Monday, August 25, 2008

If the brain were a hard disk


According to Prof. Jeff Lichtman (pictured) of Harvard's Center for Brain Science, the data storage capacity of the human brain is 1 million petabytes. A petabyte is equal to 1000 terabytes; and a terabyte is equal to 1000 gigabytes. In other words, the human brain has storage equivalent to 1000 billion gigabytes of information. So, why can't I remember where I put my car keys?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Guess that memory file was corrupted!

If we start with 100 billion neurons and lose one neuron per second, it will take on the order of 3,100 years to lose all of them.

generic viagra said...

I've been reading various Lichtman's essays and they are amazing, I really appreciate the effort about this investigation and you need more entries to write about gigabytes and terabytes, its an atypical terms without advertising.

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