How much data could the brain store, say in terrabytes?

this
Also our brain is very good at generalisation and simplification

The question is retarded. Back in the day people used to think the brain was an intricate clock. What if I were to ask how many gears are in the human brain? The question would be as stupid as the one you asked.

if my grades are any indication, probably a few megabytes.
brain seems more like a computer with a huge instruction set and little main memory/secondary storage. The only impressive thing about it is processing speed.

Its such an irrelevant question.
The brain is a pattern and behavioral agent.

It doesn't store knowledge. It stores relations between inputs. And this makes the amount stupendously complex.

it has an arguably unlimited storage capacity

>arguably unlimited
you could argue it
but you'd be wrong
face it, nothing about you is that special

Based on what I've read the brain seems more like a massive relational database which stores as little as it can than it does plain storage.

>The only impressive thing about it is processing speed.
It's really not that fast. The only reason it seems fast is because it's massively parallel in ways that current computers don't even begin to approach. If it had to function in a serial fashion it'd likely be outstripped by any computer made in the last decade.

>It's a shoddy metaphors and false analogies episode

well, that's the theory of long-term memory which is taught in most college level courses which deal with memory. i don't know what your source is.

i'm not sure if anyone has actually measured the amount of info a single brain can hold.

It's still fast even if you measure it by gpu standards

>i'm not sure if anyone has actually measured the amount of info a single brain can hold
7 +/- 2 objects

>i don't know what your source is
math. there's literally no way for it to be unlimited.
just further proof social sciences aren't science. Can't even into basic math.

Lol well you almost had me there brah

no, that was concerning working memory (or STM at that time), not the entire brain itself; further, that number's been revised to 4 +/- 1 and there are various nuances

I'd say trillion factorial terabytes.

Sure is summer in here!

what do you mean almost had you? Do you seriously not see how it's mathematically impossible for the brain to have unlimited storage?

Most conservative guess 1 terabyte
Most expansive guess 2.5 petabytes

Best guess range
10-100 terabytes

Literally first page of google guys.

I don't see it. And let me make a correction - virtually unlimited is what most theories state. Though, honestly it would be nice to see you argue why its capacity for long term storage must be something much less than unlimited. Maybe you might even come up with an actual estimate.

assuming you can imagine high definition scenarios you've never been in before, a lot.

You sure fell for the bait

The nature of the question invites inaccuracy because the the way computers store information and the way humans store information is vastly different. There are concepts on both sides that are likely akin to explaining to a blind person what color is, or why viewing certain images evokes strong emotion.

When will this bait autism end?

It doesn't matter that they work in a different way, you can find an equivalent ratio.

what if I store petabytes of 16 bit memory addresses that point to petabytes of data?

>I don't see it
because its a physical object governed by physical processes you idiot. How are you going to get unlimited storage space from it? The processes that govern memory storage might work on a very small scale so as to provide a high amount of entropy per unit of volume but it is still discreet and no matter how big it is, it can't add to infinity. That is a very basic mathematical point.
>and let me make a correction - virtually unlimited is what most theories state
and that means what exactly?

you'd be storing a shit load of duplicate addresses...

How much information can be stored in an input weight adjusting echo state neural network with an equivalent number of units and interconnections? That's probably the closest answer you'll get.

It's a tricky question because the brain doesn't store information in the way a hard drive does but in the way oscillators or similar dynamical systems do. This might seem unintuitive, but, despite the presence of hard storage capacity, the architecture supports very fast coincidence detection which makes it excel at pattern recognition. (I think the operation is actually a beat frequency calculation similar to what is used in very precise MEMS clocks, but I cant test it until our lab gets our two-photon microscope later this summer)

about lv426byte

When you stop falling for it

you haven't proven anything though. first of all, you don't know the parameters: virtually unlimited capacity means that the brain has the capacity to store a nearly unlimited amount of memories. it means an indefinitely large storage space. that's what it stands for theoretically.

>because its a physical object governed by physical processes you idiot
And, how do you explain the singularity then? Mind you, I'm not an idiot. In the singularity, things are infinitely dense. This is a very famous idea in physics. In other words, a physical process is capable of containing an unlimited amount of x. The brain, being a physical process, is going by your criterion for being a legitimate claim (must happen to physical objects governed by physical processes). What's ignorant is dismissing viewpoints without even hearing the counterargument, and also using ad-hominems to win. It goes against the idea that you are a scientist.

The amazing thing about the brain is its ability to efficiently store data, incredible compression algorithms. Each concept in our brain shares sub concepts with countless other concepts.

The brain forms this memory storage through associations. (Excluding procedural memory)

One way to get an estimate of the amount of "data" in binary would be to assign every node a number, and create a list of all assocations, which would include: node A #, node B # along with additional values to specify the strength and aspects of the connections.

Also, current studies have found no limits on the amount of associations (hippocampal indexint spots) that can be created.

>you haven't proven anything though
I proved that it doesn't make sense without invoking some magic-tier bullshit
>you don't know the parameters
i don't need to. all i need to know is that the brain uses physical processes to store memory. If it does, then it is necessarily discreet. Its volume is finite, therefore the storage capacity using that process can't be infinite.
>it means an indefinitely large storage space.
that implies infinite entropy. not only is your retarded theory mathematically impossible, but that's also physically absurd. Throwing vague qualifiers at it doesn't help your case.
> In the singularity, things are infinitely dense. This is a very famous idea in physics
in pop-physics maybe. thinking this is a good example shows just how much of a surface-level understanding of science you have. There is no evidence of any real world singularities. They are objects of mathematics and there's nothing to suggest they correlate to an real object.
Even if it was, what point are you making? that the brain contains a singularity? the fact that you need to bring a singularity up should have hinted to you how ridiculous the concept of infinite memory is.
>and also using ad-hominems to win
there you go again with your surface level knowledge of everything, dumbass. Look, you retard. An ad-hominem isn't just an insult, cock-sucker. An ad-hominem, asshole, is attacking the character of the arguer instead of the argument, you idiot. I attacked your arguments AND I insulted you, you moron. I'm allowed to do that, you cum-slurping, shit-eating, ball-tickling fucking faggot.

Pretty sure you need to measure it in Petabytes.

Like 1 terrabyte at best actually. It's how neurons work that makes you so special user.
lmgtfy.com/?q=How much memory can the brain hold?

Impossible to calculate with our current knowledge. Anyone who answers is making it up.

OP's is like half a broken and wet usb
scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/

I read a study that said about 300 megabytes. it's all about how efficiently the memory is stored

>The only impressive thing about it is processing speed.
Its in the area of 1 GHz, so it's far below even the lowest-end PC you could buy today.
The power is in the brain's parallel processing which makes it unimaginably faster than any computer we can hope to build with today's technology.

If you could quantify all the data the brain is receiving at any given time (visual, audio, touch, smell, taste, nerve communications from the body, etc) what order of magnitude would it be on? Terabytes or more? Surely vision alone has to be a fairly hefty amount.

Also, what would the bandwidth of the corpus callosum have to be to be transmitting all that data back and forth nearly instantaneously between the brain hemispheres?

it can store a large amount of fractal data, but as for raw data, it holds less but still hold a shit ton

It's even crazier when you remember that the perceived image resulting from vision isn't even remotely close to being raw. By the time your conscious mind perceives the image it's been processed to hell and back to remove small blind spots, veins, etc and vertically flip the image as well as patching in low-quality peripheral vision with mental images. All within milliseconds of being real-time. It's insane.

>Its in the area of 1 GHz
based on what? probably no credible source since clock speed is only a useful comparison for otherwise equal processors.
>The power is in the brain's parallel processing which makes it unimaginably faster than any computer
as I said before, with gpus being a better comparison but still way behind.
extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-second-of-human-brain-activity-takes-82944-processors
sure, simulation is more expensive. If i remember correctly, it's about O(n^2) complexity. it'd still be pretty powerful.

How significant is it that the brain indirectly stores information indirectly in form of chunks related to our native language?

I know at the machine level, memory can manipulated via indirect addressing, but this is still quite limited.

The brain can store information without a native tongue, you know? Look up split-brain stuff and anosognosia.

The brain's language-agnostic storage becomes extremely evident if you learn a second language to any mentionable extent. You'll notice that your thought processes actually work with abstract concepts that have different words associated for each language.

If you're monolingual this is a lot less obvious because most of the time there's a 1:1 mapping between a concept and its word in your spoken language, making it seem like you think with words.

It was then that I realized that my brain was a 500 ft tall and from the Paleolithic era

if we could measure the amount of information possibly stored by the average human brain, the way in which information is stored by the brain would be really different from the method of how information is stored on artificial memory devices. You would have to do a rough conversion until some kind of method is figured out on how to convert it easily.

anyways the mind can store a lot more than any modern HDD

About tree fiddy

Yes it's mostly conjecture. I believe the figure of ~1 GHz was derived from the frequency of neuronal firing or something like that. Certainly not applicable to a parallel processor like the brain but if you had to break it down to simple, if inaccurate figures, that's likely what you'd get.

>2016
>Still using the MB system
>Not using the glorious MiB system
kys

>Men in black system

That depends on the kind of data and how much time you want it to last. The brain, is more like a linked list than an array (if it makes sense to you).

2.5 petabytes or 2500 terabytes

You can literally google it you fucking retards

scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/

Wouldn't the closest we would come to answer this question would be through recognizing the DNA data storage from MIT I believe.

ITT: everyone assumes that the human brain operates on binary