is there a unit of Neuro signal to the brain, similar to “gigabit” and “megabit” and rate per second?
In: Biology
Not really, no. Some very long neurons (like one from the base of the spine to the foot) propagate signals very quickly on the order of 100+ meters per second. But as far as storage capacity, researchers use digital-world units (like petabytes)… which are basically guesstimates.
Reading wikipedia tells me that our nervous system sends signals via charged ions, namely Sodium, Potassium, Chloride and Calcium. So, you could say that one of these molecules is the smallest unit of communication one neuron could send to another, but the fact that there’s 4 different molecules (and maybe more) means is way more complicated than a single basic unit you can count. I think our brains work too different from computers to neatly compare them to computers.
Electrical signals in a copper wire travel at about 2/3rds the speed of light or about 224,844,344 m/s. Nerve impulses, as others have noted, travel about 100m/s.
So if you say “one nerve impulse” is equal to “one bit” of information, Gigabit transmission methods (like Ethernet) can move that bit of information well over two million times faster. Gigabit actually moves 1,000,000,000 bits per second though …
One *could* refer to the transmission of a single neuron’s signal to another neuron as a single “bit” of information. These signal speeds are all going to be fairly static, not wavering much from their average, across all people. A smarter person does not transmit signals through their neurons faster, but instead, different people have differently developed **networks** of signal connections.
The way that we go from simple neural signals to complex thought is still the subject of a lot of study and research. It is not very comparable to a computer.
Here is a pretty good video explaining signal transmission between individual neurons.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhowH0kb7n0&vl=en](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhowH0kb7n0&vl=en)
Neuronal signals are not always (not often?) linear, one firing neuron can trigger multiple others. So m/s along a single cell doesn’t really capture transmission rate. I’m not sure what unit would. Not to mention that neurons aren’t restricted to the brain, or necessarily connected up in similar ways. Certain neuron firings are limited by the sensors or muscles they are connected to, and all are affected by eating, sleeping, distractions etc.
If OP was wondering how much data can be stored, no end has been found to long term memory, which is usually considered functionally unlimited.
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