Interesting Facts

According to neuroscientists from the Salk institute, the human brain has 10 x more memory capacity than previously thought. (They measured the storage capacity of each synapse - the connections within the brain that are responsible for storing memories - and discovered that, on average, one synapse can hold about 4.7 bits of information. This means that the human brain has a capacity of one petabyte, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. One petabyte is about the same as about 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text or about the same as 13.3 years of HD-TV recordings, or 4.7 billion books.   One big problem here: I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday. It all sounds very exciting, until you realise that Google handles 20 petabytes of data every day. And a mere 50 petabytes can hold the entire written works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages. I think we need to be able to upgrade our brains, or add bits, like...

The storage capacity of the human brain is around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). (For example, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder there would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the telly running for 300 years to use it all up!  Actually, that would be really good - I've nearly run out of my 80 hours recording time!!) Source - Scientific American