The functional unit of the cerebral cortex is the cortical column. A cortical column is roughly .5-.6 mm in diameter. (lets say that 4 can fit in a square mm).
The cerebral cortex is around the size of four sheets of regular paper. Lets say the paper is 216x280 = 60,480 square milimeters. The cortex is the size of four sheets giving: 241,920 square milimeters of cortex. Counting four cortical columns/mm we get: 967,680 cortical columns. Now things get fuzzy: How much information is in each column? We know that the primary output of the column is through the firing of the pyrimidal cell which yields a timed pulse coded signal. As a guess, lets say that the column stored 64-bits of relatively stable state and 64 bits of transient state, or 16 bytes... rounding up the number of cortical columns, this would seem to indicate that the capacity of the cerebral cortex might be as small as 16mb! Maybe that's too small lets be generous and give each column 1kb of stable and 1k of transient state. Even still, we are only talking about 2GB... >From other work I have done towards figuring out the cortex, I have concluded that the cortex achieves nearly logarithmic storage efficiency for the things that it bothers to remember. This is how you seem to know a hell of a lot more than the actual information capacity of the brain allows. If this is true at all, it is _VERY_ good news for AI devels... =) -- pain (n): see Linux. http://users.rcn.com/alangrimes/ ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
