Yes, your brain has much more processing power than anybody’s laptop. But I think the people you quote are referring to the available general-purpose processing power.
Your visual cortex, for instance, packs a huge amount of processing power, but it’s specialized for one task—processing visual information. You can’t just tell it to crunch numbers and get a useful output, because it isn’t built for that. Yes, there are clever tricks for employing your visual cortex in calculating big numbers, but even those don’t take full advantage of it—the author of the linked paper says he was able to multiply two random 10-digit numbers together over a period of 7 hours. If you could use all the power in your visual cortex, you’d get the result instantly.
The brain packs a huge amount of power, but most of it is very specialized and hard to take advantage of, unless your task happens to be one similar to the domain that your brain has specialized circuitry for. Yes, with enough practice and the right tricks, people can learn to perform impressive feats of arithmetic and memory, so the circuitry is to some extent reconfigurable. But no human yet has managed to outdo modern computers in pure number-crunching. And getting even that far takes a lot of practice, so the circuitry isn’t usefully available for most tasks.
We do have some processing power available for truly general-purpose computing. Given any (non-quantum) algorithm, a pen and some paper, you can simulate that algorithm with enough time. We had people do that before coming up with digital computers. But it’s going to take a while, because your usefully available general-purpose computing power is very limited. In contrast, practically all of the laptop’s processing power is general-purpose and usefully available—give it the same algorithm, and it’s going to run through it a lot faster than you will.
Yes, your brain has much more processing power than anybody’s laptop. But I think the people you quote are referring to the available general-purpose processing power.
Your visual cortex, for instance, packs a huge amount of processing power, but it’s specialized for one task—processing visual information. You can’t just tell it to crunch numbers and get a useful output, because it isn’t built for that. Yes, there are clever tricks for employing your visual cortex in calculating big numbers, but even those don’t take full advantage of it—the author of the linked paper says he was able to multiply two random 10-digit numbers together over a period of 7 hours. If you could use all the power in your visual cortex, you’d get the result instantly.
The brain packs a huge amount of power, but most of it is very specialized and hard to take advantage of, unless your task happens to be one similar to the domain that your brain has specialized circuitry for. Yes, with enough practice and the right tricks, people can learn to perform impressive feats of arithmetic and memory, so the circuitry is to some extent reconfigurable. But no human yet has managed to outdo modern computers in pure number-crunching. And getting even that far takes a lot of practice, so the circuitry isn’t usefully available for most tasks.
We do have some processing power available for truly general-purpose computing. Given any (non-quantum) algorithm, a pen and some paper, you can simulate that algorithm with enough time. We had people do that before coming up with digital computers. But it’s going to take a while, because your usefully available general-purpose computing power is very limited. In contrast, practically all of the laptop’s processing power is general-purpose and usefully available—give it the same algorithm, and it’s going to run through it a lot faster than you will.