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I am currently in an introductory level computer science class, and I have been drawing a lot of parallels lately.  The most interesting to me is the similarity between the nervous system and an operating system. For those of you who do not know what an operating system is, it is what Windows and Mac OSX are.  Anyway, one of the main roles of an operating system is as a user-interface.  Again for all of you non-computer people, Wikipedia does a good job of describring user-interface as "the aggregate of means by which people interact with the system."  Computers speak in 0's and 1's and the user-interface of the operating system translates those 0's and 1's into words and images that we look at on the monitor.  Our receptors translate sounds waves, light, chemicals, and deformation (for mechanoreceptors) into the manner in which we perceive the world.  We surely don't perceive the worlds as waves and chemicals just as we don't read 0's and 1's when working with computers. 

A cool fact is that before computers were as we known them as today, computers were people.  I just thought that was interesting.....