ARISTOTLE, of course, was the 鈥渓ast man to know everything鈥� 鈥� everything useful to know about the world during his lifetime. No wait, it was Leonardo da Vinci. Or was it Goethe, or his equally brilliant Teutonic contemporary Alexander von Humboldt?
The trope of the last universal polymath is a common one 鈥� along with the idea that, as our compendium of knowledge grew, at some point it outstripped the capacity of one brain to house it.
Inside knowledge: The biggest questions about facts, truth, lies and belief
Forget alternative facts. To get to the bottom of what we know and how we know we know it, delve into our special report on epistemology 鈥� the science of knowledge itself
If so, that happened a long time ago, says , a palaeoanthropologist at London鈥檚 Natural History Museum. 鈥淕iven the diverse environments in which humans lived even before migrating from Africa, I doubt that any one human could have maintained all the required information needed to survive across the human range.鈥�
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A similar 鈥渆xperential鈥� limit still applies, but in today鈥檚 world the sheer amount of raw information to be processed undoubtedly far outstrips the capacity of any one person to process it. A human brain has roughly 100 billion neurons connected in labyrinthine ways by 100 trillion synapses. According to a 2015 estimate from the Salk Institute near San Diego, that amounts to 鈥� millions of gigabytes. By comparison the Large Hadron Collider, the particle smasher at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, pumps out some 30 petabytes of data in just one year. Small wonder one paper published jointly by the two main LHC collaborations, ATLAS and CMS, credited 5000 people with producing and analysing the data.
Such comparisons are, of course, facile. Creating knowledge is about a lot more than assimilating data, and your brain is not an empty petabyte memory stick. If it were, you would send it back to the shop, disappointed by its slow upload rate.
And this is the rub when it comes to working out how much any individual brain can know: we have never filled one up. We invariably reach a time limit before we reach a processing limit. Take hyperpolyglot Alexander Arguelles. Already competent in over 50 languages, he says, 鈥淕ive me total freedom of time鈥� and I could conceivably do 100 languages鈥� 鈥� at the expense of everything else in his life, though.
C茅sar Hidalgo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has dubbed the amount a person can realistically learn in their lifetime a personbyte. The knowledge you would need to throw a beautiful clay pot is less than 1 personbyte. But if you want to build an F-22 Raptor fighter jet complete with on-board missile-guidance systems, you鈥檙e going to need many thousands of personbytes. Aristotle wouldn鈥檛 know where to start.
We shouldn鈥檛 let our brains鈥� meagre bandwidth get us down. If the amount and complexity of human knowledge has increased over time, so the means of acquiring it have steadily improved too, with spoken language, written language, the printing press and now the internet. In that profusion of information, the barrier to progress lies not in the quantity of knowledge our brains can hold, but in its quality.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淗ow much can one person know?鈥�
