.4 parallel processing

---

Our brain is a parallel processor, where parallel processing means that you can do more than one task at once. Some of the new computers, you can be receiving email in the background, while you are printing, while you are doing ten different things at once. If the computer is strong enough you can do all these things, and not even notice the other things are going on because the machine does them simultaneously and in the background. To understand the level of how massive the brain's parallel processing capacity is, consider this.

If you take one eye you have million of axons in it. Each of those axons feed into the brain simultaneously. The eye doesn't put it all together and send it to the brain. And of course there are two eyes, so that is millions and millions of simultaneous images driving into the brain. For the brain to figure out whatever it is figuring out visually, it has to be processing a million parallel processing events in each eye simultaneously. And that is just to see, the most basic and taken for granted of our brain functions.

Think of the way we learn about the city. Hopefully you can remember a time when you walked into a new city for the first time. The first way many people learn about a city when they visit it is by reading a guidebook. Perhaps you did something like that when you first came to ODU's campus. Now compare how much you actually know about your city, or ODU, which what you learned that first time when you read the book. How much did you learn from that process? Not very much. Your experience of a city is completely different than the abstraction you get reading somebody's description of it. Contrast that with the way classrooms are organized. Classrooms are organized to present things one at a time. We know that the brain can process millions of things simultaneously. We know that when it does, like the first time you walk into a city, then you learn on much deeper and richer levels. So where do we get this notation that we are better off trying to present just one thing? This is probably one of the most destructive misconceptions of how we learn.

	How is merit pay different from differentiated staffing?	Answer Here
	No application question	Answer Here
	What questions do you now have about what you just read?