Does ur brains memory have a capacity? can u compare it to gigabytes or sumthin??

Question

so iam looking for serious answers on the way ur brains memory works. i mean can it ever be really full so that u cant remeber anymore, and can u compare it to a computers memory??

and nothing tooo complex (hehe)

Answer 1

Cutie, I'd say 64 kilobytes max?  

Answer 2

I don't think information ever leaves your brain, I think it goes by importance. For example, when I 'forget' something, in the long run, I generally remember it some other time.

I could get into it, but you said nothing tooooooo complex -rolls eyes-.

Answer 3

Copy/Paste from a previous answer I gave on this subject:

This is not possible to know, really - because the way which our brain stores information is complex and poorly-understood.

But, there are an estimated 100 billion (10^11) neurons in the brain, each potentially capably of forming a synaptic connection with every other neurons - meaning there are 10^22 possible synapses.

Current thinking suggests that one synapse might approximate to one "bit" of information (it is almost certainly much more complex than that, but this is probably a good approximation).

One byte is 8 bits, so this is 1.25 x 10^21 bytes, or 1.25 zettabytes, or 1.25 million terabytes of information storage.

Other estimates state that at any one time, there are actually "only" around 100 trillion (10^14) synapses in the human brain - so this would give a more modest memory capacity of 12.5 terabytes.

But to put all of this into perspective - the human brain receives about 72 gigabytes of information from the eyes *every second*, and it successfully processes *all* of that information. And that's just from the eyes.

From calculations based on the processing speed of the human retina, and up-scaling that to the number of neurons in the brain, we can estimate that the human brain performs about 100 million MIPS (Million computer Instructions Per Second ). This means that the brain is like a 168,000 MHz Pentium computer.

I'd say the amazing thing about the human brain is not just it's "hard drive size", but also it's processing speed.

Answer 4

Since the 60's this question has been approached over and over.  And the estimates for what the brain can remember have been growing steadily.  My favorite estimate is about 10 terabytes.  The estimate is inspired by the amount of information that the brain can process over a life time.

But the way that the brain stores information isn't the same as the way that computers store it.  For example, when you retrieve a memory, your brain alters that memory.  That's not how computer memory is designed.

Ten terabytes can be stored on 10 disk drives.  My current home computer can have all ten drives inside the computer box.  So, all we need is some good software.