The Brain Has a ‘Low-Power Mode’ That Blunts Our Senses | Quanta Magazine

Your brain doesn’t want to pay the energy cost of spiking neurons, so the goal is to reconfigure the network to waste as little power as possible.

I recognized that it was dangerous to conflate the workings of the brain with the technology I happened to be most familiar with, but it was hard not to think that way. Because what is a brain besides a collection of images and information, a repository of memories and desires and remembered song lyrics, and also a hundred open tabs draining energy