It appears that we might have jumped on the transistor metaphor too quick and to intensely. I believe not everything is binary in the brain, even if the resulting executive action is. Patterns, for example, might not be.
For example, "Almost everybody accepts that the brain does a tremendous amount of analog processing. The controversy lies in whether there is anything digital about it." [1]
While neural action potentials are binary (either absent or identical to every other AP) they encode temporally an analog signal (internal charge, ion concentration) with amplitude in proportion to frequency.
For example, "Almost everybody accepts that the brain does a tremendous amount of analog processing. The controversy lies in whether there is anything digital about it." [1]
[1]: http://www.rle.mit.edu/acbs/pdfpublications/journal_papers/a... (page 30 of the PDF, labelled 1630)