Happy Atheist Forum

Sometimes when I get bored I get to thinking about some random stuff.

Right now I'm pondering my brain, and thinking about how it's capacity for storage of information compares to that of a computer hard drive.

Now, I'm not the smartest guy in the world (far from it) but there has got to be a whole lot of information stored up there. There's all the words in my vocabulary. There's the definition of those words. There's everything I know about math. Everything I know about science. Everything I know about geography, history, religion, art, literature, philosophy, and so on. And mind you, that's not a whole lot, especially when compared to truly smart people and probably most other members of this forum. There's 28 1/2 years worth of everything I've done, read, seen, experienced... and so on. That's gotta be alot of information.
Then there's the fact that I can sing along word for word with pretty much my entire itunes library of music. Most of it, I can sing in my head when I'm bored at work and the music isn't even there playing. I've probably seen over a thousand movies in my lifetime, some of them over and over and over again. I have quote after quote running through my head available at a moments notice if I need to try to get a laugh out of someone. I have useless shit galore. I'll answer questions for people that I have no business knowing the answer to. I don't recall when or where I learned it, but I'll know the answer. Not all the time, mind you, but the more useless it is... the more likely it is that I'll know it.

The point is, I'm a person of average intelligence (or perhaps below average) and it boggles me to think of just how much information I have stored in my brain, and how much information that would be if translated into computer hard drive terms. And I wonder just how many of the clearly-much-smarter-than-myself information many of the other members of this board have stored in the hard drive that is their brain. And holy-shitballs... I can't imagine just how much information is or was in the brains of the really super smart dudes like Einstein and Hawking.

It really just blows me away and I can't help thinking just how amazing our brains really must be. These are the kinds of random things I ponder when I'm bored. Just thought I'd share. Thoughts?

I've got good news and bad news.  The good news is that OS crashes are very, very rare.  The bad news is that they are fatal.

Quote from: "Thumpalumpacus"The bad news is that they are fatal.

Nah... You just see a bluescreen and wake up with a memory dump  

Quote from: "Asmodean"

Quote from: "Thumpalumpacus"The bad news is that they are fatal.

Nah... You just see a bluescreen and wake up with a memory dump  

Ye a software problem shouldn't kill you directly, maybe you just wake up thinking you're a teapot.
But anyway we have three brains, so we may survive to poor another day.

Quote from: "The Magic Pudding"Ye a software problem shouldn't kill you directly, maybe you just wake up thinking you're a teapot.
But anyway we have three brains, so we may survive to poor another day.

It's weird, but my new software update has convinced me that I've been married to a toaster for the last 25 years...  :hide:

Quote from: "The Magic Pudding"

Quote from: "Asmodean"

Quote from: "Thumpalumpacus"The bad news is that they are fatal.

Nah... You just see a bluescreen and wake up with a memory dump  

Ye a software problem shouldn't kill you directly, maybe you just wake up thinking you're a teapot.
But anyway we have three brains, so we may survive to poor another day.

... unless it's the software running your ticker, or lungs, or ...

There seems to be some tentative consensus around the figure of a million gig being the brain's storage capacity.  One source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-memory-capacity

Half a million hours of TV if watching it from a DVD.

Source: http://www.hometheaterinfo.com/dvd5.htm

Quote from: "Inevitable Droid"There seems to be some tentative consensus around the figure of a million gig being the brain's storage capacity.

2.5 petabytes are 2.5 million gigs, yes..?  

You could memorize stuff at your highest learning rate for a thousand years with high (90-95%) recall and never run out of space, I bet.

Estimating the brain's capacity for raw storage in terms of bytes is meaningless.

Quote from: "Asmodean"2.5 petabytes are 2.5 million gigs, yes..?  

Yes.  I guess I misinterpreted the sentence.  Thanks for correcting me.

QuoteEstimating the brain's capacity for raw storage in terms of bytes is meaningless.

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