How much do people remember? some estimates of the quantity of learned information in long-term memory

Abstract

How much information from experience does a normal adult remember? The “functional information content” of human memory was estimated in several ways. The methods depend on measured rates of input and loss from very long- term memory and on analyses of the informational demands of human memory-based performance. Estimates ranged around 109 bits. It is speculated that the flexible and creative retrieval of facts by humans is a function of a large ratio of “hardware” capacity to functional storage requirements.