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Feature	Human Brain	Computer Memory
Estimated capacity	~2.5 petabytes (≈300 million hours of TV)	Typically 256 GB – 4 TB in consumer devices; petabytes only in data centres
Storage type	Distributed neural networks; associative, redundant	Binary digital storage; exact, address‑based
Speed	Millisecond‑scale retrieval; parallel processing	Nanosecond‑scale retrieval; mostly serial unless multi‑threaded
Error handling	Highly fault‑tolerant; reconstructs missing data	Low tolerance; corrupted bits cause failure
Energy use	~20 watts for the entire brain	50–500 watts for high‑performance systems
Flexibility	Learns, reorganises, rewires	Fixed architecture; upgrades require hardware changes
Encoding	Meaning‑based, emotional, contextual	Bit‑based (0/1), no inherent meaning
Forgetting	Adaptive; removes noise, strengthens relevance	Not automatic; deletion must be explicit
Durability	Decades, but influenced by health, ageing, trauma	Potentially indefinite if hardware is stable