I am reading Max Tegmark’s book Life 3.0 where he has written
>Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.
can we quantify our memory?
In: Biology
It’s not as though one cell stores one fact. We don’t completely understand how either memory or neuroanatomy work, but we know it’s not that simple. No one has ever run out of “room” for new information, so there’s no reason to believe in a hard limit. It’s likely that other factors prevent us from learning and remembering everything.
The current understanding is that you never lose memories, but you do lose the ability to access some memories, or to put it another way, you only retain the ability to access some of what you’ve experienced.
I think the limit vary on each person since we don’t have the same amount of neurons, same perception of reality, same creativity type… But it has to be limit because we use cells for processing, limited cells quantity mean limited processing. Also I’m pretty sure long and short term memory help flushing data from the brain or keeping it, abstraction works as some kind of compression…. So it also kind of self cleans itself and this is why it’s important to sleep, because a lot of that cleaning process happens at that time.
Tegmark arrived at that number because there are ~100 trillion synapses in the brain.
He’s saying to store the state of your brain it would require on the order 100’s of terabytes to store all of the synapses.
It’s hard to gauge the memory capacity of the brain because our memories don’t exist like memory in a computer. They’re encoded in neurons all over the brain. And
Not that we know of, no, and that quote you mentioned is wildly misleading. We really don’t know how memory works but we’re pretty sure it doesn’t work like that. There are a huge range of guesses as the the “storage capacity” of the human brain, but mostly, we don’t think the human brain even operates in a way that it has a “storage capacity” that you can describe in bits and bytes, so saying “the brains stores information in X number of gigabytes/terabytes” is not only wrong in the amount but also wrong in how the brain stores information altogether, because ultimately, the brain is not a computer.
That quote is also very misleading about how much information is stored in your DNA (your DNA doesn’t store information, it *is* the information) but that’s another topic altogether.
We can’t currently quantify memory because we don’t understand how memories are stored in the brain. Only once we understand the physical/biological process of memories can we estimate what the capacity of the brain is. Does each memory get stored in a single neuron? If not, how many neurons does it take? If each memory uses multiple neurons, can several memories overlap and use some of the same neurons? Are memories stored in the links between neurons instead of the neurons themselves? Or is it something completely different, or a combination?
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