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Man v Machine

Are humans advanced computers with a temporary hold on the title, 'most intelligent being on the planet,' or are we fundamentally different?
We are extraordinarily creative, but we can’t add up as well as a cheap pocket calculator. We have poor memories, but we can use common sense to solve problems we have never seen before. Our communication skills are woefully imprecise, but we can tell jokes that send our fellow humans into paroxysms of laughter. We might conclude humans are not computers, but the scientific consensus is that brains are ‘wet computers’. I don’t agree with this and I’m going to set out the argument to show why man is not a computing machine.
There is an urban legend we think with only 10% of our brains. This is not true. Science has mapped the vast majority of the human brain using two methods. The first, an amazing set of noninvasive imaging techniques, allows us to ‘see’ the brain as it thinks. The second is more macabre: with seven billion humans on the planet, enough accidents occur through sports injuries, car crashes and surgical mistakes to provide a large enough sample to conduct research. Questioning patients with brain-damage allows us to work out what the injured part did before the accident.
One famous patient had an accident where the blade of a toy sword went up his nose and damaged a small part of his amygdala and hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for storing memory. This rendered the man unable to lay down permanent memories after the accident. Events before the accident remained clear but he could not memorize new information. You could tell a joke and he would find it

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