The human mental ability is a characteristic that is unparalleled in the real world. Human beings are alienated from other creatures from their thought process that is always complex and multifaceted. As a matter of fact, there is uniqueness of human species in the animal kingdom that its greatest intellectual rival can only be a nonliving object that has been created by the human being themselves. Since the emergence of the computer concept, there has been a competitive atmosphere surrounding the computer machine. There has been no clear opposition to the excellence of the human design for many years. However, the fact that the computer machine does the same functions that could have been done by the human being is quite frightening. Several books and movies have used images of destructive supercomputers to perform various magic tricks that are beyond human ability. The popularity of such ideas attracts the comparison of the human memory and the computer. Many people have compared the working of human memory to the computer memory. However, these comparisons have various advantages and limitations based on an individual’s experience.
Memory has been the primary purpose of computers. Therefore, their design are always in the form of the human brain. For instance, facts and data are stored within chips that are performing the same tasks as the human memory cells. These chips or circuits tend to store information hence allowing the computers to carry out important operations. Within the computers, the wires act like the neurons in the human brain. They act as the pathway for the passage of the electric impulses and they are thus responsible for regional communication. Each of the circuit or a wire in the computer is compared to the millions of cells or neurons within the brain. Therefore, the complex system of computer components can be seen as a simplified mock-up of a more complex human brain.
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One of the most important advantage of comparing the human brain with the working of the computer is that it helps in determining if the computers outperform the overall working of the human brain. For instance, according to (Computer Science GCSE Guru, 2020), the common computers with the high storage capacity has an average storage of 1TB of the storage space. Comparing this storage space with the human storage space may be complicated. There has been a variety of estimates that indicate the number of nerve cells, or neurons that are present in a typical human brain. Stanford University study (2020) estimated that a human brain has two-hundred billion neurons. Each of these neurons has approximately a thousand connections to the other neurons. In addition, more than averagely a trillion connections in the human brain creates an overlap which eventually results in a huge storage capacity. This therefore indicate that the human brain storage capacity outperforms the computer memory capacity since the estimate indicate that the human brain storage capacity is at 1 petabyte which is an equivalence to 1TB SSDs.
People have attempted to compare the functional and structural properties of the memory of a computer and the human memory for several years. However, there has been a wide difference in that engineering specifically for computer memory are readily supplied. On the other hand, the corresponding parameters of the human memory are largely unknown. Computer memory basically consists of two important components. These are core memory which contains contents that are readily available to enter the use in logical or arithmetic computation, and a larger reservoir containing stored information that is also referred to as mass storage residing in the magnetic disks or tapes which might be required at a particular time but is not always readily accessible. When one talks about the human memory, it comes as a sense of flashback. Scientists refer to that as episode memory since an individual remembers what happened sometimes back. Human memory also takes the form of reinforcement learning in which an individual figures out how an interaction or a system should work. It takes the form of a procedure. For instance, sensing just how much one should twist the key for a door to open. These shows that all human memory is not only what one can hold in their mind, but just how one can recall how to do something. These differences in the structure of both human memory and the computer memory portrays the limitations of comparing the human brain to the working of the computer.
Both computers and human brain have short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory in computers are made to be in the form of a chip called random accessible memory (RAM) which are also known as working memory. It is these short term memory that helps both human and the computers to complete immediate tasks. In humans, most of the information stored in short-term memory usually takes 20 to 30 seconds (Norris, 2017) . However, it can take less seconds if one prevents rehearsals or active maintenance of the information. An example of short term memory in human can be where one parked their car, what they had for lunch, or even trying to remember the details of a story that one read a few days ago. On the other hand, long-term memory in the computers are in the form of hard drives. Computers store various files within these computer hard drives. The files can be pulled or retrieved and then activated or executed upon giving the computer a command to do so. That is similar to the human memories that were buried in the long-term memory. Several general characteristics of the computers’ RAM and the human short term memory as well as the general characteristics of the human and computers’ short-term memory are similar. For instance, both short term memories hold data for a short period. In the case of computers’ short term memory, when one turns the computer off, then the data that was initially stored in the short-term memory is lost.
There are difference in how the computers and human brain access or recall data. Human memory stores information in such a way that the information can be retrieved based on its content and not its location. On the other hand, computer memory stores data in such a way that the data can be accessed and addressed in memory units that are narrower than the bus. Therefore, computer memory can only remember data when given the command even though it is highly consistent compared to the human memory in terms of recalling a stored data. Human memory are less consistent but can be more random and have diversity in terms of data collection based on the various stimuli and several different senses (Jung et al., 2018) . Both computers and human memory can forget. However, computer memory chips forgets more often compared to the brain of the human being. For example, a computer’s working memory forgets a particular data when it does not need the data for a particular task. The forgetfulness of computers is by design. However, human forgets intentionally or through inconvenience and impractical.
In conclusion, human memory and computer memory are similar in some way. The general characteristics of the computer RAM and the human’s short term memory are similar. Both memory are volatile and have a limited capacity. Computer hard disks are also similar to the human long term memory as they both take longer time to give a response in additional to storing a considerable amount of data. Generally, the comparison of human memory to the computer helps to determine if computers as man-made tools can outperform human beings. These comparisons show that even though they share several characteristics, human memory still outperforms computers.
References
Computer Science GCSE Guru. (2020). Storage Devices - Computer Science GCSE Guru . Computer Science GCSE Guru. Retrieved 12 December 2020, from https://www.computerscience.gcse.guru/theory/storage-devices.
Jung, Y., Park, B., Kim, J., & Kim, T. (2018). Bioinspired Electronics for Artificial Sensory Systems. Advanced Materials , 31 (34), 1803637. https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201803637
Norris, D. (2017). Short-term memory and long-term memory are still different. Psychological Bulletin , 143 (9), 992-1009. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000108
Stanford University. (2020). New imaging method developed at Stanford reveals stunning details of brain connections . News Center. Retrieved 12 December 2020, from https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2010/11/new-imaging-method-developed-at-stanford-reveals-stunning-details-of-brain-connections.html.
