Last year, a Harvard research team put about one cubic millimeter of human brain matter—roughly the size of a mustard seed—under an electron microscope. They generated 1.4 petabytes of data, which is one quadrillion and four trillion bytes, or enough to store 12,317 copies of the movie Lawrence of Arabia in 4K Ultra HD. Petabytes are among the quantities used to measure the amount of data required for training the latest AI chatbots—the kind of staggering number that gestures at the sum of all human knowledge, the teeming universe, the void. The images from the Harvard study, freely available online, are just as laden with alien mystery and majesty as those that come careening back from the reaches of outer space via NASA’s James Webb Telescope. And if ye have grey matter even as much as a mustard seed, all this is in you. When we casually discuss “mapping the brain,” this is what we’re referring to.
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