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Comment by KineticLensman | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions lots of different insect skills such as spatial representation, route finding, pattern recognition, predation, etc, and then says that "Neurons act a little like wires, carrying electrical signals from one part of the brain to another. They are a biological version of the circuit board in a computer".

After reading the article, I was impressed by the insects, not by the BBC explainers.

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Why? That analogy is so widely recognised and accepted that electronic engineers/neuroscientists are experimenting on computer circuit boards to assess the understanding of neuroscience.

"It does so by way of neuroscience’s favourite analogy: comparing the brain to a computer. Like brains, computers process information by shuffling electricity around complicated circuits."

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2171497...

The article essentially says 'insects have very little computers in their heads'. To me at least, this doesn't meaningfully answer the question posed in the title. Furthermore, as per my comment, the BBC article characterizes neurons as 'wires', rather than the very sophisticated low-power processors they in fact are. Wetware implementing/running efficient algorithms honed by millions of years of evolution with (probably) trillions of test cases (all the insects that have ever lived).

[Edit: clarity]

Wires conduct signals unconditionally. Neurons may or may not transmit a signal depending on its complex network of inputs and internal state. A better technological analogy for neurons would be a signal processor.

Also, neurons interface using chemical messages in the form of many different neurotransmitters. The electrical phenomenon of cellular depolarization might as well be an implementation detail. If anything resembles a wire, it's the axon.

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