So how can a brain perform difficult tasks in one hundred steps that the largest parallel computer imaginable can’t solve in a million or a billion steps? The answer is the brain doesn’t “compute” the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory. In essence, the answers were stored in memory a long time ago. It only takes a few steps to retrieve something from memory. Slow neurons are not only fast enough to do this, but they constitute the memory themselves. The entire cortex is a memory system. It isn’t a computer at all.
