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According to a latest study, touted as the "real bombshell in the field of neuroscience,"

Researchers claim that they have found the evidence regarding our brain's memory capacity is much greater than we thought, says Elifesciences.com "Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte," Dr. Terry Sejnowski, a professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and co-senior author of a paper describing the research, said in a written statement.

Simply put, a human brain is capable of storing one petabyte of date, that is 1 quadrillion bytes, enough memory to store as much as 13.3 years of high-definition videos! The discovery published recently in the journal eLife, is only preliminary and requires further substantiation by deeper and more exhaustive research. However, it contributes significantly to the neuroanatomy and its understanding that can prove to be a huge step towards creating a "wiring diagram" of the human brain, said Sejnowsky to The Huffington Post.

Sejnowski and his team of researchers at the Salk and the University of Texas at Austin reached at this finding by detailed anatomical examination and 3D computer reconstruction of the cells within a small portion of tissue done subsequently on a rat's brain. As per the reconstruction, the variation in the sizes of synapses, the small gaps between brain cells that are essential for the formation of memory and its storage, were much smaller than indicated by earlier researches. In fact, these synapses only varied by 8% in size. "No one thought it would be such a small difference," Dr. Tom Bartol, a staff scientist at the institute and one of the researchers, said in the statement. "This was a curveball from nature," reported The Huffington Post