Serial vs Parallel

The hardware of the brain is fundamentally parallel, like that

of the Edinburgh machine. And it runs software designed to create

an illusion of serial processing: a serially processing virtual

machine riding on top of parallel architecture.

- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 280, Endnotes to chapter 4

Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers,

but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand

imaginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video

games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching

is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical.

Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very

recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large

portion perhaps even the lion’s share of the activity that takes

place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing:

speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and

rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates.

And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware

powers in ways that seem (from the outside) quite magical.

- Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained, 1992