After all the storage capacity of the brain is ten times higher than expected, concludes a study published in eLife
Scientists at the Salk Institute in California found that the part of the human brain that is reserved for memory has much more capacity than previously thought and can store something like 4700 million books or 670 million web pages.
If the brain were used to its maximum capacity, which does not happen, could accommodate a petabyte of information, ie about a million gigabytes. This calculation is based on measurement of synapses which are brain connections that are associated with the storage memories. On average, each can store 4.7 bits of information.
Terry Sejnowski team, professor of computational neurobiology, investigated the key links of the brain, synapses in the hippocampus, a region of memory. It found that after all there are more dimensions to the synapses, which are decisive for storage. On the other hand, the sizes can go changing depending on the activity of neurons.
“We found that ten times more dimensions of synapses than previously thought,” says Tom Bartol, one of the scientists of this team. In this case, 26 have been identified corresponding woes such 4.7 bits of information instead of one or two, as previously thought.
“This is an order of magnitude larger than anyone ever imagined “Sejnowski said.
Other important findings of this research are related to the efficiency of the brain. The adult only generates 20 watts of continuous power, both as a lamp low power. This discovery, reads the statement concerning the study “may help computer scientists to create more efficient computers, capable of analysis and sophisticated learning as language, object recognition and translation.”
The study based on a reconstruction of a hippocampus fragment designed to reproduce the exact features of each synapse in the brain of a mouse, believing the team would not be much different from the relative to humans.
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