How Much Memory Capacity Does the Human Brain Have?

Most brains have a memory capacity of about 2.5 petabytes, which is 2.6 million gigabytes. To put that in perspective, most Blu-Ray discs hold about 50 gigabytes. This means that if the brain was a digital TV recorder, it would hold about 3 million hours of TV shows.

@RoyalSpyder - I agree with you about this article. Not only is it very fascinating, but it's simply amazing what you can find by doing simple online research. Who ever thought that the brain could hold 3 million hours of television shows? That's great potential for limitless knowledge. To say that our brain is like a supercomputer is an understatement.

@Viranty - Though I can't answer either of your questions, this is just my opinion, but I think babies don't remember being born because (as you stated), their brain in still developing. On another note, would anyone even want to remember being born? Imagine what an unpleasant experience that would be. In fact, I even know some people who (surprisingly) remember their birth, and they've described it as traumatic.

@RoyalSpyder - I'm not sure how that works, but I have a couple of questions regarding this too. For example, why don't babies remember much, especially when they're born? Is it because their brain is still developing? The brain certainly is an interesting piece of work, and it contains far more knowledge and memories than most people can even think or imagine.

This is easily one of the most fascinating articles I've read so far on wiseGEEK. I never knew that the human brain had such a massive memory capacity. Although it does make me wonder how people are able to block traumatic events from their memory, and how the brain processes these unfortunate events. Does anyone have an idea of how that works?

Well, when someone sees something they like,

they want to remember that! So looked it up and did a little research and it said that the human body does more.

How does one measure the memory capacity of the brain?