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However this will be done through lossy compression (you forget irrelevant shorter term stuff, you forget details, things get abstracted and generalized etc.)
Has 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 already consumes something like 20% of our energy.
Without reading the article: of course. Evolution would not allow for much overcapacity. However this will be done through lossy compression (you forget irrelevant shorter term stuff, you forget details, things get abstracted and generalized etc.)
My 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 wa…
My 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 wa…
So you're saying it's a hard number and, one-for-one, if something new goes in, something old goes out?
Without reading the article: of course. Evolution would not allow for much overcapacity. However this will be done through lossy compression (you forget irrelevant shorter term stuff, you forget details, things get abstracted and generalized etc.)
Not that I disagree with your premise, but you can only use evolutionary arguments for populations in equilibrium. The human population has undergone so much recent evolution (I actually know of no non-domestic species that has changed more in the last 100,000 year) that you can't use evolutionary arguments like this. There may well be people alive that will never use all the capacity of their brain given their lifes…
The human population has gone through more well-studied evolution than other populations; but, for example, novel species such as the London Underground mosquito are unlikely to be rare. You may claim that this is effectively a domestic species, but I claim that's just what we can easily study.
Human lifespans are not very much greater: chimpanzees live to be 60 years old, and they are 8,000,000-12,000,000 years of evolution away. The difference in average lifespan is primarily due to progress with infant mortality rate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that I disagree with your premise, but you can only use evolutionary arguments for populations in equilibrium. The human population has undergone so much recent evolution (I actually know of no non-domestic species that has changed more in the last 100,000 year) that you can't use evolutionary arguments like this. There may well be people alive that will never use all the capacity of their brain given their lifes…
I suspect this is wrong, although I recognise your apparent authority in this field. The human population has gone through more well-studied evolution than other populations; but, for example, novel species such as the London Underground mosquito are unlikely to be rare. You may claim that this is effectively a domestic species, but I claim that's just what we can easily study. Human lifespans are not very much great…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect this is wrong, although I recognise your apparent authority in this field. The human population has gone through more well-studied evolution than other populations; but, for example, novel species such as the London Underground mosquito are unlikely to be rare. You may claim that this is effectively a domestic species, but I claim that's just what we can easily study. Human lifespans are not very much great…
Speciation and evolution are not directly connected, but this is a minor point. For a population to be in equilibrium the population size has to be approximately constant. The human population (and our domestic species) have expanded so much in recent times that we are not in equilibrium. This means that there are lots of genes of great selective value that have yet to spread through the human population. My favourit…
Our study of any other species comes nowhere close to that. To think that we can achieve that level of detail in another species is almost laughable. There are only a few species where we can guess what their equivalent to heart disease would be.
This doesn't provide evidence that humans are evolving more quickly: not at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speciation and evolution are not directly connected, but this is a minor point. For a population to be in equilibrium the population size has to be approximately constant. The human population (and our domestic species) have expanded so much in recent times that we are not in equilibrium. This means that there are lots of genes of great selective value that have yet to spread through the human population. My favourit…
Yes, human evolution (and heart disease) is overtly very well-studied, to the extent that we can identify the likely patient zero for a gene mutation occurring in recent generations. Our study of any other species comes nowhere close to that. To think that we can achieve that level of detail in another species is almost laughable. There are only a few species where we can guess what their equivalent to heart disease…
My original point is that you can't apply evolutionary principles to humans since our massive population expansion and recent change from hunter-gather lifestyles to being farmers make all such assumptions void.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're saying it's a hard number and, one-for-one, if something new goes in, something old goes out?
Pretty much. Since around my late 20s everything new going in has been at the expense of something old. The only interesting thing is the loss is not a first in, first out system nor is it based on importance. I have retained pointless memories from the past and lost things that were quite important. All I can say is that my capacity is finite and I have reached the limit.