happens elsewhere and falls into two main categories: implicit and explicit. Implicit memories are unconscious, like muscle memory, and they form in the cerebellum and the basal ganglia. Explicit memories are conscious, and they can either be episodic (things that happened) or semantic (facts). They’re formed by the hippocampus, which takes on the role of ‘writing’ the data into the
