The Brain as Computer: Bad at Math, Good at Everything Else

Painful exercises in basic arithmetic are a vivid part of our elementary school memories. A multiplication like 3,752 6,901 carried out with just pencil and paper for assistance may well take up to a minute. Of course, today, with a cellphone always at hand, we can quickly check that the result of our little exercise is 25,892,552. Indeed, the processors in modern cellphones can together carry out more than 100 billion such operations per second. What's more, the chips consume just a few watts of power, making them vastly more efficient than our slow brains, which consume about 20 watts and need significantly more time to achieve the same result. Of course, the brain didn't evolve to perform arithmetic.