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According to new information, the human brain has a potential memory capacity of a petabyte.
The scientists believe that the brain’s memory capacity is ten times bigger than believed. According to Terry Sejnowski from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, these findings are extremely important in the neuroscience field.
The experts have measured the memory capacity of the human brain and they have discovered that it can contain more information than the World Wide Web. The brain stores memories and thoughts using electrical and chemical activity. A key moment of the memory storage happens when the synapses interact with the neuron branches. Then, the neurotransmitters fire signals to other neuron through those synapses. It is important to know that every neuron can have thousands of synapses. Those thousand synapses are also connected with other thousands of neurons.
The size of the synapse is very important. According to the researchers, the larger the synapse is, the bigger the chances that the signal is transmitted to the other neurons. A key discovery has been made during this research. The scientists discovered that the synapses can a lot more sizes than they believed in the past. Previously, the scientists believed that there were just a few sizes, and now they discovered that there were 26 size categories for the synapses. As it has been discovered that the synapses are much more complex than they were believed to be, this means that the potential capacity of the brain’s memory is much larger.
Sejnowski stated that in the past, the researchers believed that there was some sort of messiness in the human brain, but now they have discovered that the synapses are actually very precise. This important discovery was made when neurons from the hippocampus were analyzed. The neurons belonged to rat brains and they were trying to see how much can the synapses store. They discovered that each synapse can store approximately 4,7 bits of data. When they transformed that to the human brain, they discovered a petabyte storage capacity.
The researchers were shocked to discover this incredible potential memory capacity that the humans hold. They hope that the results of this research will help them design better computers, more precise and efficient machines that would be based on neural network principles and learning.
The research that discovered that the brain’s memory capacity is ten times bigger than believed was published in the eLive journal.
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