How Much Information Can Our Brains Hold?

Our brains have about one billion neurons! That’s so many, it would take us about 50 years just to count them. But how much information can they hold?

 

Each individual neuron only stores a bit of information. And if they worked alone, that might be a problem. Fortunately, those millions and millions of neurons are wired together – each neuron forms approximately 1,000 connections to other neurons in your brain. That means there’s over one trillion connections constantly working in your gray matter to help you retain everything from your childhood memories to your nine o’clock meeting tomorrow morning.

 

So does your brain have an actual storage limit? Some computational neuroscientists have estimated that your mind’s storage capacity maxes out at around 2.5 petabytes—that’s about 1,000 terabytes. To put this capacity into perspective: you would have to leave your TV on for over 300 consecutive years while recording all of the programs to use up that kind of storage space.

 

That’s pretty amazing when you think about it. And feel free to think about it as much as you’d like – there’s still plenty of unused space up there!