In megabytes, how much information can the average human brain store?

Answer 1

It is almost impossible to answer this question because the brain is not a digital device.

For example, somewhere in your brain are images of some people you met as an infant. You can't call these memories up, but they could be triggered with certain hipnosis or certain stimulation of your brain. But even so, these images will be faded, cloudy.

In a computer, a still image would be stored as a bunch of pixels. A recording of an event as a series of still images.

So is your clouded memory of the face from your infancy a still image? What resolution (how many pixels, how many megabytes)? Or is it equivalent to a short film clip? And how do you subtract for the cloudiness of the memory?

And how many megabytes does the memory of a smell occupy? Or the meaning of a word? Or the emotional impact of a favorite childhood song?

The brain also stores things in a holographic way. It's not like there's a region containing the "bytes" that represent your mother's face ... if you lost one region of your brain to injury, the image would still be there, but a little fuzzier, because it is also preserved in many areas of the brain.

So it's impossible to even approximate how much storage the brain represents because the brain and a computer store things in such different ways. The brain stores HUGE amounts of information, but much of it is fuzzy or cloudy, or memories of things that have no equivalent storage medium in the computer.

Answer 2

Today it is commonplace to compare the human brain to a computer,If we take this view literally, then just as we can ask how many megabytes of RAM a PC has we should be able to ask how many megabytes (or gigabytes, or terabytes, or whatever) of memory the human brain has. well base on my knowlegde about human brain..... brain during a lifetime. This number is almost certainly larger than the true answer. So human brain can't be count in anyway, it has unlimited storage medium. Thanks

Answer 3

It's immeasurable. Neural synapses and connections can run into billions and the brain has an almost infinite capacity for storing information.

Answer 4

654.32Mb