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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Dawson who wrote (22767)	6/17/1999 5:47:00 AM
From: nic	Respond to of 29386

OT: how many bytes in the brain One can make an order-of-magnitude argument: about 10^10 neurons, about 10^4 synapses per neuron, each synapse in principle capable of storing perhaps a bit or two. This argument doesn't make much sense, however, because 1) memories tend to be stored holographically in the brain, meaning that there is a quality/quantity tradeoff, with no hard limit on quantity, 2) we don't know enough about how the brain encodes information to really quantify the information content (as opposed to just the bandwidth used) of a given neural signal, 3) storage and processing in the brain aren't as neatly separated as in a computer. Much of what the brain does is better viewed in terms of adaptive control circuits. How much information such a circuit "contains" is very hard to quantify. There are probably a bunch of other reasons I forgot. We really don't know enough about how the brain does its remarkable job to even ask questions such as the above meaningfully... - nic