SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Salk researchers and collaborators have achieved critical insight into the size of neural connections, putting the memory capacity of the brain far higher than common estimates. The new work also answers a longstanding question as to how the brain is so energy efficient and could help engineers build computers that are incredibly powerful but also conserve energy.
"This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. "We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."
Our memories and thoughts are the result of patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the brain. A key part of the activity happens when branches of neurons, much like electrical wire, interact at certain junctions, known as synapses. An output 'wire' (an axon) from one neuron connects to an input 'wire' (a dendrite) of a second neuron. Signals travel across the synapse as chemicals called neurotransmitters to tell the receiving neuron whether to convey an electrical signal to other neurons. Each neuron can have thousands of these synapses with thousands of other neurons.
Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity (10.7554/eLife.10778)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2016, @07:04AM
The memory capacity of the brain is always quoted to be the size of the trendy storage device of the day. Twenty years ago when Zip disks were the chosen storage medium of elitist assholes, sciencey types swore they had proof that the human brain could store 100 MB of information, just like a Zip disk. What's a fucking Zip disk? Not trendy anymore. Now trendy morons like to think of Teh Web as their memory store. It's all bullshit.
(Score: 4, Funny) by GungnirSniper on Friday January 22 2016, @08:11AM
Sounds like someone's warez and p0rn collection disappeared into a click of death. [wikipedia.org]
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2016, @08:36AM
"suck harder" "so stiff" [bit.ly]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 22 2016, @02:03PM
Wow.. Someone had a major case of Zip-Envy..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23 2016, @02:37AM
I do not recall this belief at all... The numbers I've seen quoted were always very large.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 23 2016, @05:33AM
Human Being: 8TB RAM, 1PB storage
(not supported by current operating system)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.