Our nervous system is really very mechanical.  Microsopic and complicated but ultimately mechanical.  I like to learn about the basic engineering aspects of our brains and it’s processing.  Here are excerpts from a Discovery magazine piece:

Tiff 
The Brain What Is the Speed of Thought?  by Carl Zimmer December 16, 2009 

“Faster than a bird and slower than sound. But that may be besides the point: Efficiency and timing seem to be more important anyway.

…It turns out that the subjects’ reaction times say a lot about their lives in general. People with faster responses tend to score higher on intelligence tests. Some psychologists have argued that a high processing speed in the brain is a vital ingredient for intelligence.  Responses slow down when people suffer certain psychological disorders like depression.  More puzzling, people with sluggish reaction times are more likely to die of incidents like strokes or heart attacks.

Using a fast code helps speed up thought, but to a large extent the brain—like a telegraph network—really depends on efficient pathways.  Impulses from the retinas, for instance, have to travel up the optic nerve to the thalamus, which relays the signals to the visual cortex in the back of the brain. Then they ripple forward to other brain centers, where we use the visual

information to make decisions and take actions. One way to hasten that journey is to use fast wiring. In 1854 physicist William Thomson showed that the wider a telegraph wire, the faster its signal and the farther the signal could travel. That same principle applies to nerves. The fattest axons, such as Betz cells in the brain, are 200 times thicker than the thinnest ones.  

Another way to speed up wires is to insulate them, and again the same goes for neurons. Some neurons are wrapped in an insulating material known as myelin. In the heavily myelinated neurons running down the spine, signals can travel up to 180 miles an hour. In neurons that lack myelin, signals travel just over half a mile an hour. (Wow!  I have read that pro athletes have much thicker myelin. Tiff) Nerve fibers that carry pain are among the slowest.   Pain can take many seconds to reach the brain, explaining why sometimes we seem to react to a stubbed toe in
slow motion.  

In principle, our thoughts could race far more efficiently if all the axons in our brains were thick. But the human brain has at least a quarter of a million miles of wiring—more than enough to reach from Earth to the moon—and is already packed tight. … “Making an entire brain out of them would create heads so large that we couldn’t fit through doorways,” he concluded. Such a brain would also consume a tremendous amount of energy. 

Given the constraints of biology and physics, our brains appear to have evolved to run very efficiently. For instance, neurons in the brain tend to be joined together into small networks, which are then linked to one another by relatively few long-range connections. This kind of network needs less wiring than other arrangements, and therefore shortens the distance signals need to travel. 

In some ways evolution has fine-tuned our brains to run like a digital superhighway. In other ways it has left us with a Pony Express. 

Our brains also speed up through practice. … With practice, Marois speculates, the neurons in the brain’s bottleneck regions, primarily in the prefrontal cortex, require fewer signals and less time to produce the right response.  

Sometimes our brains actually need to slow down, however. In the retina, the neurons near the center are much shorter than the ones at the edges, and yet somehow all of the signals manage to reach the next layer of neurons in the retina at the same time. One way the body may do this is by holding back certain nerve signals—for instance, by putting less myelin on the relevant

axons. Another possible way to make nerve impulses travel more slowly involves growing longer axons, so that signals have a greater distance to travel. 

In fact, reducing the speed of thought in just the right places is crucial to the fundamentals of consciousness. Our moment-to-moment awareness of our inner selves and the outer world depends on the thalamus, a region near the core of the brain, which sends out pacemaker-like signals to the brain’s outer layers. Even though some of the axons reaching out from the
thalamus are short and some are long, their signals arrive throughout all parts of the brain at the same time—a good thing, since otherwise we would not be able to think straight.

In our heads, speed is not always the most important thing.  Sometimes what really matters is timing.”
Full article link: http://ow.ly/11zHm

PS Does anyone have an editor utility that takes the spaces our of cut and pasted articles?