SoylentNews

hemocyanin [soylentnews.org] writes:

Salk researchers have discovered that your brain has about a petabyte of storage capacity [salk.edu], or roughly the storage capacity of the present day world wide web.

The researchers made a 3D model of a portion of rat hippocampus (about the size of a blood cell) and discovered an odd amount of duplication in synapses [wikipedia.org] which led them to make detailed measurements of those synapses. Previously it had been thought that synapses come in three sizes: small, medium, and large, with a 60x variation between small and large.

What they found was that the synapses of each broad category of synapse can dynamically and periodically change their size within an 8% range. Undoubtedly, many soylenters are probably familiar binary systems where you get one bit of information out a thing being in one state or another -- in contrast, each brain synapse has about 4.7 bits of encoding power rooted in the ability to adjust their size within that 8% range. They Salk team believes that this information could help increase computing power while decreasing energy needs -- our brains operate on just 20 watts of power.

Original Submission