Blog memory

I found this blog on memory and thought it was fascinating. I don't know how reliable it is, however.

How Much Information Can The Human Brain Store? - 17th January 2007, 08:27 PM

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I have been thinking, if the human brain could be theoretically modeled as an artifical neuron network, then how much storage space would it need on a computer. Essentially, how much information (in computer terms) can our brain store.

(this isn't meant to be 100% scientific, just a little fun)

According to conventional biology, the human brain has an average of 100 billion neurons, and 100 trillion synapse connections.

If this is true, then each neuron can be connected to an average of 1000 other neurons (making up part of a layer).

So, if we take this into the AI computer science field, we have a hypothetical neural network model consisting of 100 trillion connections, and 100 billion neurons. Forget the neurons for now, and just concentrate of the connections between neurons.

Lets assume that we model the connections using 128-bits of data for a single activation. Note, that it is probably impossible to accurately transform the analog data for the synapse strength connection into a binary representation. Our connections could potentially be thousands of bits in resoultion. But 128 bits is certainly a great deal, and is very high resoultion for this.

But whatever, lets assume this will work.

1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) connections:
@ 128-bits = 1.28e14 bits

To understand this, a bit is the most primitive form of computer data. It represents a single binary digit, either the value 0 or 1. It requires the least amount of space to represent within a computer architecture.

Okay, so lets bring it into the real world

In Terabytes (128-bit): 14901 terabytes
In Pentabytes (128-bit): 14.55 pentabytes

(how i calculated this)
For Terabytes: v = (((((1,000,000,000,000 * 128) / 8) / 1024) /1024 / 1024)
For Pentabytes: v = ((((((1,000,000,000,000 * 128) / 8) / 1024) /1024) /1024) /1024)

So we would need 14901 terabytes of computer memory just to make an accurate snapshot of the brain's synapse connections. And we haven't even thourght about the neuron itself.

I realise this is a very geeky post, but I thourght it was kind of a cool idea. The final figure is the amount of DVD's it would take to 'make a backup' of someone's brain:

3.2 million DVD's (4.7 gb)

Thats 555 years of DVD quality video.