Here are excerpts from a couple of interesting articles:
"How much does human memory hold? Tom Landauer tried to estimate this
some years ago and concluded that the brain held about 200 megabytes
of information. [Landauer 1986]. He got this number partly by looking
at the rate at which people could take in information, both by reading
and by looking at pictures. He also studied estimates of the rate at
which people forget things, and the amount of information adults need
in order to do the tasks they normally do. His numbers (expressed in
gigabits, not gigabytes), were 1.8, 3.4, 2.0, 1.4 and .5 gigabits.
Averaging these and dividing by 8 yields 227 MB. Since there are
between 10e12 and 10e14 neurons, this suggests that the brain contains
1,000 to 100,000 neurons for each bit of memory. Of course, much of
the brain is used for perception, motor control, and the like; but
even if only 1% of the brain is devoted to memory Landauer pointed out
that it looks like your head accepts considerable storage inefficiency
in order to be able to make effective use of the information."
http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ksg97/ksg.html
"How many such pictures can a person look at in a lifetime? I can only
guess, but 100 images a day certainly ought to be enough for a family
album. After 80 years, that collection of snapshots would add up to 30
terabytes. So your petabyte disk will have 970,000 gigabytes left
after a lifetime of high quality photos.
What about music? MP3 audio files run a megabyte a minute, more or
less. At that rate, a lifetime of listening--24 hours a day, 7 days a
week for 80 years--would consume 42 terabytes of disk space. So with
all your music and pictures for a lifetime you will have 928,000
gigabytes free on your disk.
The one kind of content that might possibly overflow a petabyte disk
is video. In the format used on DVDs, the data rate is about two
gigabytes per hour. Thus the petabyte disk will hold some 500,000
hours worth of movies; if you want to watch them all day and all night
without a break for popcorn, they will actually fill up your petabyte
drive if you have a lifetime of video on it as it will give you 57
years of video.
But this would probably be more than enough for most people as who
wants to see a picture of you sleeping for one-third of your life.
However, a second petabyte derive could record every moment of life,
in high-quality video, of the oldest person on earth."
http://www.mercola.com/2003/feb/22/petabyte.htm |
