Bill and Gene, you've made some very good points. I guess what bothers me
about statements I've seen about the "information capacity" of the brain
is that the estimates vary a lot, because they depend upon parameters with
very large values that vary over several orders of magnitude. The consensus
seems to be "a lot", which isn't (to me) all that informative.
Even if you could calculate a good estimate, would that number be useful?
As I write this I'm not coming up with any ways to use such an estimate, but
maybe someone else has some (besides questions like "how large a hard drive
would I need to back up my brain?" :) ).
Cheers,
Kevin
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Kevin Spencer
Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory and Beckman Institute
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
kspencer at p300.cpl.uiuc.edu
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