how come we know so much and it all fits into our brain, like we know tons and millions of things but how does the

Question: how come we know so much and it all fits into our brain, like we know tons and millions of things but how does the brain work to do all of this?
- Keywords:
  brain,
  knowledge
Asked by james68 to Ryan, Kath, James, Evan, Ailsa on 22 Jun 2011.
- Ryan Ladd answered on 18 Jun 2011:
  
  Interesting question. I hope one of the other scientists know the answer because I’d really like to know!
  
  I know that some engineers have managed to copy very simple animal’s brains, like the nematode worm. If I remember correctly, these worms only have something like 150 brain cells but they’re still amazingly complex!
- Evan Keane answered on 21 Jun 2011:
  
  I don’t know so I was looking around and I just came across this webpage http://mradomski.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/human-brain-capacity-in-terabytes/ which concerns a calculation of how much information a human brain can hold. Apparently the estimate is somewhere between 1 terabyte (a thousand gigabytes) and 1 petabyte (a million gigabytes). Hmmm … I’m not sure if I believe this though … it seems kind of a low estimate. Hmmm.
- Ailsa Powell answered on 22 Jun 2011:
  
  I dont’ know how it all fits in – but our brains are amazingly complex and sometimes just plain amazing. And I don’t know enough about how memories are formed and retained to be able to tell you (we need a neuroscientist to answer).
  
  I think the estimates Evan found are also a bit low. I think we must remember more than that. Maybe that’s all we can remember in one go and the other things are sort of stored and we have to reorganise our brain cell connections to remember other things.

Comments

james68 commented on 22 Jun 2011:

thanks guys 🙂

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Question: how come we know so much and it all fits into our brain, like we know tons and millions of things but how does the brain work to do all of this?