brain. However, Paul Reber, professor of psychology at Northwestern
University in the United States, speculated recently in Scientific American
(What is the Memory Capacity of the Human Brain?): “The human brain
consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000
connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections.
If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space
would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space,
similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash dr ive. Yet neurons combine so
that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing
the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5
petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like
a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to
hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV
running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.” We
don’t know the answer to how much memory we have or need, but it has to
be significant, given all the memories a human accumulates during the
course of their life.
No matter how you calculate the storage capacity, the human brain is an
amazing organ. And the soul needs to preserve much of what is in there.
The inescapable conclusion must be that any soul, which stores at a
minimum just our memories and personality (and/or karma), without all the
software on how to run our bodies, still needs to have a significant
mass/energy. It is possible (maybe likely) that there is a storage mechanism
superior to our brains which is used by a soul, but even using theoretical
quantum storage requires some medium of mass/energy.
There have been a few modern recorded attempts to determine the weight
of a soul (you can check out some of these with a “weight of a soul” search
on Google or your favorite search engine). The most often results quoted, at
21 grams, was determined by Dr. MacDougall in 1901. (For all you animal
lovers out there, he also determined that dogs didn’t have souls, so no
chance to be reunited with your favorite pet in the great hereafter.) His
conclusions are not widely (or even narrowly) accepted by the scientific
community, however, and his results are often chalked up to measurement
error (charitably).
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