Copying Data from Brain to HD...

[SsZERO]

Anybody ever wonder how many bytes it would take to store the information contained within a human brain on a hard drive, or similar medium? And what format would this info have to be in?

-= SsZERO =-

 

[extro]

For some people, an old 360K floppy would suffice.

 

[Egrimm]

I once read somewhere that some scientist had calculated that the entire memory of a human could be compared to 50Gb, can't remember where though.
I don't think it's possible to compare the human mind to a harddrive though, since we can't define what human memory is and since we often forget things but remember 'em later.

 

[zsouthboy]

You mean you guys haven't already been doing this? 🙂

zs <----------- stored his brain on an old 540 meg hdd, with 539.99 megs to spare 🙂

 

[Elledan]

If one would use a .txt file to store all of the locations and properties of each neuron in the brain (Human brain), the text file would be less than 10 MB in size.

 

[MrHelpful]

How would you define the locations?

 

[MrHelpful]

On a lesser note, there once was a Russian scholar who remembered everything that happened in his entire life.

 

[thomsbrain]

my brain uses NTFS. much more secure than my old brain file-system.

 

[bsobel]

Less than 10meg?

Average number of neurons in the brain = 100 billion
Mass of a large sensory neuron = 10-6gram (from Groves and Rebec, Introduction to Biological Psychology, 3rd edition, Dubuque: Wm.C. Brown Publ., 1988)
Number of synapses for a "typical" neuron = 1,000 to 10,000
Diameter of neuron = 4 micron (granule cell) to 100 micron (motor neuron in cord)

I think your numbers are off by a couple factors.
Bill

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

seriously, i heard once it would be about 7 terabytes, and that sounds reasonable i suppose.

think of all of the images, audio, and video stored in that sucker! (and things that arent quite as tangible)

waaaaaaaaay over 50GB.

 

A side note if any of you can answer:

I just upgraded to Brain XP Pro and at about 7 AM when I boot up everyday, it seems really hard for my brain to get past the BIOS post. I'm using a 17 yr. old BIOS chip, if that's got anything to do with it 🙂.
Mike

 

[murphy55d]

I think it's time to flash that bios!

😛 😉

 

[SsZERO]

Human memory is event-based storage...it's kinda like encoding data to reduce its size -- as you know, when encoded data is played back the quality is below that of the original. In terms of the brain, the problem with this setup is its lack of reliability. You can memorize something exactly as it is, if you repeat it to yourself, but say something unusual or even traumatic happens to you...your brain will only recall certain key events and fill in the blanks with whatever seems sensible to the person. That's why 10 people can see one thing, yet each person will provide you with 10 unique accounts of what happened. Of course, there are exceptions.

So far, my answer to my quesion is that the brain is an analog device, not digital...therefore it can store a lot of information, but not reliably. If our brains were digital in nature, then we'd be able to remember thinks instantly and perfectly...but with a digital brain, I doubt that people would be capable of analog responses...such as feelings and emotions. If the brain does have some kind of tangible limit, it'd be interesting to see what happens if that limit is reached. I think our brains do have limits, and these limits can be expanded almost infinitely by 'exercising' the brain. Any data that is not used frequently gets deleted, or forgotten.

-= SsZERO =-

 

[cuteybunny]

that would be useless, try copying data from harddrive to your brains. like movies it'll be there permanently everytime you want watch it, just use your head instead,it's alot faster.
you probably have to do many many time until you brain really get it right we seem to forget alot 😀

 

[AaronP]

I've got a lot of uncompressed full motion video in my brain, that's gotta take up a lot of space.

 

[gogeeta13]

I store tons of pr0n in my brain, would probably take up lots of space

 

[Sir Fredrick]

There's more than information in the brain. There's also the ability to think. We can't really hold everything we know in our brain, so the connections in our brain are strengthened or weakened to allow us to remember things more efficiently. The way to copy everything from a brain to a HD would be to build a neural network. Problem is, assuming we could map all the neural connections in the brain, once we got it in the form of a neural network, we still wouldn't really have the processing power to handle it. It's just a matter of time though...if there was a distributed computing neural network project that utilized nearly every computer out there, we could do it. The data required for the nerual network would not be outside of our capabilities...I don't know for sure how much, but it would certainly fit on one HD.

Most of what I said is just speculation, derived mostly from what my AI professor has told me. He built a neural network that could predict the best time to buy or sell stocks based on market indicators, for some big investment firm...and it worked too. It became inaccurate over time though, because the patterns are constantly changing...you'd have to retrain it frequently so that it could "learn" the patterns of the stock market. So what I'm saying is that he knew what he was talking about. But I don't. 😉

And no, he wouldn't give me a copy. 🙁