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Ask Slashdot: Storage Capacity of the Human Brain?
STUR
submitted this interesting question:
"Since humans are supposed to have such great minds,
I would like to know how much storage capacity a human
brain has compared to, let's say, a computer's hard drive.
Hrm... If the capacity is high enough, do you think that
computers of the future could possibly use the brain as a
sort of hard drive or ram chip? Just a little something
to think about." I've heard that the brain uses a form
of holographic storage to archive its information and I don't
know if there is a direct mapping to that and say terabytes
of information (warning: I am not an expert!). What do
all think?
Since our scientists are unclued on Quantum Physics (not claiming I am either), we have yet to scrape the surface on Brain Science.
But, if you want to research this kind of stuff, try http://www-bcs.mit.edu. Hrm...
hmmm, i seem to remember my psychology teacher saying it was equivalent to a couple of million exobytes, based on the average memories stored divided into the amount if audio/video in each memory... doesn't take into account non-memory thoughts or the brains tendency to forget things, but it's a ballpark starting point.
-avtr
Our file allocation tables suck too. :>
Where did I put my pen again...
I do not believe that new dentrites grow so rapidly, i.e, If I say 1,3,5,7,30 and then ask you to repeat it you come up with 1,3,5,7,30. There is zero latency for the brain to store short term data. So how does the brain physically store short term data? And for that matter, how is long term data stored, if different?
Even if we can't measure the storage capacity in digital terms, we can measure the INPUT capacity of humans that way, right? How much information can we take in in a set amount of time? Couldn't this be determined by counting all neurons and the distance their impulses can travel?
Then we'd know how much BANDWIDTH a human uses. If you provide any more information than that limit in, say, a virtual reality, you'd be wasting bandwidth. If we could deliver exactly that much information at that speed (and in the right ways), we could control ALL experiences down to the smallest detail. We need a backbone that can push that much data to EVERY person. The Matrix I guess?
I think that came from a PBS special, where some kid had hydroenephalitis (water on the brain), and about 90% of his cranial capacity was fluid. He was a mathematical genius. I had heard in a later discussion, that this particular person also had some other rather severe handicaps, sleep disturbances, seizures, etc.
I used to have all sorts of memory. But since I upgraded my brain to windows NT 4.0, can't remember much of anything anymore. Whats more my brain keeps crashing :(
I think you're missing a couple of thats in there ;).
It think it should read That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The brain stores information on a quantum level. At that level, things are not "on" or "off" like a computer bit. It's more just "random" energy moving about, organized by electrical and chemical reactions within the brain. I for one believe there is no limit to our memory systems.
I read an AI book recently and it had a few estimates and ;).
it seems that this one was the most well-founded.
It was based on two methods: on estimated of how much data can a person store
per second (~100bit) and on a game of guessing where one person asks
tries to guess what other person has in mind by asking yes/no questions and it usually
takes about 20 questions to zero in. This gives us a 2e20 then we double it to account
for info that is outside of scope of this game (personal, sensual).
It's interesting that both methods gave roughly the same answer.
of course, It's hard to say how close it is to 2gb but I seriously
doubt that it's measured in terabytes, as the number of synapses implies. I think many people really like this TB number because it makes them feel all fuzzy and warm about themselves. Seriously, 2gb wouldn't seem that small to us if not for a certain company pumping out superoverbloated software
You left out a couple of thats!
It should read:
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The matrix would have been cool if the minds were stimulated in the matrix, and once developed, were used as nodes in the main computer. It would be like hell sitting in stasis being forced to do calculations over and over...
Much better sci-fi then 'bioenergy' in my opinion.
I think that the brain is very object oriented. It contains a bunch of objects, like emotions, colors, and other sensations. When we experience something new (like love, awwwhh), that new object is added to the inventory.
When you sense/experience something and then remember it, your brain stores it as a "text file" of the objects that were involved in that scene, and as you know, text files require very little storage space. For example, the memory of seeing a 100m dash and a man running from wolves would be basically the same thing. The only different objects are the environment, circumstances. You wouldn't need to store the image of someone running twice, because its the same "object."
Oh wait a minute, I just ripped off Plato. God damn it. The first time I learned about induction I thought to myself "We could use this in powerplants!"
640K That's all anyone will ever need.
I'm not try to be condescending (but I'll probably manage that anyway), but the question is completely silly. Sure, you could probably come up with some formulation that could count the number of bits of information, but the resulting number would be meaningless.
It's like asking how many instructions the brain can process in one second. It doesn't make any sense: they're are no instructions! It's like asking which is smarter: an elephant or a dolphin. They're both damn smart, but they are so specialized to their environments the intelligence is not transferable. Put the brain of the dolphin in the body of the elephant, and it's like a fish out of water (boo!).
When you're listening audio at 44khz, you're not storing it.
I think it helps to think of storing like this: look at a book page and try to remember as many words as you can in 3 seconds. Then divide by 3.
It would seem that when you're looking at a picture, you're storing alot more information than when you're reading. But that's might not be the case. For instance, studies showed that in order to recognize a picture of Lincoln people only need a low-res pixelated image that has a quite low size, and it was shown that in order to look at a picture for a second and 'remember' it, you don't have to have higher than ~100bps 'bandwidth'.
- Rainy
Exactly. A good example is semantic network. Yeah, I know it's only a theoretical construct, but I bet it's a pretty good approximation as to what is really going on.
What the hell are people tripping about that that that wtf. It sounded like a good sentance to me?
Brain stores long-term memories in structural changes. Most of the changes are thought to occur in strengths of the connections between cells, but
...).
nobody really knows all the things that may change according to the expriences.
Memories are stored in a distributed fashion, which could be vaguely called 'holographic'. Distributed means that a substantiate amount of cells is needed to recall anything. Partial recalling is well possible - stored information in the brain does not just disappears, but instead becomes fainter and more inaccurate over time.
The brain is not, however, holographic in the sense that all the stuff could be exactly recovered. Only the somehow relevant parts are stored. Remember, brains are developed by evolution, and there has been a heavy pressure towards economic implementation. The only thing which ultimately matters is how you behave, not how exactly things are stored. Think about reminding a scenery. It is really hard to say what you remember about it. Certainly not the picture as pixels (I don't know how true to stories about people which photographics memories.) is recalled. Instead, you recall some highly processed features of the scenery, like some feelings, colors, overall appearance (open, closed, trees above, see,
Brain, as well as all biological systems, are hard to study because the solutions are not elegant or neat. Instead, everything is a big mess. There has never been need for anybody to understand a living organism during it's 'development', therefore it is not developed to be easily understandable!
From the Shannon's information theory, it is possible to deduce the information capacity of an analogous system (as well as that of a digital system), if we know probabilities of all of its states, and a 'measurement accuracy' function. In the case of the brain, suchs things are not known. I guess some kind of wild estimates are possible. But on the other hand they are lower bounds, because nobody knows all the ways information is stored, on the other hand such estimates are lower bounds because it is not known how correlated the states of different synapses are (high dependence between states of the synapses decreases the information content). Therefore, such estimates are almost unusable.
If it has more settings than just on and off, then it's not digital, it's analog.... right?
How many colours are there in the visable spectrum? 16? 256? 65536? 16277716? infinite?
You see, it's all analog... there is no exact number.
Face it... we are just organic computers programmed to replicate, but together by some higher lifeform. We age because our brain has a finite amount of drive space... not because we HAVE to age, but because our brain is a billiard-ball computer, storing history and what-not, never deleting any experiences. I guess the higher lifeforms chose to just kill us after a certain amount of time, rather than write a stack pop function.
haha...
RichieFu
that's "put together," not "but together"
and i meant a Queue pop function hehe
The 2 bps thing is ludicrous. If you try to calculate the amount of visual data flowing in through the eyes, you get some incredible number. Ballpark it as thirty 1000 x 1000 pixel pictures per second as a minimum, given the quality of displays people like and the "refresh rate" of the retina.
How much of that actually is incorporated into memory is an open issue, but to say that only 2 bps makes it in to the brain is just plain stupid.
Nah, we just need a branfsck to replace e2fsck :-)
If your Grandfather lived to be 1000, I doubt he would be even nearing the capasity of his brain. I'm no psychologist, but I do believe your long-term memory only retains general aspects of memories and leaves the details to the short-term, which eventually is lost. I also believe your brain loses (or removes?) memories placed in the long-term storage if not reminded of them, which means your brain is constantly allocating and deleting causing more than enough room for memory. As for you Grandfather, he's 100! He's old! He simply doesn't function as he once did. Furthermore, he has 100 years of memories to wallow in. Due to a certain aspect of the brain (which I can't remember the name for, go figure) When you learn/input new stimuli, it causes one to have trouble differentiating between the new and the old. Ever study for a chapter 3 test, and write down chapter 1 answers on accident?
:)
well now I'm babbling and losing focus. Blame it on the brain
He might not have been stupid, but he didn't do that well in school. There's a quite big difference.
Like I said in another comment, it is perfectly
possible to compute the information capacity
of an analog system, if you know the probabilities
of all of its states (the joint probability density function) AND how accurately you are able to measure the state. With brains neither of these
is known or even defined.
BTW, the information capacity of a hard disk or RAM refers to some kind of upper bound, which is easy to calculate. In reality, states of different parts of the memory are correlated, and all of the capacity is not used (like if you store text, it has redundancy, i.e. you are able to compress it).
This book was "The Age Of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. Not a bad read, though it didn't spend as much time covering spirituality despite the title. It's a book I'm going to try to hang on to, revisiting every few years to see how his predictions turn out. It was referenced in the John Katz sexbot article here on /. awhile back.
Underneath it all, that's why
we all come here...(at least virtually)
stand around at a party and talk out
our arses about stuff...long live Slashdot.
So I had to forget three years of junior high school last week to free up some space. I consider it a win/win situation.
Now if someone could remind what a 'wedgie' is, I'll be all set...
What's so terrible about making human life "worthless" in this way?
Geez, it's not like we've got an intrinsic "value" that the Universe recognizes or anything.
You'd still enjoy your life (or not).
Noise in the system limits the measurement accuracy of the strengths of the synapses, and for sure the state must be explicitly or implicitly measured before the information stored into it can be used. If you measure with finite accuracy, also the information capacity of one synapse is finite.
This does not hold with artificial neural networks, although I have never seen one which would really utilize the 8th number after the dot.
Anyone who says the brain is not a digital computer has not had enough LSD.
Incorect-o-mundo, my friend. Check the credits and you'll see it was Gibson who wrote the screenplay.
Not that that made it any good ...
Any calculations based on the average human being's powers of recall will fail. That's like computing hard-drive capacity from how much data you can push across the motherboard, or some similar scenario.
Calculations based on physical size of the brain are equally subjective -- it assumes a particular model for storage is true, which has yet to be proven.
Further, any calculation (of any sort) done on "average people" fails to take into account the many people out there who exhibit what's commonly called eidetic or photographic memory, people who can recall specific facts and details in depth. Such individuals undoubtedly store the same amount of information but have a much better command of recall.
Who cares about brain size... what I want to know is, what is a Brain Fart?
You sure you want to attach your brain to your computer, beware, your brain has horrible access times compared to RAM or even disks.
photographic memory is short term. Are there people who can read 1000 pages every day for 10 years and remember every single page? spending 3 secs per page? I don't think so.
- Rainy
Here's the quote:
Johnny Mnemonic: I can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in my head.
yeah those atomic configurations would give you tera-tera-terabytes of memory. Not very helpful. What I described is not very precise - in fact, its a rough estimate at best. But it gets some credibility because 2 methods were used to derive it. As approximate as it is, it's the best I've seen so far.
- Rainy
You should take a serious look at HP storage, they have products and solutions equal to if not better than EMC for a nicer price.
Um, no, an ant has a lot more than a dozen neurons. I'm sorry that I don't have any appropriate references at hand to give the real number, but I can give some lower bounds that are a higher than that.
First, the extensively-studied flatworm caenorhabditis (sp?) elegans is considered to have an extremely simple nervous system, and it still has hundreds of neurons. (My vague memory is on the order of 1500 total cells, some hundreds of which are neurons. (Incidentally, an amazing amount is known about C. elegans developmental biology. For starters, for many years they've known in detail where every single cell comes from in descent from the fertilized egg, a sort of developmental family tree.)
Second, an ant has compound eyes with a lot more than a dozen pixels, and I'm 90+% certain that each pixel of a compound eye has at least one neuron to support it.
For a less generous but more confident upper bound, consider that there can be lots of complexity in a neuron's signal inputs, but it basically has only one signal output. (It may feed several synapses, but if it's saying "click click click click" 140 times per second to one, it's saying the same thing to the others, too.) So at a minimum you need at least one separate neuron for each thing you control: open and close for the mouth, bend and straighten for each leg joint, and so forth.
It's still very impressive how much gets done with how little in insects (bee navigation, anyone?), but "how little" isn't "about a dozen neurons".
Every brain cell or neuron is capable of storing information and through the strength (or lack therof) of interconections to other neurons can build up a heirachy of multiple associative network connections.
Each brain cell associates its information with other cells, initially through electrical conenctions, and then reinforced with cemical connetcion.
So its like a SMP motherboard in that each brain cell can access other cells through axions (maybe it hasto go through some other neurons to be able to access all data)
That's as best an estimate as I've seen. If you can present us a better one, I think many people would be grateful. I would. Can you?
- Rainy
For those interested, an excellent read on this subject is _Sparse Distributed Memory_ by P. Kanvera.
Since most of you guys are computer nuts and know nothing about biology, let me straighten you all out. The reason the body ages is because later on in life, protein synthesis for growth and repair becomes a lower priority compared to other cellular functions.
It seems that what is being sought in this discussion is beyond estimate, because not enough information exists to calculate a range of figures. However, a range of possibilities can be offered by using reasonable assumptions.
First, it must be argued that a bit is the fundamental unit of any kind of memory. However the combination of inputs are processed and stored, either it exists or it does not. A bit is the measure of being versus non-being. It cannot be any other way, no matter how humans perceive it. That is, either a molecule in a brain cell changed state to represent some aspect of the memory process or it did not.
Then, an inventory could be made of the amounts and types of molecules in the brain capable of such state changes, and the numbers of possible states per molecule. This information could be used to calculate a theoretical MAXIMUM memory capacity.
A process such as this should be valid, since similar methods are used to describe heat-exchange processes from a theoretical aspect (karnot engines versus "real" heat engines, ideal op-amps from real op amps, etc, etc.)
Whether or not the answer has any practical meaning is another discussion, however.
Now, as for my knee-jerk opinion, I would say that since a DNA molecule holds an immense amount of data, the brain must surely have a [sic] mind-boggling capacity.
I dunno about you guys and your 13TB limits, but that sounds too small, I would think it would be some outrageous number... or at least MY brain would be.
i think our brain storage is limited only by time. i mean you could memorize the encyclepedia if you had the time to....
Unless I'm missing something important, it seems that the amount of memory in a human brain can be calculated pretty easily. Start with the number of neurons in the brain (about 1 trillion). Assuming that each neuron can hold one bit of information, we have a storage capacity of about 1 trillion bits, or 125GB... almost enough to run Windows 2010.
the question of whether the brain is analog or digital is a binary question. the assumption that the brain can only store information according to an analog or digital format is not necessarily true.
By your "logic", if you dissolve nice ordered salt crystals in water, you could NEVER get the salt to recrystallize, because the salt is more disordered in solution than as a crystal.
But as sunlight strikes the salt solution, it will cause the water to evaporate, leaving you with crystals of salt again. The total entropy of the sun/puddle/salt system has increased greatly (consider how much sunlight is converted to nonusable heat every second) but the entropy of one element, the salt, is reduced.
>Another very basic scientific law states that living tissue can not spawn from non living matter.
This must be related to the old Indiana "Law" that declared pi = exactly 3.
That bitrate of an average person was supposed to give an idea of an upper limit. The question is, if brain can store 14 TB, why does avg person stores data at 100bps? If someone can store data at 1000bps for some period of time but that case is far from average, it does not disprove that limit on total storage, because the its logical to suggest that a person who's storing at 1000bps has the same storage ability as another guy but has to get rid of that extra data eventually.
- Rainy
PS that original poster was me.
Few things:
1. I may have been wrong about photographic memory. My point however was that even if some people have photographic memory, that does not automatically discards that limit on storage we can derive from an average person's apparent storage ability.
2. The book I've read focused on this question in order to figure out if current computers have enough storage to attain 'complete AI' status or not.
The problem is that the brain is at the same time a cpu and ram and HD. This means that those indirect methods I described are better, IMHO, than counting synapses or neurons.
- Rainy
DeLaurentis did a great job with Dune, he supplied the visuals in my head as I read the rest of the Dune series . . . also, I think, irrelevantly, that Johnny Mnemonic had 12 pages, at least in the standard small-paperback-SF format.
Well, consider this.
If you have only 100,000 neurons, and each one has the capacity to form a connection with each other neuron (99,999 others), then you have 100,000 x 99,999 possible connections. That's 9,999,900,000
connections. Nearly ten billion. If each connection is interpretted as a bit, then that's 1.25 gigabytes of storage. Now this increased factorially with the number of participating neurons. In fact, for a system of only 1,000,000 neurons, the storage capacity (calculated this way) would be 999,999,000,000 bits, or 116.5 gigabytes. The brain isn't made up of millions of neurons, but BILLIONS.
Of course, this is a completely ridiculous way to measure "storage capacity", which seems to be a meaningless concept in the context of the brain.
Seeing that, I had to respond with a sentence I've seen before...the following _is_ gramatically correct:
:-)
"Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo."
The key to parsing it is knowing that "[B|b]uffalo" can mean a) A city in New York state, b) the American bison, and c) "to push around".
There 16.7 Million Colors in the visible Spectrum, The average eye can only depict about 4096 though. (Try it once, take a 24bit pic and convert it to 4096colors, it's almost impossible to tell the difference)
The Human Brain has Neurons that store info in more than just an on/off state, there is an infinite "In Betweens", take a Quantum Computer for example, it stores info on polorized atoms. The Atoms can be On/Off/ or any number of inbetweens. Thus you can store a HUGE amount of info on a single atom, just like neurons.
How about 5 bits? I just pulled it out of my ass, which is just as scientific as assuming that we can use the amount of input to reasonable estimate the amount of storage.
According to that logic, I could take the eyes from the recently deceased, wire them up to a squirrells brain, and magically have the same amoumnt of storage capacity--because the inputs are the same.
Hogwash.
nah its not nonsensical
that that is is that that is not is not
that which is equals that which is not is not
Or, A equals what is not not A
Your earlier statement "that that is is not that that is not"
would actually be
A != !A
;)
I have also heard that connections between neurons can have varying strengths, possibly being closer to an analog computer. This would further increase the potential capacity, because the brain's number system would be larger than just binary.
We die for the same reason Windows crashes. Bring on the nanotechnology, and let the hackers have at it! (and quickly , please)
Oh, by the way, to say that this would result in too many people is bull
Actually, I supplied the fact that average person stores data while reading at about 100bps. It was also estimated that person does not need more than 100bps to remember an image he glanced at. I got to be honest that I seem to have missed your facts about photographic memory people. How much data do they remember? For how long? Where did you get the numbers from? As you apparently have already said that, I'm sorry to request you to repeat it because apparently some of your posts are filtered before they get here. Now, let's suggest for a second that we have a person who can remember a page of typed text after looking at it for 3 seconds. Granted, this person is quite an exception. The question is, why doesn't an average person store data at this rate? Perhaps the best reason would be the limit of his storage. Obviously, if you could show that a person with photographic memory has stored data at a rate far beyond 100bps for all his life, that'd push the limit of storage up.
- Rainy
Oh, by the way.. your sig is one of the most retarded sigs i've seen.
- Rainy
It's interesting that you should have brought up the issue of facial recognition. Imagine that I am being questioned by an alien being with perfect recall, who does not understand how human memories work (like us, in that respect).
"What is something you are highly familiar with?"
--"My girlfriend's face."
"Describe her face."
--(among other things) "She has freckles."
"This description is not precise enough; draw me a picture, including the exact location of every freckle."
--"What? I can't do that. I don't remember the precise location of every one."
"I thought you said you were highly familiar with her face."
--"I am, but..."
"You have _looked_ at her face, have you not?"
--"Of course, but..."
"You have looked closely at her face, and you say you remember her face very well, and yet you cannot recall specific things about it. Why is this?"
--"I don't know. All I know is my memory doesn't work that way. I could recognize her instantaneously among millions of others, but I can't convey to you precisely what she looks like."
Perhaps our brains implement a one-way hash function for memories! More seriously, it's not clear that we _do_ remember "details". We can remember all sorts of specific concrete things - my dormroom phone number sophomore year was ElBob00, Hitler had a dog named Blondie, my uncle lives at 90 King Street - but we can't remember things we see but don't explicitly state, like the location of my girlfriend's freckles. And yet we recognize faces without having to think about it at all...
the brains capacity was in the order of 400 Quadrillion bits. or about 50,000TB. This seems like a lot, but considering all you know and that you really only use like 2% of your brain.... who knows.
okay a real comment..
How about DNA? Before theres even a brain, stem cells can friggin' layout a billion individual features of the human composition. Lets use DNA for storage man.. one cell = 3billion field database.
I'm sorry but this sounds rally lame. Slow access times my @$$!!! You obviously are no brain surgeon. A person may take a few seconds to remember something but you also have to remember that we are scanning ALL of our memories for one particular memory and then the muscles have to move in order to answer it.
Dick drives & regular PC memory store digital representations of data. Just an array of on/off signals.
... it stores an input/output relationship that is constantly being trained. How a network is trained determines how it responds to its input (I see this in lab experiments and in the real world).
The brain is a neural network. Neural networks are programmed to associate complex patterns as input with a fixed output.
You train a neural network, kind of like training a dog. You show a pattern, say the number 7, and observe the output. If the output is the desired one (example: binary output = 7 when shown the number 7 on a scanner), you know the network is trained properly for that input. If it doesn't work, you provide a feedback to correct the "weight" of each neuron (whack the dog in the ass with a rolled-up newspaper).
So a neural network doesn't really store data
Well...I don't know about yall..but I keep misplacing things, so I think I need more space or have a bad sector somewhere
On account of dogs -being- neural networks.
As is anything else with synapses in its head.
Everything can be treated as bits. In fact, I think bits are the SI unit of information. Analog doesn't pose a problem; you just sample at the highest level possible. The universe is quantized, after all.
More to the point, we can store the brain on a suitably big hard drive like this: Each neuron is assigned a number. Each neuron has only one outgoing dendrite. So for each neuron, we store the number of what the dendrite is connected to, and we store certain threshold information and current state, and that should just about do it.
My point is, that with suitable encoding, anything can be stored on a hard drive. Now, comparing that size to the size of traditional digital media formats (wav files, QT movies, CDs, etc) is impossible, because of the different technologies involved.
What the hell are you talking about. There is no way that a biological system like the brain uses any mathematical transform to process data. Sure we beleive that there are areas of the visual cortex that respond maximaly to bars in the visual field of a particular orientation, but to say that the brain uses a Gabor transform that is "optimal" (don't get me started on that) is garbage. The signals in the brain are electic potentials generated by ion flow. There are no "numbers" anywhere. We _can_ suggest that the firing rate of a given set of cells suggest that a rotation and translation invarient decomposition is taking place, but we certainly _cannot_ say that the brain uses a Gabor wavlet decomposition.
It's not really that far of a stretch to express the capacity of the brain in terms of bits or bytes ... information is stored in our brain by patterns of synaptic weights ... one synapse could be thought of as a bit of information. And a byte is just 8 bits.
Two cents from a biological type (molecular genetics, actually :)):
Consider the nature of most of your memories: they tend to be visual and perhaps tactile/olfactory in nature. No single functional brain area is being used to store them; it more or less seems like a summation of activation states (like voltages) over the entire neural net that is a brain conjures up a memory, in the same way that electrical stimulation of a particular brain area can lead to recall of a face, for instance. Assuming that a memory corresponds to a single overall activation state, that the total number of neurons number around 10e9 and the number of connections arounf 10e10 you have 10e9 * 10e10 possible routes (if i'm correct). Make the voltage binary and it's 2* (10e9 * 10e10) = 2* 10e20 possible single memories.The number of bytes is irrelevant as memories are not stored as such. The holography analogy is the best one we have I guess.
I think it should be:
:(
that that is, is that that is not that that is not
or, replacing some of the thats
that which IS, is that which is NOT that which is not
Now someone shoot me
w regards to the comment that our memory was like a holograph.. it is impossible to remove specific part of memory by removing a section of the brain, much like each piece of a broken hologram will retain the original image.
You better watch out for Compaq StorageWorks also, they are working on mainframe storage that puts EMC's slow storages to shame, along with Virtual disk support and snapshot support.
The currently accepted view of synapses is that their state is more or less binary -- ie, they can fire or not fire, according to the signal threshold of the neuron and the signals generated by other firing synapses. If this is true, then the absolute maximum storage capacity of the average human brain is about 30TB. That leaves nothing whatsoever for "logic", though (or whatever you want to call the parts of the brain that do the actual thinking).
Penrose, who is generally considered a nutcase, believes that neurons and synapses have logic and storage components which operate on the quantum level, giving each neuron potentially enormous compute power and data storage. His arguments have been pretty well discredited, though.
Nevertheless, the behaviour of firing synapses is a little more complex than simple firing/not firing. The actual signal generated can take any of a number of waveforms. Whether or not the brain actually takes advantage of the complexity of firing-synapse signal is unknown. It might not make a difference in neural activity, in which case 30TB really is the limit (and the amount actually used for storage is perhaps around half that). If it does make a difference, then depending on the resolution of the neuron's ability to detect differences in waveforms it could be a little more or a LOT more. Nobody really knows.
-
-- Guges --
-
The problem with this kind of testing is that I sincerely doubt that the questions adequately modelled everything remembered about a given object. Further, while that may give a good average as to how much we remember on average over time, it is not a good measure of our burst memorization capabilities. I can (and have) seen a face briefly passing on campus (2-3 seconds) and then recognized the person later on. I got news: even being generous, less than 1 byte is not enough data to recognize a face by, under any compression scheme.
Just to take another tack on this argument: what gives us the impression that this is the total storage amount? How many folks out there have hit the limit on their soft disk?
And do those questions ask about all the other things the people remember from the memorization period, such as a remembered image of the desk the item was on, who was in the room, whether they had to pee, how bright the light in the room was... those were all things memorized at the same time. Sure, we only got 2b/s on that specific item, but the test subjects may have had a lot of other things on their mind.
In all, I don't think this test did anywhere near an adequate job of testing either total memory storage capacity OR total rate of memorization. There are too many variables involves which were not accounted for and which will not come out in the wash, and too many unknowns and counterexamples which have not been adequately explained by it.
a little fish in a big pond .sig here... it is a .figment of your imagination
seasinger@sprintmail.com
there is no
Well duh... when was the last time you defragged your brain?
I think that different people have different capabilities in this dept, however, and that it is more a function of perception than memory (that is, we remember what we perceive, but we perceive differing amounts of detail with familiar and unfamiliar ethnic groups). For example, my brother and I look very similar on several levels (build, stance, broad movements, basic lines of face) and people have occasionally thought we were twins.
At the same time, I have yet to meet a pair of identical twins that I can't tell apart right off (yes, I've met a few :). I do have a tendency to have difficulty distinguishing members of unfamiliar ethnicities, but I can always spot someone I've been introduced to, regardless.
As I said, I think that's more a matter of how much we perceived to remember, than how much we are capable of remembering.
a little fish in a big pond .sig here... it is a .figment of your imagination
seasinger@sprintmail.com there is no
I tend to think of the brain as associative data storage, instead of memorizing everything we memorize something and anthing that looks similar we memorize it by knowing what the diffrences are... sort of like the diffrencial animation file formats, (DFF, MPEG, etc), that simply store the diffrences between data, or using diffrent data to reconstruct a memory....
Here's some interesting reading (not proof) ,No. 1,
"Quantum Coherence in Microtubules, a neural
basis for emergent conciousness?" Stuart Hameroff
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1
Summer 1994.
Seems obvious to me there's something quantum
going on in here. Consciousness is far too basic
a part of the universe to be far from the domain
of quantum theory.
I posted earlier about the brain possibly using diffrential data storage.... I guess what I was saying was that the data is compressed and more then likely a lossy compression.... :)
That is why we can forget things....
Robert Heinlein in his book, "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" outlined this one, and to me it almost makes sense. Each and every universe (whatever that means) is a creation of fiction in another universe. There are Ozes and Ringworlds and Middle Earths (And The AD&D Realms I suppose. That would be fun except for that whole death thing) All stemming from our universe (from here on out to be called "Bob") and some other universe's author thought of Bob, and wrote him into existence.
/it/ come from.
It seems simple enough, until you start wondering where the first one came from, and that question is the BIG question.
No matter what you believe, where did
Polytheistic? Where did those Gods come from? Monotheistic? Where did the one God come from? Atheistic? Where did the universe come from.
Eventually, if you trace back far enough, you have to wonder why we all exist. What reason is there for there to be anything at all?
If you know the answer, please send it to
hunter@ava.obu.edu
I beleive the actual figure is a 1000 highly paid Monkeys, 3 years.
They shreded the Win95 OSR 2.1 Script, by accident and had to start over with a Commadore 64
You NEED a spell checker.
I tried to mod up with another interesting and somehow, the /. code modded it to offtopic.
This should be a 4.
I think what he means is that it would be impossible to gauge the storage capacity of known biological neural nets (or "brains") just by taking the physical dimensions of them (i.e. number of neurons, number of synapses, etc...) like you can a disk or hard drive (tracks, sectors, etc...), because "memory" works completely differently. We don't remember things by storing sequential tracks of data. When we can get an intimate knowledge of how memory works, THEN we can potentially gauge the capacity of the a brain.
This space for sale - Cheyenne? I'm looking in your direction ...
Reminds me of this poem from high school:
The more I study, the more I learn,
The more I learn, the more I forget,
The more I forget, the less I know,
So why study?
Sorry, I don't know the source, so I can't give
credit where it is due. Cool poem though.
The human brain has no memory as such, at least not in the way computers have memory. Humans recall "memories" through rehearsal of the original perception of events. As someone else has said here ... visual perception has more to do with intelligent interpretation of retinal stimuli than the sophistication of the eye. Not to say the eye is not a highly evolved organ, it is extremely adaptable, and presents a serial flow of nervous reactions to light stimuli to the visual cortex. The visual cortex organizes that flow somewhat, but the higher processing is thought to create the perceived "picture" of the world. Importantly, this is not static. Its constantly changing. Hence perception is the abstraction of that neural melee into sequences of changing form. We automatically recall and reorganize those sequences -- sometimes consciously. Our "memories" are recalled sequences, reinterpreted every time.
Andy Pearce ajp@pwd.hp.com
Carl Sagan estimates about 10^13 bytes...
(10 billion neurons x 1k-10k synapses per neuron)
-- Pat
Well, this is all fun and interesting, the story was excellent and the movie could have been better though it was still good. But the problem here is he had a chip in his head. So the point is moot. :)
Actually, you are not fully correct.... lossy compression (like mpeg and jpeg) is a way of partially knowing something but not knowing it in detail...
Their are many other aspects to this, but you are comparing a normal computer with barely if any artificial intelegence to a humans brain capacity...
We do store things in a bit type of data, which represents on/1 or off/0.... at least neurons seemingly work this way....
You have to understand Analog simply means high resolution, everything is discreet/digital.... For example a record is said to be analog, but what the resolution comes to is somewhere above the atomic level.....Audio traveling through air is limited to atoms colliding into each other..... even electricity is theorized to travel in chunks.... there is a whole science based on quantum/quantum chunks, called quantum machanics.....so analog just means really high resolution, or highest resolution....
From what I have read about neurons is that they may be binary, in which they send a certain frequency, and when they fire off they send another frequency... Even if the frequency has many variations other then logic 1 and logic 0, it more then likely still is treated in a discreet manner at some level....
Synapsis (SP?) fire a bit (hehe) faster than 2 bits per second. Its a friggin electrical signal. Damn near close to the speed of light.
And to address the amount a brain can store: A shitload. Just think of all the audio and video your brain processes at night when you dream. All that shit comes from somewhere. If I try hard enough, I can remember in detail many memories (just like I was there). And what resolution do we see in? That accounts for space. Someone said a bunch of exobytes. MAybe that's close, but we all know its gotta be a shitload. We have a kick ass processor. I don't know of a processor on the planet that can process video, audio, the other senses, maintain a fukin huge network of cells and processes, and debate on how much capacity it has all at the same time. Give the human brain some credit. Its the biggest baddest ass computer made and who the fuck cares who or what made it. We get to play with it!!!!
I don't claim to be an expert ...
A sport psychologist lecturing recently tried to put a figure on the number of possible permutations of the synaptic links in the human brain. Alas, the more research is done, the bigger this number gets. 13TB is a bit on the low side.
Imagine a 1 in normal 10pt type with over a kilometre of 0's printed next to it. That is thought to be the latest estimate of brain permutations. Or possibly the number of possible thoughts?
Paul Thomas.
Actually this is a common mistake. Analog really is infinite resolution. Even though the particle being measured may have a discreet size it can still have a position which is offset by a mere fraction of that size from another position... velocity and position haven't been quantized even in QM, to my knowledge...if you must insist, 'highest resolution' is limited to the number of positional permutations of all elementary particles in the entire universe.
As the saying goes: all analog signals are really digital signals, because they are quantized. All digital signals are really analog signals, because there are infinite quantum positions.
Um. I have nothing to say about neurons (shrug)
subject says it all
Damn, Phil. That was poetic.
There was a ST:TNG episode a long time ago where Riker was duplicated in a transporter incident, but they never knew, and his other was left stranded on a planet for 6 years. They eventualy came back and he met up with himself. The copy that was stranded ended up going off to live some hobby or other. This was my big problem with the idea of transporting as seen in ST. I always felt that you would die, and the person at the destination would be merely a copy of you. At least thats how it would work with ST's transporting tech.
The information contained in the human mind can probably not be compared directly with binary measures because if by information is meant the content of perceptions, memories etc, then the information is holistically individuated (includes surrounding knowledge of the world), and it is therefore meaningless to put a value on a single unit.
Please remember that the term "information" as used in connection whith computer storage, is really a metaphor from the realm of the mind, so when used in this original sense, the question is equally difficult the other way: "How much information is contained in a 1.44MB diskette?"
A *different* question however, which should be possible to answer, is "How much memory-capacity should a system have, in order emuluate the cognitive capacities of humans?"
no need to that I'm brainwashed by the same music being played all day, all week, all month, all years.............
just tell me the name of a song (the Swedes are so f***** good at brainwashing us) and I'll begin to hear it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. it wont stop. STOP THE INSANITY!!
I see this said so many times, and it's really starting to bug me.
the brain dosn't store binary digital data, so it dosn't have "storage space" in the same respect as...
Huh? If the brain stores data at all, and it's not infinite in capacity, then it does have "storage space". The fact that it's not stored as on/off binary toggles is irrelevant. Now, knowing how the data is stored would be needed to make a ballpark estimate of how many bits of information can be stored, but it's just silly to say that we can't express the amount of information that can be stored in terms of bits. The average human brain has a storage capacity of X bits. What X is I can't tell you, but there's nothing wrong with this statement. I really don't care how the underlying hardware works, whether it's chemical levels, neural clusters, or if Hamming code or something similar is used in the encoding process (Hamming code stores 4 bits of information using 7 bits in the underlying layer for error correction purposes -- but this is irrelevant; to the user, you get 4 bits of storage and who cares how the underlying hardware gets the job done!). WHATEVER strange type of biological hardware and encoding method is used, you wind up with a finite amount of storage which can be characterized as X bits.
Of course, even if I knew what X was, it might not be very meaningful if I don't know how the brain uses the data...
> I've not done any research, but doesn't it seem as if there are many more defects, allergies, and weaknesses in the population today than there was in the past?
You are correct in that modern medicine WOULD cause us to de-evolve and become less fit, given enough time, but modern medicine hasn't been around long enough to change our genetics. If there are more allergies, etc, it's probably due to some of the chemicals in our environment.
I don't know exactly how fast genetic engineering will change us, but I'm sure it will be orders of magnitude faster than evolution. Hence, evolutionary changes will still go on, but they will be lost in the noise -- they won't matter.
And don't forget that nanotechnology is comming... whether it takes fifty years or two hundred years, it's tomorrow on the timescale of natural evolution. Then our bodies won't be limited to protein chemistry, so who knows what will be possible. We may even decide to replace DNA altogether.
I think they have gotten neural nets up to the power of insect nervous systems.. Saw an article somewhere recently, might even have been pointed to by a slashdot poster. (damn, i should have bought that memory upgrade for my brain :P ) Anyway, the gist of the article was that they had created robots with neural net controllers. These robots acted so insectlike that people with phobias about insects refused to touch them.
Anyone got a pointer to the article?
This is the closest to my understanding comment I
:-)) seriously...
have read so far. I'll give you another example that bytes may not be suitable to describe brain
capacity. How many bytes you need to describe
a function dx(t)/dt = a x(t) - b x(t) x(t-tau) where tau is some delay time? Well, not many, right?
Meanwhile, this so-called differential equation
with delays generates infinitely many different solutions depending on initial conditions and
delay parameter. So, where is the memory, in
the equation or in its solutions? Depending on
how you answer this question you have a few
vrs infinite.
I measure memory capacity in terms of "operations/equations" not numbers of possible states. It turns out that we may have "only"
about 2Gb of memory. However, we are incredibly good at using it - this is the hint! My hobby is to develop such computer memory/processing...
any investors around?
think the Konami code had 2 "B, A"s. But :)
it's easier to key it in than to remember
offhand.
I see what you mean, but position is also realitive to density... assuming a record has a fairly consistent density, then the particles are aligned in a manner that makes them more like digital, atoms can only stay bonded if they are in a good position....
Who knows though, the position may be quantized but to a level that is uncalcuable, perhaps that could explain certain mystries in science...
Of course that would be freaking, because then that means there is something much larger implementing the laws of nature, maybe even the prospect we are nothing more then simulations in a powerful computer.......
Sort of like a bois or diagnostic tool..... testing diffrent neurons, which causes us to think we are doing something, but its only a dream..... :)
Well, some of us just don't bother spell checking or proof reading our posts.... generally we assume that nobody is going to bite our heads off if we spell a few words wrong, misplace a few modifiers, or other grammar/spelling errors.
;)
Why DO people like to point out errors like that? Do you guys get some kind of sick pleasure from telling people they did something wrong?
Typing and riding a bicycle are reflex... more evidence of the neural network producing results from a certain input.
It's also the reptile brain (lower brain-stem). The reptile brain allows the body to live (heart/lungs etc) when the higher brain functions are gone ("brain dead")
I don't think it's possible for the nervous system to learn... The CNS (& periheral NS) are only conduits for the impulses... they don't respond independently (although there are some looped systems), or change the way they perform...
It seems to me that the "capacity" of the human brain is not really a measurable quantity.
Given that no one really has a clue how the brain works, much less the specifics of how memory work, it's not likely that anyone's come up with any figures. The brain is likely to be the most complex system on the face of the earth and, depending on your take on E.T. life, maybe the universe. It's so much more powerful than our computers that it's impossible to fathom, despite the fact that from day one people have been touting computers as our saviors. A computer is a communication device and a tool for repetetive tasks. Is it speedier than a brain at certain things? Yes. Will it ever replace a brain? I highly doubt it.
My proof lies in my own observations. I've experienced times when a certain smell has triggered memories from a past moment. This belies such a subtle and powerful underlying system that to try and quantify it in any way against a silicon chip is both futile and sort of demeaning.
Now, I'm not a religious person who believes in the utter sanctity of the human mind. I don't think it's immoral to suggest that computers may someday think for themselves. I do think it's a dream that's not likely to come about soon and I'm also not sure I like the idea of it. Despite all of this, however, I think that research into A.I. and, likewise, the workings of the brain should continue at full strength. I just don't think the two are likely to merge on some distant day.
yours,
krb
krb@rsnmail.com
>(two *very* highres uncompressed video streams)
Not really, your field of high-res vision is very small, you just move your eyes around subconciously to give the impression of a large high-res field of vision. Just try to read a line of text without moving your eyes. You'll only be able to read a word or two, the rest will be out of focus and of such a poor resolution that you won't be able to make anything out.
"Oh, where to start?"
Just to begin with: spatial resolution within the visual systems of (animals and) humans is properly expressed as an angular measurement, i.e the `number of pixels' equivalent does not compare to the number of pixels you have on your X-windowing system, or whatever - spatial sampling by the eye depends on viewing distance.
In any case, the last I heard there were thought to be the order of 10^6 photoreceptors in each eye.
Without boring you further, I refer you to the following U RL which should lead you to a more comprehensive set of vision research websites.
I would just like to say that there is a tendency to parameterise neural processing which I find personally misleading. Important questions about visual processing concern themselves with functional aspects of the brain. Questions about capacity/resolution/frame rate etc reveal more about our current obsession with VLSI and von Neumann computer architectures than real sensory systems. It's not that clear what big numbers, as in more photoreceptors, high resolution, massive memory etc, actually buy you. Remember that the next time you try to swat a fly.
Bar ry.
now all we need is a computer interface for uploading and a copy of BrainAMP :)
Must be the thought process behind talking out your ass!
I didn't know Jackie Martling (Jackie the Jokeman from the Howard Stern show) was a Slashdot reader :)
Not 2 bits per second, 2 concepts per second?
math lesson: (this may not be even close, but hey)
okay 10^13 neurons lets say. Each neuron is connected to about 1000 or more neurons. so that's 10^16 connections. Each connection (which we will i guess use as a bit of memory) would be described by 2 values: the number of the original neuron and the one it connects to. So, we would need a number that maxes out at 10^32 to describe every connection. about 2^106, so 106 bits lets say per connection. 106 bits * 10^16 connections is about 10^18 bits. Divide by 8, around 10^17. So, about 100,000 terabytes if we were to try and map out the brain's connections. And that's not even taking into account the fact that some synapses are stronger connections than others.
m0wsn33
if our brains could only hold 13 Terabytes, that would suck...windows NT 4.0 supports 4 Exabytes
(1 exabyte = 1024 terabytes)
I would venture to say that the title of your comment would apply more to yours than the comment that you responded to. 13tb is way to much information. Maybe if we store characters in 1 gig segments, but then we would have other problems ( we are not digital processors! and we are almost as inefficient as Windoze, so you can see why I am offended.)
I would be sceptical of any calculation of the
capacity of the brain in terms of bits or bytes.
And the capacity is somewhat less a matter of
interest than the methodology used to process,
retrieve, and synthesize input and associations.
Any purely mechanisitic model of conciousness is
bound to fail in an early stage of development.
I think Richard Lewontin has dealt with the
subject at great length if anyone is really
interested.
Even (to use a hackneyed example) trying to
infer the internal workings of a mechanical watch
from it's external appearance without any previous
knowlege of it's workings is a formidable task.
How much more difficult to do the same with the
brain.
Phil
When people remember things, they do not rememeber anything like a "Bitmap". To teach a computer what you would remember of the chair you are sitting on could take megabytes of memory, you know if it has wheels, if it goes up and down, where it is ripped, and the patterns and feelings of the various parts. A computer would have to store bitmaps, feeling, sound and operational info.
You remember, however, just what it is "Like". You have an idea of what a "Chair" is, and then you remember the exceptions. If it is ripped, you probably don't know everything about the rip, just that it is "Like" this other kind of tear I remeber. Over all, very little, uh, data storage is used, but the programming is being updated constantly.
There is also massave duplication and interaction of data in an immensivly parallel system.
I suppose if you were going to equate your brain to your comptuer, you would have to design one where each bit had its own microprocessor capible of interacting with many other (bits/microprocessors). The processor would have to be capible of reprogramming itself, and it would have to have a little random number processor built in (there is one in every neuron, it has been described as how the "soul" might be, hmm, "Attached" to the brain)
I may be off on some of this, but the point is, you couldn't truly memorize a single megapixel photograph the way your camera does, it would probably take up half your memory. And a computer, no matter how long you give it and how well you program it, will never be as good at interpeting it as you are.
42
It's a lovely story, but not a very good model. Take for example your assertion that "most people can't remember details very well." Then consider that any functional 5 year old retains a vocabulary of thousands of words, the rules for manipulating them in communication, and (in the case of most 5 year olds I've known) knows the TV schedule for any day of the week for multiple channels. I can still remember the phone number and address of the house I grew up in - while event memory may be fuzzy and biased, things like numbers (how many physical constants do you remember the value of for example), words, spellings, C language reserved words are all stored very crisply and accurately, with excellent recall speed. It doesn't seem to me any of these things are necessarily linked to some overarching gestalt. I suppose maybe I remember "printf" because it's "print" with an 'f' on the end, and "sprintf" because it's "printf" with a leading 's' and "snprintf" because ... But none of these do I associate with some event (I don't remember what I was wearing the first time I saw "printf" for example), and none of these recollections is in any way fuzzy or approximate.
Another thing no one here seems to be considering is that there are quite possibly multiple memory systems operating in the brain (beyond just the long term/short term pair). Your PC for example has DRAM (core), cache, CMOS setup RAM, video ram,
local ram on adapters, FIFOs, hard drive, floppy drive, CD/DVD, tape - all specialized types of memory to meet particular needs, and each with a multitude of storage formats, and each produced via an evolutionary process just like the development of the human brain.
We have externally stimulated sensory memories, internally generated emotional memories, memories of gross detail (landscapes, clothing, people), detailed, crisp memories of all kinds of specific data, and probably lot of other categories too. We perhaps don't remember the details of specific events well all of the time, but compare that to the ability to recognize facial characteristics - the resolution in that subsystem is phenomenally good.
Contrast all of this to the claim that most people can't remember details well - obviously that's over-generalized to the point of absurdity on the basis of quality or quantity of details the average person can remember. What kind of details specifically?
I was gonna put a sig on here, but I forgot what it was.
When I was taking my grade 11 biology course, we studied genetics. Something that came up was the fact that your genes could, and in fact did, change. A real question that came up, which my teacher refused to answer (said to go to the religion teachers) was one involving different chromosomes. Say I, a male, was born with two 'X' chromosomes. I would be a different physical person - obviously, a female - but would I be the same person? After all, if the soul or consciousness or what-have-you is created or metred out or whatever when you're concieved, would the prescence of a couple of extra genes make that large of a difference?
A very, very good book to read on what you wrote about is "The Terminal Experiment" by Robert J. Sawyer. It involves a scientist who has created the technology sufficient to make an exact copy of the human brain (and consciousness), and can also modify it to suit his requirements. I reccomend checking it out if you're at all interested in the theology of biology and consciousness - it is a near-future science-fiction book, if you're interested.
E-mail me if you wish to talk further.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Do you have proof for this claim (beside saying "Read 'The Emperor's New Mind'")?
And in any case, saying "quantum" doesn't make information theory magically disappear.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
I doubt your grandfather's brain is full. More likely is that he sees fewer and fewer "memorable things" because he's seen so much and it all tends to blur together. If you did something way out of the ordinary like throwing a pie in his face or something I bet he'd remember it.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Remember the part about people with photographic memory? They can look at your book page and store the entire thing in 3 seconds. Let's say 1K for the entire page (of text) div 3 is 300 bit/s. Already 3 times faster than your estimate.
I don't know if photographic memory has ever been tested for storage speed, but I doubt that 1 page of text in 3 seconds is even close to the maximum.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Posted by polar_bear:
You can't really compare the brain's capacity in terms of storage capacity to a harddrive - The amount of storage that we have in the brain is amazing, but the access is somewhat faulty. (I liked the comment someone had about needing a defragger for the brain!)
Think of it this way - the brain processes sound, sight, smell, touch and taste in real time - sometimes it saves the experience to easily accessed memory in one or all of the senses and sometimes it doesn't. If you digitized all the sight and sound information the brain processes in one day alone it would be more than enough to fill any commercially available harddrive. Then, what about free-flowing thought? How would you digitize that?
The brain is also a real-time processor as well as storage facility - so imagine the MHz needed to process the things that the brain does. And the bandwidth - to process all five senses at once we'd have to imagine a processor that handles way more than 64 - 128 bits per cycle.
What I'd really like is for someone to come up with a backup device for the brain...
Posted by Mary CW:
In Kurzweil's (sp?) recent book, Age of Spiritual Machines, the author tries to set up layman's comparisons between organic brains and computer complexity. He focuses on connectivity/dendrites not storage capacity per se, using examples such as: a computer as complex as a bug's brain, a computer as complex as a rat's brain.
Basic theme of the book is that as tech complexity increases, the machines can act more and more like organic systems, down to the point that we will have issues around the machines being conscious.
Anyone else who's read the book care to comment?
Posted by Assmodeus:
we process 13 terabytes a second...not store it... i dont know how much we can store though... it has to be more than 13tb though.
assmodeus
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Surely that's a typo. I know *I* have more bandwidth than that. Heck, I've got more than that for audio alone.
Think about it: Human speech doesn't sound natural on playback unless it's around 44kHz. That's 44 THOUSAND cycles per second. Of course, we're just talking processing so far, but people with "photographic" memory can store this information perfectly which means fast storage capacity.
As for the 20 questions proof: This assumes that the item is randomly chosen. It also assumes that the person choosing picks a specific object that they have stored rather than a general class. ("I'm thinking of the third flowerpot from the left in the workshed behind my mother's house").
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
This is, in fact, extremely accurate. However, our friends are only measuring conscious memory.
.com/SiliconValley/Network/5389/chaos.html
Since the scope of my message would overflow my system's 32MB of RAM (At least using Netscape; This reply would take three pages!), I have placed the response on my homepage at http://www.geocities
--
The Penguin Producer
--Ever read "One flew over the cuckoo's nest"? Randall McMurphy had a lobotomy performed on him, and it fscked him up. People who have had brain tumors or strokes cannot recall some things (some of them major, like relatives / spouses!)
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I don't know, I'll have to watch Johnny Mnemonic again... The story was good, if you understand about the Military Psychic Smack Dolphin...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I have read it, I know it wasn't Gibson after they got done with it, and I'm glad that "The Matrix" didn't try to steal the plot from Neuromancer (although I wouldn't mind a hot chick with some embedded razor blades... :).
;)
However, I think the short story didn't make reference to the actual storage capacity of the (admittedly digital) device embedded in Johnny's brain. But I don't mind the movie, for two reasons:
1) Johnny Mnemonic wasn't a really great Gibson short story, in my opinion. I liked fragments of a hologram rose, or whatever it was called, a lot better, but you could never make a movie out of that.
2) Keanu makes a good Johnny. He's good in action movies, and he'll never miss that chunk of brain anyhow.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's a good article, but I think memory is more involved than that is. First, for 'learning to ride a bicycle', that isn't even where the rest of memory is stored, procedural memory is in the cerebellum, I think, and it stores a lot of precise stuff, like my touch-typing. It's also the reason that we find it hard to remember a song in the middle, because we have to "sing" it from the beginning--it's a procedure.
Second, if I pick up a book I've read a long time ago, it will be familiar. (or if I just see a passage) That recognition is memory, and I've read a lot of books. If I pick up one I haven't finished, I can seek through it and find my place. I don't think 122MB of data could account for even that much information, much less the music I remember (although that might be in my cerebellum, apparently they count it as memeory).
Other than that, their methodology seems pretty sound, I'd just like to know how they got their estimates into bits.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Here's some cool stuff that explains that basically there is a "cap" on the end of our chromosomes that is reduced every time a cell divides. When the "cap" reaches a certain size the cell stops dividing (senescence). This is supposedly because you can only make so many copies before the quality is affected. Anyway, it's pretty interesting stuff. Search on Telomeres and Senescence and you'll find all kinds of info.
Here's a Yahoo search on them
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
I've had plenty of LSD in my time and I can definitely say that my brain is an analog tomato.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
This reminds me of that Sherlock Holmes story, where Watson is telling Sherlock (Sherlock? what a dorky name, anyone here remember his brother's name? Mycroft. What the fsck was WRONG with their parents?! - i digress).
Anyway, Watson was telling Sherlock about how the Earth had been proven to orbit around the sun, and Sherlock scolded him for telling him "useless information", and taking up space in the attic of his brain that would otherwise be used for storing information about topics relative to crime-solving.
Sherlock Holmes was definately a geek of the first order. I didn't read Sir Doyle's books for the mysteries, but for the fascination for this truly wierd character.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I guess the storage capacity would depend on what sort of compression our brain uses... Maybe it compresses audio to an MP3 format. Then we wouldn't even need to get a Rio. "Hear once, play anywhere".
Let's assume that 13 terabytes (well within the reach of human technology) is about the capacity the area dedicated to memory possesses internally. It probably has half that again in intrinsic storage, and I'm going to guesstimate the rest of the brain has around 10 terabytes local storage.
This'd give a total of nearly 30 terabytes.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Read "Funes the Memorious" a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. In it he descirbes a person, Funes, who not only rembers everything he has seen, his perception is so acute that he sees each moment as separate and disjoint from all others. In short he had infinite perception and retention but no association.
It is contained in Ficciones. I highly recommend the entire book and all of his work. If you have ever pondered infinity or parallel existences, you need to read Borges.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Unfortunately that article doesn't deal with the digital memory hogs of sound, smell and vision. Most people have the ability to identify (even if they cannot remember the names) thousands of people, thousands of smells, thousands of voices, and play "name that tune" for thousands of tunes. All the while, they have a working vocabulary of, say, 100,000 words, memories, thoughts and feelings. I realize that our memory is "lossy", but it isn't binary, it isn't digital. If we wanted to store all one person knew on one computer, a gigabyte would not be enough.
That must be the reason why where I work we're going to the pain of producing 16bpp images...
If you can't tell the difference between a 24 bit image and a 4096 (was that Amiga HAM?) color image, you really ought to have your eyes checked.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Parse it again. It makes sense with the two extra "that", not without.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Remember that astronaut in 2001 that HAL kills with the pod? Frank Poole. Well they find him a thousand years later. He is just about to pass beyond Pluto and the solar system when they grab him. With 31st century technology... they revive him.
Great Book
3001 the Final Odyssey
Arthur C Clarke as always sticks a lot of new science into it. He comes up with a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society in june 1994 called: Machine Intelligence, The Cost of Interstellar Travel and Fermi's Paradox. They estimate that the total mental state of a one-hundred year old human with a perfect memory could be represented by ten to the fifteenth bits (one petabit).
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
I Haven't lost my mind, I have a backup on tape somewhere...
No sig. Go away.
I Haven't lost my mind, I have a backup on tape somewhere...
No sig. Go away.
I remember reading that the human brain has a storage capacity of approximately 122 MB. It's explained here.
What does this have to do with evolution? Everything. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does NOT say that entropy ALWAYS and MUST increase EVERYWHERE in a closed system, no matter how hard creationists want to make it say that. For entropy to decrease in part of a system is NOT in ANY WAY a violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Overall, statistically, over time, entropy will increase. That's all the 2nd Law gives you, not a blanket forbidding of any decrease in entropy.
Also, note, Boyle's laws are not violated by high and low pressure areas in the atmosphere. Why? Because Boyle's laws describe what happens IF NOTHING ELSE acts upon the gas. Likewise, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states what happens to collections of molecules NOT SUBJECT TO ANY OTHER FORCES. If some other process is occuring that increases complexity and decreases entropy, this is NO WAY VIOLATES the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Just as the fact that a baloon rises in no way violates the law of gravity. This is a good analogy: saying that evolution violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is exactly like saying hot air baloons violate the law of gravity. But they don't. Because other things are going on than just gravity, hot air balloons act in a manner that, if you didn't know there were other things happening, might be construed as violating gravity. But in fact they don't, they act in perfect accord with the laws of nature, gravity includes. The point is, they don't act EXCLUSIVELY in accord with the law of gravity, other thing happen. Likewise, evolution in no way violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, it acts in perfect accord with it, as well as with other forces that seek to decrease entropy at the same time the 2nd Law seeks to increase it (exactly like how the air pressure seeks to buoy a balloon while gravity seeks to pull it down -- both forces act, you see the net result). In fact, evolution works because of, not in spite of, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. You *need* entropy in the system or mutation would not occur.
Anyways, enough said. The main point is simply this: anyone who says evolution violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics obviously doesn't understand the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to begin with. Evolution doesn't violate, invalidate, or contradict it any more than airplanes violate, invalidate, or contradict the law of gravity. Get a grip -- the world is too complex for any one simple generalization like that to forbid anything...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Umm, the percentage of people born with them shouldn't increase. With natural selection active, it should decrease. Without it, it should just remain about where they are.
On the other hand, since these people aren't dying off in childhood but remaining part of the population, even if the percentage of people born with these problems doesn't increase, the percentage of the living population that has them should increase.
Also, since the population as a whole is increasing, although on a percentage basis people born with these problems should not be increasing, the number of people with them should be.
This doesn't mean evolution will come to a dead halt. In fact, as we become more adept at and more comfortable with genetic manipulation, human evolution is likely to resume. Artificial selection of specific genes will replace natural selection of entire organisms.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I think you're confusing a couple of half-remember facts and combining them into one incorrect one. The average adult typically only uses about a thousand words. Even those of us who are extremely intelligent with vocabularies from specialized fields -- we just have a few "exotic" words in our standard lexicon of things we talk about.
This does not alter the fact that there are dozens of words we know for every one we actually use. We only use a small fraction of the words we know -- most of the words we know will never pass our lips, it'll simply never come up in conversation. Nor will we type or pen them, we'll never have cause to.
Thus, our "working vocabulary" is a rather tiny fraction of the words we know. 60,000 is not unusual for an educated adult. Add to that our knowledge of how to make words from other words, and there may be two or three hundred thousand words you would have no trouble comprehending if you came across while reading.
So, your "available vocabulary" is a few orders of magnitude greater than your typical "working vocabulary".
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Yeah, but the brain is a neural network. A mass of redundant parallel processing cells. We can survive brain surgery with minimal-zero damage. We can survive having ONE little connection severed. Try doing that to a computer. One little wire gets snicked, and the thing is a paperweight. Till we come up with a Neural Net simiulator, we can't even come close to the brain
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Right... What I maent to say (and didn't make clear) was that the impulse is not electrical at any point, its a chemical single, which is why the time for the impulse to reach the brain is noticeably longer than the time for the "knee jerk" reaction to pull your hand away.
If it was electrical, than even at a miniscule percentage of the speed of light the nerve impulses would arrive far faster than they do.
An interesting side point is that there are a lot of factors that affect the speed of nerve transmission. Researchers have found that high-contrast visual ranges tend to lead to much faster nerve impulse rates and response times, and low contrast visual scenes tend to slow down the impulses. (Which from a practical standpoint means people are not as capable of judging visually the speeds they're travelling at in low-contrast situations like driving in fog...)
I admitted in my content that I was generally talking around my ass... but what I was saying was from a generalized understanding I put together over several years of participating in, and developing research on learning and memory, including a period of time academically studying the evolution of intelligence.
Whereas your response is based on assumptions you make based on false interpretations of your experiences. You claim there is not an experience that causes you to remember what printf is. That's blatently incorrect. Your are able to associate the meaning of printf in that context because of prior experience you've had either with that concept or with concepts related to that. That's why its easy to pick up a third and fourth language when a brain has developed the proper pathways that allow it to associate with multiple languages. That's why its easy to pick up new programming languages. But that's also why you may know fifteen programming languages but be unable to learn a foreign language at all -- because you learn based on prior associations you've made and you don't have those between unrelated areas of knowledge.
In that vein however, some researchers believe that an unusual ability to create those linkages between non-related contexts are one of the causes of extremely high intelligence, partly caused by genetics, but usually among those researchers its attributed to wide-ranging stimulation during the first nine to twenty-four months of live (the first nine being particularly important because unlike every other mammal species, the human brain continues to grow for 9 months after birth).
There can't be differing ways of storing information in the brain because there is only a single construct within the brain -- the only differentiation between areas coming from the points at which there are larger interconnects within the brain, points where there are larger concentrations of neurons that are not necessarily in physical contact with each other (which is why some scientists think the folds in the brain are related to overall species intelligence), and the insertion points of external sensory nerves.
You however, most likely, do not remember nearly the detail you think you do. Very few people naturally develop the ability to do that, although it can be learned. Take for example someone asks what your significant other looks like. The odds are you will pick out and describe certain elemental details, color of the eyes, color of the hair, shape of the nose, but if someone asked if there was a mark below their ear last time you saw them you might not be able to answer that -- because you are reconstructing an image of that person in your head from individual elements you remember -- elements that may or may not be correct.
The more you pay attention to and use those snippets if information, the more other nerve pathways will utilize those elements and other memories will get locked to them. That's why you can remember the phone numbers of the houses you grew up in -- because of all the other memories associated with those specific memories. That's why you can completely forget a long-past romantic rendezvous, yet a fragrance or some sound can suddently bring that back -- because you triggered the "matrix" of nerve firings that held that experience in the context of another memory -- ane externally stimulated memories are FAR more capable of doing that than internally stimulated memories, because of the areas of the brain they tend to reside in and the relatively stronger impulses you tend to get from external sources.
That's why relaxation and meditation help focus -- because they tend to quiet and control those externally triggered cognitive events and allow more attention to fall on internally triggered ones. (And is also why under hypnosis you are both capable of digging up memories more easily AND creating memories easily).
You'll find in lingustics as well that most people do not have a concurrently available vocabulary of thousands of words, in fact 5000 words is a lot even for an adult, you don't need nearly that to get along in society. But the availability of a word at a given instant is largely related to its association with other concepts and word streams. People with larger vocabularies are often more capable of utilizing a larger wordset because they typically are making an effort to use less common words (even if they won't fess up to it).
If you were going to pick out a point of my original posting that was over-generalized to a point of absurdity, there are points that are far more obsurd than the one you picked. The one you picked is in fact one of the most easily documented points I made, and one of the most widely understood scientifically. The methods that cause it to be true are not as well understood, but its validity is not widely doubted.
This is sort of a silly question for Slashdot, since most people are going to be talking out their asses.
That said, (and talking more around my ass, than out it), there isn't any sort of storage figure. Researchers do not have much understanding about how we remember things, but it IS fairly certain that there is no relationship to the way computers store information (ie, the concept of terabytes, etc).
Generally the brain remembers certain aspects of an experience -- wether an external experience, or an internal one. Its believed that the act of experiencing something, or recalling it later starts changing the relative levels at which nerves will fire and accept the chemical impulses from neighboring neurons. (Before anyone starts talking about electrical impuses, those are only conducted within the nerve cell not between nerve cells and its not an electrical impulse as much as a chemical shift within the nerve that changes the electrical potential of the local region while the signal travels down the length of the nerve -- thats why you can have your hand off a hot stove before you actually feel its hot)
So a memory is generally a tangles mess of restimulations of fragments of what happened. Thats why with few exceptions, most people can't really remember details very well, and everyone is prone to manipulating memories. (ie, you read an interesting tale when you're young, later in life you're sure it happened to you or that someone TOLD you it happened to them, and not that you read it) Things like that happen a disturbingly large amount of the time, with everyone. Luckily such errors don't often affect anything serious.. I mean who cares where you heard a story?
That's why things like memory and attention span and personality can be manipulated chemically -- because you can control the way those experiences link up with each other and how the brain reacts to those experiences.
One of the most interesting things I think people find when they really start studying how the brain learns, and stores its experiences is how little actually comes from the senses or memory. (For example, how the brain can only distinguish general colors and shapes beyond a half-dozen degrees off center in your field of view, but you're constantly fooled into thinking you can see more than you really can)
The question with the brain then is how discret these fragments of memories and experiences are, how many times they can crossconnect with others to produce memories without those crossconnects getting so blurred that you get confused about the truth of what you're remembering, and the number of different fragments that make up a given memory.
Most likely no one will have any idea about the answers to those questions until there is a better understanding how a "neural network" arrangement can store and rerecognize patterns of nerve impulses when the "matrix" used is numbering in the millions of cells at a time...
"Anyway, Watson was telling Sherlock about how the Earth had been proven to orbit around the sun, and Sherlock scolded him for telling him "useless information", and taking up space in the attic of his brain that would otherwise be used for storing information about topics relative to crime-solving."
As much as I love Sherlock Holmes, that passage has always disturbed me for two reasons:
1) It seems to me that the brain is more like a muscle than a storage device: the more you use it, the higher its capacity becomes. Although there may be an upper capacity limit, I doubt more than 10 people alive at any given time ever get anywhere near it. Whereas I have observed many, many people who stopped using their brain capacity and, essentially, lost it.
2) It also seems to me that super-capable people (and I am purposely avoiding the words 'smart' and 'intelligent') are often those who have the ability to draw together seemingly unrelated fragments of information into a new and critical insight. If they have never been exposed to the disparate information, they would not be able to make the leap (again I am avoiding the word 'intuitive' although it probably applies).
My 0.02.
sPh
There are also reports by people who claim to remember being born (under hypnosis or something) of extreme pain and suffering.
So forgetting about your early experiences would seem to be an important sanity preserving feature.
But also, wouldn't remembering everything pretty soon take away most of the hope you have and sort of turn your life into a self fulfilling prophecy..
--
Pirkka
Actually, when you think about it, that's a common occurance... Most people may not be encyclopedic (although my friends tease that i'm that way), but how many times have you been asked a question, had a major blank in the brian, and if you just waited a few seconds, and didn't tense up, *poof* the answer appeared. I don't know that much about how it works, but a bit more speculation can't hurt. What if the brain not only does an associative path, but does a few layers of abstraction beyond that? So that the recall i was talking about above is generated by a mind basically doing a reference check...Eg: "what's Sarah's pH#?" sets off images of phones and Sarah, then does a cross search for all memories that include both those, (*grin* regardless of capitalization) then tries to arrange by date, and importance....So while you are waiting for the phone number to occur to you, you remember that you have a Birthday gift you've never sent her, and that you have to pay the phone bill....(first relations) and those thoughts lead to a few other associations, while the original search is still being processed, of other bills, other people(all of which are then added to the calculation of where that memory is), and suddenly halfway through a thought on whether you did your laundry, you remember that there is a 64 in her number, and *poof* the rest of the memory is downloaded....because you've been, i don't know if this is the right phrase, but homing in on the co-ordinates of the memory....It's just a thought!
80 Gigabytes, which can be doubled to 160 GB temporarily.
-"Johnny Mnemonic", the movie. The short story (from Burning Chrome) doesn't actually say how much info is stored.
--I hate people when they're not polite -"Psycho Killer", Talking Heads
Bet you really love my .signature, then. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
This doesn't follow. As soon as you introduce measurement accuracy on an analog signal, you can talk about bits of information.
...and the brain seems to be mixed analog/digital. Long distance pathways (e.g. to your feet) look roughly like asynchronous digital (for the obvious reason than it's hard to reliably move an analog signal that far).
In any case, the storage question is not currently answerable. We do a lot of compression, and we can adaptively learn to compress data that we see a lot of.
Ted Kaehler has some interesting comments on the excelent book "The Cerebral Code" (which is available online). Ted calculated the capacity of the typical human cortex at 500 terabytes. While I don't agree with the way he did it or with his result, it is worth lookin into this.
Well I personally believe that the brain may be some sort of ultimate storage device with almost limitless range of space. You take various case studies and you can see that pretty much every little fact a person encounters in his life is stored, it's just a matter of retrieving it. Using various trivial techniques people have reported instances dating to the womb, there early child-hood years, and things that happened yesterday. Down to the most precise details. Being that our mind is basically a vast collection of electromagnetic junctions each eminating, and working through a mass know as our brain, which has the type of shape and size, and being that is has a lot of liquid also, as too hold vast information, probably beyond our comprehention. It seems only logical to me that everything we see, hear, touch, etc. are stored via electromagnetic impulses to various places in our brain forming to date the most powerful storage medium ever seen, and maybe ever will be. After all it sure seems capable of storing the information of a persons entire life though that person may have a hard time recollecting those facts, they are there.
Quandary in the Making
The brain might not be the best model to use as a storage system. If you think about it, the brain must be using some sort of lossy storage system.
I mean, I can't remember everything I've experienced in 32-bit color with sound, although some things I can remember clearly.
In addition, a lot of times you can't remember something you want to, when you want to (much later, it seems, the answer comes floating back).
I feel that the brain is clearly optimized for something other than bit-perfect storage and quick recall of arbitrary data, and so I don't think it would work real well as a storage medium.
However, with some sort of lossy storage, it can probably store a truckload of data, much as jpeg can compress images down a lot.
-Richard.
-Richard
> 3) Does it have a RAID driver yet?
Shouldn't that be: RAIB ? Redundant Array of
Inexpensive Brains?
-- REW
There's a book all about the 'hologramic' nature of the human brain at: http://www.inst inct.org/texts/shufflebrain/shufflebrain-book00.ht ml.
Everything I know in life I learnt from
So you think Mother Nature makes sure that the flow of heat among atoms and molecules only occurs when humans are doing "thermodynamics" experiments? What you probably mean to say is that Thermodynamics doesn't depend upon any specific laws of chemistry or physics but stands alone as a body of knowledge and experience. So, if your pet theory in chemistry disagrees with the one of the laws of thermodynamics then so much for your pet theory. Thermodynamics rules on the validity of any other area of science.
1st Law: dE = q + w Translation: you can't get out of a process more than what you put in. English translation: you can't win.
2nd Law: dS = dQ/T Translation: At a given temperature the change in disorder of a system is proportional to the change in heat content. English translation: You can't breakeven
3rd Law: To avoid discussions about adiabatics, simply say that 0K is impossible to reach. English translation: you can't get out of the game.
These laws apply to any circumstance which involves matter interacting in any way at any temperature. Period. To say otherwise is to not understand how Carnot dervived the concept and how it has been enlarged upon since.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
The average human brain has about 10^10 neurons, each of which is connected to an average of 10^4 other neurons. This means that at a minimum the brain has 10^14 bits. Dividing this last number by (8 * 1024^2) translates it into 32.95 MBytes.
This is, of course, a ridiculously low lower bound.
Synaptic connections are far more likley to come in many shades of gray. Let's say that each synapse has about one-thousand possible strength values. Then you can multiply this lower bound by a factor of 10.
Next, if you include the specifics of the wiring, you can factor in the combinatorial nature of how the wiring could take place. This buys you another factor of 30 (10^10/log(2) for binary encoding of destination neurons).
But with spiking neurons, who knows? So all bets are off.
The Computational Beauty of Nature
The three necessary comments have yet to be made, so I just thought I'd have to say them.
1) Can it run Linux?
2) How many MP3s can we get on it?
And 3) Does it have a RAID driver yet?
Forgive the flame-fest, but I can't resist this troll:
Weak, weak, weak.
Along your line of logic:
Ice is a higher state of order than water.
Water has more entropy than ice.
You can not decrease entropy, as it is always increasing
Therefore, water can not become ice because entropy is always increasing.
This of course stupid.
The second law of thermodynamics argument is so wrongly used it makes me sick to my stomach each time I hear a creationist use it. It only proves how they don't try to understand the physics.
Water of course, CAN turn into ice, the extra heat energy is lost -- radiated -- the energy is elsewhere. When you look at the TOTAL system, i.e. all of the energy, every erg and calorie, that the entropy is increased.
The earth is not in a closed system. It' getting energy from the sun every day. The law of entropy doesn't apply here.
Another very basic scientific law states that living tissue can not spawn from non living matter.
Sounds positively victorian-era to me.
There's a REASON biologists across the globe don't debate creationism versus evolutionism anymore. The debate is settled. Everyone has gone home. The scientists may debatbe about the rate and the methods of evolution, but not the concepts brought forth by Darwin.
All right creationist. Answer me this: (p.s. you lose if you say some stupid thing like "Cause God made it that way") Without evolution, how can you explain:
Why do snakes have hip bones?
Why do whales have hip bones?
Why do chimpanzees have 99% shared genetic material with humans?
Why does a mosquito have significantly less in common with humans?
Why do dolphins and whales have more genetic material in common with humans than do fish?
Explain how fossils of primitive creatures seem to always be in stratum layers below more advanced creatures.
Explain all those dinosaurs, and why they're gone now.
Explain biotechnology, and tell me how it could have come this far without a deep understanding about biology -- when you say they are all wrong because the Bible says they are.
Explain myxomatosis outbreaks in Australia, and why there are still rabbits, despite the deadliness of the disease.
Explain Archeopterix
Explain Homo Habilius
Explain Homo Erectus
Explain Homo Neanderthalus
Explain why penicillin isn't so great for everything anymore.
Explain how some scientists predicted the demise of penicillin efficacy before the symptoms of bacterial resistance were observed.
Overall, I'm unmoved by your arguments. The theory of evolution has completely revolutionized the entire field. You saying that it's not true is analagous of you telling a geographer that the world is still flat, or a physicist that relativity is a crock.
Biotechnology will move on without you. You can continue to sit with your fingers in your ears shouting 'NOT TRUE! NOT TRUE!' while you choose your path ignorance and unenlightenment
-- If you met me, you probably wouldn't remember me. I'm pretty hard to remember.
go read the stuff on this website
The only reason humans "fill up" their brains (if this is even possible) is because we absorb way too much useless information. For example, in the course of reading through the comments here, I've obsorbed the information that somebody thinks the human brain holds hundreds of exobits, 13TB, or 122mb. This has no relevance to anything, I just happen to have remembered it. Most humans have selectively photographic memories, but we can never remember an entire page of text because we remember only the concept of the picture or object. Very few people can memorize an entire page of text on one reading (I am so jealous of those people!)
You flippantly mention "remembering the number of
cracks in the wall". I learned that each of our
eyes is very very inaccurate and that we have a
2 degree section of focus, in which we see with
the accuracy that we're accustomed to. I learned
that we constantly skip about with our eyes and
that our view of the world around us is mostly an
internal model, with small parts of it updated
frequently with high precision. If what I learned
is true, you'd not remember the cracks in the wall., because they wouldn't have your attention.
It is my understanding that they were talking
about sustained recording. You are talking about
a peak rate. I doubt you remember everything if I play *random* notes from your
88 note keyboard to you for an hour (a layman's
definition of "bit" in the info-theoretic sense
would be the info transmitted over a channel that
can transmit symbols from an alphabet of two
symbols where either symbol is equally likely, if
you build a markov chain and can make predictions
about the next note, as you do in music, it's not a bit).
Since we can't really decide exactly HOW the human memory works, it would be a little tough to estimate how many bits could be stored in it. I mean, first off, we don't know HOW memory is stored in the human brain. Second, we don't know WHERE memory is stored in the human brain... we know where certain things might be stored (from people with brain damaged, etc), but other information such as implicit memory, one can't say. Some think memory is stored throughout the brain in the connections between neurons themselves. Others think there are central locations. But no one knows for sure. So, in closing, there's no good answer. :)
I think, on how well one organizes their thinking into a logical, hierarchical associative structure (whew) - there are various mnemonic devices that can help one remember - such as visualizing a street (memory lane) or the inside of a castle (Interior Castle). I've met only 2, maybe three people I could say had 'encyclopedic' memories and was amazed, whenever I asked a question, they'd sort of close their eyes, maybe tilt the head back, and if you wait a few seconds they'd come back with the answer everytime (one was a priest, one an Electrical Engineering prof. and the other a Unix guy I worked with). It was amazing to watch but you'd have to give them a little time to think.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
What's interesting about the brain are the relationships between the saved data. Think about it... how a smell can remind you of a specific moment from childhood, or how hearing a song not only recalls that song, but can remind you of an old girlfriend, and the pain of breaking up.
So, yeah, we can probably make hardware that can store more than a brain, but it's really pretty hard to create all those fuzzy links that relate one memory to another. In fact, it's quite likely the very fuzzy nature of those relationships in the brain is what causes imagination an creativity. Our brains recall things, but not as exact reproductions, instead as amalgamations of many internally related memories.
is life? What is creation?
*IT* all began... with a distinction.
said "I am the body." Krishna said, "You are that."
The personality fills the body. Life fills the cosmos. These are not different.
The newest feedmag essays all have to do with the brain - one on memory resides at http://www.feedmag.com/brain/shenk.html
*****chris lindsay ICQ # 6628472 Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Alb
'watch'? ick. Read it. The movie was a poor representation of Gibson's work.
I had this intuition for a little while now that "intelligence" was a by-product of lossy compression. Computers reproduce data, but as humans, we reconstruct data. When we reconstuct data we have to fill in the gaps that are left by the compression. We as humans have evolved to take advantage of that, so we can take bits of unrelated data, and fill in the gaps between them to form a memory.
Or... We don't store the bits of information themselves, but rather the relationships between those bits. Maybe we those relationships are the key to "intelligence".
Just a thought..
No one thing exists by itself. Everything relies on something else to give it "meaning"
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
Check out Beam Robotics sometime.. The concept is to emulate biology as much as possible. Some suprisingly simple circuits generate extremely complex behaviors.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
You can't define intelligence in such glib terms. It is a wholly multidimensional phenomenon, in the sense that there are a lot of different components of intellectual competence contributing to an individual's overall intelligence.
If you are actually talking about consciousness rather than intelligence, well of course there is no agreement about how consciousness arises. But the phenomenon you mention can at best only be a small part of it, because simple neural network programs are quite capable of reconstructing memories from partial clues in the same way as you describe, and no-one is suggesting that (current) neural networks are conscious.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The biggest problem with using the brain as a reliable memory system is, well, it's not very reliable. Here's a story from Dr. Dean about how easy it is to implant a false memory.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Well,
As you all may remember from high school psychology, the brain has a couple of input buffers (sensory register and short term memory)until the data is encoded for long term memory. There are 2 ways of doing this. Accomidation and assimilation. The first time you are made aware of something, you develop a cognitive model of it (ie...class car has properties 4 wheels, steering wheel...etc). That is accommidation. If you were to see another car, you remember the differences from the original model. This is assimilation. So instead of literally remembering eveything, like a hard drive, as the sophistication of your cognitive models increases, so does your storage capacity. In other words...the more you know, the greater your ability to store data. Nature is full of neat little feedback loops like this. It's called chaos, and I think it has worked rahter well in this instance. With a finite amount of neurons, we've created potentially infinite storage. If we modeled filesystems and file formats like this, it would be a whole lot more efficient to store data, and could possibly add protection against data loss.
anyway, have fun with the thread
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Why is everyone saying, "The brain is lossy" and that you can't recall things as a bitmap or other such claims?
I can think back to the mountains I live near, and I can remeber major details, clearings, and such. I can form a picture in my mind, in full color, in real time. Of course it's not 100% accurate in every way but neither are compressed image formats!!!
Our clairty of memory is directly related to how much we care about the particular memory. If it was just something that happened, and we don't care, then we will either not remeber it or remember it fuzzily at best. Similar things occur if we don't WANT to remember it.
There are many techniques to bring the details of a scene out, and I don't mean hypnosis. I myself use a variety of mental tricks to help my memory.
One more thing, anyone who says the brain's recall rate is 2bps is smoking crack. I can call C into my head and examine it's various statements and data types easily. I think many people here could.
I'm of the opinion that memory is like scaffolding, the more you put onto it, the more room there is for new stuff, the older stuff just gets obscured unless you are careful not to.
- Paradox
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
My brain stores exactly 78 Terabytes of information.
, start), and the ever popular Blood code for Genesis Mortal Kombat (ABACABB). And speaking of Mortal Kombat, I know every single fatality in MK 1,2 and 3 (never bothered to play 4). I know about 900,000 jokes (mostly dirty). I can sing every Wierd Al song, and recogonize within 4 seconds any Pink Floyd song that comes along. I can identify within 2 years any Volkswagon Beetle, Corvette or Porche 911. I know how to program the computer to say "Hello World" in 900 languages.
... have to call my wife on that one.
10Kb of which is actually usefull.
It's amazing the stuff my brain keeps, like I can remember every stinking extra life mushroom in Super Mario Brothers. I can remember every single line to every Monty Python movie, every Mel Brooks movie, and Pee Wee's Big Adventure. I know all the cheat codes for Doom (IDDQD, IDKFA, IDSPISPOPD, etc.), and the Konami code (up,up,down,down,left,right,left,right,B,A,select
And I -THINK- My son's birthday is 11/7
The math incorperated would probably be a flavor of "Quantum Fractal Chaotics". We all know that some times if part of the brain is destroyed that the rest of the brain can take up the slack and even some times regain memories that were thought originaly lost with the dead/missing part. I suspect that if a person can come up with a way of decoding the (natural) encription of human thought we would all be with in really big trouble or looking at a mind blowing (no pun intended) future.
If at first you don't feel good.... suffer like the rest of us.
In regards to filling the capacity of the human brain:
I am inclined to agree with another reply to this comment that nobody really uses anywhere near the full theoretical capacity of their brain. However, I don't think anyone could survive even coming close, so that's a moot point.
Just like people don't let their computer drives fill up completely, the same thing happens in our brain. When concious memory and whatnot get even a little bit full, things get dumped into longer term memory. As long term memory starts to have some stuff in it, you start forgetting unimportant things. Anyone who has had kids or a sibling that is much younger than them (I have a brother 10 years younger than me) has quite likely noticed how good a child's memory is. My parents told me that once, when I was about 3, we were looking to meet someone to go on a canoe trip. My parents were trying to remember what color the canoe was. I immediately said it was yellow. Now, nobody in the family had seen these people for over a year, yet, for me as a young child, it clearly didn't require much digging through memories to find what I was looking for. Memory and/or storange in any for does not perform well when it is full. Judging by certain aspets of the speed of human responses, our memory needs to be quite empty to perform well.
As someone else pointed out, also, if you remember too much, it can drive you insane. If you look at your own memory, you can probably find memories that are nearly as vivid as what you experience at the moment. The human brain clearly has the capacity to store a LOT of very vivid memories. Now, imagine if you could remember a LOT as vividly as if it were happening. How could you tell what was real and what was memory intruding on your senses? You would quickly go insane, and probably do your best to kill yourself, or at least do something to yourself so drastic that it would be sure to bring you out of memory. Of course, you would remember that, and next time have to do something even worse.
Forgetting is necessary not only for individual survival, but also for survival of society. Imagine how much everyone would hate everyone else if they remembered vividly ever unkind thing anyone else had ever done or said to them or their friends? Society relies on people forgetting.
-Cheetah
I'm not sure that you can really relate the brain's capacity in terms of bits.
It's not too refreshing to think that all my memories and experiences could be digitized and fit into a dozen TB, but it's probably true.
On the other hand, knowing the capacity of the brain would give us a good idea of the kind of computing power we'd need to 'simulate' life.
It would be really cool if the brain could be used as a storage device (please leave aside the allusions this makes to a variety of cheap scifi movies).
Studies of how much humans can remember are not very on point if you're talking about creating a wetware device. You are going through human consciousness as an interface, which makes the process both less accurate and SLOWER. Imagine searching for primes using a virtual machine written in JavaScript running on IE5 running on Win98. Now imagine running hand-tuned machine code. That's the difference you'd see in performance if you bypassed the human as an interface.
Heck, I asked a very closely related question (and got a lot of fluff and ass-talking, but a few gems of good info) with What is the bandwidth of a human nerve?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
It seems to me that the brain is more like a muscle than a storage device: the more you use it, the higher its capacity becomes. Although there may be an upper capacity limit, I doubt more than 10 people alive at any given time ever get anywhere near it. Whereas I have observed many, many people who stopped using their brain capacity and, essentially, lost it. I would just like to call attention to what we learned on Married With Children episode #183 "Kelly Knows Something" where it was shown that for every fact that Kelly Bundy learned, she forgot something too. Sadly, at the end, she had even forgotten who it was who once scored four touchdowns in one game. It also seems to me that super-capable people (and I am purposely avoiding the words 'smart' and 'intelligent') are often those who have the ability to draw together seemingly unrelated fragments of information into a new and critical insight. Ah, the truly cursed and tormented. "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -- HP Lovecraft
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I would just like to call attention to what we learned on Married With Children episode #183 "Kelly Knows Something" where it was shown that for every fact that Kelly Bundy learned, she forgot something too. Sadly, at the end, she had even forgotten who it was who once scored four touchdowns in one game.
Ah, the truly cursed and tormented.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." -- HP Lovecraft
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
My understanding is that the memory of the brain is rather high latency by computer standards. However, it is associative, which makes up for that depending on the situation.
Personally, I want my computer's memory to be more reliable than mine.
I read somewhere that the brains capacity was on the order of 13 TB. No links to back it up yet...
If you want to back up 13TB, you might start with EMC. We deal with datasets measured in terabytes every day, and are quite adept at backing them up without even taking them offline.
:)
[Yes, I work for EMC--it's a wonderful job.]
Well, where the hell do you truly begin? Consider the actual list of things your brain stores and all the permutations of the subsequent things and itemize it, categorize it, and try and make it easily accessible with an operating system that on the majority never *truly* crashes.
:)
Here is your list:
- Talents (acting, leadership, etc.)
- Skills (driving, using tools, etc.)
- Knowledge (literature, languages, computers,
law, science, etc.)
- Experiences (learning not to touch a hot stove,
learning to walk in a straight line)
- Personality (your way of expression, your body
language
- Sub-Conscious Action (those things that are
completely natural like breathing when out of
breath, fleeing from danger, most instincts)
- Emotion (how we handle emotions, when certain
emotions occur, and how we emote)
- Abstract Thinking (all the thoughts that we get
that never truly make sense but are stored for
later use if ever)
- Environmental Knowledge (ever walk into your
apartment and know where everything is in the
dark?)
- Personal Knowledge (what we know about the
people we are)
- Survival (how we know what is inherently
dangerous, often just incredible intuition that
not many people give recognition to)
- The Others (everything else that I didn't
put here that could go on and on infinitely)
If you consider everything you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed you'll end up realizing every day you'll recall something you learned quite some time ago and you'll remember the situation in which you learned it. That's all stored in the brain. Imagine billions of text files all cross-referenced, indexed, categorized, programmed, filtered, and itemized using an operating system that can judge, understand, connect, regrow new information, deduce, comprehend and extrapolate. I would estimate the human brain has a storage capacity the likes of which we don't currently have numbers to describe.
Just something for you to think about. We store more information in our brain than we realize, and we use it every day seamlessly, so we take it for granted that it's stored.
So let your brain think about all that, have a Coke, and go insane.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
I don't know if you noticed the last word in the original message. It happens to be "haha". Now think. I think I would class this message in the "taking-the-piss" dept. And I'd just like to let you know that I am a "computer nut" to use the fools words and I just got back from a five day Biology field trip. So if we "computer nuts" know nothing about bio, then why the hell would I want to go on a bio field trip?
Gotta get in a plug for my web site:
http://www.lord1.force9.co.uk
Just remember that if the world didn't suck we'd all fall off.
sorry about the grammar comment,
but if you're going to attempt to exploit
the potential repitition in the english language,
do it correctly.
"That that is, is; that that is not, is not."
or, as books would argue,
"That which is, is. That which is not, is not."
i'm not going to bother with contractions.
-Tannin Kal
here's the problem rating how fast we can absorb info:
it depends on the medium/method.
if someone is saying numbers out loud,
say between 0 and 255 (1 byte),
we can't commit these to memory very quickly.
dependingon the person,
reading these numbers would be different.
on a massiveley different scale,
hearing a song,
and being able to recall (not necessarily reproduce)
the song perfectly indicates an incredible read-rate.
though one could argue our perception is not scalar but vector.
no one remembers at what point a given sound began and ended,
the remember a given object at a given time,
or for images,
a person standing in fron of a car,
not a band of red followed by blue,
similarly on several lines.
at any rate,
our ability to read "data",
as defined by our senses,
is not so easily defined.
in fact,
actual data volume is easier.
there is a theoretically finite number of differentiable atomic configurations in a given volume of space (our head).
-Tannin Kal
as was pointed out by one fellow reader,
some of this will be out my ass,
but not all.
i have done quite a bit of research into neural nets,
and that's not how they store data.
the weightings themselves aren't the data that is read,
but filters upon the data,
to determine how it is interpreted.
while the method you discussed could be used to hold data,
other than the incredibly slow linear read down the paths,
there are no control mechanisms in place to access the middle neurons.
even now people are somewhat uncertain as to the exact mathmatical principles behind neural networks,
except that by repeated exposure to data of some sort,
patterns can be "recognized",
and data can be "remembered".
-Tannin Kal
if you just add "what before the 3rd "that"
you're right.
that that is is what that that is not is not
thus defining "that that is"
to be equivalent to the opposite of "that that is not".
by itself,
however,
is gibberish.
nothing more.
-tk
-Tannin Kal
the first method is completely unfounded, frivolous, and not even explained.
it is not nearly so easily judged how much info we can take in simultaneously, knowing that we can't judge how it's represented.
i can store the the number 5555555 as merely 7 5's, or as about 24 bits (+-).
and other amounts and methods still for other methods of input.
100bps is a miraculous over-simplification.
as for the second method,
are you attempting to insenuate that all things that can be categorized by this game can be done so in 19 bits?
you said yourself that was the average, which means that many things cannot.
this attempt at assessing address space (which isn't even remotely close to the actual implementation) is as foolhardy as the first.
buy a different book next time.
neural networks,
as mis- or non-understood as they are,
are the closest we cna come to how our brains do store data,
and even then the method of rememebring a particular datum is unclear.
you oversimplify to the point of humor.
besides that,
the fact that you arrived at the number 2 billion (2g bits) via two methods means just as little.
with all the (mis)estimates and varying calculations done, we've guessed dozens of numbers.
hey, 11tb and 13tb aren't too far off.
they must be right.
sorry for the ranting,
but the writing was erroneous and poorly defended.
-Tannin Kal
I know next to nothing on the subject at hand, but after reading a few articles/papers on the human brain's storage capacity it seems odd to me that people try and compare it to computers(binary).
Since the brain relies on chemical reactions (again, I have next to no idea how this happens; and hence I'm probably completely wrong) wouldn't that make the brain anolouge? Rather than digital. Hence the comparison to a computer which uses binary, nul and void. Given that by being anolouge one instance of storage can hold more than two (on and off) unique values.
Anyone know more about this than me? Please feel free to correct me.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Look at the brain of an ant. It has about a dozen nurons or equivalent transistors and yet look at it walking and communicating and thinking. Do we have a robot that can think that way with so little computing power? In addition, think of how many nurons we have damaged in our life and just move on. How stable are our computers of today? could they stand to lose a handfull of transistors in their processors or RAM chips or HDD sectors and operate without problems? I think not.
The fact is that we have a long way to go before we even compare to the brains of simple bugs that dig in the dirt of our lawns. They are simpler, more robust, and do more with less.
Back in my "late 1970s" college days I did a paper on Karl Pribram's "Holographic Brain Theory"; So, I did a HotBot search for "exact phrase" and found a little history for those that may want to read the origin. One paper that poped up was "Comparison between Karl Pribram's "Holographic Brain Theory" and more conventional models of neuronal computation By Jeff Prideaux jprideaux@gems.vcu.edu".
I don't recall much of my paper or Karl Pribrim's theory, but I did like the thoughts it provoked. I believe at the time Karl Pribrim was at MIT.
Back then "1970s" this was a radical position, it was not taught at the University I attended, folks/theory still taught that we always thought in words which logically and foolishly implied babies and small children were close to brain dead.
Anyway, the memory resource question has an extremly limited perspective. I like what some other folks were talking about, because thought and memory process will far exceed any storage potential when you think of brain function options like Pribrim's Holographic Theory.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
There is Karl Pribram's "Holographic Brain Theory" (late 1970s, MIT) in case you want to go look and read up on some of the older related stuff.
... music I enjoy, I read a biography many years ago.
Do we file every-thing to memory, I don't know and don't care. I forget a/o remember as needed for what I want to do in life. Maybe it is all filed in memory, but I'm only concerned with what I recall-when. All comments made are of interest to atleast one, two, or more people.
Godel -- German, I think, Math theory, Logic Specialty, recognized reality at times has no logical explination/solution.
Escher Art was fun in the "60s" along with Conklin.
Bach
So, why do you recommend D. Hofstadter for reading?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I've heard that the brain uses a form of holographic storage to archive its information and I don't know if there is a direct mapping to that and say terabytes of information (warning: I am not an expert!). What do all think?
Wasn't it explained in 2010 (sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey) that the HAL 9000 computer uses holograms to store information also?
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
The 2bps quoted is rather interesting. Are there any studies on whether this is an absolute or indexed measure? What I mean is that its been discovered that though chess grandmasters follow the 7+-2 rule in short-term memory, they recall chunks of moves rather than individual steps. Thus 2 bits of information might be considered a compact index into a sparse information space. The more specialised a person, the more complex representation can be used.
The brain is interesting in that it generally filters out daily dross based on preconceptions and training. Flemming recognised the connection between mould and lack of bateria whereas the average lab cleaner would have thrown away the contamination without realising the significance. Thus though the memory may be limited in volume, the extreme selectivity and pattern association capabilities gives humans certain advantage in certain areas of processing. If we consider that the 2 bits can be a useful index/catalog, then you can leave the details up to a computer.
Cognitive science is going to be a fun topic over the next few decades.
LL
Sure the storage capacity would be incredible, but I would hate to see how long it would take for my computer to search and find that file I was just using....
"Oh where oh where did I put that file..."
...some days you're the dog, some days you're the hydrant...
I think that came from a PBS special, where some kid had hydroenephalitis (water on the brain), and about 90% of his cranial capacity was fluid. He was a mathematical genius.
The "we only use 10% of our brain" urban legend originated from exactly what your refering to. It is a huge misinterpretation of this study. Playtex tampons have asbestos in them and people are putting LSD and strychnine on payphone buttons. Grrrr.
In "3001: The Final Odyssey", ACC states that the entire memories of the average man can be stored in about 10^15 bytes, or about 909.5 terabytes. Though, in the afterword, it states that Dr. Chris Winter belives the number to be 10^13 bytes, or about 9.1 terabytes.
It does apply, in my mind as well. To me, "intutive" and "intelligent" are not that far apart, esp. as the latter describes everything from raw knowledge capacity to the ability to generate new concepts from old -- and I think the two are quite different.
It is different to be able to come up with somthing new from older data, something different to be able to remember and apply old dataa, and something else to simply memorize old data. And then there are those who come up with new concepts from limited data!
Holmes is actually the perfect example. Despite his early distase from "unncessary information" he seems to have soon come to realize that almost _all_ information is vauable, and we find him involved with everything from violin playing to a knoweldge of the races. Some applies to cases, some is mearly recreation, but he never turns his nose up at proffered data again (the story you quote is from one of the first written.)
And, despite Holmes' fictional status, there are real men capable of similar leaps of intuition, based upon sound reasoning. Holmes himself is based upon a real person.
The 10% thing is untrue; it is an urban legend. Check it out here.
Just like that story about Albert Einstein being stupid as a child. Fact: he was always smart.
I should clarify: Albert Einstein was not a poor student, contrary to common belief.
This belief arose because historians misinterpreted his report cards. His school used a weird grading scheme, and as a result some researcher deduced that Einstein's grades must have meant that he was a poor student. He was not.
Another common belief about Albert Einstein is that he never spoke until age four. There is absolutely no proof whatsoever to this assertion.
I don't think you can really compare human memory to computer memory. At least not in terms of quantity. Human brains are not digital, for one thing, and for another, much of the remembering we do is by association, not by some biological analog of "address space".
That said, I do think there's something like an upper limit. My grandfather, who's 100, has a lot of trouble remembering things he's learned recently. Not because he's senile or has altzheimer's disease or anything, but just because, well, his brain is full. At least that's how it seems to me. But given that it's taken him 95+ years to even approach that, I'd say the brain's storage capacity is pretty darn huge.
---Joe Merlino gnupg public key ID: 1E91EBAF
To the - errm - misguided individual who attempted to disprove the theory of evolution using the 2nd law of thermodynamics: you're a git.
Sure, entropy will constantly increase in a closed system. But the Earth is not a closed system. Life requires energy, which is provided by the Sun.
Disclaimer: I'm not a neuroscientist, but I've been reading a lot of books on this recently, and there are huge differences between computer and brain storage that make this kind of measure meaningless.
:-)
First, the "write" operation is highly dependent on how you experience an event. You can't be fully, simultaneously aware of every input- the brain is an excellent signal filter, and only processes those aspects of the environment you are focused on. But there's also an "interest" component- even if you are really paying attention an input, the aspects of it that you find important will be what you remember. Example- there was a study where a researcher asked workers in a museum about a particular painting they all saw on a regular basis. No two people described it the same way- some described the colors, others the emotions they felt as a result of the content, still others the execution of the painting and the specific stylistic elements. And what they remembered correlated closely to what it was about the painting they were "interested" in as part of their job- the curator's recollection (style, context, etc..) was very different from the guy who cleaned it (complicated, hard-to-clean frame).
Secondly, a very important aspect of remembering is uniqueness- something distinctive about a memory that allows you to get a "handle" on it later. It's also thought that multiple, similar experiences tend to blur each other and reinforce the common elements between experiences. For example, I can tell you exactly how I get to work and what lanes I prefer to use, but I can't tell you the exact sequence of lane changes I made on any specific trip.
Third, the brain has a very powerful reconstruction mechanism. It's kinda like dinosaur skeleton reconstruction. Just as a paleontologist can fairly accurately reconstruct an entire skeleton from a relatively small number of bones (or bone fragments) your brain pulls together and reconstructs the few bits of a specific experience that were stored and synthesizes a more detailed rememberance from the fuzzier "generalized" remembrances to give you the impression of remembering much more detail than you actually stored.
This all contributes to explaining why it is so difficult for humans to remember "digital" data. For most of us, there's very little that's interesting, unique, or distinctive about the numbers in a sequence. Mnemonists with apparently infinite abilities to recall details generally have a learned or innate mechanism by which they create unique, distinctive symbols for number sequences which make it possible for them to remember them. In the most highly-developed cases, these symbols encompass every sense- sight, sound, taste, texture, smell.
But such people are often cognitively lost in details... they can't deal with concepts easily, and can't abstract over information they have taken in, since they are so overwhelmed by the distinctiveness and richness of the details. As are computers, which know nothing except detail. So the "lossiness" of the human memory actually serves a useful purpose, and is a large part of what makes us "intelligent" relative to a piece of silicon.
Of course, I'd like to have it both ways...
So let's say you have one billion neurons (which is a conservative estimate). If only 1% of those are used for memory (I'm sure most are used for functional purposes), that leaves 10 million used for memory.
Then all that remains is to form paths in those 10 million neurons, the number of possible "memories" is (10e6)^2, or 10e12 (100 trillion).
That's approximately 11 Terabytes, assuming each "memory" is one bit (it's probably more, but that's just a constant factor difference).
Don't take any of this too seriously -- I'm making up most of these numbers.
Items to consider:
1. As experience increases, so does the storage capacity of the mind. Sure, we may forget one or two things from long ago, but many are retained for life.
2. At most, we use 10% of the mind consciously. Who knows what may be stored in the subconcious?
3. The most beautiful aspect of the mind is the ability to retain memories BEFORE they happen. i.e. imagination, fantasy, hallucination, and even deja vu. Try doing THAT with a Seagate, even at 7200 rpm.
JL Culp
Chair, LPSC
Ok, I'm going to say this once: The second law of Thermodynamics ONLY APPLYES TO THERMODYNAMICS!!! For god sakes, it has nothing to do with biology. Thermodynamics being the general motion of large numbers of molecules. Also, it's ridicules to say that humans are more 'complex' thermodynamically then say, a piece of seaweed, it may seem that way to us, but it doesn't have any more 'randomness' then we do... the most 'chaotic' thing in the thermodynamics world is a homogeneous gas, but that 'seems' pretty simple doesn't it? As for "living matter" sprigging forth from "non-living" matter, well there really is no difference, "Life" biologically is just a complex loop of chemical reactions, nothing more. Despite the fact that we are alive, we are made of "non-living" matter. Some scientists did an experiment where they tried to replicate what they thought the world was like when life came about. Then they jammed tons of electricity into it (that would be like lightning on the primordial ooze) In ten hours the thing was filled with amino acids. So life *can* come from non-living matter. (they started with just water and nitrogen) in short, fuck off hrm.. btw I heard that the brain can hold 100Gb somewhere, not 13TB... It's not really comparable though... we really do need a better filesystem though... *sigh*
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Oh yes, also, evolution *does* happen, you can observe it for your self in frut flys or bacteria... DNA changes, no matter what you say, you cannot change that (It has not been *proven* to be the starting point for all live, but there is no other resonable explanation)
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Um, trinity was hot enough for me :) I know another hot chick named Carrie, incedentaly..
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Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Hrm, I liked the Lawn Mower man... although I never even botherd to see the 'sequil'
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Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'd be willing to bet that you didn't notice the pattern when you picked those numbers....
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Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
If we ever get the technology to implant memorys in our mind, record companies will probably want to charge you money everytime you remember a song....
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Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Have you noticed, that things like artifical vision, and robotic motion, still come no where near what an *ant* can do? if we ever get that far, we could use that as a benchmark (our brain has x more volume then an ant's, so we are x more powerfull then computer y) on the other hand, I think it may have more to do with the "coding" in an and, or a human mind.. no one knows what that coding is like, and we have no idea how it works... or maybe soem nural net stuff who knows
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Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Hrm, this was somewhat sorted out on another Ask Slashdot, about bandwidth of Nerve tissue... they said it transferd "levels" of things based on the "freqency" of the signals... like an FM transmitter, I guess... like taking one form of analog, and converting it to another... the human brain is nothing like a modern computer (other then that it can do math)
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Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Really? I think that any structure is arithmetizable. Including any hologram. And information theory is valid even if you have quantum nano-computers. Plus, I think you don't know what "comparison" and "symbol manipulation" is. What you call "associative" and "looks at convolution" is composed of computational primitives. Frege once said that all meaning is compositional. Well I'm still in love with Alan Turing, and he would suggest that principle of compositionality would hold for all machiness, including our conscious engines.
--exa--
Really? I think that any structure is arithmetizable. Including any hologram. And information theory is valid even if you have quantum nano-computers.
Plus, I think you don't know what "comparison" and "symbol manipulation" is. What you call "associative" and "looks at convolution" is composed of computational primitives. Frege once said that all meaning is compositional. Well I'm still in love with Alan Turing, and he would suggest that principle of compositionality would hold for all machiness, including our conscious engines.
--exa--
> It should read:
>
> That that is is that that that that is not is
> not.
Completely offtopic, but the subject makes perfect sense to me. To rephrase,
That which does exist is the opposite of that which doesn't exist.
Two more 'that's just muck it up big-time for me.
.AsmodeusB
Hey do all, just a quick question, I have been checking some of these posts here, all verry intresting in there own way.
One things has struck me, people use the word information alot, do they mean to use this word. Or do they mean data?
We may find it is easier to find out how much data our brains/minds can hold. It is what is done with this data that is most important.
There is a world of diffrence between the two words, one I have noticed that is not appriciated by many (or is it just my circle, way look, my tail, round and round and round and round, sorry where was I?)
Oh yes,
Well just my two pennys worth.
Dougie
Doug.
There is a short-term memory of your entire current awareness. The registers often are used to point at these things, whether they be the red car you're avoiding, the smell of that pie you just noticed, or the part of the network topology which you're designing. These are augmented by various short-term memories for particular senses (the guy on the walkie-talkie just said your name, and you can recall several seconds of sound before that even though you weren't paying attention due to the auditory system memory).
There is a long-term memory which is updated after going through various filters. Emotions tend to increase the chances of a memory being stored permanently. Severe trauma blocks storage of memories (severe accident victims can recall details on the scene, but not after rest).
Some memory processing seems to be done during sleep, but the major reason for sleep is to recharge the energy-storing glial cells because vertebrate brains use more energy than the bloodstream can supply (otherwise there would be mammals which never sleep due to the evolutionary advantage that would provide).
Slashdot needs more filters on submitted articles, to point out to editors more about past articles.
The number of hard disk storage bits may be approaching the number of neurons and connections in the human brain, but one bit on a disk has less information than one neuron or synapse. The disk would need at least one link per item, and in many cases multiple links per item. Obviously many bits will be needed to store links per item.
cat storage | gzip -d > thought
Maybe the 'gzip' is why you have to think about a memory before you can recall it. Thinking about it just decompresses it.
--- A Jesus Fish eating a Darwin Fish only proves Darwin's point.
My initial reaction to an attempt to estimate human memory capacity in terms used to describe computers is that the two are apples and oranges.
I think of our memory and the way we process information as a highly context aware compression system, which analyses what we experience and synthesises it based upon what we already know. Anything we recall, therefore, is merely a reconstruction of the original which is rebuilt from its context.
Any estimate of capacity would have to take the potential of this compression into account.
this is per cell, not per brain ;-)
...
parallelism is the answer
I don't buy the 2bps argument. People with perfect pitch, for example, can tell you in less than 1s what note you're playing on a 88-key keyboard (6.45 bps). Even an average amature musician can tell you the interval between two notes in less than 1 second (3.58 bps). Perhaps the true/false questions that were asked were insufficient to provide the full range of data that is procesed by the brain, partially because of vocabulary limits (how do you describe the "amount" of light, or level of sound, or pitch modulation, without having a tool to measure it? Yet we still can distinguish between really small levels).
Another problem with the 2bps analogy is that you can't capture the entropy of a concept in bits, and that's a major factor in human memory. (Ever crammed for a test in a class you don't understand?)
I also think that some of these other numbers are high. MPEG, JPEG, wavelet, and MP3 compression show that not all the information we store to reproduce something electronically is actually significant to the human mind.
Just my 2c.
We do know that our memories are associative, highly compressed, and unreliable. Even though we think we remember things, we actually remember suprisingly little about our experiences. Also, people seemed to be wired to remember different kinds of information. I have friends that remember every phone number they've ever called, but can't remember where they put their car keys!
We won't be able to do this for a very long time, if ever. The very best imitations we can create are but pale shadows of the real thing even with the benefit of something to copy.
God is an AWESOME engineer!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I remember watching a NOVA (PBS Science Show) episode back in the '80s where someone had broken down English into a big associative array, assuming that the brain stores things associatively (at least language-based things) and that he calculated that a simple store-and-retrieve memory system that indexed and made available all English language constructs for "send" and "receive" on an instantaneous basis would require more storage "bits" than there are atoms in the known universe... on the basis of the number of possible permutations of english words and phrases that could make discrete sense.
I remember thinking recently that such a system wouldn't need to be nearly as big if it were based on a kind of a quantum 'hash' where elements were actually cross-referenced and instantly available when triggered... a sort of an n-bit quantum computer. Granted, that's just language... what about images, facial recognition, aural recognition, smells... etc.
I 'spose it's possible for a brain to be "full" (mine feels that way sometimes) but there must be some AWESOME 'garbage collection' processes that re-allocate space when anything 'fills up'...
My brain hurts just thinking about it...Maybe the brain uses all the atoms of the body as storage space, and we just don't know it... so when we're talking out our asses, we might sometimes be right!
Now really you should have put the disclaimer as the title. If you're religious then the original question is meaningless, and if you're not, then the phrase 'turing machine' would be a lot more helpful than "lossless accurate finite state machine/automaton".
Can a turing machine emulate brain states? Most everyone in the field thinks so except Roger Penrose ("the emperor's new mind"), who has a bee in his bonnet about wanting to recover free will by invoking quantum gravity (LOL IMO, but then writing off the first guy to tile the plane without repetitions is perhaps getting above station).
So next time you start a post with "I dont know dick but...", how about stopping just there?
Oh yeah, I had a point: You make many comments stating the noncomputability of brain functions ("you can't represent X as bytes"), and then go and concur with the idea that the question has an answer.
suggested reading:
Godel, escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
Hi, I would have emailed this but you don't give an address, so I hope you're the kind of person who looks for replies to their comments ;-)
Good question, why recommend a book on three such aparently unrelated topics? Well, Kurt Godel is mainly famous for his "incompleteness theorem", in which he showed c. 1931 that there will always be valid statements of a formal system that cannot be proved wither true or false within that system. For some time "Fermats Last Theorem" was thought to be of this type. The relevance of this is that it can be shown to be equivalet to the "Halting Problem" for universal turing machines.
A Turing Machine is a very generally specified computer with infinite memory and infinite time to carry out its calculations. a Universal Turing Machine is a TM that emulates all other TMs (where a TM is the machine + a program + data). So the haltng problem is the question, "is there a TM that, when fed the specs of another TM, says whether the TM it has been given will produce an answer?" To which Turing showed that the answer is "No".
We can see that the question about TMs (the halting problem) is equivalent to the question about mathematical statements (the "decidability question") that Godel posed and solved.
Escher comes into this by virtue of the fact that his art poses deep questions about the relationships between different levels of understanding. What exactly is the foreground and what is the background of a picture like "Swans"?
Bach comes into it because the fundamentally mthematical nature of much of his music is fascinating for the author, and provides the source for some very complex and original analogies in the text - try the chapter "Crab Canon" in which the structure of a Bach Canon is translated into a dialogue (with one interjection).
Try it and see.
M
First off, although I don't do this stuff day to day anymore, I did do my degree in cognitive science, so this is the kind of stuff we were expected to think about.
/. analogy. Consider a minimal working Linux installation (basic hardware, kernel, shell). Let us say that the system has a 10GB hard disk. It is obvious that most of the HD is almost completely devoid of information, since it has no context, but is just blank. However the portion of the HD that contains the base software is very information rich, but only in the conext of the surrounding hardware (bios etc), and perhaps more importantly, in the context of the wider environment of /.ers and others who know what Linux is and what it can do, and can interact with it.
The question as asked is ambiguous, since a 'hard disk' is an object whose contents have no semantics, just syntax, that is they have no meaning except when interpreted by another entity (you, me, sendmail, etc). OTOH the information that is stored in the brain is a mixture of semantics and syntax that we do not yet understand.
To clarify this I would like to give a very
Now here we have drawn three levels fairly clearly - the HD, the bios and other hard/firmware, and the rest of the world. But in the case of a human brain it is not at all clear where (or if) one can draw these distinctions, so only a complete description can suffice (i.e. we are not able to summarise the state by means of external references)
In this event we can rephrase the question as follows:
Given the required processing capacity, what amount of storage would be necessary to provide the same information processing capacity as a human brain?
Now here we hit astronomical numbers. The question is equivalent (check Turing, Church, etc) to asking how many bits it would require to store a complete description of a human brain at a given instant. This is certainly a smaller number than a precise description of the state of every subatomic particle in a brain (i.e. less than the memory required for a Star Trek transporter), but is still pretty big.
Back of an envelope? A very conservative envelope? If a brain state could be described by the states of each neuron and each connection in the brain, and each of those took 16 bits (which is almost certainly a gross underestimate), and there are ~10^12 neurons and ~10^3 connections each on average (Churchland and Sejnovki, 1992), then that is 16*10^15.
or 16 peta bits
HTH
Matt
Disclaimer: I have a background in both computer science and micro/molecular biology and have been studying the problem of aging for ~8 years and the problem of the limits of intelligence for ~2 years.
Minor complaint -- I can't believe the amount of commentary on this topic by people who clearly are ill-informed or do not understand what they are talking about.
I'll address 2 issues:
1) Why We Age?
This problem is well understood by biologists and dates back to the 1950's with theories proposed by Medawar and Williams. There are 2 principles:
(a) The declining force of natural selection.
Due to preditors and accidents nature has fewer and fewer individuals from which it can "select" genes which promote health in the elderly. When you have "no" individuals from whom to select natural selection fails. So to evolve
longer and longer lived species takes greater
#'s (running into environmental limits) and
increasing periods of time. Under this axiom,
we age because "the program is incomplete".
(b) Antagonistic plieotropy.
Under this theory, nature selects for genes
which promote survival in the youth and reproductive success, but which in the long run
are detrimental. These could include fundamental aspects of biology -- iron is a great carrier for oxygen, but promotes free radical damage to DNA causing program corruption. Under this axiom we age because nature balances personal survival with reproductive fitness.
As the declining force of natural selection and the effects of antagonistic plieotropy vary with the environment it is likely that both of these axioms operate in different species to different degrees.
A consequence of the these theories is that the human genome does not contain the programs necessary to maintain and repair neurons indefinately. So neurons eventually die and
the brain gradually loses capacity.
Regarding Merkle's article, Landauer's research and the capacity of the brain --
Many people misunderstood (or didn't bother
to read carefully!) the experimental situation
that derived the estimate of ~120 MB of storage.
This is the "stored" and "retreived" long term
memory capacity! It has nothing to do with the
bandwidth of our senses (such as the eyes) *or*
the processing capacity of the brain (when
differentiating between stored tones).
It is certainly true that the neuronal synaptic
capacity of the brain is much greater than ~120MB.
However, it is not clear how much of that is simply redundant information and how much of it
is *generated internally*! (without having to
go though our normal short-term to long-term
memory processing algorithms). The human brain
is very good at "filling in" very bad video
or audio information (because its survival
depended on it)! A brain that was good at
generating "hypothetical" situations that
could enhance survival strategies (and storing
them for future use) would presumably be quite successful as well.
So while, R. Merkle's/Landauer's discussion
may be very useful in determining how much information we may be able to "memorize" for future recall, it tells us little about what the internal memory capacity (that we use for discrimination calculations) really is.
This is important because humans have to deal with very poor quality data feeds. Computers/AIs/etc. may on the other hand be operating on very high quality data (or objects with very well defined meanings) and so may require much less capacity to perform operations of the complexity that humans do (when considering higher thought operations vs. simply separating the data from the noise). The processing done by the human auditory system can already be done by most computers and the human visual system will be compressed into a few chips with ~1 Teraops computational capacity.
For further information see recent books by Hans Moravec (on Robots) and Steve Austad (on Why We Age).
Where does that measurement come from?
I BELIEVE this is an idea that popped up in the 50's during early brain research. Scientists discovered neurons that were 'undersized' compared to most neurons, so they assumed that they were unused. Since a large portion of the cortex was composed of these neurons, they came up with this wild statistic.
Now we know that these neurons are just small, which doesn't make them unused. So, the notion is false.
Anyone have a different idea? My memory of introductory psychology is pretty fuzzy, as I mostly spent my time just trying to stay awake...
the brain's storage of "knowledge" is not a digital structure, so it cannot be measured in bits.
I don't think that the capacity can be measured in such one-dimensional terms.
The human experience and our perception of reality is most likely way beyond any technology we could ever concieve.
Plus, it would fuck everything up and make human life pretty worthless.
Some scientists believe that dreams are the brain's tool for organization its memory. Basically, when you dream, your brain compares what has been added to your memory, with your permenant memory. It then decided wheather the information should be discarded or wheather it should be stored. The brain tends to store information which can somehow link with information or experiances which have already been stored in permenant memory.
Disclaimer: I know only a modest amount about neuropsychology/theory of computation...
;).
/addressed/. In the brain's case, there may be loads of 'data' stored, its just you cant remember the 'links' needed to actually get to it - ever been caught out by that word you know, but you just cant quite remember? (I know I have ;).
OK, I've thought about this for a while and here goes:
As far as I can tell, there is very little we actually *know* about the brain. It cannot be likened in any definate way to a (theoretically) lossless accurate finite state machine/automaton, so there is no hard and fast way to answer this question. Get rid of that 122 meg estimate - he's obviously talking about something else
Basically, from what I can tell, the brain works _as a whole_ to store any one given 'item of information'. This is unlike a conventional computer that has a specific location to store a specific bit of data.
Any storage device on a conventional computer (as far as I know) uses some sort of definate addressing mechanism to access a particular peice of data.
On the other hand the brain "stores" pretty much everything you experienced, whether you remember it or not. The problem is how it is
The way the brain 'records' experiences is by changing (m)any neorones' receptibility to neighbouring cells as well as those neorones' internal chemical (in)balance. This would give a "random" (hey - never use the 'r' word without the quotes) yet analogue data storage that clearly cannot be enumerated in any definative way to bytes.
I believe it's entirely possible that the brain could even 'record' data in more outlandish methods such as small inductive/capacitive fields and chaotic electrical interference. What is definately known is that the way the brain stores data is probably more than the "just count the number of cells and multiply by ten" way shown in one of the replies. Such a way would be inmature, inaccurate and an insult to the more thoughtful amongst us.
Now, since I've said all that about just how impossible it is to measure the maximum capacity of the brain, what is probably a more practical answer is how much the brain will store on average. This I dont know, though I guess that that would be a question for the psychologists out there - and maybe thats where the 122 meg guess comes into it.
i was so shocked when i saw the huge number of replys to this comment, that i wondered if it might be some kinda record. at the time im posting this, there are about 120 comments in this thread. wow.
thats all, im done now.
It seems as though the Brain has a HUGE storage capacity - just think of how clearly you can remember certain images/emotions/sounds.
The Problem(tm) I think is that we forget how to find things. Unlike computers which are designed to always know where it put something.
I read once (somewhere) that the human Brain has the capability to memorize the contents of approx. 2 million books - word for word. Of course I can't back it up, but it seems reasonable to me (not that you could normally DO this, but think of Autistic people -ie Movie: Rainman).
I think this relates to one of the postings above - on HOW the Brain stores things; seperate compartments for smell/vision/touch/sound. Do you instantly recall how something smelled? or do you have to THINK about how it smelled?
Ok, so does each section have the same capacity? or say does vision have more room? And what's the difference between the THINKING part and the STORAGE part?
I used to have a cool sig.
This is right down the alley with those "facts" about how the average human uses 5-10% of the capability of his brain. Where does that measurement come from? How do we know the "theoretical limit" on human brain capability?
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
It wouldn't quite be possible, because of the loss of data from the brain (if you can't remember where you put your car keys, how do you expect it to remember thousands of lines of code)
Do you think it's possible that our brain uses some kind of compression like jpeg does and mpeg and everything does, just in a different way? Sorta like a zip file and we have to unzip it before we can view it? Because we only use like a sixteenth of our brain, even if it was 13TB, that still does seem like as much as it should be for all that we learn in a lifetine, all of the knowledge that we gain, all of the memories and such all stored in a video type format...
Maybe it's done in like a model type thing, where we all remember the model of a person's body and just remember the frames and positions....
oh well, enough of my rambling, haha, I started to wander, lol, ok, enough enough...
Once a group of creatures, to pick a well known example let's say humans, becomes civilized somewhat, they start taking better care of those who would not be able to survive on their own. They (we) aid weak newborns, semi-sterile couples, and people with defects or diseases that would quickly kill them "in the wild."
The result: these creatures live to produce offspring. Evolution fails because survival of the fittest no longer applies to the situation.
(Of course these aren't my original thoughts; I think I read of the idea in fiction by Larry Niven.)
I've not done any research, but doesn't it seem as if there are many more defects, allergies, and weaknesses in the population today than there was in the past?
I really think that the the way the brain works is quite different than the way out cpmputers work, espicially the memory. We don't have a discrete chunk of memory availabe that we fill with exact, independant entries like a digital memory would. The analogy of holography holds much better. First a hologram is distributed. That means that if you took a hologram and broke it in two pieces, you would not have the two halves of the original. Rather you would have two complete holograms, just with slightly less resolution in each one. Holograms are also associative. That is, if you construct a hologram by using the light from two objects, if you the illuminate the hologram with the light from one of the objects, you will see the other. That said, I think the analogy can be taken too far. The key is that the brain seems to be distributed similarly to holograms.
Our brains are also regenerative. Have you ever thought about something (say, an old memory) that was at first kinda fuzzy, then became more clear (either gradually or suddenly)? How would you quantify that? I don't claim to know what process is taking place there, but something happened to make the transition from fuzzy to clear.
An other HUGE case where the comparison of brains to computer memory is imagery. Firstly, we don't usually remember everything about a particular image, we remember what was important to us. And these can be time based (video) as well. How much disk space would it take to store the images you can conjure up in your brain? How about a text list of the ideas that you remember about those images? Quite different. Perhaps there is some kind of coding you could define for our brains, but now we're speculating an awfull lot.
OK, now here's some rampant speculation and conjecture:
Obviously, the functioning of the brain is rether complicated. In addition, I feel that many of the historic theories explaining brain function are deeply misguided at best. I think that the structure of the brain is related to fractals in a significant way. Fractals create complicated phenomenon from simple ideas applied on a large scale. That's not to say that if you crack open someone's head, you'll see a cheezy poster, but I think that a major breakthrough in understanding the brain would be the development of a branch of mathematics that incorporates fractals. A similar case was that vector mathematics was developed to explain E&M. Now, I am not a mathematician and my knowledge of fractals is limited to put it generously, but our brain is a very large scale object composed of relatively simple objects which follow simple rules. I think this is something worth not overlooking.
You know the most amazing ability of the human mind? The ability to ramble.
Actually, the signals set by and to neurons are quite nonlinear and switch between two distinct levels. You could argue that our brains are digital. However, the architecture is fundamentally different.
Matt
It is my understanding (thanks to the Discovery channel) that the brain doesn't store a whole memory, or anything like that, but breaks down experiences into individual items related to that experience, like the smell, the sight, the sounds, which are all stored in their respective areas in the brain. Kind of like one big ole' associative array, I guess.
Nice.
Neurons do not conduct the electrical impulse between cells because once the impulse reaches the terminal fibers of the nerve, little sacs filled with neurotransmitters are triggered, which release the chemicals. The neurotransmitters reach the dendrites of the next nerve, which in turn launches an impules which reaches its terminal fibers, and so on and so forth. The neurotransmitters are very quickly broken down by enzymes in the synapses to prevent nerves from constantly firing. (How much would it suck to touch a hot stove and have your hand feeling pain until the neurotransmitters decomposed?)
On little niggle though, the reason your hand jerks back from a hot stove before you feel it is because the heat sensory neurons in your hand get triggered by the heat, and the signals travels to your spine, which responds for your brain by sending the signal to motor neurons which then jerk your hand back. This all happens as the signal is traveling to your brain, which then interprets the signals as heat.
# Zoot
Scientists have just recently begun to understand how to add telomere's BACK now. So I assume experimentation is occuring as we speak. Only time will tell if this addition will truly extend life.
The current theory (check out Karl Pribram) is that the brain works on a holographic model - memories aren't erased, they just degrade as the brain suffers more damage, just like a hologram.
(Try cutting a hologram; you don't get half and half of a picture, you get two smaller, fuzzier pictures)
There's absolutely NO comparison. The computer is comparative and does symbol manipulation. The human brain is associative and looks at convolutions. I challenge anyone to sketch a penny from memory; you can't do it, but what you can do is recognise a penny whether or not it is upside down, on its side, or partially obscured.
You should read Permutation City, by Greg Egan.
He goes into all these issues, and many, many more. You'll probably get a migraine just thinking about some of it. I know I did.
Of course, he does have some extremely dodgy science thrown in as well -- but if he didn't, it would be true... and you really, *really* don't want that.
Duh people. The only reason why we can't remember everything our mind takes in is because we keep bouncing and jolting our brain around. If you took a computer and was using it non-stop for years on years, and it was in constant motion, wouldn't the drive platters get a little scratchy and start loosing data? That's all that is happening. Plus, don't forget, the brain is very old technology. Maybe it's time to upgrade?
Is more like the storage capacity of each register. The research (dang, I wish I had the URL handy, guy's name is Miller) indicates that a person can deal with about 7 positions on any one-dimensional scale. Seven levels of gray-scale, for example. (But we notice relationships, so it often takes more than that to represent an image.) If you show someone a gray card, and then a set of gray cards, the person will usualy be able to find the matching card if there are seven or fewer cards, but usualy fail if there are more than seven.
The surprising part is that the same experiment with tones that vary by frequency only gives about seven, and so does the version where the volume varies.
But there are multiple "registers". If you vary the tone and the volume, the subject can distinguish more than seven sounds.
Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
Homer
We apologize for the inconvenience.
During a child development class my wife and I took before our daughter was born we were told a little bit about brain development. One measureable sign of brain development is the total number of neural connections that have been made in the brain. At birth a baby's brain will have 500 x 10^x neural connections (I forget the exponent value). At 1-2 years old this number will have grown to 1500 x 10^x. As an adult this number falls down to about 1000 - 1200 x 10^x.
Whether these connections represent memory storage or processing capacity is not well understood. Probably a little of both. Another thing about these connections is the complexity of the neural interfaces. At each connection (synapse) location messages can be passed or influenced by something like 20 different chemicals called neurotransmitters. Each neuron can have many different synaptic connections with other neurons. So brain processing is radically different from binary computers. The basic binary computer building block is a transistor that has one kind of signal to pass (electric activity) and two states (on and off). The basic brain building block (the neuron) branches in several different directions and can pass multiple neurotransmitter signals along any of these branches. Fundamentally different ways of doing business.
I read somewhere that the brains capacity was on the order of 13 TB. No links to back it up yet...
So, if we view the brain as a hard drive, how about processors? Does this mean:
:)
Einstein was the biological equivalent of a Cray?
Inherently cooler people run k7s, and the feds all have PIIIs?
Dumb people have the old Celerons?
Siamese twins = dual processors?
People who take smart drugs = overclockers?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
The principle of aggrandizement is the fundamental law of every government. - Frederick the Great
The question of how many words a person knows cannot be answered very precisely -- in part because the question is ill-defined. Do you include derived words, or only root words? How well does the person need to know the meaning of the words? What about words that have multiple meanings? Do they count as one word or several?
However, once you settle on a definition of "knowing" a word, you can estimate the number of words a person knows by randomly selecting words from a dictionary of known size (preferably a very large dictionary) and conducting a little vocabulary test. The "known size" requirement of the dictionary isn't trivial, since you are presumably only interested in root words, whereas the publisher's word count will include compound words, whose meaning could be inferred from the root words.
Using the above approach, Nagy and Anderson at U. Illinois, estimated that the average high school grad knows 45,000 words. Throw in all the words that aren't listed in an English language dictionary, such as proper nouns, acronyms, recent slang, etc., and the count will be closer to 60,000. Averaged over the student's lifetime, this works out to learning an average of 10 or more words per day! I've read other, higher, estimates of the size of an adult vocabulary. I found this particular analysis in George A. Miller's The Science of Words.
IANAL (I am not a linguist), and I would be happy to be corrected by someone who is. But as someone who has struggled to learn foreign languages as an adult, I am well aware of how far 5000 words is from a passable adult vocabulary. If anyone else, like me, is interested in learning languages, you might find this web hack I wrote of interest.
It's funny that everyone is assuming the brain is digital.
There were a couple of good columns by Dewdney in Scienfic American, years ago, about analog algorithms. There are a number of algorithms that can be solved trivially, in one step, in an analog fashion, but are much nastier to solve digitally. One good example is finding the convex hull of a set of points on a plane. You could just place nails in a board representing the points, then wrap a string--or a large rubber band--around the nails. The best you can do on a digital computer is a Graham Scan, which is n log n. The brain tends to "see" the answer right away, like the nails on a board method.
However, outside of the few hundred people I know, and maybe the people _they_ know, no one cares how my life goes, but if I, say, came up with demonstrable and repeatable cold fusion, that would have a large effect.
Y'have to remember, the population of that world was about 50...
Can't fault your _source_ of quotes, though...
I think the actual capacity of the brain cannot be measured in bits, it is missleading as the brain is not an n-bit processor and we don't know what is stored. Take vision for example, if you look at the work of retinal cells in the eye the information is highly processed before being sent to the brain, and alot of the resulting information is regarding movement in the scene, see the work of Carver Mead who developed a silicon retina for more information. Also the memory storage maybe self-adaptive as well, so the memory density might vary depending on previous experience and thus have no measurable unit of storage. Also the ability to create conceptual connections is not recognised in this discussion, where two previously unrelated items are linked in the mind thus creating new data, is this already implicitly stored and just breaks into consiousness or is new information created? This is important as no one addresses this especially in the scientific community, where does a new theory come from? Did Einstein come up with the idea of riding a light wave by reference to what had gone before or was it a spontaneous creation? These mysteries may one day be solved, but we have a way to go yet.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
The brain is very much holographic. While parts of the brain are used for specific functions, in cases of trauma the functioning gets taken up by the rest of the brain.
However, there is not likely to ever be "Brain Storage(tm)", because the brain doesn't store the information that it recieves from it's input devices (the nervous system). Rather, it stores it's interpretation of the input. So what you put in and what you get out are related by the most complex nonlinear (and constantly changing) transform function you could possibly imagine.
--conform
From an information theory point of view, there's
nothing ridiculous about calculating the information capacity of the brain. Although it has a very concrete meaning in the realm of computer jargon, it is fundamentally a unit for measuring information content.
As I understand it, individual neurons, denrites, axons, nor synapses cannot retain a "state" by themselves. Groupings of connected neurons seem
to be able to retain state. In fact they any particular cell assembly has the ability to stabilize to several states. Something that can hold 2 states has an informational content of 1 bit; 4 states = 2 bits and so one.
I think the capacity of the brain would be far less than the estimate you suggest.
I just had an interesting thought .. Ok, assuming that the technology exists do to this, would it be possible to take a copy of the brain buy storing the position of every molecule, its energy, etc .. Ok, it would take *huge* amounts of memory, but if it was technologically feasible to do this, would it be possible to use this "copy" to recreate a brain in the state it was recorded in?
;)
Or would you just end up with nice steak for tea?
I'd like it first noted that the 2bps rate was on input retained, not total input. The brain filters out gobs of information evry second. In fact, it probably filters out between 90 and 99% of incoming data. Don't believe me? What do your socks feel like on your feet (assuming you are wearing socks, if not, apply to appropriate clothing in region you weren't just thinking about)? Were you noticing that feeling before I asked? How much does it weigh on you? What is the texture of your {Keyboard, Mouse, Trackball, etc...}? Your brain is dumping this 'useless' information from concious sight. Most people actually retain this information for a short time, in case it does become important, but it is otherwise lost. Additionally, since vision keeps popping up... How many significantly different images of a good friend can you bring up, and can you notice details on them, where they are, what was happening around them at the time, etc...? Most of the images you see probably (not always) end up being rather similar, even if the situation you remember them from is very different. Now do the same of a place you visit often (like your computer's room, without looking around now).
The first point is that a lot of input is simply lost on us. We don't have the throughput or need to absorb all of it. The second actually deals with soemthing deeper. Our brain tends to associate data withprevious items stored more frequently than it will create entirely new sections of data (granted, the data gets stored in half a dozen or more sections, being split up into component pieces,but we'll deal with one aspect for now). Looking at animage, you're more likelyto break it down into component shapes and store those than the entire image. In programming terms, you've got a map of pointers to predefined objects, not a bit-map. You may only input 2 bps, but those 2 bits actually contain a great deal of information. The way the brain interconnects, those 2 bits could (even in binary trees) actually deal with more than a meg of information, since those bits are likely to be pointers, which split into pointer, which... which finally lead to actual memory objects. When we're young, we learn everything much faster, because our brain is still in a formative stage, creating these actual objects (sometimes referred to as hooks) of memory.
122 MB of information could be an awful lot... if it's done properly. Since these experiments were likely done on adults, the inherent problem is that they can't capture the person creating those intial storage blocks. Using a horribly evil programming example, I'll try to elaborate. Assume that during your formative years you actually receive information on a much greater scale. This is true, since your brain has developed the necessary filters yet. It also isn't being called on to do any other tasks other thanabsorb at that point. These initial blocks can be equated to library files. (.dll) If you were to compile even a small program which statically called on assembly functions contained in their binary executable code, you could easily make a file of several MB (this is for bloatware windows). On the other hand, compiling the same program using dll libraries can reduce the size by more than an order of magnitude. If you consider the input on the adult mind to be mostly pointers to libraries of previously organized and stored memories, then that input rate, and that data size is no longer quite as absurd as some of you seem to think it to be.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
Humans remember faces not by the total image of the face, but by a specific set of key points on the face (typically eyes, nostrils, ears, lip points... anything with a good defined edge). This explains why, until you know several people, people in certain ethnic groups all tend to look very similar to you (it seems to a frequent symptom). Within that group, eyes, nose and normally hairline (the basic 3 pieces, along with general curvature of the facial edges) are all about the same. In my personal experience, I used to confuse 2 people knew casually, but after I got to know them better, I could distinguish them far better, because I consciously found differences to note between them. Now, looking at people who look even similar to them, I can distinguish those persons much faster, because I have a new set of critical points to match their faces against. Consider it similar to storing a wire-frame image onto which you attach standard pieces (eyes, skin, etc...) For more about memory being pointers or simple fractions of original data, see my reply to Post #7 "Capacity of Human Brain."
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
Now I'm wondering something...
.5, then multiply that by the original number.)
;) I've taxed my sad mathematical abilities far too much for one day.
;)
There must be some kind of numerical limit to the total phase space, but there seems to be a complication. The original message points out a lot of subtle things such as firing rates and intensities that are effected by neurotransmitters. (All this also assumes that both of those are discretized and not analog values. If firing rate and intensity are analog, all this would seem pointless.)
Let's scale it back, though. Let's ignore the subtle stuff, and trim the number of neurons back to something more manageable, like 9. Of course, a neural net is based on the connections, not the individual neurons, so with 9 neurons, there are 36 connections. Since each CONNECTION can be "on or off", you now have 2^36 (or 68719476736) possible states. [I realize in a true neural net that each neuron is not connected to all the others. This is just an upper-bound.] Here's where the fun starts. Add ONE neuron to the mix and connect it with the others. You now have 45 connections, which yields 3.518437208883e+13 possible states. This is 512 times the previous number of states. Adding an 11th neuron increases the number of states by 1024 times to 3.602879701896e+16. You can see where this is headed. Imagine the numbers you'll get with a trillion neurons. It would seem that if a thought is just one of the possible phase space states that can exist in your brain, you'll gain an unbelievable number of new possibilities just by adding a neuron. Or two. The number of connections available with One Trillion neurons is 4.999999999995e+23. The possible phase space states is 2 ^ 4.999999999995e+23. THAT is a big number. Now add just ONE neuron to that... 2 ^ 5.000000000005e+23.
I am not a mathematician. I had to use Pascal's Triangle to come up with the numbers until I figured out an easy way to get the relationships. (To get the number of connections, subtract one from the number of neurons, multiply that by
Now that we have the "upper-bound", we can reduce it a little. If each neuron connected to only 10000 others, you still have 5.000000000005e+15 possible connections, and thus 2 ^ 5.000000000005e+15 possible states. That still seems like plenty to work with... especially once you take the firing rates and intensities back into consideration. Someone else please feel free to post something taking those into account.
Hopefully, one day we will learn how to "transcend" biology... What if your mind didn't exist in your brain, but was "connected" in the very fabric of space and time, free to grow without bound? Every nanometer increase would be a tremendous increase in capacity, phase space, and processing power. Eventually, a mind (or a collection of minds) would grow to encompass the entirity of existence and become god-like.
Or maybe we'll wipe ourselves out next week and never realize our full potential. Who knows?
bytesmythe
p.s. If I've really bungled the numbers, feel free to let me know. But please, be nice.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
But the spine has signal preserving fluids and structures to allow the signal to move that far without losing strength
The emporer has no clothes -- Kabuki
"If what I learned is true, you'd not remember the cracks in the wall., because they wouldn't have your attention."
What makes the discussion we participated in so interesting was that he had no control over what he memorized in effect making every stimulus he encountered receive his full attention. To pay attention to something you must actively "forget" millions of chunks of stimulus. As it was told, this person could not and was tormented.
-Clump
In Psychology we were taught that short-term memory usually lasts less than 30 seconds and is limited. Long-term memory is unlimited and is permanant.
A little food for thought. We discussed one patient who had a literal photographic memory. It was explained to us that he committed every memory to long term memory and thus was unable to forget anything. He eventually went insane.
Sorry to bring an unprovable story in but can you imagine the ramifications of that? It would seem that having a selectively photographic memory would be nice. Just remember EVERYTHING that you want--Good times, your wedding or divorce even... I dunno, or an entire textbook before a test. But imagine of you couldn't control what you remembered. Think of all the useless information you recieve every second. What people are wearing, the color of the wall, how many cracks in the wall...
I most certainly would go insane.
-Clump
fun question, though probably unanswerable. i once gave a talk in college concerning mathematical models of the brain. doesn't make me an expert, but it's a problem i have thought about before and had to justify to a bunch of mathematicians (that was fun...).
... * 3 * 2 = big fricking number. (that is, all neurons NOT firing, just one neuron firing, 2 neurons firing, ... all but one firing, all firing)
first it seems unlikely that memory and a neuron firing has a one to one correspondence. we know that also the intensity and the frequency of firing also vary. but, ignoring that and saying that memory does correspond to neuron firing, it's important to realize that you have to look at all the combinations of neurons- both firing and not firing. since there seems to be about a trillion neurons, the total number of combination would be trillion factorial, that is 10e9 * (10e9 - 1) *
of course, you also have to factor in the frequency and the intensity. imagine one neuron's phase space. it's a space along one axis which is the intensity of the neutron firing (left is weak, right is strong). along the other axis, it's the frequency (bottom doesn't fire, top is firing continously). so the total phase space volume (err area) is the size of that plane. since there are limits on each direction, that area is finite (though large). the question then becomes what is the 'quantum' of meaningful difference. that is, how much does the frequency (or intensity) have to change to correspond to a 'new' memory or state. if you know that, you can estimate the number of available unique states for one neuron which may correspond to the number of memories.
of course, we don't have one neuron (well, at least some of us don't), but a trillion. so, it's basically a problem of counting the total number of possible states that the collection of all neurons can be in.
trivial, right?
# ls /dev/brain
/dev/brain/remembrances
/dev/brain/emotions/
./
../
dreams/
emotions/
actions/
remembrances/
consciousness/
.inconsciousness/
logic*
death_please_dont_execute*
lsd*
# df
/dev/brain 160 Exabytes
# ls
childhood/
teenage/
adult/
good_ones/
sad_ones/
happy_ones/
short_memory/
repetitive_musics/
# ls
love*
hate*
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
I would like to suggest a book titled The Age of Spiritual Machines. I dont remember the author's name off hand but perhaps someone else had read it and can back me up.
;)
It is quite good and goes into a good bit of detail on the storage and calculation capacities of the human brain. In it the author calculates that the brain has about 10^14 cycles a second worth of calculations and about 10^14 bits of memory. I could be off by a few factors of 10 but hey whats a billion between friends?
Rich
If you read one sig this year, don't read this one!
The economic argument would tend to favour using computers as extra storage for brains. rather than the converse. Something like : :-)
'The Turing Solution' by Harry Harrison & Marvin Minsky
seems less likely to bring down the wrath of the lord (or its local equivalents) than growing extra brains. I assume you aimed to grow, not purchase or procure
I guess finding the capacity of the human brain is moderately interesting, but does it really matter? It's not like we're competing with any other species on this planet for the bragging rights of largest brain.
> Hahahah yeah right. Show me where one species
> has had its DNA changed or altered and remained
> viable, and even reproduced.
Most of molecular biology is based on altering DNA. Most molecular studies of proteins involve altering DNA to examine the effects of mutation. I refer you to every study on "knockout mice" (an Altavista search will garner hundreds), which involves knocking out the function of *entire genes* and watching the effects on the mouse, which vary from lethal to no effect at all. Many crops used today have been genetically engineered (their "DNA has been changed or altered") to resist herbicides and fungal diseases. There is a tremendous body of evidence that some mutation in DNA is tolerated and utilized by organisms; I can provide many more examples if you desire.
> We're not talking natural selection... that's
> not really evolution.
Yes it is; evolution is all about natural selection. DNA accumulates errors through mutation, and nature selects certain of those mutations. Whether it selects them at random or just selects the most fit is currently a topic of scientific debate, but the fact that it occurs is not.
> Two, why isn't there a progression of steps,
> instead of concrete, finite distinctions? For
> that matter, how can we classify species under
> evolution? There should be sooo many variations
> and grades between species that one couldn't say
> for sure. According to Evolution,
> our classification should be more like:
> "This species is 40% this and and 30% that and
> 1% this..."
You are correct; there are many variations and grades. "Species" is just a taxonomic term used to help classify the tremendous diversity of organisms. In reality it's a continuum, so it might be best to classify organisms by the amount of variation between their genetic code (DNA). But because we have only begun to examine entire genomes, we still have to rely on the morphological characteristics (beak size, femur length, etc) which have traditionally been used to define a "species". Fortunately, in many cases DNA variation has upheld traditional classifications.
> If you look at *all* the facts, evolution takes
> just as much faith as creation.
Science takes a lot of faith. Faith in other scientists' findings, faith that assumptions in mathematical proofs are valid, etc. But this misses the point:
> There is also significant scientific proof for
> creation.
No, there is not. There can never be a shred of scientific proof for creation, because you're asking a question science can't answer. Science deals with testable, falsifiable hypotheses, and a "scientific answer" can always lead to more questions. But "The universe was created by a god" (while it may or may not be true) is not a scientific statement. How do we investigate it? Can you think of any test which would falsify such a statement? I can provide a myriad of possibilities for the creation of life, but you can always rejoin with "But God decided to do it that way", and I can't possibly falsify that statement. Anyone who believes that "there is significant scientific proof for creation" (or that there is evidence against it) has been taken in by charlatans who either misunderstand science or, worse, misrepresent it.
-=Hastur=-
Maybe our brains are just NICs plugged into the ether via a "psychic" connection which all humans are marginally capable of. Each NIC is mapped to a specific volume of data marked for that person. Data which is stored as short-term is easy to get to, while long-term memory is degrading data. True psychics are able to hack someone else's pipe and grab their data. But how much storage, and where? Good question. But hey, this is all in fun, rite?
Basically I agree with Hamhead, you're talking crap.
hamhead wrote:
Along your line of logic:
Ice is a higher state of order than water.
Water has more entropy than ice.
You can not decrease entropy, as it is always increasing
Therefore, water can not become ice because entropy is always increasing.
erm, correct me if I'm wrong but ice is in a higher state of order than water.
You CAN'T decrease entropy (except perhaps through the 2nd Law of black hole dynamics)
In a closed system, water can't become ice.
so, were you drunk or what ?
Lethargy Software
dunno if this has been mentioned yet (i'm not going to read all those messages :)
while it may be possible (eventually) to come up with an approx. figure of bytes per X amount of brain (probably varies throughout the same brain), that only reveals the total amount of raw data it can hold, not the total sum of the memories we can recall.
eg. we can remember what someone looks like (or at least recognise them again at a later date) without needing to store a high-res bitmap image of their face.
Results can also be calculated using existing information that may have previously seemed unrelated (unlike computers, humans are able to Think). Suddenly, we're in possession of data that we didn't need to acquire from an external source. This new information doesn't need to be stored in long-term memory either - it can be recalculated again when required.
without this "brain compression" we would not be able to store nearly as much.
Telomeres are DNA repeats at the end of our chromosomes. All creatures seem to have them. Their function seems to be to control how often a cell can replicate.
When chromosomes replicate, the DNA strands split down the middle and an enzyme reads the DNA and produces a copy very similar to how a tape recorder plays an audio tape. The problem with this replicating enzyme is that it needs to hold onto something as it starts reading. This little bit of DNA it holds onto is not copied. This results in a loss of about 6 DNA base pairs per copy (ie. per cell relpication) of the telomere in humans. After a certain number of replications, the telomere is used up and the 6 base pair loss starts eating into important genetic material. Eventually the cell stops replicating and becomes 'senescent'.
Telomerase is an enzyme who can replace these lost base pairs after replication. In humans it is found mainly in germ line cells (sperm and egg cells), bone marrow (makes red blood cells), and - drum roll - cancer cells. This seems to explain why cancer cells are immortal and our normal cells are not.
Two exciting ideas (among many) have emerged from telomere research. The first is that if an 'anti' telomerase can be found, it will be a cure for many, many kinds of cancer. The second is that if we can introduce telomerase into our normal cells, we will live much, much longer.
The company doing the most research into this is a quiet, odd firm started by an American tycoon called Geron Corporation. You can surf them at http://www.geron.com. Geron recently revealed that introducing telomerase into normal humans cells seems to make them immortal.
Exciting stuff.
While not an expert, it seems to me that Computers and Humans differ vastly (perhapse too much) in the types of data that they can store.
A computer would have no problem storing pi to several million places. Not even the most amazing human savant can acheive this. Conversly, Humans enjoy an ability to memorize diverse visual, audio, tactile, positional data. We can also remember feelings. While a computer can record the birth of your child, onlly a human can remeber that certain emotional intensity.
Also: A computer either knows something, or it doesn't. Human can half-way know something. While you might know the lyrics to every Zepplin song in existance (full knowledge), you may only be able to recognize a blurbs in the lastest Korn hit (partial-knowledge).
How much information/facts/memories/etc. can a brain store? Is there a limit to the amount of input a brain can absorb? Can a brain simply forget unused data and replace it with new data like rolling buffer? Or does the brain simply become desensitized until it enters a fugue like stasis with no more capacity to fill?
That kinda reminds me of a little riddle thing I heard a while ago:
:P
The more swiss cheese you have, the more holes you have.
The more holes you have, the less cheese you have.
Therefore, the more swiss cheese you have, the less swiss cheese you have.
Now that's logic
I have programmed a few neural network programs, but if you think about it, the human bran has a maximum number of neurons (in that you don't create new neurons when you learn something, you create new pathways to the different neurons withing the brain). You can, however, destroy neurons within the brain, thereby losing memories. One thing you have to consider, since there is a finite number of neurons, the "memories" have to manipulate the data in the neurons according to the pathways formed between the neurons. Therefore, it seems that possibly, each neuron contains somewhat of a fuzzy set within itselt in order to retain information. If you think about it, in a neural network, a node can have a value of 0.3452432545 for several linked memories, but if a new memory is formed with that pathway, then the value may change slightly to something like 0.3452432547 for the new pathway (which is part of many other pathways for the memory). Granted, you cannot really give a value for the state a neuron is in at any given moment, but think of it along those concepts. Theorhetically, the brain could hold an infinite amount of data, but you have to consider when you manipulate a neuron's "state", then it will make minor changes to other memories thereby causing degredation in another memory. Also, it is highly likely that the pathways play a role in the memories (obviouslly?) in terms of what is stored. Therefore, since pathways are ALWAYS formed, then it could be said that the brain could hold infinite information. But logically, that is not the case. Anyway.. that's my 3 pesos. Yeah yeah, go ahead and flame me already. :P
Well.. first of all human brains are analog. Therefore it is not possible to figure out a number in bits/bytes.
But if it were digital, According to a PC Magazine article from 1996, Protein does have digital switches in it which can store data 3-dimentionally at a density of 4 Terrabytes per Square Inch.