Real life tests has shown that near death events have generated a movie flashing in front of your eyes with pictures from your entire life experiences. The estimated data amount for a 30 year old person is estimated to be 3.4 Exabyte of data.
That is 3.4 Exabyte of data in one second. You would need 123 621 120 CPU cores at 3 Ghz each or at 8 cores per CPU at 3 Ghz you would need 15 452 640 computers. . A total cost for the CPUs only would be $19 532 136 960. USD. This prices for a human brain would be of enormous $ 19 532 136 960 USD with today’s technology. Take care of the brain, there is no know good mechanics for it today that can fix it or build a new one.
It would require a total of 7 726 320 kW of energy supply at 500 watt per computer.
The brain do it more sexy than we can imagine with a heat release of 50-100 watt for the human body.
The numbers gets so high that we redo the calculations again and again and find them still hard to believe.
The question that rises is does the human brain operate on another quantum level than we know of regarding like voltage usage, signaling etc than we know of in physics today. Does it get the energy from a hidden energy source that we don’t know how to tap into yet, that does not produce heat as a bi product, because 7 726 320 kW of energy would require about the same amount of energy to cool the server room down. Now of course the brain does not function on this level all the time(this is just values to happen during a adrenaline kick for a second or two) because I think the chemical and electric battery of energy and potential energy would be depleted and would need to be recharged. Does it uses quarks for signaling and storing information? The brains has many mysteries and it is formed to function as a I/O operating device of this universe physic rules. One thing is for sure question rises that gives a cause to do continue to do more research.
So this numbers are for during extreme life threatening panic situations and not valid for normal daily operations of the brain.
When it comes to bit operations per second we have the follow to offer:
28 672 000 000,00 bit @ 1-30 HZ a second and that is just from data stream from the eyes. ( close to 29 billion bit or nearly 1 billion bit per Hz .)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz
A computer today operates at 64 bit at 3 Ghz compared to the brain. You would need a 9.55 computers to compare it with the brain computing power at normal operations.
When we go over the eyes it estimated that in full view we have a resolution of 512 megapixels. That is same like 256 HD flastscreen or camcorders to get to the same resolutions as the eyes.. That generates a raw data stream to the brain of 25 088 megabit a second. That is 25 Gigabit second into the brain. That 3136 megabyte a second, Roughly 12 terrabyte an hour. Here the brain stores information faster than any known storage solution today do(except high end server farms)
A computers network card is of only 1 Gigabit compared to it.(this is something that has to increase dramatically in the computer industry or go over to optical networks, because copying a “server backup” of example 200 gigabyte over a network of 1 gigabit connection takes 26 minutes. So here the brain and eyes are performing many times better than our desktop computers are doing.)
We have reached critical amount of data because of HD video from camcorders and high resolution pictures. The storage solutions capacity and transfer speed has to go up by the factor of at least 10 very soon.