Could Your Brain Store All the Information on the Web?
The title sounds outrageous. But supporting data comes from research at the most prestigious Salk Institute. Other researchers had made enormous storage capacity estimates for brains, but this new estimate is 10 times greater. The estimate is on the order of petabytes, as much as the entire World Wide Web. How does anybody come up with such estimates? What is the basic premise? First, memory is quantified in terms of number of bits of information that can be stored and recovered. In the case of brain, the question is how much information can be stored in a synapse, the communicating junction between neurons. Size and operational strength of a synapse are the key variables: strength can be measured in bits and strengths correlate with umber and size synaptic size. Under high magnification, synapses look like a bunch of beads on a string. The newborn brain, there are relatively few “beads,” but these increase in number and size as the baby grows and learns things. Sadly, in old age, many...