The Brain 121 computer. The sophistication is achieved through reading and writing many numbers in parallel, and chaining the steps together so that if you read a particular number it triggers another read/write process, and so on. I’m glossing over some details such as logical functions but, if you know how a modern computer chip is constructed, my description is not far off. Almost all logic today is implemented in tables to achieve the speeds we expect from modern chips. All modern computers are clocked. A small piece of quartz rock has been polished, coated with metal, and wired up to a control circuit in the computer. When you apply voltage to the rock it bends and absorbs energy. When the voltage is taken away it bends back and gives out the energy. This is effectively a pendulum and it can be used to make an accurate clock. I used to design these for a living. Every logic gate in a computer is connected to this clock, and each time the clock ticks the logic gates in a computer compute. Most modern computers are entirely synchronous. The clock rate is set so that the gates in the computer fully recover by the time of the next tick, and every gate is therefore ready in its standard position when the next instruction arrives. The human brain does not have a central clock. Each neuron acts independently — firing regardless of whether the neurons it is adjacent to are ready or not. It is wrong to think of the brain as digital. Each neuron does fire and recover, but it may be triggered again before it fully recovers. This makes for a chaotic and essentially analogue operation. If one neuron fires when a second has only half recovered, then it gets half an effect. Ifthe neuron is 80% recovered, an 80% effect. Neuron recovery time is quite long, perhaps as much as 1/1000" of a second, and they are wired in three dimensions to as many as 10,000 other neurons. It is perfectly possible for a set of neurons to run one ‘program’ when they are rested and a completely dif