human DNA. No less impressive, however, is that the
weight of these bacteria alone equals the weight of your
brain—somewhere between two and three pounds!
WHAT’S IN YOUR POOP?
The average stool sample is more than half bacteria, with
each gram consisting of one hundred billion microbes.
That’s nearly fourteen times the global human population in
just one gram of dookie! Fecal matter is so dense with
microbes, in fact, that every time you go to the bathroom,
you excrete about one-third of your colonic bacterial
content. Not to worry, however, as the colonic bacterial
count rebuilds over the course of the day.^3
These microbes contain lots of information, each
carrying their own unique genetic material. If we consider
the total amount of genetic material represented by our
bacterial friends—whose DNA length is typically one to ten
megabases, which holds one million bytes of information–
just one gram of human stool has a data capacity of one
hundred thousand terabytes! And you thought your thumb-
drive keychain was cool.^4
Much like we outsource aspects of our cognition to our
smartphones—the ability to remember phone numbers, for
example, freeing up our brainpower for other tasks—we