The brain has 10 tmes more memory space than thought

[elte]

"The implications of what we found are far-reaching," adds Sejnowski. "Hidden under the apparent chaos and messiness of the brain is an underlying precision to the size and shapes of synapses that was hidden from us."
The findings also offer a valuable explanation for the brain's surprising efficiency. The waking adult brain generates only about 20 watts of continuous power—as much as a very dim light bulb. The Salk discovery could help computer scientists build ultraprecise, but energy-efficient, computers, particularly ones that employ "deep learning" and artificial neural nets—techniques capable of sophisticated learning and analysis, such as speech, object recognition and translation.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-me...ought.html

[C C]

Studying the brain is almost like investigating the visible universe, in the sense that there's always a new general discovery to make no matter how much the target has been considered to be understood conceptually and specifically mapped already.

Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.

I recollect not too long ago the claim that when 4 terabyte hard drives became more available, that average consumers would finally possess computers on a widespread basis with the amount of memory storage equivalent to the human brain's retentive capacity. That was a short-lived belief and expectation.

[elte]

I recall people saying that the brain is the most complex thing in the universe.  It more and more seems sort of true.

[Magical Realist]

We have barely scratched the surface on the specs of our own brain. How amazing for example is this thing we call memory! The ability to replay anything--a sight, a sound, a smell, a feeling, a thought, a fact, an image, a sensation, etc.
How is such stored in the interstices of our brain's molecules? What difference in structure or function occurs allowing the cell to become a remembering information-storing unit? What is living flesh, that it can even remember the experiences of a human life?

We have as much memory as the WWW! Yet how we skate over the surface of this largely unconscious database, recaling only the most minimal of details at any given time. What would consciousness become with a fully activated deep memory? Maybe in the future chips will be implanted amplifying the wattage of this memory archive of living meat. Would we be reduced to day-dreaming space cases, dissatisfied with the ephemeral glints and flashes of immediate being? Would we sink into a world of purely remembered life, living there obsessively as we would in our own best dreams and fantasies?