How much capacity does the human brain have to store information?
1 Answer
No one has an exact answer to how much the human brain can store.
Scientific American notes that the exact storage capacity of the brain is difficult to determine because the sizes of individual memories or pieces of information cannot be measured.
Memories and information are stored in the brain via a network of cells called neurons. The human brain has about a billion neurons; each one forms 1,000 connections to other neurons for a total of more than 1 trillion connections.
The storage capacity of the brain is so large because information is most likely stored in the connections between the cells, notes the Museum of American History.
It's estimated that the human brain has a storage capacity of about 2.5 petabytes, according to a Scientific American article. That is the equivalent of 3 million hours of recorded television shows.
