Your brain generates 20 watts of power
Your brain runs on about 20 watts, the same as a dim light bulb.
Reviewed by the CurioVault curator · 8 October 2026 · Last updated 22 September 2026 · Editorial standards
Your brain runs on about 20 watts, the same as a dim light bulb. Despite being 2% of body weight, it uses 20% of your energy. Those 20 watts power 86 billion neurons firing up to 200 times per second, creating enough storage capacity theorized at 2.5 petabytes. If we tried to simulate that with supercomputers, it would take megawatts. That efficiency comes from using ions not electrons, and from sparse coding, only a tiny fraction of neurons firing at once. It is why AI still struggles to match human efficiency.
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