Neuro Bombshell: Human Brain More Powerful Than the Internet?

Our memories can hold 10 times as much information as scientists previously thought -- almost as much as the Internet, or about 4.7 billion books, according to a new study.

"This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," the International Business Times quoted researcher Terry Sejnowski. "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."

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies found that key parts of the brain were more complex than scientists knew and that there's an underlying precision and efficiency in the way the brain works.

"This was a curveball from nature," Tom Bartol, a scientist at Salk, remarked. "Our data suggests there are 10 times more discrete sizes of synapses than previously thought."

"In computer terms, 26 sizes of synapses correspond to about 4.7 'bits' of information," he explained. "Previously, it was thought that the brain was capable of just one to two bits for short and long memory storage in the hippocampus."

The new findings could help scientists build better computers.