Human memory is equal to one quadrillion bytes
Human memory can hold 1 million GB of information, and too good a memory ability can be a problem for representatives of creative professions, scientists have found.
The human brain is made up of approximately 100 billion neurons, each of which makes thousands of connections with others. Ultimately, about 100 trillion connections are formed in the brain. The transfer of information is carried out at the expense of the synapse - the point of specialized contact of neurons. When two interacting regions of neurons are activated at the same time, the synapse becomes stronger. A protruding formation on dendrites (a branching outgrowth of a neuron necessary for obtaining information) - a dendritic spine - also increases in size. The spine provides contact with other cells, and increases for the perception of more incoming signals.
Spines of different sizes were previously compared by scientists with bits of computer code, only instead of the numbers 1 and 0, the researchers used descriptive characteristics of their size.
However, experts also had no idea about the number of all possible spine sizes, limiting themselves to the everyday concepts of "small", "medium", "large".
A curious observation prompted a research group at the J. Salk Institute for Biological Research (California) to revise existing measurements. A full description of the experiment and the text of the scientific article can be found in the journal eLife.
Studying the rat hippocampus (the hippocampus is a part of the cerebral cortex responsible for memorizing visual images), scientists noticed that one axon (a neuron process acting as a transmission cable) can communicate with two dendritic spines - receiving information "antennas" … The researchers hypothesized that the spines will receive the same information, since it comes from the same axon, which means that they should be similar in size and strength. With different characteristics of the spine, the information transmitted from one axon will be changed.
The researchers decided to measure the objects that form synaptic connections. As a result, it turned out that the spines receiving information from one axon differ in size by about 8%. In total, scientists have recorded 26 variants of the spine size.
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Based on this data, the researchers stated that human memory can store information of about one quadrillion bytes.
A quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes equals nearly one million gigabytes. For comparison: the average computer memory is only 8 GB. At the same time, each of us knows perfectly well that we cannot use memory 100%: people regularly forget about the dates of their friends' birthdays, schoolchildren spend hours trying to memorize a poem or memorize a paragraph from a history textbook.
At the same time, it is precisely this situation that is considered as absolutely normal, but we tend to characterize people with outstanding memory with the word “phenomenon”. For example, the American Kim Peak, who became the prototype of Raymond Babbitt from the movie "Rain Man", had a unique memory: he was able to store up to 98% of all information received.
Among his friends, Peak was nicknamed Kim-puter. In 2005, Scientific American published an article on Kim Peek. Scientists speculate that the phenomenon was caused by the absence of the corpus callosum connecting the cerebral hemispheres: non-standard neuronal connections in this area provoked increased opportunities for memory use.
If now we know how great the possibilities of our memory are, why do important concepts and events continue to slip away from it? Paul Reber, a researcher on memory mechanisms at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois, USA), tries to answer this question. The scientist did not take part in the experiments of the Salk Institute research group.
“Memory capacity is not an issue - any analysis of the number of neurons will lead to an awareness of the enormous potential of the human brain. But it doesn't matter, so our perception of the world passes faster than fixing an image in memory,”the scientist comments.
According to Reber, it is ultimately almost impossible to calculate the amount of information that can be stored in the human brain. The problem is that there is much more information than we can imagine. In memory, each person stores not only facts, faces and important skills, but also basic functions such as speaking and movement, sensory perception and expression of emotions. The scientist is sure that now it is still quite difficult to go from calculating the strength of synaptic connections to a comprehensive description of all the most complex small processes between neurons.
Nevertheless, Robert praised the work of his colleagues at the Salk Institute: "The experimental data significantly increase our knowledge not only about the amount of memory, but more importantly, they once again confirm how complex the mechanisms of human memory are."
The results obtained can already be used to create energy-saving computers that can simulate the strategies of the human brain when transmitting data. The results of the experiment will also help in clinical studies of brain diseases caused by a violation of the normal synapse.
In general, scientists have been studying memory for a long time, and sometimes such studies give very interesting results. For example, in 2011, Elizabeth Martin of the University of Missouri, Columbia was able to establish that being in a good mood directly affects our forgetfulness. For a full description of the experiment, see the journal Cognition and Emotion. The study participants were divided into two groups: some watched a comedy show, others watched instructions for installing the flooring.
The test results for memorizing the combination of numbers after watching the video showed that those who watched the entertainment program did worse with it.
Martin is sure that it is a good mood that makes us forget about an important call after a fun party.
Elizabeth Martin's colleagues, psychologists at the University of Illinois, believe that the ability to memorize a large amount of information is not so useful, especially if you are engaged in creative activities. Scientists believe that a high memorization ability develops mathematical thinking and reduces creativity. The study was published on the website of the Association for Psychological Research.
Daria Saprykina