Comment on Wang, Liu, and Wang (2003)

Abstract

Without thorough knowledge about the human brain and memory, it is difficult to make a good estimation about the size of the human long term data storage capacity. Although more knowledge is gained over the years due to extensive research and more sophisticated techniques, still much is unknown about the functioning and the capacity of human long term storage. However, it has become clear that the human memory is associative and that the relations between neurons—their connections by synapses—are very important in memorization. But how long term information is stored exactly is yet unknown. Still, one can attempt to determine an upper boundary on the total capacity of the brains long term storage. Different methods have been published, but most of these still suffer from the lack of knowledge about the “memory hardware” in the human brain. Landauer has used a method to determine the capacity of human memory which circumvents this problem by measuring the actual functional data storage capability of human memory directly (Landauer, 1986). In his study, the human data storage capability was found to be a mere 2bits per second. Using this value, one can estimate that the maximum amount of data the human brain can store during a life time lies somewhere between 1–10Gbit.