zlacker

Not a dumb question at all; one of the hard constraints of cou design is signal propagation time. Even going at 1/3 the speed of light, when you only have on the order of a billionth of a second (clock frequencies in the GHz), a signal can’t get very far.

I haven’t heard of a clocking mechanism in brains, but signals propagate much slower and a walnut / crow brain is much larger than a cpu die.

>>philsn+(OP)
> I haven’t heard of a clocking mechanism in brains

Brain waves (partially). They aren't exactly like a cpu clock, but they do coordinate activity of cells in space and time.

There are different frequencies that are involved in different types of activity. Lower frequencies synchronize across larger areas (can be entire brain) and higher frequencies across smaller local areas.

There is coupling between different types of waves (i.e. slow wave phase coupled to fast waves amplitude) and some researchers (Miller) thinks the slow wave is managing memory access and the fast wave is managing cognition/computation (utilizing the retrieved memory).