Sunday, September 23, 2012

How much information is in the Human Brain?

I recently saw a video about how the internet weighs. (You can watch it here). It was quite an interesting idea.

But later, I heard on another show that the brain contains about 10 terabytes of information (can't link to the show). I thought this was kind of small. So... I took it upon myself to come up with a more satisfying number.

The linked video says the internet weighs roughly 50 grams. That takes into account the all the electrons that make up the 1 billion trillion bytes (1x10^21).

The average human brain weighs about 1350 grams (with 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses). One could say, then, that the human brain contains about as much information of 27 internets, or 27x10^21.

That is 27 sextillion bytes (27 zetabytes).

For an idea what that means:

27,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

That is indeed a much more satisfying number for how amazing the human brain is!

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