I don't think it's very meaningful to compare one's subjective impression of detail, and a computer rendering with too much precision; those are pretty different things.
The reasons for why I think humans are worse at imagining detail than they usually notice:
I like drawing, and often I could imagine something clearly, but when I tried to put it on paper I needed a lot of tried to get it right, if I managed to. Some things - expressions, folds in clothes, poses - are surprisingly difficult to get right, even when we see them all the time.
When playtesting the user interface of games, we sometimes ask the playtesters to draw what they saw on the screen. Often huge obvious stuff is missing, and sometimes they even draw things that weren't on the screen, and come from another game.
Those are just rough impressions, but I don't think it's useful to go much further than rough impressions on this specific topic.
p.s.: it's "devise", not "device"
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?