Neuropsychological constraints to human data production on a global scale

Abstract

Which are the factors underlying human information production on a global level? In order to gain an insight into this question we study a corpus of 252-633 Million publicly available data files on the Internet corresponding to an overall storage volume of 284-675 Terabytes. Analyzing the file size distribution for several distinct data types we find indications that the neuropsychological capacity of the human brain to process and record information may constitute the dominant limiting factor for the overall growth of globally stored information, with real-world economic constraints having only a negligible influence. This supposition draws support from the observation that the files size distributions follow a power law for data without a time component, like images, and a log-normal distribution for multimedia files, for which time is a defining qualia.

to be published in: European Physical Journal B

References in corpus (3)

• Power-law distributions in empirical data
• Experience versus Talent Shapes the Structure of the Web
• Self-organized chaos through polyhomeostatic optimization

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Five decades of US, UK, German and Dutch music charts show that cultural processes are accelerating
• Entrenched time delays versus accelerating opinion dynamics: are advanced democracies inherently unstable?
• Universal size effects for populations in group-outcome decision-making problems
• A large-scale study of the World Wide Web: network correlation functions with scale-invariant boundaries
• Collective strategy condensation: When envy splits societies
• Charting closed-loop collective cultural decisions: From book best sellers and music downloads to Twitter hashtags and Reddit comments
• Self induced class stratification in competitive societies of agents: Nash stability in the presence of envy
• Collective strategy condensation towards class-separated societies