The Brain from Inside Out

by György Buzsáki

However, good enough is far from perfect. We would not want to drive a car with 60–80% accuracy or submit a scientific paper with such precision. To perform better, we also need to deploy the second virtual brain: a large fraction of slow-firing neurons with plastic properties that occupy a large brain volume connected by weaker synapses into a more loosely formed giant network. Their work is absolutely critical for increasing the accuracy of brain performance. Of course, I am not thinking about two discrete brains in one skull, but instead a continuum of a broad distribution of mixed networks that performs apparently different qualitative computations at the left and right tails. This distribution allows the brain to implement anything from preexisting rigid patterns to highly flexible solutions. Thus, there is no definable boundary between the “fast decision, low precision” and “slow decision, high precision” networks.6 Brain performance is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. After one of my talks on this topic, somebody commented: “The dichotomy you were talking about reminded me of Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.