There are so many differences that one's standard intuitions as a computer scientist can be very misleading...<p>I wrote on this elsewhere:<p><a href="http://blog.memrise.com/2011/05/how-is-memory-stored-in-brain.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.memrise.com/2011/05/how-is-memory-stored-in-brai...</a><p><a href="http://blog.memrise.com/2011/05/how-are-brains-different-from-hard.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.memrise.com/2011/05/how-are-brains-different-fro...</a><p>For instance:<p>- Storage and parallel computation in the brain are very expansive and cheap, so the brain prefers to store rather than compute where it can.<p>- Above all, the brain's storage is highly content-addressable. Similar things in the world are stored with similar representations, so that the brain can generalize, and see commonalities. This is not a graph - graphs are discretized - this is much more flexible.<p>- Even the acts of storage and retrieval are themselves a kind of computation, a transformation, a compression and a learning experience.<p>- Memories are not clean silos. Storing a new memory can subtly (and not so subtly) affect other nearby or related memories<p>- Different parts of the brain use different storage parameters. For instance, the hippocampus is like a hash table, storing each memory relatively cleanly and in isolation, but can only be accessed with exactly the cue. In contrast, the cortex stores memories in a much more content-addressable, overlapping way that's invariant to many small differences (e.g. we can recognize a face whether it's rotated, sunny, tanned, close up, obscured).