How many Gigabites does the human brain have???

Question

1.25 terabytes has been claimed as the capacity of a human being's functional memory, according to Raymond Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near, p. 126. However, this is not widely accepted.

Answer 1

Current opinion floats around the 10 terabyte mark. That's 10,000 gigabytes - 10-30,0000 times more than the amount of memory in your average desktop PC. (Or a little bit more than you can fit in a ZX81's 16K RAM pack.)

And a byte per neuron doesn't quite work. A neuron by itself is useless - it requires a network of neurons to establish an associative memory. So maybe 1 bit per neuron is closer to the mark, though that's still grossly oversimplifying it.

With respect Deep Blue's 11.38 gigaflops... A gigaflop isn't a measure of memory capacity, rather a measure of how many billions of floating-point mathematical calculations can be achieved per second. These days we tend to look at floating-point processing capacity in teraflops (trillions of operations per second).

Suffice it to say, computers - even a ZX81 - are significantly faster at math than humans.

Answer 2

Deep Blue was the computer that defeated Gary Kasparov in 1997, Kasparov was the highest rated chess player in history. Most of us use a fraction of the capacity of our brains. At the time, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer, capable of calculating 11.38 gigaflops. Perhaps someone else can have a go at estimating how this translates into Gigabytes?

Answer 3

The answer is: we don't know.
The reasons we don't know:
1. We don't know how long term memory is really stored. Is it stored in pathways, or in a molecule form in individual neurons?
2. Our stored memories are constantly degrading. You can recall some details, but mostly it just fuzzes. What were you wearing the second day of third grade? What was your teacher wearing? Who was sitting to the left and right of you? I am 47 years old, and remember almost nothing of third grade.

Answer 4

The human brain doesn't exactly store information in bites. So putting an estimate on it is kind of hard.

Answer 5

Yes well it's not quite measured like that.
On another note, we only use 5% of our actually brain capacity in a lifetime.

Answer 6

they are nerve cells and the brain consists of 10 to the 12th power nerve cells and 10 to the 15 power of synapses in short a heck of a lot. p.s you destroy hundreds and thousands every day, something else you destroy thousands every time you get drunk.

Answer 7

How about one byte per neuron? That seems like a good enough guesstimate. How many neurons?

Answer 8

it has no limitation, as long as a person can handle to memorize something, it is limitless

just liek the abnormal in the US whose brain are attached together, he can remember everything that comes in his mind

Answer 9

There is a poster in the computer room at my kids' school. It says,

"A computer is more intelligent than a brick, an earthworm is more intelligent than a computer."

It doesnt answer your question but its still a great quote.

Answer 10

only 2 in my brain