MAKING MEMORIES
THE BRAIN CAN STORE AROUND 1 MILLION GIGABYTES OF DATA.
A team at the Salk Institute in California estimates that the brain can store around 1 petabyte of information, stuffed into the connections between nerve cells. That’s around 2,000 years worth of MP3 music or 223,000 DVDs. Incredibly, it’s possible to watch memories being made.
The Weizmann Institute in Israel and UCLA in the US captured memory formation in action. Patients watched clips of videos and were then asked to recall what they’d seen. The neurons that lit up when they watched the first time then lit up again as they relived the experience inside their heads — a bit like an echo.
Recent research from the US and Japan suggests that these echoes are actually stored twice — once in the hippocampus and again in the cortex. The hippocampus handles short-term storage and gradually forgets, but as it does so, it helps to reinforce the memory in the cortex, allowing long-term recall.