III. LEARNING
A. Nervous system and human brain
Learning is an elementary process. It starts in the
womb and continues during our whole life. Senses provide
us with information about our environment and nervous
system transfers the electric impulses to our brain with
speed up to 100 meters per second [4], where information
is processed. Information processing is a base for human
cognition, creating logical abstracts, reasoning,
information classification and categorization.
Average human brain consists of 86 billion neurons
and uses typically 100 W of power, which represents
merely 20 % of the whole body energy consumption [5].
On the other hand, gorilla's brain has about 28 billion
neurons, or around 33 % capacity of human brain [6].
Each neuron is capable of making around 1000
connections, representing roughly 1000 potential
synapses, which mostly do the work of data storage. If we
multiply each of these 100 billion neurons by
approximately 1000 connections each neuron can make,
we get 100 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of
information [5].
Until recently, we believed that animals were
incapable of processing information in the way we do it.
However, tests on chimpanzees reveal, that they can be
significantly better at certain tasks, especially those
connected with motor skills and rapid movement
processing [6]. Their brains are wired differently then
human’s, therefore, they are specialized for other
purposes. Still, their overall intelligence is on the level of
a three-year-old child. An experiment performed on a
group of chimpanzees and human toddlers revealed, that
humans, unlike other species, are capable of connecting
with each other to obtain the information they need in
order to solve a problem. This was something
chimpanzees were not able to do. Researchers suggested
that humans are born to share their thoughts [6].
Social collaboration is crucial for humans, so that they
can better understand the world around them. Digital age
raised this interaction to an unprecedented level. Today,
almost everyone is connected to the Internet and
everybody is exchanging all sorts of information.
Information exchange has never been so easy and so
momentous. On the other hand, modern communication
often lacks emotional components.