The brain - ultimate quantum storage unit?

Not a twitter idea, it has to be said, twitter is not very good at telling stories and it is very good at telling stories at the same time. The quantum nature of twitter. Some things cannot be mircoblogged or maybe they can :)

But this in not about the quantum nature of twitter, it is a series of thoughts about the possibility of the brain being quantum-like in nature. Working on a project the other day, I found a need to verify something that I had come across a while ago, that in 2010/11 we would have hard drives with sufficient capacity to store the human mind. It was interesting at the time, however if I was going to use it as a reference point, I wanted to verify its validity.

So onto Google I hopped and found the info I was looking for on the Of Two Minds blog, in a post entitled, The Capacity of the Human Brain. You have to love the Internet, look you can see what the neuroscientists say between themselves, in blog language which any tech savvy person will be able to understand or quickly utilise their artificial intelligence they have recently acquired (relatively speaking). Neuroscientists are just people too and they blog like regular people too. The language may be somewhat colloquial, but you and Google can generally answer any questions that you have.

We forget that with Google, we make Google work for us..., who cares if they are getting stinking rich, really, money is not everything. Interesting question, how much do you thinking the self educational service that Google provides us with is worth? How much would all the stuff you have learned in the past ... 4 years be worth to you? Let face it Google has given us more than we have ever given them. Back to the neurologists, their blog is like reading the transcript of The Big Bang Theory, just replace Omnibrain with Sheldon, etc.

The Internet is truly more amazing then we give it credit for, now it is just here, like air and water.

Back to the capacity of the brain. What I determined was that we do not know at this point in time. I have been thinking "around" this topic for a while and the human brain while incredibly fascinating and no disrespect to anyone, but you do not have to be a neuroscientist to know that, I would argue that you would only have to have a brain. Not in the derogative sense, just having one allows us to personally experience the marvellous things it does.

We have all experienced recalling something from years ago, right out of the blue. If we look at some of those personal experiences in our own lives, many of those things from the past that we recall, we recall due to some totally unrelated topic. Often music, but more intriguing while we are discussing or trying to think of something else entirely. We have all thought it and all heard it, "Hell, I just thought of.... I have not thought of .... in years."

When I look at that from a logical perspective it raises a question in my mind, how did that happen?

I have a few ideas, that while may not be true for the brain, I believe could be true for data storage, however, it is quite interesting to consider it from a human memory point of view as well. As someone pointed out in their comment on the Of Two Minds blog, I am no expert, I am simply a scientist, from the point of view of investigating empirical evidence. It occurred to me that we are therefore all scientists in the field of life and the study of the brain, if we so choose to be.

What really got me interesting in running with the idea was seeing as there are multiple pathways to every part of the brain and indeed between the brain and the rest of the body, is it possible we have a neural algorithm that "hashes" our memories?

Let me explain a bit, with a story of a few "events" I had heard about that all seemed to just come together in my mind. As I was thinking about the possible implications of being able to store human consciousness (if indeed possible, ruling out the soul, unless the soul is created in the actual sentience of an organism and therefore perhaps transferable as well). I marvelled at the idea that almost anything is possible today and indeed will be tomorrow. The first thing that came to my mind apart from the comments I had browsed over relating to perhaps being able to have an synthetic form that your consciousness could be uploaded to. This may have an impact on Aubrey de Grey's SENS project and it raises very interesting ethical questions, perhaps more than Dr de Grey's SENS ideas themselves (compelling viewing - Do You Want To Live Forever? - Channel 4 documentary about SENS). However, I think Dr de Grey and co are on the right track. Evolution has been fine tuning cellular machines for millennia, ironed out a lot of the buys and is pretty damn efficient (even though could be much more efficent in certain areas). Perhaps my motto in Infrastructure Management comes from some older wisdom, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Evolution is very much like that, if a system works at a functional level, evolution often stops there and does not "expend" the energy on making it the best it could be.

Now back to the brain and how it may possibly do the brilliant things it does. The spontaneous recollection of things not thought of in years, really does suggest that the brains does indeed record everything. I was very excited to discover that this indeed seems to be the current theory, according to the neuroscientists over at Of Two Minds. It is also fairly interesting that this could be postulated through simple logic as well, having no background in neuroscience, just from thinking about one's own personal experiences of the brain. I guess in some way we are all neuroscientists, experiencing the empirical evidence.

This made me think of a interesting storage model. For the purpose of clarity please consider the following purely from a systematic and functional point of view. If each data unit, whether it be the magnetic alignment of a ferrous particle, a neuron or an E.coli organism, were able to have multiple configurations, where it was possible, that it could represent multiple things at once, it would take on an almost quantum nature. This is indeed a feasible concept, if it only fixed a state based on how (by which path) it was accessed, what keys were used and possibly even in what sequence they were used in. All of sudden you can see the potential for an incredibly complex system of storage and retrieval. Effectively your storage medium becomes orders of magnitude larger than anything based on a linear model and immediately scales out. This would mean that data was not stored on the data unit, but on multiple data unit AND by the path, route or sequence used to retrieve a particular configuration.

Under those circumstances, indeed the brain potentially could hold an unlimited amount of information. As long as the referencing hash tables were maintained correctly. The number of possibilities became almost limitless. Indeed that would be a genius way of storing data, without ever having to worrying about running out of disk space. It adds a whole new meaning to distributed storage.

It occurs to me that biological evolution must of come upon a similar type of problem with data storage and retrieval. Were it not for hashing functions, the technological and information revolutions would not be where they are today. Hashing has helped us to manage the masses of data we work with now, indeed down to the very data packets themselves. Hashing lends itself to assigning uniqueness to data. At the end of the day, our memories are data, calling a spade a spade. Is it so far fetched to think that we are only beginning to understand how data can be stored more efficiently and that perhaps all of our recent delving into hashing functions is perhaps just us "rediscovering" some "old wisdom" that evolution used millennia ago. Is it logical to think that if hashing has helped us to manage data uniquely, then surely it could be possible that evolution used a similar strategy?

I do not know how feasible that is from a neurological level, but from a systematic level it makes perfect sense. Building a storage unit that effectively never runs out of space. It makes no difference from a functional point of view if ageing decreases the efficient of the system. Biological evolution solved the storage and retrieval of massive data sets millennia ago. We are just starting to venture into this arena, relatively speaking. And I agree that hardware is not the issue, it is the software, the algorithm that is important. Maybe there is a way to store unlimited data. It might just be damn complicated. If there were then, data storage units would be limited only by their total single instance capacity or hash table size. However, in a biological sense, it is feasible that if the hash reference area were becoming limited due to the number of records in it, then arguably more hash referencing cells could be added to the area, grown or converted. A further limitation would be that you could not write a data set greater than the number of data units in the storage unit. This would probably never occur in any event as the input sources would probably never be able to capture and provide enough data for that to be an issue.

Solid state, that never forgets.

Today's digital storage units would not lend themselves to this model due to the mechanical and linear nature of today's hard drives and their single-pivot actuator arm, however we are moving towards multi-joint arms. The brain on the other hand can access multiple data units simultaneously, that surely allows for a quantum like data storage capability. We seem to be always thinking in terms of exponentiality, however, a fairly simple solution could provide more scalability in a single step than years of linear or logarithmic developments along the traditional technology scaling and doubling routes. Ideas are indeed the exceptions to Moore's Law. I am not saying that this is one of these, this is just conversational banter about some thoughts. I am well aware that the rate at which we are advancing in all areas, is more than any one person could ever keep up with consciously. Our brains on the other hand seem to be wired to do exactly that.

The register is reporting, "Hitachi's Global Storage product planning chief Tetsuya Kokubo is predicting disks capable of holding an amazing 2.4 trillion bits in each square inch of their surface are coming within the next five years."

The brain has a lot of neurons per cubic centimetre as well. It is interesting to note that data storage in technology terms is still two dimensional (per square inch), where biological storage is three dimension (cubic centimetres). I think this may be representative of how far we still have to go. Not to mention that fact that we use data units as unique single points. But I have wondered about that in that forensically our current medium holds more than what is presents to us. Deletion only marks the space utilized by the deleted data as simply marked as "free" for use by other data. The actual data is not overwritten. Therefore, is there not an inherently quantum-like nature to our existing media, perhaps there is another scaling step. I really do need to stop thinking and adding to this and just post it, the microbloggers are going to hate me... rambling on like this, tell a whole story..)

Now let's go back to a point made earlier and consider our spontaneous recollections. Having a quantum, almost random storage system would indeed from time to time write data with similar sequences or data units that were used previously. Seeing as this is a type of electrical chemical
activity, it is not unreasonable to think that this may "jump start" the neurons and synapses, jolting them into action. That initiation energy may also check all the data on the data unit to ensure it was in a operational state. This could even be random checks of some data stored on the unit or every other unit. Thinking from a design and administration point of view, a device that consistently checks itself and its units to ensure integrity is being maintained, would probably being the most effective way to ensure the long term integrity of the data and ensure any problem areas were identified as soon as possible and if any errors were found the data moved to another area. The data units in error could either be repaired or marked bad.

It would make sense for the device to also run through all its data units and check integrity during "downtime", this could certainly account for the randomness dreams seem to have. we also do have personal experience of randomness, somewhat structured randomness, granted. Could dreams be the brain doing integrity checks on the data units, pulling together seemingly random, images words, forms, faces, stories, but all with the purpose of integrity checking. As a systems administrator, this type of device would certainly appeal to me. From that could it be true that similar logic held true for the evolution as well? Interesting thought.

Is the brain really a CPU, memory and hard drive all rolled into one, including the entire body. It is a processor that limitlessly records all data it receives, how long would it take to engineer a device like that? The more pertinent question today is how long will it take us to reverse engineer it, guess maybe we just need the key or indeed in staying true to the train of thought, a sequence of keys.

I imagine that there are people working on these kinds of things right now or have at least invalidated them. I honestly believe that it is foolhardy to discount any possibility in the world we fnd ourselves today. Who knows what we will rewrite in the next 15 years. These are indeed the most interesting times ever. There is not a day that goes by that we do not take one giant leap.

(If anyone finds any grammatic errors, etc or just errors please let me know and I shall correct them or retract them, that is if anyone made it this far.. If you have thank you for reading.)