All the info our brain needs for language nearly fits on a floppy disc

As you learn your first language, your brain stores about 1.5 megabytes of information – just a little over the amount that would fill a floppy disc (that is what the picture for the save icon represents, if you are too young to remember them). "I thought it would be much more," says Frank Mollica at the University of Rochester in New York. When you hear a word that you know, your brain is accessing all kinds of information to help you make sense of it: the sounds that make up the word, the meanings it has, its context in a sentence, the tense of a verb, and more. Mollica and his colleagues used a branch of mathematics called information theory to figure out how many bits of data you would need to encode all of this to lean English. These are estimates, Mollica says, but they give us a ballpark idea that can quantify how much information language acquisition requires.