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I've just learned a human brain can take up to about a pettabyte of information...
Wonder how much you actually use...

From what I know about the human brain, they still haven't found an upper limit of information that can be stored within it. The problem is retrieving it.

Have you seen Johnny Mnemonic?

Even a pettabyte may not be enough.

You know the old saying that we only use 10% of our brain? That's been proven false... we totally use the VAST MAJORITY of the regions in our brains.... and we're STILL discovering new things in neurosciences.

 whembly wrote:
Have you seen Johnny Mnemonic?

Even a pettabyte may not be enough.

You know the old saying that we only use 10% of our brain? That's been proven false... we totally use the VAST MAJORITY of the regions in our brains.... and we're STILL discovering new things in neurosciences.

No, we actually only use about 35% of our brain capacity at its peak.

We use all the regions, but of the total capacity its only ~35%


So it is true that we don't use most of our brain. Of course that could be because we really don't understand much about the brain.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Have you seen Johnny Mnemonic?

Even a pettabyte may not be enough.

You know the old saying that we only use 10% of our brain? That's been proven false... we totally use the VAST MAJORITY of the regions in our brains.... and we're STILL discovering new things in neurosciences.

No, we actually only use about 35% of our brain capacity at its peak.

We use all the regions, but of the total capacity its only ~35%


So it is true that we don't use most of our brain. Of course that could be because we really don't understand much about the brain.

We use all the regions, but of the total capacity its only ~35%

What does that mean? <caveat, I know where you're going, it's just semantics>

We use that much at same time... but, we use ALL regions.

Define "region"

If you mean region as in this lobe vs that lobe, yes we use all regions of the brain.


And then there is the issue of capacity. We truly don't know what the operating capacity of the brain is and it plainly obvious that we arn't even taxing whats possable. Its as if there is a wall that can't be passed.

But the brain is very complicated. I doubt that we'll ever understand it.


There was a quote from someone that went something like this. "If the brain were simple enough for us to understand it, we would be so simple we could not."

Yup

This is facinating stuff...

Have you seen that Eli Roth had his brain scanned to see if his physiology had an evil predilection?
http://dsc.discovery.com/show-news/paging-mr-eli-roth-to-brain-scan.html

Mynameisalie wrote:I've just learned a human brain can take up to about a pettabyte of information...
Wonder how much you actually use...

I would imagine it varies. For those with eidetic memory I assume all of it and the rest of us...less.

So, the human being uses well over 35% of our brain, it can hold a pettabyte of info (theoretical, possibly the smallest estimate),

Yet, whenever I am in a 'serious' conversation with my fiance, all it wants to do is hum the theme tunes from old british comedy shows...

Highly advanced intelligence my ass...

I always figured the whole "we only use ten percent" gak was so the weirdos could get a hard on about the fact that if we "unlock" the rest of it we might be able to see the future, telepathically communicate, and teleport and all kinds of gak.

Educated guess, we use our brains pretty effectively as it is.

Doubt we could be telepathic...
More likely we'll be techlepathic.

I use my brain:

1.To receive and process audio/video concerning porn.
2. Remember my password for more porn.
3. Remember porn.
4. Remember to watch more porn.

My brain is very efficient.

No comment.
Wait, what's this then?

 kronk wrote:
I use my brain:

1.To receive and process audio/video concerning porn.
2. Remember my password for more porn.
3. Remember porn.
4. Remember to watch more porn.

My brain is very efficient.

I know I'm not a brain in a vat because reality is the perfect masturbatory aid.

Coitus ergo sum!

 kronk wrote:
I use my brain:

1.To receive and process audio/video concerning porn.
2. Remember my password for more porn.
3. Remember porn.
4. Remember to watch more porn.

My brain is very efficient.

Pornficent

More seriously,

Without knowing what 'size' the basic unit of meta-language is, I don't understand how we could know how much information the brain can hold.

one byte is eight bits of data.
A bit is either a 0 or a 1.
So technically, out brain, if it processed like a computer does, it would have about 8,000,000,000,000,000 bits in there.
Moreover, it would probably work more like a quantum computer; each neuron is complex enough to hold a sizeable amount of information.
Going even further than that, your brain contains more than 100,000,000,000 neuron connections. That means you have 100,000,000,000 paths through which information can flow.
Technically, different parts of the same byte of data passed though are brains could be computed in different parts of our brain. So, using this method, our brains are technically superior in data storage than a computer.
This is how I see it:
Neuron = tiny hard drive that can store multiple bytes of data.
Brain = Very fragmented multi-part hard drive.
If certain data is required from multiple neurons, the required bytes of data will coalesce into a comprehensible set of manageable data.
This is probably wrong.

Perhaps that the reason our full brain power isn't unlocked, it becomes too fragmented. And has no De-frag program.

Although I suppose you could de-frag your own brain by reanalyzing the information you know.

mattyrm wrote:
Educated guess, we use our brains pretty effectively as it is.

Some of us...

We might only use about 35% of brains, but how much of that will be just running the OS?

I reckon conscious thought only accounts for a small proportion of brainpower. Think about the large areas of the brain dedicated to interpreting optical information, in a way that mostly just an squishy IO bus and related software.

 Mynameisalie wrote:
Moreover, it would probably work more like a quantum computer; each neuron is complex enough to hold a sizeable amount of information.
This is probably wrong.

It is. Our brains are binary logic engines. It's way too mushy and wet to exhibit quantic properties. I think what you mean to say is that it's a hazy logic engine, which is often mistaken with ''quantum'' computing.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram

Well if that is true than the total capacity should be far higher than a petaflop.

We might only use about 35% of brains, but how much of that will be just running the OS?

Probably not as much as you would think. A mouse for instance has a much much smaller brain but similar optical abilities. The reason that our optical lobe is so big is that we are linking what we see to a whole bunch of different things. Patterns, concepts, memories, motions, impulses, emotions, etc etc. Basically I think of our brain as a mix of a vast amount of RAM and a very large number of CPUs strung throughout.

I always figured the whole "we only use ten percent" gak was so the weirdos could get a hard on about the fact that if we "unlock" the rest of it we might be able to see the future, telepathically communicate, and teleport and all kinds of gak.

Educated guess, we use our brains pretty effectively as it is.

Well actually there has been the hypothesis floating around that humans are low level empaths. If we "unlocked" the extra abilities of our brain it could potentially make us full blown empaths. Part of the reasoning for this is the documented abilities of certain peoples that have no current explanation in science. Actually some of these people were used in the Cold War by the CIA. The guy who I remember most from the documentary on it was taken in after the Vietnam war. He spent the majority of his tours there on point man and his unit was never ambushed with him in that position. Essentially, he had an ability to "sense" other human presences in the vicinity.

Actually the movie, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is a parody of that CIA program, which did actually exist, and Clooney's character is a take off of the fellow of which I'm speaking.

 Kovnik Obama wrote:

 Mynameisalie wrote:
Moreover, it would probably work more like a quantum computer; each neuron is complex enough to hold a sizeable amount of information.
This is probably wrong.

It is. Our brains are binary logic engines. It's way too mushy and wet to exhibit quantic properties. I think what you mean to say is that it's a hazy logic engine, which is often mistaken with ''quantum'' computing.

Sorry, I was correcting that then my computer tried to shut down for no reason at all.
What I meant was that the neurons seem to count as both 0 and 1 for the purpose of analyzing or outputting information.

And here's the thing:
Our conscious thought only processes what we need to know. Most of the information in the brain is background and unimportant, so therefore to prevent our "conscious" thought from suffering sensory overload it processes this background data without notifying us.
It's also incredible to note how far this has gone just from how much data can a human brain hold.

I've always thought that that empathic quality was just a combination of other brain fucntions, as opposed to a different one entirely.

Although you never said it wasn't :3 If our minds can interpret a bunch of sensory information, combined with intuition and experience into a "sixth" sense, I'd say that's just as much of an achievement as having a distinctly different sense.

The human mind is capable of all sorts of amazing things.

I suppose if we take the, rather simplified, view of the human mind being a computer we can come to some conclusions.

All humans are born with the same basic programming, and mind you its really basic. Nothing really of note beyond the ability to regulate its own system as well as store and analyze inputs.

Language for one. It takes a period of time for the brain to actually comprehend language, at least to the point where the system is capable of 2 way communication.


The process of learning can be viewed as programming the computer. The earlier the programming, the more ingrained it becomes in your system.

So if a person is indoctrinated from birth in a particular way of life it stands to reason their thought process as an adult will be radically different to someone raised in different circumstances.

Oh yeah, here is something of the sort, it's not from the specific doc that I watched but it's about the same group.




I love this guy.