Our Brain's Not a Computer

It won't run out of space, or even retrieve data, like that tune we learned...

Research psychologists have found that our brain is simply not a computer. It doesn’t have file storage for memories, does not process data the way a computer does, and is totally dependent on physical signals from the rest of the body.

One A.I. expert, George Zarkadakis, pointed out in his book In Our Own Image that people have always explained intelligence using a metaphor based on their own technology, and our current era is no exception. In Biblical times, intelligence was spirit breathed into a lump of clay by God. Four thousand years ago, hydraulic engineering in ancient Greece led to the notion that we are controlled by fluids, the “humors.” In the Renaissance, when machines with gears and springs were designed to move like people, we were perceived as machines, and philosophers began to view our brain as operated by tiny mechanical movements. Later metaphors about the brain took inspiration from developments in electricity, chemistry, and the telegraph.

And ever since the 1940s, people have viewed the brain as if it were a computer, complete with data processing and memory storage. It just ain’t so. There is no data and we’re not even sure what memory is.

This suggests that even if A.I. learns to imitate the way we think or behave, it can’t replicate or replace us, any more than sociopaths can feel emotions just by studying and learning how to behave as if they do. Their behavior, or performance, may be quite convincing, as is clear from the success of some politicians and certain corporate and other leaders, but ultimately it’s missing the heart of the matter and at some level, it’s a dead end.

Similarly, in music, I’ve discussed the notion of learning a fiddle style from within rather than only by imitating it via recordings or books, useful as that can be to some extent. A musician or dancer who actually inhabits the culture, and absorbs the feel of social dances and community functions that make use of that fiddle style have a very different sense of the experience than an academic studying from the outside. For me, for example, learning some Cape Breton tunes was nothing like feeling the pounding rhythms and energy of music at a Cape Breton dance.

A fascinating essay by psychologist Robert Epstein, called The Empty Brain, lays out where our state of knowledge seems to be. “When called on to perform,” Epstein writes, “neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite — no retrieval necessary.”

New treatments for PTSD are making use of the relatively new awareness that memories are not stored in the brain but are recreated from associations each time we need them. This experimental treatment involves administering a stimulus each time a traumatic event is recalled, in order to prevent it from being recreated. Researchers in this area suggest that each time a memory is recalled, or recreated, it takes a slightly different form. Thus, the purest memories are the ones that come to the mind of a recovering amnesiac, because they’re memories that have never been used!

Knowing this leaves us freer to explore many avenues that help us learn to play music, with a healthy skepticism toward the imperious voices in our brain and the cold logic of our eyes. In many of the posts in this publication, I’ve looked at things with a bit of that healthy skepticism. In my article Reversing Old Presumptions, I discussed why I think that our ability to remember a tune has more to do with training our ears and muscle memory than it has to do with memorizing something in our heads. Another article, Turning Music Learning On Its Head, talks about how learners often get in their own way by trying to drill, memorize, and follow methods that they believe to be their “learning style.” Some practical applications are provided by the article called Earmapping a Tune.

The more we learn about how we learn, the more we find out how little we know. Neuroscientist Kenneth Miller wrote a column (“Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain?” if you’re a New York Times subscriber) about the current knowledge of brain structure, and concluded that it will take centuries before we can map the basic neuronal wiring of a mammalian brain. A billion-dollar European project to simulate the human brain on a supercomputer within ten years fell apart in less than two because of, well, evidence.

Some humans are desperate to quantify everything but they can’t. No matter how much we talk or write about music, our words can never come close to describing how we feel about hearing it, whether it’s played by someone else or ourselves. (I sometimes like to say that the only place where words and music really meet is in song!) We have to stay open to our experiences of hearing and playing music, especially if they overrule some of our verbal presumptions.

One universal element of music is improvisation, though I have a very generous interpretation of what improv is, as you can read about in my post All Music is Improv. If you engage deliberately in improvising, though, great things happen. Neuroscientists have noticed that when you are improvising, you stop editing and criticizing yourself, as indicated by studies of which brain areas are activated by different activities. In This is your brain on improvisation, K.C. Ifeanyi writes that when improvising music, “the area of the brain responsible for self-monitoring shuts off, and the source of self-expression lights up. What that basically boils down to is you’re less inhibited when you’re improvising.”

Every time you play, even if you play a tune you know well, your ears and muscle memory are engaging in a bit of improv, whether in the feel, the bowing, the ornamentation, the pathway from one beat note to the next, the dynamics, or the effort to simply play the same tune again but better — and those ears and muscles are picking up more information than you can imagine. In fact, it’s more than any scientist today can truly understand or explain.

For a full scientific explanation of all this, please check back in about a century. But for now, learn, try, experiment, play, and enjoy.