Neuroscience is a funny discipline which can demand a level of interdisciplinary knowledge that is hard to achieve. At its heart, neuroscience is concerned with understanding the organ that is responsible for generating our behaviour, and thus, it is a branch of physiology and psychology. At the same time, most neuroscientists will have heard, or even used, the words “calculate”, “algorithm”, and “computation” many times in their professional lives. I think there’s a good reason for this: the brain is a computer, and neuroscience is also branch of computer science, in my opinion. However, many neuroscientists do not see it that way.

In online discussions I have often read the phrase “The Brain as a Computer Metaphor”. The implication of this phrase is clear: the brain is not a computer, and at best, we can use computers as a metaphor to understand the brain. (At worst, the “metaphor” does not hold and should be abandoned.) Similarly, I have heard neuroscientists say things like, “neural circuits don’t truly run algorithms”. Again, the conclusion is clear: the brain doesn’t run any algorithms in reality, so our constant use of the words “algorithm” and “computer” when talking about the brain is misguided.

Unfortunately, what these discussions demonstrate is that many researchers do not, as a rule, actually understand the formal definitions of “computer” or “algorithm” as provided by computer science. (Or alternatively, if they do understand them, they don’t accept them for some reason.) If you understand the formal definitions of computer and algorithm as given by computer science, then you know that the brain is very clearly a computer running algorithms, almost trivially so. Read More

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