Thursday, September 24, 2009

How many registers in your brain? -Why "1+1+2" is difficult to compute





Hi!

This
is fukutopika, Concept Exective Officer of Istpika .
I am a new contributor to bunkersofism.com :)
I am interested in Cognitive Science and I often try to do some reverse-engineering of my brain by understanding how it thinks.

Recently, I had a 「Aha!」moment; I suspected that the human brain must have 2 source registers (*) but only 1 destination register.

Let me explain;
Do you remember the game console from SEGA, the
"Megadrive"?
The Megadrive used to be a very advanced device with its 16-bit cpu and its
68000 Motorola microprocessor, and I was fascinated by the fact that, when programming in ASSEMBLER, you could multiply 2 registers with only 1 instruction namely the MULU instruction.
You could do
"D0xD1=D2" but not "D1xD2+D3".
I know, you will retort that you just need to combine the 2, but still.
Now, let's return to the topic of brain;
When you do some mental calculation, I realized that you can naturally do "
AxB" but when it comes to "AxBxC", that's not natural.
Also, think about "1+1+2". It does not come right away, does it?
You got to, first, prepare "1+1" and then do "+2".

Try yourself to do it and tell me how it goes;
Do you manage to computer the three at once?

For that reason, I am convinced personally that the operational registers in the human brain must be of the following type: 2 source registers for only 1 destination register.



(*) Register: A box for the CPU to put temporarily some numerical value. The number of registers that a machine has , depends on the machine.
By the way, the CPU of the Nintendo NES has only 1 working register...


Note: this blog post is a translation of the blog post originally written by FUKUTOPIKA, "
1+1+2は難しい"

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