Clearly this needs to be updated:
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (‘What else could it be?’) I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.” (John R Searle, or so the Internet says.)
I would suggest that if we don’t return to the model of the catapult then that it must be the Large Hadron Collider — specifically the two hemispheres can represent the two colliding beams of protons producing a myriad of events each of which involves the creation and decay of many many ephemeral particles (thoughts) out of which only a few muons and neutrinos survive to affect the rest of the universe. [This brings up all kinds of questions, like “What accelerates the thoughts before they collide?” Of course, that fits in well with the catapult metaphor, doesn’t it…]