>>12517022It is clear that there is hidden computation internal to the neurons. The source of these computations is almost certainly intracellular RNA, which is the main computational workhorse in the cell.
The RNA in a cell is the only entity which is active and carries significant bit density. It can transform by cutting and splicing, and it can double bind to identify complementary strands. These operations are very sensitive to the precise bit content, and allow rich full computation. The RNA analogous to a microprocessor.
In order to make a decent model for the brain, this RNA must be coupled to neuron level electrochemical computation directly. This requires a model in which RNA directly affects what signals come out of neurons.
I will give a model for this behavior, which is just a guess, but a reasonable one. The model is the ticker-tape. You have RNA attached to the neuron at the axon, which is read out base by base. Every time you hit a C, you fire the neuron. The recieving dendrite then writes out RNA constantly, and writes out a T every time it recieves a signal. The RNA is then read out by complementary binding at the ticker tape, and the RNA computes the rest of the thing intracellularly. If the neuron identifies the signal recieved RNA, it takes another strand of RNA and puts it on the membrane, and reads this one to give the output.
The amount of memory in the brain is then the number of bits in the RNA involved, which is about a gigabyte per cell. There are hundreds of billions of cells in the brain, which translates to hundreds of billions of gigabytes. The efficiency of memory retrieval and modification is a few ATP's per bit, with thousands of ATP's used for long-range neural communication only.
The brain then becomes an internet of independent computers, each neuron itself being a sizable computer itself.
