I am not a psychologist nor a brain surgeon.  But this question has been running over my mind for quite sometime and the real spark to blog about this came in yesterday when i was going through one of the fantastic articles i’ve ever read in recent times (The Free Lunch is over) (The article was published in 2005, however).

Warning : The main intention of the blog is to fool my brain into compiling what it thinks about this subject and not to derive any conclusion. Fell free to leave a comment as to what your brain thinks.

Leaving alone the technical stuff, there was this portion of the article which was intriguing.

…just because it takes one woman nine months to produce a baby doesn’t imply that nine women could produce one baby in one month…..Can you conclude from this that the Human Baby Problem is inherently not amenable to parallelization? Usually people relating this analogy err in quickly concluding that it demonstrates an inherently nonparallel problem, but that’s actually not necessarily correct at all. It is indeed an inherently nonparallel problem if the goal is to produce one child. It is actually an ideally parallelizable problem if the goal is to produce many children! Knowing the real goals can make all the difference.

Fortunately, unlike computer processors, our brains’ benchmark is not in nano or milliseconds but then parallelization is still a problem.  Is brain able to process more than two things at the same second, I leave that question to the experts. But what i mean by the brain job parallelization is the ability of the brain to do more than one thing over a period of time, say a month or a year.

I know guys who have been pursuing more than more task, given any point of time in their life. They fare well in academics, sports, music and later you find that they are good in cooking and has the ability to speak more than one language.  Absolutely no relationship among the tasks they do.  Our brains have a better scheduling algorithm, automatic priority management and most of all, very less that we know stays on our harddisks (sub-conscious), it’s in the memory (conscious) for easy and faster access.

Of course, for argument sake, we could say computers do games, play music, learn and speak more than one language but then deep down under all it understands is two numbers.  And computers don’t get tired.  Umm. May be, but their brains are always kept cool to do that.  We too have a mechanism like that but seldom used.

Recently, i learnt that the 10% usage of the brain is all a myth. And that we actually use 100% of the brain, but not all the time.  Rats and Humans aren’t always the same.  At least, medically.

(I warned you - no conclusions)

drain-318644.php (Brain Drain)