How many gbs do you think a fully matured brain can hold?

[AreaCode707]

Part of the question needs to involve references. The human brain automatically links information to other information, a giagantic cross-referenced database. The organization of the data is more advanced than a computer, although a computer may have more sheer memory and fewer faults.

Another related question - how much space does our "learning ability" take up? Our ability to essentially reprogram ourselves is beyond anything a computer can do now, and even though that's not something we would consider "memories", we do have to remember how to learn and that's got to be stored somewhere.

 

[JackBurton]

640KB. That's really all you need.

 

[So]

Originally posted by: HotChic
Part of the question needs to involve references. The human brain automatically links information to other information, a giagantic cross-referenced database. The organization of the data is more advanced than a computer, although a computer may have more sheer memory and fewer faults.

Another related question - how much space does our "learning ability" take up? Our ability to essentially reprogram ourselves is beyond anything a computer can do now, and even though that's not something we would consider "memories", we do have to remember how to learn and that's got to be stored somewhere.

Probably, but it could be that memories are stored in the connections and processing is in the neurons or somesuch. That IDK.

 

[BudAshes]

Originally posted by: JackBurton
640KB. That's really all you need.

lmao

With the amount of weed i smoke im definitely in this category.

 

[vi edit]

Riddle me this....

A typical music CD is around 650 megs.
A DVD audio disk is several gig.
A compressed MP3 can drop that down to 30 or megs.
The sheet music for a CD can be wrapped up in a couple dozen pages and further be compressed to "digital" for a couple dozen kb.

A quality musician can memorize/play dozens of albums worth of music.

How much space does that take up?

 

[mobobuff]

Brains don't operate on bits, and they are more susceptable to file corruption.

But if you assume a brain's memory can retain the precise definitions of a JPEG, MPG and a WAV... I'd say... a few hundered terabytes.

 

[So]

Originally posted by: vi_edit
Riddle me this....

A typical music CD is around 650 megs.
A DVD audio disk is several gig.
A compressed MP3 can drop that down to 30 or megs.
The sheet music for a CD can be wrapped up in a couple dozen pages and further be compressed to "digital" for a couple dozen kb.

A quality musician can memorize/play dozens of albums worth of music.

How much space does that take up?

Nobody knows. Remember, I don't know is very different from "unknowable"

 

[Jeff7]

The brain uses an unpredictably lossy compression scheme. I wouldn't entrust it for any kind of critical data storage unless it had some kind of refresh circuitry added, like what sDRAM uses.

Originally posted by: vi_edit
Can't be compared. It's sort of the digital/analog argument. Analog simply adds an extra dimension to things that can't be quantified in digital terms.

Our brains store things that simply can not be measured in quantifiable manner.

Yet.

 

[myjaja]

Originally posted by: vi_edit
Riddle me this....

A typical music CD is around 650 megs.
A DVD audio disk is several gig.
A compressed MP3 can drop that down to 30 or megs.
The sheet music for a CD can be wrapped up in a couple dozen pages and further be compressed to "digital" for a couple dozen kb.

A quality musician can memorize/play dozens of albums worth of music.

How much space does that take up?

1mb?

 

[Gibsons]

Originally posted by: vi_edit
Riddle me this....

A typical music CD is around 650 megs.
A DVD audio disk is several gig.
A compressed MP3 can drop that down to 30 or megs.
The sheet music for a CD can be wrapped up in a couple dozen pages and further be compressed to "digital" for a couple dozen kb.

A quality musician can memorize/play dozens of albums worth of music.

How much space does that take up?

I think human brains have a compression algorithm (or four), so it might be very difficult to get a reliable number (like what jeff7 is saying about two posts up).

 

[videogames101]

Well, considering the those cervant dudes exist, and have perfectly memorized basicaly everything there is to know(just about)and can give send the information back out, I would say a very large amount. I mean, they can give you the day of the week for any date in history! The rest of us are just improperly wired to use the full capacity of our brains.

 

[Motek]

I have good photograhic memory so mostly jpg files, and I can also remember songs that I can sing to. I can remember movies too so many avi's.
This would take up most of the space. The .txt files and .doc files wouldn't be even near as much. I mean if the top were about lets say 100GB, these would be about 2GB.

 

[Shawn]

400GB? LOL!!! I have more storage space than that in my computer.

 

[Jadow]

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
Keanu Reeves said that he could easily hold 80 GB in his head in Johnny Mnemonic, 160 with a doubler. I think that he was having "seepage" problems in his brain during the movie because he was trying to hold over 300 GB... So I wouldn't recommend trying that

Don't mess with the lowjacks!

 

[BigDH01]

I don't think you could ever get a right answer. I don't think the brain can be quantified into areas that "store" and areas that "execute." The human brain has a certain amount of "power" that can be divided as such.

This is borne out by "idiot savants." Those people that can memorize massive amounts of information but are inevitably lacking in other higher-order skills. I also know people that have incredible talent at one task but can't memorize anything to save their life.

I think the human brain is often underestimated. It has to assimilate and react to an incredible amount of information. For example, look around the room you are in right now. You can probably look around and immediately identify everything in the room. You can name its color and its purpose. You can most likely remember who made that object. When you think of who made it, you can probably name a fact about that company and think of the factory it came from and the people that work at the factory. The human brain is not very good at memorizing information on a pixel by pixel or bit by bit basis, but is excellent at memorizing concepts. The higher-order concepts take an incredible amount of processing power. I think it is very difficult for a computer to tell you why something is the way it is.

Furthermore, your brain can instantaneously imagine a 3d landscape. I can place a 3d person here and a 3d tree there in a split second. The resolution may not be very good, but the human brain doesn't think in pixels. However, I can imagine myself zooming into a tiny little spot getting close enough to view the the scene on an atomic or quantum scale. Can I give you the exact speed and direction of the electrons? No (but neither can anyone or anything). But I do have a pretty good idea of the concept and how it exists. More importantly in our case, I can imagine what the little girl in the scene is thinking and what she is going to do next. That ability cannot be taken for granted.

 

[Jawo]

Memory storage is not the problem; its the search feature that is rather lacking in quality though

 

[Terabyte]

Me = 1 Terabyte

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: BigDH01
Furthermore, your brain can instantaneously imagine a 3d landscape. I can place a 3d person here and a 3d tree there in a split second. The resolution may not be very good, but the human brain doesn't think in pixels. However, I can imagine myself zooming into a tiny little spot getting close enough to view the the scene on an atomic or quantum scale. Can I give you the exact speed and direction of the electrons? No (but neither can anyone or anything). But I do have a pretty good idea of the concept and how it exists. More importantly in our case, I can imagine what the little girl in the scene is thinking and what she is going to do next. That ability cannot be taken for granted.

That's just it - resolution. Vision for example, our area of high resolution is quite tiny - only directly where we're looking. Everything around that is just kind of secondary. We need to scan over to it to fully see what it is. Like right now, looking at my monitor, I can see my case, and though I know there's a C2D sticker on the front, I can barely really see the little spot of silver against the gray case. The resolution just isn't there. I recall reading that, to have full resolution vision in our entire field of vision, our visual cortex would have to be several times larger.
I can almost feel the energy drain when opening my eyes, like I'm suddenly bogging down an idle CPU with a Prime95 instance.

 

[gsethi]

let me be the first to ask about Warranty info and RMA information (just in case)

 

[Stiganator]

I recall reading somewhere that is was estimated to be 223TB. Don't ask me where, the number has just stuck with me.

 

[kamikaze27]

Gosh thats geeky, need to boot my geek personality module to reply

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

Its called it is something that cannot be measured. But if it were, I bet we could hold the whole universe in knowledge, but not understand it because that would be too much for our brains.

 

[dragonfang]

2149814818.404TB in RAW formatting

 

[ntdz]

More than any computer can hold.

 

[Raduque]

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
Keanu Reeves said that he could easily hold 80 GB in his head in Johnny Mnemonic, 160 with a doubler. I think that he was having "seepage" problems in his brain during the movie because he was trying to hold over 300 GB... So I wouldn't recommend trying that

Yea, but that was in 1995...... storage technologies have come a long way since then!