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If the Brain was a Hard Drive, what's it's capacity?

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around 100tb but most files get corrupted and our brains have a lot of bad sectors and needs to be defragged a lot

Here is a link to a detailed study comparing the brain to a computer (which also answers the memory question)

http://library.thinkquest.org/C001501/the_saga/compare2.htm

And if you are further interested at a "hard science" view of the brain, its functions, and cognative thought, go here:

http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol004.002/03_shirley.html


Here is some more information on the subject:

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How much human memory is there?

And to look at a third measure, how much does human memory hold? Tom Landauer tried to estimate this some years ago and concluded that the brain held about 200 megabytes of information. [Landauer 1986]. He got this number partly by looking at the rate at which people could take in information, both by reading and by looking at pictures. He also studied estimates of the rate at which people forget things, and the amount of information adults need in order to do the tasks they normally do. His numbers (expressed in gigabits, not gigabytes), were 1.8, 3.4, 2.0, 1.4 and .5 gigabits. Averaging these and dividing by 8 yields 227 MB. Since there are between 10e12 and 10e14 neurons, this suggests that the brain contains 1,000 to 100,000 neurons for each bit of memory. Of course, much of the brain is used for perception, motor control, and the like; but even if only 1% of the brain is devoted to memory Landauer pointed out that it looks like your head accepts considerable storage inefficiency in order to be able to make effective use of the information.

With something like 6 billion people on earth, that makes the total memory of all the people now alive about 1,200 petabytes. To the accuracy with which these calculations are being done, the results are comparable. We can store digitally everything that everyone remembers. For any single person, this isn't even hard. Landauer estimated that people only take in and remember about a byte a second; a typical lifetime is 25,000 days or 2 billion seconds (counting time asleep). The result is 2 gigabytes, or something that fits on a laptop drive.

Would it be hard to remember every word you heard in your lifetime, including the ones you forgot? The average American spends 3,304 hours per year with one or another kind of media. [Census 1995]. 1,578 hours are with TV; adding in 12 hours a year of movies, at 120 words per minute that's 11 million words, perhaps 50 megabytes of Ascii. And 354 hours a year of reading newspapers, magazines and books at 300 words per minute reading speed would be another 32 megabytes of text. In seventy years of life you would be exposed to around six gigabytes of Ascii; today you can buy 23 gigabyte disk drives.

Could we simply make a wearable device that would record everything? Yes, if either (a) we had decent speech recognition and OCR, or (b) books move to electronic form and TV sets provide access to the closed-captioned Ascii form of the scripts. Perhaps both of these choices are likely in the near future. School children no longer need to do arithmetic without calculators; perhaps they will soon no longer need to memorize anything either. If you think this is horrible remember that Plato (in the Phaedrus) suggested that writing would `create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it' and would create `the show of wisdom without the reality.' If writing something down isn't cheating, why is recording it? It is now common for speakers to use transparencies, for a conference to hand out printed proceedings, and for people to sit at talks with cassette recorders. Would it be that terrible if each attendee had a laptop doing speech recognition, and the laptop kept the transcript and provided a small vibration to wake up the attendee when a promising topic was mentioned?

Two years ago I heard Ted Nelson at a conference suggest that we should keep the entire record of everyone's life \- all the home snapshots, videos and the like. Some six-year-old, he said, is going to grow up to be President; and then the historians will wish we knew absolutely everything about his or her life. The only way to do this is to save everything about everyone's life. I laughed, but it's indeed possible. Whether it is worthwhile is another question: are we better off having all possible information and giving it the most sketchy consideration, or having less information but trying to analyze it better? Computers do not use log tables, and chess computers have dictionaries of opening and endgame positions but not whole games. We need to understand our ability to model more complex situations to know how to make best use of stored information.

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Source: http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ksg97/ksg.html

There you go. Im spent hehe.

wow wat a long reply

hmm at least 100tb (terrabytes)

This signature violates the signature guidelines, thus it has been removed.

Yes long reply, but it answers the all important question being asked.

That being, if your brain was a hard drive, how big is it? Well, its true size is unknown, but the amount we do use is 200 megabytes.

That means that our brain, with our conscious thought and our basic functions factored in, is 200 MB in hard drive memory.

Pathetic isnt it, but you must remember that there is no real method of measuring the human brain, since its make-up and functionality is too complex. Comparing our brain to a hard drive is too...well...2D. I guess our brain can be compared to a crystal hard drive (new technology), which is measured in cubic space rather than platter space (as you know hard drives are made up of stacks of magnetic platters).


But Im digressing too far from the topic.

The answer is clear, our brain as we know it holds 200mb of information, due to storage inefficiency and the brains ability to defrag and delete what is important and what isn't. It does this every night, and on average we lose 80% of what we learned in one day after each night of rest. That may seem like alot, but considering all the neural imput (sight, sound, taste, touch, memory, interactions, stimuli, input/output such as conversation, and many other dimunitive actions that would build up quickly if not erased), 80% is a pretty accurate conclusion.

Ephix

Ephix

Chibi Dark Elf

You cant really compare it to a harddrive, the human brain works by relating things to others. Like when i think of the color red, i instantly think of fire, hot, cooking, camping, blood, life, etc. Its like that game... called "7 degrees of separation" i think, where you can relate yourself to anyone in the world in 7 steps. This is why when you are studying for exams it is best to relate things to important terms and the weirder the relationship the easier it is to remember.

An example i was helping a friend with last night was finding the domain and range of a function, Range is like a driving range where you hit the ball forward aka the y-axis, and domain is like having a plot of land that stretches across the horizon aka the x-axis. I can guarantee I never forget which is range and which is domain just because of that.

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"Sleep is for the weak. *yawn* DAMNIT!"

thats an interesting method of study you have there. I dont use it but relation to things you are familiar with is a useful way of remembering things.

But relations isnt the only function of the brain. The brain works in many ways, not just one. You cant use familiarity when your learning something completely new, such as quantum physics or M-Theory. Imagination is built upon what you can create with your mind. So relation is good for existing problems, but imagination is good for creating new problems (hehe).

And your correct when you say you cant compare the human brain to a hard-drive (I do believe I said that as well), but what DO you compare it to? I think relations come into effect here. The brain is most related to a computer, and your memory is most related to a hard-drive. True there really isnt much of a comparison, but it is the only tangible way. The physics of ones brain are just too complex to explain in a conventional manner, so you must compare it to what it resembles the most.

That being a computer.

It would be 1TB with a read error 99 percent of the time.
lol

I think the capacity of the human brain would be in the Pintabyte (sp?) range. That is a step above terrabyte.

gundam00

gundam00

Gundam Pilot

No one knows because no one has measure it once because people has more capasity to store thing that most computers and computer you have to delete stuff so you can put in information but we dont have to.

Wing Zero
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infinite but... but without a file allocation table so stuff gets overwriten A lot.

Yup I have a "really" bad memory ^.~

Raineiro

Raineiro

Daisaku Enjoji

A lobotomy must be a format your brain :)

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I could have sworn I answered everyones question with my long post. Oh well :)

Rikimaru-jp

Rikimaru-jp

Katon Karyu Endan

Well it depends in my case my brain's capacity is around one Terra bites XP lol
some poeple have almost 1 kb XP and some other their brains are damaged that they lose data all by theirselves and recover them by false ones XP lol

*~* It's Not Who I Am Underneath, But What I Do That Defines Me *~*
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XyReX

XyReX

The Code Maniac

If were talkin about the capacity of your brain, a 386 floppy disk can't be stored. peace

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I think our brain can hold an infinite amount of information.

BossMac

BossMac

BRBFBI

Quote by XyReXIf were talkin about the capacity of your brain, a 386 floppy disk can't be stored. peace

If we were talkin about yours... I think somewhere below a byte.

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jediknight14

jediknight14

Guru of Reason

Where to start the Human Brain is a few things atleast.

Its a Real Neural Net Processor w/ multi functioning Sub sections,
Speach, Motor Controls, The General senses, Hightened senses, etc.
I'ts is both active Memory and Storage Memory,
Our memories and what remember through our lifes.

As for the Capacity of the human brain,
The human brain encodes memories chemically,
at the least it would be on par with todays largest HDD's
Chemmically speaking the Human brain should have a far greater capacity then
then anything that can be produced today, yet apperentally not fully as reliable
as a HDD or some Sold-State Storage. That depends on the indvidual.

maybe not....


The Brain is made of Billions of Neurons cells,
There are the Components of the Neural Net Processor,
and at as the storage medium control,
the More neurons used to store a perticular memory the stronger that memory
is and the more easily you can recall it.

1.21498 TB per Cubic Inch

Actually..A human brain is very large & big in scale...
It's better than a number of super computers put together!!
It only depends on how we use it.. & how we utilize it 2 the fullest...
Well,that's what i read on a magazine & that's according to some scientist...lolz :nya:

But somehow i don't seem 2 be able 2 use it 2 the fullest... ^_^'
I'm very forgetful...which makes my brain only 2 - 8gigabyte? XP

(\ /)
( . .)
c('')('')
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Prydey

Prydey

Once a Saint, Always a Saint...

Not infinite but definately more than ur computer and way more than u can imagine...u remember faces, names, places, songs, information...so much...

Honour above all, except vengeance...

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5-10tb because you can save some videos/sounds/smells/fotos from past like childhood etc.

I'm the one and only Xaturas

OK... I skip here because i'm tired of reading other posts. Sorry.

Brain doesn't have capacity as (A) it is both processing unit and memory storage system which varies from human to human and (A1) human does not use every little neuron in his head. (B) Human brain does not have FileSystem like ReiserFS for example. Yes of cource every harddisk is a malfunction so Filesystems and drive electronics tend to use CRC and extra bytes to keep info safe. Maybe (A1) is because of that LOL. Other than that human brain stores info in unknown format's (Like textbook in a BMP) so there's even more mistery here.

xshintax

Gif files are Compu$erve

Quote by wildarmsheeroMine would only be able to hold 5 megs. I'm not that smart.

No... That would mean you would have a larger hardrive. Less info = more space! That logic is bad somehow...

I think my Ram would be small, maybe 8 bits of ram (if you don't understand go search for a thread about xp-tan and her breats size, so by the logic described there, my ram is miniscule since i'm a breastless guy).

My harddrive would be overpowering though. 999999 Gerobytes (invented by me).

My Graphics card would be outdated, since I can't draw for sh**.

B(BTW I am not an open source OS)

Wtf is your problem?!?

Why the f*** do I need to use proprietary filetypes in my signature and avatar? Stupid Minitokyo... STUPID COMPU$ERVE! Use png instead.

ueon

ueon

Think outside the class...

probably 300gb but at most 64mb of RAM...i learn slow but efficient XD.

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