Does the Brain Store Information in Discrete or Analog Form?
New evidence in favor of a discrete form of data storage could change the way we understand the brain and the devices we build to interface with it
For engineers, the question of whether to store information in analog or discrete form is easy to answer. Discrete data storage has clear advantages, not least of which is that it is much more robust against degradation.
Engineers have exploited this property. Provided noise is below some threshold level, digital music can be copied endlessly. By contrast, music stored in analog form, such as on cassette or vinyl LP, can be copied only a few times before noise degrades the recording beyond recognition.
The process of evolution has also exploited this advantage. DNA stores information in discrete form as a sequence of nucleotides and this allows the blueprint for life to be transmitted from one generation to the next with high fidelity.
So it’s easy to imagine that the question of how the brain stores information is easy to answer. Not so. Neuroscientists have long pondered this issue, and many believe that it probably uses some form of analog data storage. But the evidence in favor of discrete or analog data storage has…
