Salk researchers and collaborators have achieved critical insight into the size of neural connections, putting the memory capacity of the brain far higher than common estimates. 10 times more precisely. Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper calls this discovery "a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience." "We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. 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." http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-memory-capacity-brain-previously-thought.html
Not long ago I read about a study which researched why older people appear to be thinking slower. The question was, are they becoming less capable of thinking, or are there other reasons. Part of this research showed, that memory access times are slower in older people. Question was, why? Badly working brain? The answer was, no, it's the amount of memories. Our brain stores a huge amount of information throughout a life, but it apparently does so in a way, that the more information a brain has stored, the longer it takes to access a given piece of information. Found a source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...f-elderly-slow-because-they-know-so-much.html Furthermore the brain seems to have strategies to reconstruct "almost forgotten" things, which have no good access paths in a process that takes hours or even some days, after the information was needed. At times I wonder if a brain can actually forget things, or if they just become inaccessible by "normal" means. The new work also answers a longstanding question as to how the brain is so energy efficient O rly? Our brain takes about 20% of the energy that our body produces. It is the single biggest energy consumer in our bodies. And it has unique ways to make sure to be always and under all circumstances be fed with energy. While starving our body consumes mass not only from fat tissue and muscles, but from all other organs, except the brain. So, energy efficiency is a relative thing. The interesting point is, that apparently the brain is our most important organ. It's kept working till the very last moment. If we assume that evolution selected for the fittest of humans in the past, it is interesting that it's the brain that gives the highest survival rating, thus the specimen whose bodies kept the brain going for the longest time survived best in times of scarse food.
So basically by determining the precision by which synapse sizes changes output, they determine amount of information stored per synaptic connection. If a synapse only had one sizes then the information it conveys would be binary, 1 for a connection and zero for none, but they determine at least 26 differentiable sizes, so this would be nearly equal to a 5 bit number! Right now in neuromorphic chips they use digital synapses of just 1 or 0, there has already been demand for analogy synapses to convey intermediate states of connection.
