# The Storage Capacity of Neural Systems

8 Feb 2014AI

I recently read The Quest for Artificial Intelligence by Nils Nilsson. Interrupting a fairly linear history of the AI field is an interlude on some more philosophical questions about artificial intelligence, minds and thought. Searle’s Chinese Room, things like that.

I got to thinking about some of these questions on my daily peregrinations with Winnie, and I started wondering about the scales that are involved in most discussions of minds and AI. Searle talks about an individual person in his Chinese Room, which makes the idea of some sort of disembodied intelligence actually understanding the Chinese sentences it’s responding to seem pretty absurd. But is that in any sense a realistic representation of a brain or a human mind?

In keeping with my upbringing as a baby physicist, I’m going to take a very reductionist approach to this question. I want to get some idea of exactly what the information storage capacity of a human brain is. I’m deliberately not going to think about information processing speeds (because that would involve too much thinking about switching rates, communication between different parts of brains, and other biological things about which I know very little). I’ll treat this in the spirit of a Fermi problem, which means I’ll be horrifyingly slapdash with anything other than powers of ten. There will be big numbers.

Where to start? Brains are made of neurons. In humans, the cerebral cortex (the part of the brain involved of what we normally consider “thinking” rather than “substrate maintenance tasks”–keeping your heart beating, and so on) has something like 15-30 billion neurons. Let’s call it 10 billion, for the sake of simplicity. Using the “cubes of water” visualisation technique from the earlier article, this is a quite accessible number. Think of ten one metre cubes of water laid out in a line. Each edge of each cube is graduated in millimetres. There are one billion one millimetre cubes in each one metre cube of water, so there are ten billion one millimetre cubes in all.

That’s a lot of little cubes, and a lot of neurons, but it doesn’t seem so many when you think about it. We have this idea that human intellect is a nearly infinite ocean of possibilityOf course, the word “nearly” is doing rather a lot of work in that sentence..., but a current desktop system has far more than 10 gigabytes of memory, i.e. 10 billion 8-bit bytes. However, we don’t expect a computer to be able to simulate a whole brain. This comes down, of course, first, to neurons being “squishy” and second, to the fact that the state of the brain may be encoded more in the connections between neurons than in the neurons themselves. The “squishiness” of neurons means that the state of an individual neuron requires much more than one bit (or eight bits) to describe. How many bits? Let’s think about that in a minute. Connections between neurons are called synapses, and there are (to an order of magnitude) about a thousand times as many synapses as neurons, so about 10 trillion, 1013. That’s quite a big number.

What about individual neurons? It’s hard to say what aspects of the state of individual neurons are important for information storage, but if neural state is encoded in neurons, and we could encode the state of an individual neuron in perhaps 1000 bits, then we’d need about 1013 bits to encode a full brain state. If synapses are important and we need 1000 bits to encode the state of each synapse, then we’re looking at perhaps 1016 bits per brain state. These numbers are almost certainly very loose lower bounds!

Let’s come at things from the other direction for a moment. There is (as far as we know) a fundamental limit of the amount of information you can squeeze into a volume of space-time, given by something called the Bekenstein bound. The possible number of quantum states is a region of space-time, $I$, measured in bits, is bounded by

$$I \leq \frac{2 \pi R E}{\hbar c \log 2}$$ where $E$ is the energy contained in the volume (including rest mass) and $R$ is the radius of a sphere bounding the region. Let’s approximate a human brain by a sphere of water of mass 1.5 kg. Writing the volume and density of this sphere as $V$ and $\rho$ respectively, this gives us:

$$I \leq \frac{2 \pi M c}{\hbar \log 2} \left(\frac{3 M}{4 \pi rho}\right)^{1/3}$$

Putting $M = 1.5\,\mathrm{kg}$, $\rho = 1000\,\mathrm{kg}\,\mathrm{m}^{-3}$, we find $I \leq 2.75 \times 10^{42}$. So that‘s a big number. Much bigger than any numbers we tried to visualise in that earlier article. Now, we have no reason to expect that the information encoding capacity of biological systems even begins to approach these limits. The Bekenstein bound tells you (more or less) how much information you can fit into a region of space-time before you start spawning baby black holes, and no-one suggests that biological systems get close to this. It’s an upper bound for some theoretical highly advanced civilisation that can manipulate quantum states directly, which we can’t really do yet.

Here are some more down to earth questions. How many atoms are there in a brain? How many molecules? How many functionally meaningful protein molecules? Atoms are probably not all that relevant, but we can get an idea of how many molecules are in a brain by taking a weight of 1.5 kg again and assuming it’s all water (slapdash, remember?): 1.5 kg of water is about 100 moles of water (the molecular mass of water is 14), so we have about 100 Avogadros of molecules or around 1026 molecules, give or take a couple of factors of 10. This is also a big number, but is visualisable with a bit of work (go and look at the picture of a sports stadium with a big cube of water in this article and think about it a bit).

So, we have (more or less):

• 1010 neurons

• 1013 synapses

• 1026 molecules

• 1042 quantum states

I think it’s fair to say that the storage capacity of a brain lies somewhere in the middle of this. In terms of bits, it’s probably somewhere between the number of synapses and the number of molecules. If we split the difference, it seems reasonable to say that the storage capacity of a human brain is unlikely to be much less or much more (in terms of powers of 10) than 1020 bits.

What does this tell us about my original musings about the scale issues in AI? If you’re the poor person locked away in Searle’s Chinese room, following the rules to process Chinese messages, how many bits can you hold in your head at a time? Maybe a few hundred in short term memory if you concentrate. Some thousands if you’re allowed to write things down. That doesn’t compare too favourably with the intrinsic storage capacity of a brain–it’s off by a factor of something like 1015.

A glass of water is not the Pacific Ocean.

And now I’m going to head off to read Seth Lloyd’s paper "Computational capacity of the universe”, which has some really really REALLY big numbers in it...