That's my greatest fear.
I'm terrified of the possibility that there could be a day when I hit my maximum capacity and have to forget things in order to be able to learn new things.
Can your brain really be full?
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#42That's my greatest fear. I'm terrified of the possibility that there could be a day when I hit my maximum capacity and have to forget things in order to be able to learn new things.
You forget things every single day.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#43No 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 Weights in a NN like the brain would just gradually shift. Older, seldom-accessed information will slowly fade. That said, a NN can suffer from the trying-to-be-jack-of-all-trades, ending-up-an-idiot problem.
You could alternatively say that the brain is constantly full.
More so as you age. As a youth, you have very little total information.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#44Earlier 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…
I always thought the cricket thing was unreasonably, almost impossibly, fast http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/061201_quietcr...
But maybe chirping isn't all that important to cricket reproduction.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll concede that this might be true - but you most certainly can't validate it based on these descriptions. In fact, by definition, you are unable to forget "something" for every other "something" you learn. In fact - if you know you forgot something - is that not a new piece of information? Now that I'm writing it out I think it's definitely nonsense actually - sorry. As a parallel consider music (a "single" domain…
No I am not trolling. The reason I know (more precise I think I know) that every new piece of information I learn is at the expense of something old, is that the old is not always lost without the metadata about the old being retained. I am often left with the memory of having once known something, but now lacking the actual knowledge. To give you an example I often come across plant species where I know I once knew…
So you forget things. Everyone does. Now demonstrate that forgetting is caused by learning. It seems you just assumed that part.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#46Having no scientific background and inclined to do computer analogies, I tend to think that our brain works like a RRD database [1], that is, we don't completely discard old information; instead, we store an aggregation of the said information as new information comes in. Then, these aggregations become our knowledge about a given subject; we don't need to store every detail, as this aggregated view is enough to help us understand new information.
Of course, if we ever need to reconstruct every detail of old info, we simply cheat, in the confabulation sense [2], possible with disastrous consequences [3]
[1] http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/
[2] http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/02/reconstructing-the-past-how...
[3] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-i...
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So then the brain must have some kind of weighting algorithm to decide what memory of equal value to jettison. Surely learning a few new URLs poses no risk to remembering which kind of car you drive? And on the subject of memories, are all memories information? If you learn something new in mathematics, do you risk losing the memory of the cake at your fourth birthday party, or only something technical you learned ab…
I am pretty sure that passing-out and altered states of consciousness are the brain's anti-DoS measures. You would have to counteract all those measures to successfully DoS a brain, and that would probably take a lot of drugs.
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll concede that this might be true - but you most certainly can't validate it based on these descriptions. In fact, by definition, you are unable to forget "something" for every other "something" you learn. In fact - if you know you forgot something - is that not a new piece of information? Now that I'm writing it out I think it's definitely nonsense actually - sorry. As a parallel consider music (a "single" domain…
No I am not trolling. The reason I know (more precise I think I know) that every new piece of information I learn is at the expense of something old, is that the old is not always lost without the metadata about the old being retained. I am often left with the memory of having once known something, but now lacking the actual knowledge. To give you an example I often come across plant species where I know I once knew…
Kind of like how I can't remember a thing about a rafting trip I was supposedly on when I was 19, but I clearly remember running into someone I was on that trip with, and discussing/reminiscing about it, when I was 22. So at 22 I clearly had the memory (enough to talk in detail about it), and I now (more than 20 years later) have a recollection of that conversation, but other than that the memory of that trip at 19 is totally purged. (except some vague recollection about glowing moss in the woods).
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
No I am not trolling. The reason I know (more precise I think I know) that every new piece of information I learn is at the expense of something old, is that the old is not always lost without the metadata about the old being retained. I am often left with the memory of having once known something, but now lacking the actual knowledge. To give you an example I often come across plant species where I know I once knew…
So you forget things. Everyone does. Now demonstrate that forgetting is caused by learning. It seems you just assumed that part.
One way of demonstrating this is if the rate of forgetting old information increases when you are doing some intense learning (either studying in school, or taking additional vacations, etc).
Re: Can your brain really be full?
#50Earlier 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_…
when we don't reach it in our lifetime, why do we have that over-capacity than? The brain already consumes something like 20% of our energy.
Why would you assume that unused spare capacity is a significant fraction of that expense?