Best Memory of All

How do the marvelous mechanical memories of computers and other methods compare with the memory capacity of the human brain? The RCA Corporation’s Advanced Technology Laboratories offers these comparisons, as published in “Business Week” magazine:

Hence, with all of human technology the human brain still has a capacity 10 times as great as that which is stored in the U.S. National Archives, 500 times as great as an advanced computer memory system and 10,000 times as great as that which is recorded in the “Encyclopædia Britannica.” Does this not make one pause to reflect on how such prodigious storage in such a small vessel came to be?

[Chart on page 15]

MEMORY DEVICE STORAGE CAPACITY

(number of characters)

Human Brain 125,000,000,000,000

U.S. National Archives 12,500,000,000,000

IBM 3850 magnetic cartridge 250,000,000,000

“Encyclopædia Britannica” 12,500,000,000

Magnetic (hard) disc 313,000,000

Book 1,300,000

Untapped Creativity

“Even the largest, most advanced computer cannot be made to understand sentences that a four-year-old child can grasp without hesitation. . . . The best way of expressing the total creative capacity of the human central nervous system in layman’s language is that, for all practical purposes, it is infinite. . . . It is still clear that we are operating at only a tiny fraction of our true abilities. Studying nature, we find that systems are created to be used to the full. What is the purpose of all the unused human capability?”​—“The Ultimate Athlete.”