The brain is not a machine. It grows, and keeps growing. It can get smarter and sharper, or duller and stupider. So yes, if the question is could you....but should you? No, that would be a waste. But you can't measure the storage of the brain in bytes. It is not a machine. It keeps growing, we have more capability for memory than a 500 TB computer, which doesn't even exist.
Does the brain discard unimportant information it remembered when new, remembered information gets stored? This is definitely true. There are distinct scents I easily recognize and they immediately trigger my memory of the person/situation/object.
Bottom line is we do not know. However, current estimates are between one and ten terabytes with a most likely value of three terabytes. Terabyte: all the X-ray films in a large technological hospital; 50,000 trees made into paper and printed 2 Terabytes: Academic research ligrary 10 Terabytes: Printed collection of the U. S. Library of Congress
Because brain stores information is two ways, it can not be equated to the bytes. I think, The brain converts all information to a fractal mathematics for future extrapolation but stores in a holographic pattern. While there are databases out there that store numbers in a fractal pattern, brain somehow stores all the sensory perception in a fractal pattern. Because the storage is in a holographic medium, the resolution is lost over time and hence retrieving the information accurately is difficult but good enough to survive. The reason, the storage capacity is difficult to calculate is that one can not equate a 3-D video of one hour using the pair of eyes to giga bytes - is it 50 GB of HD video or 500GB? Then are we using XVid to compress the file to 2 GB? Are we using a 12 MP CCD chip to collect the data or use eyes full resolution of say 500 Mega Pixel for each eye? If you use 500 MP raw format - you can calculate over a life time the numbers...same for audio, touch, smell etc....It is not just the MegaPixel, it is the color information, the contrast depth, etc...and it gets complicated....
That is because, the present theory is that the smell data goes directly to hypothalamus while all other sensory data goes through an adaptive filter whose values change over time and your experience. The neuronal gain adjustment is usually done at night when you sleep...
I'm highly skeptical of this without seeing strong evidence. I don't see how they prove it. I don't even see how bytes are ever an acceptable unit anymore than liters would be useful units for measuring the speed of a car (because they certainly can't mean how much computer memory your memories would fill up if it were in a computer format, because that would be easily over 700 MB). Our memories are too complicated to try and convert so simply, I think. Though if it were converted to some unit I still think it would be hard to estimate.
Umm...a terabytes is a million megabytes. A megabytes would be a sequence of letters 1 million letters long. Do you think that any human could remember a sequence 1 million letters long? What about three million sequences that were each one million letters long?
This says it all: This combinatorial, hierarchical approach to memory formation provides a way for the brain to generate an almost unlimited number of unique network-level patterns for representing the infinite number of experiences that an organism might encounter during life--similar to the way that the four "letters" or nucleotides that make up DNA molecules can be combined in a virtually unlimited number of patterns to produce the seemingly infinite variety of organisms on Earth.
Capacity and Sequence are two different things. It is like combining all the novels Asomov wrote to one story....
