That it stops being plastic when you’re older. The brain is plastic throughout the lifespan. Else you wouldn’t remember anything.

Having to take the brain off-line for a third of its operational history (during sleep) seems a bit of flaw. That’s 20-30 years lost when we could be doing something useful (though, in the dark, obviously). We need to sleep because the brain thinks with neurons, and learns with multiple neural systems. Neurons need to be metabolically refreshed during the night, and memories consolidated in brain connections. Even your phone can still be used while its recharging…

All the background knowledge that we take for granted when we’re experiencing the world and thinking about it. Researchers called this ‘context’, the expectations and knowledge we bring to every situation, about what’s likely to happen, who we’re likely to meet, what they’ll expect of us, what we’re likely to see and need to do. This is hard to implement because we’re usually not conscious of all this knowledge. Expectations make computations much simpler. Artificial intelligence that doesn’t have this human background knowledge faces much tougher computational challenges, and ends up being very narrow and inflexible in its abilities.

Reach out and pick up a mug of coffee without toppling forward. Arms are heavy, you have to lean back as a counter-balance. Did you even know you were doing that?

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