• Question: How Much Memory does our brain hold aprox.?

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Fiona McLean

      Fiona McLean answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      What an interesting question! Sometimes when I’ve got to remember lots of information (when I have an exam or test!) I think “I must have finite space in my brain because I just can’t remember everything!”. However, the brain is made up of billion of neurons. In fact there are approximately 86 billion neurons in our brains!

      Some researchers have tried to come up with a figure that is comparable to a computer. These researchers say the brain has the equivalent of 2.5 petabytes (or 1 million gigabytes which is the equivalent to 125,000 of the iPhone 4s). However, this figure will probably never be tested because humans don’t live long enough to fill up all this space with memories (you would need to live till you were about 300 years old to fill all that up).

      Also, not all memories are stored long-term. For example your brain will probably have stored your last birthday and you will be able to think back to details about that day however you probably can’t remember what you had to eat for lunch 2 Tuesdays ago (unless perhaps it was something special or out of the ordinary).

      I hope this helps answer your question! Maybe when your older you could design a machine that can measure brain memory capacity? That would be cool!

    • Photo: Kevin O'Dell

      Kevin O'Dell answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      There was a great cartoon by Gary Larson where a student asked his teacher ‘May I be excused? My brain is full’.

      Apparently this is unlikely to happen as we have so many neurons (see Fiona’s answer below) making so many connections that there’s no danger of me or you running out of space.

      According to Paul Reber, a psychologist interviewed in the magazine Scientific American, an average brain has the equivalent of 2.5 petabytes of computing memory. The route by which he came to that number is beyond the capacity of my brain.

    • Photo: Elaine Cloutman-Green

      Elaine Cloutman-Green answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      About 2.5 Petabytes. That is around 125,000 8GB memory sticks worth or enough for 300 hours of recorded television. Please do not use your brain this way.

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