Today we are going to see an estimate by experts, of the capacity of the human brain adapted to the technological level.
What capacity does a human brain have?
The methods and studies carried out are not 100% relevant because a human brain cannot be compared with a computer storage unit, but it can give us an orientation of how powerful and immense it is.
One of the people who was asked this question went to Robert Birge, chemist from the University of Connecticut. This made an approximate calculation taking into account the capacity of a neuron associated with a bit and multiplying them by the number of them that a brain usually has (100,000 million). The result gave him about 5 TB although his thoughts were more oriented to that we would walk about 30 or 40 TB.
It is somewhat surprising, although of course, it is not the same to use that storage to remember movies in 720p than in 4K, which is why the unit of measurement is very relative in humans.
A later study carried out by researchers from the Salk Institute, led by Terry Sejnowski, estimated that each connection in the brain could store 10 times more than what was known up to that moment, and could even speak of petabytes as a new measure.
Other similar investigations place the capacity of this between 50 and 200 TB, so they all reach a similar conclusion, and although everything is very theoretical, it helps us to imagine how much we can remember if we set our minds to it.
All of this makes our body surprising since we are now more used to seeing these types of measures with hard drives of tens of TB or even simple flash drives that already reach a couple of terabytes, but can you imagine just 50 years ago (let’s not talk hundreds or thousands) when the maximum we could store was 1.44 MB on a floppy disk, and yet our mind that was there since the beginning of time can reach millions of them.
In short, the human brain’s capacity to store information remains an enigma, but current estimates suggest it could be in the multi-terabyte or even petabyte range. As research continues to progress, it is likely that we will gain a more precise understanding of this amazing and unique ability.
For now we are going to enjoy it and continue exercising it, since all the new technologies are making us think less and less for ourselves and we are leaving aside the largest and most powerful storage that nature has ever created. Our mind.
And to you, do these data seem realistic or did you expect something else? Have you thought about how much an animal can have? It might be interesting to investigate.
