Is there any hard-coded memory capacity of our brain?

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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

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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