Brain Capacity

Winzer

Is is possible to quantify how much "space" a human brain has? Kind of like in terms of hard-drive space?
I am sure this depends on the person.

somasimple

A lot, a lot more than an hard drive.
http://www.merkle.com/brainLimits.html
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/facts.html

Andy Resnick

0.7 liter.

Cincinnatus

There's no such thing as general purpose memory in the brain. So the answer would depend on the type of memory (episodic, semantic, procedural, etc) and on its salience.

So the "memory capacity" would be highly dependent on the type of memory.

As far as I know, the one area in which this kind of question has been extensively studied is with working memory. Though you may want to liken this more to RAM than to hard drive memory. People usually claim that the "magic number" is 7 plus or minus 3 items that can be simultaneously held in working memory... Though this is a somewhat misleading figure in the context of many tasks... Strategies like chunking and rehearsal can improve these values.

confused2008

Some people with photographic memory must have huge brain capacity because of the resolution of the images they have so as a stab in the dark it could be as much as hundreds of thousands of terrabytes.

cam875

you cant measure a human brain's capacity using bytes. It doesnt work like that. Neuroscientists have been studying how the memory is stored in our brains for along time and the most current belief is that its something to do with the activity of the neurons and the way there activated so If you do a specific thing a lot those neurons are being used in a specific way in a relatively specific order so you begin to remember. Its something like that (correct if im wrong).

The Dagda

It's actually more or less infinite. There is only a limit of how long we live to how much information we can potentially store, bits don't fall out if we get full up, if that were even remotely possible. So given the massive potential of those 100 trillion brain cells to make almost an infinite number of memories, as far as we know talking about brain capacity in terms of a computer is meaningless. Our brains are more sophisticated than binary, they use fuzzy logic, and a much more sophisticated version of that. Who knows perhaps a quantum computer might be able to keep up with us.

Some people have a natural photographic memory, but practically anyone can train themselves to have one. A good example is Derren Brown who wasn't born with a photographic memory, or the world memory champion who started learning about memory because his was particularly bad. The brain is dynamic, it is far from hard wired and it is practically infinitely more flexible than 1 and 0.

Veovis

Everything in the brain is about memory. Its not just what you can consciously remember.
When we are born (even before), our nervous system learns the succesfull neural impulses and memorices them for future use. We walk by memory, we remember to avoid danger, our brain remembers how to iterpret the optical nerve input, and how to breath, etc...
So if we are to measure the amount of memory, we should count for all nerve-nerve possible interactions, in spatial, frequency, and maybe molecular domain.

I don't think that memory is someting static tha we can account for every time. Consider forgetting and re-remembering, or consider creativity: the asocciation of memories. How do we count this "hidden" posibilities?
What must be measured? Quantity, quality, or both?

PD: sorry for my spelling.

The Dagda

To be frank the brain is so mysterious atm that the answer to the OPs in anything more than a totally speculative manner is little more than a fairy tale based on what if they could be compared. They can't and there is no possibility of us ever running out of space, as the brains hardware is dynamic, unlike a PC's which has to be updated every 5 years or so. If you are talking about brute forcing information into the brain by some odd means all in one go, then it's anyones guess how many terabytes you could get in before you turned the person into a gibbering mental patient.

confused2008

I did not in my original post mean to offend anyone. I understand the workings of the mind and memory. I was just offering an educated guess. In reference to the above quote I myself suffered a mild stroke a few years ago and have relapses in my memory. I have had bad episodes which turn me into a "gibbering mental patient" but afterward i have drawn stuff that looks like it came out of a encyclopedia. So before I could have been brute forcing information into my brain which could be thousands apon thousands of terabytes if for example you looked at a brain as a computer.

The Dagda

Oh no I'm not offended nor is anyone else, it's just a fact that you can't compare the two systems because of hardware differences. We need to make it clear that not only does the brain not store information in the same way, but it doesn't even store it as a series of 1's and 0's and. In fact one of the most intriguing questions is how it does so at all.

confused2008

Ok ok you got me.
(holds up hands and surrenders)
But as a last point it does make you curious about those movies when a person' brain is downloaded into a computer.
I do understand that it is fiction and this is a place not to be discussing fiction just fact.

The Dagda

Not at all, you just have to be careful to distinguish what is fiction and what is fact. If you had to have physical proof for everything then the beyond the standard model area of the forum wouldn't exist I suspect. It's fine to speculate, in SG1 for example Colonel O'niel has the knowledge of the ancients downloaded into his brain, from which he is able to construct a gate to another galaxy and save humanity with some fancy electronics. Problem is the information is so vast, it leaves no room for anything else, so he goes slowly ancient and slowly his mind begins to break down.

confused2008

Like a computer when it needs to defrag. LOL

Cincinnatus

The brain does have an information capacity; you can measure it in bytes. Any physical system has some finite number of states which it can be in. This limits the amount of information that can be coded; for the same reason that there are only a finite number of books in Borges' Library of Babel*. This number is very large but certainly not infinite.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

The Dagda

No one disputes that you could find it in theory, the problem is without knowing how the hardware works, how could you possibly guess?

Cincinnatus

You do experiments! You can have people memorize lists, learn skills, recall experiences etc. You can measure their performance on all of these. The question "what is the information capacity of the brain" is not the question you mean to ask. What you want to know is: "how many things can be held in long term memory?" This is a question that is amenable to psychological experimentation.