How many bytes is all the data you're (supposed to) learn in school?

I don't really think you could translate it so easily into bytes.

Text wise, probably only a gigabyte or so, if take in every word from every book and conversation. Image wise, it depends on the quality.

Perhaps if you were to take all of the tests out there, wrap 'em into one, and then put the text and pics into a filefolder.

Said folder probably would be only a few megabytes.

edited 1st Mar '11 8:11:04 PM by TheMightyAnonym

I've heard speculation that human memory space is quite small. [1]

"...The remarkable result of this work was that human beings remembered very nearly two bits per second under all the experimental conditions. Visual, verbal, musical, or whatever—two bits per second. Continued over a lifetime, this rate of memorization would produce somewhat over 10^9 bits, or a few hundred megabytes."

edited 1st Mar '11 8:15:23 PM by LoveHappiness

But human memory can't be measured in terms of bytes because it just doesn't work that way.

Anyway even if the comparison were valid, "a few hundred megabytes" is absurdly low. That's a fraction of a bit per cell.

edited 1st Mar '11 8:21:15 PM by storyyeller

"But human memory can't be measured in terms of bytes because it just doesn't work that way."

Why not?

"Anyway even if the comparison were valid, "a few hundred megabytes" is absurdly low. That's a fraction of a bit per cell."

Nobody said neurons didn't store more. These are experimental results. Conceivably, I suppose that might be close to the limit for working memory or something. But honestly, it's not like read about it beyond this... Still, these results don't sound too absurd to me.

Probably less than a gig if you just use text and a few images.

: We don't store information in binary logic or something. A example: We suck at floating point calculation, but we have several times the logic capacity in contrast.
And we also use a extremely weird compression method: The larger the block, and the more blocks it is connected to, the easier it is to find, and the easier it is to use. It is a really good contrast to computers

The information is important, but the main thing you learn in school is how to learn. That's more like programming than straight storage.

Of note, we also do not store information in a deterministic manner. The way we remember the city we visited two years ago may change slightly (tones, sounds, what cars we (think we) saw) during the course of a couple weeks.

There's also weird shit with associative memory. I remember what was on TV and something random my mother said like six years ago because I was in the middle of a tense Pokemon battle at the time. The equivalent for a computer would be randomly savestating in the middle of resource-intensive processes and storing those large files for ages.

edited 2nd Mar '11 8:50:52 AM by Pykrete

Human memory cannot be measured in bytes bits or any of those because we use a compression algorithm that makes it very hard to judge.

The actual act of committing something to memory provokes a physical change in the configuration of a synapse but the act of retrieval involves taking the change and reconstructing it from associated memories and experiences. We narrate our own memory and whats more we have different affinities for different things. For example, I can look at a face and remember it in a second and yet a twelve digit number is beyond me. The data involved in memorizing a face is vastly greater than a simple 12 digits.

Furthermore human memory doesn't work in digital. It is an analog system.The best proof of this can be found in that a twelve digit number can be parsed into six two digit numbers and will take half as much storage space. There are still the same number of digits but now there are six numbers instead of 12. Doesn't make sense? Well that is because the human mind doesn't store bytes.

: More information: Apparently when we read a memory, we also write it. So every time you remember something, you rewrite the memory.

While not quite the same thing, it's a vaguely similar concept to memristance. And indeed that's about the closest we're likely to come to simulating things properly.

The human brain doesn't really have a dedicated storage space, like a hard drive. We're all RAM. Literally, we're a billion switches working in parallel, very little working in sequence (because we cant hold more than seven digits or so at a time). Memory lasts only so long as we keep re-enforcing the network associations (by accessing and processing it for example), it decays steadily otherwise, yet re-enforcing the network changes the information being stored.

So, to answer the OP- most Western school systems are designed to fulfill a goal that the human brain isn't really designed to do- memorize large amounts of factual data accurately. That's why school systems impress so many people as being really poorly designed. Students who want to do well there are literally forced to find another solution- learn how to continually process the information over and over, until it isn't needed anymore. That's where learning skills like scaffolding and creative elaboration come in. That isnt measurable in bytes, but it might be in hertz.

This site provides one (rough) estimate: http://library.thinkquest.org/C001501/the_saga/compare.htm

Impressive: 16, 800, 000 hertz.

This site provides a different estimate (scroll down to Joey Blades post): "...Technically, the clock speed of the human brain is about 500Hz. Where the brain recoops it's processing speed is in the architecture - it's highly parallel. So where your PC only has one monolithic processor churning away at several hundred megahertz, the brain has effective billions of tiny processors churning away at only 500Hz..."

edited 2nd Mar '11 10:37:55 AM by DeMarquis