How much memory does a brain have?

fideles1986

fideles1986

532
Brazil
Vitoria - ES
GTBRASIL
Well i was walking home last night, and i thought to myself; how much memory in megabytes or gigabytes would an average human brain have? lets take all the information from a persons infancy to their death, the sounds, images, places, smells, tastes and etc. What do you guys think all that would amount to? 50GB?100GB?500GB?

let's give it some limit.
70 years of age (about 25,550 days)
Audio, Images, and "Videos." = ??? GB
 
I think you'd be talking in Terabytes, and lot's and lot's and lot's of them. At least in terms of your brains capacity, as fro what you use, out brains recrd far more info that audio and visual , we record the temperature, the smell, the emotions and so on as well.
 
The actual storage mechanism of the brain is not what you'd call well-understood. It's not as simple as a digital matrix of neurons. Of course, there is short-term memory, easily recalled, and then long-term memory, you have to think about it to dig it out. What kind of indexing is done, how is a memory shifted from here to there? Supposedly nothing ever sensed is discarded, it's in there somehow.

As far as comparable digital storage, my own well-undereducated guess would be in the petabytes. That's a million gigabytes, if you're not up on your prefixes.
 
Actually, you only take in about 700 mb(average) to 1-2 Gb-(Einstien) or 500-600 kb-(Famine), so, you are all WAY off.

Who says, popular science does.
 
What resolution and frame rate do we store video memories at? This site claims anything up to 576 megapixels resolution but I can't find anything on frame rates. ~30 is good enough to fool the brain but I've read that most people aren't happy until about 60 or so Hz, but can still detect slight changes above that. Whatever you take the rate as (60Hz, 100Hz, more?), at 576 megapixels per frame you're in need of a lot of storage.
 
MatttheTuner
Actually, you only take in about 700 mb(average) to 1-2 Gb-(Einstien) or 500-600 kb-(Famine), so, you are all WAY off.

Who says, popular science does.
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Weather you take that in or not, that's not your brains maximum capacity. If we lived 200 years do you think we'd run out of space in our brains to store information? But still, we don't accurately know how to measure memory capacity in a brain.
 
*Waits for Famine to trot along and end the thread.*

In the mean time, I would take a stab at... Alot.
 
All of this raises interesting questions, such as how much RAM does your brain have? Do you crash like Windows when you try to do multiple tasks? How do you bring up the Task Manager? CTRL+ALT+SLAP?
Du&#267
Famine says 1GB.
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If I'm reading that right, that just means that that is how much is used over your life. When applied to the theory that only 10% of your brain is used, it pegs it at 10 Gigs.
 
Duċk;2402721
Famine says 1GB.
Click to expand...
This is the thread I was looking for!

I found it interesting how our brains compare to the speed of computers today:

Famine
Apparently we're capable of about 100 million gigaflops (100,000 teraflops, or 100 exaflops). This makes us only around 100,000 times - or 5 orders of magnitude - smarter than a PS3.

Sadly, computer chip technology increases processing ability by a full order of magnitude every 5 years. This means that not only are we already way down on raw memory, but in 25 years' time, we'll be only on a par in processing ability. With a games console.

(in fact I believe the current Cray is at 52 Teraflops, which brings us down to 18 years or so)

Scared now?
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Quite scary indeed.
 
Wow, that quote of Fammine there is very intriguing indeed. Although it will be surpassed oneday, our *speed* as it were of 100 exaflops still seems incredible.
 
Your brain is a brain. I would imagine it to be somewhat impossible to compare it with a processor in terms of Ghz.


Bloody nerds...
 
wfooshee
The actual storage mechanism of the brain is not what you'd call well-understood. It's not as simple as a digital matrix of neurons. Of course, there is short-term memory, easily recalled, and then long-term memory, you have to think about it to dig it out. What kind of indexing is done, how is a memory shifted from here to there? Supposedly nothing ever sensed is discarded, it's in there somehow.

As far as comparable digital storage, my own well-undereducated guess would be in the petabytes. That's a million gigabytes, if you're not up on your prefixes.
Click to expand...

I definitely need a better Indexing Algorithm :indiff:
 
amp88
What resolution and frame rate do we store video memories at? This site claims anything up to 576 megapixels resolution but I can't find anything on frame rates. ~30 is good enough to fool the brain but I've read that most people aren't happy until about 60 or so Hz, but can still detect slight changes above that. Whatever you take the rate as (60Hz, 100Hz, more?), at 576 megapixels per frame you're in need of a lot of storage.
Click to expand...

I think the human brain is actually quite lousy at "recording video".

We remember little clips of the most pressing/important moments of our life, but rarely are exact memories of more than a few secords are acurately recalled. If so, the video quality is probably quite poor. Quick! Name the color, made, model, and license plates of three cars you saw yesterday (not your own)...I wouldn't be suprosed if you can't do it, because you were focusing on other things. What shape was the cloud above you when you first went outside on your 18th birthday? Who cares, you might ask.

I tend to believe that we take carefully focused "snapshots" of your lives and piece them together; if they occur in places are common to us, then there's a wider range of focus. But if an event is recorded in a place we're unfamiliar with, then it's far more likely that only the essentials have been focuesd upon, leaving out the background or the minutiae in many cases. A single eyewitness account of an event is never 100% accurate, there's always a certain blurring of an event as time wears on.
 
The info is all there, you jst can't recall everything. But also if you make a video that's a 800x600 resolution and 60fps regadless of how accurately that clip recounts an actual even it's still an 800x600 60fps video.
 

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