How Much Information Does the Human Brain Learn Every Day?

“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.”
– Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind (2014)

Having the screentime of your life.

Information: It’s what for dinner. Between tablets, smartphones, and other digital screens serving up an endless buffet of news, knowledge, and memes directly into our retinas, for better or worse, the future we live in now is but a feast for our eyes– literally.

The average American today spends 7 hours and 11 minutes looking at a screen every day, amounting to nearly one-third of our lives feeding off that little dinner plate in our pocket– or about 109 days a year (we’re not optometrists… but, yikes).

Even as far back as 2011 A.D., Americans were taking in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986. However, analog sources of information-gathering do still exist today… books, newspapers, Spotify, the back of your Wheaties box, and of course, the other human beings in our lives. Across all channels, it is estimated that Americans consume 11.8 hours of information each day.

Much like our friendly screens, the human brain operates as a series of electric signals (a meat computer, if you will)– So, how much memory do humans consume (or even digest!) on a daily basis today? Wonder investigates.

The average information consumption of an American in 2008 (source)

How much data does an average American consume every day?

Feasting on nuggets. According to a report by the University of California–San Diego, the average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data & information every day. That estimated to be the equivalent of 100,000 words heard or read every day– or about how many words in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (95,356 words).

Here’s what else you can do with that much data:

• Stream every episode of Stranger Things (25 episodes, ~1GB each)
• Play over 15,000 hours of Fortnight (500 hrs/GB)
• Scroll 94 hours on TikTok (2.7 hrs/GB)

Ebbinghaus’s “Learning Curve” illustrates that when you first learn something, the information disappears at an exponential rate. In other words, you lose most of your newly acquired knowledge in the first couple of days, after which the rate of loss tapers off.(source)

How much data can an average human brain process every day?

Flux Capacity. The processing capacity of our mind is estimated to be 120 bits per second. For context, In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need 60 bps in order to process– To (barely) understand two people, we need at least 120 bps.

Scientists found that an average person today can process as much as 74 gigabytes (GB) of data a day.

Here’s what you could do with that kind of data:

• Stream every episode of Game of Thrones (73 episodes, ~1GB each)
• Stream every piece of music ever composed by both Vivaldi (235 hrs) & Mozart (240 hrs) (6.6 hrs/GB)
• Read every article on Wikipedia 3.6x over (As of 3/22, the compressed size of all of Wikipedia’s articles is about 20.6 GB)

Check out the full report on the information capacity of the human brain, including:

• How much information can the human brain hold indefinitely?
• What animals have the greatest memory capacities after humans?
• What occupations require learning the most information?

… and more!

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