This came up in conversation with a friend of mine, and so I searched and found this answer. Maybe instead of purchasing physical disks, we just need to get everyone to practice using their brain to remember things… on second thought, we can’t get them to practice using their brains for much of anything so… never mind.
What is the memory capacity in GB of human brain?
Something like 2 Terabytes and you are still going to be very far from the truth. I don’t think that it is possible (yet) to evaluate the capacity of the human brain. The fact is that a person can remember hundreds of movies, songs, books, events from the past, pictures, faces, names, phone numbers, etc., that if all those memories had to be put on a hard drive, terabytes upon terabytes wouldn’t be enough.
A quote from some researchers.
“The human brain contains about 50 billion to 200 billion neurons
(nobody knows how many for sure), each of which interfaces with 1,000
to 100,000 other neurons through 100 trillion (10 14) to 10
quadrillion (10 16) synaptic junctions. Each synapse possesses a
variable firing threshold which is reduced as the neuron is repeatedly
activated. If we assume that the firing threshold at each synapse can
assume 256 distinguishable levels, and if we suppose that there are
20,000 shared synapses per neuron (10,000 per neuron), then the total
information storage capacity of the synapses in the cortex would be of
the order of 500 to 1,000 terabytes. (Of course, if the brain’s
storage of information takes place at a molecular level, then I would
be afraid to hazard a guess regarding how many bytes can be stored in
the brain. One estimate has placed it at about 3.6 X 10 19 bytes.)”
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