How much storage does the brain hold?Opinions

[loveturtleozark]

twenty years ago they thought around 2 GB now those types are comparring the fastest cpus from intel to that of ant brains
there is also speculation that the brain could be a quantum computer(in which case there is no chance in hell of ever being able to put your consciousness into a computer no matter what the year)
opinions

[BJ_M]

http://www.merkle.com/brainLimits.html (couple 100 meg is all)

http://www.merkle.com/humanMemory.html

How much human memory is there?

And to look at a third measure, how much does human memory hold? Tom Landauer tried to estimate this some years ago and concluded that the brain held about 200 megabytes of information. [Landauer 1986]. He got this number partly by looking at the rate at which people could take in information, both by reading and by looking at pictures. He also studied estimates of the rate at which people forget things, and the amount of information adults need in order to do the tasks they normally do. His numbers (expressed in gigabits, not gigabytes), were 1.8, 3.4, 2.0, 1.4 and .5 gigabits. Averaging these and dividing by 8 yields 227 MB. Since there are between 10e12 and 10e14 neurons, this suggests that the brain contains 1,000 to 100,000 neurons for each bit of memory. Of course, much of the brain is used for perception, motor control, and the like; but even if only 1% of the brain is devoted to memory Landauer pointed out that it looks like your head accepts considerable storage inefficiency in order to be able to make effective use of the information.

With something like 6 billion people on earth, that makes the total memory of all the people now alive about 1,200 petabytes. To the accuracy with which these calculations are being done, the results are comparable. We can store digitally everything that everyone remembers. For any single person, this isn't even hard. Landauer estimated that people only take in and remember about a byte a second; a typical lifetime is 25,000 days or 2 billion seconds (counting time asleep). The result is 2 gigabytes,

[mrtristan]

I don't think the amount of storage that the human brain is capable of will ever be able to be quantifiably measured. The way that human memory and digital computer memory are completely different - In essence, like comparing apples and oranges.

[vitualis]

Until we know how memory is actually stored in the brain, such numbers are essentially pointless.

The current hypothesis is that memory is stored dynamically as connections between neurons... How this is achieved, however, is completely unknown. Furthermore, if you actually look, the neural connections in the brain are actually very plastic (i.e., changes all the time) so the entire hypothesis could be wrong.

One "way out" hypothesis (that isn't completely without merit) was in New Scientist sometime last year. This group hypothesised that memory was stored as DNA variations in the neurons (i.e., similar to immunological "memory").

Regards.