Isaac Newton pondered,"Was the eye contrived without skill in optics, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?” The more we know about our bodies, the more our wonder expands. Or at least it should.
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made #2
October 12, 2008
“While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real-time performance goes unchallenged. Actually, to simulate 10 milliseconds (ms) of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second.” John K. Stevens, “Reverse Engineering the Brain,” Byte, April 1985, p. 287
Or this....
The human brain itself serves, in some sense, a proof of concept [that cool petaFLOPS machines are possible]. Its dense network of neurons apparently operates at a petaFLOPS or higher level. Yet the whole device fits in a 1 liter box and uses only about 10 watts of power. That’s a hard act to follow. Ivars Peterson, “PetaCrunchers: Setting a Course toward Ultrafast Supercomputing,” Science News, Vol. 147, 15 April 1995, p. 235
Got that? And finally....
“The human brain consists of about ten thousand million nerve cells. Each nerve cell puts out somewhere in the region of between ten thousand and one hundred thousand connecting fibres by which it makes contact with other nerve cells in the brain. Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches 1015 or a thousand million million. ... a much greater number of specific connections than in the entire communications network on Earth.” Denton, pp. 330 – 331
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee
HOW GREAT THOU ART! HOW GREAT THOU ART!