First off, you need to understand the two different parts of your brain that governs your everyday life.
The conscious brain is the critical brain that helps you connect dots, think logically and critically, get creative and get organized.
The subconscious brain on the other hand, communicates through impulses, emotions, feelings and images.
When we talk about information storage, we talk about a delicate three step process, where one missing step would result in the failure of proper information storage. Every single bit of information is initially received, then the information is encoded, leading to the last step which is the storage.
Now how does this process work?
Receiving:
The first step is when you receive the information. The reception can be governed by your different senses, or your analytical thinking. The information is then acquired or rejected based on our critical analysis and subconscious intuition.
Encoding:
Once the information is received and accepted, you will start encoding the information. In this phase, the information is stored in your short term memory. This memory system is limited, information will be stored for no longer than 15–30 seconds before you shift, and start thinking about something else. In today’s digital world, where we are bombarded by information stimulation on a continuous basis, our short term memory is becoming all the more limited.
If a few hours back, you were scrolling down on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter… Can you remember what you saw? Can you remember 1% of what you saw? The answer is most likely a big NO. It is simply because all of this information was not properly encoded as your short term memory shifted from one bit of information to the other without having the time to process it and encode it properly.
Storage:
Here comes the interesting part… How much information can the human brain store and process.
There’s an interesting state that a lot of people often experience, known as the state of flow. The state of flow is when your conscious brain is in coherence with your subconscious brain. On a conscious level, we can process up to 120 bits of information a second. However, on a subconscious level, we can process up to 11,000,000 bits of information a second.
Just imagine the difference between winning 120$, and 11,000,000$.
Now by default, if your conscious brain processes 120 bits of information a second, and your subconscious brain processes information at 11 million bits a second, we can see that the subconscious brain is a lot more powerful, and it is indeed.
You don’t have to consciously think about everything you’re saying when having a conversation. You don’t need to consciously think what the capital of your country is. If you learned how to swim or how to ride a bicycle, you can jump in the poo or hop on your bicycle, and you’ll be good to go… You don’t have to consciously remember how to do it.
Now let’s see how much information the human brain can actually store:
Whether you’re familiar with technology or not, you’ll be able to understand the following metaphor.
The average storage size of a picture on your computer would be 1 mb per average quality picture. Imagine you have a computer where you can store 100,000,000 pictures. To make it even more interesting, imagine you have 100,000,000 ideas in your head that you can access at any point, how amazing would that be?
In fact the storage capacity of our brain can reach an outstanding 100 Terabytes, in other words, 100,000,000 Megabytes.
But before you get all excited, you need to know that the majority of those memories are not consciously available, but if you work on the encoding process, and make sure that most of the information received are encoded and eventually stored, you would start to expand the accessible capacity of information stored in your brain.
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