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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

1.4 petabytes for 1mm3. There are about 1100000mm3 of them in the brain. So we're talking about 1_540_000 petabytes. The web is about 175 zeta bytes, so about 17500 petabytes. So the brain would be 1_540_000 / 17500 = 88 times the size of internet.

Now that's big.

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I mean that's true, but at the risk of stating the obvious, people should not be mistaken to think that this represents the "information content" of the brain (except perhaps in a very narrow and technical sense).

If you did such 3D scans at similar resolution of all the hardware comprising the internet, for example, it would be vastly bigger than a human brain. It might even be bigger than all the human brains combined, although I'm not sure. It's not very clear whether such comparisons really mean anything (other than "wow that research team really pulled off something impressive" or "wow there are a lot of very small things in a given volume of matter"). A similar volume of toenails would contain a similar amount of 3D scan data.

my comparison was just based on the size of the data set, not the brain or whatever. I thought about it in the sense that: if we'd ever had to map a complete brain, that would be the size required to store everything.

I have no idea how the brain actually encodes information :-)

There are 10^18 voxels in that cubic mm, so a petabyte (10^15 bytes) is not too bad. Must be a lot of empty space in there.

Put another way: this is pretty close to a football-field-sized cube, filled with sand. Each grain of sand is a voxel. The central bodies (soma) of neurons are about a yard wide at that scale.

So about 1 NSA datacenter.

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