Can your brain really be full?
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Can your brain really be full?
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Re: Can your brain really be full?
#2Url changed from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-your-brain-rea..., which points to this.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#3Has anyone who knew what they were talking about every seriously suggested that your brain could "fill up", like a hard disk running out of free space? It seems like the closest you could get to that is your neurons becoming completely static (i.e. not-plastic), unable to form new connections or sever existing ones. That would kill you pretty quickly, or maybe another way to look at it is that it happens to you when you die, so the answer I guess could be "sort of, when you die".
But while you're alive? Assuming you don't just "add more space", to continue the analogy, it seems like what your brain does is probably closer to lossy compression, over and over again. And the important bits remain more-or-less readable.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#4Has anyone who knew what they were talking about every seriously suggested that your brain could "fill up", like a hard disk running out of free space? It seems like the closest you could get to that is your neurons becoming completely static (i.e. not-plastic), unable to form new connections or sever existing ones. That would kill you pretty quickly, or maybe another way to look at it is that it happens to you when…
It's like a piece of fabric one could keep weaving on - all the threads that get weaved on will always remain but only visible if it's near the top layer - That's my impression.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#5Has anyone who knew what they were talking about every seriously suggested that your brain could "fill up", like a hard disk running out of free space? It seems like the closest you could get to that is your neurons becoming completely static (i.e. not-plastic), unable to form new connections or sever existing ones. That would kill you pretty quickly, or maybe another way to look at it is that it happens to you when…
To be technical ... from a information theoretical point of view your brain definitely can't hold infinite information so it definitely fills up in the sense you can't possibly be adding information without evicting/corrupting something else. I personally don't think we can reach that point within a human lifetime though.
Something more interesting to think about is the limits of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory which you probably fill up on a day to day basis.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#6No more than a neural network can be full. To anybody who has worked with neural networks, the following comes as no surprise:
old information is sometimes pushed out of the brain
for new memories to form
That said, a NN can suffer from the trying-to-be-jack-of-all-trades, ending-up-an-idiot problem.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#7[deleted]
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#8Has anyone who knew what they were talking about every seriously suggested that your brain could "fill up", like a hard disk running out of free space? It seems like the closest you could get to that is your neurons becoming completely static (i.e. not-plastic), unable to form new connections or sever existing ones. That would kill you pretty quickly, or maybe another way to look at it is that it happens to you when…
To be technical ... from a information theoretical point of view your brain definitely can't hold infinite information so it definitely fills up in the sense you can't possibly be adding information without evicting/corrupting something else. I personally don't think we can reach that point within a human lifetime though. Something more interesting to think about is the limits of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_…
The brain is constantly evicting, shifting, and changing memories as new stimuli come in and change the connectivity of our neurons. In that sense the brain, from inception, is full in the same sense that in an artificial neural network every neuron has a weight. The only thing that changes are the weights. (Note that I realize ANNs are a dramatically overly simplified representation of the brain, but the point remains).
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be technical ... from a information theoretical point of view your brain definitely can't hold infinite information so it definitely fills up in the sense you can't possibly be adding information without evicting/corrupting something else. I personally don't think we can reach that point within a human lifetime though. Something more interesting to think about is the limits of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_…
The brain is constantly evicting, shifting, and changing memories as new stimuli come in and change the connectivity of our neurons. In that sense the brain, from inception, is full in the same sense that in an artificial neural network every neuron has a weight. The only thing that changes are the weights. (Note that I realize ANNs are a dramatically overly simplified representation of the brain, but the point remai…
The brain may also choose to re-encode a memory as part of a recognized pattern, in a sense, finding a way of compressing memories as recognizing them as part of a kind.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#10My brain is definitely full. Every new thing I learn comes at the expense of something else I know (I guess this should be past tense).
The funny thing is I still remember when my brain had spare capacity - I used to fill it with arbitrary facts like what page I was up to when I was reading dozens of books at once. When I was young I never read one book at a time or used bookmarks. I would just remember the page I was up to and whenever I came back to a book I just turned to the correct page. Of course now I have to use bookmarks and every book I read is at the expense of some part of my past :(