Gayparty's Blog

There are an estimated 100 billion (10^11) neurons in the brain, each potentially capably of forming a synaptic connection with every other neurons – meaning there are 10^22 possible synapses.
Current thinking suggests that one synapse might approximate to one “bit” of information (it is almost certainly much more complex than that, but this is probably a good approximation).
One byte is 8 bits, so this is 1.25 x 10^21 bytes, or 1.25 zettabytes, or 1.25 million terabytes of information storage.

Other estimates state that at any one time, there are actually “only” around 100 trillion (10^14) synapses in the human brain – so this would give a more modest memory capacity of 12.5 terabytes.

But to put all of this into perspective – the human brain receives about 72 gigabytes of information from the eyes *every second*, and it successfully processes *all* of that information. And that’s just from the eyes.
From calculations based on the processing speed of the human retina, and up-scaling that to the number of neurons in the brain, we can estimate that the human brain performs about 100 million MIPS (Million computer Instructions Per Second ). This means that the brain is like a 168,0000 MHz Pentium computer.

Who’s computer got a better specs than my brain?

Tan