When you create a movie in your mind's eye, then firstly, it's not clear that it actually has the amount of detail that a computer-rendered movie does. But secondly, there is (probably) no structure in your visual cortex that would straightforwardly map to a number. (This is very unlike the case in a computer, where every voltage in some sense represents a number.) Instead your neurons are taking shortcuts that a human engineer would simulate by using explicit arithmetic. Recall the famous pitch-detecting circuit; it is clearly doing the equivalent of some arithmetic, but there's certainly no explicit representation within it of any numbers.
Just because something can be achieved by explicitly representing numbers, doesn't mean that your brain does it that way - not even under the hood. Consequently the comparison to things that were achieved by massive number-crunching capacity is not strong evidence of such capacity in your brain.
From time to time I encounter people who claim that our brains are really slow compared to even an average laptop computer and can't process big numbers.
At the risk of revealing my complete lack of knowledge of neural networks and how the brain works, I want to ask if this is actually true?
It took massive amounts of number crunching to create movies like James Cameron's Avatar. Yet I am able to create more realistic and genuine worlds in front of my minds eye, on the fly. I can even simulate other agents. For example, I can easily simulate sexual intercourse between me and another human. Which includes tactile and olfactory information.
I am further able to run real-time egocentric world-simulations to extrapolate and predict the behavior of physical systems and other agents. You can do that too. Having a discussion or playing football are two examples.
Yet any computer can outperform me at simple calculations.
But it seems to me, maybe naively so, that most of my human abilities involve massive amounts of number crunching that no desktop computer could do.
So what's the difference? Can someone point me to some digestible material that I can read up on to dissolve possible confusions I have with respect to my question?