For three decades, experiments have suggested that the dendrites connected to neurons in the brain can compute information on their own. That could explain the amazing neuron computing power that scientists have underestimated.
A team of researchers at the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center used new voltage-imaging technology to record activity in the brains of mice. Each neuron has dendrites that branch out from it. In the past, scientists thought dendrites merely connected neurons, allowing information to move from one neuron to another. This research indicates that individual dendrites compute information. Rather than each neuron acting as a single processor, neurons are more like neural networks, with dendrites computing information on their own. They can serve as memory devices and compute information before it reaches the neuron cell, increasing the neuron computing power.
This new understanding of dendrite architecture as a tree-like network suggests our brains have more processing power than previously understood. Each neuron has more capabilities than previously known, and receiving input from its dendrites and thousands of neighbors allows our brains to achieve much in a relatively small space with minimal power consumption. At a time when people worry about the space and power needed to run huge data centers across the country, we realize we have an amazingly efficient data center in our heads.
Right now, your brain is reading this information, receiving input from your surroundings, generating conscious experience, and piloting your body, including all your internal organs. Your brain’s 86 billion neurons are aided in computation by sprawling branches of dendrites that are also performing computations, storing memory, receiving input, and sending output to the rest of the neural network. The textbook diagrams of neurons with only a few dendrites are not accurate representations of the neuron computing power in your brain.
Humans have not only this amazing, living computer, but we also have a soul at work guiding the computer software. Truly, we can say to God, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
— Roland Earnst © 2026
Reference: scientificamerican.com
