What is the Capacity of our Brain?

 What is the capacity of our brain? How much information it can store? Will it ever filled up completely? Let's find out.

We learn a plenty of new things each and every day. According to a study conducted by researchers of the University of California-San Diego under Roger Bon, we human beings store information of about 34 Gb(Gigabytes) everyday. So, by calculation, our brain is flooded with 238 Gb information every week and 1200 Gb in a month, which is sufficient to overload even a powerful computer. According to the study, people receive 105000 words per day. Although that much words are not read by us, but this is the number estimated to reach human brain each day. Then adding on images, videos and other things happening around us the amount touches 34 Gb.

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Now, the question that arises is – Will this data storing stop at some point? Well, possibly NO. Human brain consists of about one billion neurons. However, some current post-mortem studies suggest that the average male human contains about 86 billion, which are connected with almost 1000 synapses each (Synapses are basically the bridge between two neurons.) And more than 1000 nerve impulses are transmitted per second through these synapses. So, just to try imagine, 86 billion neurons, 1000 synapses connected with each of them & 1000 impulses per second! 

So, one question is obvious here-What is the capacity of the brain? According to an article in Scientific American in 2010, the storage capacity of the human brain is almost 2.5 petabytes. You must know a ‘petabyte’ is equivalent to 1024 terabytes which is more than million megabytes. Now you can definitely relate this with the memory capacity of your smart phones that is generally around 64 GB or 128 GB. More interestingly, if out brain acts like a video recorder, that it can record almost 30 lakh hours of TV shows. That means, your TV has to run continuously more than 300 years to use up the full storage of your brain.

To put that in perspective, Yahoo lnc.- the internet giant has created a 2 petabyte, specially built warehouse. Yahoo uses this immense capacity to analyze the behavior of its half billion Web visitors per month. It also claims that Yahoo is the World’s single-largest database, a well as the busiest. If we compare with this warehouse which can progress 24 billion events a day, with the human brain, it is 20% smaller than the capacity of a human brain. Something more interesting for you - the first spacecraft that landed on the moon, Apollo 11 had a computer with an operating system of just 64 kilobytes(64 KB), which if you can estimate just over 64 thousand characters of information.

Despite all of these, the brain’s exact storage capacity is quite difficult to calculate. This is because, mainly we don’t know how much space any particular information takes. Like, if you talk over the phone compared to a face-to-face conversation, it may use up less memory, because in face-to-face talking your brain also recognizes the expression of other people along with listening to them. Moreover, reading a book might take lesser storage, as it does not involve both listening and watching. Also some memories are forgotten automatically to free up space.

So we are not sure about them. And this is good for us - our brain can keep itself upgraded as we learn new things or seek new experiences. So you need not worry about your brain getting filled up, as there is enough capacity in it. And always remember, your brain can do much than what you can think.

That's all for today. Hope you got to learn something new. Keep visiting Learning Hub.

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