According to a new study, the human brain can hold 10 times more memories than previously believed.The key to its amazing ability lies in synapses, the neural connections responsible for storing memories. Researchers from the Salk Institute, California, found that each synapse can hold about 4.7 bits of information. This means that the human brain has a capacity of one petabyte, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. This is equivalent to approximately 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text. The study could help computer scientists build energy efficient computers, particularly ones that employ “deep learning” and artificial neural nets – techniques capable of sophisticated learning and analysis, such as speech, object recognition, and translation.
Memory capacity of brain
