Just How Parallel *IS* the Human Brain?

The human brain is often described as a massively parallel computing machine. That raises an interesting question: just how parallel is it?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Harris Georgiou at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, who has counted the number of “CPU cores” at work in the brain as it performs simple tasks in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The answer could help lead to computers that better match the performance of the human brain.

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