What is the "capacity," in computer terms, of the human brain?

Question

I'm not terribly computer literate, but has it been calculated what the "specs" of a human brain would be, if the brain were a computer?

No, I didn't try to research it, but it's too nebulous a question. I need guidance! Thanks.

Answer 1

Lots of people have taken different approaches to try and answer ths question in a variety of ways. Part of the problem is that although we have a pretty good idea about how the hardware is put together, we have a rather poor idea of exactly how it carries out its functions.

Approaches I like best are 'black box' approaches, where instead of saying, "this many neurons SHOULD be able to do this..." they ignore the brain altogether and measure actual capabilities. I've linked below a summary of a study which concludes that the human brains ability to store information is little more than two bits per second, and thus the total human memory capacity is on the order of only a hundred megabytes.

Another way of going the same place is by seeing what it takes to produce computers that can duplicate human performance. Since we know the exact specifications of a computer, we can then make a loose extrapolation of human performance. Of course, no computer in existance can do exactly what human brains can do, but that doesn't mean trends can't be observed and good guess can't be made. The second link is to one such study which concludes that the human brain seems to operate at what would be about 100 million MIPS (million instructions per second) and probably has about 100 million megabytes of working memory. Which is pretty good, compared to the long-term storage! Estimates suggest that we may have computers with these capabilities in the next decade, though they probably won't be used to simulate humans.

Which sounds like a fair picture of people to me - able to quickly pick out specifics from a field of static, but only able to retain information gained slowly through years of work. Let me know if you've got a better guess!

Answer 2

I don't think we'll ever know.