Science & Technology

Human memory capacity is 'ten times larger'

By T.K. Randall
January 22, 2016 ·  9 comments

How much data can our brain actually store ? Image Credit: YouTube / University of Washington There's no doubt that we store a lot of things in our head - but exactly how much memory we have available to us has remained a topic of debate among researchers for years.

Now however scientists in California believe that they may have finally unlocked the answer to this question by building a 3D model of the hippocampus - the part of the brain responsible for memory.By examining the difference in size between synaptic pairs they were able to determine that there exists an additional complexity to the synapses that no-one had ever realized before.

"This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," said biologist Terry Sejnowski.

"Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."

Source: Science Alert | Comments (9)

Tags: Brain, Memory