The human brain is faster than any computer -- in the things that count most to us.

The human brain is the most amazing item/system that we know, bar none.

And one of the most amazing things about it is that it really is an item. It's a mass of tissue and lots of nerve endings and connections that is about the size of a smallish chicken we'd buy at the grocery store to cook for dinner. But inside it is, well, magic.

It's a system of inter-locking and inter-facing interactions that defy description, since they all happen at a level way below introspection and too small for us to see and too strange for us to comprehend. Scientists can dissect it and name its parts and even figure out parts of its workings -- and yet be nowhere near explaining its mystery.

One of the most astonishing things about the brain is the speed with which it conjures up a panoply of information about anything we're "thinking" about. Not just numbers and pictures, like a computer, but instantaneous displays that can involve -- in a fraction of a second -- all our senses and more.

I was thinking recently about a family gathering from years ago, and in a literal instant, my brain was processing information at a blinding speed: snapshots of relatives, what someone said, where we were, what was cooking in the kitchen, the smell of my aunt's perfume, along with what I thought of those people and even what eventually happened to them. Of course not every detail was presented in chronological order; more like a rich and massive panoramic photo on a big-screen TV. And since it was composed from my own memory, everything in it was familiar.

What was incredible and inexplicable was how my brain was able to retrieve -- from wherever within itself -- all that sensory information and assemble it in the blink of an eye. And get this: none of my conscious senses were actually engaged. In other words, as I thought of those people and that event on that day way back in time, I didn't really see or smell or hear or taste or touch anything or anyone -- but I did "virtually". What a concept: the memory of a smell! Where do you suppose THAT is located in my brain? And where is the memory of the extra-sensory way I felt when left out of a game that day with older cousins? And how did my brain not just plug that into the scene set out for me but laid it down like a sort of soundtrack running underneath?

And how did it do all that so fast?

It gets confusing even trying to explain what a memory is (as you can tell by the above), but it's downright baffling to think of the brain's ability to instantly construct such multi-faceted mental experiences (or re-experiences) -- and then to dissolve them as quickly as they appeared and move on to something else. Are they stored, intact, somewhere? I don't think so. I think they are re-constructed each time we "think" of that person, event, place, etc. As a result, unlike math problems worked out on a computer, probably no two memories of the same thing are ever exactly alike.

As the poet Blake said, "Eternity in a grain of sand."

Granted, a computer can process factual/numerical/pictorial information much faster than my brain, and more accurately, but that's sort of the "work" part of our lives; the human brain handles the most important details of our lives, the elements of our existence that make us, well, human -- and does it so fast that we're not even aware of the process. (That, of course, is why brain diseases and disorders are so sad and disturbing: without the brain operating at full capacity, we are less "human" and, if it continues to deteriorate, eventually nobody at all.)

The brain seems to be best at retrieving information already stored and catalogued in it. For instance, I see someone whose name I should know. Someone I used to work with. The name is lost on me. But by the time she gets to where I am, smiling, the name pops up, and I say, "How good to see you, Lisa!" Where did that come from? The brain, without my conscious help, sorted through all the people I'd ever known and came up with the right one, at the right time. In about two seconds. Bam!

Scientists tirelessly study the human brain but only come up with educated guesses. Where, for instance, does our ethical template come from? Where is it stored in the brain? And how? Some of us value this, some that. But if you see a child drowning in a lake, you instantly want to help, right? Your brain has done some kind of ultra-fast calculation that lets you know that you ought to help. But how many calculation steps did it have to do to get to that conclusion? And at what lightning speed? And where in itself did it find the information to make that calculation?

I remember when a super-big computer beat one of the world's best chess champions, and everyone was talking about how someday a computer would be smarter than any human.

Dream on.

Being human is so much more intricate -- even on its lowest levels: survival, sex, etc. -- than anything any machine could hope to replicate. And of course no machine could even hope, right?
Hope, after all, is purely human.

The human brain is not just faster than a computer, if not in mathematical calcuations then in processing emotions and motives and decisions, but it's more sensitive, more intuitive, more nuanced. Hey, what is love?

To a computer, nothing. Just a confusion of equations.

To a human brain, love is a challenge: something to send it into overdrive, trying to figure out what's gone wrong with the set-up, the wiring, the pre-program. But it finally figures it out, makes the necessary adjustments, and we mate and maybe even get married.

Here's to the brain: long may you reign! And don't give out on me any time soon, okay?